The Tears of Autumn Read online

  “You’re talking to an American, you know,” Molly said.

  “I know. That’s the wonderful thing about them. They don’t mind being insulted.” Kim reached across the table and punched Christopher on the biceps. “Well,” he said, “I guess you’ve got a big story in the States now. Are you working on it?”

  “No, I haven’t even heard from the magazine. The people who were in Dallas are the only ones who are writing this week.”

  “It’s a great tragedy when a leader dies like that,” Kim said. “There’s no sense in it. A people just falls to its knees. Even the Americans—even you, I’ll bet, Paul. It’s a blow that strikes every person in the country.”

  “In the world, I should have thought,” Molly said.

  “Yes, I saw in the paper that Khrushchev cried,” Kim said. “No one hates a murdered man if he’s an American. These Kennedys were the real royalty of the modern age—too bad their reign was so brief.”

  They began to eat their spaghetti. “This is pretty good,” Kim said. “I taste eggs and smoked pork. There should be more pepper in it.”

  Christopher said, “I must say you seem pretty cheerful, Kim, for a man without a country.”

  “Oh, I’ll get by,” Kim said. “We lose the country every once in a while, but we always get it back. We know a secret, Paul —in the end, nobody really wants Vietnam but us. All the rest of you have to learn that the hard way.”

  “Do you really think either branch of your family will ever get back in power?”

  “Who knows?” Kim said. “Kings never come back, that’s for sure. But the Ngos—that’s another matter. They’re very hard people.”

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “But they’re dead.”

  “Diem and Nhu are dead. Would you say the Kennedys are finished because the one who happened to be President has been shot?”

  “No,” Christopher said.

  “People like the Kennedys and the Ngos always recover. One martyr wipes out all the bad memories. The Ngos have two martyrs.”

  “Are the two families really comparable?” Molly asked. “After all, the Kennedys are in America.”

  “What difference does that make?” Kim asked.

  “They’ll be safe there.”

  “Molly, my dear!” said Kim. “John Kennedy’s funeral is tomorrow.”

  “That was the work of a lunatic,” Molly said.

  “Agreed. Will you now tell me that the assassination of Diem and Nhu was the work of sane men?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Molly said.

  “You’re offended to have the two assassinations compared,” Kim said. “Why should grief belong only to the Kennedys and the Americans?”

  “It shouldn’t. But, forgive me, Kennedy’s death was more important.”

  “Ah, Realpolitik in such a beautiful young girl. Really, we backward people have no chance against you—even your women think in terms of power relationships.”

  “And yours don’t?” Christopher said. “Didn’t you just mention someone called Madame Nhu?”

  Kim had been drinking a great deal of wine. When the waiter brought the second course, he asked for another liter. His face was flushed and his voice vibrated. The conversation excited him.

  “Lê Xuan is a remarkable woman,” he said. “She is more Ngo than the Ngos. I’ll tell you a little family history. She comes from a Buddhist family, a very important family called Tran. She always felt that she was the least favorite child—she fought against her mother and father, she hardly tolerates her sister. She married Nhu when she was sixteen. She became a Catholic and an activist, she was imprisoned by the Viet Minh, she found out that the only real power for any human being is in a family that will die for its principles. In the confusion of the Japanese withdrawal in ‘45, one of her husband’s brothers was killed by Ho Chi Minh; Ho apologized to Diem and offered him half of his power, but Diem refused. Ho had killed his brother. Even Diem’s country was not so important as that. Diem and Nhu triumphed, they fell—Lê Xuan saw all that happen. She has not lost heart, she knows the family goes on. There are many, many members of that family. She is one of them as she was never one of her own family. It means everything to her. She believes the family will rise again. She knows its strength.”

  Christopher watched Kim as he spoke. The Vietnamese had ceased eating; he pushed back his plate and poured more wine. He was speaking in a low, hard voice, his eyes fixed on Molly’s. He seemed to have forgotten Christopher was there, and Christopher was content to let him go on.

  “Its strength?” Molly said. “It’s a family in ruins, hated in its own country, despised in the world, with its leaders destroyed by their own soldiers.”

  “So it would seem,” Kim said. “It’s good for the Ngos if the world believes that—especially now. That is part of their power, the insults of their enemies.”

  “I don’t see any power there—I’m sorry,” Molly said. She was angry.

  “Oh, the Ngos have power,” Kim said. “They’re a force of nature. You can’t understand it, Molly, but they’re a great family. They forget nothing, they forgive nothing. Do you understand French? Ils cracheront de leurs tombes.”

  Kim’s speech had begun to blur. He shook his head violently, his small face was deeply flushed. Christopher knew the signs; Kim’s capacity for alcohol was small, and he would soon need to go to sleep.

  “Your Kennedys are not powerful in themselves,” Kim said. “They live in a powerful country, that’s all. They were working with their hands, unable to read, when the Nguyêns were kings of the land, and the Ngos were already wise men.”

  The waiter brought the bill. Kim handed it to Christopher without looking at it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and folded it carefully before putting it down at the table. He patted Molly’s hand and pushed his chair back across the floor; the chair fell with a clatter behind him, but Kim did not look around.

