An Accidental American: A Novel (33 page)

V
ALSAMIS?” KIP BRYCE’S VOICE WAS GROGGY
over the intercom. “Gosh, John. It’s five in the morning.”

Three years Bryce had been in Beirut. Three years of the worst of it, Israeli phosphorous bombs and Syrian mortars, the slaughters at Sabra and Shatila, and Bryce still couldn’t bring himself to use the word “god.”

Valsamis pushed the speaker button. “Where’s Sproul?” he asked. “We were supposed to go up to the mountains.”

Valsamis had been heading reluctantly back to his car after buzzing Sproul’s apartment for a good ten minutes when it had occurred to him that Bryce lived in the same building and might know where Sproul was. Now, standing in the dark foyer, listening to the breathy crackle of the intercom, he felt like an idiot.

“I saw him at the Commodore last night with that Irish woman,” Bryce said. “I think they’ve been seeing each other.”

“Fucking each other,” Valsamis said cruelly, then felt bad for having said it. But there was a part of him that wanted Bryce to be shocked.

He thought briefly about asking Bryce if he knew where the Irish woman lived, but his pride won out, and he headed back to his car.

It was a strikingly beautiful morning, the sky luminous along the coast, almost as if it and the sea were extensions of each other. For much of the drive south, Valsamis was able to convince himself that what he had done meant less than it did.

There was a part of him that didn’t expect the attack to succeed. After all, the embassy was American soil. Everyone knew the consequences of such an act. Besides, there was nothing to confirm Mina’s fourth-hand information. These kind of reports were not uncommon. Just the previous summer, after a van was stolen from the embassy pool, there had been talk of an attack, and it had never materialized.

The Israelis had taken the Chouf some months earlier, but their hold was fragile. They had not only the Syrians to contend with, but the rivalry between the Druze and Phalange villagers as well. There were a thousand unforeseen hazards in the mountains, roadblocks and checkpoints and unexpected skirmishes. But Valsamis had not waited for fate to intervene. Outside of Beiteddine, he’d pulled off the road, taken out his pocketknife, and carved a crude gash into his tire. Then he’d waited for an Israeli tank to come along and flashed his AID card, explaining how the embassy pool had neglected to furnish him with a spare.

The Chouf was an unlucky assignment for the kids from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who should have been home chasing girls instead of manning tanks on the road to the cedars. They were happy to take in the hapless American, sharing their tea and cigarettes, passing him from one vehicle to another.

Valsamis was outside of Damour when he heard the first news of the bombing. It wasn’t until evening that he made it back to Beirut and could see for himself what had happened. It was dark when he got to the embassy, and giant banks of light had been set up around the blast site, giving the rubble an unearthly clarity. Several mammoth dirt movers had been brought in and were pawing clumsily through the rubble.

After so many wars, the destruction was not unfamiliar. Valsamis had witnessed this before, and worse. He’d been at the American University hospital once, after the Israelis had dropped a phosphorous bomb on Hamra, and had seen a child on fire, a little girl drenched in so much phosphorus that even after the nurses had submerged her in a tub of water, she had continued to burn.

Yet there was something about the embassy that sickened him as even that had not. Somewhere deep inside the rubble, a fire was burning. The air was thick with the reek of it, and it wasn’t flesh or hair or bone but something entirely inhuman.

Maybe Sproul hadn’t made it to work, Valsamis told himself. Maybe he was still at Siobhan’s place, getting his dick sucked, nursing his Commodore hangover. Maybe she was such a good fuck that he hadn’t heard yet, or if he had, he didn’t care.

One of the marine guards, a squat-faced kid with a thick Okie accent, recognized Valsamis in the crowd of onlookers and came toward him. “Jesus,” he said, “I didn’t think any of you guys got out.”

Valsamis didn’t say anything, just stared at him uncomprehending, so the kid motioned to the rubble. “The conference room,” he explained, referring to the meeting space that had once occupied the front of the building, the room where that afternoon’s meeting was to have been held, “it’s fucking gone. Blasted clean away. Fuck, a couple of those AID guys got blown all the way to the Corniche.”

Eight kids and a wife, years and then decades notched into the basement rafters, each mark a symbol of his longing, and Valsamis’s father had never once been back to Greece. Right up until the end, he’d talked about it as if it were inevitable that he would return, as if Greece, not the winter-stricken mountains where he’d lived out the better portion of his life, were his real home. If Valsamis had believed in God or an afterlife, he would have wished his father there now, drinking muddy coffee in a waterfront taverna, staring out across the sea.

It was snowing hard, six inches since Nicole and Graça had left, and no end in sight. A Montana snow, as in the springs of his childhood. Valsamis had a vision of his father, cursing in the June darkness as he struggled to protect his tomato plants from a late blizzard. And his mother leaning from the doorway, yelling at him for ruining her sheets.

There was no leaving now, Valsamis thought, staring out the window at the driveway. Even if he wanted to, there was no way the Twingo would make it through this snow. Though Valsamis had little doubt Morrow would find a way up the mountain.

