The Tears Of Autumn

l

They were in Molly’s bed when she asked him about his poems. She lay on an elbow, her lips a little swollen, a strip of yellow sunlight running through her hair and across her cheek.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about your poetry?” Molly asked. “‘How odd,’ I thought, when I saw the traditional slim volume, all covered with coffee stains, lying in a barrow on the Ponte Sisto. ‘Here’s a chap with my lover’s name who writes poetry.’ Then I read them, and it was your voice, you infamous wretch.”

“I think I’d like dinner at Dal Bolognese tonight,” Christopher said.

“Ah, things of the flesh and things of the spirit. Such an odd combination in an American. I want to know what you were like when you wrote those verses.”

“Young.”

“What was she like, the girl in the sonnets?”

“Oh, Molly-that was fifteen years ago. I invented her.”

“Were you the man of her dreams?”

“She didn’t like me at all, and when the book was published she liked me even less. She said people would think she wasn’t a virgin.”

“But you loved her.”

“I was crazy about her.”

“What was her name? Tell.”

“Shirley.”

“Shirley? Jesus-didn’t that discourage you?”

“All right, what was the name of your first love?”

“Paul Christopher,” Molly said. “That much is true. But now I find he has deceived me with a bird named Shirley. Paul, those poems are so good. I’m bloody jealous. Why don’t you write like that now, instead of doing journalism?”

“I’ve lost the touch.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it didn’t matter.”

“It matters. What else haven’t you told me?”

“Quite a lot, Molly.”

“I’ve often thought so. Paul, I wish you’d talk.”

“I talk all the time. We agree that Red China should be in the United Nations. I ask you about Australia and your girlhood in the outback. I explore your reasons for hating kangaroos. I praise your body.”

Molly kissed him and raised his hand to her breast. “Yes, all that, but you never go deep. I dream about you, I see you in your past, I see you in Kuala Lumpur and in the Congo when you’re away. But you never speak-you’re making me invent you, as you invented that girl.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What is the worst wound you have ever suffered?”

“Ah, Molly-I’m bulletproof.”

“You’re covered with scars. Please tell me, Paul. I’ll not ask you another question, ever.”

Christopher sat up in bed, moving his body away from Molly’s, and pulled the sheet over both of them. “All right,” he said. “Cathy could not bear to be alone. Her life, our marriage, took place in bed. She was a hungry lover, not graceful as you are. She needed sex, she’d scream and wail. Once we were thrown out of a hotel in Spain-they thought we were using whips. I knew she slept with men when I was away. I had no rule about it-it was her body, she could use it as she wished. She thought that showed a lack of love. She’d never believe I couldn’t feel sexual jealousy.”

“I believe it,” Molly said.

Cathy had not been content to let their marriage die. She set out to kill it. Christopher realized soon after he met her that he had never been so aroused by a female; his desire for her showed him a part of his nature he had not known to exist; he was seized by a biological force that had nothing to do with the mind, and he was driven to have her as, he supposed, a father would be seized by the instinct to kill the man who attacked his child. Cathy was a lovely girl with elongated gray eyes like a cat’s, perfect teeth, a straight nose, a lithe, frank body. She had been sent to college, and then to Europe to study languages and art, but she did nothing. She had superstitions, but no ideas; she had learned to play the piano and talk and wear clothes. She was beautiful and wanted to be nothing else. “What do you want?” Christopher asked her as they walked along a beach in Spain. “Not what other girls want-I’m not domestic. No children, no career. I want, Paul, a perfect union with a man.”

Cathy believed that she was different from all other human beings. Christopher was the first man in whom she had confided; she thought he was more like her in mind and soul than anyone else could be. When at last they went to bed, she was rapturous. But her passion was all she had. She had no skill as a lover and could not learn.

After a time she sensed that this was the trouble. Cathy wanted to satisfy Christopher. He wanted to reassure her. They made love constantly, in bed, in the car. She would meet him at the airport naked under a raincoat, and remove the coat as they drove home, pulling the wheel so that he would turn into the ruins at Ostia Antica, where they would lie behind the broken stones of an old wall, shuddering on the cold earth in a rainfall. Because she was an American and his wife, he told her about his work-the nature of his profession, not its details. She thought that he kept more from her than official secrets-that he could not forget some other woman whose name he wouldn’t reveal. She begged him to write about her. “You won’t give me what you are,” she said. “That’s all I want.”

Christopher loved to look at her. He bought her jewels and clothes and read to her. After a time, they lived in public as much as possible. They went to bullfights in Madrid, to the theater in London, they had restaurants they always went to and favorite drinks. Cathy loved to eat wild boar at Da Mario in the Via della Vite, she liked to sit up late on the sidewalk at Doney’s, drinking Negronis.

