An Accidental American: A Novel (31 page)

Valsamis had laughed. It wasn’t intentional, and he’d immediately felt bad about it, seeing the hurt look in Sproul’s eyes and realizing for the first time that the younger man really meant all of it.

Valsamis left Bryce and crossed to the bar, fingering the note in his pocket.
Islamic Holy War.
Valsamis repeated the words to himself, what Kanj had called this new group. It was a name none of them had heard before, though they’d known it was coming for months, since the siege, since rumors of a split within Amal had begun to circulate. A new, more frightening face to the Shiite militia, financed by the Iranians.

“Why do Arab girls carry a fish in each pocket?” Valsamis overheard one of the agents, a man named Jack Bentley, say to Siobhan and the other woman. Bentley had been in Beirut when Valsamis had first arrived in Lebanon; he worked out of the Damascus office now.

Bentley’s drink sloshed precariously against the lip of his glass as he leaned in toward the two journalists. Valsamis could see the looks of horror on the women’s faces as they waited for the inevitable punch line. They’d heard the joke, or variations of it, too many times, and not one of them had been funny.

Bentley caught Valsamis looking and leered back drunkenly, his face a mixture of warning and contempt.

Yes, Valsamis thought, he knew his place, but still, he hated to be reminded of it. Just as he hated being forced to work their scrap pile. Five years, he told himself. Five years of an asset so plum they were teaching it at the Farm, and Valsamis was still picking the shit out of other people’s shoes.

“So they can smell like their mothers,” Bentley said, turning back to the women and laughing proudly.

“Get up.”

Valsamis turned his head just slightly so that he could see my face, and I moved the barrel of the gun with him.

“Get the fuck up,” I repeated.

This time Valsamis struggled to rise. His right arm was bleeding badly. Worse than I had expected from the Makarov round. The flesh and bone were shattered where the bullet had hit. He staggered to his feet, and I pushed him forward, then bent down and picked up his Ruger.

I could see Lucifer in the snow, his body caved in on itself, what was left of his head twisted to one side. There was no sense in going to him, nothing I could do to help him.

“Inside!” I nudged Valsamis again with the pistol, and we moved together across the yard and the driveway, in through the back door, into the kitchen, where Graça was waiting.

I pulled a chair out from the table and pushed Valsamis into it, then handed the Ruger to Graça. “Watch him,” I told her. Then I opened the upper cabinet above the sink and took down a first-aid kit and two pill bottles. “Here.” I shook two pills from each into my palm. “Vicodin and amoxicillin.”

Valsamis watched as I set them on the table just beyond his reach.

“How much was it worth?” I asked, opening the first-aid kit, taking out a package of hemostat sponges. “Did Hezbollah pay you off, or was there something else?” If Valsamis wanted to live, he would have to work for it. I looked down at his arm and the growing red stain on the floor. “Talk soon,” I told him, “or you’re not going to be able to talk at all.”

He lifted his head and blinked up at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Here he was, I thought, after all these years. Here was the man who had murdered my mother. I closed my eyes briefly and thought of Lucifer, the way his legs had buckled beneath him, of Rahim in the doorway, his hand on mine.

Valsamis shook his head wearily and glanced at the gilt Dior box on the counter.

“Is this what you came for?” I asked angrily. I lifted the lid, took out the last two letters, and laid them on the table in front of Valsamis. “Here,” I told him.

The pain was like a living being, singular in its purpose. When Valsamis moved, the pain consumed him. To be aware of much more than this was difficult, and yet he knew he had to try. Valsamis read the letters, then read them again, trying to find a way around the pain, trying to make sense of it all.

According to Sabri,
Mina had written,
they have their own contact within the new movement.
If this had been true, if someone in the Beirut office had managed to cultivate an asset in Hezbollah, then it seemed almost impossible that Valsamis hadn’t known. And yet there had been someone: Kanj had said so.

“This is why you came after me to find Rahim,” Valsamis heard Nicole say. “Not because I could give you Rahim but because of the letters. It’s why you had Kanj killed. It’s why you had my mother killed: because she knew.”

Valsamis shook his head, trying to focus on the letters.
I called the French embassy yesterday,
Mina had written. And what had she told them? That she’d passed a note to a man in a café on the rue Clémenceau. Or had she simply said that there was someone, an American, who had known in advance about the bombing, when it would happen, and had done nothing to stop it? She hadn’t known his name, and neither had Kanj: Valsamis had been careful about this.

