The Tears of Autumn (15 page)

“Look at the snake’s eyes,” Wolkowicz said. “This is the only time they change expression—he gets dreamy while he’s squeezing.”

It took the python a long time to swallow the pig’s limp body. Toward the end, when only the pink rump still showed in the snake’s widened jaws, the python reached around with its tail and pushed the pig into its throat.

“He’ll sleep for days now,” Wolkowicz said. “I never knew they used their tails like that—it’s pretty interesting.”

“You enjoy having him around the house?”

“I make sure I know where he is before I go to sleep-snakes are good pets. They’ve got dry, very smooth skin, like the local girls,” Wolkowicz said, grinning. He grasped the snake’s tail and pulled it across the floor and into a closet.

When he came back he said, “I heard you took a little heat in Washington.”

“Oh, how did you hear that?”

“I got a personal letter from a guy. The way I read it, you’re not supposed to be operating out here anymore.”

“That’s why I wanted to see you, to tell you I’m not operating. All appearances to the contrary, I’m now just an honest reporter, trying to make a living.”

“That’s why you showed up at the Truong toe’s at five-thirty this morning, is it?”

“I’m doing a piece on the Ngos. I thought the Truong toe was a good person to talk to.”

“Yeah. Well, what do you want from me?”

“I hear Don Wolfe is out here.”

“That’s right. He reported in last week.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“Call him up, he’s around.”

Christopher smiled. “I just wanted to go through channels. He works for you. I thought you might like to be present.”

“I don’t
have
to be present. He works for me, as you mentioned.”

“Nevertheless,” Christopher said. “If he’s living next door, I’d be grateful if you’d call him over now. I don’t plan to hang around Saigon very long.”

Wolkowicz pursed his lips. “You’re out, aren’t you?” he said. “Patchen didn’t bother to inform anybody, but news travels.”

“I’m out, Barney.”

“So what’s in this for me?”

“If I run into anything, I’ll let you have it.”

“You’d better,” Wolkowicz said, “or you’ll never get into this country again. You believe that?”

“I believe it.”

“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. A short-range transceiver had been babbling on the coffee table while they spoke. Wolkowicz picked up the microphone and spoke into it.

“Why do you talk German on the radio?” Christopher asked.

Wolkowicz put his hand, covered with stiff black hair, over the microphone, as if it were a telephone receiver. “Wolfe can’t speak Cherokee,” he said.

Don Wolfe wore sagging Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt, and a buttoned seersucker jacket.

“You know the illustrious Christopher?” Wolkowicz said. “Tell him anything he wants to know.”

Wolkowicz picked up a heavy attaché case and his radio and went out of the room. Wolfe removed his jacket, revealing a revolver in a shoulder holster. “Station regulations, we never go out without a gat,” he said. “You don’t believe in firearms, do you?”

“I always thought somebody might take it away from me and shove it down my throat,” Christopher said.

“What can I do for you?”

“A lot, I hope. When did you leave Mexico City?”

“Let’s see, this is December 15.1 left on December 2—four days at headquarters to learn all about Vietnamese culture, then right out here.”

“David Patchen says you worked on the Oswald thing down there.”

“That’s right.”

“Are these dates right?” Christopher recited Oswald’s movements in Mexico City.

“I think so. I haven’t got your flawless memory.”

“Who talked to the people at the Soviet embassy?”

“From our shop? I did.”

“How were they?”

“The Russians? Scared shitless. There was a lot of pressure on them, you know. We had SAC in the air, and you have to admit it looked awfully funny—Oswald a onetime defector, chatting with the KGB in a foreign capital only a few weeks before he shot Kennedy. They were feeling the pressure.”

“Well, that passed.”

“I think we were a little hysterical ourselves—the Russians don’t do things like that anymore. They’re trying to be respectable, like us,” Wolfe said. “When Ruby killed Oswald, everything settled down overnight. That was a real gift, from the Sovs’ point of view.”

“Did you have any surveillance on Oswald while he was in town?”

“No, why would we? You know what the manpower problems are. He was just a jerk who went to Russia once.”

“Oswald was in Mexico City from September 27 to October 1.”

“Well, to September 30, really. He left early in the morning of October 1, by bus.”

“Who else was in town during those three days?”