When Christopher was away, she would ride through Rome on summer nights in his convertible with the top down. Finally, while he was in Africa, she met an Italian actor. After Christopher came back, she kept up the affair. She found other lovers. She went back to the actor. She would come home to Christopher, still wet, and want to make love. Christopher knew the Italian-he took Dexedrine and it made him violent. He was a Maoist who hated America; Cathy, who looked like a girl in an American film, was something he wanted to spoil.

Finally Cathy decided to break off with the actor. She had left some things at his apartment, dresses, jewelry, books. When she arrived, in the afternoon, she found him waiting with a dozen of his friends, all Italian except for a couple of Scandinavian girls. They were drinking spumante. The actor pulled Cathy into the apartment and threw her into the center of the living room. He had arranged the furniture so that the chairs were all around the walls, like a theater in the round. While his friends watched, the actor beat her with his fists. He punched her breasts, smashed her face. It went on for a long time-her nose and the bones in her cheeks were broken, some of her teeth were knocked out.

Cathy went downstairs to a coffee bar and called Christopher. When he got to her, her face was a mass of blood. Her hair was soaked with blood. She had vomited on her clothes. She wore only one shoe. Christopher took her to the hospital. The car was open. “Put up the top,” she kept saying, “put up the top.”

“I see,” Molly said.

“Do you? Outside the hospital, I kissed her mouth. She was blinded by blood. I was enough like her by then that I would have pulled off her clothes right there, but they came out with a stretcher.”

2

That evening, seated at Doney’s while the crowd drifted by on the Via Veneto, they read the papers. Christopher saw, for the first time, photographs of the dead bodies of the Ngo brothers. Diem’s corpse was closer to the camera, and a broad streak of blood ran from the wound in his temple over his cheek.

“What happens to your piece on Diem now?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know. I cabled the magazine. They may want a fix, or they may not run it. They wanted something unflattering, but that may not seem appropriate to them now.”

“You saw him?”

“Only for a few minutes. It’s odd, you know, but no one knows anything about him, really. He was sealed up in his family, never talked to strangers. All the stuff about him in the papers was science fiction.”

Piero Cremona, wearing a perfectly pressed tan suit and a silk scarf around his neck, came out of the crowd, lifting his hand in greeting.

“The famous American correspondent is back from- where was it this time, Paul?”

Christopher shook hands. “How’s the world’s best-dressed Communist?” he said.

Cremona ran the fingernails of both hands down the breast of his jacket, making the silk whistle. “The true revolutionary blends into his environment,” Cremona said. “In the jungles of Vietnam, I would wear the branches of trees. Here, this is my camouflage.”

Cremona wrote political articles for L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. He signed his pieces with the nom de guerre he had used as a partisan; everyone but the police had forgotten the name Cremona was born with. Christopher avoided American reporters, and Americans generally, in Rome, but he had got to know a lot of Italians when he was learning the language. He never reported on them or carried out any intelligence activities in Italy; it was his rule never to operate in the country where he lived.

Cremona sat down with Christopher and Molly. He tapped the newspaper photograph of the dead Vietnamese. “The imperialist eagle devours its young, eh?” he said.

“Is that the line this week, Piero?”

“It’s the obvious truth, Paul. Read my piece tomorrow. Brilliant. I’ve just come from the typewriter.”

“Why is it so obvious? Corriere della Sera says the trigger was pulled by a South Vietnamese lieutenant.”

“Yes, and the junta in Saigon says Diem and Nhu committed suicide,” Cremona said. “Everyone knew it was going to happen-you have a man of action in the White House now. I predicted it weeks ago. A handful of dollars, a head full of bullets. Madame Nhu, when she was here last month, predicted it.”

“Well, if you’re right, it ought to be a very good thing for the revolution.”

“The best, dear Paul, the best. Ah, you capitalist-imperialists are so adept at fulfilling the predictions of Lenin. You are eager for your own doom. Up to now, you’ve been growling in Indochina like a caged tiger. Now you must bleed, Paul. There will be chaos-generals cannot run a government in a civil war. Their army has always been a joke, now their country will be a joke. The U.S. Marines will land-they must. You’re committed now to playing a bad hand.”

“Last time I saw you, you were telling me that Diem and Nhu were a couple of Nazis.”

“They were-but they were no joke,” Cremona said. “Well, I must leave you. Molly, why does a beautiful girl like you consort with this running dog of Wall Street?”

“Our relationship is not political,” Molly said.

They had made love all afternoon. While Christopher took a shower, Molly wrote five hundred words on Italian fashions for the Australian weekly she represented in Rome. Christopher found her at the typewriter, naked, with her glasses slipping down her nose and a yellow pencil clenched in her teeth, when he came out of the bathroom.

