The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  On the twenty-seventh, he went twice to the Cuban embassy and once to the Soviet embassy to apply for visas; said he wanted to return to Russia, transiting through Havana. He was turned down at both places, and had a loud argument with the Cuban consul. At the Soviet embassy he spoke with Yatskov and Kostikov, both KGB types under consular cover.

  Between 27 September and 1 October, he remained in Mexico City, but there is no information about his movements on those three days. He returned to Dallas, arriving 3 October, and went to work at the Texas Book Depository on 16 October.

  He’d had the rifle for some time—bought it under a false name, “A. Hidell,” on 13 March, by mail order.

  On 1 November, he rented P.O. Box 6225, Terminal Annex, Dallas.

  After our little dance on the sidewalk, I began to think about what you’d said. Maybe we’re the ones with illusions, but it doesn’t matter. See what you can do; if you succeed, I’d like to hear about it. But that’s up to you.

  The money in Geneva represents less than the total of your magazine salary over the past five years. We never found a way to give it to charity (something about accounting regulations), so it’s been lying in a safe all this time. I found a way to give it back to you as a “termination bonus.” As long as we call it that, it seems to be okay. There’s more if you need it.

  I wish I could arrange a nobler gesture. It’s not possible. I do advise you to stay out of this country for a while. Your highly placed friend won’t be in “power” forever, but while he is, you might as well realize you have no one here who can help you. He’s serious about the straitjacket.

  I’ve told Tom about your “resignation,” to prevent his sending me cables asking where you are. He’ll keep it to himself, even if asked directly. He knows nothing else, and shouldn’t.

  Good-bye.

  Christopher read the first part of the note again to memorize it, and dropped it in the fire. Webster said, “What’s all this about, Paul?”

  “A word of farewell from David.”

  Webster brushed aside Christopher’s reply with a motion of his hand. “I mean, what brought this on so suddenly?”

  “Tom, it’s not so sudden. You get tired of the life. I’ve been hanging around alone in hotel rooms in central Africa and Afghanistan ever since I got out of college. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “It’s not too convenient for the rest of us, you know. There are twenty-six principal agents in eighteen different countries out there who won’t talk to anyone but you.”

  “They’ll get along. Ninety percent of what they do, they do out of their own resources. They aren’t photographing documents, they’re running political movements. I’ve held their hands for a long time—let them go on alone.”

  Webster sat down heavily. “I’m not used to operating against you, Paul, and I don’t like to do it. I think this smells very, very funny. Patchen doesn’t give a shit about your agents, either. He wouldn’t discuss handing them over to somebody else. It’s like he expects you back after a short vacation.”

  “I won’t be back, Tom. David knows that.”

  “Then what’s he waiting for? He doesn’t want word of your leaving to get around, isn’t that right?”

  “You read Patchen’s mind if you want to. I’ve never been able to do it. What do you mean by operating against me?”

  “Trying to get you to open up,” Webster said. “Sybille may think things have changed, but I don’t. We’ve never lied to each other, Paul.”

  “Then let’s not start now.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think you’re out. I think you and David have got something going. You went to Washington without even telling us. I didn’t know you’d been there until Patchen showed up on the doorstep day before yesterday.”

  “When I went to Washington, it seemed the thing to do, Tom. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you—but I go a lot of places without telling you, when I pay for my own ticket.”

  “So you fly home at your own expense, resign, make plans to shack up in Rome for the rest of your life with that Australian you’ve got, right?” Webster said. “And a week later I spot you in La Coupole, with Nguyen Kim, with no French surveillance closer than wherever you lost it. The French are on him like ten pots of glue, all the time. You’re telling me they took a night off so you two could eat oysters and gossip about old times?”

  “Tom, I’m not telling you that—you’re making it up.”

  “Well, I’m not making this up. Kim has run just over two million dollars through the Banque Sadak in Beirut in the last ten days. He’s got couriers going every which way.”

  “He didn’t mention that to me,” Christopher said.

  “The French have got him bugged. We couldn’t get mikes in there because there’s always someone in the house, so we’re piggybacking the French wires.”

  Christopher laughed. “I’ll bet the French are going to like that.”

  “They won’t find out. We’re not going to find out a hell of a lot listening to tapes. We need someone next to Kim—like you. But you’re an outsider. I’m not telling you any more.”

  “I can guess,” Christopher said. “You think they’re talking to Hanoi—put us back in, and we’ll let you in after we get rid of the Yankee devils.”

  “Maybe. But it may just be business. Kim’s in touch with a heroin factory in Marseilles.”

  “Why? They’ve got more opium in Vietnam than they know what to do with.”

  “I don’t know—maybe he’s buying technology. If Kim can process it himself instead of shipping it raw, he’ll make fifty, a hundred times the profit.”

  “Do you really think they’re serious about the heroin business?”

  “Kim sure as hell is,” Webster said. “He puts in all his time on it, night and day. He wants to buy a factory. I’m certain of it.”

  Christopher grinned. “Were you in touch with your wire man today?”

  “Yeah, How’d you enjoy your beer at Fouquet’s?”

  “Okay. You had nobody behind me after I left.”

