The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  Christopher rose, hesitated, held out his hand. Phuoc gripped it tightly and, holding it for a long moment, threw back his head and laughed again. “Luong—Tho should have asked Yu Lung about his own future, eh? Instead of asking questions for you, Craww-ford. Do you know what the Vietnamese name Tho means?”

  “Longevity.”

  “Yes, my brother will be dead for a long time,” Phuoc said. “Tho is also the word for a coffin that’s purchased well in advance of death. We thank you again for the money.”

  5

  Wolkowicz had given Christopher a car and a driver. “It’ll save us both trouble,” Wolkowicz said. “You don’t seem to care who knows where you go, and I can’t spare three men to sur-veille you until you get on the plane tonight.”

  “Who’s the driver?”

  “Pong’s his name. He’s a Thai, so he’s disinterested. He’ll take you where you want to go and wait outside—but don’t go off and leave him. I’m responsible to the cops until you get out of the country.”

  The car was an air-conditioned Chevrolet with a two-way radio and local license tags. Pong was flicking dust from the waxed hood with a feather duster when Christopher emerged from Luong’s house. Under the tail of his long silk shirt, Pong wore a heavy revolver. One of Wolkowicz’s Swedish submachine guns was clipped under the dashboard, with three extra magazines stowed in polyethylene pouches tacked to the door. “Pong’s got a reputation around town,” Wolkowicz had said. “These people fear the Thais, and they couldn’t be more careful of old Pong if we painted shark’s teeth and a crazy eyeball on him, like a surplus B-26.”

  Pong put his feather whisk in the trunk of the car and sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel until Christopher told him where to go. Then he moved off, turning the car into traffic as a good dancer would swing a woman onto a ballroom floor. He was a competent man.

  All during the morning, while he was looking at Luong in his coffin and talking to Phuoc, Christopher had controlled the impulse to touch the photograph the Truong toe had given him. Now he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out the picture of Molly. He looked at his watch; he could not be in Rome in less than thirty-six hours. It was useless to send a telegram. Molly wasn’t trained, she wouldn’t know how to hide, she would think the cable was a joke. Christopher was not used to feeling emotion; he was as surprised by his fear for Molly as he had been by his love for her.

  Pong maneuvered the clumsy car through traffic on the quais along the Ben Nghe Canal. Sampans lay in the foul water, their decks swarming with boatmen whose joints bulged on their thin bodies like knurs on diseased trees.

  “Driving this car is like being in America,” Pong said, “so cool and quiet—I don’t like to get out.”

  Christopher pressed the electric window control. The stench and noise of the canal and the heat of noon thrust through the open window like a beggar’s hand. Pong made a disgusted sound in his throat and stared at Christopher in the rear-view mirror. He turned north, toward the center of Cholon.

  Yu Lung’s house was not far from the place where Christopher’s Citroen had exploded. The wreck had been hauled away, but broken glass still glittered on the pavement and the flames had left a long smudge across the face of a building. A soup vendor stood with his car where the Citroen had been, tapping on a block of wood with two sticks to attract customers.

  They drove through the neighborhood twice before they found the house. Once, emerging from a sea of tin-roofed hovels, they found themselves across the city boundary, trapped on a narrow road through fields of paddy. Pong stepped on the accelerator and, reaching through the steering wheel, worked the action of the submachine gun to put a round in the chamber. He found a place to turn around by a group of huts; Pong pulled the wheel all the way over and skidded the tires in an arc through the dust. Christopher watched a young boy, astride a buffalo in a water hole, disappear in the cloud of dirt thrown upward by the wheels of the Chevrolet, and then come out the other side, not having moved while the slow wind moved the dust over him and the buffalo.

  “Stop in the shade,” Christopher said, when they had passed Yu Lung’s house for the second time. He wrote six dates, each followed by a time of day, on a page of his notebook. Then he tore five hundred-dollar bills in half, put five halves in an envelope with the notebook page, and placed the other torn halves in his wallet.

