UP TO SOMETHING, EDUARDO MORAIS THOUGHT, rolling over in his bed, listening to the front door open and close, the latch falling softly into place. Through the slats of his bedroom shutters, Morais saw his granddaughter emerge onto the lane below. She stopped in the gaslight and adjusted her coat against the night’s chill, then started off again, the hard soles of her boots tapping on the alley’s stone cobbles.

  She was up to something. Morais was certain of it. Too young to know better and too old for him to stop her. But still, he didn’t have to like it. He’d seen her with Ali, had heard the two of them in the house together when they must have thought he was asleep. A man twice her age, and an Arab.

  Morais had been relieved to see Nicole Blake back in Lisbon, more than happy to help her find Rahim. The two of them had been in love once, and Morais was hoping Nicole’s presence might distract Rahim from Graça.

  Morais closed his eyes and tried to regain the gift of sleep, but it was no use. His bladder was calling, and in the end he would have to relent.

  Sliding his feet into his slippers, Morais eased himself from the bed and padded down the hallway to the bathroom to face the first of the night’s battles. This was the worst of the degradations of age, his old body failing so badly that every piss was work, every successful elimination a minor miracle. Flipping on the bathroom light, Morais flattened his left hand against the wall, took aim at the toilet bowl, and half missed, his sloppiness part accident and part spite.

  He’d been so pleased when Graça had first come to him. Curious, as her mother never had been, and wanting to learn; Morais had been more than happy to oblige her. He’d taught her everything he knew, each careful skill, but in the end Morais had been unable to convince her of the merits of perfection. Like everyone these days, his granddaughter didn’t have the patience for the old kind of quality. She’d preferred to do things her way, preferred the speed of the computer to the beauty of the human hand.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, something moved. The cat door, Morais told himself, listening to the rasping of hinges, the quiet groan of the floorboards. His old tabby, Saramago, letting himself in from an evening of hunting. Squeezing the last few drops from his bladder, Morais shook himself off, tucked his flaccid penis inside his pajamas, and headed back out into the dark hallway. He would die soon, he thought, and everything he knew with him, the realization coming to him for no reason, as it did so often these days.

  Morais stopped at the top of the stairs, contemplating the dark hallway below, the possibility of a nightcap. He fumbled for the light switch, his hand brushing the wall. Fifty years he’d lived in this house, fifty years of late nights and early mornings, of coming and going in the dark. Then last week he’d stumbled on the way to the kitchen and lain for two hours like a beetle on its back. Later, Graça had stood with him on the stairs and made him practice turning the light on and off, made him promise he would do the same when she wasn’t there.

  His hand touched the switch, but he hesitated, listening to the sounds of the house. A new sound now, in the front hall this time. Not Saramago. Something bigger.

  “Graça?” he called.

  But the only answer was the ticking of the house’s old clocks.

  “Saramago?” Morais tried. “Saramago!” he called again, his pupils wide, his eyes intent on the dim landing.

  And then, finally, an irritated yowl, the cat’s hungry voice.

  “Yes, Senhor,” Morais called down to the creature, “I’m coming.”

  Out of the darkness, two bright eyes appeared. And behind them, the body of a man.

  Morais’s hand hit the switch, and the stairwell was flooded with light. He saw the intruder below.

  “Can I help you?” Morais blurted, for the man looked more like a lost tourist than a menace. An American, definitely an American, the kind you saw playing Pessoa at Café Nicola, or wandering with his Fodor’s through the Alfama. Only there was something off about this one. Lonely, Morais thought. A stranger, always a stranger.

  The man looked up. His face was blank, his eyes flat. He raised his right hand up the staircase, showing Morais the silenced pistol in his fist.

  Briefly there was a disconnect between what Morais saw and what he understood. Between this strange man at the bottom of the stairs and the gun in his hand. The intruder looked past Morais, as if searching for something or someone, then his eyes narrowed and he focused in on the old man.

  Morais put his hand up, the gesture part self-defense and part welcome. His last thought was of his workshop, of all that would be left unfinished, and his tools as he’d left them, each in its place.