  He lifted his camera to his eye. “Smile,” he said. “I want a souvenir of this most wonderful lunch.” He took four photographs, quickly. He nodded, and walked out of the restaurant, carefully avoiding the chairs around the empty tables.

  Molly watched him go. She closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled at Christopher.

  “That’s a bitter little man,” she said. “What was that bit in French?”

  “Il cracheront de leurs tombes,” Christopher translated. “They would spit out of their graves.’”

  Finally they went to Siena. Christopher wanted to be in a quiet place. For a week he thought of nothing but Molly. They walked through the old town with its thin campanile and its buildings that were the color of dry earth. The afternoons turned cold and they lay in bed, reading a novel aloud to one another. They drank hot chocolate with sweet Italian brandy in it. They woke each other often in the night. Afterward, Molly pushed her heavy hair away from her face and looked down, smiling, into Christopher’s face. She fed the cats that gathered around her in the cafes. Christopher loved her so intensely that he felt her move in his own body.

  It was Molly who liked to sleep with the window open. When the cold wakened Christopher on the last day in Siena, he noticed again that Molly slept with her lips parted, so that she seemed to be smiling over the day she had just lived through. It was only a few seconds after he had covered her and touched her hair that he went to the window, looked out, and realized what it was that Nguyên Kim, who looked like a brown child, had said to him in the restaurant in Rome.

  Christopher went downstairs and booked one seat on an afternoon flight from Rome to the United States.

  FOUR

  l

  Patchen listened to Christopher’s theory without speaking. They sat close together, away from the walls, in a sitting room at the Statler Hotel in Washington. Christopher had refused to use a safe house: they were equipped with microphones and tape machines. Even in the hotel room, he had turned on the television and the radio at full volume. Patchen’s face was very close to Christopher’s. Th
e blue flicker of the television screen reflected in Patchen’s glasses.

  Patchen said, “Of course. Why didn’t anyone else see it?”

  “There’s no evidence yet. It’s just a feeling.”

  “It’s obvious. No one else had a motive. All the other theories leave that out. No one had a strong enough motive—except these people.”

  “It looks like a perfect operation,” Christopher said. “It may be impossible to string everything together. They’ll have had airtight security. Maybe only two or three people know— and there’s no way of being sure who they are.”

  “Do you think they killed Oswald?”

  “No,” Christopher said. “If I’m right about how they handled him, it would have been wasteful. He didn’t know who they were. They must have told him they’d get him out after the shooting, set him up as a hero under a fake identity. He would have believed that.”

  Patchen said, “They had to find somebody Oswald would trust. Someone he already knew.”

  “Who did he know? Nobody. All they needed was someone under discipline; the contact had to have bona fides. Probably a Communist of some kind.”

  “But how did they know about Oswald?”

  “They went looking. He must have been in a lot of card files,” Christopher said. “They had to have an American gunman. Only a nut would do it—no professional killer is going to shoot the President of the United States. Gangsters are too patriotic.”

  “How much have you put together?”

  “Only the probabilities—but it’s clear enough why they had to run the operation,” Christopher said. “The psychology can’t be questioned. They believed Kennedy had done this thing to them—whether he did or not doesn’t matter. The way they think, they couldn’t do anything but kill Kennedy in return. It’s an imperative with them—insult for insult, blood for blood.”

  “Let’s come back to that. How did they run the operation?”

  “They had everything they needed,” Christopher said. “First, total security. They had all the money they needed, and secure contacts all over the world. All they lacked was the assassin.”

  “How could they know Oswald would do it?”

  “Oswald was easy enough to understand.”

  “They had no time to assess him. What if he turned them down?”

  “They would have killed him,” Christopher said. “He was unstable. But I think they were confident he’d try it, and that he’d succeed.”

  “They needed confidence, if they thought they could get away with it,” Patchen said.

  “David, they’ve gotten away with it. No one even suspects them.”

  “Yes. Killing Kennedy made everyone forget they even existed.”

  “I’ll bet that surprised them. They’re going to be tough— they’ll never believe we didn’t think of them right away. They must imagine we’ve got a thousand men working on them right now.”

  “They don’t know how dumb we can be,” Patchen said.

  Patchen massaged his bad leg, aware of the pain in it again. “No one is going to thank you for this, you know.”

  Christopher shrugged.

  “Do you want to be assigned to this—do it yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll be possible. We’ll have to tell the White House, and the liaison hasn’t changed. It’s still Foley. Johnson kept him on, with all the others.”

  “Who else can go? Who can you tell, even inside the outfit?”

  Patchen rose and limped to the window; he bent the slats of the Venetian blind and looked down at the traffic on K Street. The back of his suit was a mass of wrinkles, and he looked as if he had not slept for a long time. He expelled his breath; it was almost a laugh that he uttered.

  “‘The dog it was that died,’ “ he said.

  He touched Christopher’s shoulder and pointed at the telephone. After Patchen had closed the door behind him, Christopher turned off the television and the radio. Molly’s face, asleep and faintly smiling, flickered in his mind like the bleached electronic pictures in the mirrors of Patchen’s eyeglasses. He sat down and waited for the phone to ring.

