An Accidental American: A Novel (19 page)

“Vitor Gomes?” I asked.

Gomes nodded and started warily toward me. “Yes?”

I smiled. “I’ve been told you’re the man to see for a certain kind of entertainment.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, stopping just inside the doorway.

I shrugged. “A friend.”

Gomes’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t do dykes,” he sneered. He took a step forward, backing me away, and peered out into the hall.

His gaze lit on Graça and stopped there for a split second. “Shit!” he muttered. He put his hand on the door and moved to close it, but I caught him just below the chin with the FEG.

“Inside!” I pushed him back into the apartment, motioning for Graça to follow. “Get the door,” I told her.

“Fucking bitch!” Gomes spat.

“Any other girlfriends here?” I asked, nodding to the doorway where the woman in the tube top stood, mouth open, eyes half closed, calmly watching the scene go down.

Gomes shook his head, and I shoved the pistol harder into his jaw. “Don’t lie to me,” I warned him. He looked scared, for real, like a man who would say anything to keep from getting shot.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I turned to Graça. “Ask him how he knows al-Rashidi.”

Graça relayed my question.

“I don’t know…” I heard Gomes say, the words picked from his rapid torrent of Portuguese.

“Bullshit,” I said. I snapped off the FEG’s safety and moved my finger toward the trigger.

“Please,” Gomes pleaded, in English now. He turned his frantic eyes to mine. “I don’t know al-Rashidi.”

Graça shook her head. “I don’t think he’s lying.”

“Then ask him who exactly he recommended your services to.”

Graça began to translate, but Gomes cut her off before she finished, his answer spilling out of him, too fast for me to follow.

“He says it was someone he met through one of his contacts in the Public Security Police,” Graça explained. “A foreigner, he keeps saying.”

“And does this foreigner have a name?”

Graça conveyed my question and waited for an answer. “They met only once,” she said. “At a café in the Alfama.”

“The man was an Arab?” I asked.

Gomes shook his head. “No,” he said in English. “No Arab. American.” Then he turned to Graça and let out another frantic flood of Portuguese.

“Apparently he told Gomes he needed some shipping documents. He wanted someone without a lot of experience. Someone who could do the work but didn’t know much about the business…” Graça trailed off, her face sagging. “An amateur,” she translated.

I took my finger slowly from the trigger, eased the FEG’s safety back on, and released the barrel from Gomes’s jaw.

Gomes exhaled audibly. I could smell the fear on his breath, the rancid odor of old cigarettes and metabolized alcohol. His face, already pale, had blanched a milky green.

“This American,” I said. “Ask him what he looked like.”

Gomes glanced up at Graça, nodding while she relayed my words, then he put his hand slightly below the top of his head.

“His height,” Graça said, speaking for Gomes. “Maybe a few centimeters shorter. But bigger…” She stopped, searching for the right word. “Wider,” she tried finally.

Gomes motioned to his face.

“Ugly,” Graça explained. “Like a rock, he keeps saying.”

“And his clothes?” I asked. “How was he dressed?”

Gomes shrugged at the question. “
Como turisto,
” he said.

Graça looked at me, but I didn’t need her to translate. I knew exactly what Gomes had meant.

“Like a tourist,” I said, before Graça had a chance to. Valsamis.

R
ICHARD MORROW ROLLED OUT OF BED
and slid his feet into his slippers. Three A.M. and the phone in his office was ringing. Nine rings, ten, each tone echoing insistently through the house. Someone who wasn’t going to give up.

Morrow’s wife stirred slightly, put her hand on his back. “Christ, Dick,” she mumbled. “You’d think the goddamn sky was falling.”

He rose and shuffled out of the room and down the hallway, shrugging off the ghost of sleep as he set his hand on the receiver.

“Morrow here.”

“Dick, it’s Charlie Fairweather, in Amman.”

“Do you know what time it is?” Morrow asked.

“Yes, sir. But I thought you’d want to know right away— it’s Kanj.”

Morrow ran his thumb and forefinger across his eyes and sat down in the armchair opposite his desk. Not just tired but weary, the last thirty years catching up with him. Thirty years of chasing a shadow. Lebanon, Cyprus, Iran, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And now that they’d caught up with Kanj, Morrow didn’t know quite what to think. “He’s talking?”

“Not exactly, sir.” Fairweather’s voice was like a child’s, a little boy afraid of being scolded.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He wants to talk to you, sir.”

“That’s impossible. You know that. Tell him it’s impossible.”

“We’ve made that very clear, sir. He’s had it pretty bad— you know how it is. I’m sure he’s just playing us. But he’s very insistent. He claims it’s about the ’83 embassy bombing. In Beirut, sir. Something about a mole.”

Morrow felt his chest seize up and every muscle in his body tighten. “What does he want?” he snapped, rising from his chair.

“I believe he wants to make a deal, sir. But it’s hard to know exactly. Like I said, he claims he won’t talk to anyone but you. He must know you were the DO for Mid-East back then.”

A handful of people, Morrow thought. A handful of people who knew about what had happened in Beirut, and most of them dead. Kanj was not supposed to have been one of them. He could have been bluffing. Push hard enough, and people will say anything. Whatever they think you want to hear. Whatever they imagine will buy them a way out. But this, this didn’t make sense.

“Sir?” Fairweather asked.

“Keep him comfortable,” Morrow told the man. “I’m coming over.”

