The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  He ducked through the entrance. As Nsango walked across the parade ground, the Congolese NCO presented arms, and even the Cuban came briefly to attention and saluted. Nsango left his own Kalashnikov behind with Christopher.

  Manuel Ruiz was eating breakfast when Nsango showed Christopher into his hut. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Manuel lived in what had been the chief's compound, in the largest house; the other Cubans were quartered in the adjoining wives’ huts. A half-dozen of the youngest terrorists were hoeing the cassava beds, their faces resentful as they wielded the bent sticks rubbed bare by women’s hands and left behind when the villagers fled.

  Manuel Ruiz said, “Have you eaten?”

  When Christopher shook his head, Ruiz pushed a boiled yam and a knife across the table and poured warm beer from a liter bottle into a canteen cup. The Cuban was a young man, no more than thirty, with curly hair growing to his collar. He cultivated an air of menace that went badly with his smooth face and his wide frank eyes and snub nose. His skin was pale and he had the tremor of the dysentery victim. He ate and drank efficiently, without pausing to taste, as though to quiet his body in order to go on to more important things with the least possible delay. His eyes never left Christopher’s face. The yam was dry and overcooked; he washed down each bite with a mouthful of beer.

  Sunlight fell in splinters through the thatched roof, striping Manuel’s green uniform. He had arranged his belongings around the walls—cases of ammunition stenciled with Cyrillic writing, a rack of weapons, unopened boxes of rifles, an American radio that ran off a gasoline generator. Pictures of Fidel Castro and Lenin, and a poster showing abject prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs and their outdated American weapons, had been pinned to the sloping ceiling.

  Ruiz finished his yam, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and said, “Now. What are you doing in this installation?” He spoke grammatical French, and mixed with his adenoidal Latin American accent were some Congolese intonations.

  “Nsango has explained how I got here.”

  “Yes,” Manuel said. “But not why. You and he are old friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “He says you’re an activist, that you’ve helped him.”

  “I’ve always admired Nsango.”

  Christopher handed Manuel the knife he had loaned him, handle first. It, too, was American, a new-issue, short-bladed bayonet.

  “What I want to say to you has something to do with your work in another place,” Christopher said. “I bring you some help for what you’re doing here.”

  “Oh? What are your auspices?”

  “I’ve brought you a gift from a friend—Do Minh Kha.”

  “Do?” Manuel said. “Do Minh Kha? A gift from him? Where did you see him?”

  “I didn’t. He passed it to me through a friend in Saigon. He wanted to bypass ordinary channels. He said you’d understand why.”

  “And the friend in Saigon—what was his name?”

  Christopher paused to give it weight. “Lê Thu.”

  Manuel took the name, but not eagerly. Christopher watched the Cuban’s reaction as an angler watches his line, drawn through the water by a sluggish fish. He decided to let it go for the moment. There was no reason why the Vietnamese would have told Manuel the code name for their operation: he did not need to know. But they would have had to give him some hint, and it was possible they had given him more than that. If they talked not at all to outsiders, intelligence officers talked too much to each other.

  “What were you doing in Saigon?” Manuel asked.

  “Working. My work is mainly in that camp.”

  “And your name, Nsango tells me, is Charron?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew where to find me, you knew my name, you knew Nsango could bring you to me?”

  “I had some assistance.”

  Ruiz drew the dull edge of the bayonet down the bridge of his nose; when he brought the blade away it was filmed with sweat and he shook it off the steel with a snap of his wrist. “That’s a little disturbing,” he said.

  “Then you should dress less conspicuously,” Christopher said. “Even operating at night, that costume of yours is easily recognized. You’re in a place where white men draw attention just by being white, and you’re dealing with people who don’t know the meaning of discretion. Nsango’s men are not Nsango.”

  Manuel tugged at the lapel of his fatigue jacket and glanced at his tarnished badge of rank, earned with Castro in the Sierra Maestra. “We’re used to these clothes. They symbolize something.”

  “Well, it’s no concern of mine,” Christopher said. “You may have better success than others who’ve tried to do what you’re doing. Success is more important than security, after all.”

