The Tears Of Autumn

1

The girl led him down one final dark street. This quarter of Saigon was all but silent, but Christopher knew it by day, and its clamor persisted in the heavy air, like rifle shots in the hours after a skirmish. He met the girl in a bar on Tu Do Street. He thought she might be seventeen. She spoke no French; her languages were Cochinese dialect and soldier English.

“My name is Honey,” she told Christopher. “It rhymes with money.”

She led him up an outside staircase, tapping his arm so that he would see the boy sleeping on the landing outside her door and step over the curled body.

When Christopher told her what he wanted, she did not ask his reasons. “You’re not a bad man?” she said. Christopher said that he was not, and she believed him at once, as if no one had ever lied to her.

Christopher gave her money and she turned around modestly and tucked it away somewhere under her dress. As frail as a child’s wrist, she sat on the bed and wove her hair into a long black braid.

“Maybe I can go visit my mother while you stay here,” she said, speaking as quickly as the thought crossed her face.

“No,” Christopher said, “I want you to be here, so that you can say I’m with you and deal with the people-I speak no Vietnamese.”

Honey finished her braid and pulled her dress over her head. She wore narrow pants printed with bright northern flowers, daisies or black-eyed susans; her skin was almost the color of the dyed blossoms.

Christopher smiled at her, and she drew in her breath to make her breasts larger. “You change your mind?” she asked.

“No,” Christopher said, “I just want you to be my sister for a few days, and not bring anyone else to this room.”

She pulled a mat from under the bed and unrolled it on the floor. “Then I better sleep down here, brother,” she said. She lay down on her back, drew her braid over her shoulder, and grasping it in both small hands, went to sleep.

Christopher covered her with a sheet and lay down on the bed. Honey had lighted a joss stick; its scent mingled with the stench that poured through the window like dust with sunlight. She made no noise as she slept. Christopher turned on his side and closed his eyes.

The girl had no papers, she had told him; therefore she had no existence, and if he came and went in the dark, they should both be safe enough. Heat, as palpable as the odors in the room, closed around his body.

2

Before it was light, Christopher started walking through the city again. He lost himself twice in cluttered dead-end streets, but he found Luong’s house before the sun had wakened anyone.

Luong’s wife, wearing a Western bathrobe that was too big for her, answered his knock. She did not know him, and fright showed in her eyes.

“Tell Luong that Crawford is here,” Christopher said in French.

“Craww-ford?” she said.

Christopher repeated the name. “We’re friends,” he said.

She left the door ajar and Christopher stepped inside the house. A very young child sat up on a mat in the next room and stared silently at him. Christopher winked at the child; he could not tell its sex. Luong’s wife, fully clothed, came and gathered it up; Christopher heard her speaking softly in another room, and in a moment saw her go by the window, with all three of her children following behind her. Her hair was loose, and as she walked she reached behind her with both hands and fastened it with a clip.

“How did you find my house?” Luong asked.

Christopher handed him an envelope. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you in Bangkok. You’ll need this.”

“I waited three days,” Luong said. “When I thought it was useless, I came back.” He did not ask for an explanation; he was trained.

As they drank tea, sunlight filled the room. Luong had been much abroad. His parlor was furnished with Western sofas and chairs, and alpine scenes hung on the walls. The shrine of his ancestors, visible in a corner of an adjoining room, was crowded with cheap colored glasses filled with wax in which small flames burned on bits of cotton wick.

“Do you know anything of a person called Lê Thu?” Christopher asked.

Luong searched his mind. “Is Lê the family name or a given name?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought it might be a family name. I assumed it was a woman’s name.”

“The Lê were kings of this part of Vietnam before the Nguyen,” Luong said. “It’s a common family name, both in the North and the South.”

“This Lê Thu has some connection, I don’t know what, with the Ngo family.”

“The Ngos are not very accessible these days. They’re in mourning, you understand. And they’re learning to be careful again, like everyone else.”

“Can you find out the connection? But ask with care, Luong-it may be that opium is involved.”

“I’ll try. It may not be the sort of thing you can pay for.”

“I need to know who this person is, and where, and what is the connection to the Ngo family.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’ll come here tomorrow, just before dawn. If you want me before then, write the time and the English word airborne above the urinal at the Pussycat Night Club on Tu Do Street. Do you know it?”

Luong smiled. “I know it. Be careful what you sleep with from that place-they’re all country girls and they don’t know about precautions.”

“We speak a great deal about precautions to each other, Luong.”

“Well, it’s a time to be careful. Why are you still asking about the Ngos? The important ones are dead, or gone away.”

“This is a different matter. They still exist, as a family.”

“Oh, yes,” Luong said. “Everywhere. They buried a lot of money-and a lot of democratic elements too.”

Luong’s remark was not meant as a joke. On his home ground, when he was working, he was a serious man. That was what had earned him the Thai girl Christopher had bought for him in Bangkok, and his house in Saigon, on a street where flowers grew beside the dirt walks.

“What are people saying about the Ngos since Diem and Nhu died?”

“That their luck ran out. In Vietnam, that’s always the explanation. We have no political analysts, only superstitions and fortune-tellers.”

“And killers.”

“Yes, we’ve always had a good cheap supply of those.”

“Do you think you have some sort of personal luck that keeps you alive, Luong?”

“Of course. Everyone believes that. Even some foreigners believe it, but not you yourself. I saw that in you from the first -you believe in nothing except the force of human intelligence. Isn’t that so?”

“I doubt even that.”

“I thought so. But there are other forces. One waits, and a force moves; it’s like water, soft and yielding, but also possessing great power.” Luong smiled.

“Lao-tzu,” Christopher said. “What’s your lucky number, Luong?”

Luong hesitated. “Eleven.”

“Has it come up lately?”

“Yes. Nhu wanted to kill me, you know. There were men waiting here for me while I was with you in Bangkok. But Diem and Nhu died while I was away, on November 1-the first day of the eleventh month, an eleven and a one, three elevens if you read from front and back.”

“What was Diem’s number?”

“That’s well known. Seven, double seven. He came to power on July 7, as you may know, too.”

“Does the number go on working after death?”

“I suppose so,” Luong said. “Any combination of sevens would be good for Diem’s spirit.”