  “Didn’t I? I stuck a bleeper under the left rear fender of your fucking Peugeot, buddy.”

  Webster was filled with sly pride. He showed Christopher a rigid middle finger and poured himself another cognac.

  “That’ll teach me to believe in coincidence,” Christopher said.

  “You just aren’t used to operating against a professional service,” Webster said. “You’re not going to explain a goddamn thing, are you?”

  “Tom, there’s nothing to explain. If you think I’m not out, you’re wrong. I’m through. I don’t work for you people any longer.”

  Webster took off his glasses. He was a young man, but there were heavy pouches beneath his eyes and broken veins under the skin of his face. “Okay, Paul,” he said, “I’ll say this—next to Sybille, you’re the most sensitive human being I know. You don’t think for a minute that I believe any of this. Patchen sat right here and told me to help you any way I could and to keep my mouth shut about it. That seemed a little unusual to me.”

  “If I need any help, I’ll let you know,” Christopher said. “One thing—have you picked up anything on the audio you have on Kim about somebody called Lê Thu?”

  Webster thought, and shook his head. “I don’t recall, but I’ve got some logs in my briefcase. Hold on.” He looked through a sheaf of typed sheets. “No, nothing in these, Who’s he supposed to be?”

  “I think it’s a she—Lê is a female indicator in Vietnamese names, like Lé Xuan, for Mrs. Nhu. It was a name Kim mentioned, as if he were playing a practical joke on me. Maybe he is.”

  “I can run it through for a name check, if you want.”

  “No,” Christopher said. “Don’t do that. I’m not entitled to such services. You’ve got to start remembering I’m a private citizen.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Webster said. “Go to bed.”

  5

  Christopher rose while it was still
dark. He left a note for Sybille on the kitchen table and went down the carpeted stairs. In the cobbled courtyard of the apartment building he encountered the Webster’s concierge. She was collecting the garbage, and she raised her wizened face, narrowing her eyes in the smoke of her morning cigarette. Her squint of suspicion changed to a smile.

  “Husbands travel, don’t they?” she said.

  Christopher rapped softly on the lid of one of the concierge’s garbage cans. “It’s the age of the airplane—everybody can afford to fly,” he said.

  The old woman grinned. “But some have to take off early, eh?”

  Christopher gave her a ten-franc note, and she trotted ahead of him through the rain to open the heavy door to the street.

  He found a café filled with workmen and a few pallid whores; the girls sat at the tables by the window, talking about shops and movies with the kindness and generosity they have for one another. He was reminded of Webster; like him, the girls were aging too quickly, and they placed the same value on people who knew the things that they had learned. They understood one another’s fatigue.

  Christopher had two cups of coffee and went out into the rain again. By the time he had walked to Montparnasse, the rain had stopped and Paris was filled with its winter light, a dull atmosphere of mother-of-pearl. There was no one in the street behind the Select where he had parked his car. He felt inside the left rear fender until he found the transmitter Webster had put there. It was attached with a strong adhesive, and Christopher broke a fingernail prying it loose. He stuck it under the tailgate of a truck with Nice license plates.

  Christopher headed north, toward Brussels. He reached the airport there by noon. In the tax-free shop he bought Molly a ring shaped like a cobra with rubies for eyes. That afternoon in the sunlight in Piazza del Popolo, he watched her slip it on her finger.

  “A stealthy gift,” she said. “What lovely surprise have you in store for me next?”

  “I’m going to the Far East tomorrow,” Christopher said.

  “Christ. You just got back from there.”

  “I promise to love you the whole time I’m gone,” Christopher said.

  Molly removed the ring and put it on the table between them.

  “Don’t mock me in daylight with the things I say in the dark,” she said. “One day I’m going to leave you alone in bed, Paul, and tell you nothing when I return except that I love you. You’ll find the reassurance means quite a lot.”

  SIX

  1

  The girl led him down one final dark street. This quarter of Saigon was all but silent, but Christopher knew it by day, and its clamor persisted in the heavy air, like rifle shots in the hours after a skirmish. He met the girl in a bar on Tu Do Street. He thought she might be seventeen. She spoke no French; her languages were Cochinese dialect and soldier English.

  “My name is Honey,” she told Christopher. “It rhymes with money.”

  She led him up an outside staircase, tapping his arm so that he would see the boy sleeping on the landing outside her door and step over the curled body.

  When Christopher told her what he wanted, she did not ask his reasons. “You’re not a bad man?” she said. Christopher said that he was not, and she believed him at once, as if no one had ever lied to her.

  Christopher gave her money and she turned around modestly and tucked it away somewhere under her dress. As frail as a child’s wrist, she sat on the bed and wove her hair into a long black braid.

  “Maybe I can go visit my mother while you stay here,” she said, speaking as quickly as the thought crossed her face.

  “No,” Christopher said, “I want you to be here, so that you can say I’m with you and deal with the people—I speak no Vietnamese.”

  Honey finished her braid and pulled her dress over her head. She wore narrow pants printed with bright northern flowers, daisies or black-eyed susans; her skin was almost the color of the dyed blossoms.

