Laundry as bright as confetti. The yellow flutter of a caged canary. An old woman grilling sardines beneath the window of our apartment in the Bairro Alto. This was our Lisbon. A summer reduced to a tourist’s snapshots, to one warm night at a café on the Miradouro de Santa Catarina, the sound of a fadista in the distance.

  In the morning we would lie late in bed, listening to the neighborhood through our open window, the tsk-tsk of the woman next door sweeping her steps, a bundle of old men gossiping their way down the street. In the evening Rahim would make large, elaborate dinners for the ragtag community of drifters and students who found their way to our apartment each night.

  These were Rahim’s multitudes, the same hittistes we’d seen that first night on the Place des Moulins. Young men who’d come north to escape the repression and hopelessness of their homes, who’d found a different kind of hopelessness waiting for them. Immigrant poverty. The scorn of European women. Rahim fed them all, though not out of charity, for they were his bread and butter.

  At the time he did identity papers, mostly. French work permits for the steady stream of Moroccans and Algerians heading north, and the occasional passport or student visa. Rahim was a stickler for secrecy, for keeping his work and personal lives separate; he’d rented a space out on the northwestern fringe of the city, a shabby little studio tacked on the back of a widow’s house, in the shadow of the old aqueduct. He told his landlady he was an artist.

  When he had work, he would go there in the afternoons. Sometimes I would go with him. On a few occasions I even helped. But mainly, during the hours when he was gone, I just waited. I hadn’t really worked in months, hadn’t needed to.

  Often I would walk around the city, up across the hills and through the ancient alleyways of the Alfama, or down the wide Avenida da Liberdade to the sprawling Parque Eduardo VII and the glittering glass dome of the Estufa Fria. Or I would take the train out to Belém and sit in the tower park and watch the mammoth container ships heading out to sea. Even this was part of the waiting, and the waiting itself was something I had become. Not myself but a perversion of myself, surrendered to the fetish of longing.

  I saw John Valsamis as soon as I stepped out of Saudade, his silhouette like a clenched fist in the window of the café across the street. It was hardly a surprise, part of the game I’d known to expect. All the same, I hated the thought of being shadowed. I let him follow me down to the tram stop on the rua da Conceição, then slipped back out of the crowd just before the number 28’s doors banged shut.

  A lie, I thought as I watched the tram start the long climb up the hill, and caught a passing taxi instead. I didn’t believe for a minute that Amadeo had been mistaken about having seen Rahim. And who was Gaspar protecting? Rahim? Himself? Or was it just instinct? I was an outsider now. Or was it Eduardo Morais whom Gaspar was trying to shield? Though neither of the brothers had confirmed my guess, it made sense that Amadeo would have been referring to the watchmaker.

  Rahim and I had visited Morais many times, summoned for dinner or an afternoon of port and cards on his little back patio. Never business— Morais was a man who worked alone, an artist of the old school, meticulous in his skill— but as much as Morais preferred to work in solitude, he loathed the thought of drinking alone.

  Morais lived not far from the Igreja de São Miguel, on a tiny alley in a honeycomb neighborhood at the bottom of the Beco de Santa Helena. It was a warren of streets far too narrow for a car, so I had the taxi driver let me off at the Largo das Portas do Sol. It was still drizzling when I stepped out of the cab, and beyond the rain-lacquered railings and dripping foliage of the old square, the Tagus was shrouded in mist.

  Twelve years had all but erased the exact location of Morais’s house from my mind, and it took me a good hour of wrong turns and backtracking through the impossibly narrow lanes to find Morais’s distinct green door and the elaborate azulejo that topped it, a tile-work portrait of Saint Vincent.

  The house lay at the very back of a dead-end street, squeezed in against its neighbors and a slender flight of stone stairs that connected to the alley above. It was an unassuming structure, two stories of badly flaking plaster, windows underscored by once-elegant wrought iron. A narrow loggia ran the length of the second floor, the sagging balcony crammed with potted palms and unruly tomato plants.