“Would it make sense to honor his memory on a day seven days after his death, or fourteen days, or twenty-one?”

“Oh yes,” Luong said. “Triple seven, twenty-one, would be thought very auspicious… But you’re toying with our superstitions.”

“No, I try to understand these things. It isn’t necessary to believe in them to know they exist, even that they exert what you call force.”

“Well, perhaps one wouldn’t call such passive things a force.”

“What, then?”

Luong searched his mind for the French word. “An elegance,” he said.

3

No one in the tropics expects to see a white man at sunrise. Christopher did not live by the clock but by the rhythm of the place in which he found himself. In hot countries he moved on his targets in the cool of the morning. They were always surprised to see him. As he walked down Luong’s street under the stunted flowering trees, he received startled glances even from the children.

A few blocks away he found a taxi with its driver asleep in a patch of shade. He woke him and gave him the Truong toe’s address.

The Truong toe’s house was sealed. Shutters were fastened, doors locked. The house stood in a small park, and as Christopher walked among the flower beds and the palms it seemed to him that the noise of life parted at the gate and flowed around the walls of the garden. The babble of voices and the whine of scooter engines that filled the streets on all four sides of the narrow house were deadened. Christopher knew the noise was absorbed by the trees and the high wall cloaked with vines, but he thought, all the same, of the passive forces Luong had spoken about.

No one answered his knock. He stepped back and looked upward at the blank windows, then walked around the corner of the house to a terrace where bougainvillea grew over a trellis. Heavy iron lawn furniture, curlicued and painted white, was arranged in the shade; green mold crept up the legs of the chairs, designed to stand on a lawn beside the Loire. French doors opened on the terrace. Christopher saw someone in white robes move quickly across the room within. An entire wall was taken up by an ancestor’s shrine. Photographs of the dead and candle flames reflected in the panes of the terrace doors. The person inside was lighting a thicket of joss sticks on the shrine.

Christopher knocked again, and his fist rattled the glass. The white figure turned around; he saw it was a young woman who stood at the back of the room and stared at him. He knocked again, and drawing out his voice in the elongated tones of a Frenchman who has lived long in Asia, called, “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît!” The girl came to the glass door, held up both palms, and shook her head violently.

Christopher rattled the door handle and spoke in a loud voice: “A word with you, mademoiselle.”

She opened the door and, using the tu form, said, “Shut up. This house is closed.”

“I know, and I understand,” Christopher said. “But I’ve come all the way from Paris to see the Truong toe.”

“He’s not receiving visitors.”

“I have an important message for him. It concerns his family.”

The girl let breath burst from her nostrils. “This family?” she asked incredulously, looking at the color of Christopher’s skin.

“Yes-truly it’s very important to the Truong toe.”

“Who are you? Have you a card?”

“No-no card. But give him this.”

Christopher wrote on a page of his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to the girl. She folded the note without reading it, dropped her eyes, and closed the door again, turning the key in the lock. She pointed a finger toward the front of the house, and he went around to the main door. Fifteen minutes passed before it opened. The girl, striding in her ao dai like a Frenchwoman, led him through odors of fish sauce, furniture polish, candle smoke down a narrow hall to a room filled with books. She adjusted the blinds so that strips of light ran across the polished tile floor, and left him alone.

The Truong toe let Christopher wait for a long time. When he came in, he wore Vietnamese dress, white to signify his mourning. Without shaking hands, he sat down, holding the page from Christopher’s notebook between his thumb and forefinger. “Why do you bring me this message?” he asked.

“I wished to meet you. I thought you would want to have this information.”

“Well, then?”

“Your nephew, Ngo Tan Khoi, was garrotted after he entered his car in the parking lot of the casino at Divonne-les-Bains, on March 8,1958,” Christopher said. “He was buried that same night in the bottom of an open grave in the town of Gex, eight kilometers away. A woman named Marie-Thérèse Hec-quet, for whom the grave had been prepared, was buried in it on March 9.”

“By whom was he killed?”

“Not by your enemies. He was mistaken for a heroin dealer named Hoang Tan Khoi by the people who killed him. Your relative and the heroin dealer had the same given names and they were both Vietnamese.”

“Who were these people?”

Christopher gave him the names of the French gangsters. “Machelon is dead,” he said. “Gaboni is still in business; if one wishes to hire him, one leaves one half of a thousand-franc note in an envelope with the doorman of the Russian restaurant in the rue de Passy, in Paris. Gaboni will appear on the following Monday, at ten o’clock, in the public toilet on the Champs-Elysées, near the place Clemenceau.”

“How do you have this information?”

“I had it from Machelon.”

“Of what interest is it to me?”

“You now have it, in any case. I thank you for seeing me. Good-bye.”

Christopher uncrossed his legs and gripped the arms of his chair, as if to rise.

The Truong toe handed Christopher the notebook page. It was a gesture to establish trust; he was returning the evidence. “And you are what-a policeman? You speak like a Frenchman, but you don’t have the manners of the French.”

“I’m not a policeman. This is a personal matter-I greatly admired the late Ngo Dinh Diem. I knew him slightly. When he was murdered, I wished to express my sympathies.”

“You choose a bizarre method.”

Christopher put the page of the notebook in his pocket. “If I knew who killed Diem and his brother, I would tell you that,” he said.

The Truong toe moved his hand and let it fall back in his lap. “How did you know of me?”

“I made inquiries. Your existence is not a secret. The dead boy in France-he was a member of the Ngo chi, was he not?”

The Truong toe opened his eyes. There was nothing involuntary about his expression of surprise; he wished Christopher to understand that he respected his knowledge.

“Yes,” the Truong toe said. “We had hoped he wasn’t dead, but of course there was no other explanation.”

Christopher looked into the flat face of the Truong toe; the old skin stretched over the bones of his head like the ruined glaze of a china plate recovered from the ashes of a burned house. The old man had the light behind him, so even the faint expressions he allowed himself could not always be seen.

“It did not matter to the parents,” Christopher asked, “that Khoi was a Communist and an agent of Ho Chi Minh?”

“One accepts what a son becomes in politics. There is no choice.”

“I would be glad,” Christopher said, “if you could tell me something about President Diem. I met him only twice, but I thought him a great man.”

