The Tears of Autumn (11 page)

“Yes. Think about it. If no one knows, what was the point in doing it?”

Patchen absorbed this idea, then nodded his head.

“I’ll fire you in the morning,” he said. “If you live, and if you want to come back inside, it can be arranged. Foley won’t last forever with Lyndon Johnson.”

“The bar’s going to close. Let’s go in.”

Patchen had one more thing to say. Christopher was surprised: it was unlike Patchen to be the one who prolonged a conversation.

“It takes about a month to inform everyone in the field of a resignation,” he said. “I won’t hurry it. You may want to talk to the people in the stations.”

“Yes, there may be a question or two I’d want to ask.”

“If you need support in any kind of an emergency, you know they’ll give it to you. We’ll justify it later.”

Christopher smiled at him. “You shouldn’t be saying these things. What if I’m tortured?”

Patchen waved away the pleasantry. “Speaking of that, I wouldn’t rely too much on Wolkowicz. He and Foley are friends. The White House took an interest in Wolkowicz’s career after the Bay of Pigs.”

“Took an interest in his career?”

Patchen exhaled his dry laugh. “Wolkowicz was their idea of what a master spy should be. They all read those paperback books about secret agents. Wolkowicz carries guns and talks like a gangster. They were talking about Castro in one of the planning sessions—what to do with him after Cuba was liberated. Wolkowicz took out his revolver, removed a cartridge from the cylinder, and rolled the bullet across the table. In the Cabinet Room. That was when his star began to rise.”

Patchen opened the door for Christopher. “Now let me buy you one last beer,” he said.

5

Foley had not intended to return the phone call. When he saw the message on his desk he didn’t recognize the name of the man who had called him.

“He’s a Green Beret captain,” Foley’s secretary explained. “He’s on his way to Vietnam. He said his sister is a friend of yours. Her name is Peggy McKinney.”

Foley frowned and crumpled the slip on which the message was written.

“He said you and his sister met in Paris.”

Foley remembered. He handed his secretary the ball of paper. “Set up an appointment for him today,” he said. “Here.”

He put a plain sheet of paper in his own typewriter and began to write the letter he wanted Peggy McKinney’s brother to deliver for him. Then he phoned a man at the Pentagon and arranged to have the captain assigned to an army intelligence unit stationed on Saigon.

When the captain appeared in Foley’s office, he stood at attention in front of the desk. Foley, in shirtsleeves, grinned at him.

“Sit down, Captain,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I didn’t want to intrude on you—Peggy just asked me to call up and say hello.”

“I’m glad you did. Peggy’s terrific.”

The captain was about twenty-five, dark and fine-strung like his sister.

“You know,” Foley said, “it was right in this office that an officer like you was ordered to take the message to Garcia.”

“I guess those days are over, sir.”

“No, they’re not,” Foley said. “I have a job for you. You are not to discuss what I’m asking you to do with anyone, not even your supervisor. I’ve informed the right person in the office of the Army Chief of Staff. You and he and I, and we alone, are to know about this. Is that clear?”

Foley gave him a sealed letter for Wolkowicz and told him what else he wanted him to do when he reached Vietnam. He gave him a photograph of Christopher; he had had to call the Passport Office himself in order to obtain it.

“His real name is Paul Christopher, but he’ll probably be using an alias. Look at the picture and give it back to me.”

“What channel shall I use to report?”

“You don’t report. If you do the job, I’ll know it. And, Captain, I won’t forget you.”

“I don’t want anything for this,” the captain said. “Sir, I loved President Kennedy.”

“I know you did, son,” Foley said.

l

Christopher stood on the steps of the Galleria Borghese and watched Molly walk across the park with the pine trees behind her. She had spent the morning at the zoo while he wrote his profile of the Pope, and she carried a bag of peanuts in her hand.

She wanted to look at Canova’s nude Pauline Bonaparte and the Caravaggios before lunch. “Just those two things, Paul,” she said as she made their plans. “You needn’t look so suspicious.” Molly could spend hours looking at painting and sculpture. “There are museum guards all over Europe who think you’re in love with them, the way you hang about,” Christopher told her. “Then you
know?”
Molly said. “Chaps with sore feet in dusty uniforms make me go all funny.”

“Do you love me, now that you admit it, for my mind or for my body?” Molly had asked when he returned from Washington. Christopher could not separate the two. When he entered her, he felt himself grasped not so much by her flesh as by her idea of herself. Naked, she was as comic as a child; that was what had surprised him the first time he had her. He had imagined that she would be a solemn lover, but she laughed when she opened her legs, as if pleasure were a joke she played on life. They looked into each other’s face when they made love, smiling and chuckling.

Now, as she came toward him, holding her hair in the December wind, he felt a smile pulling at his face, and when they kissed, he laughed. Christopher had a strange loud laugh that he could not control; strangers turned their heads when it exploded.

“Ah,” Molly said, “I’ve just come from feeding a poor caged thing like you.”

When the museum closed at two o’clock, they walked to a restaurant, and because it was Thursday, ate
gnocchi
and
bollito misto.

Molly ordered a spiced pear and said, “Why does food seem so romantic when one’s having a love affair? If I ate this much in a state of innocence, I’d weigh two hundred pounds.”

When she had come back from Siena, she had moved into his apartment; she bought vases and filled them with roses and carnations. She put his books in alphabetical order, novels on one set of shelves, poetry on another, general works on a third.

Molly said she had driven Cathy’s ghost out of Christopher’s bed. “Did you really not mind the way she put horns on you?” she asked.