Wolfe rolled back his eyes. “Jesus, half the human race. What do you mean?”

“Who passed through in that time who interested you? Third-country agents, I mean.”

“Not Mexicans, not Americans. I don’t know if I can remember them all, in the time frame. The Mexico City airport is the place where they all change for Moscow, Peking, and Havana, you know.”

“What about Hanoi?”

“You mean Vietnamese? There weren’t any. Does that narrow it down for you?”

“Not a Vietnamese. A third-country white man, who maybe had been to Vietnam very recently, or was on his way there.”

Wolfe closed his eyes, reached under his T-shirt, scratched his narrow chest.

“There was only one fellow like that,” he said. “Manuel Rogales is his passport name. He uses Manuel Ruiz, Manuel Linares—always Manuel, though. He’s a protégé of Ché’s.”

“Where is he now?”

“I’m not in touch, Paul. If you find out, it’ll be helpful. He’s a great jungle fighter, he goes out and surveys revolutionary prospects for Guevara. He’s been in Bolivia and Colombia, even Panama. He surfaced for about two months this year—mid-August to mid-October. Then he went to ground, as they say, and no one’s seen him since. He’s not in Cuba.”

“He was in Vietnam in that period?”

“Yes,” Wolfe said. “In Hanoi from early September to around the end of the month. I remember his coming through town on a Chilean passport. We got a photo of him from Mexican security at the airport.”

“And after that?”

“We never saw him again. As I said, he pulled the chain on us.” Wolfe sipped his drink. “Does one ask what all this is in aid of?” he asked.

Wolfe spoke like an Englishman and in colder climates wore suits that he ordered by mail from a tailor in London.

“Nothing, probably,” Christopher said. “I’m just curious about the whole incident.”

Wolfe nodded. “How’s your bride?” he asked.

“Cathy? We’ve been divorced for three years.”

“Have you? I guess I haven’t seen you for quite a while. Your loss is somebody’s gain—I always fancied that girl, Paul.”

“Yes, she had a way about her,” Christopher said. “Have you seen Wolkowicz’s python do his act?”

Wolfe gave a high giggle. “Are you changing the subject or telling me the secrets of your bedroom?” he asked.

“Thanks for the dope,” Christopher said.

“That’s all right,” Wolfe said. “Mexico can give you the exact dates and the Cuban’s photograph the next time you get down there.”

“I think I may already have a picture of him somewhere.”

“Do
you? Tell them that in Mexico. They love it when you chaps fly in and save the world over a long weekend.”

Christopher smiled. “So does Wolkowicz. We’re admired wherever we go.”

5

Christopher left Wolkowicz’s house the way he had come, through the walled gardens of the foreigners’ compound. There was no moon, and only a few weak stars broke the black surface of the sky.

When he emerged into a quiet street, he was still alone. He didn’t understand it; by now the Truong toe’s men or the secret police should have picked him up. He walked for a mile or more on side streets, doubling back and wandering into cul-de-sacs as if he were lost, but there was no one behind him. Finally he turned and walked straight toward the glow and racket of Tu Do Street.

In the Pussycat Night Club, Honey sat on the lap of a Special Forces master sergeant. She wore his green beret on the back of her head and drank from a bottle of champagne. The sergeant’s bare forearm, covered with tattoos, encircled her. Christopher finished a bitter beer at the bar and walked across the room. Honey saw him and pointed a derisive thumb at the sergeant, whose face was buried in the hair at the back of her neck. Christopher winked at her. She wore the sergeant’s badges and ribbons on her dress, and she inflated her chest as she had done the night before and giggled again.

Over the urinal, Luong had written
1230 Airborne.
Christopher spat on his thumb and wiped out the message; the blue ballpoint ink stained the ridges of his thumbprint, and he went back to the bar and scrubbed it off with beer and his handkerchief.

Honey put her hands on the bar beside him and said, “You coming home tonight?”

Christopher, watching the sergeant in the mirror, said, “Yes, but very late. Don’t let the sergeant fall asleep.”

Honey’s face, like that of a bride in a photographer’s shop window, was fixed in innocence.

Luong took Christopher’s arm and led him through his darkened house to the bedroom. A picture of Christ, vermilion heart glowing through a white winding sheet, hung over the bed. Christopher had seen the original in Saint Peter’s.