The Truong toe folded his hands. “Many thought him a tyrant,” he said. “He was not much loved outside Vietnam. Even in his own country, many never understood him. He hadn’t the gift of the popular gesture. He once said that it was impossible for him to feel guilt.”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “‘He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.’”

“Lao-tzu. You’re a surprising man.”

“One may read as one wishes. Do you believe President Diem loved his world, which was Vietnam, as he loved his own body?”

“They were the same,” the Truong toe said. “And now the one is dead and the other is dismembered,”

“The family is partly in the North, partly in the South. Is it dismembered?”

“No, the family is one.”

“And acts as one?”

“In matters that concern the oneness of the family, when it can. But it is weak, compared to the apparatus of the state and the weapons of the world.”

“So are all families,” Christopher said. “When the American President was killed, as Diem had been killed, I wondered if the members of his family had any thoughts about your family.”

“Because we had similar sorrows? I would be surprised. We live far away, in a weak country.”

“The assassinations came close together-only twenty-one days, three weeks, separated them.”

“The Americans live in another world,” the Truong toe said. “How can they compare their situation with ours? We cannot touch such beings. Perhaps time will touch them.”

Christopher stood up. “When you communicate with Ngo Tan Khoi’s parents,” he said, “tell them I am sorry to have brought such news-and to have brought it so late.”

The Truong toe, his hands folded in his white lap, called out a phrase in Vietnamese. The young woman reappeared and led Christopher to the door.

“What’s your name?” Christopher asked.

She gave him a contemptuous glance and remained silent.

“If you want to be worthy of the Truong toe, you must learn to hide your feelings,” Christopher said.

She opened the door and dropped her eyes, as if looking at the color of his skin offended her.

Christopher walked through the muffled atmosphere of the garden. Two Vietnamese in European clothes lounged by the gate. Christopher saw the outline of revolver butts under the thin white stuff of their identical shirts. The men watched him get into his waiting taxi, then one of them crossed the street to use the telephone in a shop.

Christopher told the driver to take him to the Continental Palace Hotel. He walked past the desk and up the stairs. It was still very early in the morning, and the maids were not yet active. He found an unlocked room from which the luggage had been removed. Closing the door behind him, he sat down on the soiled bed and used the telephone to call Wolkowicz.

4

Wolkowicz imagined that he was stalked by murderous enemies. He carried a heavy revolver in a shoulder holster and a smaller pistol strapped to the calf of his leg. A young Marine armed with a submachine gun drove Wolkowicz to work in the embassy and home again in a Mercedes with armored doors and bullet-proof windows. Wolkowicz’s villa was surrounded by a concrete wall, and the house itself had been fitted with steel doors and shutters. There were submachine guns, steel helmets, and flak vests in every closet.

Christopher rang the bell and saw Wolkowicz’s eye at the peephole. In the dark hall, Wolkowicz worked clumsily to refasten the bolts and locks with his left hand. He carried a pistol in his right hand and a newborn pig under his arm.

“I was just about to feed the snake,” Wolkowicz said. “Have a drink if you want one.”

Christopher made himself a gin and tonic with big clear ice cubes from Wolkowicz’s American refrigerator.

“Nhu, where the hell are you?” Wolkowicz said. “Come on, baby, we haven’t got all night He hides during the day, half the time I can’t find him.”

Wolkowicz shifted the pig to his left hand and replaced the revolver in his shoulder holster. He got down on his knees and looked under the furniture. “There you are, you son of a bitch,” he said. “Come on out.”

A young python glided from beneath the sofa and lifted its flat head. The pig squirmed sleepily in Wolkowicz’s arms.

“I have to dope the pig, otherwise the house gets wrecked in the chase,” Wolkowicz said. “I gave this one a Miltown in a can of beer. He’s feeling no pain.”

“Where’d you get the snake?” Christopher asked.

“Phnom Penh,” Wolkowicz said. “I had to go over to see Pete. The Cambodians run around with pythons draped around their necks. This is a nice one-I bought him from a taxi driver. He had him on the seat beside him. The problem is getting food for him. You don’t have to feed him often, but he’ll only eat live stuff. He likes chickens, but I can’t stand the noise.”

Wolkowicz put the pig on the floor and sat down heavily beside Christopher on the sofa. “You ever seen this done?” he asked. “It’s kind of interesting.”

The snake watched the pig fixedly. The drugged pig seemed surprised that it was unable to run; it gave a faint squeal and staggered toward the sofa. Wolkowicz gave it back to the python. With much slower movements than Christopher had expected, the snake attacked, wrapping itself around the pig’s small body. The pig struggled briefly, then subsided, uttering a series of thin squeals like a baby drifting to sleep. Its head thumped on the floor.

“Look at the snake’s eyes,” Wolkowicz said. “This is the only time they change expression-he gets dreamy while he’s squeezing.”

It took the python a long time to swallow the pig’s limp body. Toward the end, when only the pink rump still showed in the snake’s widened jaws, the python reached around with its tail and pushed the pig into its throat.

“He’ll sleep for days now,” Wolkowicz said. “I never knew they used their tails like that-it’s pretty interesting.”

“You enjoy having him around the house?”

“I make sure I know where he is before I go to sleep-snakes are good pets. They’ve got dry, very smooth skin, like the local girls,” Wolkowicz said, grinning. He grasped the snake’s tail and pulled it across the floor and into a closet.

When he came back he said, “I heard you took a little heat in Washington.”

“Oh, how did you hear that?”

“I got a personal letter from a guy. The way I read it, you’re not supposed to be operating out here anymore.”

“That’s why I wanted to see you, to tell you I’m not operating. All appearances to the contrary, I’m now just an honest reporter, trying to make a living.”

“That’s why you showed up at the Truong toe’s at five-thirty this morning, is it?”

“I’m doing a piece on the Ngos. I thought the Truong toe was a good person to talk to.”

“Yeah. Well, what do you want from me?”

“I hear Don Wolfe is out here.”

“That’s right. He reported in last week.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“Call him up, he’s around.”

Christopher smiled. “I just wanted to go through channels. He works for you. I thought you might like to be present.”

“I don’t have to be present. He works for me, as you mentioned.”

