The Tears of Autumn (34 page)

Trumbull nodded.

“I’m not Christopher’s best salesman,” Foley said. “But I told J.D. what his suspicions were.”

Christopher realized that Foley had not addressed him directly since the night they met in Webster’s apartment.

“In the past week or so,” Patchen said, “Christopher has been to Vietnam, to Europe, to the Congo. He’s talked with the people involved. He’s put his life in hazard, and it’s still in hazard.”

As he spoke the last sentence, Patchen shifted his unblinking eyes from Trumbull to Foley. Foley returned the stare, tapping his nose with a forefinger.

“Now wait a minute,” Trumbull said. “As I understand it, Paul is no longer with us.” He turned to Christopher. “You’ve been doing all this on your own?”

“Yes,” Patchen answered. “He wasn’t operating under our auspices, nor did he have our support. He ceased to be our employee before he started out. What he has to report to us he’s reporting as a courtesy to the government. Bear in mind that this information belongs to Christopher, not the government.”

“All right,” Trumbull said. “Let’s have it.”

Patchen took Christopher’s report, a bundle of typed sheets with several photographs attached, out of his briefcase and handed it to Trumbull. “You’ll have to take turns reading it,” he said. “There are no copies, and I think you’ll agree there shouldn’t be any.”

“Who’s read it so far?” Foley asked.

“I have. The Director refused to read it.”

J. D. Trumbull put on a pair of half-moon reading glasses and settled back into his easy chair. He read rapidly, wetting a forefinger as he turned the typed pages. He went through the photographs and the attached documents slowly; when he saw Frankie Pigeon’s confession and Glavanis’s photographs of the naked gangster he gave a series of soft snorts. When he was finished, he closed the folder with care and handed it to Foley. There was no jollity left in Trumbull’s face. He passed his eyes over Christopher once, then crossed his legs and stared at the tip of his boot while Foley read the file.

The four men faced each other, Foley and Trumbull in chairs on one side of a coffee table, Christopher and Patchen on a sofa on the other side. Christopher watched Foley. As he read, his face tightened. Once or twice he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. He finished the last page, closed the folder, and tossed it on the coffee table. A photograph fell to the floor, the picture of the dead gunmen by the paddy in Saigon. Patchen picked it up and put it back into the file folder.

“That’s pretty rough reading,” Trumbull said. “David, what’s Paul’s background?”

“Christopher has been decorated twice for his work. He is a very senior officer. Within the outfit, his skill and his accuracy have never been questioned.”

Foley cleared his throat. “He’s also Patchen’s best and oldest friend,” he said.

“That’s irrelevant,” Patchen said. “The question before us is this report.”

Trumbull peered over his glasses. “Paul,” he said, “I’d like a little more flavor before I make a comment. Tell us how you see this.”

“It’s all there, in the report.”

“I mean in your own words.”

“Those are my own words, Mr. Trumbull.”

“I know that, boy. What I want you to do is talk us through it.”

Foley got to his feet, went to the bar, and made himself another drink. He took his glass to the window and stood there, looking into the quiet street.

“The truth is plain enough,” Christopher said. “Before I go into it, I want to ask you a question.”

Trumbull said, “Ask away.”

“What exactly was the role of the U.S. government in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem?”

Trumbull stared for a moment at Foley’s rigid back. Then he said to Patchen, “Tell him.”

“I think you already know, Paul,” Patchen said. “In simple terms, we countenanced it. We knew it was being planned. We offered advice. We provided support. We encouraged the plot. We welcomed the results.”

“Who exactly is ‘we’?” Christopher asked.

“It was a White House project. They handled it, for the most part, with their staff and their communications. The foreign-policy establishment ran errands. There was no plan to kill Diem and Nhu.”

“No plan? What did you people imagine was going to happen to them?”

“There’s no point in arguing that now, Paul. What happened, happened.”

J. D. Trumbull had been gazing idly at Dennis Foley’s back. Now he turned his eyes, set in nests of wrinkles, on Christopher.

