An Accidental American: A Novel by Alex Carr Page 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