The Tears of Autumn Page 4

  “Well, if you’re right, it ought to be a very good thing for the revolution.”

  “The best, dear Paul, the best. Ah, you capitalist-imperialists are so adept at fulfilling the predictions of Lenin. You are eager for your own doom. Up to now, you’ve been growling in Indochina like a caged tiger. Now you must bleed, Paul. There will be chaos—generals cannot run a government in a civil war. Their army has always been a joke, now their country will be a joke. The U.S. Marines will land—they must. You’re committed now to playing a bad hand.”

  “Last time I saw you, you were telling me that Diem and Nhu were a couple of Nazis.”

  “They were—but they were no joke,” Cremona said. “Well, I must leave you. Molly, why does a beautiful girl like you consort with this running dog of Wall Street?”

  “Our relationship is not political,” Molly said.

  They had made love all afternoon. While Christopher took a shower, Molly wrote five hundred words on Italian fashions for the Australian weekly she represented in Rome. Christopher found her at the typewriter, naked, with her glasses slipping down her nose and a yellow pencil clenched in her teeth, when he came out of the bathroom.

  “Tripe,” she mumbled. Molly wanted to live the life she thought he led, interviewing foreign ministers and film directors for a great American magazine. She kept all his articles, and would have typed them if he let her. Christopher did not want a secretary or a wife. He had hired Molly as an assistant two years before, to have someone in his office while he was away. It was important to his cover that someone answer the telephone and collect the mail. He kept nothing in the office, or anywhere else, that would connect him to his work as an agent. Molly could discover nothing.

  Molly, who talked so beautifully, wrote badly, and she had never had an editor who knew enough about English to punish her for it. She asked too many questions when she interviewed; she had not learned to let her sources talk and betray themselves. Mostly she did stories about Italians, who liked the flat accent she used to speak their language, and tried to seduce her. She had beautiful legs and a soft way of smiling that made men want her.

  Christopher had realized that he wanted her to stay with him after they had gone to bed for the first time. They had eaten lunch together on the first warm day of the year in the Piazza Navona. Molly had tied a scarf under her chin, and her bright hair was hidden. When Christopher spoke to her she searched his face, as though for some hint that he was mocking her. She spoke English with a public school accent, but when she talked Italian to the waiter her Australian intonations were audible.

  She wore a gray sweater and a pleated skirt like a schoolgirl, and Christopher thought she was ashamed of her clothes, as she was ashamed of her Australian accent. He wanted to ask why she flinched when he talked to her; he thought she must be having a bad love affair. Her eyes were flecked with copper, and when she peeled a mandarine he saw that she had lovely, skillful hands.

  Out of mischief, because she was so shy, he said, “Would you like to make love?” Molly replied, touching the corner of her mouth with a napkin, “Yes, I think I would.”

  Webster knew that Christopher slept with Molly. He sent her name in for a background investigation without mentioning that she was Christopher’s mistress. “Do you want to read the file?” Webster asked when it came back from Canberra. “No,” Christopher said. “She seems to be okay,” Webster said. “If you have to live with a foreigner, an Australian is as clean as you can do.” They did not live together; Molly kept her own small apartment. She didn’t like the bed at his place, where Cathy had slept.

  They walked to the restaurant through the Borghese Gardens. Molly did not hold his arm; she never touched him in public. Streetlights glowed in the branches of the trees. They paused on the Pincio and looked out over the dark city.

  “We’re too late for the sunset,” Molly said.

  After dinner, they drank coffee in the Piazza del Popolo. “Rome does smell of coffee in the winter,” Molly said. “Have you ever mentioned that to me?”

  She grinned at him. Christopher loved the scent of Rome, a mixture of dust and cooking and bitter coffee. When he had drunk enough wine, he described the aroma of the city to Molly, and they tried to separate the odors.

  Molly had caught him in the middle of a thought. He didn’t want to leave her, but she mistook what she saw in his face.

  “You don’t much like being loved, do you?” Molly said.

  Christopher stopped himself from touching her. “I’m going to the States next week,” he said.

  “For how long?”

  “A week, ten days.”

  “Will you be coming back to Rome, or going on?”

  “To Rome. Maybe we can go someplace together.” Molly read his face again. “We’re already here,” she said.

  3

  David Patchen came to the safe house in Q Street at three o’clock in the morning. He was white with fatigue, and the glass of scotch Christopher gave him trembled in his hand. He drank it and poured another before he spoke.

  “Dennis Foley wants your balls for breakfast,” he said.

  As a seventeen-year-old Marine on Okinawa, Patchen had been wounded by grenade fragments. The left side of his face was paralyzed. He walked with a limp. One of his eyes had been frozen open and he had learned not to blink the other; he wore a black eye patch when he slept. Patchen had no gestures. He was so still, like a hunting animal lying on the branch of a tree, that people would cough in nervous relief when finally he moved, and they saw that he limped.

