An Accidental American Read online

  “Bring back memories?” I heard Valsamis say.

  “Is this a joke?” I asked.

  Valsamis cocked his head to one side. “Now, why would you say that?”

  “This. All of this,” I said, motioning to the paper. “He’s not a terrorist.”

  Valsamis took a business card from the briefcase and handed it to me. JOHN VALSAMIS, it said. In the center of the card was an embossed seal, an eagle grasping three crossed arrows, and around it the words DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  “We’d like you to look up your old friend for us,” he said.

  So this was what he’d come for. Not me but someone else. What I could give him.

  “I don’t do this,” I told him. “Besides, I haven’t seen Rahim in years. I can’t help you.”

  “We think you can.” Valsamis said this as if it were a fact that had been clearly established, as if I and my opinions had little bearing on the situation.

  “Well, you’re wrong.” I glanced down at the picture of Rahim. It didn’t do him justice, didn’t capture even half of the breath-stopping quality of his face.

  Valsamis opened his briefcase and took out a thin manila folder. “The American embassy in Nairobi,” he said. He slid an eight-by-ten photograph from between the tan flaps and offered it to me.

  The picture was familiar, a scene that had been played and replayed on the news and in the papers when it had happened over four years earlier. It showed the charred hulk of a car and a vast mountain of rubble behind it. Some two hundred people, I remembered, mostly Kenyans, had died in the bombing, and another five thousand had been injured.

  “Your friend,” Valsamis said, “and his friends in the IAR.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I shook my head. “Rahim’s not a radical. He’s one of the least political people I’ve ever known.” And hadn’t we all been? Not a crusader among us, unless you counted money as a cause, and even that had its limits. I couldn’t imagine Rahim working for the Islamic Armed Revolution, no matter what they offered him.

  “Times change,” Valsamis said. He handed me a second photograph, one that I hadn’t seen in the papers. It was of a young Kenyan woman and a child. The woman was dead, tossed to the ground, both legs blown clean off above the knees. The child, a little girl of two or three, was alive. She stood next to the body of what had once been her mother with a blank look and a blood-spattered face.

  “There’s more.” Valsamis flipped through the remaining pictures, offering glimpses of eviscerated bodies, shoes, tattered pieces of clothing, everyday objects juxtaposed against the horrific. A woman’s handbag lay in a pool of blood. A framed photograph of someone’s wife and children poked out from a heap of smoldering bricks. “I’ve been there,” Valsamis said. “It was right in the middle of the city. Most of the people killed didn’t even work at the embassy.”

  “It’s terrible,” I agreed, and meant it, meant more than that. “But you’re wrong about Rahim. I know him. This isn’t something he would do.” I turned the pictures facedown, set them down on the counter.

  “Rahim was recruited by the IAR four years ago. He made all the documents they needed for their part in the bombing. Apparently his older brother has been with the organization for some time.”

  “Driss?”

  Valsamis nodded. “I understand you knew him in Lisbon.”

  I shrugged. To say I’d known Driss was an overstatement. Rahim’s brother had stayed with us for a month on his way to France, but he and I had barely spoken.

  “He did a stint in one of Hassan II’s prisons, as I understand it,” Valsamis remarked, producing three more photographs from the folder. “Some hole in the desert for dissenters. Not a pleasant experience, I’m sure.”

  Valsamis handed the first of the pictures to me. It was a photograph of Rahim and Driss, the two brothers caught unaware, walking together down a city street. “This was taken just last month,” Valsamis explained, “in Lisbon.”

  “So Rahim’s brother visited him,” I conceded. “But even if Driss is with the IAR, this doesn’t make Rahim a terrorist.”

  Valsamis nodded patiently, then put the second photograph in my hand. Some dozen men were seated around a long table, each in full military dress, each sporting a dark mustache. And at the head of the table, like a patriarch at a family dinner, his face unmistakable, sat Saddam Hussein.

  “Ibrahim al-Rashidi,” Valsamis said, pointing to the man to the immediate right of Hussein. “Saddam’s second in command in Iraqi intelligence.”