“Nevertheless,” Christopher said. “If he’s living next door, I’d be grateful if you’d call him over now. I don’t plan to hang around Saigon very long.”

Wolkowicz pursed his lips. “You’re out, aren’t you?” he said. “Patchen didn’t bother to inform anybody, but news travels.”

“I’m out, Barney.”

“So what’s in this for me?”

“If I run into anything, I’ll let you have it.”

“You’d better,” Wolkowicz said, “or you’ll never get into this country again. You believe that?”

“I believe it.”

“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. A short-range transceiver had been babbling on the coffee table while they spoke. Wolkowicz picked up the microphone and spoke into it.

“Why do you talk German on the radio?” Christopher asked.

Wolkowicz put his hand, covered with stiff black hair, over the microphone, as if it were a telephone receiver. “Wolfe can’t speak Cherokee,” he said.

Don Wolfe wore sagging Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt, and a buttoned seersucker jacket.

“You know the illustrious Christopher?” Wolkowicz said. “Tell him anything he wants to know.”

Wolkowicz picked up a heavy attaché case and his radio and went out of the room. Wolfe removed his jacket, revealing a revolver in a shoulder holster. “Station regulations, we never go out without a gat,” he said. “You don’t believe in firearms, do you?”

“I always thought somebody might take it away from me and shove it down my throat,” Christopher said.

“What can I do for you?”

“A lot, I hope. When did you leave Mexico City?”

“Let’s see, this is December 15.1 left on December 2-four days at headquarters to learn all about Vietnamese culture, then right out here.”

“David Patchen says you worked on the Oswald thing down there.”

“That’s right.”

“Are these dates right?” Christopher recited Oswald’s movements in Mexico City.

“I think so. I haven’t got your flawless memory.”

“Who talked to the people at the Soviet embassy?”

“From our shop? I did.”

“How were they?”

“The Russians? Scared shitless. There was a lot of pressure on them, you know. We had SAC in the air, and you have to admit it looked awfully funny-Oswald a onetime defector, chatting with the KGB in a foreign capital only a few weeks before he shot Kennedy. They were feeling the pressure.”

“Well, that passed.”

“I think we were a little hysterical ourselves-the Russians don’t do things like that anymore. They’re trying to be respectable, like us,” Wolfe said. “When Ruby killed Oswald, everything settled down overnight. That was a real gift, from the Sovs’ point of view.”

“Did you have any surveillance on Oswald while he was in town?”

“No, why would we? You know what the manpower problems are. He was just a jerk who went to Russia once.”

“Oswald was in Mexico City from September 27 to October 1.”

“Well, to September 30, really. He left early in the morning of October 1, by bus.”

“Who else was in town during those three days?”

Wolfe rolled back his eyes. “Jesus, half the human race. What do you mean?”

“Who passed through in that time who interested you? Third-country agents, I mean.”

“Not Mexicans, not Americans. I don’t know if I can remember them all, in the time frame. The Mexico City airport is the place where they all change for Moscow, Peking, and Havana, you know.”

“What about Hanoi?”

“You mean Vietnamese? There weren’t any. Does that narrow it down for you?”

“Not a Vietnamese. A third-country white man, who maybe had been to Vietnam very recently, or was on his way there.”

Wolfe closed his eyes, reached under his T-shirt, scratched his narrow chest.

“There was only one fellow like that,” he said. “Manuel Rogales is his passport name. He uses Manuel Ruiz, Manuel Linares-always Manuel, though. He’s a protégé of Ché’s.”

“Where is he now?”

“I’m not in touch, Paul. If you find out, it’ll be helpful. He’s a great jungle fighter, he goes out and surveys revolutionary prospects for Guevara. He’s been in Bolivia and Colombia, even Panama. He surfaced for about two months this year-mid-August to mid-October. Then he went to ground, as they say, and no one’s seen him since. He’s not in Cuba.”

“He was in Vietnam in that period?”

“Yes,” Wolfe said. “In Hanoi from early September to around the end of the month. I remember his coming through town on a Chilean passport. We got a photo of him from Mexican security at the airport.”

“And after that?”

“We never saw him again. As I said, he pulled the chain on us.” Wolfe sipped his drink. “Does one ask what all this is in aid of?” he asked.

Wolfe spoke like an Englishman and in colder climates wore suits that he ordered by mail from a tailor in London.

“Nothing, probably,” Christopher said. “I’m just curious about the whole incident.”

Wolfe nodded. “How’s your bride?” he asked.

“Cathy? We’ve been divorced for three years.”

“Have you? I guess I haven’t seen you for quite a while. Your loss is somebody’s gain-I always fancied that girl, Paul.”

“Yes, she had a way about her,” Christopher said. “Have you seen Wolkowicz’s python do his act?”

Wolfe gave a high giggle. “Are you changing the subject or telling me the secrets of your bedroom?” he asked.

“Thanks for the dope,” Christopher said.

“That’s all right,” Wolfe said. “Mexico can give you the exact dates and the Cuban’s photograph the next time you get down there.”

“I think I may already have a picture of him somewhere.”

“Do you? Tell them that in Mexico. They love it when you chaps fly in and save the world over a long weekend.”

Christopher smiled. “So does Wolkowicz. We’re admired wherever we go.”

5

Christopher left Wolkowicz’s house the way he had come, through the walled gardens of the foreigners’ compound. There was no moon, and only a few weak stars broke the black surface of the sky.

When he emerged into a quiet street, he was still alone. He didn’t understand it; by now the Truong toe’s men or the secret police should have picked him up. He walked for a mile or more on side streets, doubling back and wandering into cul-de-sacs as if he were lost, but there was no one behind him. Finally he turned and walked straight toward the glow and racket of Tu Do Street.

In the Pussycat Night Club, Honey sat on the lap of a Special Forces master sergeant. She wore his green beret on the back of her head and drank from a bottle of champagne. The sergeant’s bare forearm, covered with tattoos, encircled her. Christopher finished a bitter beer at the bar and walked across the room. Honey saw him and pointed a derisive thumb at the sergeant, whose face was buried in the hair at the back of her neck. Christopher winked at her. She wore the sergeant’s badges and ribbons on her dress, and she inflated her chest as she had done the night before and giggled again.

