The Tears Of Autumn

1

Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he had stopped writing poetry. Cathy, his wife, imagined that some earlier girl had poisoned his gift. She became hysterical in bed, believing that she could draw the secret out of his body and into her own, as venom is sucked from a snakebite. Christopher did not try to tell her the truth; she had no right to know it and could not have understood it. Cathy wanted nothing except a poem about herself. She wanted to watch their lovemaking in a sonnet. Christopher could not write it. She punished him with lovers and went back to America.

Now his new girl had found, in a flea market on the Ponte Sisto, the book of verses he had published fifteen years earlier, before he became a spy. Christopher read her letter in the Bangkok airport; her headlong sentences, covering the crisp airmail sheet, were like a photograph of her face. She made him smile. His flight was called over the loudspeaker in Thai; he waited for the English announcement before he moved toward the door, so that no one who might be watching him should guess that he understood the local language. His girl was waiting in Rome, changed by her discovery that he had once been able to describe what he felt.

Christopher walked across the scorched tarmac into the cool American airplane. He didn’t smile at the stewardess; his teeth were black with the charcoal he had chewed to cure his diarrhea. He had been traveling down the coast of Asia for three weeks, and he had spent the last night of his journey in Bangkok with a man he knew was going to die. The man was a Vietnamese named Luong. He thought Christopher’s name was Crawford.

They had met in the evening, when it was cool enough to remain outside, and walked together along the river while Luong delivered his report. Later, at a restaurant, the two of them ate Thai food, drank champagne, and talked in French about the future. Just before dawn, Christopher gave his agent money to pay for the girl, quiet and smooth as a child, who sat down beside Luong arid placed her small hand in his lap. Luong smiled, closed his eyes, and ran his fingertips over the flowered material of the girl’s dress and onto the skin of her neck. “No difference, silk and silk,” he said. “Can you loan me some baht?” Christopher handed Luong two dirty Thai bank notes. Luong, his face reddened by drink, started to leave with the girl, then came back to Christopher. “Is it true that these girls will dance on your spine before making love?” he asked. Christopher nodded and gave him another hundred-baht note.

Christopher paid the bartender and left. He walked through the city with its smell of waste: dead vegetation, open drains, untreated diseases of the skin. The people who slept in the streets were awakening as the sun, coming up on the flat horizon, flashed into the city like light through the lens of a camera. A leper, opening his eyes and seeing a white man, showed Christopher his sores. Christopher gave him a coin and walked on.

When he reached the river, he hired a boatman to take him to the floating market. He had three hours to kill before going to the airport. It was cooler on the river, and he was just another white man among dozens who had risen early to be paddled past the grinning naked boys standing in the roiled waters and the market boats filled with odorless flowers and lovely fruits that had no taste. He bought some limes and shared them with the boatman.

The night before, in the toilet of a bar, Luong had put his thumbprint on a receipt for the money Christopher brought to him, his monthly stipend. While Luong cleaned the ink off his thumb with whiskey from the glass he had carried with him into the toilet, Christopher showed him the envelope. It was filled with Swiss francs, new blue hundred-franc notes. “I’d better keep this till morning,” Christopher said. Luong, who always ended the night with a girl, nodded. They agreed on a plan for a meeting in the morning, checking their watches to be sure that they showed the same time.

Now, as Luong slept, Christopher took the envelope out of his coat pocket. He put the stamp pad inside with the money, sealed it, and dropped it over the side of the boat. The white envelope twisted in the moving brown water of the Chao Phraya and disappeared.

Christopher smiled at his own gesture. It was not likely that Luong would understand the message. He trusted Christopher. Luong knew, of course, that agents were sometimes sacrificed, but he did not consider himself an agent. He did things for Christopher and Christopher did things for him: though Christopher was white and Luong was brown, they had the same beliefs. “This money,” he asked once, “it’s good money, from people like us?” Christopher replied, “Yes.” Luong was a subtle man, but Christopher, throwing ten thousand francs in secret funds into a tropical river, did not really believe that the Vietnamese would understand that the loss of the money meant the loss of Christopher’s protection. It was more likely that he’d think there had been a mistake, that Christopher would come back, as he had always done. Luong would go back to Saigon and die.

Christopher was in no danger. If the secret police in Saigon interrogated Luong before they killed him, he would speak about a blond American named Crawford who believed in social justice and spoke unaccented French. Christopher had what no American is supposed to have, an ear for languages. He registered everything he heard, sense and tone, so that he understood even Oriental languages he had never studied after hearing them spoken for a few days. This trick was the fossil of his talent for poetry.