“Tripe,” she mumbled. Molly wanted to live the life she thought he led, interviewing foreign ministers and film directors for a great American magazine. She kept all his articles, and would have typed them if he let her. Christopher did not want a secretary or a wife. He had hired Molly as an assistant two years before, to have someone in his office while he was away. It was important to his cover that someone answer the telephone and collect the mail. He kept nothing in the office, or anywhere else, that would connect him to his work as an agent. Molly could discover nothing.

Molly, who talked so beautifully, wrote badly, and she had never had an editor who knew enough about English to punish her for it. She asked too many questions when she interviewed; she had not learned to let her sources talk and betray themselves. Mostly she did stories about Italians, who liked the flat accent she used to speak their language, and tried to seduce her. She had beautiful legs and a soft way of smiling that made men want her.

Christopher had realized that he wanted her to stay with him after they had gone to bed for the first time. They had eaten lunch together on the first warm day of the year in the Piazza Navona. Molly had tied a scarf under her chin, and her bright hair was hidden. When Christopher spoke to her she searched his face, as though for some hint that he was mocking her. She spoke English with a public school accent, but when she talked Italian to the waiter her Australian intonations were audible.

She wore a gray sweater and a pleated skirt like a schoolgirl, and Christopher thought she was ashamed of her clothes, as she was ashamed of her Australian accent. He wanted to ask why she flinched when he talked to her; he thought she must be having a bad love affair. Her eyes were flecked with copper, and when she peeled a mandarine he saw that she had lovely, skillful hands.

Out of mischief, because she was so shy, he said, “Would you like to make love?” Molly replied, touching the corner of her mouth with a napkin, “Yes, I think I would.”

Webster knew that Christopher slept with Molly. He sent her name in for a background investigation without mentioning that she was Christopher’s mistress. “Do you want to read the file?” Webster asked when it came back from Canberra. “No,” Christopher said. “She seems to be okay,” Webster said. “If you have to live with a foreigner, an Australian is as clean as you can do.” They did not live together; Molly kept her own small apartment. She didn’t like the bed at his place, where Cathy had slept.

They walked to the restaurant through the Borghese Gardens. Molly did not hold his arm; she never touched him in public. Streetlights glowed in the branches of the trees. They paused on the Pincio and looked out over the dark city.

“We’re too late for the sunset,” Molly said.

After dinner, they drank coffee in the Piazza del Popolo. “Rome does smell of coffee in the winter,” Molly said. “Have you ever mentioned that to me?”

She grinned at him. Christopher loved the scent of Rome, a mixture of dust and cooking and bitter coffee. When he had drunk enough wine, he described the aroma of the city to Molly, and they tried to separate the odors.

Molly had caught him in the middle of a thought. He didn’t want to leave her, but she mistook what she saw in his face.

“You don’t much like being loved, do you?” Molly said.

Christopher stopped himself from touching her. “I’m going to the States next week,” he said.

“For how long?”

“A week, ten days.”

“Will you be coming back to Rome, or going on?”

“To Rome. Maybe we can go someplace together.” Molly read his face again. “We’re already here,” she said.

3

David Patchen came to the safe house in Q Street at three o’clock in the morning. He was white with fatigue, and the glass of scotch Christopher gave him trembled in his hand. He drank it and poured another before he spoke.

“Dennis Foley wants your balls for breakfast,” he said.

As a seventeen-year-old Marine on Okinawa, Patchen had been wounded by grenade fragments. The left side of his face was paralyzed. He walked with a limp. One of his eyes had been frozen open and he had learned not to blink the other; he wore a black eye patch when he slept. Patchen had no gestures. He was so still, like a hunting animal lying on the branch of a tree, that people would cough in nervous relief when finally he moved, and they saw that he limped.

Christopher was Patchen’s only friend. They met in a naval hospital in the last days of the war and played chess together. While Patchen was still in a wheelchair, they were mustered with a handful o other wounded men to be decorated by a visiting admiral. Afterward, as Christopher pushed Patchen along a path planted with oleanders, Patchen unpinned the Silver Star from his bathrobe and threw it into the bushes. Both men were younger sons who had grown up in families in which an older brother was the preferred child. They were contemptuous of human beings who needed admiration.

Later, they had been roommates at Harvard. Another Harvard man, a few years older, took them to dinner at Locke-Ober’s in the spring of their senior year. He ordered Pouilly-Fumé with the oysters and Médoc with the roast lamb, and afterward, in his room at the Parker House, recruited them for intelligence work. Neither man hesitated; they understood that what the recruiter was offering them was a lifetime of inviolable privacy.

