An Accidental American: A Novel (28 page)

Taking my digital camera, I went downstairs to the kitchen and stowed the passports in the freezer, then made my way out into the living room. The television was on, the satellite tuned to CNN, but Graça wasn’t watching it. She had fallen asleep on the couch.

I moved to turn off the TV but stopped myself, my eyes catching the ticker at the bottom of the screen. The information was frustratingly brief, gone before I had a chance to get a handle on it, leaving me to sports scores, and on the main screen the day’s weather forecast, though the words were clear enough. Punching the remote, I flipped fruitlessly through the other news channels, LCI, EuroNews, and BBC World, then back to CNN, waiting for the ticker to scrawl through its cycle again.

Too many coincidences, I thought as I read the words for the second time. SABRI KANJ, #4 ON THE INTERNATIONAL TERROR WATCH LIST, KILLED DURING A RAID BY JORDANIAN SECURITY FORCES.

Valsamis and now Kanj. Beirut’s ghosts. My mother’s ghosts. Of all the people Valsamis could have used to get to Rahim, he’d chosen me. There was something more at stake here than the invoice.

From up the hill at the Hernots’ came the low, mournful sound of a dog howling. Lucifer, I thought, recognizing the throatiness of his voice immediately. My skin prickling, I turned instinctively from the television to the glass patio doors. Down at the far edge of the garden, a slender shadow moved across the drifts. A pine marten or a stoat sniffing out a meal.

Old business, I told myself, watching the animal nose its way across the yard. I was finally beginning to understand. Old business, and yet Valsamis had come to me.

Graça stirred, then lifted her head and blinked sleepily up at me. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I shook my head, then motioned to the camera in my hand. “I need to get a picture.”

Morrow leaned forward in his seat and peered down at the farmland patchwork of the Jordan River valley far below. To the west, the fortifications of the Israeli border lay like an ugly scar against the Jordan’s banks, miles of concertina wire and electric fence, long, dusty gashes where patrol roads had been hacked into the valley floor. To the south, a dry canal bed, a remnant of good American intentions left to rot, spurred back toward Amman, its concrete sluiceway tinted green with scrub and grass from decades of disuse. Yet another failure, Morrow thought, watching the canal disappear beneath the plane, a physical reminder of all that they had squandered.

It was nearly dusk, the sun wild and red, plunging toward the horizon of the sea. In the distance, beyond the Judean Hills, the lights of Jerusalem were beginning to wink. Morrow allowed himself a glimpse of the world as it could have been if they had stayed the course. The shanty camps of Gaza and the West Bank gone and Israel restored. The Syrian border stretching across the Bekaa Valley and over Mount Lebanon to the Mediterranean shore. The world as it might still be.

Not peace but something bigger than peace. The fruit of war. The beginning of the end. This was what Andy Sproul hadn’t been able to understand.

Twelve years, Morrow told himself, for the chance to finish what they’d started in Iraq. Twelve years, and this time there would be no leaving until things were set right.

The cockpit door opened, and the copilot ducked out of the cabin to make his way toward Morrow’s seat.

“Satellite call, sir,” he said, passing Morrow the handset, then starting back toward the front of the plane.

Morrow pressed the receiver to his ear. “Yes.”

“I’ve found the sister,” the voice said. “Emilie Delon, deceased.”

“Any relatives?” Morrow asked. Even if the sister was dead, the letters were somewhere.

“Husband, Olivier, still living. Two children, Antoine and Marie, also still living. Antoine’s in Paris, and Marie is in London. There’s also a third child, a niece, I believe, raised by the Delons after her mother died. Name’s Nicole Blake. Spent six years in prison in France on forgery charges. Currently living in the French Pyrenees, a little town called Paziols.”

Morrow felt his heart catch. Valsamis had known, he thought. He must have heard something when Kanj was first apprehended in Pakistan, must have figured Kanj was about to finger him. It was why he’d been so insistent on using Nicole Blake to find Rahim Ali.

“Sir?” The voice crackled back at him through the static of space.

“Yes.” Morrow recovered himself. “I’ll need an exact location on the Blake woman.”