  Christopher smiled at her, and she drew in her breath to make her breasts larger. “You change your mind?” she asked.

  “No,” Christopher said, “I just want you to be my sister for a few days, and not bring anyone else to this room.”

  She pulled a mat from under the bed and unrolled it on the floor. “Then I better sleep down here, brother,” she said. She lay down on her back, drew her braid over her shoulder, and grasping it in both small hands, went to sleep.

  Christopher covered her with a sheet and lay down on the bed. Honey had lighted a joss stick; its scent mingled with the stench that poured through the window like dust with sunlight. She made no noise as she slept. Christopher turned on his side and closed his eyes.

  The girl had no papers, she had told him; therefore she had no existence, and if he came and went in the dark, they should both be safe enough. Heat, as palpable as the odors in the room, closed around his body.

  2

  Before it was light, Christopher started walking through the city again. He lost himself twice in cluttered dead-end streets, but he found Luong’s house before the sun had wakened anyone.

  Luong’s wife, wearing a Western bathrobe that was too big for her, answered his knock. She did not know him, and fright showed in her eyes.

  “Tell Luong that Crawford is here,” Christopher said in French.

  “Craww-ford?” she said.

  Christopher repeated the name. “We’re friends,” he said.

  She left the door ajar and Christopher stepped inside the house. A very young child sat up on a mat in the next room and stared silently at him. Christopher winked at the child; he could not tell its sex. Luong’s wife, fully clothed, came and gathered it up; Christopher heard her speaking softly in another room, and in a moment saw her go by the window, with all three of her children following behind her. Her hair was loose, and as she walked she reached behind her with both hands and fastened it with a clip.

  “How did you find my house?” Luong asked.

  Christopher handed him an envelope. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you in Bangkok. You’ll need this.”

  “I waited three days,” Luong said. “When I thought it was useless, I came back.” He did not ask for an explanation; he was trained.

  As they drank tea, sunlight filled the room. Luong had been much abroad. His parlor was furnished with Western sofas and chairs, and alpine scenes hung on the walls. The shrine of his ancestors, visible in a corner of an adjoining room, was crowded with cheap colored glasses filled with wax in which small flames burned on bits of cotton wick.

  “Do you know anything of a person called Lê Thu?” Christopher asked.

  Luong searched his mind. “Is Lê the family name or a given name?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought it might be a family name. I assumed it was a woman’s name.”

  “The Lê were kings of this part of Vietnam before the Nguyen,” Luong said. “It’s a common family name, both in the North and the South.”

  “This Lê Thu has some connection, I don’t know what, with the Ngo family.”

  “The Ngos are not very accessible these days. They’re in mourning, you understand. And they’re learning to be careful again, like everyone else.”

  “Can you find out the connection? But ask with care, Luong—it may be that opium is involved.”

  “I’ll try. It may not be the sort of thing you can pay for.”

  “I need to know who this person is, and where, and what is the connection to the Ngo family.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’ll come here tomorrow, just before dawn. If you want me before then, write the time and the English word airborne above the urinal at the Pussycat Night Club on Tu Do Street. Do you know it?”

  Luong smiled. “I know it. Be careful what you sleep with from that place—they’re all country girls and they don’t know about precautions.”

  “We speak a great deal about precautions to each other, Luong.”

  “Well, it’s a time to be careful. Why are you still aski
ng about the Ngos? The important ones are dead, or gone away.”

  “This is a different matter. They still exist, as a family.”

  “Oh, yes,” Luong said. “Everywhere. They buried a lot of money—and a lot of democratic elements too.”

  Luong’s remark was not meant as a joke. On his home ground, when he was working, he was a serious man. That was what had earned him the Thai girl Christopher had bought for him in Bangkok, and his house in Saigon, on a street where flowers grew beside the dirt walks.

  “What are people saying about the Ngos since Diem and Nhu died?”

  “That their luck ran out. In Vietnam, that’s always the explanation. We have no political analysts, only superstitions and fortune-tellers.”

  “And killers.”

  “Yes, we’ve always had a good cheap supply of those.”

  “Do you think you have some sort of personal luck that keeps you alive, Luong?”

  “Of course. Everyone believes that. Even some foreigners believe it, but not you yourself. I saw that in you from the first —you believe in nothing except the force of human intelligence. Isn’t that so?”

  “I doubt even that.”

  “I thought so. But there are other forces. One waits, and a force moves; it’s like water, soft and yielding, but also possessing great power.” Luong smiled.

  “Lao-tzu,” Christopher said. “What’s your lucky number, Luong?”

  Luong hesitated. “Eleven.”

  “Has it come up lately?”

  “Yes. Nhu wanted to kill me, you know. There were men waiting here for me while I was with you in Bangkok. But Diem and Nhu died while I was away, on November 1—the first day of the eleventh month, an eleven and a one, three elevens if you read from front and back.”

  “What was Diem’s number?”

  “That’s well known. Seven, double seven. He came to power on July 7, as you may know, too.”

  “Does the number go on working after death?”

  “I suppose so,” Luong said. “Any combination of sevens would be good for Diem’s spirit.”