  I shrugged again. “I still don’t see what this has to do with Rahim.”

  Valsamis added the third picture to the stack. “We took this last week,” he said. “Lisbon again.”

  It was Lisbon, all right. The picture had been taken at the Café a Brasileira, just off the Largo do Chiado. The café’s trademark yellow umbrellas were a dull shade of gray in the black-and-white photograph, but I recognized them nonetheless. In the center of the picture, at one of the outdoor tables, two men sat over coffees.

  “Al-Rashidi,” Valsamis said, pointing to the man on the right. He was in civilian dress now, a dark business suit and tie. “I don’t have to tell you who his companion is.”

  I looked down at the face, the eyes and lips fading into the paper’s dark ink. Twelve years and I would have known him anywhere.

  “We have serious and credible intelligence that the IAR is planning something with the help of the Iraqis,” Valsamis said, taking a careful step back. “Something bigger than Nairobi, and Rahim is part of it.”

  I shook my head, flipped back and forth between the pictures, between al-Rashidi’s face and Rahim’s, not wanting to believe what I saw. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “You know I can’t,” Valsamis answered, but he paused as if considering breaking the rules.

  Nuclear, I thought, or biological, like the attacks on the Kurdish villages. Or the Trade Center all over again.

  “We need your help, Nicole.”

  I leaned back against the counter, fingering that phantom cigarette. “Get out of my house,” I told him.

  Valsamis took a step as if to go, then hesitated and turned back to me. He reached out and flipped the stack of pictures on the counter back over so that the girl and her mother were on top, caught forever in that moment of loss. “A car bomb,” he said, tapping the photograph with his index finger, nudging it slightly in my direction.

  The statement hit me hard, and my eyes flew to Valsamis before I could catch myself. Not luck, I thought, searching his face, not mere coincidence, this choice of words. And yet Valsamis’s face betrayed nothing. His head was bent just slightly, his own eyes focused on the girl and her mother. No, I thought, pushing away the dark reminder, he didn’t know, could not have known.

  “Sleep on it,” Valsamis said confidently. “I’ll be back in the morning.” Then he turned and headed for the front door.

  AFTER VALSAMIS LEFT, I poured myself a glass of wine and went out and sat on the back patio with Lucifer. It was a cold night, with nothing of the day’s warmth left. The moon was up, fat and full, a silver coin just cresting the opposite hillside. A thick fog had settled on the valley floor, dense and pillowy, and here and there in the distance, a few lights were visible, mountainside perches like mine, twinkling in the darkness. Below, the town was just a dim smear, only its hilltop church shining above the mist, ancient windows blazing with orange light, stone foundation skimming the clouds. In the distance, a rough doppelgänger, the Château d’Aguilar looked down from its own aerie island.

  This was not a life I had ever expected, but it was one I’d come to cherish, the rhythm of each day like that of the one before. Out in my garden, in the cold beds tidied and blanketed for winter, I knew the shape of each flower to come. First the bulbs, crocuses and tulips, then the bright orange of poppies. Blue and white came next, the towering spikes of delphiniums. And in July, the garish yellows and reds of the daylilies, before the August flush of pink phlox.

  On my first day at the Maison des Baumettes prison in Marseille, my cell mate, Celine, had pointed to one of the photographs above her bunk, a bright color glossy of a little girl balanced on a black rubber playground swing.

  “Find something,” Celine had said, motioning to the child, legs dangling in midair, feet in scuffed red sandals, toenails glittering hot pink. And next to the girl, another picture, a man leaning against the side of a car, ankles crossed, hands in pockets, shirt untucked. “If you want to make it out of here, find something.”

  That night, in the institutional half-darkness, I’d lain awake listening to the sounds of the cell block, the clatter of keys, the muffled patter of the night guards, the slow breathing of some hundred pairs of lungs. Find something, I’d heard Celine say, but for me there had been nothing. No Kodachrome sheen, no girl on a green scrap of lawn. I was alone by then, my grandparents dead several years earlier, and my aunt shortly after, from cancer.

