The Tears of Autumn (31 page)

Somewhere between the autostrada and the coast, Frankie Pigeon would be lying in a field. In the interrogation room, in the instant before he had begun to talk, Pigeon had risen from his chair, clasped his hands in front of his heart, and bent his knees as if he would fall to the floor in prayer unless someone supported him. He hadn’t been begging for his life: he knew he wouldn’t be killed. He wanted to be let go, so that he could return to the idea of himself he’d had before Eycken and Glavanis put the rubber siphon down his throat. Christopher, looking at his own hand on the steering wheel, had a quick vivid mental image of Eycken’s thumbless hands. After that he didn’t think of Pigeon again. “Pigeon does what he does for money,” Klimenko had said. “After you pay a man like that, you don’t owe him anything more.”

In Orvieto Christopher found a coffee bar just opening and sat by the window drinking
caffè latte,
alone with the teen-aged boy who worked the early shift. At eight o’clock the street filled up with Italians, as though the town had been turned upside down like a sack and its people spilled into the morning. Once, after a week in Switzerland and a drive through the night over the Saint Bernard, he and Molly had arrived at the same time of day in Torino. When she saw the Italians again, shouting and gesticulating, Molly had leaped up, spread her arms as if to embrace them, and cried,
“The human race!”

Christopher walked through the crowd to the post office and mailed Pigeon’s confession and Dieter Dimpel’s photographs and Yu Lung’s horoscopes to himself in care of general delivery, Washington. The envelope would arrive by registered airmail in four days’ time.

He had put photocopies of all the evidence in an envelope addressed to Patchen’s post office box in Alexandria. After the clerk put stamps on this package, Christopher reached across the counter and touched his hand.

“Don’t cancel the stamps on that one,” he said. “I want it back.”

The clerk shrugged. “You’ll waste the postage.”

“That’s all right, I’ll arrange it another way.”

Outside the town, Christopher stopped the car and burned the envelope and its contents, grinding the ashes into the earth with the heel of his shoe.

It was the act of a romantic. Christopher laughed aloud at himself. But he was no longer under discipline; the information belonged to him and to the people from whom he had stolen it. Unlike Frankie Pigeon, the Truong toe was owed something: a sporting chance to stop Christopher from learning his last secret.

2

Christopher used the airport at Milan because it was less likely to be covered than the one in Rome. He turned in his rented car and bought a ticket for Salisbury. He used no special care: if he was being watched, there was no way in which he could avoid being seen. He carried one small bag containing a camera, a tape recorder, and the clothes he’d need.

He stopped at the newsstand and bought the
Herald-Tribune
and a paperback book. Nguyen Kim, wearing a coat with a fur collar, was standing behind him when he turned around.

“Hi, baby,” Kim said.

Christopher smiled and punched Kim lightly on the left side of the chest; Kim was carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster. Christopher put his hand into the pocket of his own raincoat and smiled again.

“Why don’t you walk me to the passport control?” he said. “Walk on my right and keep a step ahead. Clasp your hands behind your back.”

Kim closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked very tired and less boyish. No expression showed on his face. He put his hands behind his back and they walked together past the long row of ticket counters.

“Just like the movies,” Kim said. “All I want is a chance to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“You know your buddies out there burned down a church right after you left?”

“No.”

“Well, they did. It’s very upsetting. That and the picture you mailed to the Truong toe.”

They were in a passageway now. Christopher put his back to the wall and gazed at Kim.

“The question is this,” Kim said. “Are you going to stop fooling around, or not?”

“In time.”

“How much time do you think you’re going to have? You can’t work without traveling, Paul. You’ll leave traces.”

“Everyone leaves traces, even the Truong toe.”

“You’re not going to find traces of him. Even he doesn’t know all the details of what you’re after.”

“No, I don’t suppose he does.”

“He wanted me to tell you that,” Kim said, “and that’s extraordinary. He says nothing to anyone outside the family. The old man admires you, you know.”

