An Accidental American: A Novel (13 page)

It was a small gun, a Hungarian FEG SMC-918. Soviet firepower in a bantam package, its clip lined with six neat Makarov rounds. I put my hand on the grip, let my palm become familiar with the weight and shape. I hadn’t had a lot of use for guns in my profession, but back before I’d gone to prison, I’d carried an old Luger, a Czech knockoff that my father had given me once in a rare gesture of paternal concern.

I’d used it only a few times, mostly on deadbeat clients who thought they could skip out without paying, and then just as a way to impress. But on a few occasions the gun had actually saved my life, and I wasn’t unhappy to see the little FEG now. I checked the safety, slid the pistol back into my pocket, and headed out into the café.

The morning was in full swing and the establishment was buzzing, the windows white with steam, with the heat of so many bodies and the humid respirations of the espresso machines. Hands and toes tingling, I made my way through the crowd, squeezed in at the stand-up bar, and ordered a coffee and a bread roll.

I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat anyway. Out in the cold, there hadn’t been much room for thought, but as my mind began to thaw, I stumbled back over the morning’s events, each time vainly hoping for a different outcome. But in the end there was no denying my complicity. Rahim was dead and I was alive, only because he had saved me.

I shook a cigarette from my pack, thought back to my first glimpse of Valsamis, his face through the window of the white Twingo. A con, I’d told myself then, and I hadn’t been wrong. The only question now was how much I’d been played. There was a part of me that still wanted to believe Valsamis had been right about Rahim, that what had happened on Santa Catarina was merely a broken promise, that getting rid of me was just a way of eliminating any complications.

There was a sort of sweet absolution in believing this. Foolishness instead of guilt. My own skin all that mattered in the equation. But the better part of me knew the answer wasn’t nearly so simple.

I lit my cigarette with my shaking hands and glanced out the café’s front windows at the ferry, still a fair distance from the dock. There was a trio of old men at the bar beside me, part of the ubiquitous flock of gray-hairs and newspapers that populates every café from Athens to Lisbon, their blood thick with coffee and anisette.

“I’m telling you!” the pensioner closest to me insisted. “There is nothing to find.” He unrolled his paper and set it on the bar in front of him, tapping the headline with a gnarled index finger.

His friends nodded in agreement, then the conversation moved on to football, a far more contentious topic.

I downed the last of my coffee and scanned the headline, slowly deciphering the Portuguese. UN INSPECTORS FIND NOTHING BUT SAND, DIRT. Beneath was a picture of an empty warehouse.

Here we all are again, I thought, twelve years on and back to the same argument. For a fleeting moment I was in our apartment on the Travessa da Laranjeira, back in the little front room listening to the throaty hum of the radio. Waiting, still waiting, for Rahim to come to bed.

I closed my eyes and fought back the memory.

The young desk clerk flicked his eyes upward and watched Valsamis enter the lobby. He’d been reading a paperback western, the frayed cover showing a virile man on a muscular horse and a bronze-skinned woman in tight buckskin cowering seductively beneath him.

The romance of the American Indian, Valsamis thought, remembering the Blackfeet and Salish of his childhood, dirty kids in ancient cars, a boy his age he’d seen outside a bar on the way to Great Falls one winter. Twenty below and a good foot of new snow on the ground and the boy had been waiting outside without shoes or a coat, his bare feet red and raw, his matchstick arms mottled and bruised.

Too lazy and too stupid to take care of their own, Valsamis’s father had said. But when they got in the car to leave, Valsamis’s mother had reached back and untied Valsamis’s scuffed brown boots, taken them and his coat, and trudged back to where the boy was waiting.

Nine years old, maybe ten, and even then Valsamis had understood the significance of his mother’s action, the boots and coat, he’d been reminded over and over, not merely clothes but some defined portion of his father’s life. A certain number of hours inside the smelter. A sacrifice made for them. And yet when they’d pulled onto the two-lane highway and Valsamis had started to complain, his father, without looking, had reached back and slapped him, hard.

Valsamis watched the desk clerk turn back to his book, then started across the lobby and up the stairs to his room. He’d had her, he thought, angry at himself for having bungled things, angry at Morrow for having sent him to Lisbon in the first place, when what he wanted was back in France, back in Paziols, when he should have been clear of it all by now.

Just a temporary setback, he reminded himself as he unlocked the door and let himself into the room. But there was no time to spare now. The drapes were open and he could see Nicole’s room across the air shaft, her window dark as well. She wouldn’t be coming back here, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find her.

It was a short walk from the Cacilhas dock to the old dairy. Ten minutes and I found myself at the pale feet of the milkmaid. Remembering the cat, I’d stopped and bought a dozen grilled sardines from the old man who kept a cart near the pier. I was glad I had, for she was there to meet me, pacing back and forth on the landing like an impatient lover.

