An Accidental American: A Novel (30 page)

Valsamis slid the Ruger from inside his coat and checked the clip one last time, then fitted the silencer on the barrel. Still as the evening was, a gunshot here would be heard all the way down in the valley. He scanned the garden, then started walking again, hugging the wall as he went. From somewhere in the distance, past the dark fringe of the trees, came the sound of a dog barking, lonely and wild.

There would be Nicole’s dog to contend with, Valsamis reminded himself, angling toward the front of the house and the driveway, and the kitchen door, which he remembered as being slightly blind. Nicole’s dog, and the two women, and the twelve-gauge he’d seen in the hallway on his first visit.

Valsamis stepped into the side garden, then stopped himself and drew back. It was dark here, the windows on this side of the house all black, but in the meager illumination the snow threw up, Valsamis could just make out the silhouette of a figure moving through the snow. Not Nicole.

It was Graça Morais, her long hair loose down her back. She was carrying a basket in one hand, and in the other, something Valsamis couldn’t see. She made her way to the fence that surrounded the chicken coop, then pulled the gate open against the snow and slipped through it.

It was surprisingly warm inside the small house, the hens tucked into their nests, the rooster perched on one of the upper rafters, his lizard eyes glistening like crushed glass. Graça closed the door behind her and switched on the camp lantern she’d taken from Nicole’s kitchen, then set it on one of the empty roosts and took a step into the coop. There was a general disquiet at her presence, the rustling of feathers, the birds’ cosmic dialect of fear and warning playing on their throats’ crude flutes.

It’s better this way,
Graça heard Nicole say. Better for each woman to know only what she needed to survive. Yet Graça understood more than she would have liked, could see clearly now the price of what she’d taken from Rahim.

She closed her eyes and thought of her grandfather’s house in the Alfama, the place to which she would not be going back, the chipped face of Saint Vincent above the front door, the tiny garden in the back, the patio where she’d first seen Rahim, where she’d first seen Nicole as well. And later, through the window of the front room, the two of them embracing beneath one of the gas lamps. Rahim’s hand beneath Nicole’s shirt. Nicole’s mouth on his ear. Then something whispered and they were gone again, slipping off down the hill. She’d thought Nicole sophisticated at the time, and she had been, mysterious as Eduardo’s workshop, the jars of ink and acetone, the shelves of tools Graça was forbidden to touch.

It was in this same way that Graça had come to fall in love with Rahim, wanting not him but the idea of him, the place he came from and the mystery of it. The medina, with its secret alleyways and hidden gardens, women swaying behind dark veils.

Ten years later, with Eduardo asleep inside, trundled off early to bed after too much wine, they’d found themselves awkwardly alone together for the first time. Nothing happened between them, but when Rahim got up to leave, he put his hand on Graça’s arm, and she understood that it was just a matter of time.

It was two months before they ran into each other outside the Café da Ponte down at the Santo Amaro docks. Both of them had been dragged there by friends, and both were looking for an early exit and a cab ride home. In the end, they’d taken the train together and walked up into the Alfama. Not to Eduardo’s house but to Rahim’s apartment in the tumbledown neighborhood on the hill’s western flank.

What she hadn’t told him then, what she had never told him: This had been her first time. There in the dark foyer of his apartment, her legs failing, her hands shaking so hard he’d had to undress them both.

Graça reached her hand into the nest of one of the Marans, and the bird rose up from the touch, fluttering her wings like a bony, feathered angel. The straw was hot where she’d lain, the egg red, dark as blood.

Better not to know, she told herself again, slipping the egg into the basket, moving on like the robber she was. Then the coop’s door flung open, and for an instant she felt the breath knocked from her body, felt herself a vessel filled entirely with fear.

There was one scream, high and quick, and then there was nothing. Graça, I told myself, setting the next letter back in the box unread, straining to hear across the silence. In the garden, though I couldn’t be sure, fleeting as the sound had been, muffled by the attic’s rafters, the stone walls of the house.

Grabbing the shoe box and the letters, I peered out through the open trapdoor, then carefully lowered my body down. It was a house full of creaks— the loose board in the front foyer, the groaning hinges on the kitchen door— but I could hear nothing.

Sliding the FEG from the back of my pants with my free hand, I ducked into my office and peered out the window at the driveway below. The outside light was on, the snow churned and muddled where tracks led from the kitchen door and disappeared around the side of the house toward the garden and the chicken coop.

Stupid. Silently cursing myself for having used the computer, I moved back out to the hallway, then into the dark spare bedroom. I could see the continuation of Graça’s tracks from the window, her footprints veering across the yard and in through the door of the chicken coop. I could see another set of prints as well, this one emerging from the woods, joining Graça’s at the hut.

I turned out of the office and went downstairs to the kitchen, switching off the lights behind me. It was a calculated sacrifice on my part, for it meant Valsamis would know I had heard something, but the advantage of the darkness was worth the trade. I set the letters on the kitchen counter and made my way carefully into the living room.

