The Tears of Autumn (23 page)

l

Christopher did not imagine that the Truong toe would be immobilized by a photograph of Nicole. He’d hide the girl, as Christopher intended to hide Molly, and try again to kill Christopher. But he would have to adjust his operations. All this would take time. Time was what Christopher wanted, and Molly’s life.

It was raining in Rome and the Christmas decorations were up. The taxi driver let Christopher out by the door of his apartment on the Lungotevere. Christopher looked up and down the curving street and saw no one. One side of the street was open to the Tiber and the other was lined with old buildings whose heavy doors, built to accommodate horse-drawn coaches, were always locked. There was no place for surveillance to hide; that was why Christopher lived in this street.

Christopher’s training told him it was better to see the opposition than not to. He did not know how quickly the Truong toe could move. He felt the beating of his own heart as he went inside and climbed the stairs. Molly should be asleep. He used his mind to make his body stop trembling.

Letting himself into the apartment, he walked across the marble floors, hearing his own footsteps. Molly had decorated a small Christmas tree and placed it on a table in front of one of the windows. The paintings that had been in the bedroom now hung in the living room. She thought that pictures should be moved from one wall to another so that the eye would be surprised to see them in a new place each day.

It was not yet six o’clock in the morning, and the rooms seemed cold in the wintry light that filtered through the windows. Christopher went into the bedroom. Molly was not in the bed. The clothes she had worn the day before were draped over the back of a chair, and a book she had been reading lay open on the bedside table.

Christopher pushed open the bathroom door. It was a windowless room; he turned on the light and, hesitating for a moment, pulled the shower curtain aside. The tub was empty and the tap dripped on a brown stain he knew was only rust. He was still wearing his raincoat and its hard material whistled softly on the door frame as he brushed against it.

Christopher looked at the bed again. There was a small lump in the center of the mattress. He threw back the covers and saw a bottle of champagne lying on the sheet; there were beads of moisture on the cold glass. He stared at the bottle.

Feeling something at his back, he turned around and saw Molly standing in the doorway, pushing her tangled hair away from her face. She wore one of his T-shirts and carried two wineglasses between the long fingers of her left hand.

“Double bloody damn,” she said. “I wanted to be in bed with the wine poured when you came in. I forgot the glasses.”

Molly pushed the hair away from her cheek and smiled. “I heard the taxi in the street,” she said. “It woke me from a dream, and I looked out and saw you in the flesh, which was what the dream was about. You must have come in like a cat burglar—I didn’t hear you from the kitchen.”

She shivered and placed one bare foot on top of the other. Her eyes were defenseless with sleep. Christopher took several deep breaths, but he could not regain control of himself: he had believed for thirty seconds that she was dead. Blood poured through his heart—he felt its temperature, as hot as tears on the cheek.

“Open the wine,” Molly said. “Never too late.”

Christopher picked up the bottle and began to peel the foil off its neck. He lost control of his hands; they leaped on his wrists and he dropped the bottle. It exploded on the marble floor. He put his quivering hands in his armpits and sat down on the bed.

“Paul,” Molly said, “what’s the matter?”

“Be careful of the broken glass,” he said.

“What is it? Stop trembling, Paul.”

She knelt beside him on the bed and put her hand on his forehead, as if he might have a fever.

“You’re cold as ice,” she said. “You’ve caught a chill.”

When they made love, Christopher cried out as if he were in pain. Molly wanted to talk, but he put his fingers on her lips. After they had lain quietly for a few moments, he opened his eyes, thinking she would be asleep. But she lay on her side with her knees drawn up, gazing into his closed face. When he kissed her, she didn’t open her lips or put her hand on him. He fell asleep.

He woke before she did. Molly found him sitting on the sofa with the long strips of Yu Lung’s calligraphy spread on the coffee table before him.

Christopher rubbed her thick hair; it crackled with electricity in the damp winter air. Molly moved away from him.

“Don’t stroke me,” she said. “I’m not a cat.”

“All right. What do you want?”

“To be told. What was the matter with you when you came home this morning? I thought you were going to scream when I walked into the room.”

“I couldn’t find you.”

“Where would I be? Sleeping with an Italian?”

“I didn’t consider that possibility.”

“Then what?” Molly asked. I’ve never known anyone like you, Paul—each time you show your feelings you act like someone who’s been caught in a lie. *

“I’m trying to get over that.”

“Well, I wish you’d huny it up. I take you into my body. The least you can do is to tell me what it is that’s made you so cold when you’re not making love. When you get out of bed, you change, you know. I’d like to know whether you’re yourself when you’re lying down or when you’re standing up. I used to think it was Cathy, but it’s more than that, Paul.”

“Yes, it’s more than that.”

Something had changed in Molly. Christopher looked at her for the first time without a memory of sex or a desire for it. Molly’s personality had always been the force that lit her face or formed her gestures, something that made her physical beauty accessible to him. Now it leaped out of her flesh. There might have been two women facing him—one with Molly’s body and the other, entirely separate, a spirit that had escaped from it.

“For Christ’s sake, Paul, what is it?” Molly cried. “What am I to you? You confess that you love me at midnight, and go to America in the morning without a word. You go to Saigon for no reason and come back looking as if you’ve done murder. I thought your heart had dropped out of your body when I walked into the bedroom this morning with the wineglasses. Why were you so frightened?”

“I thought I’d killed you,” Christopher said.

He told her about the photograph the Truong toe had given him.

“Was that the picture that odd little Vietnamese took in the restaurant?” Molly asked.

“Yes. I was stupid to let him see you.”

