No, I thought, working the problem over and over in my mind, each answer like a square block in a round hole. There was something I was missing.

  Graça appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. “Find anything?”

  I shook my head. There was nothing left for us to find. Nothing left for me, either.

  JOHN VALSAMIS HADN’T WANTED TO RETIRE. Barely fifty, he hadn’t thought of himself as old, though his father hadn’t been much older when he’d left the smelter, and Valsamis had regarded him as ancient at the time. But things had been different then. That kind of work and the weight of so many children took their toll on a person’s body.

  In the end, it hadn’t been Valsamis’s choice to make. In his last eight years at the Agency, the world had easily outpaced him, along with so many others who’d done their jobs just a little too well. Men and women like Valsamis who, through a combination of their own efficiency and blind luck, had been rendered obsolete.

  As much as he didn’t want to leave, Valsamis was a man who knew how to make a graceful exit, and he was gracious in defeat. He had smiled placidly through the retirement party Morrow presided over for him in Near East, careful not to drink himself into a bitter nostalgia, as he’d seen too many of his colleagues do. At the ceremony in the Bubble, he’d gritted his teeth and returned the admiring and slightly patronizing handshakes of the twentysomethings who had come to take his place, nodding at their talk of tropical beaches and beautiful women, a paradise built from Gauguin paintings and Club Med ads.

  But Valsamis had other plans for himself. Five days after his release from the Agency, he’d cleaned out his already spare apartment and boarded a plane. A tourist this time, heading not south but east, to a country he’d known intimately for so many years, for which he’d given so much, though he’d never once set foot within its borders.

  It was January when he arrived in St. Petersburg, and he was uncharacteristically nervous as he handed his brand-new passport and tourist visa to a bored customs agent. Half an hour later, he was out on the airport breezeway with his one small bag, his teeth chattering, his back turned to a wind he hadn’t felt since he was a boy, the same punishing cold that battered the Montana plains. But Valsamis hadn’t gone to Russia for the weather.

  The next morning he took a tram to the Hermitage and wandered among the masterpieces that had been denied him for so long. Titian’s Danae, Leonardo’s Madonna and Child, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. In the afternoon he went up onto the roof and looked out over the palace’s weathered copper gables toward the frozen Neva and the snowy expanse of Vasilyevsky Island, the towering rostral columns and the Exchange Building like some icy, arctic Parthenon.

  The new Russia, Valsamis had thought, his Russia, as cold and broken as it still was. And then, alone on the windy rooftop balcony, with all of St. Petersburg at his feet, he’d broken down and wept.

  Another e-mail, Valsamis told himself as he took a seat at the nearly empty bar. Another message, and now Nicole was asking about him. They’d been slow this time. It had taken Kostecky’s man a good half hour to get the call through, and by then Nicole was long gone. But they would be ready when she went to pick up the Russian’s reply. Until then all he could do was wait.

  Valsamis ordered a whiskey and soda, the cheap stuff, what he preferred, the taste that reminded him of somewhere else. Early morning in the Pintlers, Hank Williams on the truck’s old AM radio and his father singing along in broken English. Outside, in the headlights, snow and more snow, flakes the size of a man’s fist, downy and friable, as if the clouds themselves had broken apart and were falling. Inside, the rattle of the Ford’s ancient heater, the bottle of Ten High sloshing on the seat between them. The truck such meager shelter from the wilderness around them, the dark miles of snow and ice, the mountains echoing back and back, all the way to the Idaho border and beyond.

  It was early still, but out on the dance floor, two young men were moving in ecstatic synchronicity. They had taken off their shirts, and their bare skin flashed in the club’s colored lights, chest and shoulders, the curve of a well-crafted back. Youth on display.

  The music stopped abruptly, and the two men lingered for a moment, then headed for the bar. Valsamis huddled around his drink, his eye on the darker of the two. He was taller than Valsamis by a good six inches, his hair long and straight, swept languorously across his face, but he was slight of build, his arms and chest frail as a young girl’s.