Christopher waited. There was nothing he wanted to say.

“He asked me to give you a message,” Kim said. “He had nothing to do with what happened to Luong. He didn’t even know about it until after you left Saigon.”

“Tell him I know that.”

Kim came a step closer. “There’s more,” he said. “He knows you’re not worried about yourself. He accepts that. But your girl is something else. You have to worry about her.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. I know something now I didn’t know twenty minutes ago. I thought the girl was with you. Now I know she’s not. It simplifies the hunt.”

Kim paused, peering up into Christopher’s face, expecting him to reply. He frowned, as if exasperated with a stupid person, and went on.

“He told me to tell you this: there is no limit of time. You’d have to hide her for the rest of her life.”

“And what will he do with Nicole?”

“Protect her, as long as he lives. But he’s old, and when he dies, Nicole will be just a girl.” Kim, his hands still behind him, rose on his toes. “Believe me,” he said, “if you go on, if you don’t stop, Molly will have rice in her mouth.”

Christopher did not understand Kim’s words at first; then he remembered Luong in his coffin with a grain of rice between his lips: food for the Celestial Dog.

“Why threaten Molly?” he asked. “Why not kill me?”

“The old man thinks you’re not afraid of death.”

Christopher said, “What makes him think I’m afraid of guilt?”

Kim dropped his hands to his sides and walked away down the passageway, his unbuttoned overcoat billowing around his hurrying figure.

3

The flight to Salisbury, through Khartoum and Nairobi, took eleven hours. Americans were not required to have a visa to enter Rhodesia, and Christopher, white and blond, passed through customs unnoticed. He took a domestic flight to Lusaka and found the man he wanted in the bar of the Ridgeway Hotel that night. He had used him once before, and he would not have used him again if he had been in less of a hurry.

They left in darkness, but when the light plane rose to its cruising altitude they could see the sunrise. It wasn’t a long flight, along the brown Kafue River, above tan plains, and then, beyond the Congolese frontier, over a higher savannah that was the color of cheap green paint.

The pilot sideslipped between the trees and landed on a straight stretch of clay road. A herd of black and white goats, no larger than spaniels, bounded out of the way of the taxiing plane.

“That was Kipushi you saw up ahead,” the pilot said. “It’s an hour’s walk. You can catch a ride to Elisabethville from there. I daren’t land you closer without papers—they’re hateful bastards, the Baluba.”

1

The day went by slowly, fried by the morning sun, flogged by the afternoon rain. The war had not been over for long, and Elisabethville had the atmosphere of a city whose residents, driven out by a plague, had only just found the courage to come back and claim their possessions.

In the darkened lobby of a hotel, Christopher drank mineral water and read the two Simenons, dirty and swollen by the rainy climate, that he had bought from a street vendor. At nightfall he went into the men’s room and put on the boots and the bush clothes he had brought with him. He wasn’t used to carrying a pistol, and he had to remind himself not to touch the hard shape of the .22 automatic tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

Nsango was four hours late. He made no apology. Christopher followed him into a quarter where hundreds of his tribesmen, driven out of the bush by war or the hope for money, had settled. Charcoal fires burned down the length of a long street, like a herd of red eyes in the black night. Nsango dropped on all fours in front of a tin hovel and crawled inside. It was constructed of flattened gasoline cans and other bits of scavenged metal, and it stood in a row of houses that looked like mouths with the teeth knocked out.

Christopher crawled in after Nsango. Nsango sent away the people who lived there; they trotted, giggling, into the street and squatted in the dirt. Nsango found the stub of a candle and lit it. It gave little light. Christopher saw Nsango’s gestures but not his face as he told him what he wanted him to say to Manuel Ruiz.

“Why would he believe such a story?” Nsango said. “He’s not stupid.”

“I know enough to bluff him—certain names.”

“It’s dangerous, Paul. I don’t know if I can protect you. These Cubans are quick to shoot.”