  It took me almost half a year to find the one bright snapshot that would see me through my sentence, and in the end it had been not a lover or a child but a place. Not even a place but the memory of it. A town I’d been to some dozen years earlier, seventeen years old and working the grape harvest. A little valley in the Pyrenees. A bright café with cracked green walls. Stone streets leading up to a hilltop church. This was what I’d promised myself, those six long years in the gray hive of the prison.

  When the doors had swung open on me that last day, I’d headed straight to Gare St.-Charles. And from there to Geneva, to a bank on the rue du Rhône, a quiet room in the basement, and a metal drawer that held everything I’d left behind. The few things my aunt had given me, pictures of another time, the letters she and my mother had exchan
ged during their years apart. And cash, enough money for an old farmhouse with a graying stone wall and a chicken coop. A garden set amid the scrub and limestone hills. Eggs so fresh they steamed in the cold morning air. This place. And the long-held promise that I would never go back to prison again.

  All that I had in the world. And what had Valsamis said? It would be a shame to lose it.

  Lucifer sniffed the wind and whined, the wolf in him straining toward the night’s riot of scent. Damp rosemary and juniper. The mice in the hedge, the skunk in the old pine.

  “Viens.” I patted my thigh, and the dog lumbered toward me, circling the ground at my side before sinking to his stomach. He sighed, then rested his snout on his crossed paws.

  I took a sip of wine and closed my eyes, trying to forget Valsamis’s pictures, Nairobi and that little girl. But the images clustered in the darkness before me, the hands and faces of the dead jostling against one another like the dry husks of my pole beans on their weathered trellis. On the legless woman’s cheek, a stray lock of hair. The girl looking slightly away, as if to shield herself from the immodesty of death.

  In another place, at another time, a phone rings and my grandmother answers, pushing her own dark hair behind her ear. A word and then silence. She turns to me, and I know something terrible has happened. On the other end of the line, there is panic, a garbled voice. “No,” I hear my grandmother say, and then “Mina.”

  Mina, my mother’s name.

  It’s the thing we’ve been waiting for, the thing we’ve all expected yet been certain would never happen. My mother is dead, caught in a random act of violence in the city she loved more than all of us, her life extinguished by a car bomb intended for somebody else, for anyone but her.

  And what did I think Rahim capable of? I wondered. You’re wrong about Rahim, I’d told Valsamis. I know him. But even as I’d said it, I hadn’t believed it. For in the end, hadn’t that been our problem? Hadn’t the truth been how little we really knew each other? The divide we had been unable to breach?

  Lucifer lifted his head and rose to attention, his ears stiffening, his eyes scanning the darkness. On the farm below, a dog started barking and another joined in as something wild and menacing made its way along the hillside. A fox or a skunk, or maybe even a wolf. Whatever it was, the dogs could smell it coming.

  Something bigger than Nairobi, I thought, and I was back in Lisbon then, back in our apartment in Santa Catarina. I’d said something smart about Driss, I remembered, his first night with us, something about false piety and wanting what you couldn’t have. We were standing in the kitchen, Rahim coaxing an omelet from the pan, and I remember how he turned to me, his whole body suddenly bristling with fury. He clenched his fists, and I thought he might hit me.

  Times change, I heard Valsamis say.

  THROUGH THE GRIMY PORTHOLE in the kitchen door, John Valsamis could see his waiter, the man’s pocked face and Gaul cheekbones. The owner’s nephew, he thought, or a cousin. Who else would want to work here, grease-stained as it was, the air tinged with the odor of turning meat? The man lit a cigarette and scratched at the back of his neck, his fingers raking the oily fringe of hair above his collar.

  Valsamis dipped the corner of his napkin in his wine and wiped the tines of his fork, suddenly wishing he’d braved the fog to find the restaurant two towns over, the one Dick Morrow had recommended back in D.C. The best cassoulet in France, Dick had boasted. True or not, it would have been better than the watery pot-au-feu Valsamis no doubt faced now.

  In any other car, he would have made the trip, but he hadn’t trusted his tin-can rental on the slick mountain roads. Valsamis silently cursed the rental agent in Perpignan, the girl’s surly smile as she handed him the keys. “It’s all we have left, monsieur,” she’d said, and he’d seen there was nothing to be done except smile back.