“Luong can vomit all over the floor about you,” said Wolkowicz, the man from the station in Saigon. “The Vietnamese are never going to believe that an American can speak French the way you do. They’ll figure some Frenchman has been passing himself off to Luong as an American, and we’ll be off the hook.”

“At Luong’s expense. There’s no reason to let him be arrested. You know they don’t have any evidence he’s tied up with the VC. He’s not.”

Wolkowicz put bread in his mouth and softened it with a sip of wine so he could chew it. Wolkowicz was self-conscious about his false teeth, but not for any cosmetic reason: his own teeth had been pulled by a Japanese interrogator in Burma during the Second World War, and there was a belief in the profession that a man who had been tortured, and stood up under it, could not afterward be trusted. He would know too well what to expect.

“Since when do facts make any difference?” Wolkowicz asked. “There’s nothing you can do about this, Christopher.”

“Luong is in Bangkok, waiting to meet me. I can tell him to stay there.”

“What good would that do? Nhu told us he was going to grab Luong because he wanted to see if we’d warn him. If we do, Nhu will know we’ve been running Luong. We don’t need that. We have enough trouble with the bastard without giving him proof that Luong and that noisy little political party of his have an American case officer.”

“They’ll kill him,” Christopher said.

“They’ll kill him in Bangkok if they have to. We can’t salvage him without blowing you and the whole political operation. One agent isn’t worth it.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Call him by his name. He’s not an abstraction. He’s five feet six inches tall, twenty-nine years old, married, three children, a university graduate. For three years he’s done everything he’s been asked to do. We got him into this.”

“All right, so he’s flesh and blood,” Wolkowicz said. “He proved that when he struck out in Vientiane last month.”

“He’s not supposed to be an FI operator. He’s paid to act, not to steal information. Luong was not the only one who couldn’t find out what Do Minh Kha was doing in Vientiane in September.”

“Action is what I wanted from Luong. He’s supposed to be a boyhood chum of Do’s. He should have walked in on him, like I suggested.”

“Barney, Do would have shot him. He’s a chief of section of the North Vietnamese intelligence service. Do you think he doesn’t know who Luong works for?”

“I don’t know what Do knows,” Wolkowicz said. “I know Luong struck out on me.”

“Luong reported what he saw-Do and the girl, constantly together for three days. At least he brought you back photographs.”

“With no identification of the girl. Very useful.”

Wolkowicz called for the check. They were sitting at a table at the Cercle Sportif. “Do you notice anything unusual about that girl in the white bikini?” he asked.

Christopher looked at a French girl who had just pulled herself out of the pool. She was wringing the water out of her long bleached hair, and her body curved like a dancer’s. “No,” he said.

“She has no navel. Look again.”

It was true. The girl’s belly was smooth except for a thin white surgical scar that ran through her tan into the waist of her bathing suit.

“She had an umbilical hernia,” said Wolkowicz, “so she asked them to remove it when she had a cesarean. The clever Vietnamese just removed her belly button altogether.”

The waiter went away with the signed chit.

“Christopher,” said Wolkowicz, “you’re a conscientious officer, everybody knows that. But Luong is not your child. He’s an agent. Go to Bangkok. Meet him. Give him his pay. Wipe his eyes. But leave well enough alone.”

“You mean let Nhu have him.”

“Nhu may not live forever,” said Wolkowicz.

On the airplane in Bangkok, a stewardess handed Christopher a hot towel. Stewardesses disliked him. He had no sexual thoughts about them; combed and odorless, in their uniforms, they seemed as artificial as airline food and drink. He had been in nine countries in twenty days, flying in and out of climates and time zones, changing languages and his name at each landing. His appetites and his emotions were suspended.

The jet turned over the city. Sunlight flashed on a pagoda that quivered on the brown plain like a column of crystal; Christopher knew that the pagoda was faced with broken blue china saucers, smashed in the hold of an English sailing ship by a storm a century before. He stood up when the seat-belt warning went out and removed his jacket. The jacket was wool because he was flying into a cold climate, and it was clammy with sweat. It was the last day of October, 1963, and it would be chilly in Paris, where he was going to make his report.

Christopher organized his mind, sorting out what he had learned and what he had done in the past twenty days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl who had no navel beside the pool in Saigon, the brown girl he had bought in Bangkok for Luong, and finally the girl in Rome who was waiting with his book of poems to make love to him.

