He rose and shuffled out of the room and down the hallway, shrugging off the ghost of sleep as he set his hand on the receiver.

  “Morrow here.”

  “Dick, it’s Charlie Fairweather, in Amman.”

  “Do you know what time it is?” Morrow asked.

  “Yes, sir. But I thought you’d want to know right away— it’s Kanj.”

  Morrow ran his thumb and forefinger across his eyes and sat down in the armchair opposite his desk. Not just tired but weary, the last thirty years catching up with him. Thirty years of chasing a shadow. Lebanon, Cyprus, Iran, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And now that they’d caught up with Kanj, Morrow didn’t know quite what to think. “He’s talking?”

  “Not exactly, sir.” Fairweather’s voice was like a child’s, a little boy afraid of being scolded.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He wants to talk to you, sir.”

  “That’s impossible. You know that. Tell him it’s impossible.”

  “We’ve made that very clear, sir. He’s had it pretty bad— you know how it is. I’m sure he’s just playing us. But he’s very insistent. He claims it’s about the ’83 embassy bombing. In Beirut, sir. Something about a mole.”

  Morrow felt his chest seize up and every muscle in his body tighten. “What does he want?” he snapped, rising from his chair.

  “I believe he wants to make a deal, sir. But it’s hard to know exactly. Like I said, he claims he won’t talk to anyone but you. He must know you were the DO for Mid-East back then.”

  A handful of people, Morrow thought. A handful of people who knew about what had happened in Beirut, and most of them dead. Kanj was not supposed to have been one of them. He could have been bluffing. Push hard enough, and people will say anything. Whatever they think you want to hear. Whatever they imagine will buy them a way out. But this, this didn’t make sense.

  “Sir?” Fairweather asked.

  “Keep him comfortable,” Morrow told the man. “I’m coming over.”

  “You were lovers, weren’t you?” Graça asked, though there was little question in her voice.

  I slid a cigarette from her pack and tapped it against the bar, hesitating before pressing the filter to my lips. I had more questions for Sergei, but my better judgment told me not to go back to the Largo do Picadeiro, so Graça and I had taken the train from Gomes’s place to the Rossio instead. I had a hunch there would be a cybercafé near the train station, and I was right. We’d found a busy storefront on the Praça dos Restauradores and settled in at the bar to wait for a free computer.

  I struck a match, then touched the flame to the cigarette, lifted my face upward, and exhaled. “Yes,” I said.

  “What happened?” Graça asked.

  I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “But you loved him?”

  I thought about the question, the answer I expected myself to give. “I don’t know,” I told her finally. “Did you?”

  “Yes,” she said easily. Her eyes held mine, then she reached forward and picked up her cigarettes.

  Had I ever been that sure? I wondered. Those first days in Marseille? The months on the Travessa da Laranjeira? From where I sat, such faith seemed impossible, and yet there was a time when my answer would have been the same as Graça’s. In the end, though, I hadn’t even said goodbye. I’d packed what little I had while Rahim was out one afternoon and taken a taxi to Santa Apolonia Station. From there, a train north to my father’s house in Collioure.

  “Who was he?” Graça asked, and initially I thought she meant Rahim. “The man at my grandfather’s,” she elaborated.

  “I don’t know. He’s an American. With the government.”

  “He’s the one who killed Rahim, isn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “But why?”

  Because I betrayed him, I thought. Because I was afraid. Because you took al-Rashidi’s job. But I didn’t say any of this. “That’s what we need to find out,” I told her.

  She lit her cigarette and looked across the table at me. Stony, as she had been that first day on her grandfather’s doorstep, her dark eyes reflecting the café windows, the steady stream of passersby on the sidewalk outside.

  “Did you know Rahim was blackmailing al-Rashidi?” I asked.

  Graça looked up at me, and I could tell immediately that she’d been telling the truth all along, that Rahim hadn’t told her about the invoice. “What do you mean?”

  “The invoice,” I said. “It was a fake.”

