An Accidental American: A Novel by Alex Carr

Valsamis’s mother had reached back and untied Valsamis’s scuffed brown boots, taken them and his coat, and trudged back to where the boy was waiting.
    Nine years old, maybe ten, and even then Valsamis had understood the significance of his mother’s action, the boots and coat, he’d been reminded over and over, not merely clothes but some defined portion of his father’s life. A certain number of hours inside the smelter. A sacrifice made for them. And yet when they’d pulled onto the two-lane highway and Valsamis had started to complain, his father, without looking, had reached back and slapped him, hard.
    Valsamis watched the desk clerk turn back to his book, then started across the lobby and up the stairs to his room. He’d had her, he thought, angry at himself for having bungled things, angry at Morrow for having sent him to Lisbon in the first place, when what he wanted was back in France, back in Paziols, when he should have been clear of it all by now.
    Just a temporary setback, he reminded himself as he unlocked the door and let himself into the room. But there was no time to spare now. The drapes were open and he could see Nicole’s room across the air shaft, her window dark as well. She wouldn’t be coming back here, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find her.

    It was a short walk from the Cacilhas dock to the old dairy. Ten minutes and I found myself at the pale feet of the milkmaid. Remembering the cat, I’d stopped and bought a dozen grilled sardines from the old man who kept a cart near the pier. I was glad I had, for she was there to meet me, pacing back and forth on the landing like an impatient lover.
    I climbed the stairs and let myself inside, fumbling in the darkness for the light chain I remembered from my earlier visit while the purring cat twined herself around my ankles. The room was ugly in the unshaded glare of the bare bulb. Narrow cot and empty shelves, everything dirty and worn. Not much, I thought, but it would do for tonight.
    I set the fish on the tiny kitchen table and unwrapped the paper. The sardines were still hot, their skins crisp and charred, the fish nestled tail to tail like a bouquet of silver flowers, heads and gills blossoming upward. The cat jumped up beside me and snatched a sardine for herself, then tore greedily into the flesh, resting her belly on the table while she ate.
    Due any day now, I thought, watching her chew through the soft bones. Her stomach was tight, her nipples swollen and pink, her body no longer her own. She adjusted herself slightly and one of the kittens rippled beneath her mottled fur, nose or paw rolling upward, looking for a way out.
    I ran my palm across her back and she stopped eating to glare defiantly up at me, as if daring me to go on. Taking the hint, I left her to her meal and made a slow circuit of the apartment, carefully checking the old cabinets, running my hand between the toilet and the wall, under the cot, anywhere I thought Rahim might have stashed an invoice. But the search seemed senseless, the possible hiding places almost infinite. And that was if the invoice existed at all.
    The mind’s tricks, I told myself, remembering the last frantic moments with Rahim, his desperation to tell me. From two breathless words it was impossible to know what he’d really meant, or even if he had understood. Though he’d been right about the car lights, right about Valsamis’s nightscope, and I had doubted him there as well.
    The cat jumped down, landing with a heavy thump on the old floorboards, and sauntered across the room, drunk off the fish. She stopped next to the printer/copier and ran her whiskers across the corner of the machine.
    As stripped down as the apartment was, there was something wholly incongruous about the printer. It was a quality piece of equipment, a step up even from the digital multitasker I had at home, and certainly more sophisticated than anything I’d known Rahim to use in the past. Though I wasn’t really