An Accidental American: A Novel (26 page)

Not just the money, I thought, though I needed it— Graça and I needed it— but something else, some other reason why I’d come. As if the request were a gift in itself, this one last chance for my father to redeem himself.

“Of course,” he answered, suddenly serious. “I’ll do what I can. It’ll take me a day or two to round up that kind of cash. You can stay here.”

I shook my head again. “I need to go home first, pick up some things.” I didn’t say where home was, though I had a hunch that he knew, that perhaps he had lied to Valsamis, or Valsamis had lied to me when he’d said my father hadn’t known where I was. Ed had a way of finding things out when he wanted to.

“Sure, baby. Whatever.” Years, decades now, living in Europe, and Ed still talked like a character in a bad American movie. “When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow.” I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“Okay,” he said.

He reached out his hand, and this time I let him touch me.

“There’s a plane on the way now,” Charlie Fairweather said, slipping his cell phone back into his pocket, signaling to a passing waiter. He grinned over at Morrow, then lowered his voice conspiratorily. “I know you won’t believe it, but these are the best margaritas outside of Texas.”

The waiter approached their table and peered out from under the brim of his spangled sombrero. Filipino, Morrow thought, as were most of those who did the actual work in this part of the world. But he’d been outfitted to look the part, as had the restaurant, all of it made to conform to some rich Arab’s idea of a Mexican cantina.

Fairweather ordered a round of drinks, and Morrow let him. If the Gulfstream had stayed put, as he’d been told it would, he would have been gone by now, instead of drinking overpriced margaritas in the lounge at the Amman InterContinental. But the plane had been summoned elsewhere, and there was nothing to do except wait. For some reason, Morrow didn’t particularly want to be alone.

Fairweather picked a corn chip from the basket on their table and scooped up some salsa. “So what did Kanj have to say?” he asked, popping the chip into his mouth, brushing the salt from his hands. “Any meat to his story?”

Again Morrow thought of Andy Sproul. Something about Fairweather’s gesture and the ease with which he asked the question, his obliviousness to its audacity.

Morrow shook his head. “Nothing but bluster,” he answered. “A waste of my time and yours.”

Fairweather shook his head in sympathetic agreement. “They’ll say anything, won’t they?”

The waiter returned with their drinks, two fishbowl-sized glasses filled with green slush. He set them ceremoniously in front of the two men before retreating to his discreet post near the bar.

How did they teach the waiters to serve so perfectly? Morrow wondered. Without judgment. Without reason. Without regard for anything other than the needs and comfort of the few privileged men passing through this place.

Morrow raised his finger just slightly, and the waiter, ever vigilant, hustled across the room.

“You can take this,” Morrow told him, motioning to his drink. “I’ll have a martini instead. Tanqueray, no ice.”

A different kind of project,
Valsamis could hear Morrow saying, his voice grainy and distant on the battered black telephone in his landlady’s kitchen. Though it was the only call Valsamis had gotten in the six months he’d spent on Crete, he hadn’t been surprised by the predawn knock on his door, the widow’s husky voice in the corridor. A woman who didn’t mind waking people up. “Mr. Valsamis, there’s a phone call for you. Very urgent.” Valsamis hadn’t asked how Morrow had found him.

Six in the morning in Hania, and in Washington it was still the night before. September 11 and the Pentagon smoldering, the remnants of the towers still in flames. And Morrow himself on the line. “It’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to get okayed for years. On the high side,” Morrow said. “Our money comes straight from the secretary of defense. Christ, the Agency won’t even know we exist.” Not an apology, not even close, but an acknowledgment that they needed him.

No matter what they thought, they still needed him.

Valsamis hunched his shoulders and shuffled north along the Avenida da Liberdade, trying not to think about Nicole. He would find her, he reminded himself. Kostecky’s people were still listening. For now it was just a matter of waiting it out, of trying to keep his nerves in check until the next call came in.

It was far too early for the real showgirls to be out, but there were a few desperate early birds peddling their wares. On the opposite side of the street, a tall transvestite in a denim miniskirt clung to her doorway, watching the traffic go by. Down the block, a fat woman in a fishnet halter top tottered on eight-inch heels, her arms stippled with dark vines of needle tracks, her scarred stomach stretched like a deflated balloon.

Valsamis was reminded of the central panel of Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights.
All the grotesque compulsions of man on display, Valsamis’s very much among them.

