The Tears of Autumn Read online

  “Yes, I saw you across the boulevard.”

  “Ah, what eyes!” Nsango spoke rapid French at the back of his throat, with many extra m sounds as if his own language struggled to reveal itself. “Well, what news?”

  “The Congolese think you’re in Angola. Someone told the Portuguese you were camping along the frontier, and they told the police.”

  “Are they looking for me there?”

  “They’re watching the crossing points.”

  “Good. I’ll go the other way.” He laughed again.

  “How did you explain this journey?”

  “I told them in the camp that political organization was needed in some villages I know about. They probably think I have a woman somewhere.”

  “What’s going on in Katanga?” Christopher asked.

  “It’s very quiet, my friend. I lose five or six men a week— they go back to their villages.”

  “Do you tell them to go?”

  “Yes, they’ll wait for me there. They don’t like the new foreigners.”

  “There are new foreigners?”

  “Yes, the Chinese have all gone away. They took their aspirin that made men bulletproof with them. But now we have others—some of them are black men.”

  “Stop talking like a native, Nsango. Who are they?”

  Nsango guffawed. “They fell from the sky on great white leaves, master. Oh, we were frightened!”

  Christopher had seen this man, who had the best political brain in black Africa, trembling in fear because he believed a spirit had entered his body as he slept; he felt it devouring his liver like a maggot. Christopher had brought a juju man from the Ivory Coast and he removed the spirit, sending it into the body of the man who had cursed Nsango. Christopher had given the juju man fifty ounces of gold for his work. He and Nsango had used the sorcerer again to carry out an operation they hoped would result in Nsango’s becoming, in time, the prime minister of his country. They failed, and Nsango had gone back into the forest. Christopher knew he would never come out again, and Nsango, despite his diploma from the Sorbonne and his name that was known throughout the world, still feared enchantment and blamed it for his bad luck. Nsango was not, however, afraid of foreigners.

  “They’re Cubans,” he told Christopher. “Three blacks, four whites.” He removed a stained envelope from the pocket of his shorts and handed it over. Inside was a roll of film and a sheet of paper on which the names the Cubans used were written in Nsango’s neat missionary-school hand.

  “When did they come?” Christopher asked.

  “Maybe a month ago. First there was this one.” Nsango pointed at the sheet of paper. “Manuel. He speaks good French. Then the others a few days afterward.”

  “How did they find you?”

  “I suppose the Chinese told them.”

  “What do they want?”

  “A revolution. They talk even more than the Chinese—we have meetings all the time. The men like it, there’s a lot of beer, and they brought some very good guns.”

  “How many?”

  “Ah, my friend, not so many. Some mortars. Not enough ammunition.”

  “Are they issuing the weapons to your men?”

  “No, they’re like the Chinese were at first. We must make our own weapons to make our own revolution. Spears and stones—Mao’s teachings. We killed a South African for them— the capitalists have that mercenary camp still outside Elisabeth-ville. We ambushed a jeep, the whites were drunk. One got away—he had a machine pistol, so we didn’t chase him.”

  “Are you going back?”

  “Yes, I’m the leader. We need the guns. The Cubans won’t stay forever.”

  “Nsango, I think you’re taking a chance.”

  “It’s better than prison. What do they say about me in the papers?”

  “In Léopoldville, nothing. But I see your name written on walls all over town: everyone believes you’re alive. In Brussels, that your movement still is dangerous, and that you are more so.

  “What would you do about these Cubans?”

  “Let them stay,” Christopher said. “It’s better to have someone you know than to wait for someone you don’t know to show up.”

  Nsango picked up the candle and held it next to Christopher’s face so that he could watch his expression as he answered the question Nsango always asked.

  “You still think I have no chance?”

  “I don’t say that. I can’t help you—you have the wrong allies.”

  “But if, after all, I win, you’ll be my friend, and your friends will expect me to remember past favors?”

  “That’s what they’ll expect,” Christopher said. “They’re not always realistic.”

  “We’ll see. When will you come back?”

