An Accidental American: A Novel (15 page)

From somewhere in the Maryland countryside, the voice of Hank Kostecky snapped onto the line. “Hank here!” In the background was a woman’s voice, a single word carefully repeated. Kostecky’s Arabic lesson, Valsamis thought. Berlitz for the spy. Fifty-odd years of Russian, and now there wasn’t an intelligence man out there who could so much as order a glass of tea in Baghdad.

“Johnny the Greek!” Kostecky quipped at the sound of Valsamis’s voice.

Valsamis blanched. The big Polack was the only man who could get away with calling him that, but Valsamis didn’t have to like it.

A Westerner by habit and a Greek by blood, Valsamis hadn’t known quite what to make of the Agency’s social code. Part Southern and part military, Langley’s mores had both confounded and irritated the working-class kid from Montana who’d grown up in the rough-and-tumble melting pot of a copper boomtown.

He and Kostecky had met in Peshawar, back in the early eighties. Kostecky was just starting out then, and Valsamis had recognized himself immediately in the son of an immigrant steelworker from Pennsylvania.

“I need a favor,” Valsamis told Kostecky now.

“I’m listening.”

Valsamis could hear the woman’s voice in the background. “
Fein yimkin ana akra beshkleeta?
” she asked patiently. And then, in flawless English, “Where can I rent a bicycle?”

“I need your ears for a few days,” Valsamis said.

“Anyone special?” Kostecky asked.

“Her name’s Nicole Blake. American citizen living in France. A little town in the Pyrenees called Paziols. She’s a freelancer for Solomon, the British document security firm.”

“What are we talking about here? Phone calls, e-mail?”

“Whatever you can get that will help me find her. I lost track of her a couple of days ago in Lisbon.”

“I’m on it,” Kostecky told him. “How do you want me to reach you?”

Valsamis rattled off his number. “You know the drill,” he reminded the other man. “This is strictly between us.”

“I know the drill,” Kostecky replied, then paused. “I guess you’ve heard about Kanj.”

“I heard the Pakistanis finally caught up with him,” Valsamis said. “Everyone must be chomping at the bit to get a piece of the action.”

“Word is Near East is prepping for him in Amman. But officially he’s still a ghost. No Red Cross visits for that boy.” Kostecky laughed crudely, then muttered something to himself.

Valsamis could hear the woman again. “
Ey kar yamshee ila al-qasr?
Which bus goes to the palace?”

“You ever get the hang of this piece-of-shit language?” Kostecky asked.

Valsamis smiled to himself. “I get by.”

I was soaked through and shivering when I finally turned off the Beco de Santa Helena and onto Eduardo Morais’s narrow street. I stepped into the shelter of the loggia and knocked once on the old green door, turning my face up to Saint Vincent.

It was Graça who answered. Graça, in designer jeans and a black turtleneck, her hair falling across her shoulders.

“My grandfather is asleep,” she announced, staring out at me defiantly. Her feet were bare on the tile floor of the foyer, her nails lacquered a dark plummy red.

“I haven’t come to see Eduardo,” I told her.

“No?”

A piece of work, I thought, everything about her meant to unnerve. Though there was something about my having known her before, something about my memory of her as a child, that made the act less intimidating than I knew she wanted it to be.

“Rahim’s dead,” I said, my rickety Portuguese allowing no room for subtlety.

Graça shifted slightly in the doorway, her hand moving to the door frame, her face collapsing in on itself. All that hardness momentarily unmasked, and in its place a flickering of unsteadiness and grief.

“I saw you at the dairy,” I told her. “Yesterday afternoon. That was me inside.”

“What do you want?” she asked, rallying the old hostility.

I nodded to the dark hallway beyond her. “I want to come in,” I said. “I need to know what Rahim has been working on.”

Graça took a step forward, steady and sure, bristling once again, her body filling the doorway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Twenty, I thought, counting back the years, twenty-one at most. She couldn’t have been more than ten the last time I’d seen her.

“Rahim’s dead,” I repeated, in English this time, too tired to battle on, taking a gamble that her English was better than my Portuguese. “Someone shot him this morning on the Miradouro de Santa Catarina, and they would have killed me, too. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out you two were together. Do you understand?”

Graça nodded. Scared, I thought, as she should have been, for her grandfather’s name would not protect her from Valsamis or those who had sent him.

“These people don’t mess around,” I told her.

She took a step back, and I thought she might let me in, but she shook her head instead.

“I can’t help you,” she said, then swung the door closed.

