An Accidental American: A Novel (8 page)

A lie, I thought as I watched the tram start the long climb up the hill, and caught a passing taxi instead. I didn’t believe for a minute that Amadeo had been mistaken about having seen Rahim. And who was Gaspar protecting? Rahim? Himself? Or was it just instinct? I was an outsider now. Or was it Eduardo Morais whom Gaspar was trying to shield? Though neither of the brothers had confirmed my guess, it made sense that Amadeo would have been referring to the watchmaker.

Rahim and I had visited Morais many times, summoned for dinner or an afternoon of port and cards on his little back patio. Never business— Morais was a man who worked alone, an artist of the old school, meticulous in his skill— but as much as Morais preferred to work in solitude, he loathed the thought of drinking alone.

Morais lived not far from the Igreja de São Miguel, on a tiny alley in a honeycomb neighborhood at the bottom of the Beco de Santa Helena. It was a warren of streets far too narrow for a car, so I had the taxi driver let me off at the Largo das Portas do Sol. It was still drizzling when I stepped out of the cab, and beyond the rain-lacquered railings and dripping foliage of the old square, the Tagus was shrouded in mist.

Twelve years had all but erased the exact location of Morais’s house from my mind, and it took me a good hour of wrong turns and backtracking through the impossibly narrow lanes to find Morais’s distinct green door and the elaborate azulejo that topped it, a tile-work portrait of Saint Vincent.

The house lay at the very back of a dead-end street, squeezed in against its neighbors and a slender flight of stone stairs that connected to the alley above. It was an unassuming structure, two stories of badly flaking plaster, windows underscored by once-elegant wrought iron. A narrow loggia ran the length of the second floor, the sagging balcony crammed with potted palms and unruly tomato plants.

I knocked once on the peeling door, and the sound echoed in the quiet street. In the doorway of the house opposite, an old woman huddled against the day’s chill, grilling sardines on a makeshift brazier, impassively taking me in.

I knocked again, louder, and heard someone move inside. After a few seconds, the green door swung open and a young woman looked out at me.

“
Bom dia,
” I said in my best guidebook Portuguese.
“Queria ver Senhor Morais.”

“My grandfather is working,” the woman answered, her hand on the door, her black eyes hard on my face.

I smiled reassuringly. “It’s important,” I told her. “Please.”

She hesitated, lingering on the stone threshold. She was thin and elegant, her long hair swept up and back, dark and shiny as polished ebony. “He knows you?”

“Yes.” And I know you, I thought. A barefoot girl on Morais’s back patio, gangly limbs tanned the color of caramel, lips stained with pomegranate juice. “My name’s Nicole,” I told her. “Nicole Blake.”

She opened the door a few inches wider and reluctantly motioned for me to step inside. “Wait here,” she said, leaving me in the dark hallway.

I heard her move through the back of the house, doors opening and closing as she went. She returned a few moments later. “Grandfather will see you,” she said grudgingly. Then she led me through the same series of doors.

The low room that held Eduardo Morais’s workshop had changed little since I’d been there last. Half a century of clutter lined the walls, disemboweled timepieces and boxes of scavenged watch works, tiny gears and pins. On a workbench near the one small window, a tall cabinet clock lay like a patient on a stretcher, its face dismantled down to the clockwork bones.

There was an unusual smell to the room, oil and metal, and something entirely unrelated to watchmaking. A printer’s smell, achingly familiar. Ink and acetone and unblemished paper. The tools of a forger.

A watchmaker by trade, Eduardo Morais was a man with an eye for minutiae and the patience for painstaking detail, two qualities that had also made him one of the best counterfeiters in Europe. He’d learned his craft long before the era of the computer knockoff, before Xerox and Hewlett-Packard had helped make forgeries a home business, and when I knew him, he still worked by hand. It was slow going, but Morais turned out quality instead of quantity, single documents that more than paid for his time. If you wanted quickie car papers or a residence card, Eduardo was the wrong man to ask. But if you were looking for a clean U.S. passport and you were willing to pay, Morais could do the job better than anyone.

Morais was hunched over a drafting desk when I entered, his shoulders silhouetted by the bright lamp that illuminated his work. He made a slight movement of acknowledgment, hand flicking over his shoulder, then secreted whatever task was at hand into a large leather folder before pivoting his chair to face me.

He had not aged over the years so much as he had shrunk, his body caving in on itself, bones and skin sagging under the pressure of time. Another year or two, I thought, and he would disappear entirely among the clocks and tools.

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said in easy French. He motioned to a fraying chair just an arm’s length from his own. “Will you sit?”

“I don’t mean to stay long,” I told him, grateful for a common language other than Portuguese. “You’re busy.”

He shook his head. “Nonsense.
Pas du tout.
I’ve asked Graça to bring us some tea. Now, please, sit.”

“Thank you.” I stepped forward, following his gesture to the dusty armchair. His fingers were smeared with ink, his cardigan mottled with black stains. “I’m afraid not everyone has been so gracious in their welcome.”

Morais nodded sympathetically. “I’m too old for petty suspicions,” he said. “Working for Vanguard, aren’t you? I seem to remember having heard that.”

“Solomon, actually,” I corrected him. “And some freelancing here and there. There wasn’t much else for me. Once I got out.”

“Yes,” Morais agreed. “Better not to waste your talents. Though with you there, I’ll have to be on my toes.”

“Hardly.” I doubted there was much I could throw at Morais that he wouldn’t be able to get around.

“The straight and narrow must agree with you,” Morais commented. “You look good.”

