The Tears Of Autumn

1

Christopher knew where Alvaro Urpi prayed. Each morning Urpi walked down the Tiber, crossed the river on the Ponte Palatino, and spent the first three hours after sunrise on his knees in the church of Saint Sabina. Urpi liked the place because it was named for a saint who was converted to Christianity by her slave, because it was almost barren of decoration, with great white columns standing in its nave-and because one could look through a peephole into a hidden garden and see an orange tree grown from the seeds of a tree planted seven hundred years before by Saint Dominic, a Spaniard who had the mind of a Moor, as Urpi had the mind of a Chinese.

Christopher waited at the back of the church while a young priest said Mass and Urpi finished his prayers. Christopher went with him to look at the orange tree and listen to the story again. “Dominic has a better immortality than stone,” Urpi said, and blushed, made shy by the poetry of his thought.

They went back to the Vatican together; Urpi walked like a Chinese, in small rapid steps with his arms held stiff at his sides and his eyes on the pavement. He showed Christopher his translation of Yu Lung’s horoscopes. Christopher needed some help with the Latin: Urpi moved a finger from Yu Lung’s ideograms to his own crowded handwriting, his eyes darting like a bird’s from the material to Christopher’s face as he explained the difficulties of the translations.

“As I said, it’s obscure, metaphorical,” Urpi said. “But it’s plain that five men are involved. Three of them-two brothers and a foreign enemy-are marked for death. Also a woman who appears to be a virgin, and who has a relationship to three of the men. Her horoscope has to do with a journey and a message.”

“Can you construe her destination and the message?” Christopher asked.

“Oh yes. That part is plain enough.”

“And you’re certain of the identities of the persons who commissioned the horoscopes?”

Urpi nodded, reading out the Latin phrases. He pronounced very clearly. Christopher cleared his mind, memorizing what Urpi told him.

Urpi gathered together Yu Lung’s manuscript and his Latin text and handed them to Christopher. “What is being discussed in these horoscopes is murder,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Strange that they should express the crime in such beautiful language,” Urpi said.

Before he left Rome, Christopher again drove past his apartment. The Truong toe’s men were still there, but they had got under cover; they sat together in the Citroën, two men asleep and the other on watch. The man awake was as youthful as Luong, with a lock of hair like Luong’s falling into his eyes. He bent his head toward a cupped match and lit his cigarette as Christopher drove by. There was nothing to be done about the Vietnamese: they broke no law as they waited for the opportunity to kill Christopher or kidnap Molly. He was glad to have them there, watching his empty flat, waiting for him to come back.

It was not yet full daylight when he reached the autostrada and turned north. There was a moon in the western sky and one of the planets shone beyond it. The road behind Christopher was clear. Only a few big trucks were moving at that time of day. No living soul knew exactly where he was, or where he was going.

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.”