An Accidental American: A Novel (20 page)

Beirut, I thought, my neck prickling as I stopped on the word. Iraq and Lebanon were close neighbors, had been allies for a long time. If the elder al-Rashidi had been an intelligence man, he could have been sent there under diplomatic cover.

In the early 1980s,
the article continued,
both he and his sister were sent to the United States to study at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Dr. al-Rashidi went on to attend Princeton University and the University of Washington’s medical school…

There was no further mention of the sister or any of al-Rashidi’s other family members, nor of the turbulent times that must have followed, a family split by war and distance. And yet somehow the younger Ibrahim al-Rashidi had found a way to stay in the United States. Or his father had found a way for him.

I scrolled back to the picture of al-Rashidi’s face, trying to match the square jaw and dark eyes with the photograph Valsamis had shown me, the older al-Rashidi in his uniform, and later, at Brasileira with Rahim.

“Close out of this,” I told Graça, straightening up, heading back to my computer. Coincidence, I reminded myself, and yet nothing seemed coincidental anymore.

There was an answer from Sergei waiting in my mailbox. Working late, though at this hour Sergei was more likely cruising his favorite adult websites. What was it about the Russians that made them such suckers for big hair, fake tits, and too much makeup?

Give me twelve hours and I’ll see what I can find out,
Sergei had written.

Not the answer I’d been hoping for, but one I could live with. I closed out of my account, then crossed back to the bar, where Graça was waiting for me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before,” I apologized. “That was smart, looking for al-Rashidi like that.”

Her face softened slightly. She shuffled her feet and craned her neck, peering toward the door. “What next?” she asked.

Just killing time, I thought, waiting for Sergei’s answer, hoping for something on Valsamis that would make all the pieces fall into place. “I want you to take me to Rahim’s apartment.”

“You don’t really believe in all that Kissinger bullshit, do you?” Andy Sproul had asked, dividing the last of the Ksarak among their three glasses.

Morrow was visiting Beirut on his annual tour of the Mid-East stations. He and Sproul and Valsamis had gone out to a late dinner at one of the cafés near the embassy.

The golden boy, they called Sproul at the Beirut station, but Morrow wasn’t impressed. Foolish, he thought, hopelessly naive. Though not a threat, not yet. Sproul was like the white kid who went into the ghetto speaking jive, and Morrow figured the Arabs would see right through him. Though of course they never did.

“What I believe,” Morrow said, “is that we have to look out for our own best interests.”

“And by ‘best interests,’ ” Sproul countered, “I assume you mean the seven-hundred-billion-plus barrels of oil our neighbors in the Gulf are sitting on right now.”

Morrow smiled. “Perhaps you’d like to phone the folks back in Wichita and tell them to start chopping wood for this winter.”

Sproul sat back in his chair and lifted the Ksarak as if in a toast. “Touché,” he said, but there was the faintest hint of mockery in his tone.

“Everything in this world has a price,” Morrow reminded him fiercely. “It’s easy to forget that, but it’s true.”

Sproul touched the glass to his lips and drained it, then set it back on the table. “You know,” he said, “there are a lot of Lebanese who think we want the Syrians here. That it’s all part of some scheme to get the Palestinians out of Israel and give them Lebanon instead.”

Morrow shrugged. “They’re entitled to their opinion, aren’t they?”

He turned to Valsamis, hoping to shift the conversation his way. “I hear you’ve picked up an asset in Amal. A true believer, from what people are saying.”

“Peace and country and all that,” Valsamis agreed.

Morrow nodded. “It’s the true believers that are the most useful.”

“Or the most dangerous,” Sproul added.

Dick Morrow sat awake in the darkness and listened to the sounds of his house, the whir of the furnace, the patter of rain on the eaves.
They’re all here,
he could hear his father saying, the old man’s last words, death already scrabbling at the back of his throat.
They’re all here.

Morrow’s mother had reached out and put her hand on his father’s papery wrist, smiled her detached smile, whispered,
Yes, dear, we’re all here.
But this wasn’t what he’d meant, and Morrow had known it, could see the ghosts waiting in the room’s dark corners: the German kid his father had bayoneted at Belleau Wood; his best friend, Jack Harrison, who’d died in agony in a little church near St. Mihiel, his legs blown to pulp by a German mortar.

Yes, Morrow thought, this is how it happens: At the end you are alone with them. And his own ghosts? Still gathered at their usual table at the Commodore. Bryce and Wilson and Valsamis. Andy Sproul in the ridiculous keffiyeh he’d taken to wearing at the end, catching the waiters off guard with his easy Arabic.

