An Accidental American: A Novel (22 page)

Leaving the boy to sleep, Valsamis rolled out of bed, dressed quietly, and set two twenty-euro notes on the hall table. Then he let himself out through the apartment’s front door and took the stairs down to the street.

The night had barely begun, and the cramped neighborhood around the Praça do Principe Real was just finding its rhythm. Groups of men paraded up and down the narrow streets. Like an Arab city, Valsamis thought, reminded of the cafés in Cairo or Damascus, men walking arm in arm and the smell of knocked-off European cologne. The freedom of a world unburdened by the complications of gender.

A young man crossed the street in his direction and Valsamis felt his heart catch, remembering the apartment he’d just left behind, the stale smell and the shared bathroom on the landing, the boy’s obvious embarrassment at all of it.

The cell phone in Valsamis’s right breast pocket rang. He drew it out and flipped it open. “Yes?”

“We’ve just recorded a hit, sir.” A woman this time, young, with a slightly Southern twang. Never the same person twice. How did they do it? Twelve-hour days at some basement computer, and the other twelve, sir, trying to forget everything they’d heard or seen. On the weekends, backyard barbecues where everyone knew better than to ask about work.

“What’s the location?” Valsamis asked.

“It’s coming in now, sir. Are you ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“One-twenty-six rua Diário de Notícias. Looks like a public server.”

The café above São Roque, Valsamis thought. A fifteen-minute walk at most. “She’s still online?”

The woman paused, then, “Yes, sir. Is there anything else, sir?”

“No, nothing else,” Valsamis told her.

Once more my search came up bust. The engineer, the newlywed, and now a Greek musician. Again, nothing on John Valsamis. I logged back in to my Hotmail account, and this time there was a message waiting for me.

Where Sergei got his information, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. What I did know was that my friend had a network to rival that of the best small-town gossip, an electronic web of contacts, old and new, that seemed to know where every body, from Minsk to Mexico City, was buried.

John Valsamis,
Sergei had written, his answer characteristically brief.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Mid-East division. Field officer, Istanbul, Cairo, Beirut. Retired, 1997.

There it was again, I thought, an electric chill coursing up my back. Beirut. Not coincidence, then, this city that connected us all, Valsamis and al-Rashidi and me.
A car bomb,
I heard Valsamis say that night in my kitchen, his finger on the picture of the girl and her mother. Later, on his way out, his thin smile. He’d known about my mother, known before I did that I would agree to find Rahim. Known just what I’d need to justify my choice, to let myself think it wasn’t fear or anger driving me but something else.

What was it my father liked to say?
You can’t con an honest man.

I glanced up and saw Graça slide off her bar stool. She waved at me, pointed back through the café, toward the alcove marked WC.

Valsamis flipped the collar of his coat up around his neck and turned down the rua da Rosa, powering forward past the clubs and fado houses, the steamy overflow of bodies outside Play Bar and Nova. On the narrow sidewalk in front of O Forcado was a less sophisticated clientele. Obvious tourists huddled against the rain, fighting for the few taxis that had wandered into the hilltop neighborhood.

Close now, Valsamis thought, just a few more blocks. He crossed the street to avoid the crowd, his gait almost a jog, then he turned onto the Travessa da Boa Hora and the quieter rua Diário de Notícias. He could hear the Internet café from a good block away, the thump of electronic music pounding out into the narrow lane. A group of kids in makeshift costumes eyed him with unchecked suspicion as he opened the door and let himself inside.

Valsamis stood near the door, getting his bearings. Then he elbowed his way into the crush of bodies, starting for the back of the café and the monitors he’d glimpsed through the crowd.

A hand caught the sleeve of his coat, and Valsamis turned to see a young woman glaring at him with unvarnished contempt. She couldn’t have been over twenty, her pale face bristling with a dozen different piercings. Her body was slightly too doughy for her black vinyl corset and zippered miniskirt, her arms stippled with goose bumps, her white stomach bulging over her waistband. “There’s a wait for the computers,” she snarled in Portuguese. “You need to get in line.”

Valsamis shook off her hand and started forward again, scanning the crowd for Nicole’s dark hair and narrow face. But the girl wouldn’t let him go.

“Hey, asshole!” she snarled. “Are you deaf?”

