The Tears of Autumn (7 page)

Hitchcock drank six glasses of gin and tonic before dinner. The boys served cold soup and a large grilled river fish whose muddy flesh was slightly bloody along the spine. “Do you enjoy uncooked food, Paul?” Theresa Hitchcock asked. “The boys are defeated by the electric stove. We’re all defeated.” She smiled brightly and pushed her limp hair away from her forehead. “You’ll excuse me? I have a headache.” She went up the stairs.

“I’m sending her home,” Hitchcock said. “She can’t cope here—I don’t know who can. My mother went mad as a hatter, you know. The old man told her to pray, but she thought the natives were going to gang her at any moment. Actually, they think white women are repulsive—like fish bellies.”

Hitchcock had escaped from God and the Congo when he was eighteen, on the last freighter to cross the southern Atlantic before the Germans began to torpedo Belgian ships. His parents were buried in Kasai, in the red dirt of their churchyard. Hitchcock had studied German and Russian. “My idea,” he told Christopher, “was to spend my life in cold climates. Whoever would have thought the Congo would become one of the hinges of American foreign policy? I grew up thinking uranium was good for curing cancer.”

In his mind, Hitchcock still lived in cold climates. He sat at the table with the remains of the fish congealing on his plate, and sweat blackening the armpits of his seersucker suit, and talked about Berlin. He had been a famous operative there in the postwar years. Hitchcock liked to deal with Germans—they were always on time and they liked to be trained.

“You get to Zurich, don’t you?” he asked Christopher. “There’s a guy there you ought to know—you can’t forget his name. Dieter Dimpel. I bought him a watch store in 1950—told ‘em it was owed to old Dieter. So he’s out of it. But go see him.”

“I will,” Christopher said. “I use up a lot of watches.”

“Listen, Paul. Dieter is a midget—I mean he’s a real midget. He’s one meter, twenty-five centimeters high. Comes from Munich. Walks like Goring—he’s got a big imaginary body he carries around with him. He used to sweep up in the beer halls. Knew Hitler in the old days, when the Führer would come in in his trench coat and mumble about taking over the world. They wouldn’t let Dieter into the party because he was a freak, right? So Dieter goes to a forger and has a party card made. He gets himself an armband with a swastika on it and goes to all the Nazi rallies. Around 1943, some storm trooper grabs him. The forger had asked Dieter what number he wanted on his card. Dieter said, ‘Oh, make it 555—that’s easy to remember.” Unfortunately, 555 is the number of Adolf Hitler’s party card. The storm trooper was nothing compared to the Gestapo when they got hold of Dieter. Forged credentials! A freak saying he’s a Nazi! Using the Führer’s party number!

“Off old Dieter goes to Dachau. He’s resourceful as hell, he becomes a trusty. He escapes five days before the Americans come. He heads
east.
The Russians grab him. Dieter is a bit light-headed after two years on the Dachau diet, so he tells the Russians he’s a Nazi.
They
put him in a camp. Well, of course he walks right through the wire and heads west again.

“I picked him up in Berlin in late ‘46—he’s sweeping up in a beer hall again, wearing tiny
lederhosen.
Dieter is a bitter little guy. He knows he’s smarter than Hitler, but he’s only four feet tall. He wants revenge against the world. Good agent material.

“At that time we were trying to figure some way to get into the headquarters of a certain occupying power. No way to do it—troops on every door, bars on every window, bells and sirens wired up all over the place. Miller was running the Berlin base then, and he was full of stories of the good old prewar days in the FBI, when they used to sneak into the German ambassador’s bedroom in Washington and come back with samples of his wife’s pubic hair.

“Miller thought he was the world’s champion burglar, but he couldn’t think of a way to crack the GRU. However, / had Dieter. I recruited him by giving a whore a few marks to pretend she couldn’t live without him. I gave him a cyanide pill to carry in a hollow ring—Krauts don’t think you’re serious unless you give ‘em a cyanide pill.