There were footsteps in the hallway, and Morrow’s wife appeared, her hair sleep-tousled, silhouetted in the doorway. “Can’t this keep until morning?”

Morrow shook his head. “Go back to bed.”

The peace to which my mother and I returned was quick to fail. In March the fedayeen attacked Tel Aviv, and the Israelis responded by crossing the border into southern Lebanon, sending tens of thousands of refugees streaming north to Beirut. After Tony Franjieh, son of the Syrian-backed president, was assassinated, old rivalries flared, and by the summer of 1978, the city was once again a war zone.

My grandparents and I were among the flood of prosperous Beirutis to seek refuge at their weekend homes up the coast in Jounieh. The port town was barely thirty kilometers from Beirut, but it was another world entirely, untouched by the raging destruction of the conflict and the homeless squatters who had swamped the city.

My mother had long since made the decision to stay. She would not leave this time, would not watch the war from afar, as she had those years in Paris. My grandmother knew better than to cross her daughter, but my grandfather fought her tooth and claw.

In the end, my mother won. Like many of the other Beirutis who stayed behind, she believed in the heroism of daily and modest defiances, of teaching her classes and feeding herself amid the car bombs and rockets. At least this was what she told us at the time. And what, I suppose, she believed.

Even then I think she understood that there was more than duty that compelled her to remain in Beirut. She’d been gone often that spring, coming in late from her classes and leaving at night, reappearing for breakfast as she had the morning after we’d gone to see
Petra.
She and my grandmother maintained their truce, but in the evenings after I went to bed, I could hear my grandparents arguing.

We finally left for Jounieh in July, the three of us packed into my grandparents’ Mercedes with the good china and the family photos, sepia prints of my mother and her sister in their school uniforms, of picnics in the cedars, and of elegant women in long slim gowns. Snapshots of another time. On the steps of the Achrafiye apartment building, my mother stood in a stylish Parisian pantsuit, waving goodbye.

Everything I knew about the way Rahim worked told me not to expect much from the apartment, that anything of interest most likely would have been at the Cacilhas workshop. But I’d wanted to come, had held out hope that I might find something that would help me understand. I’d wanted something else as well, some physical reminder of our life on the Travessa da Laranjeira, the old green chair or the knife-scarred kitchen table, remnants of who we had been.

Rahim’s apartment had already been ransacked by the time Graça and I got there. The drawers had been emptied, the mattress and pillows sliced open, the cabinets searched in a way that suggested both carelessness and attention to detail, as if whoever had been here had known Rahim wouldn’t be coming back and had taken his time.

I paused in the bedroom and glanced at the chaos around me: shattered glass, a heap of sheets on the floor. The window had been left open and several rainfalls had poured in, leaving a dark wash of mildew on the curtains. There was a musty smell to the room, the rotten stink of waterlogged fabric. Gone, I thought, the old iron bed frame and the mahogany dressing table, the chair with its green tapestry, a worn Eden of flowers and vines.

It was raining now, not rain so much as mist driven in from the Atlantic. I walked to the window and peered across the Travessa da Água de Flor and out over the rooftops of the Bairro Alto, letting the rain settle on my face and in my hair. I could hear Graça in the living room, stumbling through the clutter.

They would have made love here, I thought, turning back to face the bed, not ours but theirs, Graça and Rahim’s. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the dissolution of his body, the marks of time and age that my own body mirrored back to me. And yet for all my effort, I could see him only as he’d been that night many years earlier on the train from Marseille. Young, as we’d both been, and flawless.

An amateur,
I heard Graça say, her translation of Gomes’s words catching her like a fierce and unexpected slap. The humiliation of youth and inexperience, the loss of everything she’d imagined herself to be.

Fumbling in my coat pocket, I took out the copy of the shipping invoice and unfolded it. BSW AIR CARGO, I read, skimming the letterhead, the United Arab Emirates address, letting my eyes wander down the page, trying to see what Rahim had seen. Fishy, I thought, remembering the word Sergei had used in his e-mail. Not just the dimensions but the itinerary as well, the question I’d asked myself still nagging at me: If the Alazans were headed for embargoed Iraq, as the invoice said, why broadcast that fact by listing Basra as the cargo’s destination? Especially if the shipment was going by way of Sharjah. And if the Iraqis were buying dirty bombs from the former Soviet stockpile, then why wouldn’t the Americans want the world to know?

No, I thought, working the problem over and over in my mind, each answer like a square block in a round hole. There was something I was missing.