The man I talked to promised to get my information into the right hands, whatever those might be.
Two days after the bombing, Valsamis reasoned, the Beirut station still in chaos, and where would the French have gone? To Langley, to the next man up, the Mid-East DO, and yet clearly they hadn’t, for the next man up at the time had been Dick Morrow.

The truth was so simple that Valsamis was ashamed of himself for having missed it.
Rumor is, someone else has been asking about your girl,
he heard Kostecky say.

There had been a contact in Hezbollah, someone else who’d known about the bombing and had survived it. Someone who had his own reasons to be afraid of Sabri Kanj and the secrets he’d carried from Beirut. Someone with access to Kanj in Jordan.

All these years Valsamis had thought the LeClerc woman’s death a coincidence, but Nicole was right: It hadn’t been. The French had gone to Morrow, and Morrow had assumed Mina was fingering him, just as Valsamis had assumed the same about Kanj all these years later.

A game of chicken, I thought, watching the blood drip from Valsamis’s hand as he lowered his head and scanned the papers, what I wanted from him and what he was willing to give me. A secret so long and tightly held that it seemed inconceivable he would release it now. A log settled in the stove, and I could hear the fire rearrange itself around it, the crack and hiss of sparks and sap, of water forced from the wood.

Valsamis finished reading and lifted his eyes, then looked from me to Graça and back again. He hadn’t shaved for some time, and his face was gray beneath gray stubble, though his eyes were disturbing in their lucidity.

“It was Morrow,” he said.

I hesitated before taking the bait. “Who’s Morrow?”

“Dick Morrow,” Valsamis answered.

I shook my head. “You knew about the bombing,” I insisted. “No one else survived.”

Valsamis nodded. “You’re right, but Morrow knew, too. Look.” He gritted his teeth against the pain, then motioned to the letters. “He was director of operations at the time. The French would have gone to him. He would have known what your mother told them.”

A con, I reminded myself, but I still felt a cold flush across my body, as at the mention of a ghost in a dark house.

“He’s coming here, Nicole.” Valsamis motioned to the letters. “He’s been to see Kanj, and he knows you have these.”

I moved as if to step forward, then stopped myself. “You’re lying.”

Valsamis closed his eyes, and I thought he might pass out. Then he opened them again and looked right at me. “How do you think I knew you were here?” he asked.

I shrugged. There hadn’t been enough time since I’d used the computer for Valsamis to have driven from Lisbon, so I figured he must have already been on his way. “You came for the letters,” I said. “You didn’t care if I was here.”

“But I knew,” Valsamis said. “How do you think I knew?”

I moved away from him, pressing my back against the counter.

“Did you really think Ed wouldn’t sell you out again?” Valsamis asked. “Did you really think you could trust him?”

I shook my head. I could hear Valsamis that first morning.
Even your father doesn’t know where you are.
They must have struck a deal, I thought, the terms of which I didn’t want to know. Ed must have agreed then to let Valsamis know if I came to him.

“He called me after you left the hotel,” Valsamis offered, as if Ed’s deception were proof of something larger, as if this were all the corroboration he needed. “He told me you were heading up here.”

“What does this have to do with Beirut?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

But I could see this wasn’t quite true, either, and when he lunged for the pills, I didn’t stop him.

I
T DIDN’T MATTER WHAT I BELIEVED
,
whether Valsamis was telling the truth or not, or if Morrow was really on his way. Graça and I had already stayed too long at the house. What mattered now was that we get out, but before we could, I needed to finish our passports.

I dressed Valsamis’s wound as best I could, packing it with coagulant and wrapping his arm in a compression bandage. Then I left him with Graça, took the passports from the freezer, and climbed up to my office.

I figured these documents would be a breeze, as far as forgeries went. There were no tricky stamps or inkless images to deal with. All I really needed to do was peel away the laminates and switch out the photographs, then put everything back as I’d found it.

The passports were brittle from the freezer, and the plastic on both documents came away easily. Still, it was meticulous work, and it took me a good hour to coax the laminates off and slip the new photographs into place. It was delicate work as well, for I had to line up the original guilloches perfectly before I could reapply the laminates.

My aunt Emilie always used to say that the first crepe out of the pan is for the dog. As anyone who has ever made crepes will attest, rarely does the first attempt turn out the way you hope. The pan is either too hot or not hot enough, or there’s too much grease or too little.