“I had Dieter trained in rope climbing, in judo, I turned him into an acrobat. Dieter was a very strong midget. I put him through a course in clandestine entrance. Safecracking, photography with infrared, the works. After six months, he was the best burglar in Germany. Then, one dark and moonless night, I sent him down the chimney with a camera. Dieter came out a fireplace on the second floor, cracked every safe in the place, photographed everything, put it all back, and came out the chimney again. For three years Dieter went down the chimney once a month and did his work. Never left even a finger print. We sent him all over the place, doing the same. He got more stuff than any agent in the history of Berlin.

“One night, Dieter was shooting some agents’ reports and one of their colonels came in, working late. He turned on the lights, and here was this sooty midget with a camera and an infrared light set up in his office and the safe spilling all over the floor. Dieter whipped out his gun and shot the Russian right between the eyes. He dropped everything but the camera and went up the chimney like a rocket.

“I’m waiting in the next street. Lights go on, sirens go off, soldiers start coming out the windows. Dieter spent twenty-four hours hanging on to his rope inside the chimney—they couldn’t find him, he couldn’t come down. Next night, he sneaked over the roof and got away. Still had the camera, but he forgot his rope and they found it, so that ended that. He wouldn’t have forgotten the rope, but all he could think about was taking a leak. The human element.”

“How’s he like the watch business?” Christopher asked.

“Okay, I guess. It pays for the girls. He takes pictures of them—he’s a white-socks fetishist. Tell him you’re a friend of Major Johnson. Old Dieter Dimpel. If you want to use a recognition code, give him the number of his party card, and Hitler’s —555. He’ll reply with the date of his arrest, June 4, 1943.”

Hitchcock listened happily to Christopher’s laughter. “I mean it,” he said, “look Dieter up. He’s useful.” Telling the story had made him feel better; despite all he had had to drink, he was alert and smiling.

He drove Christopher to the airport. They shook hands in the dark interior of the car. “I’d go in with you for a farewell drink, but Theresa worries at night,” Hitchcock said. “Christ how they change—had you noticed that, Paul?”

7

November is a rainy month on the Congolese coast, and Christopher was soaked when he entered the airport building after struggling through the crowd of porters between the curb and the entrance. In the ticket line an Englishman was having a violent argument with the airlines clerk, a laughing Congolese who told him that he had no record of his reservation.

“You’ll bloody well hear about this!” the Englishman said. “I’m a first-class passenger to London, and the booking was made a month ago.”

The Congolese waved his hand in the Englishman’s face. “Go away, go away—you have no reservation.”

Christopher slid his bag onto the scale and handed the clerk his ticket. The clerk removed the five-hundred-franc note from the ticket, put it in his breast pocket with the rest of his bribes, stamped Christopher’s boarding pass, and tagged his baggage.

“How much delay in the flight?” Christopher asked.

“That airplane will never be late!” said the clerk with another laugh.

Christopher took his passport out of his pocket, marked the page on which his visa was stamped with his boarding pass, and walked toward the passport control. A young Belgian priest carrying a transistor radio stepped in front of him. He tapped Christopher’s green passport with his finger.

“You’re an American?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Your President has been shot.”

“What?”

“President Kennedy—he’s dead. Listen.”

He turned up his radio. A Frenchman’s voice on Radio Léopoldville was reading the news from Dallas. It was nine o’clock in the Congo, two o’clock in Dallas. The news was still a simple bulletin.

Christopher went back to the ticket counter and lifted the clerk’s telephone. He dialed the American embassy. The duty officer did not say hello. He picked up the phone and said, “Yes, it’s true. President Kennedy has been assassinated. The vice-president is safe. The President is dead. We have no details. Please hang up now.” Christopher hung up the phone, nodded to the startled clerk, and walked toward the passport control.