“It’s not good to meet here,” Luong said. “My wife wonders who you are.”

“You can’t go out at night.”

“I can. But carefully. I have something about this name, Lê Thu.”

Christopher was tired; he moved so that his back was against the head of the bed.

“I haven’t put a person to the name yet,” Luong said, “but there is something about it—it startled some of the people I asked.”

“Startled them? Why?”

“I think perhaps there is no person, that this is a false name —but I suppose you expected that.
U,
as you know, comes from the old Chinese. It means, or suggests, ‘tears.’
Thu
means ‘autumn’ in Vietnamese—therefore, ‘the tears of autumn.’”

Christopher nodded. “As Lê Xuan—Madame Nhu’s name —means the tears of spring.”

“Exactly. I asked a man who takes messages into the countryside if he had ever heard the name. His reaction was interesting. He said nothing, as if he were thinking, and then something connected in his memory. He advised me to forget the name, and left me.”

“Did you go on asking after that?”

“No. I had already asked others. There is a man I might see, but he’s not in Saigon. He’s in a village on the way to Bien Hoa. I had no reason to go today, but perhaps tomorrow I can drive there. We have a party cell in the village—he has not been unfriendly.”

“Who is he?”

“He was a Catholic priest when the French were here. They thought he was running with the Viet Minh and they tortured him. They say he’s a eunuch. He still lives in the church and wears priest’s clothes.”

“Does he still run with the Communists?”

Luong shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a remote connection of the Ngos—his grandfather married one of their women while the Catholics were still in the North.”

“Would he talk to me?”

“Not for money. Maybe for curiosity. There’s talk about you —you went to see the Truong toe, I hear. They’ve been asking about a man who must be you. They think you’re French, despite your looks.”

“They haven’t tried to contact me,” Christopher said.

“They can’t find you in any of the places you should be.”

“And if I talk to this priest?”

“Then they’ll find you.”

“He reports to them?”

“He’s their relative, my friend. You’re a foreigner,” Luong said. “There’s a way to deal with him, Crawford. He’s doing some business with opium—a lot more of the stuff has been moving in the last few weeks, I hear.”

“Moving? How?”

“The VC are bringing it in from Cambodia, and from Laos, down the trail. I hear that the principal storage place is under the priest’s church—there are VC tunnels running under the village. They control that part of the countryside.”

“Then he is still running with the Communists?”

“Doing business with them. He’s buying. He has a great deal of money, it’s said, very suddenly. He never had any before.”

“How would one deal with him? Offer to buy? Threaten to expose him?”

“I wouldn’t make threats,” Luong said.

“Show me where he can be found, exactly.”

Luong drew a map on a page of Christopher’s notebook, showing the roads to the village. He drew a row
ofX’s
along the main line. “Ambushes at all these places recently,” he said. On another page he sketched the village, showing the church and the room where the priest lived. Christopher studied the pages for a moment, then ripped them out of the notebook and handed them back to Luong. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“With whites he uses the French style,” Luong said. “Jean-Baptiste Ho.”

Christopher stood up. Fatigue ran through his body like a painful injection. “Where can I get a car without papers?”

“Now? You’re going out there at night?”

“Yes. I can get back before daylight.”

Luong gave him the name of a garage. “There’s one more person I can ask tonight about the name,” he said. “I don’t want to meet here again—have you a place in the city?”

Christopher, so as not to say it aloud, wrote the address of Honey’s room and sketched the entrance. He looked at his watch. “I’ll be back at five o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Don’t come after it’s light.”

“If I have anything by five o’clock, I’ll come,” Luong said.

Christopher shook hands with him. “One more thing—if Lê Thu means the tears of autumn as a name, how do you say it in the ordinary way?

“In Vietnamese?
Nuόe mằt mùa thu.”

“It’s more poetic in French.”

Luong smiled. “You hear music in the language you know,” he said.

6

The car was a Citroen with only thirty thousand kilometers on the odometer. Its soft fabric cushions and the air suspension took some of the ache out of Christopher’s back and legs. There was a checkpoint at the Thi Nghe Canal bridge where the highway joined the avenue leading into Saigon; a young guard took the thousand-piaster note clipped to Christopher’s press card and waved him through.