I’ve often wondered, driving past the old Cathar refuges on the Perpignan-Quillan road, what my choice would have been had I been one of the unlucky inhabitants when the soldiers of the pope came riding across the valley. There was hardly any hope for salvation, for those who stayed faced certain slaughter, and those who fled were almost invariably captured and burned as heretics.

Standing alone, staring out through the glass patio doors toward the back garden, I thought of the Cathar women in the stone coffins of their fortresses, and I felt a desperate urge to run.

Steady, I told myself, taking a deep breath, feeling the FEG against my palm. Silently, I slid the door open and stepped outside. It was snowing again, the flakes fine as pastry flour, settling on my bare arms and in my hair, veiling the woods and the valley below, the meager lights of the town. I took a step forward and another, hugging the house with my left shoulder, picking my way through the drifts.

As I rounded the corner of the house, I could see that the door to the chicken coop was open, and there was a light on inside. My camp lantern, I thought, the one I kept by the back door. Graça must have found it, but there was no sign of her now and no sign of Valsamis. Only the breathy warnings of the hens, and the rooster squawking excitedly.

Then, through the tattered scrim of the snow, I saw two dark silhouettes hobbling together toward the driveway like a pair of drunks. Valsamis had his arm around Graça’s shoulder, but the gesture wasn’t a friendly one. In his other hand he held a gun, the barrel obscenely distended by the silencer that had been fitted to it, the muzzle pressed against the back of Graça’s neck.

Crouching close to the house, I lifted the FEG and sighted at their retreating backs. Easy, I reminded myself. I tried to get a bead on Valsamis, but it was impossible to distinguish him from her. My finger caught against the trigger, and I could hear the rush of my own heart.

The duo reached the far corner of the house and stopped suddenly. At first I thought Valsamis had heard me, but he turned toward the woods instead, his gaze resting on the dark fringe of the trees. The marten again, I told myself, or an owl cruising for its dinner. In trees this thick with snow, the slightest movement was catastrophic.

And then, out past the garden wall, I saw the humped back of a creature moving through the underbrush. Lucifer.

“Luce!” I whispered fiercely. “No!” But it was too late.

The dog burst forth into the yard, his front legs churning through the drifts, his neck bristling, his lips pulled back against his teeth. He lunged forward, then stopped in front of Valsamis and crouched down, snarling and barking.

Valsamis regarded the dog, then lifted the gun from Graça’s neck and pointed it at Lucifer’s head. It was a swift and easy motion, Valsamis’s hand and arm sweeping out in perfect alignment, as if the gun were an extension of him, as if it always had been. There was one shot and then another, the muzzle flaring with each round, and Lucifer collapsed into the snow.

As if from some unrecognizable source came the sound of a third gunshot. Valsamis spun around, and I fired again, my hands steady on the FEG’s grip, the gun suddenly my own. The second round caught Valsamis’s forearm, and his pistol leaped from his hand.

“Go!” I yelled to Graça. “Get inside!”

She wrenched herself free and staggered forward, her boots kicking up snow as she disappeared around the corner of the house.

I pointed the gun at Valsamis’s head but didn’t fire. “Get down!” I shouted. “On your knees!”

He hesitated, looking back at me, cradling his injured arm. Slowly, he lowered himself into the snow.

T
HE FESTIVITIES WERE IN FULL SWING
by the time Valsamis got to the Commodore. There was a sense of overblown joviality among the crowd, the locals wanting to show their guests an authentic Beirut good time, and the visitors hungry for a taste of wartime camaraderie.

The hotel was no one’s first pick. Too many journalists were there, for one thing, too many other Westerners hanging around the bar drinking Scotch and sodas. But since the siege and the attacks on the Multinational Force a month earlier, there was really nowhere else to go, so everyone was making the best of it. There were two female journalists at the bar, a Swedish AP photographer and a young reporter from
The Irish Times,
and both were enjoying unlimited free drinks.

Valsamis ordered a bourbon and found Kip Bryce in a corner booth opposite the bar. Bryce was a good Mormon kid who’d just transferred in from Cairo, and he appeared to be the only sober one in the bunch. “You seen the chief?” Valsamis asked. He needed to let the station chief know about his meeting with Mina as soon as possible.

Bryce shook his head. “He and Sproul went up to the Chouf.”

“You know when they’ll be back?”

The kid shrugged. “Sometime tonight. They must have gotten stuck at a checkpoint.” His eyes wandered across the room and lingered on the Irish girl.

Siobhan, Valsamis thought, digging deep to remember her name. Sproul had introduced her to him once at the Summerland. Valsamis had given him a hard time about it later. Sleeping with the enemy, he’d said when he saw Sproul the next morning at the embassy. He’d been joking, but Sproul hadn’t been amused.

“For fuck’s sake,” he’d shot back, then hastily apologized. “I mean, we all want the same thing for this place, don’t we?”