The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  Webster and Christopher needed to make no allowances for one another. They lived in a world where all personal secrets were known. They had been investigated before they were employed; everything that could be remembered and repeated about them was on file, the truth along with the gossip and the lies. Gossip and lies were valuable: much can be understood about a man by the untruths that are told about him. Once a year, on the anniversary of their employment, they submitted to a lie detector test. The machine measured their breathing, the sweat on their palms, their blood pressure and pulse, and it knew whether they had stolen money from the government, submitted to homosexual advances, been doubled by the opposition, committed adultery. The test was called the “flutter.” They would ask of a new man, “Has he been fluttered?” If the answer was no, the man was told nothing, not even the true name of his case officer.

  To Webster, the flutter was the ordeal of brotherhood. He believed that those who went through it were cold in their minds, trained to observe and report but never to judge. They looked for flaws in men and were never surprised to find them: the polygraph had taught them so much about themselves— taught them that guilt can be read on human skin with a meter —that they knew what all men were.

  They had no politics. They had no morals, except among themselves. They lied to everyone except their government, even to their children and the women they entered, about their purposes and their work. Yet they cared about nothing but the truth. They would corrupt men, suborn women, steal, remove governments to obtain the truth, cleansed of rationalization and every other modifier. To one another, they spoke only the truth. Their friendships were deeper than marriage. They needed each other’s trust as other men needed love.

  Webster recited these things to Christopher when he was far gone in drink. They were true enough. Webster, a phlegmatic man, had tears in his eyes; he had lost a young American in Accra. The boy had been shot by members of the Ghanaian service, who thought murder was the way in which secret agents dealt with their enemies. “What that kid really liked about this life is what we all like,” Christopher said. “It’s like living in a book for boys.” Webster was outraged; he leaped at Christopher. “But he died! How many have you seen die? I can name them for you.” Christopher gave his old friend another drink. “No need; I remember,” he said. “But, Tom, be honest. If it had been you those black amateurs shot, what would have been your last thought?” Webster shook his head to clear the whiskey from his voice: “I’d laugh. It would be such a goddamn joke of a death.” Christopher lifted his glass. “Absent friends,” he said.

  Webster was short and muscular. He had once held the shot-put record at Yale. He wore the clothes he had had in college, fifteen years before, and shoes he had inherited from his father that were a half size too small for him. Though he was homely and had no luck with women, he was amused by Christopher’s good looks and the way girls came to him. “I’m the portrait you keep in your attic,” he told Christopher. “Each time you sin, I get another wart.”

  Christopher, finishing his beer, remembered this and laughed aloud as in his mind he saw Webster as clearly as in life. The bartender took away his glass and didn’t ask if he wanted another drink.

  In the safe house, an apartment on the sixth floor of an old building behind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Christopher ate the food that had been left in the refrigerator for him, took a shower, and sat down at a portable typewriter. He worked steadily on his report until he heard the morning traffic moving on the quais along the Seine. He wrote nothing about Luong, except to include the receipt for the money he had thrown into the river. He burned his notes and the typewriter ribbon and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

  Then, placing the typed report inside the pillowcase, he went to bed and slept for twelve hours. He dreamed that his wife, standing with the light behind her in a room in Madrid where he had slept with another girl, told him that she had given birth; even asleep, his mind knew that he had no child, and he ended the dream.

  3

  Tom Webster’s apartment in the avenue Hoche had once belonged to a member of the Bonapartean nobility. Its salon preserved the taste of the marquis and his descendants. Caryatids with broken noses stood at the corners of the ceiling; rosy women picnicked on the grassy banks of a painted brook that flowed along the wainscoting.

  “Tom makes fun of the decor,” said Sybille, his wife. “But really, in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s très luxe.”

  “There’s no need for all that before the other guests come,” Webster said. “Paul knows that the chief decoration in all our houses is my scrotum, which you nailed to the wall years and years ago, Sybille.”