  I knocked once on the peeling door, and the sound echoed in the quiet street. In the doorway of the house opposite, an old woman huddled against the day’s chill, grilling sardines on a makeshift brazier, impassively taking me in.

  I knocked again, louder, and heard someone move inside. After a few seconds, the green door swung open and a young woman looked out at me.

  “Bom dia,” I said in my best guidebook Portuguese. “Queria ver Senhor Morais.”

  “My grandfather is working,” the woman answered, her hand on the door, her black eyes hard on my face.

  I smiled reassuringly. “It’s important,” I told her. “Please.”

  She hesitated, lingering on the stone threshold. She was thin and elegant, her long hair swept up and back, dark and shiny as polished ebony. “He knows you?”

  “Yes.” And I know you, I thought. A barefoot girl on Morais’s back patio, gangly limbs tanned the color of caramel, lips stained with pomegranate juice. “My name’s Nicole,” I told her. “Nicole Blake.”

  She opened the door a few inches wider and reluctantly motioned for me to step inside. “Wait here,” she said, leaving me in the dark hallway.

  I heard her move through the back of the house, doors opening and closing as she went. She returned a few moments later. “Grandfather will see you,” she said grudgingly. Then she led me through the same series of doors.

  The low room that held Eduardo Morais’s workshop had changed little since I’d been there last. Half a century of clutter lined the walls, disemboweled timepieces and boxes of scavenged watch works, tiny gears and pins. On a workbench near the one small window, a tall cabinet clock lay like a patient on a stretcher, its face dismantled down to the clockwork bones.

  There was an unusual smell to the room, oil and metal, and something entirely unrelated to watchmaking. A printer’s smell, achingly familiar. Ink and acetone and unblemished paper. The tools of a forger.

  A watchmaker by trade, Eduardo Morais was a man with an eye for minutiae and the patience for painstaking detail, two qualities that had also made him one of the best counterfeiters in Europe. He’d learned his craft long before the era of the computer knockoff, before Xerox and Hewlett-Packard had helped make forgeries a home business, and when I knew him, he still worked by hand. It was slow going, but Morais turned out quality instead of quantity, single documents that more than paid for his time. If you wanted quickie car papers or a residence card, Eduardo was the wrong man to ask. But if you were looking for a clean U.S. passport and you were willing to pay, Morais could do the job better than anyone.

  Morais was hunched over a drafting desk when I entered, his shoulders silhouetted by the bright lamp that illuminated his work. He made a slight movement of acknowledgment, hand flicking over his shoulder, then secreted whatever task was at hand into a large leather folder before pivoting his chair to face me.

  He had not aged over the years so much as he had shrunk, his body caving in on itself, bones and skin sagging under the pressure of time. Another year or two, I thought, and he would disappear entirely among the clocks and tools.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” he said in easy French. He motioned to a fraying chair just an arm’s length from his own. “Will you sit?”

  “I don’t mean to stay long,” I told him, grateful for a common language other than Portuguese. “You’re busy.”

  He shook his head. “Nonsense. Pas du tout. I’ve asked Graça to bring us some tea. Now, please, sit.”

  “Thank you.” I stepped forward, following his gesture to the dusty armchair. His fingers were smeared with ink, his cardigan mottled with black stains. “I’m afraid not everyone has been so gracious in their welcome.”

  Morais nodded sympathetically. “I’m too old for petty suspicions,” he said. “Working for Vanguard, aren’t you? I seem to remember having heard that.”

  “Solomon, actually,” I corrected him. “And some freelancing here and there. There wasn’t much else for me. Once I got out.”

  “Yes,” Morais agreed. “Better not to waste your talents. Though with you there, I’ll have to be on my toes.”

  “Hardly.” I doubted there was much I could throw at Morais that he wouldn’t be able to get around.

  “The straight and narrow must agree with you,” Morais commented. “You look good.”

  I smiled. “So do you.”

  “Old, you mean.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t lie,” Morais scolded. “Now, tell me, my dear, what can I do for you? I’m right to assume this visit isn’t purely for old times’ sake?”