Christopher never forgot anything. The tone of his mother’s voice, the smell of a leper in Addis Ababa, the telephone number of the embassy in Kabul, the looks of a man killed by a car in Berlin as he crossed the street to meet him moved constantly through his mind. Now he thought of nothing. He went to the windows and looked out through the rain at the glistening jets drawn up on the tarmac. He felt a hand on his arm; the priest was beside him again.

“There’s nothing more on the radio,” the priest said. “They’re playing music. Do you go to Brussels?”

“No, Rome.”

“You’re crying. Would you like to pray with me?”

“No, Father. I don’t believe.”

“It’s a frightful thing.”

Christopher thought the priest was talking about his rejection of faith. “For some,” he said.

“For all. President Kennedy was a great man. That death should come like that to him—he was like a young prince.”

“Yes, it’s a great shock.”

“You must have loved your President.”

“I love my country,” Christopher said.

“It’s the same thing, perhaps.”

“Ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have said so, Father. Now I think you’re right.”

It was dawn when Christopher arrived in Rome. He bought the newspapers and read them in the deserted waiting room at Fiumicino while he waited for his call to Paris to go through. Sybille answered the Websters’ phone.

“Tom’s at the embassy,” she said. “They’ve been up all night. We all have.”

“Tell him I’m home if he wants me.”

“I will. God, Paul, how I’m feeling this!”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “The next time you see your friend Peggy, ask her what she thinks of assassination now.”

l

Christopher saw the truth at dawn on the tenth day after the death of Kennedy. He woke shivering with cold and covered Molly with the blankets that had slipped to the floor during the night. A rooster crowed on the hillside above Siena, and as he watched from the open window of their hotel room, the town changed color in the growing light from burnt umber to rose.

In the first sunlight, two figures in black hurried across a field and into the edge of a woods. These Italian farnners going innocently to work triggered Christopher’s memory. Once again he saw men in black moving at a trot along the fringe of a forest, and an American in a flowered shirt lying in the weak morning light with the back of his head blown away.

The explanation struck like a bell in Christopher’s mind. He knew who had arranged the death of the President.

All his life, Christopher’s unconscious had released images, and he had learned to trust this trick of his mind. He often knew what men had done before they confessed their acts to him. (Cathy had thought him a fortune-teller. He had sometimes been able to see her lovers in her gestures—she would untie a scarf and pull the silk through her fist with a smile and Christopher would see her lifting her breast toward a stranger’s lips.
“Did you see me, did you see me?”
she would gasp. It excited Cathy to know she could walk through the gates of Christopher’s mind. She believed in dark powers.)

Christopher knew that this gift, which grew stronger as he grew older, was only a kind of logic. His senses received everything, he forgot nothing. Experience and information joined in the brain to provide explanations. It was like writing the first draft of a poem: words formed on the page without passing through the conscious mind.

Now, as he stood by the open window, he heard the plans being made for Kennedy’s murder. He saw the messages being passed, saw the look in the eyes of the conspirators, watched the tension flow out of their faces when news of success was brought to them. He felt their sense of triumph like an electrical charge between them. He himself had been a part of such scenes often enough. He wondered why it had taken him so long to realize the truth.

Christopher had seen many men die for politics, and he knew that politics was merely the excuse their murderers used. Men killed not for an idea but because they could not live with a personal injury. Now he made the simple connection between the injury and the President’s violent death. He understood the motive perfectly. He wondered if the murderers had foreseen that the death of Kennedy would drive the very memory of their existence out of the consciousness of the world.

Because they were who they were, the killers might have escaped suspicion forever. Christopher felt no anger, he wanted no revenge. The life he had led had burned away such feelings. He did not blame the murderers for what they had done. They had repaid an insult. He was only surprised that they had been able to do it so quickly. He would have expected them to be more patient, to choose a moment, such as Inauguration Day, when the humiliation would have been more intense. He supposed it had something to do with the stars; they would have horoscoped such an operation very carefully.