An Accidental American: A Novel (34 page)

“Yes,” he said. “I see.”

“Sproul was right, you know,” Morrow added. “The true believers are the most dangerous.”

There was a click then, the sound of a safety disengaging, and Valsamis looked up to see Morrow’s gun, the barrel’s vacant eye staring back at him.

“I’m sorry,” Morrow said.

Valsamis shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

Then Morrow’s finger found the trigger and there was nothing left to say.

“Two coffees, please.” I set a five-euro note on the counter, lit a cigarette, and watched Graça make her way back through the café toward the bathrooms.

The bartender turned to the espresso machine, and I could see her scowl reflected in the bar’s back mirror. Behind her was the glare of the Perpignan train station’s main concourse, the ceiling arching upward and out of sight. Midnight, moving into the wee hours, and the woman would have rather been anywhere but here. The television flickered silently over the dusty bottles. The weather on EuroNews.

Several bedraggled newspapers were heaped together at the far end of the bar, and I helped myself to the pile, salvaging a copy of
Le Monde
and part of a
Guardian.
The story of the day was the U.S. secretary of state’s speech to the United Nations, and both papers had devoted a fair amount of copy to it. But there was a second, smaller article in the
Guardian
that caught my eye. UK NUCLEAR EVIDENCE A FAKE, the small headline announced.

British intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein has been trying to import uranium for a bomb are unfounded and based on deliberately fabricated evidence,
I read, skimming quickly through the text.
“Close scrutiny and cross-checking of the documents led us to conclude with absolute certainty that they were false,” an official with the International Atomic Energy Agency said…. The fabrication was transparently obvious and quickly established, the sources added, suggesting that British intelligence was either easily hoodwinked or a knowing party to the deceit.

The bartender set down our coffees, and I moved the paper aside and looked up into her impassive face. On the TV screen behind her, the day’s sports recap was playing, a football player rushing toward the goal. Late in the day, I thought, glancing down at the article one more time, and already none of this mattered. Or if it did, there was a collective sense that nothing could be done, that the machinery of war had already overtaken us.

“Is something wrong?” Graça slid onto the stool next to mine.

I shook my head. “Ten minutes,” I reminded her. “You don’t want to miss your train.” I opened my bag, took out a large manila envelope, and handed it to her. “You can’t come back here. You understand that? Not here. Not Lisbon. At least not for a long time.”

Graça lifted the flap on the envelope and peered inside. “I can’t take it,” she said, shaking her head at the stack of euros I’d crammed inside along with her Brazilian passport. “It’s yours.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ve set aside some for myself. Besides, it’s not much. Enough for a plane ticket, I hope. I wouldn’t hang around Paris, if I were you.”

She dropped a lump of sugar into the tiny cup and stirred it in. “What about you?”

“You’d better get going,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, then drank the coffee in one gulp and slid off her stool. It seemed as if I should say something, as if we should both say something, but neither of us knew what.

I watched her walk away, then reached into my jacket and pulled out Rahim’s invoice. It was tattered and creased, the paper frayed from having spent so much time in my pocket. Yes, I thought, I had been played. We all had been played, and good.

I set the invoice on the bar, took my passport from my bag, and opened it to the front page, to my own face staring up at me from beneath the cracked plastic. I’d been right; it had been a less than perfect job, and the laminate hadn’t held. As it was, the document would be worse than useless, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave it behind.

Slipping the passport into my pocket, I finished my coffee and walked out onto the concourse. At the far end of the deserted hall, the massive departure board leered down at me, destinations in digital neon. PARIS ST.-LAZARE, the top line read, Graça’s train. And beneath that, the next train out, the sleeper to Barcelona. The coast train, through Elne and Argelès-sur-Mer.

Through Collioure, I thought, pausing before taking a step toward the ticket booth.
Did you really think Ed wouldn’t sell you out again?
I heard Valsamis say, though the real question was not this but why I had given him the chance.

No, I had been there and back already. I would wait for the next train out.

A
T FIRST IT’S JUST A FEELING
,
nothing more, the internal knowledge that something has changed. Two weeks later, I know for sure. Rahim has gone out, and I’m standing in our chilly bathroom, bare feet on the cold tiles. In the silvered mirror above the sink, my own face stares back at me, all my physical imperfections magnified by the room’s unforgiving overhead light. On the rim of the sink, balanced carefully on the curve of white porcelain, is a slender finger of plastic.

Outside, on the rua da Moeda, the Bica funicular groans up the hill. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…I start a long count backward from one hundred, listening to the car fade slowly into the distance, teeth grinding at the worn rails. Never before has my life felt so precarious, the whole of it sliding away. And what’s left, ravaged and raw.

I think of my mother, alone in her room in my grandparents’ apartment in Achrafiye, packing a suitcase with clothes she will soon be unable to wear. For the first time in my life, it’s almost possible for me to imagine what she felt. What amazes me is her conviction, her certainty, even amid such raging fear, that she would keep me. At least this was the way she always told the story. No doubts, not even a moment’s cringing desire to give me up.