  “Is it not? All right, what does Do want?”

  “To thank you. To give you this for your work here.”

  Christopher counted twenty thousand Swiss francs, in sodden thousand-franc notes, onto the bamboo table. Ruiz sat with his hands in his lap, gazing at the money.

  “Very handsome of Do,” he said. “What’s it for?”

  “As I said, for your work—a gesture of solidarity.”

  “Yes—but in return for what?”

  “Lê Thu,” Christopher said.

  “What is Lê Thu?”

  “I was told you’d understand. If you don’t, so much the better for Do’s security.”

  “I spent ten days in Hanoi. I didn’t become fluent in Vietnamese.”

  “In French the name means ‘the tears of autumn.’ ”

  Manuel Ruiz’s eyes moved away from Christopher’s. He sat very still, then picked up the stack of pink bank notes. Christopher knew the signs, knew he had been right.

  “Las lagrimas del otoño,” Manuel muttered. “How did you come by that phrase?”

  “I help out, when I can, with some of Do’s operations. He can’t move freely outside his own country—he stands out, as you do among these blacks. Money, for example, must be carried and delivered.”

  Manuel nodded and cleared his throat. “It’s remarkable what they can accomplish, Do and his people. But you’re right, of course, their race limits them. They have to rely on others from time to time.”

  “Once again, security is sometimes less important than success.”

  “There’s no such thing as security among professionals. You’re here. I wouldn’t have thought that possible.”

  Ruiz folded the money in half and stuffed it into his breast pocket. He fastened the metal button.

  “Frankly,” Christopher said, “Do didn’t think what you did was possible. He’s very grateful. You were the key.”

  Manuel leaned back in his chair and slapped his palm with the flat of the bayonet. He struggled with a smile of pleasure, then submitted to it. He had large even teeth.

  Manuel Ruiz’s mind opened with an almost audible click. Christopher had seen this happen before to men who had done great things in secret. No matter how disciplined, they wanted admiration. Manuel, sent by Che Guevara into a Congolese rain forest, was a long way from people he could trust—who could understand what he had done. Christopher didn’t know whether Ruiz had decided to trust him or kill him, but he knew that Ruiz had decided to talk.

  But not immediately. Manuel moved a stack of papers to the center of his desk, and wetting his thumb, began to go through them. After a time he looked up and recoiled in mock surprise, as if he had forgotten that he had a guest.

  “You must excuse me now, I have urgent work,” he said. “You’ll stay the night, I suppose? Eat supper with me.”

  “Gladly. I have some Polish vodka in my bag. Do you like it?”

  “No, but I’ll drink it, Charron.”

  3

  Outside, in the scorched white light of afternoon, nothing moved. Christopher heard African laughter coming from the huts and a radio playing songs in one of the Congolese languages. The sun had dried the cassava beds so that the soil was as fine as rouge.

  N
sango sat in his hut, reading. When Christopher entered on his hands and knees, Nsango put a finger in his book to mark the place and showed him the cover. It was a French translation of one of Albert Schweitzer’s works. Even before he became a terrorist, Nsango had told Christopher that Schweitzer, who lived among black lepers in order to save his own white soul, was the only man in Africa he dreamed of murdering.

  “Know thine enemy,” Nsango said.

  Christopher took off the bush jacket he had been wearing, wiped the perspiration from the small wire recorder in its breast pocket, and fitted a new spool of wire.

  “How did it go?” Nsango asked.

  “All right. He’ll talk tonight. He wants to talk to someone.”

  “Yes, he’s lonely. He’s above the other Cubans—they’re louts. Manuel is an educated man.”

  “What are his communications with the outside?”

  “You saw the radio. It breaks down a lot, and the man who knew how to fix it was the one who was bitten by the snake. Manuel has a link with the Russian radio in Dar es Salaam, but sometimes it takes hours to raise them. I think they don’t listen for his transmissions.”

  “Would you consider sabotaging the radio?”

  Nsango shrugged. “He’ll connect it to you.”