  Graça Morais tucked the cigarettes in her pocket and started back up the hill, leaving behind the little kiosk, the ancient owner’s wizened face framed by the day’s headlines. On the front covers of Diário de Notícias and Público, the scowling face of the American president. And in Jornal de Notícias, a beleaguered United Nations weapons inspector and the simple headline WHERE?

  It wasn’t so much the cigarettes Graça had wanted as an excuse to walk, to get out and get some fresh air and sort things through. Whatever she believed, something had happened at the Miradouro de Santa Catarina the day before. After the Blake woman’s visit, Graça had walked up into the Bairro Alto and stood behind the police barricades with the other gawkers, listening to the neighborhood gossips.

  “Murdered,” the old woman beside Graça had said to her friend, pointing her gnarled finger at her head, indicating a gun. The friend had looked back at her, her shock one step removed. And then, whispered: “They say it was an Arab.”

  Graça turned down the narrow lane toward home and picked up her pace, her boots pounding out a rapid staccato. She should have known, she thought, pulling her coat tight to stifle a shiver. She should have guessed there was something wrong with the job for al-Rashidi. Even Rahim had said it: It was too much money for what the man wanted. A handful of phony papers that any hack could have turned out on a PC. But Graça had wanted the job, and in the end Rahim had not been able to say no to her.

  Up ahead, a cat darted from the shadows and into the gaslights, her grandfather’s big tabby, Saramago, swaggering toward her. King of their street, as always. Graça bent down and put out her hand, and the cat nudged her palm, running the length of his back beneath her fingers, spine arching in pleasure. She brushed his tail and her hand came away wet. Not water but something sticky, the smear dark in the lamplight.

  Graça raised her hand to her face and sniffed, pulling back in disgust, the smell of blood unmistakable. Not Saramago’s, for the cat seemed fine. He darted ahead and stopped on their front doorstep, looking back at Graça, impatient as always, waiting for his servant to let him in, though he knew perfectly well how to use the cat door off the back patio.

  Graça wiped her hand on her jeans and started forward, fishing her keys from her pocket. But as she neared the front door, she could see that she wouldn’t need the keys. The door was open just slightly. A centimeter, maybe less, where the wood met the jamb.

  Not her work, for she could clearly remember turning the lock behind her when she left. Clearly. It seemed odd that her grandfather would have come this way so late, unless the cat had been scratching to come in. But even then, left to his own devices, Saramago almost always went around to the back.

  Graça put her hand on the knob and pushed. The door swung inward, revealing a slice of the front hall, the floor and wall lit by the light from the stairwell.

  “Papi?” she whispered.

  Saramago rushed past her, down the hallway and toward the kitchen. Something was wrong, Graça thought, the sound of the cat’s paws like the slap of feet on a wet bathroom floor.

  “Papi?” She took a tentative step, peering down the hallway as her hand pushed the door wide.

  At the foot of the stairs, a large dark stain spread across the floor. Toward the kitchen, a neat set of prints, Saramago’s staggered tracks fading like a printer’s stamp run out of ink. And just to the left of where the cat had passed, a wide smear, the stain muddled where something large and heavy had been dragged across it.

  Graça looked down at her own hand, at the faint patina of blood on her palm. “Jesus.” She retched, doubling over, hand catching the door frame as she steadied herself. There was so much of it, she thought, too much.

  Above her, in the back corner of the house, where her bedroom was, something stuttered across the old floorboards, a human foot and the weight it carried. Someone quietly searching.

  Graça took a step back. Too much blood for anyone to have survived, she told herself, closing the door behind her. “Bless me, Father,” she whispered, and the start of the Hail Mary, the words coming haltingly back to her. And then she was running, down into the darkness, down through the hive of houses and lanes.

  I slept hard on the narrow cot at the dairy, swallowed whole by the great beast of exhaustion, gone, finally, to some other place. Years earlier, the train trip south with Rahim, and “The Girl from Ipanema” coming softly through the wall. In my mouth, as I woke, wine and cigarettes, the sour taste of shame.