Eighteen, I count, seventeen…Suddenly I am ashamed of myself, embarrassed by my own wavering, my panic. What I’ve known all along now confirmed for me: that I will never be as strong as she was. On the sink, in the tiny window, a thin blue bar has appeared. No question, no doubt, except for the choice waiting to be made.

The front door opens, much earlier than I had expected it would, and I hear two voices in the living room, the guttural reverberations of Arabic. Rahim and one of his Moroccan friends. I take a deep breath and gather myself, pressing my palms against the sink’s cool porcelain. Out in the living room, the radio comes on, Europe 1, from France. I will have to tell him, I think. If he hasn’t guessed already, he will.

I tuck the plastic stick in my pocket, open the door, and start down the hall. Rahim is in the kitchen making tea.

“I’m going out,” I say, and he nods silently, spooning dried mint into the ornate teapot his brother, Driss, brought as a gift a few weeks earlier.

Rahim’s friend Mustapha shouts something from the living room, and Rahim answers back, his tone angry. This is their new nightly ritual. Mint tea and the news and, later in the evening, a bottle of cheap port. The long slow countdown to January 15. The long final breath before war.

In the living room, Mustapha lights a cigarette, one of his shaggy roll-your-owns. The smell of the tobacco makes me gag.

Rahim looks up at me. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and I am beside myself, undone by love, mine and his. We can do this, I think, looking down at his hand on the old silver spoon, his fingers so graceful at even the simplest task. I can do this.

Of course I can’t. I want to tell him, but I don’t.

The real story, then. Not the one I’ve told myself all these years but the truth, the way it actually happened. The first betrayal of how many? Not for country. Not for God, even.

And what would it take now? Not to go back but to go forward. To be forgiven.

Nice

January 6, 1969

Dear Emilie,

I’ve done it. I know you thought I wouldn’t go through with this. The truth is, I didn’t think I would, either. But there’s no way I can give her up. And yes, she is a girl. Everyone says you can’t know these things, but I do.

It wasn’t hard to find Ed. The Côte d’Azur is such a small world. He and his friends had docked in St. Tropez, just like Papa said. But by the time I got there, they had moved up the coast to St. Raphael.

He didn’t want anything to do with me or the baby at first, but I told him I would go to his hosts if he didn’t sign the papers. I could have made life difficult for him if I had.

I felt bad at first, lying to him. He really believes the baby is his. But there is Papa’s check, much more than what Ed’s name and nationality on a piece of paper are worth. I don’t think he’s a bad person, but I think he would do just about anything for money.

I know you. I’m sure you think I was wrong to do this. But I hope you understand why. And if you can’t understand, I hope you will at least forgive me. There’s no other way I can keep her.

Even you have to admit I’m right about this. The attack in Athens and the bombing of the airport are proof of what I’ve said all along. This tug-of-war between the Israelis and the Palestinians has just started, and there is no place for us in it, no future for a girl with a Christian mother and a Muslim father. Just as there is no future for Sabri and me.

Please tell Maman I love her. She doesn’t know anything, and I’m trusting you not to tell her. Respectability is so important to her. My choice will be hard enough for her to bear. Not to mention how angry she would be at Papa if she were to find out that he helped me.

I’m leaving for Paris in the morning. Please don’t worry. Marie Haziz is there— you remember her, she played fifth chair at AUB— and I can stay with her until I get on my feet. I will write again soon.

Love,

Mina

The first letter, then. The first one written and the last one read. All these years and they had known, my grandfather and my aunt. All this time they had collaborated to keep this secret.

And what had my father said? His second rule: It’s always the marks who think they’re too smart to be played who are the easiest to con.

I set the letter aside and fingered the frayed passport in my pocket, even this, even my failure, telling me what I should have known all along: that Ed Blake was not my father.

The bartender approached me and for a moment I struggled to remember where I was, in which language I would be expected to communicate. A month on the road, a day or two before moving on, and I was no longer fluent in anything.

On the television screen, ragged palm trees spanned the fortress bulk of the presidential palace. The lights in the high-rises along the Tigris were still on, and even from the camera’s distance, it was possible to make out people moving behind the windows of their apartments.
They should all be forced to do this,
my mother had written in one of her later letters, after she’d spent a sleepless night helping her downstairs neighbor console her four small children while mortars fell all around them.
To hold a child in your arms. There is no other way to understand.

Yes, I thought, it’s one thing to expect war from afar, to wait, as we all have these last days, our televisions tuned to the Baghdad skyline, to the silhouette of Saddam’s great palace, the roads scarred by the green glow of headlights. It’s one thing to watch the quiet city, cars moving toward their wee-hours destinations. Sick children, women in labor, men heading home from the late shift.

To those of us watching, there’s a sense of relief when the fighting comes, a feeling that something finally has happened. There’s also the spectacle, the glare and chatter of death, the beauty of it. Like the vulture with its onyx wings.