Over the urinal, Luong had written 1230 Airborne. Christopher spat on his thumb and wiped out the message; the blue ballpoint ink stained the ridges of his thumbprint, and he went back to the bar and scrubbed it off with beer and his handkerchief.

Honey put her hands on the bar beside him and said, “You coming home tonight?”

Christopher, watching the sergeant in the mirror, said, “Yes, but very late. Don’t let the sergeant fall asleep.”

Honey’s face, like that of a bride in a photographer’s shop window, was fixed in innocence.

Luong took Christopher’s arm and led him through his darkened house to the bedroom. A picture of Christ, vermilion heart glowing through a white winding sheet, hung over the bed. Christopher had seen the original in Saint Peter’s.

“It’s not good to meet here,” Luong said. “My wife wonders who you are.”

“You can’t go out at night.”

“I can. But carefully. I have something about this name, Lê Thu.”

Christopher was tired; he moved so that his back was against the head of the bed.

“I haven’t put a person to the name yet,” Luong said, “but there is something about it-it startled some of the people I asked.”

“Startled them? Why?”

“I think perhaps there is no person, that this is a false name -but I suppose you expected that. U, as you know, comes from the old Chinese. It means, or suggests, ‘tears.’ Thu means ‘autumn’ in Vietnamese-therefore, ‘the tears of autumn.’”

Christopher nodded. “As Lê Xuan-Madame Nhu’s name -means the tears of spring.”

“Exactly. I asked a man who takes messages into the countryside if he had ever heard the name. His reaction was interesting. He said nothing, as if he were thinking, and then something connected in his memory. He advised me to forget the name, and left me.”

“Did you go on asking after that?”

“No. I had already asked others. There is a man I might see, but he’s not in Saigon. He’s in a village on the way to Bien Hoa. I had no reason to go today, but perhaps tomorrow I can drive there. We have a party cell in the village-he has not been unfriendly.”

“Who is he?”

“He was a Catholic priest when the French were here. They thought he was running with the Viet Minh and they tortured him. They say he’s a eunuch. He still lives in the church and wears priest’s clothes.”

“Does he still run with the Communists?”

Luong shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a remote connection of the Ngos-his grandfather married one of their women while the Catholics were still in the North.”

“Would he talk to me?”

“Not for money. Maybe for curiosity. There’s talk about you -you went to see the Truong toe, I hear. They’ve been asking about a man who must be you. They think you’re French, despite your looks.”

“They haven’t tried to contact me,” Christopher said.

“They can’t find you in any of the places you should be.”

“And if I talk to this priest?”

“Then they’ll find you.”

“He reports to them?”

“He’s their relative, my friend. You’re a foreigner,” Luong said. “There’s a way to deal with him, Crawford. He’s doing some business with opium-a lot more of the stuff has been moving in the last few weeks, I hear.”

“Moving? How?”

“The VC are bringing it in from Cambodia, and from Laos, down the trail. I hear that the principal storage place is under the priest’s church-there are VC tunnels running under the village. They control that part of the countryside.”

“Then he is still running with the Communists?”

“Doing business with them. He’s buying. He has a great deal of money, it’s said, very suddenly. He never had any before.”

“How would one deal with him? Offer to buy? Threaten to expose him?”

“I wouldn’t make threats,” Luong said.

“Show me where he can be found, exactly.”

Luong drew a map on a page of Christopher’s notebook, showing the roads to the village. He drew a row ofX’s along the main line. “Ambushes at all these places recently,” he said. On another page he sketched the village, showing the church and the room where the priest lived. Christopher studied the pages for a moment, then ripped them out of the notebook and handed them back to Luong. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“With whites he uses the French style,” Luong said. “Jean-Baptiste Ho.”

Christopher stood up. Fatigue ran through his body like a painful injection. “Where can I get a car without papers?”

“Now? You’re going out there at night?”

“Yes. I can get back before daylight.”

Luong gave him the name of a garage. “There’s one more person I can ask tonight about the name,” he said. “I don’t want to meet here again-have you a place in the city?”

Christopher, so as not to say it aloud, wrote the address of Honey’s room and sketched the entrance. He looked at his watch. “I’ll be back at five o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Don’t come after it’s light.”

“If I have anything by five o’clock, I’ll come,” Luong said.

Christopher shook hands with him. “One more thing-if Lê Thu means the tears of autumn as a name, how do you say it in the ordinary way?

“In Vietnamese? Nuόe mằt mùa thu.”

“It’s more poetic in French.”

Luong smiled. “You hear music in the language you know,” he said.

6

The car was a Citroen with only thirty thousand kilometers on the odometer. Its soft fabric cushions and the air suspension took some of the ache out of Christopher’s back and legs. There was a checkpoint at the Thi Nghe Canal bridge where the highway joined the avenue leading into Saigon; a young guard took the thousand-piaster note clipped to Christopher’s press card and waved him through.

The Citroen made very little noise apart from the grip of its tires on the tar road. Christopher turned off the headlights, and by the time he was far enough away from Saigon to be in danger, he saw well enough in the starlight to drive as fast as the car would go. His eye followed the road through the trees and the low bushes, and the paddies shining in the darkness like coins. He saw no movement. He didn’t think that anyone would expect to see a darkened car moving at 150 kilometers an hour, or be able to hit it with gunfire.

On the dirt track leading into the village, Christopher went more slowly, but still dust blew in the open windows and coated the interior of the car. The church was a small building standing by itself beyond the huts that lined the principal street. Light from the altar candles leaked through its thin walls. Inside, there were a few long benches with their ends lying in deep shadow. Like Patchen’s house in Washington, the church was a place in which nothing involving human emotion had happened in a long time.

Christopher knocked, loudly, on the door behind the altar. The priest opened the door at once; behind him, the tiny room in which he lived was lit by a kerosine lantern. He wore a cassock, unbuttoned at the top so that his neck and his bony chest showed. Christopher heard a soft noise and saw a woman sitting upright on a plank bed; she turned her eyes aside and went to stand with her back against the wall at the far side of the room.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,” Christopher said. “I need your help.”

The little priest threw back his head and looked Christopher in the eye. “It’s very late,” he said. “It’s very dangerous, there are no army patrols at this time of night.”

