The Tears of Autumn (20 page)

Musicians played at the end of the room, and male relatives with white mourning bands tied around their foreheads were drinking and laughing at jokes. They stared at Christopher, who stood alone by Luong’s coffin, and went on with their loud conversation. Luong’s widow made no sign that she saw him. When he turned away from the corpse, an old woman approached and gave him a bowl of food. He thanked her in Vietnamese and she bowed.

Christopher ate the food. Guests continued to arrive, crowding into the small house and filling it with a babble of voices and laughter. Luong’s picture of Christ with a burning heart had been brought out of the bedroom and hung beside a portrait of Buddha on the wall nearest the coffin.

A man detached himself from the group of male relatives and came toward Christopher with a cup of rice wine in either hand; he gave one of the cups to Christopher.

“You are my brother’s friend Crawford,” he said.

“Yes, I’m sorry for your family’s sadness,” Christopher replied.

“You speak Vietnamese.”

“Very badly,” Christopher said in French. “You are Tho’s brother? You look a great deal alike.”

“Yes, I am older by five years. My name is Phuoc.”

“I don’t want to intrude here. I only wished to pay my respects. I knew your brother well.”

“We thank you for the gifts you brought,” Phuoc said. “You knew he liked that sort of champagne. I told him often it would be his downfall.” Phuoc looked into Christopher’s face and gave an explosive high-pitched laugh. “The burial is tomorrow—will you come?”

“Alas, I’ll be gone tomorrow. But my thoughts will be here.”

Christopher finished his rice wine. Phuoc handed him his own cup. “Drink it,” he said. “I have no use for it. Perhaps Tho told you I am a
cu si
—not quite a monk and, my brother always said, not quite a man. I observe the five interdictions of Buddha: no sex, no alcohol, no tobacco, no theft, no killing.”

“Yes, he spoke about you. I believe he admired you very much.”

“Did he? Tho lived without interdictions of any kind, except that he never betrayed a friend.”

“That I have known for a long time,” Christopher said.

“How much money did you bring?” Phuoc asked. It was a polite question among Vietnamese, who were always asking each other the details of their salaries and bank accounts.

“There are 175,000 piasters in the envelope.”

“Very generous. In dollars or piasters?”

“In piasters—it’s an odd sum, but it equals five thousand dollars.”

“Piasters will be less embarrassing,” Phuoc said. “It will be a great help to his widow. She must stay indoors for two years, as you know. She worries about the children—Tho insisted on expensive schools.”

“He was right in that, of course.”

“He was right in most things. He put money away, I believe more than a million piasters. My brother expected to die young, he often told me so. His was not the sort of life that lasts very long in a country as troubled as ours.”

“He lived his life with courage, at any rate.”

Phuoc laughed again, opening his eyes and his mouth wide and letting shrill notes escape from his throat; it was a mannerism of grief.

“For your friendship and your money, you should have something in return,” Phuoc said. “Come with me for a moment.”

He led Christopher down the hall and into his dead brother’s bedroom. Closing the door behind them, he went to the window and looked out, then leaned his back against the wall. Incense burned on the dresser in front of a photograph of Luong.

“My brother was going to meet you when he died,” Phuoc said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes. I found his body.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“That doesn’t happen,” Christopher said. “He died instantaneously—you saw his wound.”

“Can you tell me anything more about his death?”

“I saw the men who killed him. They walked past me as I entered the street where he lay. I did not, of course, know then what had happened.”

“Would you know them again?”

“I saw them again. They shot at me.” Christopher gave Luong’s brother a description of the two men. “Both times they were in Cholon. I’d look for them, if I were looking, around

Dong Khanh Boulevard. They’ll have money to spend, and that’s where they’d go to spend it.”

Phuoc absorbed the information. “Have you any idea what my brother wished to tell you?”

“No. I asked him to find a person named Lê Thu. Before he went out for the last time, he told me he had one more source to question—nothing more than that.”

“Then he went to his death for you?”

“Yes,” Christopher said.

Phuoc did not laugh again. “My brother always did as he wanted to do. It wasn’t your fault. He thought highly of you. As it happens, I know where he went.”