  The boy caught Valsamis’s stare and held it, then glanced nervously at his empty hands. This one, Valsamis thought, imagining how it would happen, the boy’s slender hips beneath his. Valsamis felt his stomach contract, felt the hot rush of blood to his groin, repulsion and desire at the same time.

  He could hear Dick Morrow all those years earlier, the last thing he’d said before disappearing into the crowd at the L.A. airport. These are your choices, John: to be the stronger or the weaker, to be the ruler or the ruled, to be the powerful or the powerless.

  Valsamis took a sip of his whiskey and watched the young man come toward him.

  In the end, the choice is made for me. Rahim and I have gone out to a dinner party at a friend’s house in Belém. It’s a pleasant evening. Our host, a Frenchman, has made real coq au vin, and for dessert tiny pots de crèmes peppered with lemon zest and orange-scented muscat. Gifts of edible sunshine in the midst of gray winter.

  It’s the usual suspects, a ragtag conglomerate of drifters and crooks. Two Russians, the Frenchman’s Hungarian girlfriend, an Italian con man. A week and a half since the first attack on Iraq, and already people here are weary of talking about it, tired of the Americans’ relentless prowess and their own anger, the nightly films of precision killing. “A clean war,” one of the Russians snorts, “there is no such thing.” And then, as if by silent pact, we move on to other subjects.

  It feels good to be free of it for a few hours, such a surprising return to normalcy. In the cab on the way home, Rahim kisses me, and I can taste the sweet muscat in his mouth, orange blossoms and honey and lavender. Back at the apartment, we barely make it up the stairs. We stumble over each other in the darkness, fingers fumbling with buttons and clasps, key clawing at the lock. So desperate that I am momentarily afraid, acutely aware of his physical power, so much greater than mine, and the fierceness of what brought us together.

  Inside, coats still on, we make love on the living room floor. For the first time, though I still haven’t told him, I am certain he knows about the baby. Hungry as we are, there is a tentativeness between us, a sense of deliberation, our bodies slow and cautious. When we are finished, we lie together for a long time, silent and still, hearts hammering against each other.

  It isn’t until I pull away and feel Rahim slide out from inside me that I realize what has happened. On his stomach and my thighs is a dark stain, my own blood, musky and rich.

  Rahim sees it as well, and a look of involuntary disgust crosses his face. Here is the one great taboo between us. This prohibition that is part of his faith and that has become my monthly humiliation. By the time he understands and recovers himself, it is too late.

  For a moment, more than anything, I am deeply relieved, then a wave of loss hits me, a feeling of grief that I couldn’t have expected. Suddenly I know, with utter certainty, that I cannot stay.

  It was just shy of Sergei’s twelve hours when Graça and I stepped into the cybercafé on the rua Diário de Notícias. The café was packed, pulsing to the angry rhythms of Goth rock, the crowd mostly pale faces and black hair. Trying to ignore the high-decibel screams ricocheting off the brick walls and concrete floor, I left Graça at the bar, found a free computer, and logged in to my Hotmail account. There was nothing from Sergei in my account yet, no messages except for a few spams, come-ons for breast enhancement and penis enlargement, the usual stray detritus of the Internet. Still a good half hour to Sergei’s promised deadline, I reminded myself, checking my watch. Time for the Russian to come through with something tonight, and I’d give him every minute.

  Wiping the spam from my in-box, I followed Graça’s earlier lead and typed Valsamis’s name into the search engine. A list of websites flooded the screen: a marine engineer in Houston, Texas, a wedding announcement from a small-town newspaper in upstate New York, a teenager’s home page. Nothing even remotely related to the John Valsamis I was after. Killing time, I typed in the address for a different search engine and entered Valsamis’s name once again.