“So I understand, but it was important that I see you. You are Jean-Baptiste Ho?”

“And you are what-a Frenchman?”

The priest fumbled with the tiny buttons on his cassock. He had a facial twitch; his cheek moved, causing the right eye to open and close like a caged owl’s. Christopher had never seen an Oriental with such an affliction. Remembering what Luong had told him about the priest’s experiences with French interrogators, Christopher said, “Father, I’m an American.”

“Ah? You don’t look or sound it, if I may pay you that compliment.”

“Well, I’m something of an outcast,” Christopher said. “I have lived very little in America as an adult, so I haven’t kept up with my countrymen’s manners.”

“You’re an outcast-or a pariah?”

“Between the two, for the time being-like yourself, Father.”

The priest still stood in the doorway of his room, with the motionless woman behind him. His twitch became more active, and he placed a hand, ropy with age, over his cheek. “Like me?”

“Like you,” Christopher said. “Your relatives the Ngos were willing enough to tolerate an unfrocked priest who dealt with the enemy and used his church for cover. Perhaps you could be of service to them in small ways. But the new regime is less tolerant. How long do you think you’ll last here?”

The priest called out a phrase in Vietnamese. His woman rummaged in a box and brought him an envelope filled with white powder. He turned his head away and snuffled heroin into his nostrils. In a moment his cheek quietened, and he gestured Christopher to follow him. They sat down together on a bench near the altar.

“The regime makes a great deal of noise in the daylight,” the priest said. “As you see, their soldiers are very quiet at night.”

“That’s fine for those who live only at night, like the Viet-cong combatants. For those who wish to utilize the whole clock, it’s inconvenient. When next you send a message to Kim in Paris, tell him to change banks. The Banque Sadak in Beirut is leaky.”

The priest’s twitch had stopped altogether. The heroin had had an effect and also, Christopher saw, it was not the present that drove the man’s nerves out of the control, but a memory of the past. He put his hands in the sleeves of his soutane and gazed at Christopher.

“I’ve heard something about you, I think,” he said. “You have a great deal of information.”

“I have an appetite for it. Father, I have no curiosity about your traffic in opium or in politics. It’s your affair. But it’s the sort of thing, if it were to come to the wrong ears, that could send you to prison again. Where did the French put you?”

“Chi Hoa Prison.”

“You have a relative there now-Ngo Dinh Can.”

“Thanks to the Americans, yes. Thanks to them, I have no doubt Can’s jailers have more modern equipment than mine did-the French are poor mechanics. They used field telephones, water, even their boots.”

“Yes-and Can is guarded by Vietnamese, not Frenchmen,” Christopher said. “That makes a difference.”

“I suppose so. What is it you want?”

“I want to talk to you about a certain Lê Thu.”

Like a man picking up a teacup to show that his hand does not tremble, the priest moved his eyes slowly from Christopher’s face to the dusty altar and back again. “I know no one named Le Thu,” he said.

“My Vietnamese is very poor,” Christopher said. “The name means ‘the tears of autumn,’ does it not?”

“You’ve come here to discuss Vietnamese names and their derivations from archaic Chinese? I’m not an expert.”

“Father, I’ve given you some information, voluntarily. Perhaps I could give you more-I have an idea that your business with Kim is important. If you go on taking heroin, you’ll soon be of no use to your family or your movement, and if the regime doesn’t kill you, the drug certainly will. You will have had a personal experience of its effects when you go to your grave, and since you are a political man as well as a member of the Ngo family, I expect that you’ll smile to think of the American soldiers you’ve doomed to be ruined like yourself. They’ll be very young and very stupid.”

“You have a morbid imagination.”

“I’ve learned to understand revenge,” Christopher said. “What I want to know I want to know for myself, not for any family or any government, or any other person. I understand that you won’t believe that, but it’s true.”

“And what is it you want to know?”

“First let me tell you what you get in return. Silence. I’ll tell no one-not in Saigon, not in Washington, not in Paris-what you are planning with heroin.”

“Why not? Do you care nothing for your countrymen?”

“Yes. But I’ll be truthful once again. They wouldn’t believe it-they underestimate you. They think you haven’t the intelligence or the resources, and they think they are too strong for you, as individuals and as a nation.”

“Then they are weaker than I thought.”

“No, they’re not weak,” Christopher said. “They just don’t see that the weak can strike at them. The senses travel very slowly in such an enormous body as America’s. Men like you can wound, but you cannot kill such a large organism. That’s your weakness.”

“So, what is it you want to know in return for your silence, and this lesson on philosophy?”

“Three things,” Christopher said. “First, is Lê Thu the code name of the operation that was carried out on November 22 in Dallas? Second, how was the message transmitted from Saigon to the North, and then to the man who recruited the American assassin? Third, what is the name of your relative in the intelligence service of North Vietnam who recruited the man who, in turn, activated Oswald?”‘

The priest sniffed; the drug had fixed a smile on his face, and his body rocked slightly as if in rhythm with the movement of the heroin through his bloodstream.

“You’re very direct,” he said. “You must not be afraid of consequences.”

“I’m careful of them. You’ve read detective stories, I suppose? The blackmailer always arranges that his information will pass into other hands if he is killed.”

“You’ve told me it would not be believed.”

“Not by any American you know about, or can conceive of. There are others who would believe it, and I advise you not to have contempt for them. As your recent success has taught you, contempt is a mistake.”

“Ah-it’s for these people that you want this information?”

“No, for myself. It’s an intellectual challenge-I’m accused of believing that everything can be discovered and understood.”

“If you already understand, or think you do, then why insist on discovery?”

“Before I realized what the heroin was for, I imagined that you had had revenge enough,” Christopher said. “So one discovers something new every day.”

The priest’s tic was awakening again. His blinking eye seemed to register Christopher as an automatic camera freezes the motions of an athlete.

“Do you want me to give you the information, assuming that it exists and that I know it?” he asked. “Or do you merely want us-me-to know that you have this idée fixe?”

“Have you the information?”

“No.”

Christopher stood up. “Then I’ll be in plain view all day tomorrow in Saigon. If anyone wishes to talk to me, I’ll be available.”

