The Tears of Autumn (36 page)

4

Patchen went to the door with Trumbull and Foley. Neither man said anything more to Christopher. He watched through the window as Trumbull, smiling at his driver and making a joke, got into his car. Foley opened the back door of his Cadillac for himself, brushing past the chauffeur. The two black cars rolled away down the quiet street, under the leafless trees.

When Patchen came back from the hall he wore his topcoat and carried Christopher’s over his arm. “I guess there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have dinner together,” he said.

They ate a bad meal, cooked with contempt and served with scorn, in an expensive restaurant in Georgetown that was going out of fashion. In the men’s room there were lewd jokes in French painted on the wall. They spoke very little; Patchen did not finish his food.

Outside, on the sidewalk, Patchen, with an abrupt movement, held out his hand to Christopher. He was exceptionally strong on the good side of his body, and he tightened his grip until he caused pain.

“You think they’re coming after you, don’t you?” he asked.

“The Vietnamese? Yes. But maybe not right away. They’ll know I’ve told you. When nothing happens, they may postpone. It’s a matter of waiting—everything is.”

“Maybe they’ll conclude the damage has been done. They may decide they’ve done enough.”

“Do you think so?” Christopher asked. “They’ve had two sons murdered—three, if you count Ngo Dinh Can. The generals will shoot him eventually.”

Patchen buttoned the collar of his coat; the wind, smelling of winter rain, was blowing down Wisconsin Avenue.

“So?”

“Only one Kennedy has been shot,” Christopher said.

l

Molly came into the room with snow in her hair. When she saw a man standing by the window, she went silent and stopped, frozen, like a cat that scents something strange in a familiar house. Then, seeing that the man was Christopher, she fell back against the door and put her hands to her cheeks: she wore all the rings Christopher had ever given her.

“Ah,” she said. “Ah, Paul—it’s you.”

Molly had been on the ski runs and the wind had gone into her clothes; she smelled as clean as the snow. The mountain sun had browned her face and bleached her lashes, so that her eyes seemed a darker green. They didn’t kiss. Christopher stood by the window with snow falling beyond the glass; Molly leaned against the door, her bright clothes reflecting in the varnished pine.

Christopher said, “Nothing has happened?”

“Nothing. We’ve spent the whole time on the slopes, or eating fondu.”

“Then you’ve had a good week?”

“Oh, yes,” Molly said; she moved across the room and touched his face, tracing the line of his eye and mouth. “But there’s been a certain lack.”

Later, she sat up with the bolster folded behind her and brushed her hair. It crackled and sailed after the brush in the cold air; Molly parted it into two long streams and brushed hard, biting her lip as she counted the strokes. Christopher arranged her hair, still alive with electricity, so that it covered her breasts. Molly threw back the featherbed and examined his skin.

“What are all those red bumps? I felt them under the eiderdown.”

“Insect bites,” he said. “I’ve been in Africa.”

“Not the dreaded tsetse fly?” Molly cried, in an imitation of Sybille’s voice.

Christopher laughed. “You’ve learned to love Sybille?”

“I believe so. I do think it’s wonderful, the way she dances on the candle flame and flirts with waiters, other women, dogs, the English language—every thing and creature except poor Tom. She’s so filmy, like Vivien Leigh in
Gone with the Wind.”

“Tom thinks she’s a wonder. They’re a sort of comedy team.”

“Tom’s been marvelous. He tells me all the time we’re safe in Zermatt because there are no roads up the mountain, only the train. He goes down and watches each train unload, then comes back and tells me once again that I can’t possibly be liquidated until the next one arrives.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“He’s mad to know what you’ve been up to,” Molly said. “I haven’t breathed a word. Sybille says he’s most impressed, the way I keep secrets.”

“I’ll tell him tonight.”

“Then it’s over?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’m through with it.”

“Ah, and did you learn anything?”

“Everything, Molly.”