  Valsamis had thought the young man pretty when he’d first seen him at the bar, but here, against the shabby surroundings of the apartment, he was almost beautiful. Valsamis reached up and touched the sleeping boy’s shoulder, ran his finger lightly along the hollow of his collarbone. His hair smelled of cedar and cigarette smoke, of sweat and faded cologne. His chest was smooth and delicate, his skin luminously pale.

  There had been something slightly off about the young man, something passive and yet powerful about the way he carried himself, the demeanor of an untrained whore. Offering his body and yet not, and the combination had made Valsamis want him even more.

  Leaving the boy to sleep, Valsamis rolled out of bed, dressed quietly, and set two twenty-euro notes on the hall table. Then he let himself out through the apartment’s front door and took the stairs down to the street.

  The night had barely begun, and the cramped neighborhood around the Praça do Principe Real was just finding its rhythm. Groups of men paraded up and down the narrow streets. Like an Arab city, Valsamis thought, reminded of the cafés in Cairo or Damascus, men walking arm in arm and the smell of knocked-off European cologne. The freedom of a world unburdened by the complications of gender.

  A young man crossed the street in his direction and Valsamis felt his heart catch, remembering the apartment he’d just left behind, the stale smell and the shared bathroom on the landing, the boy’s obvious embarrassment at all of it.

  The cell phone in Valsamis’s right breast pocket rang. He drew it out and flipped it open. “Yes?”

  “We’ve just recorded a hit, sir.” A woman this time, young, with a slightly Southern twang. Never the same person twice. How did they do it? Twelve-hour days at some basement computer, and the other twelve, sir, trying to forget everything they’d heard or seen. On the weekends, backyard barbecues where everyone knew better than to ask about work.

  “What’s the location?” Valsamis asked.

  “It’s coming in now, sir. Are you ready?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “One-twenty-six rua Diário de Notícias. Looks like a public server.”

  The café above São Roque, Valsamis thought. A fifteen-minute walk at most. “She’s still online?”

  The woman paused, then, “Yes, sir. Is there anything else, sir?”

  “No, nothing else,” Valsamis told her.

  Once more my search came up bust. The engineer, the newlywed, and now a Greek musician. Again, nothing on John Valsamis. I logged back in to my Hotmail account, and this time there was a message waiting for me.

  Where Sergei got his information, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. What I did know was that my friend had a network to rival that of the best small-town gossip, an electronic web of contacts, old and new, that seemed to know where every body, from Minsk to Mexico City, was buried.

  John Valsamis, Sergei had written, his answer characteristically brief. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Mid-East division. Field officer, Istanbul, Cairo, Beirut. Retired, 1997.

  There it was again, I thought, an electric chill coursing up my back. Beirut. Not coincidence, then, this city that connected us all, Valsamis and al-Rashidi and me. A car bomb, I heard Valsamis say that night in my kitchen, his finger on the picture of the girl and her mother. Later, on his way out, his thin smile. He’d known about my mother, known before I did that I would agree to find Rahim. Known just what I’d need to justify my choice, to let myself think it wasn’t fear or anger driving me but something else.

  What was it my father liked to say? You can’t con an honest man.

  I glanced up and saw Graça slide off her bar stool. She waved at me, pointed back through the café, toward the alcove marked WC.

  Valsamis flipped the collar of his coat up around his neck and turned down the rua da Rosa, powering forward past the clubs and fado houses, the steamy overflow of bodies outside Play Bar and Nova. On the narrow sidewalk in front of O Forcado was a less sophisticated clientele. Obvious tourists huddled against the rain, fighting for the few taxis that had wandered into the hilltop neighborhood.

  Close now, Valsamis thought, just a few more blocks. He crossed the street to avoid the crowd, his gait almost a jog, then he turned onto the Travessa da Boa Hora and the quieter rua Diário de Notícias. He could hear the Internet café from a good block away, the thump of electronic music pounding out into the narrow lane. A group of kids in makeshift costumes eyed him with unchecked suspicion as he opened the door and let himself inside.