Desire is not a thing that stops with death,

but joins the corpse and fetus breath to breath…

Christopher remembered what he had written well enough, but not so well as he remembered what had made him write. His grandfather’s death had given him his first poem, eight quatrains in Tennyson’s voice. The old man, lying in a hospital with the tubes removed from his arms so that he might die in his own time, thought that he was in a railroad station; as he ran for his train he met his friends, and they were young again: “Mae Foster! Your cheeks are as red as the rose!… Caroline! You’re wearing the white dress I always loved!” Christopher’s last poem was written in his own voice after he slept with a girl whose brother, who trusted Christopher as Luong did, had died for nothing. She sobbed all through the act.

After the girl had gone to sleep, Christopher wrote a sonnet and left it beside her; rhyme and meter came as easily to him as the technique of sex, and had as little to do with love. This happened in Geneva, on a night when snow had fallen, so that the gray city under its winter clouds gave off a little light. Christopher, as he stepped off the curb, was nearly hit by a car. The incident did not frighten him. It interrupted his behavior, as a slight electric shock will cause a schizophrenic to cross over in the mind from one personality to another. He saw what his poems had become: another part of his cover, a way of beautifying what he did. He went back to the bedroom of the sleeping girl and burned what he had written. She found the ashes when she woke, and knowing what they were because Christopher had written her other poems, considered them more romantic than the sonnet.

“Do you wish to sleep?” the stewardess asked.

“No,” said Christopher. “Give me a large whiskey.”

2

Christopher walked out of the Aérogare des Invalides, under the bare elms along the Seine. Autumn chill, smelling of wet pavement and the river, went through his clothes and dried the sweat on his spine. He walked across the Pont Alexandre-III, where he had once kissed his wife and tasted the orange she had eaten. The winged horses on the roof of the Grand Palais were black against the electric glow above the city. “The French do have the courage of their vulgarity,” Cathy had said when, as a bride, she had first seen these colossal bronze animals trying to fly away with the ugliest building in France.

There were two policemen on the bridge. Each carried a submachine gun under his cape. Christopher walked by them and waited until he was in the shadows at the other end of the bridge before checking again to see that he was not being followed. Christopher knew Paris better than any city in America. He had learned to speak French in Paris, had written his book of poems and discovered how to take girls to bed there, but he no longer loved it. More, even, than most places in the world, Paris was a city where his nationality was deplored and his profession was despised; he could not stay there long without being watched.

Near the Madeleine, Christopher went into a cafe, bought a jeton, and called his case officer. When Tom Webster answered, Christopher heard the click of the poor equipment the French used to tap Webster’s telephone. The volume of their speech faded and increased as the recording machine in the vault under the Invalides pulled power out of the line.

“Tom? Calisher here.”

They spoke in English because Webster did not understand French easily; he was slightly deaf, and he had learned Arabic as a young officer. The effort, Webster said, had been so great that it had destroyed his capacity to learn any other foreign tongue.

“I’m staying with Margaret tonight,” Christopher said.

“Then you’ve got better things to do than come over for a drink,” Webster said.

Christopher smiled. Webster’s tone of voice told him that he was proud of this quick-witted reply; he thought it made the conversation sound natural. Webster paused, sorting out with an almost audible effort the simple code they used on the telephone.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said at last. “Tomorrow, one o’clock at the Taillevent. I know you like the lobster there.”

“Fine,” Christopher said, and hung up. By the time he had climbed the stairs and ordered a beer at the bar, he had overcome the smile Webster’s voice had brought to his lips. Webster was not very good at telephone codes. After seven years, he knew that any name beginning with a C was Christopher’s telephone name. He was able to remember that “Margaret” was the euphemism for the safe house in the rue Bonaparte to which Christopher carried a key. It was the time-and-place formula that confused him. Christopher had spent many hours waiting alone in expensive restaurants like a disconsolate social climber because Webster was never sure whether to add or subtract seven hours from the time stated over the telephone for a meeting. Lunch at the Taillevent at one o’clock meant dinner at Webster’s apartment at eight o’clock.

In other ways, Webster was a skillful professional. When he was still in his twenties, he had saved a kingdom in the Near East by penetrating a revolutionary organization and turning it against itself, so that the terrorists murdered each other instead of their monarch. The king he saved was still his friend. Like all good intelligence officers, Webster knew how to form friendships and use the friends he made. No human action surprised him or touched his emotions.

