An Accidental American: A Novel (17 page)

I slept hard on the narrow cot at the dairy, swallowed whole by the great beast of exhaustion, gone, finally, to some other place. Years earlier, the train trip south with Rahim, and “The Girl from Ipanema” coming softly through the wall. In my mouth, as I woke, wine and cigarettes, the sour taste of shame.

It was early still and dark, the windows staring blindly back at me. The sky tinged a deep black ocher by the phosphorous lights of the port. The cat was asleep at my feet, curled up and snoring, eyes closed tight, whiskers twitching in her own fantasy. Thin again, and lithe, catching rats in the deserted dairy below.

I rolled over and tried to blink away the dream that had woken me, but Rahim refused to leave. I could see him still, slumped in the doorway, his head marked by Valsamis’s bullet, by the dark wound of my betrayal.

Down in the side passageway, something moved through the weeds, bigger than a cat but almost as quiet. Snapping awake, I swung my feet to the floor and crossed to the window. At the bottom of the stairs, a figure moved, a black cap of hair and two thin shoulders. Graça Morais. She hesitated, looking up at the cracked windows and closed door. Then she put her foot on the first step and started upward.

“There was nowhere else to go,” Graça said. She was shaking slightly, perched on the edge of a battered folding chair, her coat tight around her. On her jeans was a smear of blood, a long fading smudge where she’d wiped her hand. And on her skin the rusty tinge of it, darker where her fingers creased at the knuckles.

I took the stovetop coffeemaker from the hot plate, poured out two cups, and passed one to Graça.

“I used to give Rahim a hard time about this place,” she said, cradling the chipped porcelain, glancing around the spartan space. We’d settled comfortably on English as a common language. Hers was better than mine, honed, like the English most of her peers spoke, on pop music and American television.

“All his secrets,” she remarked. “How did you know?”

“Your grandfather told me.”

She contemplated my reply. “Do you think it’s safe here?”

I shrugged. “I hope so.”

“Whoever it was was still in the house,” she said, looking down at her cup.

“They saw you?” I asked.

“No. I could hear them in my bedroom upstairs.”

Valsamis, I thought. He did not strike me as someone who would leave this kind of work to others.

“I found a copy of a shipping invoice when I was here the other day,” I said. “For a cargo of cables from Trans-Dniester to Basra, Iraq.”

Graça’s head jerked upward, betraying what she knew. In over her head, I thought, watching the cool girl I’d met earlier evaporate.

“You knew about the invoice, didn’t you?” I prompted.

She took a sip of coffee and squeezed her eyes shut.

“We can find a way out of this,” I told her, not believing a word myself. “But I need you to tell me what you know.”

She opened her eyes and stared back at me, hard now, who she was coming slowly back to her. “I remember you,” she said. “From when I was a child.”

For an instant I was back on Eduardo Morais’s patio, under the shadow of his arbor, the broad leaves of the grapevines whispering against one another. On the table, the patter of gin rummy, the drowsy slap of the stiff cards against the old wood table. In the chair beside me, his face naively triumphant as it always was when he was about to win, Rahim. “Yes,” I agreed.

Graça nodded, gathering herself. “What are you doing here?”

I let the words sink in, the question I also wanted an answer to. “I don’t know,” I told her. It was the best I could manage.

Graça got up, walked to the dirty front window, and stared silently out at the dark street. The cat followed behind, weaving back and forth between Graça’s legs, brushing her calves.

“This job, the invoice,” I said, not sure where to begin or how much to give away. “I was told Rahim has been working for the Islamic Armed Revolution.”

Graça spun back to face me. “You’re kidding, right?”

I shook my head, but Graça balked at what I was suggesting.

“Rahim hated those people. Cowards, he called them. I was with him last fall when the towers came down. He was disgusted by it, like we all were.” She slid a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and fished one out. “Besides,” she said, putting the filter to her lips, striking a match, “the Trans-Dniester invoice was my job.”

“Your job?” I tried to hide my surprise.

Graça nodded. “Yes,” she said proudly. “Al-Rashidi came to me.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“I’ve done a few jobs.”

“And your grandfather knew?”

“He knew.” Graça flicked the ash from her cigarette.

Knew, but not really, I thought. “How did al-Rashidi find you?”

“I did a job a couple of months ago for a guy named Vitor Gomes. Immigration papers. Al-Rashidi got my name from Vitor.”

“And Gomes? How did you come by his patronage?”

“He came to my grandfather, but Papi wouldn’t take the job.”

“So you offered your services instead?”

“Yes.”

“And did your grandfather say why he wouldn’t work for Gomes?”

“You know him, yes?”

I nodded.

“Then you know how he can be. I thought maybe the job was too simple for him. No teeth, as he likes to say.”

“And al-Rashidi’s job, did it have teeth?”

Graça shrugged. “Enough.” She turned her face down and away, but I could see the flush in her cheeks. She was a good liar but not good enough.

“You couldn’t do it by yourself, could you?”

“I know what I’m doing,” she protested.

“But you couldn’t finish the invoice on your own.”