  “I don’t know. If you want to see me, send a postcard. The one with the elephants if it’s urgent. I’ll use a postcard with a picture of Pope John. I’ll come to Elisabethville on the sixth day after the postmark, ten o’clock at night. I don’t think you should come to Léopoldville again—at least, not to meet me.”

  Christopher took a key out of his pocket and gave it to Nsango. “Deposit box 217, Banque de Haute Katanga, Elisabethville,” he said. “In case you need it, there’s a ticket to Algiers, a thousand dollars, and a passport with a visa for Algeria. It’s a Camerounian passport, so don’t go there.”

  “What good would I be to the movement, or to you, in Algiers?” Nsango said. “The old soldiers’ home for revolutionaries.”

  “What good would you be dead?” Christopher asked.

  6

  Trevor Hitchcock knocked on the door of Christopher’s hotel room at six in the morning. He was the son of missionaries, and he had spent his childhood in the Congo; he worked in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and drank through the night. His Presbyterian father had taught him to make no concessions to the climate and Hitchcock never went out in the sun without a coat and a tie and a Panama hat.

  “Father made more converts than anyone in Kasai province,” Hitchcock once told Christopher. “He thanked God for smiling on the Presbyterians. Then he learned, after about five years, that it was because he sweated like a hog butcher in his black suits and his celluloid collars. The Congolese thought he smelled like a human being—the other missionaries, who wore shorts and took baths, smelled dead to them. That’s what whites are called in the Lingala language—the dead.”

  Hitchcock read the cable Christopher had drafted in longhand after his meeting with Nsango. “What’s the film?” he asked.

  “As I said in the cable, pictures of the Cubans. Also photographs of some of their documents.”

  “Spendthrift took those?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “I gave him a camera in the old days.”

  “Spendthrift” was Nsango’s pseudonym; Hitchcock was a careful professional who believed even the Congolese might have microphones planted in hotel rooms.

  “I’ll get this off this morning,” Hitchcock said. “The Cubans are news to me. Do you believe it?”

  “Well, there are the photographs. And Spendthrift has never lied to us, despite our lack of reciprocity in that department.”

  “You really thought we should have backed him all the way, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. He was better than any of the alternatives.”

  “Wrong tribe. Wrong time.”

  “He didn’t take it personally,” Christopher said. “He believes he’s going to be running this country someday, and so do a lot of other people. His relationship with me is political money in the bank.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Hitchcock said. “You recoil in horror from giving any of these people guns—that’s the main reason Spendthrift struck out in ‘61. But if the world gets blown up, the bomb will be made with uranium and cobalt dug out of the Shinkolobwe by some black living in the Bronze Age.”

  “It won’t be Spendthrift who drops the bomb.”

  “Or gets blown up by it. How were things in Washington?”
r />   “Ecstatic,” Christopher said. “The crisis managers are flying out to Saigon by the hundreds.”

  “Terrific. I hope they take along a few of the ones we’ve got here. What time does your plane go?”

  “Ten o’clock tonight.”

  “Do you want to come out to the house for dinner?” Hitchcock asked. “I’ll send your scoop, manage a crisis or two, and pick you up at six.”

  Hitchcock lived on the outskirts of Léopoldville in a large stucco house that still belonged to a Belgian trader. The Belgian fled to Brussels after Lumumba’s troops raped his wife during the mutiny in 1960. Hitchcock’s houseboys, three stocky men who laughed hysterically when he berated them in Lingala, were the same ones who had worked for the Belgian and opened the door to the drunken troops. One of the boys came into the darkened living room with a bottle of gin on a silver tray. He put it down and trotted across the tile floor, leaving the sweaty prints of his bare feet behind him. “Ice, glasses, tonic water, limes!” Hitchcock screamed. “We don’t drink the stuff out of the bottle, Antoine!”

  Hitchcock’s wife flinched at the boy’s wild laugh. She was a frail woman with thinning gray hair; as Christopher watched her, she pulled the cloth of her dress away from her body and placed a wadded Kleenex between her breasts. “It’s the constant perspiration, it drives you mad,” she said. Her damp skin had a reddish shine, as though discontent had burned away its outer layers.

  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.