Christopher walked rapidly out of the church. He checked the doors of the Citroen for wires and looked at the motor and the undercarriage with a flashlight. There was no sign of explosives. Christopher had seen the woman go through a trapdoor in the priest’s room after she had given him his heroin, but the village VC would be out on patrol, and unless some of them were lying along the dirt track that led to the highway, they would not have had time to get back. He turned the car around and drove out of the village.

Halfway to Saigon, Christopher saw shapes move in the darkness beside the road, a hundred yards ahead of the car. He turned on the headlights, bathing three armed men in their glare. One of them threw his arm in a floppy pajama sleeve across his eyes. Christopher turned off the lights and blew the horn. In the rear-view mirror he saw muzzle flashes, like the burners of a gas stove. There were no tracers; that gave him confidence. Rounds struck the road behind the car and ahead of it, but none hit the Citroen before it went around the next curve, rising with a sigh on its suspension, the steering wheel chattering in his hands.

7

As Christopher entered the city, the red sun touched a string of cirrus clouds on the eastern horizon. He looked at his watch and, remembering Luong, realized that he was late. He could see the shapes of buildings in the increasing light. The streets were still empty. There was the taste of dust in his mouth and his eyes burned from the strain of driving in the dark; he pulled the headlight switch and followed the yellow puddle of the low beams through the grid of Saigon’s streets. He parked the car five blocks from Honey’s room, locked it, and walked the rest of the way.

At the mouth of the alley, he met two Vietnamese. They had changed their white shirts for darker ones, but he recognized them. The men, walking rapidly, stopped when they saw him, then hurried by. Christopher turned around and watched them disappear into another alley; a motor scooter whined away, its rider shifting gears very rapidly.

Christopher climbed the stairs. The air smelled fresh, as if there had been rain in the night, and the sunrise washed across the roofs of the quarter. The boy was asleep again on the landing outside Honey’s room, sprawled on his back with one trouser leg pulled upward on his hairless calf.

Stepping over the sleeping figure, Christopher looked down. It was Luong, his eyes staring, his black hair blown forward as if by the wind. Christopher kneeled and touched his skin. It was still warm; there was a black stain on his trousers where his bladder had emptied.

Christopher pushed back Luong’s hair and saw the small blue hole on his smooth forehead. “He’s not your child,” he heard Wolkowicz say. Christopher laid his palm on Luong’s cheek and closed the eyes and the slack lips with his thumb and forefinger.

He opened the door. The Special Forces sergeant, wearing an identification bracelet with a delicate gold chain on his thick wrist, lay on his back with Honey in his arms. Her narrow body with its row of knobs along the spine rested easily on the sergeant’s chest; she had left her hair unbraided. They were breathing together softly. Luong’s killers must have used a silenced gun.

Christopher knelt beside Luong again and looked through his pockets. There was nothing for him there, or in the dead man’s clenched hands. He was not surprised; no agent had ever spoken a last message to Christopher before he died.

8

Christopher started the Citroen without checking it for bombs and wondered if the tension on his wrist when he turned the key might be the last sensation his brain would ever register. But the warm engine started normally, and he drove to the post office, where there were coin telephones. He called Wolkowicz and told him what had happened.

“Tell someone to get there fast, before the people in the neighborhood wake up and dump the body,” Christopher said.

“What difference does it make?” Wolkowicz said. “He was a politique-they won’t investigate, they’ll just close his file.”

“As long as they get the body. He has a wife.”

“All right, I’ll put out a call, but don’t expect any answers from the Vietnamese-if they went around solving murders in this town they’d never get anything else done.”

Christopher thanked him. “That’s okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? If he’d come back from Bangkok last month when he was supposed to, and they’d shot him then, his widow would’ve gotten a pension. But this sure doesn’t sound like death in line of duty.”

“It never does, after it happens,” Christopher said.

In the lobby of the Continental Palace half a dozen foreigners, Americans and Frenchmen, waited in two docile groups for the early minibus to the airport. Christopher had not slept for twenty-four hours or changed his clothes for forty-eight. The Frenchmen stared curiously at his rumpled suit and unshaven cheeks; he could tell by their clothes and the way in which perpetual impatience had twisted their faces that they lived in Vietnam. They were not used to seeing dirt on a white man, and it annoyed them.

The métis behind the reception desk, who had his father’s Norman nose and his mother’s small bones and almond eyes, spoke English to Christopher as a matter of course. He said he had no room. When Christopher replied in French, the métis pushed a registration card across the desk and took a key from the rack. “Pièce d’identité?” Christopher handed him his American passport, and the clerk gave back a resentful look- he had lost his first bribe of the day through trickery.

Christopher sent the bellboy for the suitcase he had left at the Alitalia office. He shaved and took a bath; the tepid water coughed from the tap, rusty and smelling faintly of the river. He sat down and wrote a letter to Patchen. Using the English section of a Collins French-English pocket dictionary, he converted the words he had written into groups of numbers corresponding to the page, line, and column where they were found in the book. It was not a satisfactory dictionary for use in a book code; heroin did not appear, and he had to render the word as “next-stage morphine derivative.” He might as well have been writing in German, he thought. Christopher burned the paper on which he had written his draft, and put the thin sheet covered with rows of numbers into an envelope with an American airmail stamp already affixed. He did not address the envelope.

Before he went to sleep, Christopher took no precautions apart from the useless one of locking the door. Precautions would serve no purpose. If Luong had been killed as a warning, Christopher himself would not be killed until whoever was running the assassins decided that Christopher had not taken the warning. The two men could have killed Christopher easily enough in the alley when they met him face to face. Or, if they wished to be artistic, they could have shot him after letting him discover Luong’s body. The killers had no distinguishing features, they looked like any other young Vietnamese sharing a motor scooter and looking for a way to make a little money out of the war.

Each time Christopher began to dream, he reached into that part of his mind and stopped the pictures. Nevertheless, he saw the man run down in Berlin again, and a youth in Algiers with a bullet coming out his back in a plume of blood as if he had thrown a glass of wine over his shoulder, and Luong’s photograph on a grave marker with a bright sacred heart glowing on his chest. While the Truong toe drank tea, Jean-Baptiste Ho showed Christopher pictures of all the Ngo dead, arranged among candles in the room in Siena where he had repeated to Molly that he loved her. Touching Christopher’s arm as if he were an old friend, the priest said, “It would be beautiful to die of disgust, but you will not.”