  I shook my head. “I hear Rahim is still in Lisbon.”

  Morais smiled knowingly. “Of course,” he teased. “I should have guessed.”

  There was a soft knock from the hallway, then the door opened and Morais’s granddaughter appeared with a tray.

  “You’ve met Graça?” Eduardo nodded at the young woman.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Graça thinks I’m old,” Morais remarked. “And foolish. Don’t you, my dear?”

  The girl scowled. “Of course not, Papi.” She set the tray on a low table between us, then leaned down and kissed Morais on the cheek.

  “Senhorita Blake is an old friend of Rahim Ali’s,” Morais said, addressing his granddaughter in Portuguese. “Perhaps you can tell her where to find him?”

  The briefest shadow of panic darkened Graça’s features. Then she shrugged petulantly.

  “Nao?” Morais prodded. “I felt sure you would know.”

  “Nao,” Graça replied coolly. She poured out two cups of tea, then turned and made her way out of the workshop, closing the door behind her.

  After watching her go, Morais reached under his desktop and produced a ring of keys. “I’m at her mercy,” he complained, bending down to unlock the lower drawer of his desk, producing a pack of cigarettes. “Otherwise there would be port instead of tea. Everyone thinks they can live forever these days. I’m afraid I don’t see the point.” He tapped a cigarette from the pack and offered me one, but I shook my head.

  “You are staying in the city?” he asked.

  “In the Bairro Alto, at the Pensão Rosa.”

  Morais lit the cigarette, closed his eyes, and leaned back to inhale. “I can’t be sure,” he said, his words obviously chosen with care, “but I’ve heard he has a workshop in Cacilhas. In an old dairy, not far from the ferry dock.”

  Three old men, I told myself, thinking of the Fieldings. Three old minds, memories slipping like worn gears. It was hard to know whom to believe, impossible to separate lie from mere confusion— though I was more certain than before that Amadeo had been right, that he had seen Rahim here. Yet if Morais was willing to tell me where Rahim’s studio was, then why would he lie about this?

  I reached for my cup and took a sip of the tea. Not panic but fear, I thought, remembering the look on Graça’s face when Morais mentioned Rahim. It had been an odd exchange, and though Morais had chosen to speak to the girl in Portuguese, I couldn’t help but feel that it had been for my benefit.

  THOSE FIRST YEARS MY MOTHER AND I spent in Paris are hardly a memory to me now, just a few hazy scenes conjured up from the dim vault of childhood: a particular pair of brown leather pumps, the chipped rim of our old bathtub, the sounds of one of my mother’s students playing the Kreutzer études in our living room, or the same scale over and over, the same missed note each time.

  It was my aunt Emilie who sketched in the details of that time, what took my mother from Beirut in the first place, and what led her back. My mother and her sister had not lived in the same city since my mother first left for France. By the time we returned to Beirut, my aunt had already married and moved to Bordeaux. But the sisters had kept a faithful correspondence, and it was through my aunt’s secondhand retelling that I learned about the convent in Dordogne. How, faced with the only respectable choice— that of giving me up— my mother had chosen a different path entirely. How she had cobbled together a life for us in Paris, at first sleeping on the floor of a friend’s studio near the Sorbonne and, later, in our drafty apartment on Montmartre.

  A few months before Emilie died, she gave me the entire record of her correspondence with my mother, an old Dior shoe box crammed with yellowed paper. It was a gesture of reconciliation on my aunt’s part, I know that. But to this day, I have not been able to bring myself to read the letters.

  We all carry the dead within us, as we wish them to be. To my aunt, my mother was never anything other than the one who’d stood up to their father and won. To her father, my mother remained a slightly serious girl on the stage of the recital hall at the American University, her hair bound in a tight bun, her chin and shoulder curled around her violin, her whole body swaying with the effort of a Dvorak concerto.

  And to me? The person I’ve carried for so many years is yet another incarnation of the woman we all knew. My mother was a breathtaking skier, as fearless as her compatriots but with a certain grace that transcended the characteristic Lebanese recklessness. It is this version of my mother I try to hold on to now: her black hair flying loose behind her, her skis carving effortlessly through the snow at Faraya-Mzaar, her body not wrecked as it was at the end, but whole, powering its way down the mountain. The only reconciliation I need.