Webster and Christopher needed to make no allowances for one another. They lived in a world where all personal secrets were known. They had been investigated before they were employed; everything that could be remembered and repeated about them was on file, the truth along with the gossip and the lies. Gossip and lies were valuable: much can be understood about a man by the untruths that are told about him. Once a year, on the anniversary of their employment, they submitted to a lie detector test. The machine measured their breathing, the sweat on their palms, their blood pressure and pulse, and it knew whether they had stolen money from the government, submitted to homosexual advances, been doubled by the opposition, committed adultery. The test was called the “flutter.” They would ask of a new man, “Has he been fluttered?” If the answer was no, the man was told nothing, not even the true name of his case officer.

To Webster, the flutter was the ordeal of brotherhood. He believed that those who went through it were cold in their minds, trained to observe and report but never to judge. They looked for flaws in men and were never surprised to find them: the polygraph had taught them so much about themselves- taught them that guilt can be read on human skin with a meter -that they knew what all men were.

They had no politics. They had no morals, except among themselves. They lied to everyone except their government, even to their children and the women they entered, about their purposes and their work. Yet they cared about nothing but the truth. They would corrupt men, suborn women, steal, remove governments to obtain the truth, cleansed of rationalization and every other modifier. To one another, they spoke only the truth. Their friendships were deeper than marriage. They needed each other’s trust as other men needed love.

Webster recited these things to Christopher when he was far gone in drink. They were true enough. Webster, a phlegmatic man, had tears in his eyes; he had lost a young American in Accra. The boy had been shot by members of the Ghanaian service, who thought murder was the way in which secret agents dealt with their enemies. “What that kid really liked about this life is what we all like,” Christopher said. “It’s like living in a book for boys.” Webster was outraged; he leaped at Christopher. “But he died! How many have you seen die? I can name them for you.” Christopher gave his old friend another drink. “No need; I remember,” he said. “But, Tom, be honest. If it had been you those black amateurs shot, what would have been your last thought?” Webster shook his head to clear the whiskey from his voice: “I’d laugh. It would be such a goddamn joke of a death.” Christopher lifted his glass. “Absent friends,” he said.

Webster was short and muscular. He had once held the shot-put record at Yale. He wore the clothes he had had in college, fifteen years before, and shoes he had inherited from his father that were a half size too small for him. Though he was homely and had no luck with women, he was amused by Christopher’s good looks and the way girls came to him. “I’m the portrait you keep in your attic,” he told Christopher. “Each time you sin, I get another wart.”

Christopher, finishing his beer, remembered this and laughed aloud as in his mind he saw Webster as clearly as in life. The bartender took away his glass and didn’t ask if he wanted another drink.

In the safe house, an apartment on the sixth floor of an old building behind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Christopher ate the food that had been left in the refrigerator for him, took a shower, and sat down at a portable typewriter. He worked steadily on his report until he heard the morning traffic moving on the quais along the Seine. He wrote nothing about Luong, except to include the receipt for the money he had thrown into the river. He burned his notes and the typewriter ribbon and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Then, placing the typed report inside the pillowcase, he went to bed and slept for twelve hours. He dreamed that his wife, standing with the light behind her in a room in Madrid where he had slept with another girl, told him that she had given birth; even asleep, his mind knew that he had no child, and he ended the dream.

3

Tom Webster’s apartment in the avenue Hoche had once belonged to a member of the Bonapartean nobility. Its salon preserved the taste of the marquis and his descendants. Caryatids with broken noses stood at the corners of the ceiling; rosy women picnicked on the grassy banks of a painted brook that flowed along the wainscoting.

“Tom makes fun of the decor,” said Sybille, his wife. “But really, in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s très luxe.”

“There’s no need for all that before the other guests come,” Webster said. “Paul knows that the chief decoration in all our houses is my scrotum, which you nailed to the wall years and years ago, Sybille.”

“Does Paul know that?” Sybille asked. “But then he’s trained to notice everything, isn’t he? Paul, Tom is always so glad to see you. He tells me in bed that you’re absolutely the best in the whole company. In bed-what is the significance of that, do you suppose?”

Sybille Webster was a quick woman who liked to pretend that she was married to a slow man. Her fine face was more beautiful in photographs than in life. There were pictures of her in every room, and these were an embarrassment to her; she cleared away the frames when she invited strangers into the house. Webster married her thinking that he would want sex with no one else for the rest of his life, and he still gazed through his glasses at his wife as if she were, at all times, whirling about the room in a ballet costume. It was he who had taken the photographs.

Christopher took the drink Sybille had made for him and kissed her on the cheek. He handed his report to Webster. “Read the first two contact reports, if you have a minute,” he said. “You may want to send something tonight.”