Christopher waited. When Phuoc did not speak again, he said, “Would your brother have wished you to tell me?”

“Oh, I think so,” Phuoc said. “You paid, after all. He went to see a Chinese named Yu Lung. You know the name? Yu Lung is a respected astrologer and geomancer. He knows the stars and all the rest very well—it’s a gift as well as a science. Very expensive. Yu Lung serves the famous in secret, he won’t deal with ordinary men.”

“Thank you. Where is Yu Lung’s house?”

“In Cholon, near the Tat Canal, by the racetrack. Ask anyone. Yu’s house is poor outside, rich inside—he’s a Chinese.”

Christopher rose, hesitated, held out his hand. Phuoc gripped it tightly and, holding it for a long moment, threw back his head and laughed again. “Luong—
Tho
should have asked Yu Lung about his own future, eh? Instead of asking questions for you, Craww-ford. Do you know what the Vietnamese name Tho means?”

“Longevity.”

“Yes, my brother will be dead for a long time,” Phuoc said. “Tho is also the word for a coffin that’s purchased well in advance of death. We thank you again for the money.”

5

Wolkowicz had given Christopher a car and a driver. “It’ll save us both trouble,” Wolkowicz said. “You don’t seem to care who knows where you go, and I can’t spare three men to sur-veille you until you get on the plane tonight.”

“Who’s the driver?”

“Pong’s his name. He’s a Thai, so he’s disinterested. He’ll take you where you want to go and wait outside—but don’t go off and leave him. I’m responsible to the cops until you get out of the country.”

The car was an air-conditioned Chevrolet with a two-way radio and local license tags. Pong was flicking dust from the waxed hood with a feather duster when Christopher emerged from Luong’s house. Under the tail of his long silk shirt, Pong wore a heavy revolver. One of Wolkowicz’s Swedish submachine guns was clipped under the dashboard, with three extra magazines stowed in polyethylene pouches tacked to the door. “Pong’s got a reputation around town,” Wolkowicz had said. “These people fear the Thais, and they couldn’t be more careful of old Pong if we painted shark’s teeth and a crazy eyeball on him, like a surplus B-26.”

Pong put his feather whisk in the trunk of the car and sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel until Christopher told him where to go. Then he moved off, turning the car into traffic as a good dancer would swing a woman onto a ballroom floor. He was a competent man.

All during the morning, while he was looking at Luong in his coffin and talking to Phuoc, Christopher had controlled the impulse to touch the photograph the Truong toe had given him. Now he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out the picture of Molly. He looked at his watch; he could not be in Rome in less than thirty-six hours. It was useless to send a telegram. Molly wasn’t trained, she wouldn’t know how to hide, she would think the cable was a joke. Christopher was not used to feeling emotion; he was as surprised by his fear for Molly as he had been by his love for her.

Pong maneuvered the clumsy car through traffic on the quais along the Ben Nghe Canal. Sampans lay in the foul water, their decks swarming with boatmen whose joints bulged on their thin bodies like knurs on diseased trees.

“Driving this car is like being in America,” Pong said, “so cool and quiet—I don’t like to get out.”

Christopher pressed the electric window control. The stench and noise of the canal and the heat of noon thrust through the open window like a beggar’s hand. Pong made a disgusted sound in his throat and stared at Christopher in the rear-view mirror. He turned north, toward the center of Cholon.

Yu Lung’s house was not far from the place where Christopher’s Citroen had exploded. The wreck had been hauled away, but broken glass still glittered on the pavement and the flames had left a long smudge across the face of a building. A soup vendor stood with his car where the Citroen had been, tapping on a block of wood with two sticks to attract customers.

They drove through the neighborhood twice before they found the house. Once, emerging from a sea of tin-roofed hovels, they found themselves across the city boundary, trapped on a narrow road through fields of paddy. Pong stepped on the accelerator and, reaching through the steering wheel, worked the action of the submachine gun to put a round in the chamber. He found a place to turn around by a group of huts; Pong pulled the wheel all the way over and skidded the tires in an arc through the dust. Christopher watched a young boy, astride a buffalo in a water hole, disappear in the cloud of dirt thrown upward by the wheels of the Chevrolet, and then come out the other side, not having moved while the slow wind moved the dust over him and the buffalo.