“Old Dennis told me you were upset about Diem and Nhu and how they died,” he said. “I think that speaks well of you, Paul. But it reminds me of what Harry Truman said about the bleeding hearts who kept on weeping and gnashing their teeth and crying shame and damnation after we dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Truman said he heard a lot about all those dead Japs, but damn little about the drowned American sailors at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. You’ve got to keep your eye on the whole balance sheet.”

“You just got through reading the balance sheet, Mr. Trumbull.”

“Well, maybe. What you’ve given us in this report is just bare bones, Paul. I’d still like to hear it from your own lips, if you think you’re ready to talk to us now.”

“This seems redundant,” Christopher said. “The facts are in my report. All the rest—how I operated and why, what people looked like when I spoke to them, how much money it cost —is background noise. If it helps you to understand, I can tell you all that.”

“Do that,” Trumbull said. “I’m just an old country lawyer. I’d like to hear how you fellows do the things you do.”

At that, Patchen smiled at last and picked up his glass of scotch. Trumbull had been sipping his own whiskey for some moments, and he rattled the ice in his empty glass and gave Patchen an inquiring look. Patchen fetched him another drink.

2

Christopher began to speak.

“The report deals with the main question—who assassinated President Kennedy and why—and with two incidental pieces of information,” he said. “These treat with the murder of Oswald, and with the possibility that heroin and other drugs will be used as weapons of war against U.S. troops in Vietnam. The Oswald murder—execution would be a better word—and the heroin just popped up in the course of the search for information about the assassination. There is no doubt about the truth of the matter where the assassinations of Kennedy and Oswald are concerned. As to the heroin, Patchen and the outfit can pursue it. It’s more important than the other two questions, because you can still do something about it. It’s intelligence. The rest of what I reported is just explanation.”

Trumbull leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’m learning,” he said. “You fellows are a cold bunch.”

“I’ll deal first with the Kennedy assassination,” Christopher said. “This is the way it happened: Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother, believed for some time that the Kennedy Administration wanted to overthrow their regime and replace it with a more pliant one. The Ngos knew that a coup was being plotted—they knew everything that went on in Saigon. There is collateral intelligence in the files on these two points. I reported some of it myself while the Ngo brothers were still alive.

“Around the beginning of September, Diem and Nhu gave up all hope that they could survive. They were realists; they knew the power of the United States and the ambitions of the South Vietnamese generals. Diem and Nhu expected to be overthrown, and I believe they knew their enemies would kill them. They made plans to revenge themselves—to spit out of their graves, as one of their relatives put it. You have to understand that they didn’t want revenge for personal reasons. They regarded the coup and their own murders as an insult to their family and to the Vietnamese nation.

“It’s normal in South Asia for people, even educated people, to horoscope important projects. They believe there are forces beyond human intelligence that have an effect on the acts of men—you can smile, Mr. Trumbull, but if you don’t understand that reality, and give it due weight, you’ll be making an arrogant mistake. You may think horoscopy is primitive, but it exists, and it’s used as a matter of course throughout the tropical world.

“You’ve seen that there are two sets of horoscopes, both drawn by the Chinese Yu Lung in Saigon. The first set was drawn up on September 8,1963. It predicted, quite accurately, that Diem and Nhu would be murdered and that the murder would be instigated by a powerful foreigner.

“On the basis of that horoscope, Diem and Nhu alerted their family. The head of the family, the Truong toe, who is identified in my report, took over the planning for the revenge of the deaths of Diem and Nhu. After reading Yu Lung’s horoscopes, no one in the family doubted that the murders would occur, and soon. Nor did they doubt the broker for these murders would be the President of the United States.

“On September 12 Yu Lung drew up the second set of horoscopes. September 12 was the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s marriage. You have the translations. The men horoscoped were Diem and Nhu again, President Kennedy, a North Vietnamese intelligence officer named Do Minh Kha, and Do Minh Kha’s grown-up daughter. Her name is Dao—or, in French, Nicole. In addition to a reading of zodiacal signs relating to these five persons, Yu Lung drew up an elaborate geo-mantic scheme. This showed the places, the geographical locations, where the
feng shui,
or the good and evil forces that act on men, would be strongest.

