An Accidental American: A Novel (16 page)

I skirted the National Theater and headed across the square and in through the door of the cybercafé. The crowd had thinned since my earlier visit, and the establishment was nearly empty. Two bored employees lingered behind the coffee bar, a thin pale girl in a leather jacket and a nervous young man with spiky black hair. The only other client was a middle-aged woman in cheap office clothes. Miss Lonelyheart, I thought, watching her face in the light of the monitor, her shoulders hunched over the keyboard.

I ordered a coffee, then took a computer at the back of the café and logged in to my Hotmail account. There was an e-mail from Sergei waiting for me, the message short and even more obtuse than his earlier one. There were no cute smiley faces this time, no fooling around.

Cargo likely labeled incorrect,
he had written.
Search Alazan.

I typed the word into the search frame and waited for a response. Several dozen listings flooded the screen, three pages of possible websites and articles. I skimmed through the descriptions, my eyes lighting on the same phrases over and over.
Alazan rocket. Weather control. Trans-Dniester.

I clicked on the first listing, an article from a scientific journal. It was technical jargon, mostly, written with professionals in mind, but I managed to glean from it that the Alazans had originally been part of a Soviet weather-control experiment in which the rockets were launched into storm clouds as a way of preventing hail from damaging crops.

The second article on the search list, titled “Cloak and Dagger,” was from a British paper, a description of two journalists’ descent into the post-Soviet black market in arms. There was a long intro that narrated a shady meeting with a Ukrainian gangster named Dimitri in Trans-Dniester’s frontier capital city of Tiraspol.

A typical exposé, I thought, the journalists more concerned with their own skin and careers than anything else. No doubt a con job on the Ukrainian’s part, for I’d known enough Dimitris in my time to know they didn’t do anything for free. And then, several paragraphs into the article, I felt my heart catch.

The Alazan rocket,
the text explained,
initially part of a failed Soviet experiment in weather control, was later fitted with warheads containing radioactive waste. Now part of a huge stockpile of aging, unwanted weapons in Trans-Dniester, a 129-mile-long sliver of land on Moldova’s border with Ukraine, the Alazan is considered to be an ideal weapon for terrorists.

Dirty bombs, I told myself, glancing around the café, my eyes lingering on the single woman and the two kids behind the counter. My old prison paranoia at work again. I shuddered slightly as I remembered what Valsamis had said that first night. Something bigger than Nairobi. No, this was something much bigger. Somewhere just up-river from the Baltic Sea, radioactive missiles were up for grabs. And if Sergei was right, the invoice was a shipping bill for five of them.

U
P TO SOMETHING, EDUARDO MORAIS THOUGHT
,
rolling over in his bed, listening to the front door open and close, the latch falling softly into place. Through the slats of his bedroom shutters, Morais saw his granddaughter emerge onto the lane below. She stopped in the gaslight and adjusted her coat against the night’s chill, then started off again, the hard soles of her boots tapping on the alley’s stone cobbles.

She was up to something. Morais was certain of it. Too young to know better and too old for him to stop her. But still, he didn’t have to like it. He’d seen her with Ali, had heard the two of them in the house together when they must have thought he was asleep. A man twice her age, and an Arab.

Morais had been relieved to see Nicole Blake back in Lisbon, more than happy to help her find Rahim. The two of them had been in love once, and Morais was hoping Nicole’s presence might distract Rahim from Graça.

Morais closed his eyes and tried to regain the gift of sleep, but it was no use. His bladder was calling, and in the end he would have to relent.

Sliding his feet into his slippers, Morais eased himself from the bed and padded down the hallway to the bathroom to face the first of the night’s battles. This was the worst of the degradations of age, his old body failing so badly that every piss was work, every successful elimination a minor miracle. Flipping on the bathroom light, Morais flattened his left hand against the wall, took aim at the toilet bowl, and half missed, his sloppiness part accident and part spite.

He’d been so pleased when Graça had first come to him. Curious, as her mother never had been, and wanting to learn; Morais had been more than happy to oblige her. He’d taught her everything he knew, each careful skill, but in the end Morais had been unable to convince her of the merits of perfection. Like everyone these days, his granddaughter didn’t have the patience for the old kind of quality. She’d preferred to do things her way, preferred the speed of the computer to the beauty of the human hand.

Downstairs in the kitchen, something moved. The cat door, Morais told himself, listening to the rasping of hinges, the quiet groan of the floorboards. His old tabby, Saramago, letting himself in from an evening of hunting. Squeezing the last few drops from his bladder, Morais shook himself off, tucked his flaccid penis inside his pajamas, and headed back out into the dark hallway. He would die soon, he thought, and everything he knew with him, the realization coming to him for no reason, as it did so often these days.

Morais stopped at the top of the stairs, contemplating the dark hallway below, the possibility of a nightcap. He fumbled for the light switch, his hand brushing the wall. Fifty years he’d lived in this house, fifty years of late nights and early mornings, of coming and going in the dark. Then last week he’d stumbled on the way to the kitchen and lain for two hours like a beetle on its back. Later, Graça had stood with him on the stairs and made him practice turning the light on and off, made him promise he would do the same when she wasn’t there.

