The Tears of Autumn Read online

  Sybille turned to Christopher. “Paul has just seen a president out in Vietnam,” she said. “A little president. Do tell, Paul.”

  “Oh,” said Peggy. “Diem or Ziem, or whatever his name is. Horrid man.”

  “I’m interested,” Foley said.

  “There’s not much to tell,” Christopher said. “I stood by while he talked to somebody else. Or, rather, listened. The other man was an American.”

  “Who’s that?” Foley asked.

  “Carson Wendell. He’s a Republican from California.”

  “I know about him,” Foley said. “What poison is he spreading?”

  “I don’t think you want to hear it, Mr. Foley.”

  “Now I do,” Foley said.

  “You may not like this,” Christopher said. “Wendell hates you people. He said Kennedy ran a dishonest, dishonorable campaign in 1960—lying about a missile gap that didn’t exist and inventing a USIA report that was supposed to show American prestige abroad was at an all-time low.”

  “Losers have to have some excuse,” Foley said. “What else?”

  “Wendell told Nhu that Kennedy wasn’t elected President —Nixon was. He claimed there’s evidence that votes were stolen in Illinois and a couple of other states where there was a very small difference in the popular vote. The Democrats are in the White House by fraud, according to Wendell. He was very circumstantial, citing numbers and precincts to Nhu.”

  Peggy McKinney beat her fist on Sybille’s tablecloth. “I’ve never heard such slander,” she cried. “That man’s passport ought to be taken away from him! I mean, Christ. ...”

  Foley unwrapped a cigar. “What did Nhu say to all that?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I had a feeling he’d heard it all before.”

  Peggy McKinney opened her mouth to speak. Foley laid a hand on her arm. “People like Wendell and Nhu don’t count,” he said. “Power counts—and the right people are in power. I think we’ll stay in power for quite a while.” He grinned for the first time all evening, and sipped his wine. “In fact, if I can use one of the Republicans’ more famous phrases, I think Mr. Nixon can look forward to at least twenty years of treason.”

  “Wit is back in the White House,” said Peggy McKinney with tears of laughter in her eyes. “Let’s drink to that.”

  6

  Sybille led her guests into the salon for coffee. Peggy McKinney stood with Foley, her feet placed at right angles like a model’s. She wore a pink Chanel suit, pearls, and a half-dozen golden bracelets on her right wrist. With her thin, nervous body and her bold features, she might have been taken for a Frenchwoman who had affairs. That, she told Foley, was the impression she had cultivated until the last election; the Kennedys had made her want to be an American again.

  Tom Webster had said nothing during dinner. The evening had been spoiled for him by outsiders. Christopher operated all the time on hostile ground; in every country but his own he was a criminal. Outsiders, who did not know how fast betrayal traveled, could do him harm, perhaps even kill him, by knowing his name and speaking it at a cocktail party. Tonight Webster had entrusted Christopher’s identity to two people who had no right to know it. He put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and began to speak.

  He never got the words out. The doorbell rang and Webster went to answer it, closing the door behind him so that no other stranger could catch a glimpse of Christopher. The others went on talking; Christopher heard Webster speaking English in the hall.

  When he came back, he held a perforated embassy envelope in his hand. He opened it and read the cable it contained.

  “Wonderful,” Webster said in a flat tone. “There’s been a coup d’etat in Saigon. Some generals have seized power. The Saigon station says the coup has succeeded.”

  “What about Diem and Nhu?” Foley asked. He took the long white cable out of Webster’s hand and read it. Peggy McKinney, not cleared to read secret traffic, stepped back discreetly; she gazed at Foley and her eyes danced.

  “No one knows,” Webster said. “The ambassador talked to Diem and offered him asylum, but he didn’t accept.”

  “He’s a dead man,” Christopher said.

  Foley handed the cable back to Webster. His face was expressionless.

