An Accidental American: A Novel (9 page)

To my surprise, the man’s directions proved to be accurate, and I found the old dairy easily, about halfway down a dead-end alley. The azulejo that had served as the dairy’s billboard had seen better days. Some of the tiles were cracked or missing, and those that were left were scarred and stained, but the milkmaid, sketched in delicate blue, was as lovely as ever, her ample bosom and coquettish smile perfectly intact.

Other than a black-and-white cat curled in the shelter of a nearby doorway, the alley showed no signs of life. The ramshackle buildings were closed up tight, windows shuttered and locked. The dairy itself had obviously been vacant for some time.

I started into the overgrown passage on the building’s left side, and the cat climbed out of her doorway and bounded ahead of me, meowing loudly as she scaled the rust-pocked iron stairway that led to a small landing and windowless door on the dairy’s second floor.

Searching the ground for something to get me past the padlock that I could see hanging just above the door’s knob, I picked up a broken piece of iron railing and started upward.

The cat mewled again and scratched impatiently at the door. Waiting for something, food, water, affection, or all three, something she’d gotten here in the past. She looked well fed, but in a strange way, all belly. Pregnant, I thought.

Nudging her gently aside, I wedged the tip of the broken rail beneath the hasp and pulled, praying the corroded iron would hold. The screws groaned and snapped, threads tearing through the jamb’s ancient wood. I pulled again, mustering all my strength, throwing my weight behind the bar, and the screws popped free.

With the hasp gone, the door opened easily. The cat rushed past me as I tightened my fist around the iron rail and made my way forward, taking in the makeshift apartment and its spartan furnishings.

Along the far wall was a narrow cot, the mattress dressed in mussed sheets and a blanket. Next to the cot, a doorway opened onto a rudimentary bathroom. Closer to the front door was the kitchen, with a refrigerator, a grimy sink and hot plate, and two rows of open cabinets that held a coffee canister and an assortment of chipped dishes.

In the middle of the room was a crude desk, a long, thick piece of plywood propped on four hefty crates with a powerful swing-arm lamp attached to either end. Clues to the apartment’s real purpose, I thought. Bulbs bright enough to see the tiniest mistake by. And on the floor to the right of the desk, a combination digital printer, copier, and scanner.

In my day we’d had the one-hour rule, the time it took to clear a space of anything incriminating. And by now? I wondered. Twenty minutes? Ten? The way things worked today, a laptop was enough computer for almost any job, and in the end you could just fold it up and walk away. No doubt that’s exactly what Rahim had done, for there was no computer to be seen, and nothing else of any interest, either.

Making my way to the copier, I lifted the lid and looked inside. It was an unlikely hunch, but I figured it was at least worth the effort, the last thing copied or scanned easily overlooked. But the glass plate was empty.

The cat snapped at me from the kitchen, a sharp meow this time, her hunger desperate.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I warned her, crossing to the refrigerator, kneeling to open the door. But she was right. On the wire rack was a half-full bottle of milk, and beside it, an opened tin of sardines. The milk had turned, but the fish was still good. I put the tin on the floor, and the cat set greedily at it.

“Good girl,” I told her, reaching down to run my fingers along her back as she ate. She licked the tin clean, then stopped suddenly and lifted her head, her whole body tensing, her eyes on the open door.

Outside, something snapped in the passageway, feet rustling the weeds, the stride quick and purposeful. I crossed to the front window and peered out through the grime-streaked pane. A figure moved in the shadows below. Not Rahim. A woman.

Gripping the bar, I ducked into the bathroom and flattened myself against the wall. The woman started up the stairs, her shoes reverberating on the iron treads. Then she stopped on the landing, and I could hear her lingering in the doorway.

“Rahim?” she called. And then, in Portuguese, “Are you there?”

The cat answered with a plaintive meow, and the woman tried again, her voice quieter, more tentative. “Rahim?”

She waited for a moment, as if debating whether or not to come in. Then I heard her footsteps on the stairs, going down this time.

I waited for her to finish her descent, then stepped out of the bathroom and made my way back to the window. A woman, I thought, watching her go. If she had known to come here, there must have been something beyond the casual between her and Rahim.

She turned out of the side passage and started down the street toward the bus station and the docks. Even from a distance, I could tell that she was not unattractive. She was tall, dressed in a long wool coat and boots, her black hair cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She walked to the end of the street, then turned to look back before disappearing around the corner, and I caught sight of her face for the first time.

Graça Morais.

T
AZMAMART. WHAT WAS IT VALSAMIS
had called it?
Some hole in the desert for dissenters.
The worst thing a man can do to another man, Rahim had said. Ten years we can’t even begin to imagine. Forsaken completely, crouched in a tomb in the sand, living off roaches and fetid rainwater, a single vent and a thin slice of sky. Ten years during which Rahim had prayed each day that his brother was dead.