There was some kind of disturbance at the front of the café, a woman’s voice shouting angry Portuguese. A clutch of bodies at the counter shielded my view, customers waiting to pay and others loitering, gawking at the uproar. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but I could see one of the counter girls through the crowd, the same surly young woman who’d assigned me my computer. Some poor soul had crossed her and was paying for it.

I ducked into the stairwell that led down to the restrooms, years of prison instinct telling me it was best to lie low.

A man’s voice answered the young woman’s, the Portuguese a broken growl. There was a slight movement in the crowd, and then I heard the girl gasp, her breath high and tight, caught against her throat. The sound a puppy might make when kicked.

“Hey!” someone shouted. And another voice: “Get your hands off her!”

The crowd fell silent. Over the music I heard the unmistakable click of a bullet being chambered, the sound itself warning enough. The ring of people fell away, and I could see the gun, the metal glinting in the café’s halogen spotlights, and the man’s hand on the girl’s wrist, her arm turning uncomfortably purple beneath his grasp.

He pushed her aside, then pivoted, his eyes raking over the café, toward the alcove where I stood, pressed up against the wall. I could see his face and the look of disgust on it, the same contempt I’d seen that morning in my kitchen in Paziols.

Ducking farther into the alcove, I slid the FEG from my pocket and took the stairs down to the basement landing, where Graça was waiting outside the women’s room.

“He’s here,” I told her, taking a split-second inventory of my surroundings. There were three doors off the landing, the men’s and women’s bathrooms, and a third, unmarked door.

“Who?” Graça asked.

“The American,” I answered, pushing the men’s room door open with my foot, peering in at the stained walls and filthy floor toilet.

I tried the unmarked door next, revealing a cramped utility closet, a mop and broom, a shelf stocked with spare paper and cleaning supplies, a stack of cardboard boxes.

Graça nodded to the women’s room. “There’s someone in there.”

There was the sound of a toilet flushing. The door opened and a young woman stepped out, another of the café’s counter girls. She glanced down at the gun and froze.

“Is there a way out of here?” I asked in my broken Portuguese.

The girl blinked back at me, uncomprehending.

“Ask her!” I told Graça.

Graça quickly translated, and the girl blinked again, then raised her hand and pointed to the closet. Her fingers were trembling, her black nails chipped where she’d chewed off the polish. She spoke rapidly, and Graça nodded. Then Graça stepped into the narrow space and shoved aside one of the boxes, revealing not a wall but the beginning of what looked like endless darkness, a passageway stretching back into the rock, a relic of the ancient city.

“She says she’s heard it goes all the way to the Largo Trindade Coelho,” Graça explained.

I looked back at the girl, and she nodded at me. “Yes!” she insisted. “Yes!”

Graça shrugged. “I believe her.”

The girl’s eyes were glassy with fear. “You’re coming with us,” I told her, grabbing her arm with my free hand.

The rear of the café was divided into two churchlike columns, with five straight rows of tables and monitors laid out along a center aisle. Drawn by the woman’s protests, most of the clientele had congregated near the front counter, but there were a few stray customers still at their workstations and a handful more huddled beneath the tables.

There’s nothing like a gun to get people’s attention, and Valsamis’s Ruger, though not flashy, commanded definite respect. As he made his way toward the back of the café, Valsamis listened with satisfaction to the numbed silence, the perfection of it broken only by the girl’s sobs. By the time he reached the second row of tables, even those had begun to fade. The door whooshed open behind him, and Valsamis swung around in time to see a trio of figures escaping into the night. Three potential heroes, Valsamis thought, watching the boys disappear. He would have to work quickly.

Valsamis swept forward again, scanning the hunched forms on the floor. A young man with jet-black hair. A blond girl in a dark velvet cape, her incisors capped with two long fangs. And then, at the far end of the very last row, Valsamis caught a glimpse of cropped brown hair, a woman’s long lean back, her knees bent tight against her chest, her face buried between them.

Valsamis skirted the tables and came up behind the woman. She was crying, not sobbing like the girl at the front, but just quietly weeping, her whole body racked by the force of her fear.

“Get up,” Valsamis told her, setting the Ruger’s barrel against the back of her neck. “Get up now.”

“Please,” she whispered, unfolding slowly toward him, arms and head and face. Not Nicole, not even close. “Please,” she repeated, but Valsamis was already turning from her, his eyes scanning the café, lighting on the stairwell that led down to the restrooms.