  “Pong, walk back so they don’t see the car,” he said, “and give this to whoever answers the door. Make an appointment for me to see Yu Lung after dark tonight—but not after nine o’clock. Tell him I want horoscopes for the men born under the first four dates and times—he’ll have to transpose the dates to the lunar calendar. I want to trace the connection between the birth dates and the last two dates, which are days and times when certain events took place. Have you got all that?”

  Pong scowled and repeated Christopher’s instructions. “Who do I tell him is coming?” he asked. “He may not want to see an American.”

  “Tell him I’m a friend of Lê Thu,” Christopher said. Pong tapped the submachine gun to call Christopher’s attention to it and stepped into the street. Pong rocked from side to side as he walked, as if the taut muscles of his squat body were disputing the signals from his brain.

  When he came back, he nodded at Christopher. “Yu Lung will have the stuff for you at eight o’clock,” he said.

  “Let’s have some lunch, then,” Christopher said.

  “Barney told me not to leave the car.”

  “Have you anything with you?”

  “Sandwiches,” Pong said, holding up a packet. “I made them at Barney’s while you were telephoning the young lady.”

  “You’re a good operator, Pong. Did you report that to Wolkowicz?”

  “Yes, on the radio while I waited for you at the dead man’s house. That’s when he told me not to leave the car.”

  6

  Nicole was waiting at the table on the roof of the Majestic, a Coca-Cola before her and the city spread out beyond her soft profile. She wore a different French frock; her hair was bound with a broad white ribbon that passed over the top of her head. Christopher sat down with his back to the view, so that he could watch the door and the room.

  “I’m a little surprised you came,” he said.

  “You came last night when I invited you.”

  “Yes. I hope you have a quieter journey home than I had.”

  “You seem well. There’s a cut on your cheek.”

  Christopher spoke to the waiter, who poured cassis in the bottom of a glass and filled it with white wine.

  “You shouldn’t drink wine at midday in this climate,” Nicole said. “It’s very bad for the liver.” Her eyes looked beyond him as she watched ships move in the river.

  “Well,” Christopher said, “have you any compliments or messages for me from the Truong toe?”

  Nicole smiled, a sudden sly glint of teeth and eyes. “He doesn’t confide—I listen at doors. I listened last night, in Cho-lon. You took their breath away, you know.”

  “Did I? Then they have very good self-control.”

  “They don’t know how to deal with you. At first they thought you were insane.”

  “And now?”

  Nicole traced a pattern on the tablecloth with her fingernail, then looked up quickly into Christopher’s eyes. “They think you’re in a terrific hurry. That upsets them more than what you say you know, or suspect. They think you want to lay this theory out before the world as truth. They know you’re a journalist.”

  “I’ve never concealed it.”

  “They know what else you are. You conceal that.”

  “Then I’m concealing it still. I’m only a journalist, Nicole. There’s no one behind what I’m doing.”

  Nicole shuddered with impatience. “You suppose they don’t know where you slept last night, or whose car you have today? Come, Paul—really.”

  “My embassy thought, for some reason, that I needed protection. I was glad to h
ave it.”

  Nicole looked at him again and laughed shrilly, almost in the tones of Phuoc’s laughter. The waiter brought them fish, poured more wine, and went away. Nicole ate deftly, saying nothing until she had cleared her plate. Her eyes moved busily over the landscape behind Christopher’s shoulder; the sun filtering through the green awning changed the hue of her skin as she turned into the light or away from it.

  “What you were saying to my uncles last night—were you serious?” she asked.

  “About revealing what they had done? Absolutely.”

  “If they have done such a thing—let us have that plainly understood.”

  “All right. It isn’t proved that they did.”

  “You think the proof would have the effect you described? Would the Americans leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s logical,” Nicole said. “The Americans would do what you say in the open, before the world. But what would they do secretly?”

  Christopher shrugged. “I don’t know. Not much. After all, it was a fair enough exchange.”