I
N HIS WHOLE LIFE, JOHN VALSAMIS
had known his father to cry only two times. The first was on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Valsamis was in school when it happened, and he’d come home to find the same man who once beat him for wasting food sobbing before the black-and-white footage of Jackie climbing down from the ambulance in her bloody dress.

The second time was almost ten years later, when Harry Truman died. No tragedy this time, just an old man gone at last, but still, Valsamis’s father had cried like a baby.

Valsamis had been home from Vietnam at the time, discharged from the marines and staring down the rest of his life, the old brick smelter that had swallowed so many of his family’s days and nights. Four brothers and a father working overtime. Three sisters married to the same kind of man.

On the plane from Honolulu, in the first-class seat they’d bumped Valsamis into, a different offer, a man in a dark blue suit who’d talked about Castro and Allende, who’d given Valsamis his business card before disappearing down the crowded concourse of the Los Angeles airport.

Valsamis’s father was a devout anti-Communist, a former member of the National Republican Greek League, and a survivor of the ferocious civil unrest that had convulsed Greece after World War II. He’d been in the mountains along the Albanian frontier in the summer of 1949, and he hadn’t forgotten what the Americans had done for them, the sound of Truman’s air force humming in the west.

Valsamis and his father sat up late the night of Truman’s death, toasting the former president, his father recounting battle stories over his homemade retsina, the tales legend now, each one told and retold, forged into myth. His life before eight kids and twenty-five years smelting copper, his body compressed by the weight of it all.

After his father staggered off to bed, Valsamis went to his room, fished the business card from the bottom of his old military duffel, and laid it carefully on his mother’s yellowed quilt. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, it said. Beneath the letters, the official seal, and beneath the seal, a name.

Richard Morrow, Valsamis read, remembering the man from the airplane. Clean hands on the sweating tumbler that held his gin and tonic. Teeth and shirt so white Valsamis almost couldn’t bear to look. And then, as the plane banked toward smoggy Los Angeles, his finger on the day’s paper, the headline screaming failure in Vietnam, what Morrow had said.
Someone’s got to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
And suddenly Valsamis had gotten the feeling the good luck that had nudged him up from coach hadn’t been luck at all.

Valsamis tucked the card carefully away, turned the light out, and climbed into his bed. Outside in the darkness, the wind was blowing hard, scouring the mile-high Anaconda plain, lashing at the house, the old windows and wooden clapboards creaking and moaning like a ship in a gale.

Nostalgia, John Valsamis thought, irritated by his own memories. Thirty-plus years on, his father dead for nearly a decade now, and it was this night that came back to him as he sat at the bar in the Café Nicola and watched two old men playing chess.

Even the Communists were gone, a failed experiment left to molder on some back shelf. In Beijing there was a brand-new television in every apartment and an Avon store on every corner.

The menace now is something none of us could have imagined, Valsamis thought, something we will never understand. A rage born of being always left behind, an anger that worships everything American and hates its own idolatry. Worse, this enemy is a beast of our own making, stitched together from money and guns and oil, a fury that served us once and well, and that now threatens to destroy us.

Yes, Valsamis thought, ordering a second coffee, slapping a handful of coins onto the counter, someone has to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Valsamis’s cell phone rang. “Yes?” he answered.

“We’ve got her,” the caller said neutrally. The voice was bland, midwestern. A man.

“Where?” Valsamis asked.

“Lisbon. She accessed an e-mail account from a public server at 10 Largo do Picadeiro. Looks like an Internet café.”

“She checked her e-mail?” Valsamis had used Kostecky’s NSA connections a few times before, but he was still amazed at what they could do.

“Yes, sir. Just spam, from the looks of it. But she sent several e-mails to a private account.”

“Were you able to get a name?”

“Yes, sir. The account’s registered to a Sergei Velnychenko. The e-mails were received at a private address on Tortola, British Virgin Islands.”

The man hesitated as if he had more to say but was waiting for further instructions. “Sir?” he asked finally. “I can read the transcripts if you’d like, sir.”

Vanity, I thought, making my way back toward the Largo do Picadeiro, my own pride that had sent me here. All those years ago, a part of me had wanted Rahim wrecked by my leaving, gone, as he’d promised. Yet here he’d been, his life and his appetites still perfectly intact.

You’re wrong about Rahim,
I heard myself say that night in my kitchen in Paziols.
I know him. This isn’t something he would do.
And yet hadn’t part of me wanted Valsamis to be right? Hadn’t my vanity wanted this weakness in Rahim, his rage at my leaving, some flaw greater than my own? Didn’t a part of me still want this? That was the insult of Graça Morais.