In the twenty-year-old photograph on my computer screen, the destruction looked almost elegant. Where the front of the American embassy had been, there was a waterfall of rubble, the seven floors sheared perfectly away, pancaked onto one another. The picture had been taken at night, and there was an element of theater to it, the bulldozers toiling away beneath the lights like actors on a set.

Nighttime clearing operations at the American embassy in Beirut, April 1983,
the caption read.
Sixty-three people were killed in the bombing, seventeen of them Americans.
Citizens even in death.

Working on a hunch, I perused one of the websites turned up by my Internet search for information on the Beirut embassy bombing. The site was a memorial, an online tribute created by one of the victims’ children.

Just a hunch, and probably a misguided one at that. Still, it had been this act that had convinced my mother it was time to get out.

I clicked on a link marked FACTS and waited while the new screen loaded. It was crazy to be online, and I knew it, but I was hoping Valsamis’s surveillance extended only to my e-mails. Besides, even if people were listening, I planned to be long gone by the time they traced the computer and found the house.

A bulleted list appeared, the basics of time and means, another breakdown of the dead by rank and nationality. Seventeen Americans. One marine guard. One journalist. Several army trainers. Three USAID employees. Near the bottom of the list, one piece of information caught my eye.

The entire U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Middle East contingent was killed in the bombing.
But of course this wasn’t quite accurate. John Valsamis was still very much alive.

Valsamis pulled the Twingo to the side of the road and cut the engine. It was snowing again, winter’s final, flimsy pronouncement skittering down through the trees and into the barrels of the headlights. Ahead, the road curved up and away, the last quarter-mile climb to Nicole’s driveway vanishing into the woods.

Valsamis turned off the lights, then opened the door and stepped out, his shoes punching through the snow’s thin crust of ice. It was dusk already, and the sky and the snow were the same cool shade of blue, the trees stark and bare.

Valsamis’s cell phone rang, cutting through the twilight stillness. He jumped at the sound and fumbled the phone from his coat pocket to his ear.

“Yes?” he answered quietly.

“John?” It was Kostecky.

Work hours, Valsamis thought, counting back to D.C. time. “Yes,” he said. Something was wrong.

“Rumor is, someone else has been asking about your girl.” Kostecky cleared his throat.

“Who is it?” Valsamis asked. He could tell Kostecky didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

There was a long pause, and Valsamis thought he had lost the connection. Then Kostecky’s voice came back to him.

“Morrow,” he said.

W
HEN, BY MIDAFTERNOON, MY MOTHER
still had not returned, my grandfather drove down to the city to find her. We were to sail at six, and aside from our suitcases, everything we were taking had already been loaded on board the freighter. It was too hot to sit in the garden, so my grandmother and I waited together in the empty villa, and she paced the hollow rooms.

It was a forty-kilometer round trip, down the coast and back, but my grandfather was gone for several hours before we heard anything. It was after six when he finally called, and by then my grandmother and I both knew something was terribly wrong and we would not be leaving Jounieh that night. They spoke only briefly, just long enough for my grandfather to tell her what had happened. He did not have it in himself to console her: There was too much to be done still. The business of the body. He would need all his strength.

It was nearly midnight by the time he returned, the lights of his Mercedes sweeping up the hill, then pulling to a slow stop in the drive while I watched from the veranda. The car sat for some time, the engine softly cooling in the darkness. I could see the silhouette of his head through the window, his shoulders bobbing and shaking. Ten minutes, fifteen, before he steeled himself and climbed out of the car.

My grandfather was the only one of us to see my mother, to witness what had been done to her. But my grandmother would have her own, weightier burden to bear. It was she who had let my mother go that morning, and she carried the guilt of it until she died, just as my mother had carried her own guilt all those years earlier. Her choice then, to sacrifice everything for me. And later, as if in penance, her choice to stay.

It was another week until we could leave, until what remained of my mother was buried in the family cemetery in Achrafiye and all the other chores of death were attended to. Kanj was not at the funeral. He could not have come even if he had wanted to. The war had segregated us even in mourning. And yet I could not help but look for him at the church that day. After all, he had been her lover.

It would be some time before I would learn what had become of him and who he had become. Who he had been even then. It seems somehow fitting, a testament to the utter gracelessness of war, that he should have escaped Beirut while my mother died there.