  “Does Paul know that?” Sybille asked. “But then he’s trained to notice everything, isn’t he? Paul, Tom is always so glad to see you. He tells me in bed that you’re absolutely the best in the whole company. In bed—what is the significance of that, do you suppose?”

  Sybille Webster was a quick woman who liked to pretend that she was married to a slow man. Her fine face was more beautiful in photographs than in life. There were pictures of her in every room, and these were an embarrassment to her; she cleared away the frames when she invited strangers into the house. Webster married her thinking that he would want sex with no one else for the rest of his life, and he still gazed through his glasses at his wife as if she were, at all times, whirling about the room in a ballet costume. It was he who had taken the photographs.

  Christopher took the drink Sybille had made for him and kissed her on the cheek. He handed his report to Webster. “Read the first two contact reports, if you have a minute,” he said. “You may want to send something tonight.”

  “Why are you so good at the work, Paul?” asked Sybille. “Do you know?”

  “People trust him,” Webster said.

  “Do they? Wouldn’t you think that word would get around?”

  “Oh, I think it has, Sybille,” Christopher said. “You notice that Tom never leaves us alone.”

  “He’s been that way ever since he started to flag,” Sybille said. “That was, oh, the fourth day of our honeymoon. He took me to New York—the Astor Hotel. I was just a simple virgin from Tidewater Virginia. So many memories. Tom used to go to the Astor when he was a soldier and meet interesting people in the bar.”

  Sybille, sitting on the arm of Christopher’s chair with her legs crossed, pointed a finger at Webster, who never gave any sign that he heard the things she said about him.

  Webster tapped the report. “This is hotter than a firecracker,” he said. “Do you think Diem and Nhu are really in touch with the North?”

  “Why not? They sure as hell don’t trust Washington anymore.”

  “What was Nhu like at the party?”

  “Polite. I didn’t ask him to his face what he was planning. Wolkowicz didn’t like that.”

  “Screw Wolkowicz. All he wants to do is clean out was-tebaskets.”

  “Well, he’s expected to know everything that happens in Vietnam,” Christopher said. “He doesn’t see any sense in the things I do, running people like Luong. It upsets the police liaison. In a way, he’s being logical. What good is building democratic institutions to Wolkowicz? Diem and Nhu don’t like it, and they know who’s doing it.”

  “What about Luong?” Webster asked. He drained his glass and held it out to Sybille to be refilled.

  “Nhu is going to pick him up and kill him. They’ll torture him a little first for appearances’ sake.”

  Webster stared at Christopher for a second, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did you warn him off?”

  “I was instructed not to,” Christopher said.

  Webster put his glasses back on his nose and resumed reading.

  Sybille brought them another drink. “It surely is difficult for me not to overhear some of the things you two say to each other,” she said. “Paul, do you want to play tennis with me tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to Rome tonight.”

  Sy
bille raised her hands in protest. “But dinner!” she cried.

  Christopher told her that his plane didn’t leave until two in the morning, and Sybille went on with what she wanted to say as if he had not spoken to her. He wondered how Webster had found a way to propose to her; Sybille sometimes answered questions a day or a week after they had been asked.

  “You don’t know what a coup you’re going to witness,” she said. “Tom has invited Dennis Foley, the President’s right-hand man. And I remembered that Harry McKinney is out of town, so I asked his lovely wife, Peggy, who thinks she’s the counselor to the embassy instead of her husband. Peggy thought that about herself even when we were at Sweet Briar together. It’s going to be a treat, Paul.”

  Webster put Christopher’s report into his briefcase and locked it. “Foley’s brother and I used to put the shot together,” he said. “The brother’s all right. I don’t know this one.”

  “You’ve been to lots of meetings with him all week,” Sybille said. “The entire embassy has been meeting with him. Foley came to Paris to tell de Gaulle who’s really running the world. President Kennedy thought he ought to know—only de Gaulle won’t give Foley an appointment. Wonderful JFK! Oh, that man is so sexy. He squeezed this little hand when he was here with the First Lady and I said, ‘I, too, think you’re absolutely irresistible, Mr. President.’”

