An Accidental American: A Novel (14 page)

“Well?” Morrow’s tone seemed presumptive, accusatory, even. Too confident, Valsamis thought, that something was wrong.

“There won’t be any more problems with Ali.”

“And Nicole Blake?”

“I told you, I’ll take care of her.” Valsamis winced, wishing he had lied.

“There are people in Lisbon I can call if things get out of hand.” Morrow’s words were more warning than assurance.

“They won’t,” Valsamis told him.

Morrow hesitated. “One more thing, John.”

Valsamis felt suddenly sick. He leaned toward the window and pushed it open, hoping to temper the lingering odor of stale cigarette smoke, but it was no use, the room was saturated.

“We should take care of the Morais girl as well.” Morrow’s voice was dispassionate, contained. “And the old man, too. Loose ends, you know?”

F
OR SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER
our return to Lebanon, it looked as if my mother might actually be right. There was a fragile concord that fall and winter. Not so much a peace as a common acknowledgment of the lunacy of war. For the truth of the early conflict was that the rifts it had revealed ran far too deep to ever be forgotten again. And yet, in our eagerness, we all believed.

In Beirut there was an almost hysterical scramble for normalcy, as if people knew the worst was yet to come. There were concerts and dinner parties, even the return of ordinary crime, of holdups and burglaries and murders of passion. In January, Fairuz sang the Rahbani brothers’
Petra
at the Piccadilly Theatre, and my grandfather took us all to the opening night.

I was eight at the time, too young for the theater, far too young to understand what the performance meant to a city struggling to forget civil war, but I still remember the spectacle of that evening, the competing smells of expensive perfumes, the textures of the women’s gowns as I moved among them in the foyer. The crush of silk and sequins and fur.

Onstage, her robes catching the lights like the feathers of some exotic bird, what we had all come for, the poor printer’s daughter from the Zuqaq al-blat who had conquered the world, the woman whose voice was our own. Goddess, I’d thought when the curtain first parted to reveal Fairuz standing there, and the entire audience had caught its breath with me.

At intermission someone gave me my first glass of champagne and I wandered, light-headed, through the dark sea of tuxedos, hot and itching in my stockings and tight shoes. When the houselights blinked to signal the end of the intermission, I looked up to see my grandmother pushing her way through the crowd.

She was a beautiful woman, even at her age, slim as a girl from her regular tennis matches at the Summerland Hotel, her hair dark and glossy. She’d worn a red dress that night, an elegant sheath that clung to her waist and thighs, and as she came toward me, I could see the powerful muscles in her arms and legs.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked, bending toward me.

I shook my head. “She said she was going to the bathroom.”

She took my hand and started back into the crowd. The lights blinked a second time, and people began to file slowly back into the theater, reluctant, it seemed, to get back to the story. Even I knew it would end badly. My mother had told me everything in the car on the way there, how Petra refuses to betray her country and how her daughter is killed because of it.

We neared the ladies’ lounge and my grandmother stopped abruptly. “Go back to the theater,” she said, letting go of my hand.

I moved slightly, trying to look past her, but she positioned her body as if to shield me from something.

“Go to your seat,” she hissed. This time there was an edge of threat to her voice, as when I crossed her at home.

I turned to leave, craning my neck as I went, peering past her. I could see my mother in the far corner of the lobby, talking animatedly to a man in an elegant tuxedo who seemed to be listening intently. The man looked to be about my mother’s age, tall, with a neat dark beard and dark eyes.

My mother was leaning with one shoulder against the wall and her back to us, sweeping her hair over one ear as she spoke, a gesture I recognized as one of nervousness. She was wearing a dress not unlike my grandmother’s, only black, and from the back the two women looked so much alike that it would have been difficult to tell one from the other had I not already known who was who.

“Go!” my grandmother repeated sharply.

My mother and grandmother were late getting back to their seats. By the time they joined us, they had missed an entire scene. After she sat down, my mother turned to me and smiled. Her face was open, her expression meant as a gift of reassurance for me, but even in the darkness, I could tell she had been crying. My grandmother sat rigid beside her, looking straight ahead toward the stage.

It was late morning when I left the dairy and headed back to the docks, the dim day dimming even further, the sky sliding from pearl to dove gray. The wind had picked up, cold and gusty, straight off the Atlantic, and there was a steady rain falling, with no break in sight. I’d found a worn peacoat, presumably Rahim’s, back at the apartment, and I was grateful to have it as I stood on the waterfront watching the ferry come in.

I rode back across the river, then headed up into the Chiado, to a cybercafé on the Largo do Picadeiro that I’d noticed the day before. I needed help with the invoice. Normally I would have taken the document to Eduardo Morais, but with Graça and possibly Morais himself involved, I wasn’t sure how much I could trust him or anyone else in Lisbon.