  2

  They met again after dark in Patchen’s living room. The narrow row house still bore traces of Patchen’s wife: a dying plant, chintz furniture. There were no photographs, no letters lying around, no odor of food and soap. The signs that anyone had ever made love in Patchen’s house were disappearing.

  Dennis Foley sat on the sofa with his long legs stretched before him. Grief had made him listless. The mannerisms Christopher had noticed in Paris were gone. Foley dressed as carefully as before, and he still wore the PT-109 clasp on his black knitted tie, but he had the look of a man who has been told that he has lost his health or his wife. What he had thought himself to be was in the past.

  “You’ve met, I think,” Patchen said.

  Foley looked at Christopher without interest. “I haven’t been briefed,” he said. “Your people called to say you had something for the White House and we ought to take you seriously. Go ahead.”

  Christopher glanced at Patchen. “Who’s been told?” he asked.

  “The Director. He decided that the White House had to be brought in at once. No one else will be told without presidential authority.”

  “I can give you twenty minutes,” Foley said.

  Christopher remained standing. “I’ll have to give it to you cold, Mr. Foley,” he said. “It has to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.”

  Foley gritted his teeth and started to get up. “Take him to Earl Warren’s people,” he said. “That’s the proper channel.”

  “It’s too sensitive for that,” Patchen said. “I know this is painful, but I think you should listen. You can reject what Christopher has to say after you’ve heard it, and you won’t hear from him again.”

  Foley relaxed his grip on the arms of the chair. “All right,” he said.

  He stared at the floor as Christopher began to speak. After hearing the first sentence, his eyes snapped upward and fastened on Christopher’s face. Christopher actually saw the pupils dilate, so that Foley’s pale eyes changed color and darkened, as if his brain had commanded them to stop admitting light. Foley wore such an expression of pain that Christopher wanted to look away. It took Christopher, trained to report in clean sentences, very little time to summarize what he believed.

  Foley went on staring into Christopher’s eyes, but when he spoke, he spoke to Patchen. “It’s insane,” he said.

  “No,” Patchen replied. “It’s logical.”

  “It’s grotesque,” Foley said; his voice had lost timbre, and he put a hand to his neck and cleared his throat. He began to cough, and in the midst of the spasm lit a cigar.

  “It’s grotesque,” he repeated. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy and these people do not belong in the same order of nature.”

  “Nevertheless,” Christopher said, “the possibility is there.”

  “How is it there—even the possibility?” Foley asked hotly. “How did they do it, how did they organize it? Give me the scenario.”

  “These things are less difficult than you think,” Christopher said. “Tradecraft is a simple art.”

  “What is a simple art?” Foley asked.

  “Tradecraft,” Patchen explained. “It’s jargon for the technique and practice of espionage. Go on, Paul.”

  “This is all speculation, Foley, and I like speculation even less than you seem to,” Christopher said. “Bear with me for a minute.”

  “All right,” Foley said.

  “They needed an opportunity, and they knew it would come. American Presidents show themselves in public under security arrangements that are the laughingstock of the world. In addition to opportunity, they needed an assassin.”

  “So they reached into Dallas and picked out a psychotic like Oswald?” Foley said, his voice rising. “Come off it, Christopher.”

  “If I’m right, yes—they reached into Dallas and picked
out Oswald,” Christopher said. “His psychosis was the handle they had on him.”

  “Psychotics can’t be trusted to function,” Foley said, and Christopher, without surprise, again felt the man’s stubborn resistance to what he was being told.

  “I’d say he functioned very well,” Christopher said. “You don’t have to be sane to pull a trigger. You tell an agent who is obsessed with something, as Oswald was obsessed with his own impotence and the power of others, something that will inspire him to act out of the logic of his insanity.”

  “And what did they tell Oswald?”

  “I don’t know yet. I would have told him that I was a Soviet intelligence officer, and that we’d been watching him benevolently for years, here and when he was in Russia, knowing that he was capable of a great act that would change history. That would have fitted in with his fantasy.”

  Foley looked at his watch. “Half my time is gone,” he said wearily. “Why does it have to be a conspiracy? Why can’t Oswald have just done it for his own insane reasons?”

  “One thing, and again it’s speculation, but it fits in with the theory because it fits in with standard clandestine practice,” Christopher said. “Oswald killed the President with a rifle. That’s the tool of an agent, not the weapon of a lunatic. Every other President who has been killed or wounded by an assassin has been killed or wounded by a pistol—Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley. Both Roosevelts were attacked with pistols. Gandhi was killed with a pistol. Nuts like to smell their victims. Oswald used a rifle, and he left it behind like a professional and walked away. If he’d been a real professional, instead of something designed for one-time use, he would have got away.”

  Christopher was still standing. He had taken care to speak in a calm voice. He looked down at Foley, who had closed his eyes again; he was massaging the bridge of his nose to advertise his fatigue.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Patchen,” Foley said.

  He said nothing more to Christopher and did not look at him again.