  “What did he say to you, Sybille?”

  “He said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and sort of flung me down the reception line toward Jackie. Then she said the same thing and flung me again. They shake hands like a couple of black belts.”

  Webster grasped Sybille’s chin. “Sybille,” he said, “let’s not have any of this Southern-belle chatter when Foley gets here. He doesn’t know you.”

  “Oh, we’re all going to be very respectful, Tom. I do think this administration has raised the whole tone of American life. Why, Peggy McKinney has been reading Proust in the original French and learning the names of all those new African countries. She says the people of Zimbabwe want rice and respect. I always thought they wanted money.”

  “Sybille, how about making this your last martini?” Webster said.

  “I have to do something while you and Paul talk about betrayal and torture.”

  “We don’t enjoy it,” Webster said.

  “Oh,” said Sybille, “I think it makes you happy enough.”

  4

  Dennis Foley, arriving with Peggy McKinney, did not have the air of a man who expected to have a good time. He nodded to Sybille and to Christopher when he was introduced, but did not offer to shake hands. Foley was a bony man who had played basketball in college, and he had still the manner, self-aware and faintly contemptuous, of the athlete. He had a habit of touching his own body as he talked, running a hand over the waves of stiff black hair on the back of his head, unstrapping his large gold watch and massaging his wrist. His eyes, pale blue with tiny irises, looked beyond the person with whom he was conversing. His face, which changed color rather than expression when he was pleased or annoyed by something that was said to him, was roughened by acne scars. Foley wore a two-button suit with a tin PT-109 clasp on a Sulka tie. Like President Kennedy, he drank daiquiris without sugar and smoked long, thin cigars. He had been talking to Peggy McKinney when he arrived, and he moved her across the vast room, away from the others, to continue the conversation. As Sybille and Christopher watched, Peggy lit Foley’s cigar for him with a table lighter.

  “Observe his gestures, listen to his voice,” Sybille said. “He’s turning into a JFK. All these New Frontier people are like that, have you noticed? It must be some royal virus. The closer you are to the throne, the worse the infection. Poor Peggy McKinney—see how she’s trying to get everything just right? Way over here in Paris, all she can do is read Proust and take up touch football. She plays left end in the Bois de Boulogne every Sunday.”

  Across the room, Foley nodded brusquely, as if Peggy had told him everything he was interested in hearing. He brought his empty glass to Sybille.

  “This is quite a place,” Foley said. “How did you find it?”

  “Oh, the French have this idea that Americans will rent anything,” Sybille replied.

  Foley’s glance ran like an adder’s tongue over Sybille’s face and body, and a corner of his mouth lifted, as if he were rejecting a sexual invitation. “I’ll bet you’re the wittiest woman in Paris,” he said. “I’d like some soda water. Just plain, with an ice cube.”

  Sybille took his glass and went to the bar. Foley turned to Christopher. “Webster tells me you’re just back from Saigon,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand you talked to Diem and his brother.”

  “I saw them at a reception Nhu gave. It was more a matter of overhearing what they said to others.”

  Foley took the glass Sybille handed to him and turned his back on her. “I’ve read some of your stuff in the magazine,” he said. “I had a feeling you were holding back. Don’t you write everything you know?”

  “Usually. I don’t write what I don’t know.”

  “Look, let’s cut the crap. I’ve got eyes—you work with Webster.”

  “Do I?”

  “I can confirm it in thirty seconds if I have to. You’re fresh from Saigon. You seem to circulate at pretty high levels out there. I’d like to hear your reactions. If they’re worth it, I’ll pass them on to the boss when I see him tomorrow,”

  The others overheard. Webster fell silent and put a cold pipe between his teeth. Peggy McKinney’s face, as smooth as an ingenue’s, was suddenly alight with curiosity; though she saw his name listed in the front of a great magazine and read his articles, she had never believed Christopher’s cover story.

  “The Americans are talking to themselves,” Christopher said. “The Vietnamese say that the U.S. is working up to a coup to remove the Ngos.”