  “Of course it was a fake.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t just mean the forgery. The whole document’s wrong. The cargo. The destination. That’s why whoever hired you through Gomes wanted an amateur. It’s the only thing that makes sense. They figured you wouldn’t see it. What they didn’t bank on was you bringing Rahim in to help.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. But Rahim did, and whatever he knew, he must have guessed it was worth more than what al-Rashidi had already paid.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. But he met with al-Rashidi. I’m sure of that. And I can’t think of any other reason why Rahim would have stayed in Lisbon, knowing it wasn’t safe for him here. Can you?”

  Graça’s face darkened. I realized then that she must have thought Rahim had stayed because of her. She was quiet, then she shook her head.

  The barman came over and gathered our empty cups, then pointed toward the back of the café.

  “Looks like it’s our turn,” I said, following the man’s finger to a computer that had just come open. I crushed my cigarette in the cheap tin ashtray and slid off my stool. “We’ll get out of this,” I told Graça. “Don’t worry.”

  I wove back through the rows of desks and slid in behind the keyboard, then logged on to my Hotmail account. There was nothing from Sergei, no new information, just a handful of spam e-mails sitting in my in-box. I deleted them, then addressed a new message to Fernando76. Need info on John Valsamis, I wrote. Showed me U.S. Defense Department credentials.

  I hit SEND and waited, checking my watch, making a mental note of the time. Sergei was a night owl, but the time difference made it close to four in the morning in the Islands. I’d give him half an hour, and if I hadn’t heard anything by then, I’d check back later.

  Showed U.S. Defense Department credentials, I thought. But Valsamis hadn’t really, had he? What he’d shown me had been a business card, ink on paper. Something even Graça Morais could have done. There’d been the photographs as well, and more than that, there had been everything Valsamis knew. My story at his fingertips.

  You can’t just act the part, my father had told me once, early on. You have to be the part.

  I drummed my fingers on the desk and sat back in my chair, glancing around the café. Graça had found a free computer and was hunched intently over the keyboard. Stupid, I thought, cursing her silently. I got up and shrugged out of my coat, then laid it on my chair to keep my place and made my way toward Graça.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  She looked up at me and blinked, then motioned to the screen. “I did a search for al-Rashidi,” she said.

  “Well?”

  “I found an Ibrahim al-Rashidi, but he’s not exactly the one we’re looking for.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

  “Evidently his son is quite popular. He’s an orthopedic surgeon in the U.S.”

  I looked at her quizzically, and she moved aside to give me a better look at the monitor. “See for yourself.”

  I bent down and peered at the article on the screen. It was a puff piece from The Seattle Times, a Sunday feature on the city’s most eligible bachelors. An architect, a chef, a football player, and an orthopedic surgeon, Ibrahim al-Rashidi. There were pictures of the men, each well groomed and likable-looking, each smiling his flawless smile. Each a perfect combination of looks and ambition, the marrying type. I skimmed through the text, the cursor passing the first three stories, slowing at al-Rashidi’s.

  “Here,” Graça said, setting her finger against the screen.

  Dr. al-Rashidi was born in Iraq, the sentence she’d picked out began, where his father was a high-ranking member of Saddam Hussein’s government. Al-Rashidi lived a privileged life, his childhood split between homes in Beirut and Baghdad.

  Beirut, I thought, my neck prickling as I stopped on the word. Iraq and Lebanon were close neighbors, had been allies for a long time. If the elder al-Rashidi had been an intelligence man, he could have been sent there under diplomatic cover.

  In the early 1980s, the article continued, both he and his sister were sent to the United States to study at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Dr. al-Rashidi went on to attend Princeton University and the University of Washington’s medical school…

  There was no further mention of the sister or any of al-Rashidi’s other family members, nor of the turbulent times that must have followed, a family split by war and distance. And yet somehow the younger Ibrahim al-Rashidi had found a way to stay in the United States. Or his father had found a way for him.

  I scrolled back to the picture of al-Rashidi’s face, trying to match the square jaw and dark eyes with the photograph Valsamis had shown me, the older al-Rashidi in his uniform, and later, at Brasileira with Rahim.