  Christopher watched Sybille put her coffee cup down, very gently, on the table. She sat in a corner of the sofa and looked out the window. Christopher, remembering the anecdote about the golf ball that symbolized a nation, stared at Foley, but the presidential assistant did not glance his way.

  Tom Webster went to answer the ringing telephone. When he returned his hair was disheveled. “Diem is dead,” he said. “So is Nhu. They were shot by a young officer in the back of an M-113 armored personnel carrier.”

  “American aid,” said Peggy McKinney.

  Foley let out a long breath through his nose and made a chopping gesture, as if to drive home a point.

  Peggy McKinney, flushed and smiling, took five small running steps toward the middle of the room. Planting her sharp heels in the carpet, legs apart, she said, “All together, folks— three cheers!”

  Lifting her thin arm, bracelets jangling, she cried, “Hip, hip, hooray!” She repeated the cheer three times. No one joined in.

  Sybille put a fist to her mouth; Tom Webster fumbled for a pocket comb and ran it through his hair.

  “Paul,” Peggy cried, pointing a long finger. “Did you do this? I’ll bet you did, you sly spy—you were just out there in your false mustache.”

  “No,” Christopher said. “I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did. I hope it really was the Vietnamese.”

  “Oh, come on,” Peggy said.

  “Peggy, I’m going to tell you once more. I didn’t know anything about this, and I want that to be clear to you. Don’t give me credit for murder, if you don’t mind.”

  “Murder?” said Peggy. “Surgery.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sybille said. “Excuse me.” She left the room.

  “Did I say something?” Peggy asked, touching Foley’s sleeve. “You’d think Sybille would be a little tougher, considering Tom’s line of work.”

  “I guess Sybille’s got the idea that assassination is foul work,” Christopher said.

  “Well, she can shed tears for both of us,” Peggy said. “What happened tonight—what’s the date? November 1, 1963—may show the world that the United States is going to take the initiative for a change. God knows they need to wake up to the reality of power in this world.”

  “You think assassination is the way to wake them up?”

  “Oh, Paul, come on—a petty Asiatic dictator and a secret-police chief.”

  Christopher said, “Well, I have a plane to catch.”

  Peggy shook hands with him. Foley stayed where he was, across the room, looking Christopher up and down as if he wanted to remember every detail of his appearance.

  In the hall, Webster helped Christopher into his raincoat. “There’s one thing about this,” he said. “Luong should be all right.”

  “Maybe,” Christopher said. “I don’t think they’d have had time to take him with them.”

  Sybille came into the hall on tiptoe. She put her arms around Christopher. “Sorry I fled, love,” she said. “I’ve reached the age where everything reminds me of something that happened in the past. Wherever we go, it’s corpse after corpse. God, how I hate death and politics.”

  Christopher walked up the shallow hill to the Etoile and found a taxi. The streets shone with rain. No one else was out walking. His mouth was dry with the metallic aftertaste of wine. He closed his eyes and tried not to hear the whine of the taxi’s tires: he did not want to use any of his senses. In his mind, as if it were a clear photograph projected on a screen, he saw Molly’s face, framed in russet hair and filled with belief. He had a sexual thought, his first in three weeks: it was a memory of the sun on her skin.

  TWO

  l

  They were in Molly’s bed when she asked him about his poems. She lay on an elbow,
her lips a little swollen, a strip of yellow sunlight running through her hair and across her cheek.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about your poetry?” Molly asked. “‘How odd,’ I thought, when I saw the traditional slim volume, all covered with coffee stains, lying in a barrow on the Ponte Sisto. ‘Here’s a chap with my lover’s name who writes poetry.’ Then I read them, and it was your voice, you infamous wretch.”

  “I think I’d like dinner at Dal Bolognese tonight,” Christopher said.

  “Ah, things of the flesh and things of the spirit. Such an odd combination in an American. I want to know what you were like when you wrote those verses.”

  “Young.”

  “What was she like, the girl in the sonnets?”