Because people who had seen him remembered his wounds, Patchen remained in Washington. He was a natural administrator; he absorbed written material at a glance and never forgot anything. He knew the names and pseudonyms, the photographs and the operative weakness of every agent controlled by Americans everywhere in the world. Patchen never met any of them, and none of them knew he existed, but he designed their lives, forming them into a global sub-society that had become what it was, and remained so, at his pleasure. His hair turned gray when he was thirty, possibly from the pain of his wounds. At thirty-five he was outranked by only four men in the American intelligence community.

Christopher had gone into the field almost at once. It was thought that his book of poems gave him reality and an excuse to go anywhere. He began to write magazine articles after the brief notoriety of his poems dissipated.

They met once or twice a year in Washington. Patchen’s wife was gone, like Cathy Christopher. Patchen and Christopher saw changes in one another, but the changes were physical. Their minds were as they had always been. They believed in intellect as a force in the world and understood that it could be used only in secret. They knew, because they had spent their lives doing it, that it was possible to break open the human experience and find the dry truth hidden at its center. Their work had taught them that the truth, once discovered, was usually of little use: men denied what they had done, forgot what they had believed, and made the same mistakes over and over again. Patchen and Christopher were valuable because they had learned how to predict and use the mistakes of others.

“Foley ordered me to destroy any report you’d filed on that theory of Carson Wendell’s about the 1960 election,” Patchen said. “I told him there was no report.”

“Did he believe that?”

“Of course not. He’s got the idea we run a gossip mill. You may have to write something, so he can burn it in his ashtray.”

Christopher smiled.

“He wanted you fired,” Patchen said. “The Director put a handwritten note in your file explaining that you were responding to a direct request for information and had no political motive.”

“Does Foley believe that?”

“How could he? He lives on loyalty to one man, the President. He’s had no experience with coldhearted bastards like you. No one but us can see that information is just information. Foley thinks you’re an enemy if you don’t agree with everything the President does, one hundred percent.”

“So now everyone agrees with assassination?”

Patchen lifted his bad leg, using both hands, and crossed it over the other one. “Foley thought you were being emotional,” he said. “I could kick Tom Webster’s ass for bringing you two together.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

Patchen hesitated. It was not like Christopher to ask for information he didn’t need to have.

“The outfit had nothing to do with what happened to Diem and Nhu,” he said.

“Foley didn’t seem very surprised at the news.”

“I can’t explain Foley, or what he does,” Patchen said.

Patchen opened his briefcase with a snap; he had had enough of this subject. He handed Christopher a newspaper clipping, the obituary of an Asian political figure who had died the week before of a heart attack.

“Did you see this? It isn’t often that an agent dies of natural causes.”

Christopher read the obituary. It said that the Asian would be remembered by history for three things: his autobiography, which made the world aware of the struggle of a whole people through the description of the author’s own life; the Manifesto of 1955, which had influenced political thought and action throughout the Third World; and the statesman’s success in driving Communists out of the political life of his country.

“Not even a chuckle?” Patchen asked.

Christopher shook his head. It was a convention that agents, even after they were dead, were called by their code names, never by their own. The Asian’s pseudonym had been “Ripsaw.”

“How much of Ripsaw’s autobiography actually happened in his life?” Patchen asked.

“Most of the anecdotes were true as he told them to me. I just put in the parts where he had deep, deep thoughts. The Manifesto of 1955 I wrote on a plane, going down from Japan. It was the universal text-I’d done things like it before for some of the Africans. There just happened to be a guy from the Times in-country when Ripsaw issued it, so it got publicity.”

“Don’t you think it’s funny, the way the Times is always reporting on you, and it doesn’t know you exist?”

“That’s what newspapers are for.”

“Yes, to explain the real world.”

“There is no real world, David.”

Patchen smiled at the irony. He took back the clipping and closed his briefcase. He sat for a long moment with his good eye closed and a hand over the other one, sipping from his glass of whiskey. He took his hand away from his face and stared at Christopher.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I got out your file and read it; you’ve been through a lot in twelve years. You’re losing your humor, Paul. I’ve seen it happen to others who stay in the field too long, do too much.”

“Seen what happen?”

“Professional fatigue. I believe, in the case of Christians, it’s called religious melancholy. Do you play with the thought of getting out? I know you like to be with this girl Molly.”

“Sometimes I play with the thought. I’m tired of the travel, and once or twice a year I meet someone I’d rather not lie to.”

“Molly wouldn’t be enough for you, you know, any more than poetry was, or your wife. You say there’s no real world, but if there is one, it consists of you and maybe a dozen other operators like you on both sides. You ought to be intoxicated.”

“Maybe I am.”

“No. Your agents are intoxicated. Foley is intoxicated. That’s why you don’t like him-you know how easily you could use him if he was a foreigner.”

“Well, I’m going back out. I have to meet Spendthrift in Léopoldville later this week, and after that I want to see what’s left of the network in Vietnam.”