“Why are you so good at the work, Paul?” asked Sybille. “Do you know?”

“People trust him,” Webster said.

“Do they? Wouldn’t you think that word would get around?”

“Oh, I think it has, Sybille,” Christopher said. “You notice that Tom never leaves us alone.”

“He’s been that way ever since he started to flag,” Sybille said. “That was, oh, the fourth day of our honeymoon. He took me to New York-the Astor Hotel. I was just a simple virgin from Tidewater Virginia. So many memories. Tom used to go to the Astor when he was a soldier and meet interesting people in the bar.”

Sybille, sitting on the arm of Christopher’s chair with her legs crossed, pointed a finger at Webster, who never gave any sign that he heard the things she said about him.

Webster tapped the report. “This is hotter than a firecracker,” he said. “Do you think Diem and Nhu are really in touch with the North?”

“Why not? They sure as hell don’t trust Washington anymore.”

“What was Nhu like at the party?”

“Polite. I didn’t ask him to his face what he was planning. Wolkowicz didn’t like that.”

“Screw Wolkowicz. All he wants to do is clean out was-tebaskets.”

“Well, he’s expected to know everything that happens in Vietnam,” Christopher said. “He doesn’t see any sense in the things I do, running people like Luong. It upsets the police liaison. In a way, he’s being logical. What good is building democratic institutions to Wolkowicz? Diem and Nhu don’t like it, and they know who’s doing it.”

“What about Luong?” Webster asked. He drained his glass and held it out to Sybille to be refilled.

“Nhu is going to pick him up and kill him. They’ll torture him a little first for appearances’ sake.”

Webster stared at Christopher for a second, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did you warn him off?”

“I was instructed not to,” Christopher said.

Webster put his glasses back on his nose and resumed reading.

Sybille brought them another drink. “It surely is difficult for me not to overhear some of the things you two say to each other,” she said. “Paul, do you want to play tennis with me tomorrow?”

“I’m going to Rome tonight.”

Sybille raised her hands in protest. “But dinner!” she cried.

Christopher told her that his plane didn’t leave until two in the morning, and Sybille went on with what she wanted to say as if he had not spoken to her. He wondered how Webster had found a way to propose to her; Sybille sometimes answered questions a day or a week after they had been asked.

“You don’t know what a coup you’re going to witness,” she said. “Tom has invited Dennis Foley, the President’s right-hand man. And I remembered that Harry McKinney is out of town, so I asked his lovely wife, Peggy, who thinks she’s the counselor to the embassy instead of her husband. Peggy thought that about herself even when we were at Sweet Briar together. It’s going to be a treat, Paul.”

Webster put Christopher’s report into his briefcase and locked it. “Foley’s brother and I used to put the shot together,” he said. “The brother’s all right. I don’t know this one.”

“You’ve been to lots of meetings with him all week,” Sybille said. “The entire embassy has been meeting with him. Foley came to Paris to tell de Gaulle who’s really running the world. President Kennedy thought he ought to know-only de Gaulle won’t give Foley an appointment. Wonderful JFK! Oh, that man is so sexy. He squeezed this little hand when he was here with the First Lady and I said, ‘I, too, think you’re absolutely irresistible, Mr. President.’”

“What did he say to you, Sybille?”

“He said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and sort of flung me down the reception line toward Jackie. Then she said the same thing and flung me again. They shake hands like a couple of black belts.”

Webster grasped Sybille’s chin. “Sybille,” he said, “let’s not have any of this Southern-belle chatter when Foley gets here. He doesn’t know you.”

“Oh, we’re all going to be very respectful, Tom. I do think this administration has raised the whole tone of American life. Why, Peggy McKinney has been reading Proust in the original French and learning the names of all those new African countries. She says the people of Zimbabwe want rice and respect. I always thought they wanted money.”

“Sybille, how about making this your last martini?” Webster said.

“I have to do something while you and Paul talk about betrayal and torture.”

“We don’t enjoy it,” Webster said.

“Oh,” said Sybille, “I think it makes you happy enough.”

