The Tears of Autumn (16 page)

The Citroen made very little noise apart from the grip of its tires on the tar road. Christopher turned off the headlights, and by the time he was far enough away from Saigon to be in danger, he saw well enough in the starlight to drive as fast as the car would go. His eye followed the road through the trees and the low bushes, and the paddies shining in the darkness like coins. He saw no movement. He didn’t think that anyone would expect to see a darkened car moving at 150 kilometers an hour, or be able to hit it with gunfire.

On the dirt track leading into the village, Christopher went more slowly, but still dust blew in the open windows and coated the interior of the car. The church was a small building standing by itself beyond the huts that lined the principal street. Light from the altar candles leaked through its thin walls. Inside, there were a few long benches with their ends lying in deep shadow. Like Patchen’s house in Washington, the church was a place in which nothing involving human emotion had happened in a long time.

Christopher knocked, loudly, on the door behind the altar. The priest opened the door at once; behind him, the tiny room in which he lived was lit by a kerosine lantern. He wore a cassock, unbuttoned at the top so that his neck and his bony chest showed. Christopher heard a soft noise and saw a woman sitting upright on a plank bed; she turned her eyes aside and went to stand with her back against the wall at the far side of the room.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,” Christopher said. “I need your help.”

The little priest threw back his head and looked Christopher in the eye. “It’s very late,” he said. “It’s very dangerous, there are no army patrols at this time of night.”

“So I understand, but it was important that I see you. You are Jean-Baptiste Ho?”

“And you are what—a Frenchman?”

The priest fumbled with the tiny buttons on his cassock. He had a facial twitch; his cheek moved, causing the right eye to open and close like a caged owl’s. Christopher had never seen an Oriental with such an affliction. Remembering what Luong had told him about the priest’s experiences with French interrogators, Christopher said, “Father, I’m an American.”

“Ah? You don’t look or sound it, if I may pay you that compliment.”

“Well, I’m something of an outcast,” Christopher said. “I have lived very little in America as an adult, so I haven’t kept up with my countrymen’s manners.”

“You’re an outcast—or a pariah?”

“Between the two, for the time being—like yourself, Father.”

The priest still stood in the doorway of his room, with the motionless woman behind him. His twitch became more active, and he placed a hand, ropy with age, over his cheek. “Like
me?”

“Like you,” Christopher said. “Your relatives the Ngos were willing enough to tolerate an unfrocked priest who dealt with the enemy and used his church for cover. Perhaps you could be of service to them in small ways. But the new regime is less tolerant. How long do you think you’ll last here?”

The priest called out a phrase in Vietnamese. His woman rummaged in a box and brought him an envelope filled with white powder. He turned his head away and snuffled heroin into his nostrils. In a moment his cheek quietened, and he gestured Christopher to follow him. They sat down together on a bench near the altar.

“The regime makes a great deal of noise in the daylight,” the priest said. “As you see, their soldiers are very quiet at night.”

“That’s fine for those who live only at night, like the Viet-cong combatants. For those who wish to utilize the whole clock, it’s inconvenient. When next you send a message to Kim in Paris, tell him to change banks. The Banque Sadak in Beirut is leaky.”

The priest’s twitch had stopped altogether. The heroin had had an effect and also, Christopher saw, it was not the present that drove the man’s nerves out of the control, but a memory of the past. He put his hands in the sleeves of his soutane and gazed at Christopher.

“I’ve heard something about you, I think,” he said. “You have a great deal of information.”

“I have an appetite for it. Father, I have no curiosity about your traffic in opium or in politics. It’s your affair. But it’s the sort of thing, if it were to come to the wrong ears, that could send you to prison again. Where did the French put you?”

“Chi Hoa Prison.”

“You have a relative there now—Ngo Dinh Can.”

“Thanks to the Americans, yes. Thanks to them, I have no doubt Can’s jailers have more modern equipment than mine did—the French are poor mechanics. They used field telephones, water, even their boots.”

“Yes—and Can is guarded by Vietnamese, not Frenchmen,” Christopher said. “That makes a difference.”

“I suppose so. What is it you want?”

