An Accidental American: A Novel (18 page)

I don’t know where my mother went that night, but she was there again in the morning when I woke up. Her hair was still up and pinned, as it had been for the theater the night before, but her face was pale, stripped of makeup. She made me breakfast, and we ate in silence at the small table in the kitchen. I knew better than to ask any questions.

There was no sign of my grandmother. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I could see now that they must have worked out some kind of agreement, the terms of which had been settled on for my sake, a cease-fire that allowed them to share a living space without acknowledging each other’s presence.

After breakfast, my mother got her violin, and we walked together to my school on the rue Huvelin. Before saying goodbye and catching her bus to the American University, she stopped and set her violin case down on the sidewalk.

“This has nothing to do with you,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, crouching until our faces met. “You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“That man you saw last night was an old friend of mine. We went to the university together a long time ago.” She hesitated before going on. “He’s a Shiite. That’s why your grandmother didn’t want me talking to him. Do you understand why that’s wrong?”

“Yes,” I said, though at the time, I couldn’t have possibly understood. I knew only what I heard, that the war had been fought between us but that the Palestinians were the real culprits.

“Good,” my mother said. “I love you.” Then she kissed me on the head, picked up her violin, and headed off down the rue Huvelin.

I woke before dawn, slipped into my shoes and coat, and let myself out of the apartment, leaving Graça and the cat asleep together on the cot. I wasn’t sure what my next move would be, but I knew I worked better and faster on my own and that the last thing I needed was to hold Graça’s hand. She’d told me everything she could; now it was up to her to get herself out of whatever mess she’d made.

I stopped beneath the cracked gaze of the milkmaid and lit a cigarette, babying the flame between my hands. I believed what Graça had told me the night before, believed she didn’t know anything beyond the original job she’d agreed to do. The real question was why Rahim had gone to al-Rashidi in the first place.

Shaking the match to the ground, I started off again, laying out the possible answers in my mind as I headed for the river. It didn’t surprise me that Rahim had agreed to help Graça. It was easy to be a sucker for youth, even easier when youth looked like Graça Morais. But there was more, much more, that didn’t make sense. Like the picture of Rahim and al-Rashidi at Brasileira, and the fact that Rahim had stayed in Lisbon at all. For if he’d known, as Valsamis had insisted, that someone was looking for him, there were plenty of places he could have gone.

Then there was the matter of the invoice itself, that last document left in Rahim’s printer. Carelessness, I’d told myself at the time, but the explanation had rung hollow even then. Rahim had never been a careless person. None of us was. Our profession was one that required a religious attention to detail, and I couldn’t see Rahim overlooking something so important. My gut told me there was a reason that printer and invoice had been left behind.

Youth and beauty, I reminded myself, the two qualities Rahim had appreciated the most. Though above all this, there was one other thing, something he would not have been able to turn away from. Not Graça Morais, for there were others like her, as there had been others like me. No, if Rahim had chosen to stay, it would have been for one thing only: money. And not the ten thousand euros al-Rashidi had already doled out. True, it was a lot for such an easy job, but it wasn’t enough to risk one’s life for.

No, Rahim had seen something funny in that invoice. What Sergei had seen, or something else altogether, something that told him he could get more than just Graça’s ten thousand euros out of al-Rashidi. That was why the two men had met at Brasileira. It was why Rahim had kept a copy of the invoice in his printer. And in the end, it was what had gotten him killed.

None of this explained the bigger problem, the original invoice and the cargo it described, the five Alazan rockets that had slipped quietly out of Odessa harbor.
Worse than Nairobi.
Valsamis’s warning repeated itself in my head, the only thing so far that made sense. I thought of Beirut, the Alazan’s invisible and deadly cloud spreading out over the city. Through Hamra and the narrow alleyways of Ras Beirut and out onto the crowded Corniche. It would be the same no matter where it happened, in the mosques and markets of Tehran or the beehive of ancient Jerusalem. Worse than Nairobi, I told myself, so much worse.

I was rounding the corner toward the waterfront when I heard footsteps behind me, a woman’s gait, quick and light. Graça, I thought, glancing back to see her coming toward me.

By the time she overtook me, she was panting, her breath thick and tangled in the cold morning air.

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” I told her, picking up my pace, making her jog to keep stride with me. “It’s not safe.”

“I’m coming with you,” she insisted.

“If I were you,” I told her, not breaking my stride, “I’d disappear for a while. Get out of Lisbon. Maybe even leave Europe. I’m sure you’ll have no problem getting a passport.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going back to the dairy.”

“Do what you like, but you’re not coming with me.”

We’d reached the waterfront, and I could see the ferry coming in, its lights reflected in the river’s oily surface. Above us on the dark hillside, the great Cristo Rei hung like a hacked sliver of moon.

“You’re going to need a translator,” Graça said.

“My Portuguese is fine,” I told her.

