An Accidental American: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

meant to be one. And five months later, in a maternity hospital in Paris, still groggy from the drugs, my mother had fought for this one thing on my birth certificate. Father’s nationality: American.
    Not a choice, then, but a legacy, a truth from which I cannot ever fully escape. My name, my own blue passport in a drawer, the real one, the cover indelibly stamped with the seal of the United States of America.
    So when Valsamis turned back to me, I stared up at him, trying at first to get the joke, then realizing he was serious.
    “Which country is that?” I asked.

    I waited until I was sure Valsamis was gone, then walked a sulking Lucifer down the road to his temporary exile at the neighbors’ house and headed back home to pack. I found a small shoulder bag in my closet and tossed a couple of changes of clothes inside, clean underwear and the essentials, toothbrush and soap. Traveling light, as I’d always liked it. Traveling optimistically as well. And why not? A week at most, I’d promised myself. A week at most, and I’d be back to Lucifer and the hens.
    When I was done, I made my way to my office and sent a short e-mail to Solomon to let them know I’d be gone, then headed downstairs again. Valsamis’s uneaten croissant and cold coffee were still on the kitchen table. I cleared his place, washed the dishes, and took the full garbage bag from below the sink.
    The photographs of Rahim and the embassy were on the counter where Valsamis had set them the night before. I picked them up, meaning to throw them away, then hesitated and, unable to stop myself, thumbed through them one last time. It was a narrative of violence, a reminder of what terror can do. On one end, Rahim. On the other, the child, the little girl. And on both their faces, the same expression of hopelessness, the same inward turning of self and soul.
    And in one of the other pictures, something I hadn’t noticed before. At the outer edge of the rubble, half buried beneath the twisted frame of a bicycle, a dog, someone’s pet. Not a dog but part of one. Paw and leg and shoulder and half a face, the rest of the creature cleaved clean away.
    “ Les brutes, ” I could hear my aunt Emilie saying after we’d buried my mother. Even then I’d thought, No, animals wouldn’t have done this.
    A week, I told myself again, dropping the photographs into the trash bag, then opening the back door and setting the garbage on the steps. I would find him and I would come home. I would be back before the crocuses flowered.

    Valsamis skirted Perpignan and nudged the Twingo onto the racetrack of the A9, forcing the gas pedal to the floor, trying for power that just wasn’t there. In his rearview mirror, he could see headlights fast approaching, then a brief blinked warning before one car after another flew by him. Valsamis downshifted and tried the accelerator again, coaxing another ten miles an hour out of the engine. Better, he told himself, but still, it was going to be a slow trip south. He’d have to make good time if he wanted to get to Lisbon before Nicole.
    It was a clear day, the sky bright and cloudless, Mont Canigou visible through the sooty scrim of diesel haze, the city thinning to farmland and vineyards, the rocky fields still bare, scarred by the plow. Valsamis relaxed into his seat, slid from his pocket the disposable cell phone he’d bought at the airport, and checked for reception.
    No such thing as a valueless contact, Valsamis heard Andy Sproul say. A dead man’s counsel, the first thing Sproul had told him when he’d gotten to Beirut. Valsamis hated advice, should have hated Sproul for his presumption. Still green as the Iowa cornfields in which he’d been raised, and already Sproul had the world figured out. Yet Valsamis hadn’t been able to hate him. It just wasn’t possible.
    And now, all these years later, it was Sproul’s advice that came back to Valsamis. Sproul’s ghost, smiling out from beneath his blond mop of hair, thumbing