  Christopher was Patchen’s only friend. They met in a naval hospital in the last days of the war and played chess together. While Patchen was still in a wheelchair, they were mustered with a handful o other wounded men to be decorated by a visiting admiral. Afterward, as Christopher pushed Patchen along a path planted with oleanders, Patchen unpinned the Silver Star from his bathrobe and threw it into the bushes. Both men were younger sons who had grown up in families in which an older brother was the preferred child. They were contemptuous of human beings who needed admiration.

  Later, they had been roommates at Harvard. Another Harvard man, a few years older, took them to dinner at Locke-Ober’s in the spring of their senior year. He ordered Pouilly-Fumé with the oysters and Médoc with the roast lamb, and afterward, in his room at the Parker House, recruited them for intelligence work. Neither man hesitated; they understood that what the recruiter was offering them was a lifetime of inviolable privacy.

  Because people who had seen him remembered his wounds, Patchen remained in Washington. He was a natural administrator; he absorbed written material at a glance and never forgot anything. He knew the names and pseudonyms, the photographs and the operative weakness of every agent controlled by Americans everywhere in the world. Patchen never met any of them, and none of them knew he existed, but he designed their lives, forming them into a global sub-society that had become what it was, and remained so, at his pleasure. His hair turned gray when he was thirty, possibly from the pain of his wounds. At thirty-five he was outranked by only four men in the American intelligence community.

  Christopher had gone into the field almost at once. It was thought that his book of poems gave him reality and an excuse to go anywhere. He began to write magazine articles after the brief notoriety of his poems dissipated.

  They met once or twice a year in Washington. Patchen’s wife was gone, like Cathy Christopher. Patchen and Christopher saw changes in one another, but the changes were physical. Their minds were as they had always been. They believed in intellect as a force in the world and understood that it could be used only in secret. They knew, because they had spent their lives doing it, that it was possible to break open the human experience and find the dry truth hidden at its center. Their work had taught them that the truth, once discovered, was usually of little use: men denied what they had done, forgot what they had believed, and made the same mistakes over and over again. Patchen and Christopher were valuable because th
ey had learned how to predict and use the mistakes of others.

  “Foley ordered me to destroy any report you’d filed on that theory of Carson Wendell’s about the 1960 election,” Patchen said. “I told him there was no report.”

  “Did he believe that?”

  “Of course not. He’s got the idea we run a gossip mill. You may have to write something, so he can burn it in his ashtray.”

  Christopher smiled.

  “He wanted you fired,” Patchen said. “The Director put a handwritten note in your file explaining that you were responding to a direct request for information and had no political motive.”

  “Does Foley believe that?”

  “How could he? He lives on loyalty to one man, the President. He’s had no experience with coldhearted bastards like you. No one but us can see that information is just information. Foley thinks you’re an enemy if you don’t agree with everything the President does, one hundred percent.”

  “So now everyone agrees with assassination?”

  Patchen lifted his bad leg, using both hands, and crossed it over the other one. “Foley thought you were being emotional,” he said. “I could kick Tom Webster’s ass for bringing you two together.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  Patchen hesitated. It was not like Christopher to ask for information he didn’t need to have.

  “The outfit had nothing to do with what happened to Diem and Nhu,” he said.

  “Foley didn’t seem very surprised at the news.”

  “I can’t explain Foley, or what he does,” Patchen said.

  Patchen opened his briefcase with a snap; he had had enough of this subject. He handed Christopher a newspaper clipping, the obituary of an Asian political figure who had died the week before of a heart attack.

  “Did you see this? It isn’t often that an agent dies of natural causes.”

  Christopher read the obituary. It said that the Asian would be remembered by history for three things: his autobiography, which made the world aware of the struggle of a whole people through the description of the author’s own life; the Manifesto of 1955, which had influenced political thought and action throughout the Third World; and the statesman’s success in driving Communists out of the political life of his country.

  “Not even a chuckle?” Patchen asked.

  Christopher shook his head. It was a convention that agents, even after they were dead, were called by their code names, never by their own. The Asian’s pseudonym had been “Ripsaw.”

  “How much of Ripsaw’s autobiography actually happened in his life?” Patchen asked.

  “Most of the anecdotes were true as he told them to me. I just put in the parts where he had deep, deep thoughts. The Manifesto of 1955 I wrote on a plane, going down from Japan. It was the universal text—I’d done things like it before for some of the Africans. There just happened to be a guy from the Times in-country when Ripsaw issued it, so it got publicity.”

  “Don’t you think it’s funny, the way the Times is always reporting on you, and it doesn’t know you exist?”

  “That’s what newspapers are for.”

  “Yes, to explain the real world.”

  “There is no real world, David.”

  Patchen smiled at the irony. He took back the clipping and closed his briefcase. He sat for a long moment with his good eye closed and a hand over the other one, sipping from his glass of whiskey. He took his hand away from his face and stared at Christopher.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I got out your file and read it; you’ve been through a lot in twelve years. You’re losing your humor, Paul. I’ve seen it happen to others who stay in the field too long, do too much.”

  “Seen what happen?”

  “Professional fatigue. I believe, in the case of Christians, it’s called religious melancholy. Do you play with the thought of getting out? I know you like to be with this girl Molly.”