4

Dennis Foley, arriving with Peggy McKinney, did not have the air of a man who expected to have a good time. He nodded to Sybille and to Christopher when he was introduced, but did not offer to shake hands. Foley was a bony man who had played basketball in college, and he had still the manner, self-aware and faintly contemptuous, of the athlete. He had a habit of touching his own body as he talked, running a hand over the waves of stiff black hair on the back of his head, unstrapping his large gold watch and massaging his wrist. His eyes, pale blue with tiny irises, looked beyond the person with whom he was conversing. His face, which changed color rather than expression when he was pleased or annoyed by something that was said to him, was roughened by acne scars. Foley wore a two-button suit with a tin PT-109 clasp on a Sulka tie. Like President Kennedy, he drank daiquiris without sugar and smoked long, thin cigars. He had been talking to Peggy McKinney when he arrived, and he moved her across the vast room, away from the others, to continue the conversation. As Sybille and Christopher watched, Peggy lit Foley’s cigar for him with a table lighter.

“Observe his gestures, listen to his voice,” Sybille said. “He’s turning into a JFK. All these New Frontier people are like that, have you noticed? It must be some royal virus. The closer you are to the throne, the worse the infection. Poor Peggy McKinney-see how she’s trying to get everything just right? Way over here in Paris, all she can do is read Proust and take up touch football. She plays left end in the Bois de Boulogne every Sunday.”

Across the room, Foley nodded brusquely, as if Peggy had told him everything he was interested in hearing. He brought his empty glass to Sybille.

“This is quite a place,” Foley said. “How did you find it?”

“Oh, the French have this idea that Americans will rent anything,” Sybille replied.

Foley’s glance ran like an adder’s tongue over Sybille’s face and body, and a corner of his mouth lifted, as if he were rejecting a sexual invitation. “I’ll bet you’re the wittiest woman in Paris,” he said. “I’d like some soda water. Just plain, with an ice cube.”

Sybille took his glass and went to the bar. Foley turned to Christopher. “Webster tells me you’re just back from Saigon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I understand you talked to Diem and his brother.”

“I saw them at a reception Nhu gave. It was more a matter of overhearing what they said to others.”

Foley took the glass Sybille handed to him and turned his back on her. “I’ve read some of your stuff in the magazine,” he said. “I had a feeling you were holding back. Don’t you write everything you know?”

“Usually. I don’t write what I don’t know.”

“Look, let’s cut the crap. I’ve got eyes-you work with Webster.”

“Do I?”

“I can confirm it in thirty seconds if I have to. You’re fresh from Saigon. You seem to circulate at pretty high levels out there. I’d like to hear your reactions. If they’re worth it, I’ll pass them on to the boss when I see him tomorrow,”

The others overheard. Webster fell silent and put a cold pipe between his teeth. Peggy McKinney’s face, as smooth as an ingenue’s, was suddenly alight with curiosity; though she saw his name listed in the front of a great magazine and read his articles, she had never believed Christopher’s cover story.

“The Americans are talking to themselves,” Christopher said. “The Vietnamese say that the U.S. is working up to a coup to remove the Ngos.”

“We know that the ruling family, and Nhu and his wife especially, are rabidly anti-American. What about that?”

Christopher shrugged.

“You think the U.S. government can work with a man like Diem?” Foley asked.

“Maybe not. He wants to stop the war and get us out of there. His brother is talking to the North. They have relatives in Hanoi, and Ho and Diem know each other from the old days.”

“That’s beautiful. Do you think we can countenance their talking to Ho Chi Minh behind our backs?”

Webster had begun to move across the room toward Foley and Christopher. Foley moved a step closer to Christopher, as if to prevent anyone stepping between them.

“They asked for our help,” he said. “We’ve committed our power. You suggest that we stand by, tolerate corruption and wink at what amounts to Fascism, and let the whole project go down the drain?”

“I don’t know that it would make much difference, except in terms of American domestic politics.”

Foley’s face had gone red. He tapped Christopher’s chest with a blunt forefinger.

“The freedom of a people is involved,” he said, “and that’s all that’s involved. If you think we’re holding on in Vietnam because we’re afraid of losing the next election, you don’t know a hell of a lot about John F. Kennedy or the men around him.”

“I’ve got no answer to that, Mr. Foley.”

Webster put a hand on Foley’s arm. “Sybille says dinner is ready,” he said.

Foley continued to stare into Christopher’s face. “What do you suggest we do out there?” he asked. “Nothing?”

“Sometimes,” Christopher answered, “that’s the best thing to do.”

“Well, buddy, that’s not the style any longer.”

Foley put his glass into Webster’s hand and strode into the dining room with Sybille and Peggy McKinney trailing after him.

5

At dinner, Foley’s mood improved. He entertained Sybille on his right and Peggy McKinney on his left with stories about the President.