“Who knows?” Patchen said. “You may find the atmosphere improved in Saigon. The embassy’s traffic is full of bounce and optimism.”

“I’ll bet. Do you think the Foleys have any idea of what’s going to happen to them out there?”

Patchen stood up. When he spoke, he turned the dead side of his face toward Christopher. “They’re a funny bunch,” he said. “They’re bright. They believe in action, and at first that seemed refreshing. But they’re almost totally innocent. They have about as much experience as you and I had when we were recruited, and there’s no way to season them. They got into the White House and opened the safe, and the power they discovered took their breath away. ‘Christ, let’s use it!’ Power really does corrupt. They think they can do anything they like, to anyone in the world, and there’ll be no consequences.”

“But there always are.”

“You know that,” Patchen said. “For those who never smell the corpse, there’s no way of knowing.”

4

On his way out of America, Christopher stopped in New York to have lunch with the managing editor of his magazine. The man was fascinated with the internal politics of the magazine. In his eyes, Christopher was a good writer who delivered six articles a year according to his contract.

Christopher had been offered the contract after he wrote profiles of a dozen foreign statesmen whom no other journalist had been able to interview. It was good cover, but it created a security problem; Christopher could not be revealed to the editors.

The Director called the chairman of the board of the magazine; the two old men had been at Princeton together. The Director explained that Christopher was an intelligence operative in addition to being a writer. It was arranged that Christopher’s salary, twenty thousand dollars a year, would be donated in a discreet way to the favorite charity of the chairman of the board. He either saw no reason to inform the editor of the magazine of Christopher’s connection with the government, or forgot about it. In any case, no one at the magazine had ever mentioned a suspicion of Christopher.

The managing editor drank three martinis before lunch. He told Christopher he had thrown away his profile of Ngo Dinh Diem.

“My eyes glazed over,” he said. “Diem was boring enough when he was alive. Who’s going to read about a dead dinosaur? There’s no American angle.”

He asked Christopher to write five thousand words on the new Pope.

5

Christopher, alone, sat in a sidewalk café in Léopoldville. It had grown too dark to read, and the book he had brought with him lay closed on the table. Its pages, like Christopher’s shirt and the tablecloth, were swollen with moisture.

Three gaunt adolescent boys ran among the tables of the café. Two of them carried armloads of wood, and the third clutched a piece of meat. It appeared to be the ribs of a large animal and it had begun to spoil; Christopher smelled its rancid odor. The boys crouched by a mimosa tree a few yards from the café and started a fire. The flames burst upward, licking the bole of the tree, silhouetting the thin boys, who threw the meat into the fire and danced away from its heat.

The child who had been carrying the meat darted away from his friends and came to Christopher’s table, giggling as he ran. He was a leper. He snatched Christopher’s unfinished bottle of beer from the table and ran away, hugging it against his chest with a fingerless hand. Back at the fire, he and his companions passed the bottle from mouth to mouth.

Christopher paid the impassive waiter and walked away. The unlighted streets were deserted except for an occasional Congolese, asleep in the dirt. By day, the concrete buildings, painted white or rose or pale blue like the Belgian sky, showed tropical sores and lesions. Now they were dark shapes, too geometrical to be natural, but emitting no more light than the forest that lay a few hundred yards away. Christopher walked in the middle of the street, to avoid the doorways. When he looked back, he saw the faint reflection of the fire in the high branches of the tree by the café.

It was too dark to see the river, but he could hear it. A power launch passed, showing no lights, and Christopher heard the canoes rattling at their moorings in its wake. He walked along the bank until he saw the outlines of a river steamer; it had once been white and its blunt stern was clearly visible against the sky. Christopher, leaning against a piling, waited until he saw a tall man go aboard the steamer. Then Christopher climbed the gangplank, crossed the deck, and went down a ladder into the interior of the boat. A candle burned in a stateroom at the end of a narrow gangway, and Christopher walked toward its nervous light. He heard Nsango behind him, and stopped.

“My friend,” Nsango said.

Christopher turned around. The black, wearing the khaki shorts and torn singlet of a workman, embraced him. He took Christopher’s hand in his own dry fingers and led him to the stateroom.

“I’m sorry to make you wait,” Nsango said. “Did you come every night?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “Four times, but I never saw the light.”

Nsango laughed. “I was in the bush. I was waiting, too. But I knew you would come back tonight. I saw you in the café, reading your book.”

“Yes, I saw you across the boulevard.”

“Ah, what eyes!” Nsango spoke rapid French at the back of his throat, with many extra m sounds as if his own language struggled to reveal itself. “Well, what news?”

“The Congolese think you’re in Angola. Someone told the Portuguese you were camping along the frontier, and they told the police.”