His hand touched the switch, but he hesitated, listening to the sounds of the house. A new sound now, in the front hall this time. Not Saramago. Something bigger.

“Graça?” he called.

But the only answer was the ticking of the house’s old clocks.

“Saramago?” Morais tried. “Saramago!” he called again, his pupils wide, his eyes intent on the dim landing.

And then, finally, an irritated yowl, the cat’s hungry voice.

“Yes, Senhor,” Morais called down to the creature, “I’m coming.”

Out of the darkness, two bright eyes appeared. And behind them, the body of a man.

Morais’s hand hit the switch, and the stairwell was flooded with light. He saw the intruder below.

“Can I help you?” Morais blurted, for the man looked more like a lost tourist than a menace. An American, definitely an American, the kind you saw playing Pessoa at Café Nicola, or wandering with his
Fodor’s
through the Alfama. Only there was something off about this one. Lonely, Morais thought. A stranger, always a stranger.

The man looked up. His face was blank, his eyes flat. He raised his right hand up the staircase, showing Morais the silenced pistol in his fist.

Briefly there was a disconnect between what Morais saw and what he understood. Between this strange man at the bottom of the stairs and the gun in his hand. The intruder looked past Morais, as if searching for something or someone, then his eyes narrowed and he focused in on the old man.

Morais put his hand up, the gesture part self-defense and part welcome. His last thought was of his workshop, of all that would be left unfinished, and his tools as he’d left them, each in its place.

Graça Morais tucked the cigarettes in her pocket and started back up the hill, leaving behind the little kiosk, the ancient owner’s wizened face framed by the day’s headlines. On the front covers of
Diário de Notícias
and
Público,
the scowling face of the American president. And in
Jornal de Notícias,
a beleaguered United Nations weapons inspector and the simple headline WHERE?

It wasn’t so much the cigarettes Graça had wanted as an excuse to walk, to get out and get some fresh air and sort things through. Whatever she believed, something had happened at the Miradouro de Santa Catarina the day before. After the Blake woman’s visit, Graça had walked up into the Bairro Alto and stood behind the police barricades with the other gawkers, listening to the neighborhood gossips.

“Murdered,” the old woman beside Graça had said to her friend, pointing her gnarled finger at her head, indicating a gun. The friend had looked back at her, her shock one step removed. And then, whispered: “They say it was an Arab.”

Graça turned down the narrow lane toward home and picked up her pace, her boots pounding out a rapid staccato. She should have known, she thought, pulling her coat tight to stifle a shiver. She should have guessed there was something wrong with the job for al-Rashidi. Even Rahim had said it: It was too much money for what the man wanted. A handful of phony papers that any hack could have turned out on a PC. But Graça had wanted the job, and in the end Rahim had not been able to say no to her.

Up ahead, a cat darted from the shadows and into the gaslights, her grandfather’s big tabby, Saramago, swaggering toward her. King of their street, as always. Graça bent down and put out her hand, and the cat nudged her palm, running the length of his back beneath her fingers, spine arching in pleasure. She brushed his tail and her hand came away wet. Not water but something sticky, the smear dark in the lamplight.

Graça raised her hand to her face and sniffed, pulling back in disgust, the smell of blood unmistakable. Not Saramago’s, for the cat seemed fine. He darted ahead and stopped on their front doorstep, looking back at Graça, impatient as always, waiting for his servant to let him in, though he knew perfectly well how to use the cat door off the back patio.

Graça wiped her hand on her jeans and started forward, fishing her keys from her pocket. But as she neared the front door, she could see that she wouldn’t need the keys. The door was open just slightly. A centimeter, maybe less, where the wood met the jamb.

Not her work, for she could clearly remember turning the lock behind her when she left. Clearly. It seemed odd that her grandfather would have come this way so late, unless the cat had been scratching to come in. But even then, left to his own devices, Saramago almost always went around to the back.

Graça put her hand on the knob and pushed. The door swung inward, revealing a slice of the front hall, the floor and wall lit by the light from the stairwell.

“Papi?” she whispered.

Saramago rushed past her, down the hallway and toward the kitchen. Something was wrong, Graça thought, the sound of the cat’s paws like the slap of feet on a wet bathroom floor.

“Papi?” She took a tentative step, peering down the hallway as her hand pushed the door wide.

At the foot of the stairs, a large dark stain spread across the floor. Toward the kitchen, a neat set of prints, Saramago’s staggered tracks fading like a printer’s stamp run out of ink. And just to the left of where the cat had passed, a wide smear, the stain muddled where something large and heavy had been dragged across it.

Graça looked down at her own hand, at the faint patina of blood on her palm. “Jesus.” She retched, doubling over, hand catching the door frame as she steadied herself. There was so much of it, she thought, too much.

Above her, in the back corner of the house, where her bedroom was, something stuttered across the old floorboards, a human foot and the weight it carried. Someone quietly searching.

Graça took a step back. Too much blood for anyone to have survived, she told herself, closing the door behind her. “Bless me, Father,” she whispered, and the start of the Hail Mary, the words coming haltingly back to her. And then she was running, down into the darkness, down through the hive of houses and lanes.