  “A milkmaid,” the old man said, his false teeth sliding in and out of place as he contemplated my question. Then he put his finger to the side of his head. “Yes! Yes! The old dairy.” He smiled and turned, gesturing out the café’s front window toward the bus station across the street and a narrow lane that disappeared behind it. “Down there and take your first right.”

  “Thank you.” I slid a ten-euro note onto the counter and waved the barman over, adding another of the pensioner’s medronhos to my bill before gathering my things to go.

  It was a wretched afternoon in Cacilhas, sodden and gray, the air above the waterfront thick with yellow smoke from the factories below. Beneath the beneficent arms of the Cristo Rei, tugboats shuffled back and forth across the harbor, their red and white hulls bright as songbirds against the dark river.

  At night, well-heeled Lisbonites crossed the Tagus to visit the seafood restaurants clustered along the riverfront, but during the day, unless you lived or worked in Cacilhas, there wasn’t much reason to make the trip. It was a hardscrabble little town, made more so by the rain and chill, the dull patina of wet mud and soot that glazed the streets and sidewalks.

  To my surprise, the man’s directions proved to be accurate, and I found the old dairy easily, about halfway down a dead-end alley. The azulejo that had served as the dairy’s billboard had seen better days. Some of the tiles were cracked or missing, and those that were left were scarred and stained, but the milkmaid, sketched in delicate blue, was as lovely as ever, her ample bosom and coquettish smile perfectly intact.

  Other than a black-and-white cat curled in the shelter of a nearby doorway, the alley showed no signs of life. The ramshackle buildings were closed up tight, windows shuttered and locked. The dairy itself had obviously been vacant for some time.

  I started into the overgrown passage on the building’s left side, and the cat climbed out of her doorway and bounded ahead of me, meowing loudly as she scaled the rust-pocked iron stairway that led to a small landing and windowless door on the dairy’s second floor.

  Searching the ground for something to get me past the padlock that I could see hanging just above the door’s knob, I picked up a broken piece of iron railing and started upward.

  The cat mewled again and scratched impatiently at the door. Waiting for something, food, water, affection, or all three, something she’d gotten here in the past. She looked well fed, but in a strange way, all belly. Pregnant, I thought.

  Nudging her gently aside, I wedged the tip of the broken rail beneath the hasp and pulled, praying the corroded iron would hold. The screws groaned and snapped, threads tearing through the jamb’s ancient wood. I pulled again, mustering all my strength, throwing my weight behind the bar, and the screws popped free.

  With the hasp gone, the door opened easily. The cat rushed past me as I tightened my fist around the iron rail and made my way forward, taking in the makeshift apartment and its spartan furnishings.

  Along the far wall was a narrow cot, the mattress dressed in mussed sheets and a blanket. Next to the cot, a doorway opened onto a rudimentary bathroom. Closer to the front door was the kitchen, with a refrigerator, a grimy sink and hot plate, and two rows of open cabinets that held a coffee canister and an assortment of chipped dishes.

  In the middle of the room was a crude desk, a long, thick piece of plywood propped on four hefty crates with a powerful swing-arm lamp attached to either end. Clues to the apartment’s real purpose, I thought. Bulbs bright enough to see the tiniest mistake by. And on the floor to the right of the desk, a combination digital printer, copier, and scanner.

  In my day we’d had the one-hour rule, the time it took to clear a space of anything incriminating. And by now? I wondered. Twenty minutes? Ten? The way things worked today, a laptop was enough computer for almost any job, and in the end you could just fold it up and walk away. No doubt that’s exactly what Rahim had done, for there was no computer to be seen, and nothing else of any interest, either.

  Making my way to the copier, I lifted the lid and looked inside. It was an unlikely hunch, but I figured it was at least worth the effort, the last thing copied or scanned easily overlooked. But the glass plate was empty.