“I’ve heard your Portuguese.” She hesitated. “Look, Gomes had an apartment in Campo de Ourique. I can take you there.”

I stopped walking and turned to look at her. Scared, I thought, and yet she wouldn’t back down.

“You’ll do what I tell you,” I said. “Understood?”

Graça nodded.

“Understood?” I repeated.

“Understood.”

Sabri Kanj raised his head and looked up at his interrogator. The man walked to the crude sink in the corner of the cell and rinsed his hands, then rolled down his sleeves and carefully buttoned the cuffs, as if these smallest of gestures could somehow civilize him. Kanj had come to recognize this as a sign that they were done for now, and he let his weight relax slightly against the ropes that held him. The day before, two other men had beaten his hands with electrical cords until every bone in his fingers was broken. The pain now was so intense that he found himself slipping in and out of consciousness, struggling to hold on.

He’d once thought this was the worst of all possibilities. When they’d read
1984
in his first-year literature class at the American University, Kanj had told Mina afterward that they could do anything else to him but this. For if they broke his fingers, he would never be able to play the violin again.

Mina had thought him naive, had laughed, even. “There are so many worse things,” she’d said at the time, the two of them in the little coffee shop on the rue Bliss that they liked to frequent after class, “things more terrible than death.” Kanj could still remember the earnestness of her face, how he’d leaned across the table and kissed her, partly to hide the fact that he didn’t believe her. But he believed her now, had seen these things himself, had been both witness and perpetrator. It had been years since he’d played the violin, decades, his last instrument destroyed along with his parents’ house during the Israeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982.

The cell door swung wide, and Kanj forced his eyes open. There was a man in the corridor, a silent figure in a pair of light khakis and a crisp cotton dress shirt. He nodded to Kanj’s interrogator, and the Jordanian stepped aside, relinquishing his turf. An American, Kanj thought, and the physical sensation of relief was so powerful that he had to fight to keep from crying.

He steadied himself, then looked up into the man’s blue eyes. “I want to see Richard Morrow,” Kanj said.

Under the cover of darkness, and after half a dozen drinks, the nightclub on the rua do Sol ao Rato in Lisbon’s immigrant Campo de Ourique neighborhood might have looked like a place to go to have a good time. But in the morning’s gray light, it was hard to imagine why anyone would go there willingly. The walls were peppered with African graffiti, the black door streaked with piss stains. Someone had vomited in the gutter the night before, and you could make out the contents of the person’s last meal: chicken and rice, the vivid blue of a neon cocktail. The sign above the door read ENCLAVE, the script a flourish of pink on black.

“Vitor’s apartment is upstairs,” Graça said, nodding to a doorway several meters to the left of the club’s entrance. “Third floor.”

“You’ve been inside?” I asked.

Graça nodded.

“What’s the layout?”

“Front entryway, with a living room off to the right. That’s as far as I’ve been. The kitchen’s in the back. And there’s at least one bedroom in the back as well.”

“Any idea how many people to expect?”

Graça shook her head. “He’s usually got at least one girl up there.”

I looked up at the third-floor window. Someone had put cardboard across the panes, so it was impossible to tell whether the lights were on. Early as it was, I figured we would catch Gomes either asleep or at the tail end of his evening.

“Let’s go,” I told Graça, heading for the door, letting myself into the building’s foyer.

There was a stink to the place, stale beer and the ammonia tinge of urine. We made our way up the stairs and stopped on the third-floor landing. There was a barrage of Afro-techno music coming from behind Gomes’s closed door.

“You wait out here,” I said, slipping the FEG from my pocket and engaging the clip.

Graça blinked at the sight of the gun. “Why don’t I go first? At least he knows me.”

I shook my head and pointed to a spot near the stair rail. “Wait right there,” I told her, then tucked my hand and the FEG behind my back, took a step toward Gomes’s door, and knocked.

The music stopped, and I could hear rustling and bumping within, someone fumbling with the bolt. The door swung open to reveal an African woman in a leather skirt and a bright yellow tube top. She was a good six inches taller than I, her eyelids a shimmering blue, her lips stained a muddy purple, the color of young red wine. She looked down at me, wavering drowsily on her tall platform shoes. Half gone, I thought, plummeting toward her own sweet opiate oblivion.

“I’m here to see Gomes,” I said.

She blinked once and nodded, moving in slow motion as she swung her head toward the interior of the apartment. “Vitor!” she called lazily. “Vitor! Baby!”

An irritated male voice shouted from inside the apartment. “What?”

“There’s a woman,” she yelled in reply, her head drooping between her bare shoulders as she reached out to steady herself on the wall. Then she turned and staggered off, disappearing through a doorway.

There was a brief and hostile exchange between the two voices, then a man emerged from the same door. He was smaller than I’d expected, pale and wiry, with all the nervous energy the woman lacked.