Free An Accidental American: A Novel by Alex Carr Page A

find that Nicole had thrown herself back in with Ed in the first place. Even among people who lied for a living, Ed Blake had a bad reputation. He was the kind of hustler who would have cheated his own mother. Or, in this case, his own daughter.
    Rahim didn’t know the details, only what he’d heard through the grapevine. Something about a car scam, reselling rentals with phony pedigrees. It was just the sort of thing Ed would have cooked up, crude and old-fashioned. Somehow he’d talked Nicole into doing all the paperwork, the cartes grises and the credit cards and licenses they’d used to lease the cars in the first place.
    The way Rahim had heard it, Ed had cut and run at the first sign of trouble, leaving Nicole to pick up the pieces. And when the French police, alerted by a string of bad credit cards, finally caught up with him in Val d’Isère, he’d offered Nicole up, talking his way into a nice neat six-month sentence.
    But Nicole had done her time, every last day of it, as Rahim would have expected her to. Not someone who would sell others out to save herself, Rahim thought. And the last Rahim had heard, she’d taken a consulting job with some document security firm. Out of the life, and who could blame her?
    Out of the life, and yet she’d come back after all these years. Come back and was asking about him. Rahim couldn’t help but wonder why.

    At first it’s just a feeling, nothing more, the internal knowledge that something has changed. Two weeks later, I know for sure. Rahim has gone out, and I’m standing in our chilly bathroom, bare feet on the cold tiles. In the silvered mirror above the sink, my own face stares back at me. On the rim of the sink, balanced carefully on the curve of white porcelain, is a slender finger of plastic.
    Outside, on the rua da Moeda, the Bica funicular groans up the hill. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…I start a long count backward from one hundred, listening to the car fade slowly into the distance, teeth grinding at the worn rails.
    Eighteen, I count, seventeen…On the sink, in the tiny window, a thin blue bar has appeared. No question, no doubt, except for the choice that is now waiting to be made.
    The front door opens, much earlier than I had expected it would, and I hear two voices in the living room, the guttural reverberations of Arabic. Rahim and one of his Moroccan friends. I take a deep breath and gather myself. Out in the living room, the radio comes on, Europe 1, from France. I will have to tell him, I think. If he hasn’t guessed already, he will.
    I tuck the plastic stick in my pocket, open the door, and start down the hall. Rahim is in the kitchen making tea. He nods silently at me, spooning dried mint into the ornate pot Driss brought with him as a gift from Morocco. Rahim’s friend Mustapha shouts something from the living room, and Rahim answers back, his tone angry.
    This is their nightly ritual now. Mint tea and the news and, later in the evening, a bottle of cheap port. The long slow countdown to January 15, the deadline given to the Iraqis by the Americans for withdrawal from Kuwait. The long final breath before war. By now we all know Saddam Hussein will never back down.
    In the other room, Mustapha lights a cigarette, one of his shaggy roll-your-owns, and the smell of the tobacco makes me gag.
    Yes, I think, I will have to tell him, but not now. Not like this.
    “ Je sort, ” I say. I’m going out.

    Even with the hindsight of history, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact date on which the Lebanese civil war began. Aftershocks from the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in the form of a massive influx of Palestinian refugees, had shaken the foundations of Lebanon’s delicate political balance for some time. In the ensuing struggle for power, violent confrontation became more and more common, as the Lebanese army and the Christian Phalange Party, led by the Gemayel family, pitted themselves against the Palestinians and the militias of Kamal Jumblatt’s