“Yes, I minded, until I saw her reason,” Christopher said. “She knew more about my life than you do, Molly. Cathy was a gloomy woman. Maybe she wanted an existence that was as corrupt as she thought mine to be. It wasn’t love, but it was the best she could do, to go down the way she thought I was going.”

They were in bed, with Molly’s candles burning on all the tables in the room. “I know nothing about your life—are you all that bad when you’re away?” she asked.

“I never was, but when I was younger I had a tendency to melancholy,” Christopher said. “I’d return from Lagos, still seeing the lepers catching coins in their mouths like dogs because their fingers had fallen off, and I’d betray a certain sadness. Cathy thought she knew another reason for my mood.”

Molly lay still in the moving light. “Black girls?” she asked.

“That was the least of it,” Christopher replied.

“It must have been your bloody silence,” Molly said. “Have you any love for me when you’re away, or does it start when you see me and end when your plane takes off?”

Christopher took a candle off the bedside table and held it up so that both their faces were in the light. “If I love you, Molly, it’s because you’ve never been with me in all those places,” he said. “I won’t tell you, I won’t take you. That part of it isn’t life.”

A tear ran down her cheek. He had never seen her cry before.

“I never thought there was any love in you at all,” she said, “and now that you say there is, I want it all.”

He blew out the candle. Molly drew his arm around her body, put her wet face in the hollow of his neck, and went to sleep.

2

The following morning, Molly came back from the post office with Patchen’s letter. Christopher looked at the sterile envelope with his name and address typed on it and knew the sender: the characters that fell on the left side of the typewriter keyboard were fainter than the others. Once, as a joke, he had advised Patchen to get an electric machine to conceal these traces that his letters were typed by a man with one arm weaker than the other. He sent Molly out of the room and opened the envelope. On a sheet of cheap paper were typed two lines from one of Christopher’s old poems.

Death fell breathless behind us in our war-struck youth, and winning that race, we lost our chance at truth.

Below this, Patchen had typed:
“PSRunner/22XI63/UBS (G).”

The note was unsigned. Christopher put it in his pocket, lifted the phone, and made a reservation on the noon plane to Geneva.

Christopher was not known at the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva, but they were used to strangers there. He told a clerk that he wished to discuss a numbered account, and he was taken into an office where a bald Swiss sat behind a bare desk. Swiss banks have a churchly atmosphere; Christopher judged from the furnishings in the bald man’s office that he was the equivalent of a bishop. The man rose from a chair with a high carved back and shook hands, but did not smile.

“There is a numbered account here for me, recently opened, I believe,” Christopher said.

“Will you state the number and the name, please?”

“It is 22X163,” Christopher said, “and the name is P. S. Runner.”

“One moment.” The bald man unlocked a file and extracted a large card; he centered it on the polished surface of the desk before him and looked expectantly at Christopher.

“Do you require a signature?” Christopher asked.

“No, monsieur. Our instructions are to pay on demand, but you must furnish the second of two lines of verse.”

Christopher quoted the line from Patchen’s letter.

“It’s in order,” the bald banker said. “Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”

“What is the current balance?”

“A deposit of $100,000 has been made—that is, Swiss francs 432,512.65. You may have any amount, in either currency.”

“Please give me twenty-five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, and five thousand Swiss francs in hundred-franc notes.”

The banker wrote on a form and pressed a bell. In a moment, a messenger returned with two long buff envelopes. The banker counted the money rapidly, sealed the envelopes, and handed them to Christopher. “Your balance is now $73,865.74,” he said. “When you call for more funds, you may come directly to this office without asking the
huissier.
It’s more discreet.”

Christopher nodded and put the envelopes in his breast pocket. Outside in the rue du Rhone he saw a man in a tweed Brooks Brothers overcoat limping through the crowd and thought for an instant that it might be Patchen. His letter bore a Swiss postmark, so he might have carried the cash to Geneva himself. Christopher followed the limping man for a block or two before he got a clear glimpse of his face, which was whole and handsome.

At a garage near the railroad station, Christopher rented a car with French license plates. There were no identity controls at the French frontier for motor traffic. The weather in northern Europe was already turning bad, and he drove over the Jura through fog and sleet. He did not want to leave any traces of himself on paper in France, so he did not stop at a hotel. He drove all night and arrived in Paris before the morning traffic had begun to move. He parked the car behind the horse barns at Longchamps and slept for three hours in the back seat. When he awoke, he touched the envelopes with Patchen’s money in them.

3

It took Christopher half the day to learn the telephone number of Nguyen Kim.

“Are you still bumming meals?” Christopher asked, when Kim came on the noisy line.

They arranged to meet at Fouquet’s. Christopher filled the gas tank and spent three hours circling the block until he found a parking place on the Champs-Elysées in front of the cafe.

Kim drank two large bourbons at Fouquet’s and two more at La Coupole after they had driven through Montmartre and doubled back across the Seine bridges. Kim did not know the city, and the long ride with many detours down side streets did not surprise him. When they reached the restaurant, they were alone; as they pulled away from Fouquet’s, Christopher had seen, in the rear-view mirror, the two men who were following Kim. One hurried around the corner to get a taxi while the other watched Christopher’s rented Peugeot vanishing into a school of others just like it toward the place de la Concorde.

Kim ordered oysters. For an Asian, he was an adventurous eater, but he looked uncomfortable when he saw before him the thick green meat of a dozen
Spéciales
in their gnarled shells. He squeezed lemon over the oysters, and putting one into his mouth, opened his eyes wide and chewed. “They have no taste,” he said, and sprinkled pepper over the ones remaining.

“Kim,” Christopher said, “Let me see if I have this straight. The part of the Vietnamese family called the
toe
consists of all persons, male or female, who claim a common ancestry back five generations into the past, and forward three generations into the future. Is that right?”