An Accidental American: A Novel (25 page)

The only confession you need to make is to Allah,
Sabri Kanj’s father had told him once. Kanj had been twelve at the time, earnest in his belief, and he had not been satisfied by his father’s advice. He could not remember now what he had done wrong, only that he’d wanted concrete absolution for it, some form of humiliation or punishment to set the score straight. His father had refused to indulge him. Now, watching the door close behind Richard Morrow, Kanj understood for the first time what his father had meant. He felt physically changed, as if he’d been scoured clean by the truth.

Kanj was not naive enough to believe there was anything left for him but the inevitable. He would die here, in this place, or out in the desert. Once they no longer needed him, they would kill him without ceremony.

But he had done what he had not been brave enough to do all those years earlier. Morrow knew now about the bombing, that it was Valsamis who had betrayed the others and killed Mina. Because of what she knew. Because of what Kanj had told her. No one could abide a traitor, he told himself. Surely, now, Valsamis would pay.

For the first time since he’d boarded the ship at the Jounieh aquamarina all those years earlier, Kanj allowed himself to think of Mina without guilt. He closed his eyes and thought back to that last morning in Beirut. From the beginning, they’d agreed on a meeting place, a deserted building off the rue de Mazraa where they would rendezvous in the event that something went wrong. Mina’s job at the American University gave her a legitimate reason to travel to West Beirut, so she would be the one to come to him.

Kanj had gotten there before dawn the day after the bombing. There had been a skirmish near the museum crossing that morning, and Mina had been held up getting across the Green Line. It was nearly noon when she finally arrived, and Kanj had almost given up. She was flustered, her hair slipping from beneath the black scarf she always wore to their meetings. For the first time since he’d known her, Kanj could tell she was afraid. By then they both understood it was not coincidence that Valsamis had escaped the embassy bombing, that he had never intended to share the information they’d given him. Both knew just how much danger they were in.

Mina had driven from her parents’ house in Jounieh earlier that morning. She was leaving, she explained. The whole family would be heading to France the next evening on one of her father’s ships.

The building they were in had housed apartments at one time. As Mina spoke, Kanj realized that they were sitting in the shell of someone’s living room. In one corner, half buried in rubble, was what was left of a couch. And next to the couch, listing on three broken legs, was a child’s table and a small chair. For the first time, Kanj could see clearly the perversion of war. He thought of
Petra
and that night at the Piccadilly, Fairuz weeping over the body of her dead child. Though even this, he realized, was wrong, for in the end, any attempt at finding a moral in war, tragic or not, seemed like an indulgence.

“There will be someone waiting for you,” Mina told him then. “On the rue Said Khadige at the Green Line, before dawn. They will take you across and on to Jounieh and the aquamarina. There is a freighter leaving for Cyprus in the afternoon that will take you on. My father has arranged everything.”

Kanj bristled. “Your father hates me.”

Mina shook her head. Nothing was this simple.

She put her fingers on his face, and he could feel her hand shaking. “You can’t stay here,” she said, and she was right about this as well.

“We’re leaving,” Morrow told Fairweather. “Go to the truck and wait for me.”

A wounded look crossed the young man’s face. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glared at Morrow like a petulant teenager, then turned and started down the corridor.

Morrow waited until Fairweather was out of earshot, then lowered his voice and addressed the Jordanian. “You will get nothing more from him,” he said, motioning toward the door of Kanj’s cell.

The Jordanian nodded. He was a man, Morrow thought, who knew how these kinds of things worked. He had been waiting for just this authorization, relishing it. Still, he did not like being told what to do.

He curled his lip and leered at Morrow, his tone acerbic, half mocking: “Whatever you say, sir.”

O
UR DECISION TO LEAVE LEBANON
was a hasty one. I came home from school on a Monday afternoon in April to find my mother and grandparents sitting together in the kitchen of my grandparents’ villa. My mother had been up that weekend and had returned to Beirut only the night before, so when I came through the door and saw her, I knew immediately that something was wrong.

The radio was tuned to the Voice of Lebanon, and I could hear the familiar patter of the announcer, the bland voice of tragedy that had become the background noise of our lives. The news that afternoon was no different from what it usually was: an explosion in Beirut, a truck bomb. This time, however, the American embassy had been the target.