“Stop in the shade,” Christopher said, when they had passed Yu Lung’s house for the second time. He wrote six dates, each followed by a time of day, on a page of his notebook. Then he tore five hundred-dollar bills in half, put five halves in an envelope with the notebook page, and placed the other torn halves in his wallet.

“Pong, walk back so they don’t see the car,” he said, “and give this to whoever answers the door. Make an appointment for me to see Yu Lung after dark tonight—but not after nine o’clock. Tell him I want horoscopes for the men born under the first four dates and times—he’ll have to transpose the dates to the lunar calendar. I want to trace the connection between the birth dates and the last two dates, which are days and times when certain events took place. Have you got all that?”

Pong scowled and repeated Christopher’s instructions. “Who do I tell him is coming?” he asked. “He may not want to see an American.”

“Tell him I’m a friend of Lê Thu,” Christopher said. Pong tapped the submachine gun to call Christopher’s attention to it and stepped into the street. Pong rocked from side to side as he walked, as if the taut muscles of his squat body were disputing the signals from his brain.

When he came back, he nodded at Christopher. “Yu Lung will have the stuff for you at eight o’clock,” he said.

“Let’s have some lunch, then,” Christopher said.

“Barney told me not to leave the car.”

“Have you anything with you?”

“Sandwiches,” Pong said, holding up a packet. “I made them at Barney’s while you were telephoning the young lady.”

“You’re a good operator, Pong. Did you report that to Wolkowicz?”

“Yes, on the radio while I waited for you at the dead man’s house. That’s when he told me not to leave the car.”

6

Nicole was waiting at the table on the roof of the Majestic, a Coca-Cola before her and the city spread out beyond her soft profile. She wore a different French frock; her hair was bound with a broad white ribbon that passed over the top of her head. Christopher sat down with his back to the view, so that he could watch the door and the room.

“I’m a little surprised you came,” he said.

“You came last night when I invited you.”

“Yes. I hope you have a quieter journey home than I had.”

“You seem well. There’s a cut on your cheek.”

Christopher spoke to the waiter, who poured cassis in the bottom of a glass and filled it with white wine.

“You shouldn’t drink wine at midday in this climate,” Nicole said. “It’s very bad for the liver.” Her eyes looked beyond him as she watched ships move in the river.

“Well,” Christopher said, “have you any compliments or messages for me from the Truong toe?”

Nicole smiled, a sudden sly glint of teeth and eyes. “He doesn’t confide—I listen at doors. I listened last night, in Cho-lon. You took their breath away, you know.”

“Did I? Then they have very good self-control.”

“They don’t know how to deal with you. At first they thought you were insane.”

“And now?”

Nicole traced a pattern on the tablecloth with her fingernail, then looked up quickly into Christopher’s eyes. “They think you’re in a terrific hurry. That upsets them more than what you say you know, or suspect. They think you want to lay this theory out before the world as truth. They know you’re a journalist.”

“I’ve never concealed it.”

“They know what else you are. You conceal that.”

“Then I’m concealing it still. I’m only a journalist, Nicole. There’s no one behind what I’m doing.”

Nicole shuddered with impatience. “You suppose they don’t know where you slept last night, or whose car you have today? Come, Paul—really.”

“My embassy thought, for some reason, that I needed protection. I was glad to have it.”

Nicole looked at him again and laughed shrilly, almost in the tones of Phuoc’s laughter. The waiter brought them fish, poured more wine, and went away. Nicole ate deftly, saying nothing until she had cleared her plate. Her eyes moved busily over the landscape behind Christopher’s shoulder; the sun filtering through the green awning changed the hue of her skin as she turned into the light or away from it.

“What you were saying to my uncles last night—were you serious?” she asked.

“About revealing what they had done? Absolutely.”

“If
they have done such a thing—let us have that plainly understood.”

“All right. It isn’t proved that they did.”

“You think the proof would have the effect you described? Would the Americans leave?”

“Yes.”

“It’s logical,” Nicole said. “The Americans would do what you say in the open, before the world. But what would they do secretly?”