“Are they looking for me there?”

“They’re watching the crossing points.”

“Good. I’ll go the other way.” He laughed again.

“How did you explain this journey?”

“I told them in the camp that political organization was needed in some villages I know about. They probably think I have a woman somewhere.”

“What’s going on in Katanga?” Christopher asked.

“It’s very quiet, my friend. I lose five or six men a week- they go back to their villages.”

“Do you tell them to go?”

“Yes, they’ll wait for me there. They don’t like the new foreigners.”

“There are new foreigners?”

“Yes, the Chinese have all gone away. They took their aspirin that made men bulletproof with them. But now we have others-some of them are black men.”

“Stop talking like a native, Nsango. Who are they?”

Nsango guffawed. “They fell from the sky on great white leaves, master. Oh, we were frightened!”

Christopher had seen this man, who had the best political brain in black Africa, trembling in fear because he believed a spirit had entered his body as he slept; he felt it devouring his liver like a maggot. Christopher had brought a juju man from the Ivory Coast and he removed the spirit, sending it into the body of the man who had cursed Nsango. Christopher had given the juju man fifty ounces of gold for his work. He and Nsango had used the sorcerer again to carry out an operation they hoped would result in Nsango’s becoming, in time, the prime minister of his country. They failed, and Nsango had gone back into the forest. Christopher knew he would never come out again, and Nsango, despite his diploma from the Sorbonne and his name that was known throughout the world, still feared enchantment and blamed it for his bad luck. Nsango was not, however, afraid of foreigners.

“They’re Cubans,” he told Christopher. “Three blacks, four whites.” He removed a stained envelope from the pocket of his shorts and handed it over. Inside was a roll of film and a sheet of paper on which the names the Cubans used were written in Nsango’s neat missionary-school hand.

“When did they come?” Christopher asked.

“Maybe a month ago. First there was this one.” Nsango pointed at the sheet of paper. “Manuel. He speaks good French. Then the others a few days afterward.”

“How did they find you?”

“I suppose the Chinese told them.”

“What do they want?”

“A revolution. They talk even more than the Chinese-we have meetings all the time. The men like it, there’s a lot of beer, and they brought some very good guns.”

“How many?”

“Ah, my friend, not so many. Some mortars. Not enough ammunition.”

“Are they issuing the weapons to your men?”

“No, they’re like the Chinese were at first. We must make our own weapons to make our own revolution. Spears and stones-Mao’s teachings. We killed a South African for them- the capitalists have that mercenary camp still outside Elisabeth-ville. We ambushed a jeep, the whites were drunk. One got away-he had a machine pistol, so we didn’t chase him.”

“Are you going back?”

“Yes, I’m the leader. We need the guns. The Cubans won’t stay forever.”

“Nsango, I think you’re taking a chance.”

“It’s better than prison. What do they say about me in the papers?”

“In Léopoldville, nothing. But I see your name written on walls all over town: everyone believes you’re alive. In Brussels, that your movement still is dangerous, and that you are more so.

“What would you do about these Cubans?”

“Let them stay,” Christopher said. “It’s better to have someone you know than to wait for someone you don’t know to show up.”

Nsango picked up the candle and held it next to Christopher’s face so that he could watch his expression as he answered the question Nsango always asked.

“You still think I have no chance?”

“I don’t say that. I can’t help you-you have the wrong allies.”

“But if, after all, I win, you’ll be my friend, and your friends will expect me to remember past favors?”

“That’s what they’ll expect,” Christopher said. “They’re not always realistic.”

“We’ll see. When will you come back?”

“I don’t know. If you want to see me, send a postcard. The one with the elephants if it’s urgent. I’ll use a postcard with a picture of Pope John. I’ll come to Elisabethville on the sixth day after the postmark, ten o’clock at night. I don’t think you should come to Léopoldville again-at least, not to meet me.”

Christopher took a key out of his pocket and gave it to Nsango. “Deposit box 217, Banque de Haute Katanga, Elisabethville,” he said. “In case you need it, there’s a ticket to Algiers, a thousand dollars, and a passport with a visa for Algeria. It’s a Camerounian passport, so don’t go there.”

“What good would I be to the movement, or to you, in Algiers?” Nsango said. “The old soldiers’ home for revolutionaries.”

“What good would you be dead?” Christopher asked.

6

Trevor Hitchcock knocked on the door of Christopher’s hotel room at six in the morning. He was the son of missionaries, and he had spent his childhood in the Congo; he worked in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and drank through the night. His Presbyterian father had taught him to make no concessions to the climate and Hitchcock never went out in the sun without a coat and a tie and a Panama hat.

