An Accidental American: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the deck of cards he always carried with him. Good for a game of 41 or Basra with the old men who inhabited the Hamra cafés, and Sproul holding his own like a native. He’d been right, of course: There was no such thing as a valueless contact. But then Valsamis had figured that out long before Beirut.
    Valsamis pushed Sproul to the back of his mind and dialed the number in Peshawar, heard the phone ring on the other side of the world. Sproul’s wasn’t the only ghost that had come back to haunt him these last few days, though not all were as pleasant.
    The line clicked open on the fifth ring, and Valsamis was relieved to hear Kamran Javed’s voice in his ear.
    “It’s me again,” Valsamis told his old friend. “Any news on Kanj?”
    “He was moved yesterday,” Javed said.
    An Audi sped by on the Twingo’s left, and Valsamis’s grip on the steering wheel tightened suddenly. “Where to?”
    “Officially, Amman. I told you before, it was only a matter of time. I kept him here for as long as I could.”
    Valsamis looked down at his hand. His knuckles were white, his arm shaking. “Yes,” he told Javed. “I know.” But he was thinking: Not long enough.
     
     

T HIS BEAUTIFUL TIME , my mother used to say, speaking of her country in the years after the Americans left and before the Six-Day War, before the flood of Palestinians from the south. The time in which she became a woman. In Beirut and along the coast, there was French champagne and American music. “Moon River” and the twist. And in Jounieh, at the Casino du Liban, women in Dior dresses clustered at the roulette tables, their wrists glittering with diamonds, their bare shoulders tanned by the Mediterranean sun.
    For a few earnest students, the shadow of 1958 remained. In the Hamra coffee shops, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan warbled over fuzzy speakers. But for most of the country, there was hope, a peace that people convinced themselves might hold. More important, there was money. Money to fuel one long last blind hurrah before the looming specter of civil war.
    It is difficult for me to imagine Lebanon as it was then, knowing it as I do, through the filters of childhood and war. Hard for me to imagine the things my mother and her sister so often described, the Eden of the American University, seen through the eyes of the two young students these women once were. Even as a child, I understood the power of nostalgia, time’s ripening of memory. Even then I had my suspicions.
    “We were arm in arm,” my aunt Emilie would say, recounting the parties and concerts, the professors they had tormented, the boys with whom they had flirted. Muslim and Christian and Druze all united under the banner of youth and prosperity. “Arm in arm,” she would repeat, looking at my mother for confirmation in those rare times when I knew them to be together, and my mother would nod, though in a way that made me think she wasn’t quite so sure.
    Of course, by the time my mother met my father, Lebanon had already begun to change. For the young and wealthy, there were still yacht parties in Byblos and winter weekends on the slopes at Faraya-Mzaar. But along the border, and in the refugee camps south of Beirut, the humiliations of the Six-Day War had erupted into rage. And in the mountains around the Qadisha Valley, young Phalangists trained for battle.
    My father must have been one of the last of his kind to arrive before the war, drifting south along the Mediterranean, following the scents of Chanel and good Cuban cigars, the fading reek of other people’s money. Not a fighter but a two-bit hustler from Buffalo with an expensive tuxedo and a nice face. A man who hadn’t been born to privilege but who had studied it and knew how to work a room. A gigolo, my aunt Emilie had once called him.
    My aunt had been there the day my parents met in the ski lodge at Faraya-Mzaar, and she had disliked my father from the start. Too loud and too flashy, she’d thought, but my mother had