“There are still the same number?”

“Only five now. One was shot in the stomach and they couldn’t treat his wounds. The other died of snakebite.”

“You’ve been seeing action?”

“Some. We’re still earning our guns.”

“How many of the Cubans speak French?”

“All, but badly except for this Manuel. I think the others only understand about half of what’s said to them.”

“How are their nerves?”

“Jumpy. Some of my chaps are pretty simple men—they ate the knuckles and the liver of a prisoner not long ago. I wasn’t there. It left Manuel and the others a bit sick.”

“Then it’s you they’re nervous about?”

“Yes, they’ve received a lot of Kalashnikov machine rifles and they know we want them,” Nsango said. “And of course they all have dysentery. Who knows? They may be glad to see another white man.”

“Can we go now?”

Nsango sighed. “All right. It’s a long walk to where I left the Jeep, and we’ll have to find some gasoline and carry that.”

He went outside and shouted. A babble erupted in the darkness, then died down as all but the people Nsango wanted drifted away. In a few minutes Nsango called to Christopher. He stood in the street with four jerry cans at his feet.

“Two for you, two for me,” he said. “Sweat is the fuel of the revolution.”

Walking through a field of coarse grass outside the city, Nsango began to sing in a low voice. Christopher compelled his imagination to form a picture of Molly, walking between high snowbanks in Zermatt, her face pinkened by the wind and the cold. His conversation with Nguyen Kim at the Milan airport kept intruding, like the strong signal of a distant radio station in nighttime. Christopher had gambled Molly as willingly as he would have played the life of an agent. He’d done it on reflex: never let the opposition see that you are vulnerable. Christopher ran operations the way a natural athlete plays a sport: he knew the game in his muscles and in his bloodstream. To change styles was to lose; thought was a handicap, emotion a hazard. His arms stretched by the weight of the jerry cans, he walked on, trusting Nsango to keep alert. The march went quickly.

Nsango’s camp lay to the north, in the upland forest not twenty miles from the Rhodesian frontier. Nsango drove fast through the bush, down narrow paths, and he and Christopher leaned toward the center of the Jeep, their heads sometimes bumping together as they dodged the branches that whipped over the windshield. Nsango, shouting, told Christopher how the Cuban had been killed by a tree mamba that had fallen into the speeding Jeep a few days before. “A one-minute snake,” he said. “He was dead before they could put on the brakes and run away.”

They were challenged twice by sentries, boys wearing torn bits of camouflage uniform, before they reached the camp. It was an abandoned village with a large open space, beaten shiny by bare feet, in the center of a ring of conical wattle huts.

“This used to be a prosperous place,” Nsango said. “I passed through here in ‘62 and found a pile of right hands—men’s, women’s, children’s—in the middle of the village, on the open ground. A hundred people had been dismembered. It was propaganda. In the old days the Belgians used to cut off the right hands of a whole village if one man committed a crime. During the fighting someone revived the practice. I think it was the mercenaries—some of them were Belgians, after all. The whites said it was the Chinese and their Simbas, who wanted the whites to be blamed. It could have been either. In any case, that’s where the population went.”

Christopher knew the story was true; he had seen a heap of severed hands in another part of the Congo.

“
‘The horror,’”
Nsango said, his lips twisting around the quotation. “You may as well come to my hut and get some sleep. This Manuel is not a very early riser.”

Inside the hut, Nsango handed Christopher a calabash of water. “It’s been boiled,” he said, noticing Christopher’s hesitation. “You gave me your sickly intestines along with your white ideas.”

2

Christopher woke every fifteen minutes and ran his eyes over the interior of the hut; it was about the size and shape of the room in which Frankie Pigeon had been kept. Nsango, his skinny legs drawn up, slept unworriedly, breathing softly. The sun came up and filled the low door with intense white light. There was a burst of birdsong at sunrise. Then the temperature rose twenty degrees in fifteen minutes and the surrounding forest fell silent.