  Valsamis stood near the door, getting his bearings. Then he elbowed his way into the crush of bodies, starting for the back of the café and the monitors he’d glimpsed through the crowd.

  A hand caught the sleeve of his coat, and Valsamis turned to see a young woman glaring at him with unvarnished contempt. She couldn’t have been over twenty, her pale face bristling with a dozen different piercings. Her body was slightly too doughy for her black vinyl corset and zippered miniskirt, her arms stippled with goose bumps, her white stomach bulging over her waistband. “There’s a wait for the computers,” she snarled in Portuguese. “You need to get in line.”

  Valsamis shook off her hand and started forward again, scanning the crowd for Nicole’s dark hair and narrow face. But the girl wouldn’t let him go.

  “Hey, asshole!” she snarled. “Are you deaf?”

  There was some kind of disturbance at the front of the café, a woman’s voice shouting angry Portuguese. A clutch of bodies at the counter shielded my view, customers waiting to pay and others loitering, gawking at the uproar. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but I could see one of the counter girls through the crowd, the same surly young woman who’d assigned me my computer. Some poor soul had crossed her and was paying for it.

  I ducked into the stairwell that led down to the restrooms, years of prison instinct telling me it was best to lie low.

  A man’s voice answered the young woman’s, the Portuguese a broken growl. There was a slight movement in the crowd, and then I heard the girl gasp, her breath high and tight, caught against her throat. The sound a puppy might make when kicked.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. And another voice: “Get your hands off her!”

  The crowd fell silent. Over the music I heard the unmistakable click of a bullet being chambered, the sound itself warning enough. The ring of people fell away, and I could see the gun, the metal glinting in the café’s halogen spotlights, and the man’s hand on the girl’s wrist, her arm turning uncomfortably purple beneath his grasp.

  He pushed her aside, then pivoted, his eyes raking over the café, toward the alcove where I stood, pressed up against the wall. I could see his face and the look of disgust on it, the same contempt I’d seen that morning in my kitchen in Paziols.

  Ducking farther into the alcove, I slid the FEG from my pocket and took the stairs down to the basement landing, where Graça was waiting outside the women’s room.

  “He’s here,” I told her, taking a split-second inventory of my surroundings. There were three doors off the landing, the men’s and women’s bathrooms, and a third, unmarked door.

  “Who?” Graça asked.

  “The American,” I answered, pushing the men’s room door open with my foot, peering in at the stained walls and filthy floor toilet.

  I tried the unmarked door next, revealing a cramped utility closet, a mop and broom, a shelf stocked with spare paper and cleaning supplies, a stack of cardboard boxes.

  Graça nodded to the women’s room. “There’s someone in there.”

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing. The door opened and a young woman stepped out, another of the café’s counter girls. She glanced down at the gun and froze.

  “Is there a way out of here?” I asked in my broken Portuguese.

  The girl blinked back at me, uncomprehending.

  “Ask her!” I told Graça.

  Graça quickly translated, and the girl blinked again, then raised her hand and pointed to the closet. Her fingers were trembling, her black nails chipped where she’d chewed off the polish. She spoke rapidly, and Graça nodded. Then Graça stepped into the narrow space and shoved aside one of the boxes, revealing not a wall but the beginning of what looked like endless darkness, a passageway stretching back into the rock, a relic of the ancient city.

  “She says she’s heard it goes all the way to the Largo Trindade Coelho,” Graça explained.

  I looked back at the girl, and she nodded at me. “Yes!” she insisted. “Yes!”

  Graça shrugged. “I believe her.”

  The girl’s eyes were glassy with fear. “You’re coming with us,” I told her, grabbing her arm with my free hand.

  The rear of the café was divided into two churchlike columns, with five straight rows of tables and monitors laid out along a center aisle. Drawn by the woman’s protests, most of the clientele had congregated near the front counter, but there were a few stray customers still at their workstations and a handful more huddled beneath the tables.