  Nicole drew in her breath. “You are cold-blooded. Would you speak in this way to an American?”

  “I’ve done so. They don’t like it any more than you do, Nicole.”

  Nicole touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. “Leave Vietnam,” she said. “You don’t understand us.”

  “Don’t I? Tell me about yourself, Nicole. Where were you born? What were your schools? What is your future?”

  She drew back her hand. “All that means nothing.” She touched her temples. “You believe one lives in this part of the body, but I live in my three souls and my nine spirits, and there are a thousand vital points in my body. Each one of which touches a time or a date or a number in the lunar calendar, which you cannot even understand. I never speak my own name, nor does anyone who loves me. You haven’t time, if you lived here for another fifty years, to begin to understand.”

  Christopher put a forefinger on her brow; she made no movement to avoid it. “If your brain stops,” he said, “then all this wonderful system of mysteries stops, too, doesn’t it?”

  “In this body, yes. There are other forms, other forces that go on.”

  “You seem determined to convince me that Vietnamese culture is a secret code.”

  “And you seem determined not to believe me.”

  Christopher called for the bill. While he counted out the money, Nicole sat watching him, her upper lip caught between her thumb and forefinger. Christopher remembered how he had closed Luong’s dead mouth, and again saw the grain of rice between his lips, magic against the Celestial Dog. It took him a moment to realize that Nicole’s long fingernail was pressing into the back of his hand. When he looked up, she removed it, leaving a white half-moon on his sunburnt skin.

  In Vietnamese she said, “My name is Dao. I was born in Hanoi. I am twenty-three. All that is worth loving will die around me before I have a child.”

  Christopher, giving no sign that he understood her language, folded his napkin into a neat triangle. “We seem to be back where we began,” he said. “I thought we might to beyond gibberish today.”

  “You really don’t believe in the importance of anything I’ve told you, do you?”

  “Oh, yes, I believe in its importance, and you’ve taught me quite a lot,” Christopher said. “But if there is one certain thing about codes, it’s this—they can be broken. Tell the Truong toe I thank him again for the photograph he gave me last night. Tell him, too, that I have some pictures of my own.”

  “I don’t understand that message.”

  “The Truong toe will understand. Like me—and like Diem and Nhu—he believes in consequences.”

  EIGHT

  l

  “Barney ordered me not to leave you,” Pong said. His eyes darted over the crowd in the narrow street outside Yu Lung’s house. There was enough light to see movement, but not enough to distinguish faces. Bicycles drifted by, and an occasional motor scooter sounded its horn, scattering pedestrians and cyclists as it plunged past the parked car.

  “If you stay here with the car you’ll draw attention,” Christopher said. “Go somewhere else, and come by again at exactly nine o’clock. I’ll be here.”

  A cyclist peered angrily through the windshield and hammered on the hood of the car.

  Pong said, “Okay, nine o’clock. If you’re not here, I’ll come inside.”

  He drove away through the crowd, touching the horn lightly in a series of Morse dots to clear the way ahead of him. Christopher was annoyed by Pong’s unnecessary noise. Then he realized it made no difference—secrecy was of no further use to him in Saigon.

  Yu Lung’s house had a blind front except for a frame of carved wood, painted red, around the door. The lintel was low, and Christopher ducked his head to enter. A servant with a large flashlight showed him down a long hall to the back of the house. They walked past rooms filled with noise—plaintive Chinese music playing on a gramophone, loud voices, the beating of a spoon against a pot in the kitchen. But the hall itself was dead space. It was impossible to guess what sort of people lived behind the closed doors.

  After the noise and the pungent smell of the house, Christopher did not expect to find Yu Lung looking as he did. The fortune-teller was a man of forty with a round prosperous belly under a checkered vest and a gold watch chain. He greeted Christopher not in a dim room hung with incense and calligraphy but in a brightly lighted office, sitting at a polished desk with gray-steel file cabinets behind him. There were two telephones and a photograph of his wife and her young children in a gold frame on the desk. Yu Lung rose from his chair with a smile and shook hands with Christopher. The pressure of his hand was firm and quick.