“Everything? Only the dead know everything.”

Christopher took his hands away. Molly grinned at him, drawing a strand of hair across her upper lip. Christopher laughed and kissed her; she laid her long body against his, toe, breast, and cheek.

“Ring down for a bottle of champagne, will you?” Molly said. “Let’s drink it and stay in Zermatt for a while. I like things as they are. I do love hours like this one—they’re like sailing ships, so reckless and inside the wind, and you don’t see how lovely they are until you get off and watch them sail away.”

2

Tom Webster, crossing the hotel lounge through a crowd of slender men and women dressed like actors in perfect ski clothes, looked as if he were costumed for the 1932 Olympics. His sweater was too small for his shoulders, and his trousers, too long for his muscular legs, were the old-fashioned kind that bagged at the ankles. Christopher, watching him, felt a wave of affection spread through his chest.

At the bar Webster ordered two hot buttered rums. “You have to drink these things up here,” he said. “It’s part of the cure, like mineral water at a spa.”

Webster saw an empty table against the wall, and dashed across the room to claim it. He didn’t like to have people behind him when he talked.

“I think you’re clear for a while,” he told Christopher. “There’s been no sign of Kim’s people in Zermatt. I’ve had the technicians and the translators rush the wiretap logs on Kim. He’s pulled off the surveillance he had on you.”

“Why?”

“Something you said to him in the airport in Milan. He thought you were going to kill him right there, in the terminal. He thinks you’re crazy.”

“That won’t last.”

“No. Kim spends half his time raving about you. He says you’ve got to be stopped. He may not use Vietnamese operators next time. It may dawn on him that white men are harder to spot in Europe.”

“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “They’re about to realize they’ve had a bad experience with a white agent.”

Christopher told Webster, in a few low sentences, what he had learned. As Webster received the information, his heavy face stiffened.

“What will you do about Molly?” he asked. “She’s changed you, you know. You care what happens. If you have to worry about her, she’ll bring you down.”

The expression left Christopher’s eyes, as if he were handling an agent. Webster’s glance didn’t waver.

“You ought to run,” Webster said. “I don’t blame you for wanting to go on with her, but it’s a mistake.”

“I’ve made worse mistakes. I’m worn out, like Klimenko. Would you say Molly’s a better choice than the one he made?”

“Prettier. But less likely to forgive and forget if you make the mistake of telling her as much as Klimenko’s going to tell us.”

“Molly doesn’t want to hear it.”

Webster picked up Christopher’s glass and handed it to him.
“Everyone
wants to hear it,” he said. “But what the hell —let’s have a good time. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

3

Webster had booked a table in another, smarter hotel for the
réveillon
supper. Sybille and Molly wore evening gowns and jewels. Webster had forgotten to pack his dinner jacket. He appeared in a tailcoat frayed at the lapels and shiny from a generation of flatirons. It fitted him no better than his skiing costume.

“Don’t you think Tom looks wonderful?” Sybille asked. “We borrowed his outfit from the headwaiter—well, rented it with an enormous tip—and I stitched and tucked Tom into it. He wanted to carry a napkin over his arm but I said no. Do you think I was right to interfere?”

During the elaborate supper, Webster ordered bottle after bottle of champagne. He kissed Molly at midnight and danced with her, spinning her with her arm above her head so that her hair flew out of its pins and her long skirt swirled around her legs.

“God,” Sybille said to Christopher. “She’s a beautiful girl. Are you going to marry her and spoil her figure with babies?”

“I don’t think so.”

Sybille watched Webster and Molly, gasping with laughter, on their way back to the table.

“I’ll tell you something, Paul. She prefers fear to the alternative. You won’t be able to make her go away.”

“Has Tom been talking to you?”

“Tom tells me everything, and so does Molly. You bloody fool.”

“Do you think I’ve made a mistake, Sybille?”