  “Close out of this,” I told Graça, straightening up, heading back to my computer. Coincidence, I reminded myself, and yet nothing seemed coincidental anymore.

  There was an answer from Sergei waiting in my mailbox. Working late, though at this hour Sergei was more likely cruising his favorite adult websites. What was it about the Russians that made them such suckers for big hair, fake tits, and too much makeup?

  Give me twelve hours and I’ll see what I can find out, Sergei had written.

  Not the answer I’d been hoping for, but one I could live with. I closed out of my account, then crossed back to the bar, where Graça was waiting for me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before,” I apologized. “That was smart, looking for al-Rashidi like that.”

  Her face softened slightly. She shuffled her feet and craned her neck, peering toward the door. “What next?” she asked.

  Just killing time, I thought, waiting for Sergei’s answer, hoping for something on Valsamis that would make all the pieces fall into place. “I want you to take me to Rahim’s apartment.”

  “You don’t really believe in all that Kissinger bullshit, do you?” Andy Sproul had asked, dividing the last of the Ksarak among their three glasses.

  Morrow was visiting Beirut on his annual tour of the Mid-East stations. He and Sproul and Valsamis had gone out to a late dinner at one of the cafés near the embassy.

  The golden boy, they called Sproul at the Beirut station, but Morrow wasn’t impressed. Foolish, he thought, hopelessly naive. Though not a threat, not yet. Sproul was like the white kid who went into the ghetto speaking jive, and Morrow figured the Arabs would see right through him. Though of course they never did.

  “What I believe,” Morrow said, “is that we have to look out for our own best interests.”

  “And by ‘best interests,’ ” Sproul countered, “I assume you mean the seven-hundred-billion-plus barrels of oil our neighbors in the Gulf are sitting on right now.”

  Morrow smiled. “Perhaps you’d like to phone the folks back in Wichita and tell them to start chopping wood for this winter.”

  Sproul sat back in his chair and lifted the Ksarak as if in a toast. “Touché,” he said, but there was the faintest hint of mockery in his tone.

  “Everything in this world has a price,” Morrow reminded him fiercely. “It’s easy to forget that, but it’s true.”

  Sproul touched the glass to his lips and drained it, then set it back on the table. “You know,” he said, “there are a lot of Lebanese who think we want the Syrians here. That it’s all part of some scheme to get the Palestinians out of Israel and give them Lebanon instead.”

  Morrow shrugged. “They’re entitled to their opinion, aren’t they?”

  He turned to Valsamis, hoping to shift the conversation his way. “I hear you’ve picked up an asset in Amal. A true believer, from what people are saying.”

  “Peace and country and all that,” Valsamis agreed.

  Morrow nodded. “It’s the true believers that are the most useful.”

  “Or the most dangerous,” Sproul added.

  Dick Morrow sat awake in the darkness and listened to the sounds of his house, the whir of the furnace, the patter of rain on the eaves. They’re all here, he could hear his father saying, the old man’s last words, death already scrabbling at the back of his throat. They’re all here.

  Morrow’s mother had reached out and put her hand on his father’s papery wrist, smiled her detached smile, whispered, Yes, dear, we’re all here. But this wasn’t what he’d meant, and Morrow had known it, could see the ghosts waiting in the room’s dark corners: the German kid his father had bayoneted at Belleau Wood; his best friend, Jack Harrison, who’d died in agony in a little church near St. Mihiel, his legs blown to pulp by a German mortar.

  Yes, Morrow thought, this is how it happens: At the end you are alone with them. And his own ghosts? Still gathered at their usual table at the Commodore. Bryce and Wilson and Valsamis. Andy Sproul in the ridiculous keffiyeh he’d taken to wearing at the end, catching the waiters off guard with his easy Arabic.

  There were footsteps in the hallway, and Morrow’s wife appeared, her hair sleep-tousled, silhouetted in the doorway. “Can’t this keep until morning?”

  Morrow shook his head. “Go back to bed.”