  It was early still and dark, the windows staring blindly back at me. The sky tinged a deep black ocher by the phosphorous lights of the port. The cat was asleep at my feet, curled up and snoring, eyes closed tight, whiskers twitching in her own fantasy. Thin again, and lithe, catching rats in the deserted dairy below.

  I rolled over and tried to blink away the dream that had woken me, but Rahim refused to leave. I could see him still, slumped in the doorway, his head marked by Valsamis’s bullet, by the dark wound of my betrayal.

  Down in the side passageway, something moved through the weeds, bigger than a cat but almost as quiet. Snapping awake, I swung my feet to the floor and crossed to the window. At the bottom of the stairs, a figure moved, a black cap of hair and two thin shoulders. Graça Morais. She hesitated, looking up at the cracked windows and closed door. Then she put her foot on the first step and started upward.

  “There was nowhere else to go,” Graça said. She was shaking slightly, perched on the edge of a battered folding chair, her coat tight around her. On her jeans was a smear of blood, a long fading smudge where she’d wiped her hand. And on her skin the rusty tinge of it, darker where her fingers creased at the knuckles.

  I took the stovetop coffeemaker from the hot plate, poured out two cups, and passed one to Graça.

  “I used to give Rahim a hard time about this place,” she said, cradling the chipped porcelain, glancing around the spartan space. We’d settled comfortably on English as a common language. Hers was better than mine, honed, like the English most of her peers spoke, on pop music and American television.

  “All his secrets,” she remarked. “How did you know?”

  “Your grandfather told me.”

  She contemplated my reply. “Do you think it’s safe here?”

  I shrugged. “I hope so.”

  “Whoever it was was still in the house,” she said, looking down at her cup.

  “They saw you?” I asked.

  “No. I could hear them in my bedroom upstairs.”

  Valsamis, I thought. He did not strike me as someone who would leave this kind of work to others.

  “I found a copy of a shipping invoice when I was here the other day,” I said. “For a cargo of cables from Trans-Dniester to Basra, Iraq.”

  Graça’s head jerked upward, betraying what she knew. In over her head, I thought, watching the cool girl I’d met earlier evaporate.

  “You knew about the invoice, didn’t you?” I prompted.

  She took a sip of coffee and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “We can find a way out of this,” I told her, not believing a word myself. “But I need you to tell me what you know.”

  She opened her eyes and stared back at me, hard now, who she was coming slowly back to her. “I remember you,” she said. “From when I was a child.”

  For an instant I was back on Eduardo Morais’s patio, under the shadow of his arbor, the broad leaves of the grapevines whispering against one another. On the table, the patter of gin rummy, the drowsy slap of the stiff cards against the old wood table. In the chair beside me, his face naively triumphant as it always was when he was about to win, Rahim. “Yes,” I agreed.

  Graça nodded, gathering herself. “What are you doing here?”

  I let the words sink in, the question I also wanted an answer to. “I don’t know,” I told her. It was the best I could manage.

  Graça got up, walked to the dirty front window, and stared silently out at the dark street. The cat followed behind, weaving back and forth between Graça’s legs, brushing her calves.

  “This job, the invoice,” I said, not sure where to begin or how much to give away. “I was told Rahim has been working for the Islamic Armed Revolution.”

  Graça spun back to face me. “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head, but Graça balked at what I was suggesting.

  “Rahim hated those people. Cowards, he called them. I was with him last fall when the towers came down. He was disgusted by it, like we all were.” She slid a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and fished one out. “Besides,” she said, putting the filter to her lips, striking a match, “the Trans-Dniester invoice was my job.”

  “Your job?” I tried to hide my surprise.

  Graça nodded. “Yes,” she said proudly. “Al-Rashidi came to me.”

  “How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

  “I’ve done a few jobs.”

  “And your grandfather knew?”

  “He knew.” Graça flicked the ash from her cigarette.

  Knew, but not really, I thought. “How did al-Rashidi find you?”

