An Accidental American: A Novel (11 page)

The corridor was empty by the time I got to the door. I picked up the envelope and put my hand on the light switch, then stopped myself. Through the open curtains, I could see one or two lit rooms on the opposite side of the air shaft, and the dark windows around them. Valsamis was somewhere behind one of the blank panes. And if I was awake, I thought, it was a good bet he was, too.

His prerogative, I reminded myself, as I had that morning. And why wouldn’t he be watching? But still.

Skirting the bed, I made my way to the bathroom and closed the door, then turned on the lights over the sink, greedily tore open the envelope, and pulled out the single piece of paper.

It was a brief message, the words handwritten in dark ink, but I knew exactly what it meant.
Adamastor,
it said.
6:00.

I put my free hand to my face and could feel the flush in my skin, the heat of my whole body drawn upward. There was only one person who would have left such a note, who would have wanted to meet at the statue of the old sea monster on the Miradouro de Santa Catarina.

Rahim.

It’s late when I get back to the apartment, moving toward the early hours of the morning, but more of Rahim’s friends have come since I was gone, and they are clustered in the dark living room. The television is on, and on the screen an otherworldly ballet is unfolding. Dark sky, luminous pearls of anti-aircraft fire, the Baghdad skyline washed with the aqueous green of night vision.

It’s happened, I think, the Americans have finally gone in. Knowing better than to intrude, I stand in the doorway for some time, listening to the broadcast, the contained panic of the American reporters and their cameraman as the bombs begin to fall.

For the first time that I can remember, everyone is silent. No one, not even Rahim, acknowledges my presence, and at first I think he hasn’t seen me. But when I turn to start down the hall to our bedroom, he looks up at me, angry, accusatory, and in that moment, I think, I am every failing that has ever divided him from himself, every weakness that has kept him from his god. I am one of
them
now, and nothing will ever be the same between us.

Something bigger than Nairobi,
I thought, Valsamis’s words ricocheting in my head. Turning off the bathroom lights, I made my way back out into the dark bedroom and fumbled in my coat pocket for the pack of Portugués Suaves I’d bought on my way up from the docks. Not for smoking, I’d told myself then and reminded myself now. Just an old habit for my hands.

I closed my eyes and could see the pictures again. Not the ones of the Nairobi bombing but the others, the images we all see in our dreams and wish we didn’t. The blurred body of a plane hurtling forward. The giant tongues of fire. Smoke like some mad dark river churning into the blue sky. And in one of the towers’ windows, a man, a tiny figure desperately waving a makeshift white flag.

What would it take to change a person, I wondered, to bring him to this place? Anger distilled to its purest form.

During my six years at the Maison des Baumettes, I lived among women who had done the unthinkable, who had murdered their husbands or drowned their children. Monsters and yet not. In truth, there was very little that separated these women from the rest of us, from the forgers and junkies and thieves, even from those on the outside. We are all, in some way, overtaken by our lives, shaped and molded by the glacial forces of time and family until the person we are and the self we recognize no longer agree.

And my own life? And Rahim’s? There was Driss, of course. And there was the war.

“If you were to leave,” Rahim had told me once, before such things seemed possible, “if you were to leave, I would go home to the mountains, to the old Berber sheepherders. There will be nothing left for me here.” I’d laughed then, laughed at the impossibility of it. But I had left.

And in the end he had not gone to the Berbers. He had not chosen the rocky wilderness of the High Atlas, as he’d promised, but some other, fiercer wasteland.

I tapped the unopened pack of Suaves against my palm and felt the cigarettes shift. There was a certain satisfaction in the gesture, in the promise, however false, of pleasure.

Six o’clock at the statue of Adamastor. Not a betrayal, I told myself, putting down the cigarettes, making my way toward the door. Not a betrayal but simply what had to be done. And yet somehow I had imagined more time, days in which to get used to the idea, in which to convince myself I was doing the right thing.

I punched the wall switch and the overhead light glared on, illuminating the room in all its shabbiness, all the ominous and unidentifiable stains that accompany the human condition. In the window I could see my own blurred reflection, pale arms and legs framed in the room’s entryway. And my hand, raised now, the note clutched in my fingers.

At the time it seemed like I stood there forever, but looking back, I can see how quickly it all happened. How little time it took for the phone to ring and for me to answer.

“We just need to talk to him,” Valsamis told Nicole. “Find out what he knows.”

Nicole didn’t say anything. From his window, Valsamis watched her sit down on the edge of the bed and put her free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the phone, over her face. A gesture of despair.

Valsamis turned and glanced at the Ruger on his bedside table. Four more hours to keep her on track, he thought. Or he could do it now, quick and quiet. Though if anything went wrong in the morning, if Rahim got spooked or didn’t show, he’d have nothing to fall back on.

“Nicole?” he said again, and this time her voice came back to him.

“Yes?”

“You’ve done the right thing, Nicole.”

I
N THE EARLY-MORNING DARKNESS
,
Santa Catarina rose like some madwoman’s wedding cake, each dark tier sugared and frilled with the city’s wild sprawl, palm fronds and rooflines and intricate Manueline facades, stone twisted and curled like icing from a piping bag. And on the hill’s southern flank, the long narrow gorge of the funicular tracks, like a greedy finger dipped in and drawn upward.

On the Largo do Calhariz, at the top of the Bica funicular, the windows of a coffee kiosk blazed out onto the silent square, onto the handful of tables and upturned chairs, the umbrellas folded in on themselves like the wings of sleeping bats. Inside, a barista and two customers, three curls of smoke wreathing up toward the fluorescent lights.

Down on the Tagus, the Ponte 25 de Abril shimmered like a bracelet on the river’s black wrist. And on the far bank, the great Cristo Rei statue, lit as if from within, arms outstretched toward the city.

I paused in the kiosk’s glare, facing into the darkness, and slid the Suaves from my pocket.
We just need to talk to him,
I could hear Valsamis say, his assurance when I’d called to tell him about Rahim’s message.

Though of course this was a lie. I knew what the Americans did to people like Rahim. We all knew.

Greedily ripping the cellophane wrapper, I shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it, then cupped my shaking hand around the match’s delicate flame, succumbing to the warm rush of smoke, the taste of tobacco.

Twelve years between them, Rahim thought, stepping back into the doorway as he watched Nicole turn onto the rua Santa Catarina and make her way toward him. Twelve years, and why she had come back to Lisbon, Rahim couldn’t say. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t safe for her to be asking about him, wasn’t safe for either of them. Even now he was aware of the danger, aware that someone could be watching. This was why he’d chosen to wait here instead of on the belvedere.

A gust of wind whistled up from the river, and Nicole pulled the collar of her coat tight, hunching her shoulders against the cold. She was close now, just a couple of meters away, passing into the bright arc of the nearest streetlamp. Her hands were bare, the knuckles red and chapped, and as she drew closer, Rahim could see the smeared salt stain on her cheek from where the wind had made her eyes tear. Not beautiful, he thought, for no one could have argued that Nicole was beautiful. But there was a primitiveness to her, her whole body as raw as those pale hands. And for all that had passed between them, he wanted her still.