  “Oh, Molly—that was fifteen years ago. I invented her.”

  “Were you the man of her dreams?”

  “She didn’t like me at all, and when the book was published she liked me even less. She said people would think she wasn’t a virgin.”

  “But you loved her.”

  “I was crazy about her.”

  “What was her name? Tell.”

  “Shirley.”

  “Shirley? Jesus—didn’t that discourage you?”

  “All right, what was the name of your first love?”

  “Paul Christopher,” Molly said. “That much is true. But now I find he has deceived me with a bird named Shirley. Paul, those poems are so good. I’m bloody jealous. Why don’t you write like that now, instead of doing journalism?”

  “I’ve lost the touch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it didn’t matter.”

  “It matters. What else haven’t you told me?”

  “Quite a lot, Molly.”

  “I’ve often thought so. Paul, I wish you’d talk.”

  “I talk all the time. We agree that Red China should be in the United Nations. I ask you about Australia and your girlhood in the outback. I explore your reasons for hating kangaroos. I praise your body.”

  Molly kissed him and raised his hand to her breast. “Yes, all that, but you never go deep. I dream about you, I see you in your past, I see you in Kuala Lumpur and in the Congo when you’re away. But you never speak—you’re making me invent you, as you invented that girl.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What is the worst wound you have ever suffered?”

  “Ah, Molly—I’m bulletproof.”

  “You’re covered with scars. Please tell me, Paul. I’ll not ask you another question, ever.”

  Christopher sat up in bed, moving his body away from Molly’s, and pulled the sheet over both of them. “All right,” he said. “Cathy could not bear to be alone. Her life, our marriage, took place in bed. She was a hungry lover, not graceful as you are. She needed sex, she’d scream and wail. Once we were thrown out of a hotel in Spain—they thought we were using whips. I knew she slept with men when I was away. I had no rule about it—it was her body, she could use it as she wished. She thought that showed a lack of love. She’d never believe I couldn’t feel sexual jealousy.”

  “I believe it,” Molly said.

  Cathy had not been content to let their marriage die. She set out to kill it. Christopher realized soon after he met her that he had never been so aroused by a female; his desire for her showed him a part of his nature he had not known to exist; he was seized by a biological force that had nothing to do with the mind, and he was driven to have her as, he supposed, a father would be seized by the instinct to kill the man who attacked his child. Cathy was a lovely girl with elongated gray eyes like a cat’s, perfect teeth, a straight nose, a lithe, frank body. She had been sent to college, and then to Europe to study languages and art, but she did nothing. She had superstitions, but no ideas; she had learned to play the piano and talk and wear clothes. She was beautiful and wanted to be nothing else. “What do you want?” Christopher asked her as they walked along a beach in Spain. “Not what other girls want—I’m not domestic. No children, no career. I want, Paul, a perfect union with a man.”

  Cathy believed that she was different from all other human beings. Christopher was the first man in whom she had confided; she thought he was more like her in mind and soul than anyone else could be. When at last they went to bed, she was rapturous. But her passion was all she had. She had no skill as a lover and could not learn.

  After a time she sensed that this was the trouble. Cathy wanted to satisfy Christopher. He wanted to reassure her. They made love constantly, in bed, in the car. She would meet him at the airport naked under a raincoat, and remove the coat as they drove home, pulling the wheel so that he would turn into the ruins at Ostia Antica, where they would lie behind the broken stones of an old wall, shuddering on the cold earth in a rainfall. Because she was an American and his wife, he told her about his work—the nature of his profession, not its details. She thought that he kept more from her than official secrets—that he could not forget some other woman whose name he wouldn’t reveal. She begged him to write about her. “You won’t give me what you are,” she said. “That’s all I want.”

  Christopher loved to look at her. He bought her jewels and clothes and read to her. After a time, they lived in public as much as possible. They went to bullfights in Madrid, to the theater in London, they had restaurants they always went to and favorite drinks. Cathy loved to eat wild boar at Da Mario in the Via della Vite, she liked to sit up late on the sidewalk at Doney’s, drinking Negronis.