  “We know that the ruling family, and Nhu and his wife especially, are rabidly anti-American. What about that?”

  Christopher shrugged.

  “You think the U.S. government can work with a man like Diem?” Foley asked.

  “Maybe not. He wants to stop the war and get us out of there. His brother is talking to the North. They have relatives in Hanoi, and Ho and Diem know each other from the old days.”

  “That’s beautiful. Do you think we can countenance their talking to Ho Chi Minh behind our backs?”

  Webster had begun to move across the room toward Foley and Christopher. Foley moved a step closer to Christopher, as if to prevent anyone stepping between them.

  “They asked for our help,” he said. “We’ve committed our power. You suggest that we stand by, tolerate corruption and wink at what amounts to Fascism, and let the whole project go down the drain?”

  “I don’t know that it would make much difference, except in terms of American domestic politics.”

  Foley’s face had gone red. He tapped Christopher’s chest with a blunt forefinger.

  “The freedom of a people is involved,” he said, “and that’s all that’s involved. If you think we’re holding on in Vietnam because we’re afraid of losing the next election, you don’t know a hell of a lot about John F. Kennedy or the men around him.”

  “I’ve got no answer to that, Mr. Foley.”

  Webster put a hand on Foley’s arm. “Sybille says dinner is ready,” he said.

  Foley continued to stare into Christopher’s face. “What do you suggest we do out there?” he asked. “Nothing?”

  “Sometimes,” Christopher answered, “that’s the best thing to do.”

  “Well, buddy, that’s not the style any longer.”

  Foley put his glass into Webster’s hand and strode into the dining room with Sybille and Peggy McKinney trailing after him.

  5

  At dinner, Foley’s mood improved. He entertained Sybille on his right and Peggy McKinney on his left with stories about the President.

  “There are dogs and kids, great books and great
paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have been under Franklin Roosevelt. If I want to see the boss, I just go in. You know you’ll come out of there with a decision. The door is wide open on the world. He’s likely to pick up the phone and call some little twirt way down the ladder in the Labor Department. Imagine, you’re forty and gray-faced, wearing a suit from Robert Hall, and for fifteen years you haven’t even been able to get an office with a window. Then—ring and ‘Mr. Snodgrass, this is the President. What the hell are you doing about migrant workers today?’ It stirs up the tired blood.” Foley looked around the table at the smiles of his listeners.

  “The bureaucracy can use a little of that, believe me,” said Peggy McKinney. “God, how we’ve needed to bring brains and style back into the government. The embassy just crackles with ideas and energy. De l’audace, et encore de l’audace,—that’s what the foreign policy of a great nation should be.”

  “Christopher was just telling me the opposite,” Foley said.

  “Oh? Well, so many of Tom’s friends have to be cautious.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Sybille asked, with her elbow on the table and her wineglass held against her cheek.

  “Oh, Sybille, come along now. We all know about Tom’s friends,” Peggy McKinney said. “Is it true,” she asked Foley, “that the President putts when he thinks? I mean, does he really get out his putter and knock golf balls around the Oval Office? I think that’s so lovely, do say it’s true. I just devour all this gossipy stuff. You really don’t have to humor me.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ve just spent a week listening to Couve de Murville. Believe me, you’re a welcome change,” Foley said. “Yes, the boss putts occasionally. He’ll do it at the damnedest times. The other day a couple of us came in with a recommendation. It was serious stuff. A decision had to be made—the kind of decision that would drive me, for instance, into agony. But his mind is like crystal. He’s right on top of everything. He knew the situation—felt it, if you will, better than any of us. We gave him some new information. He absorbed it. We gave him the options. He didn’t say a word at first. He got up, grabbed his putter, lined up a shot, and tapped it across the rug. We all watched the ball roll. Somehow—this will sound corny, but it’s true—we all suddenly saw that golf ball as the symbol of the fate of a nation. Not a very big nation, not our nation, but a nation. The ball ran straight into the cup. ‘Okay,’ said the boss. ‘Go.’ There’s never been another like him.”