  “Not if you’re subtle. The generator operates on a gasoline motor. Put a little dirt in the gas tank.”

  “Sooner or later he’s going to describe you to someone in their apparatus.”

  “Maybe. But not today.”

  “All right, I’ll have it done. Manuel won’t try to transmit until after dark—the sun interferes.”

  Christopher stood up and poured water into his mouth from the calabash. He touched Nsango’s Kalashnikov rifle, setting it swinging gently on its hangers.

  “I see the weapons have been issued.”

  “Only to me and other more advanced natives,” Nsango said. “The men are growing impatient.”

  “I counted ten cases of rifles in Manuel’s hut. Your men must want them very badly.”

  “Yes. Manuel or one of the other Cubans guards them all the time.”

  Christopher sat down on the beaten dirt floor. “How soon do you expect to kill them?” he asked.

  “It’s difficult, even though there are only four of them left besides Manuel. I don’t want to use juju again, it leaves the men in a bad way afterward. And the Cubans never go out with us all at once. It’s easiest to do it in a fire fight, so they think it’s the other side.”

  “I’d like to see Manuel Ruiz live for a while—a month or two.”

  Nsango lay against the twigs and clay of the wall, his legs stretched before him, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “Manuel wants to live, too,” he said. “He has zeal for the idea of what he’s doing—not, I think, for the act itself. That’s only a means to an end. He wants to go back to Cuba and tell how black men died like flies for his idea. As I’m the only one who understands the idea, or even knows what Communism is, he needs me. Mine is the only black name he can remember. To him, the others have no names, any more than lions or porcupines have names; they’re fauna. But my name is known in the world, thanks to another white man—you. ‘I led Alphonse Nsango’s revolution, I am the white explanation for his victory,’ Ruiz will say.”

  “Don’t blame me for your fame.”

  “No? Then who hired all those boys to paint ‘Nsango’ on the walls in Léopoldville and Brussels, who bribed the journalists and wrote their stories of my heroism, who carried my book through the jungles to a publisher?” Nsango pointed both index fingers at Christopher and laughed. “To whom do I owe this life of adventure and idealism, to whom do I owe Manuel, if not to you?”

  “If I’ve done all that for you, then keep Manuel Ruiz alive for me. I may need him again.”

  “I don’t know if I can keep him alive, and you, too. He’ll kill you when he’s had time to think.”

  “He mustn’t be killed until he’s talked. It may be necessary for him to talk again.”

  Nsango’s smile had not left his lips. “All right,” he said.

  4

  Christopher knew that a man who is trained to keep secrets can be counted upon, when at last he breaks his oath of silence, to tell everything he knows. The spoiled spy will reveal the true names of his superiors and his agents, he will suggest ways to destroy his own networks. He will bore his interrogators, who until the day before were his enemies, with the details of his thefts, betrayals, unauthorized murders, sexual vices.

  Manuel Ruiz had not reached that point, but he was at a more dangerous one: he was an idealist who had done a great thing for his cause. Idealists make brave agents, but they are bad intelligence officers. They cannot exist for long without the company of like minds; they have a need to speak their beliefs and to hear their beliefs spoken. Ruiz wanted to talk and he had no one to talk to.

  He did not trust Christopher, but Christopher was white and he knew Ruiz’s ideological vocabulary. Besides, Christopher was in Ruiz’s camp, surrounded by Ruiz’s men, miles from safety. Ruiz imagined that he could kill him whenever he liked.

  Ruiz was drunk. Christopher had gone to his hut in the dark, following another Cuban who carried a lantern. Ruiz opened tins—sardines, tuna fish, pineapple, cheese, round un-salted biscuits. They ate from this Utter of food with their fingers and drank Christopher’s vodka, warm in tin cups. For hours they talked about places they had been, Ruiz testing Christopher to see if they knew the same people. Christopher knew some of them in fact and others from hearsay; a few he knew more intimately than Ruiz ever would because he had run agents against them. Ruiz wore a .45 Colt automatic, U.S. Army issue, in a shoulder holster; its butt, like Ruiz’s fingers after dipping into the canned fish, shone with oil.