“No.” She took a long drag off her cigarette and wrapped her free arm tight around her chest. She was making an effort not to cry and just barely succeeding.

“What did Rahim say when you asked for his help?”

“He thought it was too much money for too small a job.”

“And was it?”

“Ten thousand euros,” Graça said quietly.

“On a fake shipping invoice?” It was a huge sum for what might have amounted to two days’ work, a price that would have seemed too good to be true to any real professional.

Graça nodded. She’d made a mistake and she knew it, knew exactly what her miscalculation had cost her.

“But Rahim agreed to help you anyway?”

“Yes.”

Yes, I thought, of course he’d agreed. And looking at Graça, I knew why.

“And did al-Rashidi pay?”

“The agreement was half up front and half on delivery,” Graça explained. “I gave the invoice to him two weeks ago and got the last five thousand then.”

“You delivered the invoice?” I asked.

“Yes. We met at Casa Suíça.”

“Rahim was with you?”

“No.”

“But the two of them must have met,” I insisted, thinking of Valsamis’s photographs, Rahim and al-Rashidi on the patio of Brasileira. “To discuss details of the job, at least.”

Graça shook her head. “I was the only one who dealt with al-Rashidi.”

“But you told him you were working with someone else.”

“No.” She finished her cigarette, walked to the sink, and carefully doused the coal.

Whatever adrenaline had carried her across the river was gone; she was tired and deflated, sagging against the old countertop. “I’m sorry,” she said, in Portuguese now, speaking to no one in particular.

I opened my mouth to offer some form of absolution, then stopped myself. “That was the only time you met, then? To deliver the invoice?”

“We met once before,” Graça answered. “At the beginning, to talk about the job.”

I took a sip of my coffee, then fiddled with the cup’s chipped rim, pondering what Graça had just told me, hoping and failing to find an answer in the momentary distraction.

“And Gomes?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing, really. Like I said, he came to my grandfather. He runs girls. Junkies, mostly. Africans.”

“You know where to find him?”

Graça shook her head.

“Nice of you to help him out,” I said.

Graça didn’t flinch. She stared back at me, her eyes saying she knew I’d done worse.

I tossed my coffee into the sink. The grounds had been old and stale, and it was too bitter to drink. There was one more thing I needed to ask Graça. “Rahim’s brother,” I said. “Driss. Did you know he was here?”

Graça nodded. “He comes to visit every few months. He’s got a mosque up in Toulouse.”

“A mosque?”

“He’s some kind of cleric,” Graça explained. “Imam, or whatever they call it. I’ve never met him. I don’t think he cares much for Rahim’s lifestyle.”

No, I thought. Some things didn’t change. I set down the empty cup and motioned toward the back of the apartment. “You need to get some sleep,” I told her. “Take the cot.”

John Valsamis turned off the taps and stepped out of the shower. Two bars of cheap hotel soap whittled down to their flowery essence, and he could smell it still. The stink tenacious as the odor of a field-dressed elk on a cold morning. Not his clothes, for these Valsamis had wrapped tightly in three plastic bags, everything he’d had on, right down to his underwear, a neat package to be disposed of later. No, this stink was in him, the old man’s blood in his nostrils and in the back of his throat.

It had been so long since he’d killed a man close-up that Valsamis had forgotten how much blood there could be. With Morais, so much had spilled out that it had seemed almost as if he’d been in a hurry to die, each ounce of his being rushing out onto the tile floor.

Valsamis had seen this kind of haste only once before. Years earlier, in a little village in the Annam highlands, just east of the Laotian border. He’d bungled that job, too. Green and scared, on one of his first trips out, and he’d stumbled across a young girl in the darkness, younger than he was, even. Pretty as a deer and quiet as one, she’d stepped out of the bushes in front of him. At the moment there hadn’t been time for reason, just Valsamis’s fear hammering him to action.

He’d shot her a good dozen times in the chest, and she’d been dead before she hit the ground. Vanished, Valsamis had thought at the time, her soul bled out onto the little footpath. As if she couldn’t get away quickly enough, away from him and that place.

We should take care of the Morais girl as well,
Valsamis heard Morrow say, the “we” echoing in his head. This from a man who’d spent Valsamis’s war drinking cocktails at the embassy club.

Valsamis rubbed himself dry and padded out of the bathroom, securing the towel around his waist before reaching for the disposable cell phone on the bedside table. Things were getting ugly. Nicole Blake was gone, and now the Morais girl, and Kanj would find someone to listen to him soon, if he hadn’t already.

Valsamis pressed the talk button, punched in Kostecky’s number, and waited. Nicole would use her Hotmail account again. And when she did, Valsamis wanted to be the first to know.

M
Y GRANDMOTHER WAS A METICULOUS WOMAN
,
raised under colonial rule, keenly aware of her place in Lebanese society, and of what that meant. Like other Christians of her age and class, my grandmother prided herself on her French, so it was French that was the language of our household. But that night, after we’d come home from the theater, it was Arabic I heard through my bedroom walls, my grandmother’s voice and my mother’s, the two of them arguing ferociously in the kitchen. Then a door slammed, and the whole building shuddered around me.