“Yu Lung’s readings confirmed that death was certain for Diem and Nhu. The family had already decided—through logic, not magic—that John F. Kennedy would be the murderer of their relatives. Yu Lung’s horoscope, based on the precise hour, date, and year of Kennedy’s birth and other public information —when and where he was wounded in the war, was stricken with his illness, was married, when his child died, when his older brother was killed—showed that there were patches in the lunar calendar in which Kennedy was vulnerable to violent death.

“One of these periods fell during the third week in November on the Western calendar. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday of the third week in November—the day of prime danger for him, as predicted by Yu Lung. That he was killed on that day will seem happenstance to you, but it didn’t look that way to Yu Lung or the Truong toe.

“Diem and Nhu were killed on November 1, our time. Kennedy died precisely twenty-one days later, on November 22. Diem’s personal lucky number was seven. Seven times three is twenty-one. Also, in Vietnamese funeral custom, special rites are performed for the dead every seventh day after the day of death. So there was, in the choice of November 22 as the date of the assassination, what one of my agents called ‘an elegance.’

“Now, as to the North Vietnamese intelligence officer, Do Minh Kha, and his daughter. Do is a member of one of the Ngo
phais
—he and Diem and Nhu were cousins of a sort. Do’s name, by the way, is a
nom de révolution;
he was born a Ngo. Kinship is a powerful thing in Vietnam. Do Minh Kha may have been a Communist and an enemy intelligence officer, but he was also a blood relation of Diem and Nhu. That would be, in a matter like this one, the more important loyalty.

“Yu Lung’s horoscopes, which predict the
time
of events, and his geomantic readings, which indicate the best
place
to do something, showed this about Do: that he should be approached in Vientiane, Laos, in early September. Yu Lung foresaw that the best possible messenger was his daughter, Dao. She’s called by her French name, Nicole, in my report. Dao or Nicole is the child of a woman the Truong toe wanted to marry when he was younger. The mother was killed during the migration of the Catholics out of North Vietnam after Ho Chi Minh took over in 1954. The Truong toe rescued the child and raised her as his own daughter. Therefore Do Minh Kha owed a debt to the Ngos not only out of kinship but also out of gratitude for the way in which they’d cared for his child.

“We knew that Do Minh Kha was in Laos during September. We watched him as a matter of routine; he is a very high-ranking officer and we wanted to know what he was up to. One of my agents, Vuong Van Luong, was among the U.S. assets who were sent to Vientiane to try to find out what Do Minh Kha was doing there. Luong failed to find out, and so did all our other agents. Do just stayed in a house in Vientiane for three days with a beautiful young Vietnamese woman. When nothing more than that happened, we assumed he was shacking up. Luong did manage to take photographs of the girl, coming in and out of the house with Do. The girl wasn’t in our files. We couldn’t identify her. We now know that the girl was not his mistress but his daughter. Do and Nicole met in Vientiane in September for the first time since the girl left Hanoi as a child.

“We weren’t able to wire the house in Vientiane, and it probably wouldn’t have done us much good if we had. Do is too professional to have talked, even to his daughter, in a strange house where there might be listening devices. However, Luong reported that Do and Nicole would go for walks together around the garden of the house in Vientiane. We know now what Nicole asked her father to do. And we know that he agreed.

“Nicole told her father about the family’s plan to kill President Kennedy in revenge for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. She showed him the horoscopes, probably. She asked for his help in the name of the family. They code-named the operation against Kennedy ‘the tears of autumn.’ That phrase, ‘the tears of autumn,’ can be rendered in Vietnamese as a woman’s name, Lê Thu.

“Lê Thu was the death name of Do’s wife. As you saw in the report, the Vietnamese change their names when they die. There was a kind of double poetry, and a good deal of psychology, in the choice of this code name. At first I thought it was a play on the name of Madame Nhu—she’s called Lê Xuan, which means ‘the tears of spring.’

It was autumn in America when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. The code name had two purposes—Lê Thu because of the guilt it would evoke in Do Minh Kha, who had sent his wife away to be killed. And ‘tears of autumn’ because Kennedy was going to die in autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.