“I want to talk to you about a certain Lê Thu.”

Like a man picking up a teacup to show that his hand does not tremble, the priest moved his eyes slowly from Christopher’s face to the dusty altar and back again. “I know no one named Le Thu,” he said.

“My Vietnamese is very poor,” Christopher said. “The name means ‘the tears of autumn,’ does it not?”

“You’ve come here to discuss Vietnamese names and their derivations from archaic Chinese? I’m not an expert.”

“Father, I’ve given you some information, voluntarily. Perhaps I could give you more—I have an idea that your business with Kim is important. If you go on taking heroin, you’ll soon be of no use to your family or your movement, and if the regime doesn’t kill you, the drug certainly will. You will have had a personal experience of its effects when you go to your grave, and since you are a political man as well as a member of the Ngo family, I expect that you’ll smile to think of the American soldiers you’ve doomed to be ruined like yourself. They’ll be very young and very stupid.”

“You have a morbid imagination.”

“I’ve learned to understand revenge,” Christopher said. “What I want to know I want to know for myself, not for any family or any government, or any other person. I understand that you won’t believe that, but it’s true.”

“And what is it you want to know?”

“First let me tell you what you get in return. Silence. I’ll tell no one—not in Saigon, not in Washington, not in Paris—what you are planning with heroin.”

“Why not? Do you care nothing for your countrymen?”

“Yes. But I’ll be truthful once again. They wouldn’t believe it—they underestimate you. They think you haven’t the intelligence or the resources, and they think they are too strong for you, as individuals and as a nation.”

“Then they are weaker than I thought.”

“No, they’re not weak,” Christopher said. “They just don’t see that the weak can strike at them. The senses travel very slowly in such an enormous body as America’s. Men like you can wound, but you cannot kill such a large organism. That’s
your
weakness.”

“So, what is it you want to know in return for your silence, and this lesson on philosophy?”

“Three things,” Christopher said. “First, is Lê Thu the code name of the operation that was carried out on November 22 in Dallas? Second, how was the message transmitted from Saigon to the North, and then to the man who recruited the American assassin? Third, what is the name of your relative in the intelligence service of North Vietnam who recruited the man who, in turn, activated Oswald?”‘

The priest sniffed; the drug had fixed a smile on his face, and his body rocked slightly as if in rhythm with the movement of the heroin through his bloodstream.

“You’re very direct,” he said. “You must not be afraid of consequences.”

“I’m careful of them. You’ve read detective stories, I suppose? The blackmailer always arranges that his information will pass into other hands if he is killed.”

“You’ve told me it would not be believed.”

“Not by any American you know about, or can conceive of. There are others who would believe it, and I advise you not to have contempt for them. As your recent success has taught you, contempt is a mistake.”

“Ah—it’s for these people that you want this information?”

“No, for myself. It’s an intellectual challenge—I’m accused of believing that everything can be discovered and understood.”

“If you already understand, or think you do, then why insist on discovery?”

“Before I realized what the heroin was for, I imagined that you had had revenge enough,” Christopher said. “So one discovers something new every day.”

The priest’s tic was awakening again. His blinking eye seemed to register Christopher as an automatic camera freezes the motions of an athlete.

“Do you want me to give you the information, assuming that it exists and that I know it?” he asked. “Or do you merely want us—me—to know that you have this
idée fixe?”

“Have you the information?”

“No.”

Christopher stood up. “Then I’ll be in plain view all day tomorrow in Saigon. If anyone wishes to talk to me, I’ll be available.”

Christopher walked rapidly out of the church. He checked the doors of the Citroen for wires and looked at the motor and the undercarriage with a flashlight. There was no sign of explosives. Christopher had seen the woman go through a trapdoor in the priest’s room after she had given him his heroin, but the village VC would be out on patrol, and unless some of them were lying along the dirt track that led to the highway, they would not have had time to get back. He turned the car around and drove out of the village.