  When Christopher was away, she would ride through Rome on summer nights in his convertible with the top down. Finally, while he was in Africa, she met an Italian actor. After Christopher came back, she kept up the affair. She found other lovers. She went back to the actor. She would come home to Christopher, still wet, and want to make love. Christopher knew the Italian—he took Dexedrine and it made him violent. He was a Maoist who hated America; Cathy, who looked like a girl in an American film, was something he wanted to spoil.

  Finally Cathy decided to break off with the actor. She had left some things at his apartment, dresses, jewelry, books. When she arrived, in the afternoon, she found him waiting with a dozen of his friends, all Italian except for a couple of Scandinavian girls. They were drinking spumante. The actor pulled Cathy into the apartment and threw her into the center of the living room. He had arranged the furniture so that the chairs were all around the walls, like a theater in the round. While his friends watched, the actor beat her with his fists. He punched her breasts, smashed her face. It went on for a long time—her nose and the bones in her cheeks were broken, some of her teeth were knocked out.

  Cathy went downstairs to a coffee bar and called Christopher. When he got to her, her face was a mass of blood. Her hair was soaked with blood. She had vomited on her clothes. She wore only one shoe. Christopher took her to the hospital. The car was open. “Put up the top,” she kept saying, “put up the top.”

  “I see,” Molly said.

  “Do you? Outside the hospital, I kissed her mouth. She was blinded by blood. I was enough like her by then that I would have pulled off her clothes right there, but they came out with a stretcher.”

  2

  That evening, seated at Doney’s while the crowd drifted by on the Via Veneto, they read the papers. Christopher saw, for the first time, photographs of the dead bodies of the Ngo brothers. Diem’s corpse was closer to the camera, and a broad streak of blood ran from the wound in his temple over his cheek.

  “What happens to your piece on Diem now?” Molly asked.

  “I don’t know. I cabled the magazine. They may want a fix, or they may not run it. They wanted something unflattering, but that may not seem appropriate to them now.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Only for a few minutes. It’s odd, you know, but no one knows anything about him, really. He was sealed up in his family, never talked to strangers. All the stuff about him in the papers was science fiction.”

  Piero Cremona, wearing a
perfectly pressed tan suit and a silk scarf around his neck, came out of the crowd, lifting his hand in greeting.

  “The famous American correspondent is back from— where was it this time, Paul?”

  Christopher shook hands. “How’s the world’s best-dressed Communist?” he said.

  Cremona ran the fingernails of both hands down the breast of his jacket, making the silk whistle. “The true revolutionary blends into his environment,” Cremona said. “In the jungles of Vietnam, I would wear the branches of trees. Here, this is my camouflage.”

  Cremona wrote political articles for L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. He signed his pieces with the nom de guerre he had used as a partisan; everyone but the police had forgotten the name Cremona was born with. Christopher avoided American reporters, and Americans generally, in Rome, but he had got to know a lot of Italians when he was learning the language. He never reported on them or carried out any intelligence activities in Italy; it was his rule never to operate in the country where he lived.

  Cremona sat down with Christopher and Molly. He tapped the newspaper photograph of the dead Vietnamese. “The imperialist eagle devours its young, eh?” he said.

  “Is that the line this week, Piero?”

  “It’s the obvious truth, Paul. Read my piece tomorrow. Brilliant. I’ve just come from the typewriter.”

  “Why is it so obvious? Corriere della Sera says the trigger was pulled by a South Vietnamese lieutenant.”

  “Yes, and the junta in Saigon says Diem and Nhu committed suicide,” Cremona said. “Everyone knew it was going to happen—you have a man of action in the White House now. I predicted it weeks ago. A handful of dollars, a head full of bullets. Madame Nhu, when she was here last month, predicted it.”