“There are dogs and kids, great books and great paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have been under Franklin Roosevelt. If I want to see the boss, I just go in. You know you’ll come out of there with a decision. The door is wide open on the world. He’s likely to pick up the phone and call some little twirt way down the ladder in the Labor Department. Imagine, you’re forty and gray-faced, wearing a suit from Robert Hall, and for fifteen years you haven’t even been able to get an office with a window. Then-ring and ‘Mr. Snodgrass, this is the President. What the hell are you doing about migrant workers today?’ It stirs up the tired blood.” Foley looked around the table at the smiles of his listeners.

“The bureaucracy can use a little of that, believe me,” said Peggy McKinney. “God, how we’ve needed to bring brains and style back into the government. The embassy just crackles with ideas and energy. De l’audace, et encore de l’audace,-that’s what the foreign policy of a great nation should be.”

“Christopher was just telling me the opposite,” Foley said.

“Oh? Well, so many of Tom’s friends have to be cautious.”

“What do you mean by that?” Sybille asked, with her elbow on the table and her wineglass held against her cheek.

“Oh, Sybille, come along now. We all know about Tom’s friends,” Peggy McKinney said. “Is it true,” she asked Foley, “that the President putts when he thinks? I mean, does he really get out his putter and knock golf balls around the Oval Office? I think that’s so lovely, do say it’s true. I just devour all this gossipy stuff. You really don’t have to humor me.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve just spent a week listening to Couve de Murville. Believe me, you’re a welcome change,” Foley said. “Yes, the boss putts occasionally. He’ll do it at the damnedest times. The other day a couple of us came in with a recommendation. It was serious stuff. A decision had to be made-the kind of decision that would drive me, for instance, into agony. But his mind is like crystal. He’s right on top of everything. He knew the situation-felt it, if you will, better than any of us. We gave him some new information. He absorbed it. We gave him the options. He didn’t say a word at first. He got up, grabbed his putter, lined up a shot, and tapped it across the rug. We all watched the ball roll. Somehow-this will sound corny, but it’s true-we all suddenly saw that golf ball as the symbol of the fate of a nation. Not a very big nation, not our nation, but a nation. The ball ran straight into the cup. ‘Okay,’ said the boss. ‘Go.’ There’s never been another like him.”

Sybille turned to Christopher. “Paul has just seen a president out in Vietnam,” she said. “A little president. Do tell, Paul.”

“Oh,” said Peggy. “Diem or Ziem, or whatever his name is. Horrid man.”

“I’m interested,” Foley said.

“There’s not much to tell,” Christopher said. “I stood by while he talked to somebody else. Or, rather, listened. The other man was an American.”

“Who’s that?” Foley asked.

“Carson Wendell. He’s a Republican from California.”

“I know about him,” Foley said. “What poison is he spreading?”

“I don’t think you want to hear it, Mr. Foley.”

“Now I do,” Foley said.

“You may not like this,” Christopher said. “Wendell hates you people. He said Kennedy ran a dishonest, dishonorable campaign in 1960-lying about a missile gap that didn’t exist and inventing a USIA report that was supposed to show American prestige abroad was at an all-time low.”

“Losers have to have some excuse,” Foley said. “What else?”

“Wendell told Nhu that Kennedy wasn’t elected President -Nixon was. He claimed there’s evidence that votes were stolen in Illinois and a couple of other states where there was a very small difference in the popular vote. The Democrats are in the White House by fraud, according to Wendell. He was very circumstantial, citing numbers and precincts to Nhu.”

Peggy McKinney beat her fist on Sybille’s tablecloth. “I’ve never heard such slander,” she cried. “That man’s passport ought to be taken away from him! I mean, Christ.…”

Foley unwrapped a cigar. “What did Nhu say to all that?” he asked.

“Nothing. I had a feeling he’d heard it all before.”

Peggy McKinney opened her mouth to speak. Foley laid a hand on her arm. “People like Wendell and Nhu don’t count,” he said. “Power counts-and the right people are in power. I think we’ll stay in power for quite a while.” He grinned for the first time all evening, and sipped his wine. “In fact, if I can use one of the Republicans’ more famous phrases, I think Mr. Nixon can look forward to at least twenty years of treason.”

“Wit is back in the White House,” said Peggy McKinney with tears of laughter in her eyes. “Let’s drink to that.”

6

Sybille led her guests into the salon for coffee. Peggy McKinney stood with Foley, her feet placed at right angles like a model’s. She wore a pink Chanel suit, pearls, and a half-dozen golden bracelets on her right wrist. With her thin, nervous body and her bold features, she might have been taken for a Frenchwoman who had affairs. That, she told Foley, was the impression she had cultivated until the last election; the Kennedys had made her want to be an American again.