  “I did a job a couple of months ago for a guy named Vitor Gomes. Immigration papers. Al-Rashidi got my name from Vitor.”

  “And Gomes? How did you come by his patronage?”

  “He came to my grandfather, but Papi wouldn’t take the job.”

  “So you offered your services instead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did your grandfather say why he wouldn’t work for Gomes?”

  “You know him, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you know how he can be. I thought maybe the job was too simple for him. No teeth, as he likes to say.”

  “And al-Rashidi’s job, did it have teeth?”

  Graça shrugged. “Enough.” She turned her face down and away, but I could see the flush in her cheeks. She was a good liar but not good enough.

  “You couldn’t do it by yourself, could you?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she protested.

  “But you couldn’t finish the invoice on your own.”

  “No.” She took a long drag off her cigarette and wrapped her free arm tight around her chest. She was making an effort not to cry and just barely succeeding.

  “What did Rahim say when you asked for his help?”

  “He thought it was too much money for too small a job.”

  “And was it?”

  “Ten thousand euros,” Graça said quietly.

  “On a fake shipping invoice?” It was a huge sum for what might have amounted to two days’ work, a price that would have seemed too good to be true to any real professional.

  Graça nodded. She’d made a mistake and she knew it, knew exactly what her miscalculation had cost her.

  “But Rahim agreed to help you anyway?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes, I thought, of course he’d agreed. And looking at Graça, I knew why.

  “And did al-Rashidi pay?”

  “The agreement was half up front and half on delivery,” Graça explained. “I gave the invoice to him two weeks ago and got the last five thousand then.”

  “You delivered the invoice?” I asked.

  “Yes. We met at Casa Suíça.”

  “Rahim was with you?”

  “No.”

  “But the two of them must have met,” I insisted, thinking of Valsamis’s photographs, Rahim and al-Rashidi on the patio of Brasileira. “To discuss details of the job, at least.”

  Graça shook her head. “I was the only one who dealt with al-Rashidi.”

  “But you told him you were working with someone else.”

  “No.” She finished her cigarette, walked to the sink, and carefully doused the coal.

  Whatever adrenaline had carried her across the river was gone; she was tired and deflated, sagging against the old countertop. “I’m sorry,” she said, in Portuguese now, speaking to no one in particular.

  I opened my mouth to offer some form of absolution, then stopped myself. “That was the only time you met, then? To deliver the invoice?”

  “We met once before,” Graça answered. “At the beginning, to talk about the job.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, then fiddled with the cup’s chipped rim, pondering what Graça had just told me, hoping and failing to find an answer in the momentary distraction.

  “And Gomes?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing, really. Like I said, he came to my grandfather. He runs girls. Junkies, mostly. Africans.”

  “You know where to find him?”

  Graça shook her head.

  “Nice of you to help him out,” I said.

  Graça didn’t flinch. She stared back at me, her eyes saying she knew I’d done worse.

  I tossed my coffee into the sink. The grounds had been old and stale, and it was too bitter to drink. There was one more thing I needed to ask Graça. “Rahim’s brother,” I said. “Driss. Did you know he was here?”

  Graça nodded. “He comes to visit every few months. He’s got a mosque up in Toulouse.”

  “A mosque?”

  “He’s some kind of cleric,” Graça explained. “Imam, or whatever they call it. I’ve never met him. I don’t think he cares much for Rahim’s lifestyle.”

  No, I thought. Some things didn’t change. I set down the empty cup and motioned toward the back of the apartment. “You need to get some sleep,” I told her. “Take the cot.”

  John Valsamis turned off the taps and stepped out of the shower. Two bars of cheap hotel soap whittled down to their flowery essence, and he could smell it still. The stink tenacious as the odor of a field-dressed elk on a cold morning. Not his clothes, for these Valsamis had wrapped tightly in three plastic bags, everything he’d had on, right down to his underwear, a neat package to be disposed of later. No, this stink was in him, the old man’s blood in his nostrils and in the back of his throat.