  Manuel left the hut frequently to empty his bowels; he had a bad case of dysentery and it carried the oily food through his body in a torrent. It was after Ruiz came back from one of his trips to the latrine that Christopher saw the idea come into his eyes. It amused Ruiz as an idea for mischief will amuse an intelligent boy. He knew what Christopher wanted to talk about; he would talk. Then he would keep Christopher until he could authenticate him, or kill him.

  “These blacks of mine sometimes eat their prisoners,” Ruiz said.

  “So I understand.”

  Ruiz drank from his canteen cup, his eyes wide open and bright over its rim. “We began to talk about Do Minh Kha and his people this afternoon,” he said.

  “I remember.”

  “I’ve never heard of you, Charron. Perhaps that should reassure me. You know Do well, do you?

  “Well enough. I explained the relationship to you.”

  Ruiz looked at the ceiling, swirled the vodka in his cup, fixed his eyes on Christopher; his speech was blurred, and he struggled to enunciate the foreign language he was speaking. He began a sentence in Spanish, stopped himself, and rephrased it in French.

  “They have a good revolution, the Vietnamese,” he said. “Like ours—the same enemy, the same devotion, the same practicality.”

  Christopher permitted a grin to cover his face, as if he knew a joke too delicious to conceal.

  “Do you know Benshikov?” he asked.

  “He was in Havana for two years.”

  “After that, in Hanoi. Benshikov can be pompous. He wanted to reorganize the North Vietnamese service on KGB lines. Do told Benshikov that the Soviet service was too bureaucratic to have imagination. Do said you Cubans had the best service in the world, because your revolution is still young enough to feel hunger and rage.”

  Ruiz nodded, accepting the compliment. “Do told me that story, too,” he said.

  Christopher went on speaking, as if prolonging the joke. “It was Benshikov who suggested a professional rifleman for Dallas, you know. Do wouldn’t tell him the details, just that he wanted an assassin.”

  Ruiz read the label on the empty vodka bottle.

  “Truthfully, at the time, I thought they had chosen t
he wrong man—not you, the assassin,” Christopher said. “He was so unstable.”

  Ruiz seized the bottle by the neck and tapped on the table with it; outside, some of Nsango’s men were drumming and Ruiz tried to reproduce the rhythm, which was almost as complicated as speech.

  “Oswald was insane,” he said. “But perhaps that’s what was needed.”

  Christopher lifted his eyebrows. “Did you imagine he could succeed?” he asked.

  “No. That’s why I was permitted by my own people to go ahead with the contact. They regarded it as a harmless favor to the Vietnamese—a credit for the future when we might want something from them. It wasn’t a high-level decision. I can’t imagine who had the balls to pass the word to Fidel after Oswald actually shot Kennedy. Naturally the Americans suspected us. A lot of people in Havana must have been very, very nervous.”

  “Your people had no misgivings?”

  Ruiz waved a hand. “It’s the old rule—the result justified whatever risk there might be. They thought even an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kennedy would have an important propaganda effect. To show he wasn’t safe in his own country.”

  “Yes, but Oswald himself was a risk. I don’t know how you avoided terrible handling problems.”

  “I handled Oswald very little, Charron. The contact was peculiar. He was such an outsider, such a clown. Our people in Mexico wouldn’t let me take him to a safe house, even. I spoke to him for perhaps an hour, in the Alameda, between planes.”

  “But it was you who brought him to Mexico.”

  “Yes, and I who suggested him to Do Minh Kha. I had his dossier with me in Hanoi, it came out to me in the pouch with a lot of other low-level stuff. One of our agents in New Orleans had assessed Oswald. He was trying to draw our attention there with that ridiculous thing of passing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. We approached him. He offered to train and lead freedom fighters in Latin America. We pretended interest. Our man told him he’d have no problem getting a transit visa for the USSR at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. The idea was that he’d stay in Havana, but the FBI and the CIA and all the others Oswald thought were watching him would think he’d redefected to Russia. Are you following?”