Tom Webster had said nothing during dinner. The evening had been spoiled for him by outsiders. Christopher operated all the time on hostile ground; in every country but his own he was a criminal. Outsiders, who did not know how fast betrayal traveled, could do him harm, perhaps even kill him, by knowing his name and speaking it at a cocktail party. Tonight Webster had entrusted Christopher’s identity to two people who had no right to know it. He put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and began to speak.

He never got the words out. The doorbell rang and Webster went to answer it, closing the door behind him so that no other stranger could catch a glimpse of Christopher. The others went on talking; Christopher heard Webster speaking English in the hall.

When he came back, he held a perforated embassy envelope in his hand. He opened it and read the cable it contained.

“Wonderful,” Webster said in a flat tone. “There’s been a coup d’etat in Saigon. Some generals have seized power. The Saigon station says the coup has succeeded.”

“What about Diem and Nhu?” Foley asked. He took the long white cable out of Webster’s hand and read it. Peggy McKinney, not cleared to read secret traffic, stepped back discreetly; she gazed at Foley and her eyes danced.

“No one knows,” Webster said. “The ambassador talked to Diem and offered him asylum, but he didn’t accept.”

“He’s a dead man,” Christopher said.

Foley handed the cable back to Webster. His face was expressionless.

Christopher watched Sybille put her coffee cup down, very gently, on the table. She sat in a corner of the sofa and looked out the window. Christopher, remembering the anecdote about the golf ball that symbolized a nation, stared at Foley, but the presidential assistant did not glance his way.

Tom Webster went to answer the ringing telephone. When he returned his hair was disheveled. “Diem is dead,” he said. “So is Nhu. They were shot by a young officer in the back of an M-113 armored personnel carrier.”

“American aid,” said Peggy McKinney.

Foley let out a long breath through his nose and made a chopping gesture, as if to drive home a point.

Peggy McKinney, flushed and smiling, took five small running steps toward the middle of the room. Planting her sharp heels in the carpet, legs apart, she said, “All together, folks- three cheers!”

Lifting her thin arm, bracelets jangling, she cried, “Hip, hip, hooray!” She repeated the cheer three times. No one joined in.

Sybille put a fist to her mouth; Tom Webster fumbled for a pocket comb and ran it through his hair.

“Paul,” Peggy cried, pointing a long finger. “Did you do this? I’ll bet you did, you sly spy-you were just out there in your false mustache.”

“No,” Christopher said. “I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did. I hope it really was the Vietnamese.”

“Oh, come on,” Peggy said.

“Peggy, I’m going to tell you once more. I didn’t know anything about this, and I want that to be clear to you. Don’t give me credit for murder, if you don’t mind.”

“Murder?” said Peggy. “Surgery.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sybille said. “Excuse me.” She left the room.

“Did I say something?” Peggy asked, touching Foley’s sleeve. “You’d think Sybille would be a little tougher, considering Tom’s line of work.”

“I guess Sybille’s got the idea that assassination is foul work,” Christopher said.

“Well, she can shed tears for both of us,” Peggy said. “What happened tonight-what’s the date? November 1, 1963-may show the world that the United States is going to take the initiative for a change. God knows they need to wake up to the reality of power in this world.”

“You think assassination is the way to wake them up?”

“Oh, Paul, come on-a petty Asiatic dictator and a secret-police chief.”

Christopher said, “Well, I have a plane to catch.”

Peggy shook hands with him. Foley stayed where he was, across the room, looking Christopher up and down as if he wanted to remember every detail of his appearance.

In the hall, Webster helped Christopher into his raincoat. “There’s one thing about this,” he said. “Luong should be all right.”

“Maybe,” Christopher said. “I don’t think they’d have had time to take him with them.”

Sybille came into the hall on tiptoe. She put her arms around Christopher. “Sorry I fled, love,” she said. “I’ve reached the age where everything reminds me of something that happened in the past. Wherever we go, it’s corpse after corpse. God, how I hate death and politics.”

Christopher walked up the shallow hill to the Etoile and found a taxi. The streets shone with rain. No one else was out walking. His mouth was dry with the metallic aftertaste of wine. He closed his eyes and tried not to hear the whine of the taxi’s tires: he did not want to use any of his senses. In his mind, as if it were a clear photograph projected on a screen, he saw Molly’s face, framed in russet hair and filled with belief. He had a sexual thought, his first in three weeks: it was a memory of the sun on her skin.