“What’s going on?” I asked, setting my books down on the counter.

For a long time no one answered, then my grandmother looked up at me. “Go pack your things,” she said.

I turned to my mother for an explanation, for some harbor from the insanity that seemed to have gripped the three of them, but she just nodded her assent. “Do what your grandmother tells you.”

My grandmother seemed to know she would never see Beirut again. This time she packed for a permanent exile, the furniture padded and crated, the silver and china carefully wrapped for the trip. In the morning my grandmother drove me down to school so I could say goodbye to my friends, and when we got back, my mother was standing in the driveway with her keys in her hand.

“I have to go back to the city,” she said as we climbed out of the car.

My grandmother shook her head, but my mother was insistent. “I’ll be back by noon,” she promised.

She walked to where I was standing, put her arms around me, and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t worry,” she told me. Then she pulled her head back and smiled broadly, hopefully, this smile her greatest lie.

It was noon by the time we reached the French border and headed the last few miles up the coast, past Banyuls sur Mer and Port-Vendres. Graça had driven part of the night shift, across the Spanish plains, and she was still sleeping when I nudged the Renault off the main road and down into Collioure.

It was a perfect spring day, clear light dazzling the sea, the water a deep sapphire, the waves cresting white in the distance. Along the waterfront, a line of palms waved like cabaret girls. On the gray pebble beach, where the surf came and went almost imperceptibly, a handful of pastel fishing boats languished in the sun.

This was the tourist’s France, a place of manufactured charm, of waterfront restaurants selling overpriced pizzas and cheap Matisse reproductions in the souvenir shops. Even the boats were waiting not for fishermen but for the perfect photo opportunity.

I turned onto one of the old town’s narrow streets, and Graça stirred.

“Where are we?” she asked, opening her eyes, glancing out the window at the unfamiliar surroundings.

“Collioure,” I explained. “My father has a place here.”

Turning down another lane, I pulled the Renault to the curb in front of a pale green building with a weather-faded sign that read HOTEL DERAIN.

“Wait out here,” I said. “I won’t be long.”

Graça nodded, and I cut the engine and climbed out.

It had been nearly a decade since I’d visited my father, six years in Marseille and another four in the mountains, yet the hotel seemed unchanged. Even the planters on either side of the doorway were untouched, the dead geraniums just as withered as they’d been on my last visit, another of Ed’s misguided attempts at beautification.

A sign on the door, printed in five different languages, advertised clean rooms and harbor views. One of my father’s cons, for the rooms, at my last visit, had been dirty at best, and the water views had been obscured several centuries earlier by neighboring buildings. “The sea is there,” he would tell his guests, the ones who had the cheek to complain. “It’s on the other side of that rooftop.”

There was a woman behind the small front desk, a fat Catalonian with transvestite’s makeup and thinning hair the color of eggplant. She looked up and scowled at me, her smudged eyebrows arching painfully.

“I’m looking for Ed,” I said when she failed to offer assistance.

She pursed her lips, and I could see the tiny red fissures where her lipstick had run. Her scalp was white beneath the tinted curls.

“What do you want?” she asked contemptuously.

“I’m his daughter.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the woman and my father might be a couple, but I could tell immediately by her expression that this was the case, and that Ed hadn’t told her about me. Without saying a word, she got up from her chair, opened the door behind the desk, the one I knew led to Ed’s living quarters, and disappeared.

There was silence, then the sound of a quarrel, the voices intelligible only in their anger. Then, suddenly, the door opened and my father appeared.

He had aged, though not as much as someone else might have, for he had done much of his aging earlier on and possessed the same static quality Valsamis did. He looked at me and smiled, and it was as if he’d been expecting me, as if it had been one year instead of ten.

“Nic!” He stepped forward to greet me, but I took an instinctive step back.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

He lifted his arms out from his sides, as if trying to show me he was unarmed. “What’s going on?”

I looked at him, trying, as I had in the past, to see him as my mother had. He was still handsome, though in a dissolute sort of way. Like a bum you might pass on the street and recognize some element of yourself and your own humanity in.

“I need money,” I told him.

He didn’t flinch, just kept smiling, the same smile I’d seen him use a thousand times. “Whatever you need, sweetheart.” He took out his billfold and started to open it.

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “real money. I’m going to have to disappear for a while.”