An Accidental American: A Novel by Alex Carr Page B

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.
     
     

T HOSE 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