  “Yu Lung,” he said. “You’re a friend of—who was it again?”

  “Le Thu.” Christopher found himself smiling broadly—Yu Lung had made magic efficient.

  Christopher took the torn halves of the five one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and laid them on the desk. The Chinese produced his own portions of the torn bills from a desk drawer and spent a moment fitting them together on the glass top of his desk.

  “Is the fee satisfactory?” Christopher asked.

  “I’ve drawn the horoscopes for you,” Yu Lung said. He spread six sheets of rice paper over the top of the desk. On each sheet he had drawn a circle; symbols connected by lines lay within the circle. A vertical row of Chinese characters ran down the edge of each page. Yu Lung looked expectantly at Christopher.

  “I’m afraid I can’t read these without assistance,” Christopher said.

  Yu Lung nodded. “As you no doubt suspected, there is a remarkable conjunction of forces between the four men and the two dates you gave me. The fates are acting quite strongly on one other. Do you wish a classical interpretation, or a Vietnamese reading?”

  “Vietnamese, to begin with,” Christopher said.

  “I thought you might, so I’ve added the geomantic factors as well. Briefly, three of these men are either dead already or will be on”—he ran his finger down a lunar calendar— “the next conjunction of their forces, which will occur, in Western time, seven years from now on the dates you gave me for the events.”

  He pushed aside the charts that he had drawn for Kennedy, Diem, and Nhu on the basis of their birth dates and times.

  “This fourth man,” Yu Lung said, tapping the Truong toe’s chart, “is active in the fates of the others. I see no danger for him. You understand, you’ve asked me to work from very limited information.”

  “I’m impressed with what you’ve done. How much faith have you in your results?”

  “Well, you understand that the basis of horoscopy in our system is that the stars and all the other portents predispose rather than predetermine an individual’s fate. A man’s acts can alter his reading—in other words, he can avoid destruction through wisdom, or cheat himself of good fortune through stupidity. But the forces here are quite clear.”

  “A
nd the factors other than horoscopy?”

  “Yes, the geomantic factors. You understand the principle of geomancy, of course—one orients oneself to the natural world on the basis of harmony with the five natural elements, which are fire, water, metal, wood, and earth. None of these three men seems to have been in harmony with the world. In Vietnamese terms, they were all under the influence of the Ma Than Vong.”

  “Which is?”

  “A very colorful and malevolent force—the tightening-knot ghost. Ma Than Vong goads men to suicide, or into situations where their violent death is inevitable. One of the men, this one—a foreigner, I believe—am I correct?”

  Christopher nodded. Yu Lung had shown him Kennedy’s horoscope.

  “The foreigner was a powerful man,” Yu Lung said, “but his particular nemesis was Ma A Phien, whom the Vietnamese call the opium ghost. This man was predisposed to a death in the pleasures. Also, he was much involved with the am, the female spirit that stands for darkness and is associated with death. As for the others, who must be Vietnamese, there was a long period of the influence of duong, or the male spirit of light, or life. Then this force conjoins with the am spirit of the other man, and they are lost.”

  “By whose error?”

  “Their own, of course. As I said, we are dealing with predisposition, not predetermination. The horoscope is incomplete, as you must realize.”

  “Incomplete? In what way?”

  “There are other individuals involved. One in particular, who I could guess is a Vietnamese related in some way to the other two. Perhaps he lives elsewhere than in the place where his two relatives live, or lived. He exerts a force after their death. It’s a key force. Without knowing his stars, you will not understand the others.”

  Yu Lung rocked back in his swivel chair with a faint squeal of metal springs and folded his hands on his stomach. “Would you care for some tea,” he asked, “or a glass of scotch whiskey?” Yu Lung’s face was circular like his charts—a small pursed mouth, a broad nose that moved when he smiled, arched eyebrows.