“Father made more converts than anyone in Kasai province,” Hitchcock once told Christopher. “He thanked God for smiling on the Presbyterians. Then he learned, after about five years, that it was because he sweated like a hog butcher in his black suits and his celluloid collars. The Congolese thought he smelled like a human being-the other missionaries, who wore shorts and took baths, smelled dead to them. That’s what whites are called in the Lingala language-the dead.”

Hitchcock read the cable Christopher had drafted in longhand after his meeting with Nsango. “What’s the film?” he asked.

“As I said in the cable, pictures of the Cubans. Also photographs of some of their documents.”

“Spendthrift took those?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “I gave him a camera in the old days.”

“Spendthrift” was Nsango’s pseudonym; Hitchcock was a careful professional who believed even the Congolese might have microphones planted in hotel rooms.

“I’ll get this off this morning,” Hitchcock said. “The Cubans are news to me. Do you believe it?”

“Well, there are the photographs. And Spendthrift has never lied to us, despite our lack of reciprocity in that department.”

“You really thought we should have backed him all the way, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He was better than any of the alternatives.”

“Wrong tribe. Wrong time.”

“He didn’t take it personally,” Christopher said. “He believes he’s going to be running this country someday, and so do a lot of other people. His relationship with me is political money in the bank.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Hitchcock said. “You recoil in horror from giving any of these people guns-that’s the main reason Spendthrift struck out in ‘61. But if the world gets blown up, the bomb will be made with uranium and cobalt dug out of the Shinkolobwe by some black living in the Bronze Age.”

“It won’t be Spendthrift who drops the bomb.”

“Or gets blown up by it. How were things in Washington?”

“Ecstatic,” Christopher said. “The crisis managers are flying out to Saigon by the hundreds.”

“Terrific. I hope they take along a few of the ones we’ve got here. What time does your plane go?”

“Ten o’clock tonight.”

“Do you want to come out to the house for dinner?” Hitchcock asked. “I’ll send your scoop, manage a crisis or two, and pick you up at six.”

Hitchcock lived on the outskirts of Léopoldville in a large stucco house that still belonged to a Belgian trader. The Belgian fled to Brussels after Lumumba’s troops raped his wife during the mutiny in 1960. Hitchcock’s houseboys, three stocky men who laughed hysterically when he berated them in Lingala, were the same ones who had worked for the Belgian and opened the door to the drunken troops. One of the boys came into the darkened living room with a bottle of gin on a silver tray. He put it down and trotted across the tile floor, leaving the sweaty prints of his bare feet behind him. “Ice, glasses, tonic water, limes!” Hitchcock screamed. “We don’t drink the stuff out of the bottle, Antoine!”

Hitchcock’s wife flinched at the boy’s wild laugh. She was a frail woman with thinning gray hair; as Christopher watched her, she pulled the cloth of her dress away from her body and placed a wadded Kleenex between her breasts. “It’s the constant perspiration, it drives you mad,” she said. Her damp skin had a reddish shine, as though discontent had burned away its outer layers.

Hitchcock drank six glasses of gin and tonic before dinner. The boys served cold soup and a large grilled river fish whose muddy flesh was slightly bloody along the spine. “Do you enjoy uncooked food, Paul?” Theresa Hitchcock asked. “The boys are defeated by the electric stove. We’re all defeated.” She smiled brightly and pushed her limp hair away from her forehead. “You’ll excuse me? I have a headache.” She went up the stairs.

“I’m sending her home,” Hitchcock said. “She can’t cope here-I don’t know who can. My mother went mad as a hatter, you know. The old man told her to pray, but she thought the natives were going to gang her at any moment. Actually, they think white women are repulsive-like fish bellies.”

Hitchcock had escaped from God and the Congo when he was eighteen, on the last freighter to cross the southern Atlantic before the Germans began to torpedo Belgian ships. His parents were buried in Kasai, in the red dirt of their churchyard. Hitchcock had studied German and Russian. “My idea,” he told Christopher, “was to spend my life in cold climates. Whoever would have thought the Congo would become one of the hinges of American foreign policy? I grew up thinking uranium was good for curing cancer.”

In his mind, Hitchcock still lived in cold climates. He sat at the table with the remains of the fish congealing on his plate, and sweat blackening the armpits of his seersucker suit, and talked about Berlin. He had been a famous operative there in the postwar years. Hitchcock liked to deal with Germans-they were always on time and they liked to be trained.

“You get to Zurich, don’t you?” he asked Christopher. “There’s a guy there you ought to know-you can’t forget his name. Dieter Dimpel. I bought him a watch store in 1950-told ‘em it was owed to old Dieter. So he’s out of it. But go see him.”

“I will,” Christopher said. “I use up a lot of watches.”

