An Accidental American: A Novel (21 page)

Graça appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. “Find anything?”

I shook my head. There was nothing left for us to find. Nothing left for me, either.

J
OHN VALSAMIS HADN’T WANTED TO RETIRE
.
Barely fifty, he hadn’t thought of himself as old, though his father hadn’t been much older when he’d left the smelter, and Valsamis had regarded him as ancient at the time. But things had been different then. That kind of work and the weight of so many children took their toll on a person’s body.

In the end, it hadn’t been Valsamis’s choice to make. In his last eight years at the Agency, the world had easily outpaced him, along with so many others who’d done their jobs just a little too well. Men and women like Valsamis who, through a combination of their own efficiency and blind luck, had been rendered obsolete.

As much as he didn’t want to leave, Valsamis was a man who knew how to make a graceful exit, and he was gracious in defeat. He had smiled placidly through the retirement party Morrow presided over for him in Near East, careful not to drink himself into a bitter nostalgia, as he’d seen too many of his colleagues do. At the ceremony in the Bubble, he’d gritted his teeth and returned the admiring and slightly patronizing handshakes of the twentysomethings who had come to take his place, nodding at their talk of tropical beaches and beautiful women, a paradise built from Gauguin paintings and Club Med ads.

But Valsamis had other plans for himself. Five days after his release from the Agency, he’d cleaned out his already spare apartment and boarded a plane. A tourist this time, heading not south but east, to a country he’d known intimately for so many years, for which he’d given so much, though he’d never once set foot within its borders.

It was January when he arrived in St. Petersburg, and he was uncharacteristically nervous as he handed his brand-new passport and tourist visa to a bored customs agent. Half an hour later, he was out on the airport breezeway with his one small bag, his teeth chattering, his back turned to a wind he hadn’t felt since he was a boy, the same punishing cold that battered the Montana plains. But Valsamis hadn’t gone to Russia for the weather.

The next morning he took a tram to the Hermitage and wandered among the masterpieces that had been denied him for so long. Titian’s
Danae,
Leonardo’s
Madonna and Child,
Rembrandt’s
Return of the Prodigal Son.
In the afternoon he went up onto the roof and looked out over the palace’s weathered copper gables toward the frozen Neva and the snowy expanse of Vasilyevsky Island, the towering rostral columns and the Exchange Building like some icy, arctic Parthenon.

The new Russia, Valsamis had thought, his Russia, as cold and broken as it still was. And then, alone on the windy rooftop balcony, with all of St. Petersburg at his feet, he’d broken down and wept.

Another e-mail, Valsamis told himself as he took a seat at the nearly empty bar. Another message, and now Nicole was asking about him. They’d been slow this time. It had taken Kostecky’s man a good half hour to get the call through, and by then Nicole was long gone. But they would be ready when she went to pick up the Russian’s reply. Until then all he could do was wait.

Valsamis ordered a whiskey and soda, the cheap stuff, what he preferred, the taste that reminded him of somewhere else. Early morning in the Pintlers, Hank Williams on the truck’s old AM radio and his father singing along in broken English. Outside, in the headlights, snow and more snow, flakes the size of a man’s fist, downy and friable, as if the clouds themselves had broken apart and were falling. Inside, the rattle of the Ford’s ancient heater, the bottle of Ten High sloshing on the seat between them. The truck such meager shelter from the wilderness around them, the dark miles of snow and ice, the mountains echoing back and back, all the way to the Idaho border and beyond.

It was early still, but out on the dance floor, two young men were moving in ecstatic synchronicity. They had taken off their shirts, and their bare skin flashed in the club’s colored lights, chest and shoulders, the curve of a well-crafted back. Youth on display.

The music stopped abruptly, and the two men lingered for a moment, then headed for the bar. Valsamis huddled around his drink, his eye on the darker of the two. He was taller than Valsamis by a good six inches, his hair long and straight, swept languorously across his face, but he was slight of build, his arms and chest frail as a young girl’s.

The boy caught Valsamis’s stare and held it, then glanced nervously at his empty hands. This one, Valsamis thought, imagining how it would happen, the boy’s slender hips beneath his. Valsamis felt his stomach contract, felt the hot rush of blood to his groin, repulsion and desire at the same time.