“You were lovers, weren’t you?” Graça asked, though there was little question in her voice.

I slid a cigarette from her pack and tapped it against the bar, hesitating before pressing the filter to my lips. I had more questions for Sergei, but my better judgment told me not to go back to the Largo do Picadeiro, so Graça and I had taken the train from Gomes’s place to the Rossio instead. I had a hunch there would be a cybercafé near the train station, and I was right. We’d found a busy storefront on the Praça dos Restauradores and settled in at the bar to wait for a free computer.

I struck a match, then touched the flame to the cigarette, lifted my face upward, and exhaled. “Yes,” I said.

“What happened?” Graça asked.

I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“But you loved him?”

I thought about the question, the answer I expected myself to give. “I don’t know,” I told her finally. “Did you?”

“Yes,” she said easily. Her eyes held mine, then she reached forward and picked up her cigarettes.

Had I ever been that sure? I wondered. Those first days in Marseille? The months on the Travessa da Laranjeira? From where I sat, such faith seemed impossible, and yet there was a time when my answer would have been the same as Graça’s. In the end, though, I hadn’t even said goodbye. I’d packed what little I had while Rahim was out one afternoon and taken a taxi to Santa Apolonia Station. From there, a train north to my father’s house in Collioure.

“Who was he?” Graça asked, and initially I thought she meant Rahim. “The man at my grandfather’s,” she elaborated.

“I don’t know. He’s an American. With the government.”

“He’s the one who killed Rahim, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“But why?”

Because I betrayed him, I thought. Because I was afraid. Because you took al-Rashidi’s job. But I didn’t say any of this. “That’s what we need to find out,” I told her.

She lit her cigarette and looked across the table at me. Stony, as she had been that first day on her grandfather’s doorstep, her dark eyes reflecting the café windows, the steady stream of passersby on the sidewalk outside.

“Did you know Rahim was blackmailing al-Rashidi?” I asked.

Graça looked up at me, and I could tell immediately that she’d been telling the truth all along, that Rahim hadn’t told her about the invoice. “What do you mean?”

“The invoice,” I said. “It was a fake.”

“Of course it was a fake.”

I shook my head. “I don’t just mean the forgery. The whole document’s wrong. The cargo. The destination. That’s why whoever hired you through Gomes wanted an amateur. It’s the only thing that makes sense. They figured you wouldn’t see it. What they didn’t bank on was you bringing Rahim in to help.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But Rahim did, and whatever he knew, he must have guessed it was worth more than what al-Rashidi had already paid.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything. But he met with al-Rashidi. I’m sure of that. And I can’t think of any other reason why Rahim would have stayed in Lisbon, knowing it wasn’t safe for him here. Can you?”

Graça’s face darkened. I realized then that she must have thought Rahim had stayed because of her. She was quiet, then she shook her head.

The barman came over and gathered our empty cups, then pointed toward the back of the café.

“Looks like it’s our turn,” I said, following the man’s finger to a computer that had just come open. I crushed my cigarette in the cheap tin ashtray and slid off my stool. “We’ll get out of this,” I told Graça. “Don’t worry.”

I wove back through the rows of desks and slid in behind the keyboard, then logged on to my Hotmail account. There was nothing from Sergei, no new information, just a handful of spam e-mails sitting in my in-box. I deleted them, then addressed a new message to Fernando76.
Need info on John Valsamis,
I wrote.
Showed me U.S. Defense Department credentials.

I hit SEND and waited, checking my watch, making a mental note of the time. Sergei was a night owl, but the time difference made it close to four in the morning in the Islands. I’d give him half an hour, and if I hadn’t heard anything by then, I’d check back later.

Showed U.S. Defense Department credentials, I thought. But Valsamis hadn’t really, had he? What he’d shown me had been a business card, ink on paper. Something even Graça Morais could have done. There’d been the photographs as well, and more than that, there had been everything Valsamis knew. My story at his fingertips.

You can’t just act the part,
my father had told me once, early on.
You have to be the part.

I drummed my fingers on the desk and sat back in my chair, glancing around the café. Graça had found a free computer and was hunched intently over the keyboard. Stupid, I thought, cursing her silently. I got up and shrugged out of my coat, then laid it on my chair to keep my place and made my way toward Graça.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

She looked up at me and blinked, then motioned to the screen. “I did a search for al-Rashidi,” she said.

“Well?”

“I found an Ibrahim al-Rashidi, but he’s not exactly the one we’re looking for.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“Evidently his son is quite popular. He’s an orthopedic surgeon in the U.S.”

I looked at her quizzically, and she moved aside to give me a better look at the monitor. “See for yourself.”

I bent down and peered at the article on the screen. It was a puff piece from
The Seattle Times,
a Sunday feature on the city’s most eligible bachelors. An architect, a chef, a football player, and an orthopedic surgeon, Ibrahim al-Rashidi. There were pictures of the men, each well groomed and likable-looking, each smiling his flawless smile. Each a perfect combination of looks and ambition, the marrying type. I skimmed through the text, the cursor passing the first three stories, slowing at al-Rashidi’s.

“Here,” Graça said, setting her finger against the screen.

Dr. al-Rashidi was born in Iraq,
the sentence she’d picked out began,
where his father was a high-ranking member of Saddam Hussein’s government. Al-Rashidi lived a privileged life, his childhood split between homes in Beirut and Baghdad.