I smiled. “So do you.”

“Old, you mean.”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t lie,” Morais scolded. “Now, tell me, my dear, what can I do for you? I’m right to assume this visit isn’t purely for old times’ sake?”

I shook my head. “I hear Rahim is still in Lisbon.”

Morais smiled knowingly. “Of course,” he teased. “I should have guessed.”

There was a soft knock from the hallway, then the door opened and Morais’s granddaughter appeared with a tray.

“You’ve met Graça?” Eduardo nodded at the young woman.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Graça thinks I’m old,” Morais remarked. “And foolish. Don’t you, my dear?”

The girl scowled. “Of course not, Papi.” She set the tray on a low table between us, then leaned down and kissed Morais on the cheek.

“Senhorita Blake is an old friend of Rahim Ali’s,” Morais said, addressing his granddaughter in Portuguese. “Perhaps you can tell her where to find him?”

The briefest shadow of panic darkened Graça’s features. Then she shrugged petulantly.

“
Nao?
” Morais prodded. “I felt sure you would know.”

“
Nao,
” Graça replied coolly. She poured out two cups of tea, then turned and made her way out of the workshop, closing the door behind her.

After watching her go, Morais reached under his desktop and produced a ring of keys. “I’m at her mercy,” he complained, bending down to unlock the lower drawer of his desk, producing a pack of cigarettes. “Otherwise there would be port instead of tea. Everyone thinks they can live forever these days. I’m afraid I don’t see the point.” He tapped a cigarette from the pack and offered me one, but I shook my head.

“You are staying in the city?” he asked.

“In the Bairro Alto, at the Pensão Rosa.”

Morais lit the cigarette, closed his eyes, and leaned back to inhale. “I can’t be sure,” he said, his words obviously chosen with care, “but I’ve heard he has a workshop in Cacilhas. In an old dairy, not far from the ferry dock.”

Three old men, I told myself, thinking of the Fieldings. Three old minds, memories slipping like worn gears. It was hard to know whom to believe, impossible to separate lie from mere confusion— though I was more certain than before that Amadeo had been right, that he had seen Rahim here. Yet if Morais was willing to tell me where Rahim’s studio was, then why would he lie about this?

I reached for my cup and took a sip of the tea. Not panic but fear, I thought, remembering the look on Graça’s face when Morais mentioned Rahim. It had been an odd exchange, and though Morais had chosen to speak to the girl in Portuguese, I couldn’t help but feel that it had been for my benefit.

T
HOSE FIRST YEARS MY MOTHER AND I
spent in Paris are hardly a memory to me now, just a few hazy scenes conjured up from the dim vault of childhood: a particular pair of brown leather pumps, the chipped rim of our old bathtub, the sounds of one of my mother’s students playing the Kreutzer études in our living room, or the same scale over and over, the same missed note each time.

It was my aunt Emilie who sketched in the details of that time, what took my mother from Beirut in the first place, and what led her back. My mother and her sister had not lived in the same city since my mother first left for France. By the time we returned to Beirut, my aunt had already married and moved to Bordeaux. But the sisters had kept a faithful correspondence, and it was through my aunt’s secondhand retelling that I learned about the convent in Dordogne. How, faced with the only respectable choice— that of giving me up— my mother had chosen a different path entirely. How she had cobbled together a life for us in Paris, at first sleeping on the floor of a friend’s studio near the Sorbonne and, later, in our drafty apartment on Montmartre.

A few months before Emilie died, she gave me the entire record of her correspondence with my mother, an old Dior shoe box crammed with yellowed paper. It was a gesture of reconciliation on my aunt’s part, I know that. But to this day, I have not been able to bring myself to read the letters.

We all carry the dead within us, as we wish them to be. To my aunt, my mother was never anything other than the one who’d stood up to their father and won. To her father, my mother remained a slightly serious girl on the stage of the recital hall at the American University, her hair bound in a tight bun, her chin and shoulder curled around her violin, her whole body swaying with the effort of a Dvorak concerto.

And to me? The person I’ve carried for so many years is yet another incarnation of the woman we all knew. My mother was a breathtaking skier, as fearless as her compatriots but with a certain grace that transcended the characteristic Lebanese recklessness. It is this version of my mother I try to hold on to now: her black hair flying loose behind her, her skis carving effortlessly through the snow at Faraya-Mzaar, her body not wrecked as it was at the end, but whole, powering its way down the mountain. The only reconciliation I need.

“A milkmaid,” the old man said, his false teeth sliding in and out of place as he contemplated my question. Then he put his finger to the side of his head. “Yes! Yes! The old dairy.” He smiled and turned, gesturing out the café’s front window toward the bus station across the street and a narrow lane that disappeared behind it. “Down there and take your first right.”

“Thank you.” I slid a ten-euro note onto the counter and waved the barman over, adding another of the pensioner’s
medronhos
to my bill before gathering my things to go.

It was a wretched afternoon in Cacilhas, sodden and gray, the air above the waterfront thick with yellow smoke from the factories below. Beneath the beneficent arms of the Cristo Rei, tugboats shuffled back and forth across the harbor, their red and white hulls bright as songbirds against the dark river.

At night, well-heeled Lisbonites crossed the Tagus to visit the seafood restaurants clustered along the riverfront, but during the day, unless you lived or worked in Cacilhas, there wasn’t much reason to make the trip. It was a hardscrabble little town, made more so by the rain and chill, the dull patina of wet mud and soot that glazed the streets and sidewalks.