He could hear Dick Morrow all those years earlier, the last thing he’d said before disappearing into the crowd at the L.A. airport.
These are your choices, John: to be the stronger or the weaker, to be the ruler or the ruled, to be the powerful or the powerless.

Valsamis took a sip of his whiskey and watched the young man come toward him.

In the end, the choice is made for me. Rahim and I have gone out to a dinner party at a friend’s house in Belém. It’s a pleasant evening. Our host, a Frenchman, has made real coq au vin, and for dessert tiny pots de crèmes peppered with lemon zest and orange-scented muscat. Gifts of edible sunshine in the midst of gray winter.

It’s the usual suspects, a ragtag conglomerate of drifters and crooks. Two Russians, the Frenchman’s Hungarian girlfriend, an Italian con man. A week and a half since the first attack on Iraq, and already people here are weary of talking about it, tired of the Americans’ relentless prowess and their own anger, the nightly films of precision killing. “A clean war,” one of the Russians snorts, “there is no such thing.” And then, as if by silent pact, we move on to other subjects.

It feels good to be free of it for a few hours, such a surprising return to normalcy. In the cab on the way home, Rahim kisses me, and I can taste the sweet muscat in his mouth, orange blossoms and honey and lavender. Back at the apartment, we barely make it up the stairs. We stumble over each other in the darkness, fingers fumbling with buttons and clasps, key clawing at the lock. So desperate that I am momentarily afraid, acutely aware of his physical power, so much greater than mine, and the fierceness of what brought us together.

Inside, coats still on, we make love on the living room floor. For the first time, though I still haven’t told him, I am certain he knows about the baby. Hungry as we are, there is a tentativeness between us, a sense of deliberation, our bodies slow and cautious. When we are finished, we lie together for a long time, silent and still, hearts hammering against each other.

It isn’t until I pull away and feel Rahim slide out from inside me that I realize what has happened. On his stomach and my thighs is a dark stain, my own blood, musky and rich.

Rahim sees it as well, and a look of involuntary disgust crosses his face. Here is the one great taboo between us. This prohibition that is part of his faith and that has become my monthly humiliation. By the time he understands and recovers himself, it is too late.

For a moment, more than anything, I am deeply relieved, then a wave of loss hits me, a feeling of grief that I couldn’t have expected. Suddenly I know, with utter certainty, that I cannot stay.

It was just shy of Sergei’s twelve hours when Graça and I stepped into the cybercafé on the rua Diário de Notícias. The café was packed, pulsing to the angry rhythms of Goth rock, the crowd mostly pale faces and black hair. Trying to ignore the high-decibel screams ricocheting off the brick walls and concrete floor, I left Graça at the bar, found a free computer, and logged in to my Hotmail account. There was nothing from Sergei in my account yet, no messages except for a few spams, come-ons for breast enhancement and penis enlargement, the usual stray detritus of the Internet. Still a good half hour to Sergei’s promised deadline, I reminded myself, checking my watch. Time for the Russian to come through with something tonight, and I’d give him every minute.

Wiping the spam from my in-box, I followed Graça’s earlier lead and typed Valsamis’s name into the search engine. A list of websites flooded the screen: a marine engineer in Houston, Texas, a wedding announcement from a small-town newspaper in upstate New York, a teenager’s home page. Nothing even remotely related to the John Valsamis I was after. Killing time, I typed in the address for a different search engine and entered Valsamis’s name once again.

Valsamis had thought the young man pretty when he’d first seen him at the bar, but here, against the shabby surroundings of the apartment, he was almost beautiful. Valsamis reached up and touched the sleeping boy’s shoulder, ran his finger lightly along the hollow of his collarbone. His hair smelled of cedar and cigarette smoke, of sweat and faded cologne. His chest was smooth and delicate, his skin luminously pale.

There had been something slightly off about the young man, something passive and yet powerful about the way he carried himself, the demeanor of an untrained whore. Offering his body and yet not, and the combination had made Valsamis want him even more.