“And you think they really would kill me in order to— what? Punish you for learning their secrets?”

“I know they would,” Christopher said.

Looking steadily into her eyes, Christopher told her what his life had been. He gave her no details, just the fact that he had always lied to her. Molly gazed back at him while he spoke, showing no flicker of surprise.

She said, “Is this what drove Cathy to do the things she did —knowing you were a spy?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Then she was a fool.”

“You may not say so when you’ve lived with it for a while, Molly. Ninety percent of the time it’s a foolish, joking sort of life. But once in a while something like this happens, and the joke stops.”

“Do these people really go about murdering strangers?”

“Not usually. This time they’re really threatened.”

Molly moved for the first time since they had begun to talk; she crossed her legs, clasped her bare knee, and put her chin on it, as if listening to a story about creatures she didn’t believe in.

“What do you have on them, for heaven’s sake?”

“Molly, it’s better that you don’t know that.”

“No,” she said, “we’re not going to have that again, Paul. If you don’t tell me I’ll go out into the streets and let them kill me. I won’t go on with you.”

“All right,” Christopher said. “I believe they assassinated Kennedy. I have some proof, and before I’m done I’ll have it all.”

“I see. And when you have the proof, what good will it be?”

“I don’t know, Molly. All my life I’ve believed that the truth is worth knowing, even if it leads to nothing. It usually leads to nothing. But what else is there?”

Molly touched herself, and with the same finger, touched Christopher.

“Yes,” he said. “But I didn’t know that always.”

“It’s funny,” Molly said, after a moment of silence. “I won’t say I’m not frightened. But it’s too unreal.”

“It’s real enough,” Christopher said. “I’m sorry you have to know.”

“Know what? I’ve always known you were dying of shame. Now I know why, and it’s not so bad as it might have been.

Whatever you’ve done, you’ve done for your country. Isn’t that

supposed to justify anything?”

“That’s what we train ourselves to believe.”

“Yes,” Molly said. “I would like to know one more thing. Have you killed other men?”

Christopher closed his eyes. “Not with a gun or with my

hands,” he said. “People have died because I made mistakes, or

by accident. Sometimes I knew it was going to happen and did

nothing to prevent it. I don’t know the difference between that

and murder.”

2

Molly made them a cooked breakfast. She put a new record on the phonograph and stood with her arm around Christopher’s waist and a glass in her hand, waiting for him to laugh at the words of a new Italian love song.

After they ate, she gave him the mail and the telephone messages from the office. Christopher sorted out five of the telephone messages and pushed them across the table.

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“Herman. I don’t know whether that’s supposed to be a first or a last name. He talks Italian with an accent.”

“And this was the message?”

“Yes. It seems less mysterious now than it did then. He just kept saying he’d be standing by the
Pietà
in Saint Peter’s at ten o’clock in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. Then he’d say,
‘Molto urgente!’—and
ring off.”

“Could you tell what sort of an accent he had?”

“Not really. A lot of tongue and lips in it.”

Christopher looked at his watch. “It’s three-thirty,” he said. “I ought to be back in less than two hours.”

Molly gave him a long look and then laughed. “Ah,” she said, “the joys of love.”

“Molly, you have to understand. This may be nothing—I may not even make the contact when I see who it is. But I have to know. It could be important.”

“It could be a killer.”

“In Saint Peter’s? Shooting a man in front of the
Pietà
is the sort of thing a lover or a lunatic would do—not a professional.”

“Kennedy was shot in Dallas, in the middle of a crowd of people with cameras.”

“Yes,” Christopher said, “but there’s no way to kill the President of the United States discreetly.”

“What you’re saying is that if they kill you—or me, I suppose—they’ll not simply kill us but destroy all trace of us. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s the idea, Molly.”

They sat on opposite sides of a narrow table, and Christopher could see every detail of Molly’s face. Her eyes were closed and she pressed her lips together, so that a web of lines appeared for an instant on her smooth skin. Tears ran through her lashes.

“My God, how cruel,” she whispered. “They leave a person no meaning at all.”

Christopher turned up the volume on the phonograph and told Molly what to do while he was gone. On his way out of the building, he used the stairs again, searching the hallways on each floor as he descended.

The day was as gray as slate. There was no one in the street except a shepherd, down from the Abruzzi for the Christmas season, who stood on the low wall above the river playing bagpipes. The shepherd’s wild music followed Christopher across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, but no one was behind him, and he was still alone when he reached Saint Peter’s Square. He walked through one of the colonnades of Saint Peter’s, loitering among the pillars, but still saw no one following.

Inside the basilica, he walked along the left wall, pausing to look at paintings. In an alcove near the great altar he saw the original of Luong’s picture of Christ: its meaning was being explained in German by a guide to a group of tourists. Christopher walked on, behind the main altar. Foreign priests were celebrating mass in the chapels along the sides of the basilica.

Gherman Klimenko, standing before the
Pietà
with a guidebook in his hand, saw Christopher coming. He leaned on the chapel rail, as if to read Michelangelo’s signature on the girdle of the Madonna, then snapped the guidebook shut and walked leisurely to the other side of the church. Christopher paused for a moment at the sculpture and watched Klimenko’s gray-tweed overcoat disappear into the group of German tourists.

He followed Klimenko past Luong’s Christ and saw the Russian get into the elevator that led to the roof of Saint Peter’s. Christopher took the stairway, and Klimenko was already on the gallery, gazing down into the Vatican gardens, when Christopher got there. He went to the opposite side of the terrace and waited until a young couple finished taking photographs and descended the stairs. Klimenko turned and looked at him, and Christopher walked across the flagstones toward him.