“A mistake? You’ve thrown your life away for nothing. Tom says you did it for your country and the honor of the outfit. Those two things, added together, equal nothing. What good is what you’ve done? Look at Molly before you answer.”

Sybille, as if she could not bear the taste of anything bought with her husband’s work or Christopher’s, threw her champagne on the tablecloth.

They were the last to leave the dining room. Webster, still wearing his party hat, draped strings of confetti around the shoulders of the women. Outside, between the high snowbanks, they walked hand in hand, four abreast. The low winter moon, as white as the glacier, lay on the brow of the Matterhorn.

“My God, I’ve loved this place,” Molly said.

“Everyone does,” Sybille said. “It’s the funny train ride to the top and coming into the sunshine. And gazing upwards at the Matterhorn and being so glad one isn’t Swiss. God does squander his landscapes.”

Christopher stood behind them. Their faces were lifted toward the mountain and they were breathing deeply in the sharpened air. Molly, without shifting her gaze from the moonlit field of snow, put a hand behind her back, beckoning Christopher to her side. But he was looking up and down the shadowed street.

Molly turned and smiled. She lifted her hands and fluttered her fingers as though to wake him from a daydream. She still wore all his rings: the emerald from Burma, the jade from Macao, the scarab from Egypt, a topaz, and an opal. There was a cathedral on Majorca where Christopher had gone with Cathy to look at a wooden virgin whose chipped enameled fingers were laden with jeweled rings. “There must be a lot of people around here who are afraid to die,” Cathy said. “You don’t give offerings like that to be forgiven your sins—only to be allowed to live a little longer.”

4

The Websters left the next day after lunch. Christopher and Molly skied all afternoon. Molly, perfect in every use of her body, plunged down the mountain ahead of Christopher, stinging his face with the plume of snow that flew from the heels of her skis. She was full of laughter during dinner, but she was reluctant to go upstairs. They sat by the fireplace until midnight, drinking brandy and listening to a guitarist.

Finally they went to bed. After a time, Molly turned on the lamp and pushed Christopher’s hair off his forehead. “I forgot the candles,” she said.

Molly saw that he meant to speak; she put a finger on his lips.

“I know what you have in mind,” she said. “Don’t say it, Paul. I won’t go.”

“It would be better, Molly. I can’t take you back to Rome. You’re only in danger so long as they believe I care for you.”

“Yes. You’ve explained. When you told me about Cathy’s affairs, you said her body was her own—that she could do as she wished with it. Did you honestly feel that way?”

“Yes. I still do.”

“Then you must feel the same way about my body.”

“What I feel for you is love, not jurisdiction. That wasn’t enough for Cathy.”

“I own myself, just as Cathy did, then,” Molly said. “She chose to abuse her body, and broke her heart. What I choose is this: I’ll give up my body and lay it in the earth before I’ll go away from you.”

She turned off the light and turned her back. Christopher saw that not even a lie would change her mind. In Molly, love was a force as ruthless as the one that ruled him. To respond in kind was beyond him. He had been dyed, heart and memory, by the life he had lived, and not even Molly, willing to be murdered in order to prove to him that love was possible, could rescue him from what he knew about himself. Molly had taught him to feel again, but not that it mattered.

Molly moved under the featherbed and fitted her body against his, warm skin and hair that smelled of wind and wood-smoke. Before Christopher went to sleep, he thought again, out of long habit, of the things he knew he could say and do to outwit the simplicity of her passion. But he gave up: his betrayals had not saved Luong or Cathy or any of the others. Lovers and agents, living within their secret, could not be saved, or even be warned, by treachery.

Molly murmured in her sleep and threw a nerveless arm across his chest. Christopher felt her pulse on his own skin.

Also available by Charles McCarry

‘McCarry is back… rich in suspense, colourful characters,
sudden surprises and detail. His prose, as always, is
elegance itself ’
Washington Post

CHRISTOPHER’S
GHOSTS

A Paul Christopher novel