I climbed the stairs and let myself inside, fumbling in the darkness for the light chain I remembered from my earlier visit while the purring cat twined herself around my ankles. The room was ugly in the unshaded glare of the bare bulb. Narrow cot and empty shelves, everything dirty and worn. Not much, I thought, but it would do for tonight.

I set the fish on the tiny kitchen table and unwrapped the paper. The sardines were still hot, their skins crisp and charred, the fish nestled tail to tail like a bouquet of silver flowers, heads and gills blossoming upward. The cat jumped up beside me and snatched a sardine for herself, then tore greedily into the flesh, resting her belly on the table while she ate.

Due any day now, I thought, watching her chew through the soft bones. Her stomach was tight, her nipples swollen and pink, her body no longer her own. She adjusted herself slightly and one of the kittens rippled beneath her mottled fur, nose or paw rolling upward, looking for a way out.

I ran my palm across her back and she stopped eating to glare defiantly up at me, as if daring me to go on. Taking the hint, I left her to her meal and made a slow circuit of the apartment, carefully checking the old cabinets, running my hand between the toilet and the wall, under the cot, anywhere I thought Rahim might have stashed an invoice. But the search seemed senseless, the possible hiding places almost infinite. And that was if the invoice existed at all.

The mind’s tricks, I told myself, remembering the last frantic moments with Rahim, his desperation to tell me. From two breathless words it was impossible to know what he’d really meant, or even if he had understood. Though he’d been right about the car lights, right about Valsamis’s nightscope, and I had doubted him there as well.

The cat jumped down, landing with a heavy thump on the old floorboards, and sauntered across the room, drunk off the fish. She stopped next to the printer/copier and ran her whiskers across the corner of the machine.

As stripped down as the apartment was, there was something wholly incongruous about the printer. It was a quality piece of equipment, a step up even from the digital multitasker I had at home, and certainly more sophisticated than anything I’d known Rahim to use in the past. Though I wasn’t really surprised, for the sophistication of documents had changed markedly over the last twelve years, and Rahim would have been keeping up.

No, it wasn’t so much the printer as the fact that Rahim had left it, especially since he’d so obviously cleaned the apartment of everything else. If it had been me, I thought, and I’d been running, I might not have taken it with me, but I wouldn’t have left it behind, either.

Crossing the room, I lifted the lid and checked the scanner plate again, then pulled out the tray and leafed through the blank sheets of paper. Nothing. I put the tray back and pressed the power button, watched the little green light blink on.

The machine was silent at first, but as I moved to stand, some internal mechanism clicked inside. There was a hum and then the sound of paper sliding from the tray. Whatever Rahim’s last command to the machine had been, he’d turned off the power prematurely. Now, back online, the printer spit out its long-hoarded task.

Taking the document from the tray, I switched on one of the swing-arm lamps and set the paper on the makeshift desk. It was a shipping bill of some sort. An invoice, though for what I couldn’t be sure. The bulk of the document was printed in Russian, but the letterhead stood out in English. BSW AIR CARGO INTERNATIONAL, it read. And the address: a post office box in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The date at the top of the page read April 11, 2001.

Language is an integral part of forgery— I’ve worked in dozens of languages in my time— but fluency is never a requirement. Where opera singers learn their parts phonetically, I’ve often learned mine by shape, perfecting whole documents without ever deciphering their meaning.

Russian had been a minor exception; I’d attained what I called bar fluency, enough knowledge to order a drink. And, from my few forays into Soviet commerce, the basics of official language. But all that had been a long time ago. I didn’t work in Cyrillic at Solomon; there were specialists for that.

I read over the body of the document, stumbling through the text, trying to conjure up the ghost of my lousy Russian. Most of the copy was gibberish to me, but a few words stood out, confirming my first impressions. In the space that called for a
description of goods,
my Russian failed me completely, but I managed to decipher the next few lines.
Country of origin,
I translated, and, in the space provided,
Trans-Dniester.
And below,
Port of origin, Odessa.

The next few lines were shipping technicalities, weights and measurements, but there was one other piece of information that caught my eye, a single line close to the bottom of the page.
Port of entry,
it read,
Basra, Iraq.

Valsamis rolled onto his side and put the pillow over his ear. On the chair by the window, his coat pocket was ringing, and not for the first time that morning. It would be Morrow, Valsamis thought, counting out the four long rings, waiting for his voice mail to kick in. Valsamis had forgotten to turn off the ringer earlier, and now the idea of getting out of bed and walking across the room seemed like too much effort.

He was hoping that if he ignored the phone, Morrow would give up. But the ringing started again almost as quickly as it had stopped, just enough time in between for Morrow to hang up and redial.

Valsamis pushed aside the covers, swung his legs off the bed, and padded across the room. Fishing in his coat pocket for the little phone, he flipped open the receiver. “Yes?”