Driss had been a student when they arrested him, a reckless young man preaching democracy on the streets of Rabat. But Tazmamart had changed all that. The Driss I’d known in Lisbon was sober and stooped, with the air of an ascetic. And though he stayed with us through most of August, he and I barely exchanged a dozen words.

He didn’t like me, treated me with the same scorn so many of Rahim’s Moroccan friends so obviously felt toward me. It was a stigma I’d grown used to, the woman they all wanted to fuck yet hated for making them want her. Driss’s scorn had extended to Rahim as well, I’d thought, to his Swiss watch and German stereo. I was merely another possession.

Driss had brought a shortwave radio with him, and after dinner he would sit in a corner of the kitchen listening to the BBC or Radio France. The Iraqis had invaded Kuwait by then, but the faraway skirmish was not something to which any of us gave much thought.

But Driss was listening, and slowly, the others were, too. I could hear them after I went to bed, voices in the darkness, the Arabic harsh and guttural. Moroccan Arabic was an even greater mystery to me than its Lebanese counterpart, and aside from the odd word or two, I could understand very little. But their anger and outrage were clear.

At first it was mainly Driss who spoke, then slowly the others joined in, faces I recognized from Rahim’s dinners, desperate men who came to the apartment for a week or two and were suddenly gone.

And then, finally, I could hear Rahim’s voice as well.

John Valsamis crossed to the window and peered out across the air shaft at Nicole’s half-closed drapes, the swath of dark room visible in the space between the two long panels. Up before dawn and gone. And now, coming into evening, there was still no sign of her. Valsamis could hardly blame her for her disappearances— no one wants to be followed— but still, he didn’t like it that she’d been gone all day, plus the day before.

Valsamis’s cell phone rang, and he hit the mute button on his TV remote. CNN dropped into silence. On the screen, a handful of white SUVs, each marked with the plain black letters UN, pulled into a fenced factory compound, their wheels kicking up clouds of fine desert dust. FALLUJAH, IRAQ, the banner across the bottom of the screen read.

“Yes?” Valsamis said into the phone.

“Any word on our Moroccan friend?” Morrow’s voice, and the cough again.

They were getting old, Valsamis thought, all of them. “Not yet.”

“And the girl?”

Valsamis hesitated just a moment too long.

“You said she would get this done,” Morrow snapped.

“She will.”

A woman’s voice sounded in the background on the other end of the line. “Cocktail,” Valsamis caught, “darling.” And then Morrow: “Tell everyone I’ll be right there, dear.”

That life, Valsamis thought, and that house. Rain falling quietly on the towpath, on the cobbled Georgetown streets. And inside, only what he imagined, waxed wood and tastefully worn rugs, dinner dishes shining in the firelight, a woman in a plain cashmere sweater and a simple silver necklace. Furniture isn’t something you buy, it’s something you have, he thought, trying to remember who it was who’d told him that. Someone in the Agency, back when he was first starting out. Valsamis had been careful never to bring anyone to any of his apartments after that.

“Remember,” Morrow said. “No loose ends.” Then the line clicked dead.

November 29, 1990. The end of a rainy fall in Lisbon. On our kitchen table, a bowl of tangerines, an empty bottle of vinho verde, and half a loaf of bread. Dinner dishes in the sink, and on the floor a plate of fish bones for the silky black cat who has adopted us. Leila, Rahim calls her, the Arabic word for “night.” Out the open window, rain drums on the rooftops of the Bairro Alto, on the foot-worn cobbles and glistening streets tumbling down toward the black Tagus.

Driss has been gone for three months now, but in the living room, the radio he left hums low, the almost inaudible drone of a woman’s voice, a proper British accent punctuated by the hush of static. The BBC. It’s late and the others have gone, but Rahim is still listening. In the news today, an ultimatum, a UN resolution for force. The beginning of something we have been expecting and other things we can’t yet imagine.

In the dark bedroom, on the old green chair, a chocolate-brown sweater and black jeans, underwear trimmed in lace. To be in love, I think, to want nothing more than this. The radio clicks off, and I hear Rahim moving down the hallway. He climbs into bed, and I put my mouth on the crest of his shoulder. He is as comfortable in his own skin as a wild animal.

Nothing more, I tell myself again. And yet when Rahim turns toward me and slips his hand across my stomach, I can feel a knot there, like a secret waiting to happen. The thing that will divide us, though I don’t yet want to know it. At the moment there is only a feeling of apprehension, a vertiginous sense of choice. And in the darkness, the rain’s thrum, the sound of Leila in the kitchen, the clink of the bones against the porcelain bowl.