With my local contacts out of the question, my best bet for help was my friend and colleague at Solomon, Sergei Velnychenko. A crackerjack forger, Sergei was a man who knew firsthand the ugliness of the Russian prison system. Legend had it that Sergei had made a good name for himself in the Russian mob, managing to keep his free-agent status and operate within both the Odessa and the Moscow mobs at the same time. Things would have stayed rosy if he hadn’t made the mistake of screwing one of the big Muscovite’s wives and getting caught at it. The man had seen to it that Sergei spent the next five years in a prison in Siberia.

Like most of the scattered workers at Solomon, Sergei and I had never actually met. With all the bad blood dogging him in Russia, and few employment opportunities waiting for him upon his release, he’d taken Solomon’s offer straight out of prison and moved his paycheck and his computer to a new home in the British Virgin Islands. But sometimes you don’t have to meet people to know them. I’d spent enough time online with Sergei to know that if there was one person I could trust to keep a secret for me, it was him.

Checking my watch, I found a free computer at the café and logged in to the Hotmail account I kept for personal use. Still early on Tortola, I thought, though Sergei wasn’t much for sleep.
Need your expertise on a document,
I typed, hoping to catch the Russian at his computer fulfilling some early-morning fantasy, figuring he would know from the Hotmail address that my request wasn’t work-related. Ten minutes, I told myself, hitting send, watching the message evaporate. If there was no reply by then, I’d check back later.

I sat back in my chair and glanced around the café at the midmorning clientele, a hodgepodge of students and artists and pensioners, each intimately connected to something or someone on his or her screen. They’d be looking for me eventually, probably already were. Valsamis and whomever he was working for.

On the far side of the café, a girl rushed to greet her friends clustered at the coffee bar, and for half an instant, seeing her dark hair and long coat, I mistook her for Graça Morais. It wasn’t much of a surprise, I thought, that Rahim had chosen her. She was so much of what he’d always liked, young and pretty with a hard edge. But I was taken aback by his choice nonetheless, almost insulted, though I couldn’t quite say why.

I checked my watch, and my empty in-box stared back at me. Then a message popped onto the screen, another Hotmail address, Fernando76. Sergei Velnychenko was an ABBA fan.

Sergei’s answer was as short as my request had been:
Send it my way and I’ll see what I can do,
he replied in his impeccable English.

Waiting for your answer,
I wrote back. Then I hastily slipped the invoice from my pocket, ran the document through the café’s communal scanner, and e-mailed the image to Sergei.

I didn’t have to wait long. Not even five minutes later, Fernando76 had a new message for me.
Standard shipping invoice,
Sergei wrote, confirming what I already knew.
Five crates of steel cables from Trans-Dniester to Basra via Odessa. Nothing unusual.

And BSW Air Cargo?
I e-mailed back.

Owned by Bruns Werner, old friends say main cargo gladiolas. As for Werner, armor-plated.
Meaning somebody was looking out for this Werner. Someone with a lot of pull. As for the gladiolas, it was a word Sergei had used before, and not in reference to flowers. Gladiolas had been the cover Sergei’s bosses in Odessa had used when helping to clean out the Ukrainian supply of Soviet-era weaponry. In other words, Bruns Werner was an arms dealer.

Another e-mail followed.
Dimensions fishy,
Sergei had written.
Do you mind if I ask around?

I hesitated, my hands hovering over the keyboard while I thought about Sergei’s offer. Nothing unusual, he’d said, but that in itself was strange. You don’t forge a copy of a shipping invoice unless there’s something unusual about it, and I was fairly certain the invoice was a fake— not just because I’d found it in Rahim’s printer. There was a slightly flawed quality to the white spaces where the shipping information had been penned by hand. It was a shadow of a shadow, nothing I could put my finger on, nothing someone who didn’t know exactly what he was looking for would find, but it was there nonetheless.

Of course, with the sanctions, almost anything going into Basra would have been contraband. But then why put Iraq as the destination? Especially with a home base like Sharjah, a well-known convenience port, a shell game for ships and cargo flights heading to the Mid-East and Africa. A commercial no-man’s-land where, for the right price, almost anything, including a plane’s official destination, was negotiable.

And then there was the question of Trans-Dniester, a strange little country carved from the remnants of the Soviet Union. Famous more because of its unaccounted-for supply of Soviet weapons than its steel cables. The breakaway republic had won its hard-fought independence from Moldova in the early 1990s, right before I’d gone to prison, and I remembered the frenzy then, every arms dealer and hack smuggler looking for a piece of the cash pie. No, something didn’t make sense.

Be discreet,
I typed.

The answer from half a world away: a pixilated face, a yellow moon winking at me.
As discreet as a hundred-dollar whore,
Sergei had written.
Check back P.M.

Rush hour, John Valsamis thought, checking his watch, doing a quick backward calculation. He punched a number into the disposable cell phone he’d bought on the rua Augusta and imagined his call rocketing straight toward the pandemonium of the Beltway, the phone on the other end chirping its insistent message. A favor called in, but then he was owed, had more favors coming his way than he could ever use. A Cold War’s worth.