A boy stepped out of a doorway up ahead of Valsamis, and their eyes met briefly. The boy’s head was bare, his slight frame lost beneath the folds of a thick wool coat. A coat that had fit him once, Valsamis told himself. A coat a mother or a grandmother would have bought, a gift of warmth.

The young man was smoking, the smell of the tobacco heightened by the cold air, the smoke wreathing his face like a mourning veil. He looked slightly unwell. In need of something, of whatever it was that had brought him to this life in the first place.

Valsamis slowed his pace and angled himself in the boy’s direction. He lifted his head and tried to think of something to say. This was always the hardest part, the stilted attempt at conversation, the meager gestures at fantasy. What was the point? After all, they both understood why they were here.

The boy smiled uneasily, and at the same moment Valsamis’s phone rang, flooding him with a profound sense of relief. He turned away and picked up his pace again, slipping the phone from his pocket, pressing it to his ear as if for salvation.

Kostecky, he thought, but the voice on the other end was one he didn’t immediately recognize.

“You told me to call,” the man said. Then there was a hesitant silence, the caller waiting for Valsamis to understand.

“She’s there?” Valsamis asked.

“She left about ten minutes ago,” Ed Blake replied calmly. He didn’t sound like a man who was giving up his own daughter. “She’s on her way home, but she’s coming back here. She asked for money, and I stalled her.”

“Did she say when?”

“Tomorrow, I think. She’s not sure.”

Valsamis thought. “Was she alone?”

“There was another woman in the car. She didn’t come in, but I saw her when they were leaving. Young. Pretty. Long dark hair.”

Graça Morais, Valsamis told himself. The two of them heading for Paziols together.

“It’s good?” Ed asked. “I called, just like you wanted.”

“Yes,” Valsamis assured him, “it’s good.” Even he was awestruck by the coldness of the man, the ease with which he had betrayed Nicole. “You’ll get your money.”

Kanj had not been able to bring himself to go to the rue Said Khadige. That last night in Beirut, he’d lain awake sorting through his options, fully aware of what his choice to stay would mean. In the end, he could not accept the help of the man whose pride had kept him from Mina all those years earlier, whose scorn kept them apart still. Kanj had watched dawn come and go from his window overlooking the ravaged southern slums, then finally fallen asleep.

It was midmorning when he heard the knock on his door. Khalid or one of the others from Amal, Kanj thought. Come to check up on him, for he had been uncharacteristically absent the last few days. But when he opened the door, he saw Mina standing in the hallway.

She had been to the apartment several times before, in the earlier days, before Valsamis, when their affair was just that, but even then they had been aware of how dangerous it was for her to come. Now it seemed inconceivable that she would have navigated the neighborhood alone.

“My friends called to say you hadn’t come,” she said as Kanj pulled her inside and shut the door.

“I can’t,” Kanj told her, but she wasn’t listening.

“You can still catch the freighter,” she insisted. “It doesn’t leave until three. You can take our old fishing boat. It’s at the yacht club. The
Patxi.
You’ll find it easily. I can’t imagine there will be anyone there to stop you. The key is under the captain’s chair.”

Kanj shook his head, but Mina persisted. “Don’t you see? They’re not here to help us. None of them are. This isn’t their country.”

She was right, of course. They had all known it for some time now. The Americans would leave as soon as their presence in Lebanon no longer suited them, as would the Russians and the Syrians and the Israelis, as the French had done before. Still, Kanj could not bring himself to accept that the sacrifices of the last few years, the deaths and betrayals, had all been in vain.

Mina ducked her head to avoid his gaze. “I’m scared, Sabri,” she said. “I’ve written my sister. In case something were to happen. I’ve told her everything.”

Kanj wanted to lie, to tell her that nothing would happen, but he couldn’t. He reached out to touch her, but she turned away.

“I can’t stay here,” she said, opening the door, stepping into the hallway. “Three o’clock,” she reminded him. “The ship is the
Akilina.
”

She moved her hand to her face, as if to adjust her head scarf, but Kanj could see that she was crying, and that the motion was one of camouflage.

It was this final gesture that Kanj would carry with him for the next twenty years, to Cyprus, Algeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Through war and rage and flight. This gesture and what Mina had said to him.
They’re not here to help us.

This and the knowledge that it was his own indecision that had killed her. That if he had left in the morning, if she had not returned to Beirut to find him, she would not have been stuck in traffic on the rue Huvelin later that morning when a black Mercedes pulled up beside her car and the driver leaped out and sprinted to the far side of the street. Not before triggering the explosion that would kill Mina and five others.