  The local wine was drinkable, a bit rough but with a character that Valsamis could appreciate. Like the wine his father had made each fall in their cellar in Anaconda, the stench of the fermenting fruit wafting up through the floorboards. Though those had been California grapes, shipped into Montana on a railcar for the Italian mine workers.

  Valsamis took a sip, then slid his cell phone from his pocket and punched in the Virginia area code and Dick Morrow’s number.

  As always, it was Morrow who answered, his voice tight, slightly irritated. Midafternoon on the East Coast, Valsamis thought.

  “I’ve found her,” Valsamis said.

  “She’s agreed?”

  “More or less.”

  Morrow coughed. “Which is it?”

  “She’ll do it,” Valsamis assured him, thinking of the look on Nicole’s face when he’d left, how she’d watched him. Yes, he thought, he had gotten to her. She would agree in the end.

  “You’re sure she’ll be able to find him?”

  “Yes,” Valsamis said, though in truth he wasn’t so confident. Twelve years was a long time.

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then finally Morrow spoke. “I want you in Lisbon.”

  Valsamis flinched. “I thought you had someone else to clean up the Portuguese end of things.”

  “Change of plans,” Morrow said, trying to sound just a bit too cheerful about it, as if the whole thing were a picnic that had been rained out and now they’d be eating inside instead.

  They’d had him in mind all along, Valsamis thought, but hadn’t bothered to tell him.

  “I thought you’d be pleased, actually,” Morrow continued. “After all, it’s been your project, and it was your idea to use the woman. This will give you a chance to finish what you started.”

  “Of course.” Valsamis recovered himself. “Just surprised is all.”

  Morrow cleared his throat. “I don’t have to remind you, John. We can’t afford to have anything go wrong this time.”

  No, Valsamis thought, it was he who couldn’t afford another mistake.

  “No loose ends,” Morrow cautioned. “Understood? You’ll take care of them when this is finished. Ali and the woman both.” Not a question, not even a request, but a command.

  “Yes,” Valsamis agreed. So this was why they wanted him in Lisbon. For the dirty work as well as the clean. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Morrow went to hang up, but Valsamis stopped him.

  “Any news from the Pakistanis?” he asked casually.

  “Not yet,” Morrow replied. “But you know how it is. We’ve got to oblige our hosts. Let them at least believe they’ve got a hand in things. I imagine we’ll be sending someone over in a few days. That’ll give Kanj time to soften up, anyway.”

  Time, Valsamis thought, but not much, not enough. He’d have to work quickly, but if things went smoothly in Lisbon, he’d have all the time he needed. There was a dull hum of empty air, and Morrow clicked off.

  Valsamis put away his cell phone and lifted his glass again. Yes, there was definitely something to the wine. Lavender and wild thyme and rosemary, the taste of the Pyrenean scrub.

  He closed his eyes and thought of the house in Anaconda, the high-altitude sheen of Indian summer. In the backyard, his father’s old winepress, the wood stained with dark juice, and his father smiling up at him, the neck of his shirt ringed with sweat, his big hands on the iron crank.

  The kitchen door swung open and the waiter appeared. He set Valsamis’s food down in front of him, a hunk of grisly beef, a few pale vegetables floating in a greasy broth.

  “Merci,” Valsamis said, but the man was already gone, leaving him alone again, the sole diner in the oversize room. He took a bite of the meat and chewed, the food no better or worse than he had expected.

  Yes, he told himself, there would be no loose ends. He would find Ali, and he would put it all to rest.

  Lucifer woke me at seven the next morning, huge paws prodding me through my blankets, wide-eyed as a puppy and ready for the day ahead. Such boundless energy that I had to let him out the back door while I gulped my first cup of coffee and slipped into my boots and coat for our morning walk. It was a cold day and clear, the fog peeled back to reveal the valley, the hills dew-drenched and glistening in the bright morning sunshine. I let Lucifer run ahead on our daily circuit, nosing his way briefly along the road, then up the narrow path that led to the windy ridge above the house and back again.