  The peace to which my mother and I returned was quick to fail. In March the fedayeen attacked Tel Aviv, and the Israelis responded by crossing the border into southern Lebanon, sending tens of thousands of refugees streaming north to Beirut. After Tony Franjieh, son of the Syrian-backed president, was assassinated, old rivalries flared, and by the summer of 1978, the city was once again a war zone.

  My grandparents and I were among the flood of prosperous Beirutis to seek refuge at their weekend homes up the coast in Jounieh. The port town was barely thirty kilometers from Beirut, but it was another world entirely, untouched by the raging destruction of the conflict and the homeless squatters who had swamped the city.

  My mother had long since made the decision to stay. She would not leave this time, would not watch the war from afar, as she had those years in Paris. My grandmother knew better than to cross her daughter, but my grandfather fought her tooth and claw.

  In the end, my mother won. Like many of the other Beirutis who stayed behind, she believed in the heroism of daily and modest defiances, of teaching her classes and feeding herself amid the car bombs and rockets. At least this was what she told us at the time. And what, I suppose, she believed.

  Even then I think she understood that there was more than duty that compelled her to remain in Beirut. She’d been gone often that spring, coming in late from her classes and leaving at night, reappearing for breakfast as she had the morning after we’d gone to see Petra. She and my grandmother maintained their truce, but in the evenings after I went to bed, I could hear my grandparents arguing.

  We finally left for Jounieh in July, the three of us packed into my grandparents’ Mercedes with the good china and the family photos, sepia prints of my mother and her sister in their school uniforms, of picnics in the cedars, and of elegant women in long slim gowns. Snapshots of another time. On the steps of the Achrafiye apartment building, my mother stood in a stylish Parisian pantsuit, waving goodbye.

  Everything I knew about the way Rahim worked told me not to expect much from the apartment, that anything of interest most likely would have been at the Cacilhas workshop. But I’d wanted to come, had held out hope that I might find something that would help me understand. I’d wanted something else as well, some physical reminder of our life on the Travessa da Laranjeira, the old green chair or the knife-scarred kitchen table, remnants of who we had been.

  Rahim’s apartment had already been ransacked by the time Graça and I got there. The drawers had been emptied, the mattress and pillows sliced open, the cabinets searched in a way that suggested both carelessness and attention to detail, as if whoever had been here had known Rahim wouldn’t be coming back and had taken his time.

  I paused in the bedroom and glanced at the chaos around me: shattered glass, a heap of sheets on the floor. The window had been left open and several rainfalls had poured in, leaving a dark wash of mildew on the curtains. There was a musty smell to the room, the rotten stink of waterlogged fabric. Gone, I thought, the old iron bed frame and the mahogany dressing table, the chair with its green tapestry, a worn Eden of flowers and vines.

  It was raining now, not rain so much as mist driven in from the Atlantic. I walked to the window and peered across the Travessa da Água de Flor and out over the rooftops of the Bairro Alto, letting the rain settle on my face and in my hair. I could hear Graça in the living room, stumbling through the clutter.

  They would have made love here, I thought, turning back to face the bed, not ours but theirs, Graça and Rahim’s. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the dissolution of his body, the marks of time and age that my own body mirrored back to me. And yet for all my effort, I could see him only as he’d been that night many years earlier on the train from Marseille. Young, as we’d both been, and flawless.

  An amateur, I heard Graça say, her translation of Gomes’s words catching her like a fierce and unexpected slap. The humiliation of youth and inexperience, the loss of everything she’d imagined herself to be.

  Fumbling in my coat pocket, I took out the copy of the shipping invoice and unfolded it. BSW AIR CARGO, I read, skimming the letterhead, the United Arab Emirates address, letting my eyes wander down the page, trying to see what Rahim had seen. Fishy, I thought, remembering the word Sergei had used in his e-mail. Not just the dimensions but the itinerary as well, the question I’d asked myself still nagging at me: If the Alazans were headed for embargoed Iraq, as the invoice said, why broadcast that fact by listing Basra as the cargo’s destination? Especially if the shipment was going by way of Sharjah. And if the Iraqis were buying dirty bombs from the former Soviet stockpile, then why wouldn’t the Americans want the world to know?