Halfway to Saigon, Christopher saw shapes move in the darkness beside the road, a hundred yards ahead of the car. He turned on the headlights, bathing three armed men in their glare. One of them threw his arm in a floppy pajama sleeve across his eyes. Christopher turned off the lights and blew the horn. In the rear-view mirror he saw muzzle flashes, like the burners of a gas stove. There were no tracers; that gave him confidence. Rounds struck the road behind the car and ahead of it, but none hit the Citroen before it went around the next curve, rising with a sigh on its suspension, the steering wheel chattering in his hands.

7

As Christopher entered the city, the red sun touched a string of cirrus clouds on the eastern horizon. He looked at his watch and, remembering Luong, realized that he was late. He could see the shapes of buildings in the increasing light. The streets were still empty. There was the taste of dust in his mouth and his eyes burned from the strain of driving in the dark; he pulled the headlight switch and followed the yellow puddle of the low beams through the grid of Saigon’s streets. He parked the car five blocks from Honey’s room, locked it, and walked the rest of the way.

At the mouth of the alley, he met two Vietnamese. They had changed their white shirts for darker ones, but he recognized them. The men, walking rapidly, stopped when they saw him, then hurried by. Christopher turned around and watched them disappear into another alley; a motor scooter whined away, its rider shifting gears very rapidly.

Christopher climbed the stairs. The air smelled fresh, as if there had been rain in the night, and the sunrise washed across the roofs of the quarter. The boy was asleep again on the landing outside Honey’s room, sprawled on his back with one trouser leg pulled upward on his hairless calf.

Stepping over the sleeping figure, Christopher looked down. It was Luong, his eyes staring, his black hair blown forward as if by the wind. Christopher kneeled and touched his skin. It was still warm; there was a black stain on his trousers where his bladder had emptied.

Christopher pushed back Luong’s hair and saw the small blue hole on his smooth forehead.
“He’s not your child,”
he heard Wolkowicz say. Christopher laid his palm on Luong’s cheek and closed the eyes and the slack lips with his thumb and forefinger.

He opened the door. The Special Forces sergeant, wearing an identification bracelet with a delicate gold chain on his thick wrist, lay on his back with Honey in his arms. Her narrow body with its row of knobs along the spine rested easily on the sergeant’s chest; she had left her hair unbraided. They were breathing together softly. Luong’s killers must have used a silenced gun.

Christopher knelt beside Luong again and looked through his pockets. There was nothing for him there, or in the dead man’s clenched hands. He was not surprised; no agent had ever spoken a last message to Christopher before he died.

8

Christopher started the Citroen without checking it for bombs and wondered if the tension on his wrist when he turned the key might be the last sensation his brain would ever register. But the warm engine started normally, and he drove to the post office, where there were coin telephones. He called Wolkowicz and told him what had happened.

“Tell someone to get there fast, before the people in the neighborhood wake up and dump the body,” Christopher said.

“What difference does it make?” Wolkowicz said. “He was a
politique
—they won’t investigate, they’ll just close his file.”

“As long as they get the body. He has a wife.”

“All right, I’ll put out a call, but don’t expect any answers from the Vietnamese—if they went around solving murders in this town they’d never get anything else done.”

Christopher thanked him. “That’s okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? If he’d come back from Bangkok last month when he was supposed to, and they’d shot him then, his widow would’ve gotten a pension. But this sure doesn’t sound like death in line of duty.”

“It never does, after it happens,” Christopher said.

In the lobby of the Continental Palace half a dozen foreigners, Americans and Frenchmen, waited in two docile groups for the early minibus to the airport. Christopher had not slept for twenty-four hours or changed his clothes for forty-eight. The Frenchmen stared curiously at his rumpled suit and unshaven cheeks; he could tell by their clothes and the way in which perpetual impatience had twisted their faces that they lived in Vietnam. They were not used to seeing dirt on a white man, and it annoyed them.

The
métis
behind the reception desk, who had his father’s Norman nose and his mother’s small bones and almond eyes, spoke English to Christopher as a matter of course. He said he had no room. When Christopher replied in French, the
métis
pushed a registration card across the desk and took a key from the rack.
“Pièce d’identité?”
Christopher handed him his American passport, and the clerk gave back a resentful look— he had lost his first bribe of the day through trickery.