Valsamis turned from the window and rattled another Vicodin from the bottle. Just one, he told himself, bargaining with the pain. Just enough to see him through, for it seemed of the utmost importance that he be lucid when Morrow arrived.

The shotgun was still propped where Nicole had left it. Valsamis had thought it a strange offering at first, but he could see now that she’d meant it as a way out, a gesture not quite of forgiveness but of reconciliation. This, his final choice to make.

Dick Morrow hit the defrost button and ran his glove across the inside of the Range Rover’s windshield. The road stretched up and away from him like the barrel of a gun, a tunnel of white trees and white snow against the night’s utter darkness. The snow was soft and wet, heavy as concrete, and Morrow could feel the Rover’s tires struggling against it.

Just about here, Morrow thought, searching the trees for a light, any sign of habitation. From what he’d been able to see on the satellite maps, Nicole’s house should be just past the next bend.

A stoat darted into the Rover’s headlights, its slender body stippled with snow, and Morrow tapped the brakes, felt his wheels sliding out from underneath him and his heart with them. He was too old for this sort of thing. Then, on his right, the trees parted, and he could see a driveway curving downward.

He stopped the Rover and squinted through the falling snow at the unbroken expanse of the drive. The snow was like a fresh duvet, quilted here and there by a neat herringbone of stitches where a chiffchaff or a blackcap had crossed. The house’s bulk was visible at the bottom of the slope, the windows all dark.

Morrow nosed the Rover down the driveway, set the brake, and climbed out, scanning the woods and the yard, letting his senses adjust to the stillness of the place. The air was heavy with wood smoke. The fire from the farmhouse up the hill, Morrow thought, remembering the satellite map once again as he made his way toward the house. He’d been good at this kind of thing once, but all that had been years earlier, and Morrow was relieved when the door swung open without a fight.

He stepped inside and hesitated, then started into the darkness. It was warm in the house, hot even. Ahead, where a doorway opened off the hall, Morrow could see the reflection of a dim fire.

Cautiously, he moved toward the doorway and peered inside. There was a woodstove burning in the far corner of the room, its grate shivering pale light across what Morrow could now see was a kitchen. There was a range and a refrigerator, a long row of cabinets against the far wall, and in the middle of the room, a table and three chairs.

It took a moment for Morrow to find Valsamis. He was sitting just inside the doorway, in the darkest part of the room, and it wasn’t until Morrow saw his eyes that he realized the other man was there.

“John?” he asked. He could smell Valsamis now, the vaguely animal odor of the wounded. Valsamis shifted, and Morrow could see the bandage on his arm, the dark stain on the fringes where he’d bled through. There was a shotgun resting against the wall next to him, its barrels catching the light.

“Jesus, John. You scared the hell out of me.” Morrow laughed gently, then slipped his hand into the pocket of his coat and rested his palm on the stock of his Browning.

“There’s nothing left,” Valsamis said, nodding to the woodstove. “I’ve burned them all.”

Morrow was quiet. Valsamis could see him fingering the gun in his pocket. “And the women?” he asked finally.

“Out past Forte do Bugio by now, I would think,” Valsamis replied, referring to the old lighthouse at the mouth of the Tagus. It was a weak lie, and Valsamis was almost surprised at the ease with which Morrow believed him.

Morrow smiled slightly, as if he’d been proved right about something, as if Valsamis’s final act of brutality was merely confirmation of what he’d known all along. Valsamis thought of the boy on the Avenida da Liberdade, the look in his eyes when he’d seen Valsamis watching him. Yes, he thought, there was no point in pretending they didn’t both know what was going to happen.

“I’ve taken care of the invoice as well,” Valsamis added, but Morrow waved away this news.

“Haven’t you heard?” he said. “The
Guardian
broke the Niger uranium documents this morning. ElBaradei and those pricks at the IAEA are screaming forgery.” As always, the obscenity sounded wrong coming from Morrow, the word awkward in his mouth.

Valsamis didn’t say anything. The Niger documents were big, far bigger than the Lisbon invoice, a chronicle of Iraqi efforts to buy enriched uranium from the African nation. They were a British effort, first acquired by MI6, but the Americans had leaned on the documents heavily in their case for war.

Morrow shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be ugly for a while. But we’re committed now.”

He glanced at the fire, as if looking for the remnants of the letters there. “You understand, don’t you? You understand why it had to happen. There was no other way to make people see. Sproul was just a part of it.”

Valsamis shook his head, trying to clear away the Vicodin haze.
We all want the best for this place,
he heard Sproul say again, though of course that hadn’t been true. “You arranged for the theft of the van,” Valsamis said. “You were there that summer. You arranged it all through the Syrians.”

Morrow nodded. “You do see, don’t you?” he asked again, as if looking for absolution, though Valsamis knew this wasn’t the case. “This is bigger than any of us.”

Valsamis closed his eyes and was back on that footpath in the Annam highlands. He could see the girl again, her feet bare in the moonlight, her sandals clutched in her right hand. Sneaking out to visit her lover, Valsamis had thought after the adrenaline of fear had subsided and he’d had time to think. Gone shoeless so that no one would hear.