  “Sometimes I play with the thought. I’m tired of the travel, and once or twice a year I meet someone I’d rather not lie to.”

  “Molly wouldn’t be enough for you, you know, any more than poetry was, or your wife. You say there’s no real world, but if there is one, it consists of you and maybe a dozen other operators like you on both sides. You ought to be intoxicated.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “No. Your agents are intoxicated. Foley is intoxicated. That’s why you don’t like him—you know how easily you could use him if he was a foreigner.”

  “Well, I’m going back out. I have to meet Spendthrift in Léopoldville later this week, and after that I want to see what’s left of the network in Vietnam.”

  “Who knows?” Patchen said. “You may find the atmosphere improved in Saigon. The embassy’s traffic is full of bounce and optimism.”

  “I’ll bet. Do you think the Foleys have any idea of what’s going to happen to them out there?”

  Patchen stood up. When he spoke, he turned the dead side of his face toward Christopher. “They’re a funny bunch,” he said. “They’re bright. They believe in action, and at first that seemed refreshing. But they’re almost totally innocent. They have about as much experience as you and I had when we were recruited, and there’s no way to season them. They got into the White House and opened the safe, and the power they discovered took their breath away. ‘Christ, let’s use it!’ Power really does corrupt. They think they can do anything they like, to anyone in the world, and there’ll be no consequences.”

  “But there always are.”

  “You know that,” Patchen said. “For those who never smell the corpse, there’s no way of knowing.”

  4

  On his way out of America, Christopher stopped in New York to have lunch with the managing editor of his magazine. The man was fascinated with the internal politics of the magazine. In his eyes, Christopher was a good writer who delivered six articles a year according to his contract.

  Christopher had been offered the contract after he wrote profiles of a dozen foreign statesmen whom no other journalist had been able to interview. It was good cover, but it created a security problem; Christopher could not be revealed to the editors.

  The Director called the chairman of the board of the magazine; the two old men had been at Princeton together. The Director explained that Christopher was an intelligence operative in addition to being a writer. It was arranged that Christopher’s salary, twenty thousand dollars a year, would be donated in a discreet way to the favorite charity of the chairman of the board. He either saw no reason to inform the editor of the magazine of Christopher’s connection with the government, or forgot about it. In any case, no one at the magazine had ever mentioned a suspicion of Christopher.

  The managing editor drank three martinis before lunch. He told Christopher he had thrown away his profile of Ngo Dinh Diem.

  “My eyes glazed over,” he said. “Diem was boring enough when he was alive. Who’s going to read about a dead dinosaur? There’s no American angle.”

  He asked Christopher to write five thousand words on the new Pope.

  5

  Christopher, alone, sat in a sidewalk café in Léopoldville. It had grown too dark to read, and the book he had brought with him lay closed on the table. Its pages, like Christopher’s shirt and the tablecloth, were swollen with moisture.

  Three gaunt adolescent boys ran among the tables of the café. Two of them carried armloads of wood, and the third clutched a piece of meat. It appeared to be the ribs of a large animal and it had begun to spoil; Christopher smelled its rancid odor. The boys crouched by a mimosa tree a few yards from the café and started a fire. The flames burst upward, licking the bole of the tree, silhouetting the thin boys, who threw the meat into the fire and danced away from its heat.

  The child who had been carrying the meat darted away from his friends and came to Christopher’s table, giggling as he ran. He was a leper. He snatched Christopher’s unfinished bottle of beer from the table and ran away,
hugging it against his chest with a fingerless hand. Back at the fire, he and his companions passed the bottle from mouth to mouth.

  Christopher paid the impassive waiter and walked away. The unlighted streets were deserted except for an occasional Congolese, asleep in the dirt. By day, the concrete buildings, painted white or rose or pale blue like the Belgian sky, showed tropical sores and lesions. Now they were dark shapes, too geometrical to be natural, but emitting no more light than the forest that lay a few hundred yards away. Christopher walked in the middle of the street, to avoid the doorways. When he looked back, he saw the faint reflection of the fire in the high branches of the tree by the café.

  It was too dark to see the river, but he could hear it. A power launch passed, showing no lights, and Christopher heard the canoes rattling at their moorings in its wake. He walked along the bank until he saw the outlines of a river steamer; it had once been white and its blunt stern was clearly visible against the sky. Christopher, leaning against a piling, waited until he saw a tall man go aboard the steamer. Then Christopher climbed the gangplank, crossed the deck, and went down a ladder into the interior of the boat. A candle burned in a stateroom at the end of a narrow gangway, and Christopher walked toward its nervous light. He heard Nsango behind him, and stopped.

  “My friend,” Nsango said.

  Christopher turned around. The black, wearing the khaki shorts and torn singlet of a workman, embraced him. He took Christopher’s hand in his own dry fingers and led him to the stateroom.

  “I’m sorry to make you wait,” Nsango said. “Did you come every night?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “Four times, but I never saw the light.”

  Nsango laughed. “I was in the bush. I was waiting, too. But I knew you would come back tonight. I saw you in the café, reading your book.”