9

When Christopher awoke, he went to the American embassy and mailed his letter to Patchen, scribbling the false name and the post-office-box number in Washington across the envelope at the moment he dropped the envelope in the box. He knew it would reassure Patchen to see that the message had passed through the U.S. mail only. It was undecipherable without the book that was the key to the code, but ciphers are incriminating in themselves.

The crowd of foreigners on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel reminded Christopher of travelers on the deck of a ship. Everything that interested them lay inside the rails; the Vietnamese, as alike as gulls, went by on the sidewalk, locked in a language that made no sense to white men. Christopher saw four Americans he knew, all of them journalists. He sat at the other end of the terrace with his back to their table and ordered a vermouth cassis. In the street, ordinary women in ao dai and trousers and bar girls in miniskirts that spoiled the grace of their slender bodies were out walking; a rawboned American girl carrying an armload of packages strode through the crowd, whistling a love song, her hair swinging.

Christopher waited. Dark had fallen, and most of the people on the terrace had gone inside to have dinner, when the girl came. She had changed out of her white gown into a linen suit, with a tangled necklace of pearls at her throat and her heavy hair coiled on her neck.

She paused in the doorway, saw Christopher, and walked straight to his table. She took the bamboo chair opposite Christopher, sitting on its edge with her spine straight. She wore a faint violet scent, and Christopher thought of Honey’s bikini printed with foreign flowers she had never seen. Christopher did not speak again, except to summon the waiter; he let the girl order her own Coca-Cola.

“It’s curious,” she said, “this was the very first place I looked for you. I’m glad you’re so easy to find.”

“There aren’t many places in Saigon to look for a foreigner,” Christopher said. “I’m a little surprised that the Truong toe sent you-I had an idea he’d send a male relative.”

The girl wrapped a paper napkin around the sweating glass the waiter had set before her. “I detest ice,” she said. “It makes one feel no cooler to swallow these freezing drinks.”

She smiled and lifted the glass; her gestures, like her face, were softer outside the Truong toe’s house. She had the fine features of the Vietnamese young; her fresh skin was lighter than Honey’s. She had had a better diet: the bones of her neck were covered with smooth flesh and her hair shone with health. Her small ears, pierced by the golden earrings of an engaged girl, were almost transparent.

“My uncle was impressed with you,” she said. “He wasn’t pleased that I had been rude to you.”

“Neither was I. Perhaps we can come to the point. I’m a little tired, and very hungry.”

“You repay me my rudeness, I see. You have the right. There’s been death in our family, as you know, and it’s difficult sometimes to remember one’s manners. I’m exhausted with condolences-everyone comes to the Truong toe’s house, and I’m tired of all the sadness.”

“I understood. It’s not important.”

“My uncle would like to talk to you again.”

“Would he? I have nothing more to tell him about your cousin.”

“He knows that, but he would like to meet with you. What’s your Christian name? We can’t go on calling each other ‘monsieur’ and ‘mademoiselle.’ I am called Nicole, in French.”

“Nicole? And in Vietnamese?”

She smiled. “Nicole is easier. And you?”

“Paul.”

“Like the angry saint. I’ve always liked that name.” She spoke French like a Parisian, with a studied musicality that paid compliments to the language. She was not speaking to him in the same way as before. Like an educated Frenchwoman, she had two voices: her natural speech for ordinary business, and a sweeter tone when she wished to be charming.

“I’d be glad to see the Truong toe again,” Christopher said. “Has he a time and place in mind?”

“He asked me to bring you to him.”

“That’s kind, but I know the way.”

“He’s not at home tonight-we’d have to go to another place, and I’m not sure you could find it. It’s in Cholon, and the streets are not easy there.”

“All right. I have a car-but really I must eat before we go. I’ve had nothing since yesterday.”

Nicole reached across the table and lifted Christopher’s wrist to look at his watch. “It’s only eight-we have time,” she said.

During the meal Nicole talked about France. “I was educated to belong there, all of us were whose families had enough money,” she said. “I think in French even now-it really is the language of logic. I separate people into French categories, intelligent or not intelligent. Everything is so simple in French, one knows the difference between things.”

“And do you feel in French as well?” Christopher asked.

“Ah, no-a Vietnamese feels in Vietnamese. French is a language of the mind-Vietnamese, of the blood.”

“You sound like Diem-what was he to you, an uncle?”

“A sort of cousin. Why should I sound like him? He hardly ever spoke.”

“He spoke enough,” Christopher said. “Is this mystical idea of Vietnamese nationhood something the mandarin class has invented? You’re the only ones who speak of it.”

“How would you know? You can only speak to people who understand French.”

“That’s true, and you all have this tendency to dramatize the Vietnamese side of your nature. You take such pleasure in tantalizing outsiders with your national mystery, as if it were something hidden, but in plain sight.”

“And what, in your opinion, is that mystery?”

“A pride in your murders. It’s not a quality that’s confined to Vietnam. There’s a tribe in Ghana that believes no one dies a natural death-when a man dies, they use magic to find who in the tribe has killed him, and by what spell. Then the dead man’s son is given his father’s sandals. When he grows big enough to wear them, he kills his father’s murderer. Eventually, of course, he too is killed in revenge. It goes on, generation after generation.”

“You think the Vietnamese question is as simple as that?”

“I think the human question is as simple as that, Nicole. Intellectual systems are developed to justify the exchange of death; the system of the Ghanaian tribe is as sensible as Christianity or your own family’s sense of aristocracy, or what the Americans call the dignity of the individual. In Germany, two thousand years of Christian teaching produced the SS. In Vietnam, two thousand years of colonialism produced this slaughter of peasants Ho Chi Minh calls a revolution and Diem never put a name to. It required only a hundred years of technology to produce the Hiroshima bomb. All achieved the same results- murder without guilt.”

Nicole put down her knife and fork and leaned back in her chair, peering at Christopher as if his words had formed a frame around him. “You believe in nothing, then,” she said.

“I believe in consequences,” Christopher replied.