“Listen, Paul. Dieter is a midget-I mean he’s a real midget. He’s one meter, twenty-five centimeters high. Comes from Munich. Walks like Goring-he’s got a big imaginary body he carries around with him. He used to sweep up in the beer halls. Knew Hitler in the old days, when the Führer would come in in his trench coat and mumble about taking over the world. They wouldn’t let Dieter into the party because he was a freak, right? So Dieter goes to a forger and has a party card made. He gets himself an armband with a swastika on it and goes to all the Nazi rallies. Around 1943, some storm trooper grabs him. The forger had asked Dieter what number he wanted on his card. Dieter said, ‘Oh, make it 555-that’s easy to remember.” Unfortunately, 555 is the number of Adolf Hitler’s party card. The storm trooper was nothing compared to the Gestapo when they got hold of Dieter. Forged credentials! A freak saying he’s a Nazi! Using the Führer’s party number!

“Off old Dieter goes to Dachau. He’s resourceful as hell, he becomes a trusty. He escapes five days before the Americans come. He heads east. The Russians grab him. Dieter is a bit light-headed after two years on the Dachau diet, so he tells the Russians he’s a Nazi. They put him in a camp. Well, of course he walks right through the wire and heads west again.

“I picked him up in Berlin in late ‘46-he’s sweeping up in a beer hall again, wearing tiny lederhosen. Dieter is a bitter little guy. He knows he’s smarter than Hitler, but he’s only four feet tall. He wants revenge against the world. Good agent material.

“At that time we were trying to figure some way to get into the headquarters of a certain occupying power. No way to do it-troops on every door, bars on every window, bells and sirens wired up all over the place. Miller was running the Berlin base then, and he was full of stories of the good old prewar days in the FBI, when they used to sneak into the German ambassador’s bedroom in Washington and come back with samples of his wife’s pubic hair.

“Miller thought he was the world’s champion burglar, but he couldn’t think of a way to crack the GRU. However, / had Dieter. I recruited him by giving a whore a few marks to pretend she couldn’t live without him. I gave him a cyanide pill to carry in a hollow ring-Krauts don’t think you’re serious unless you give ‘em a cyanide pill.

“I had Dieter trained in rope climbing, in judo, I turned him into an acrobat. Dieter was a very strong midget. I put him through a course in clandestine entrance. Safecracking, photography with infrared, the works. After six months, he was the best burglar in Germany. Then, one dark and moonless night, I sent him down the chimney with a camera. Dieter came out a fireplace on the second floor, cracked every safe in the place, photographed everything, put it all back, and came out the chimney again. For three years Dieter went down the chimney once a month and did his work. Never left even a finger print. We sent him all over the place, doing the same. He got more stuff than any agent in the history of Berlin.

“One night, Dieter was shooting some agents’ reports and one of their colonels came in, working late. He turned on the lights, and here was this sooty midget with a camera and an infrared light set up in his office and the safe spilling all over the floor. Dieter whipped out his gun and shot the Russian right between the eyes. He dropped everything but the camera and went up the chimney like a rocket.

“I’m waiting in the next street. Lights go on, sirens go off, soldiers start coming out the windows. Dieter spent twenty-four hours hanging on to his rope inside the chimney-they couldn’t find him, he couldn’t come down. Next night, he sneaked over the roof and got away. Still had the camera, but he forgot his rope and they found it, so that ended that. He wouldn’t have forgotten the rope, but all he could think about was taking a leak. The human element.”

“How’s he like the watch business?” Christopher asked.

“Okay, I guess. It pays for the girls. He takes pictures of them-he’s a white-socks fetishist. Tell him you’re a friend of Major Johnson. Old Dieter Dimpel. If you want to use a recognition code, give him the number of his party card, and Hitler’s -555. He’ll reply with the date of his arrest, June 4, 1943.”

Hitchcock listened happily to Christopher’s laughter. “I mean it,” he said, “look Dieter up. He’s useful.” Telling the story had made him feel better; despite all he had had to drink, he was alert and smiling.

He drove Christopher to the airport. They shook hands in the dark interior of the car. “I’d go in with you for a farewell drink, but Theresa worries at night,” Hitchcock said. “Christ how they change-had you noticed that, Paul?”

7

November is a rainy month on the Congolese coast, and Christopher was soaked when he entered the airport building after struggling through the crowd of porters between the curb and the entrance. In the ticket line an Englishman was having a violent argument with the airlines clerk, a laughing Congolese who told him that he had no record of his reservation.

“You’ll bloody well hear about this!” the Englishman said. “I’m a first-class passenger to London, and the booking was made a month ago.”

The Congolese waved his hand in the Englishman’s face. “Go away, go away-you have no reservation.”

Christopher slid his bag onto the scale and handed the clerk his ticket. The clerk removed the five-hundred-franc note from the ticket, put it in his breast pocket with the rest of his bribes, stamped Christopher’s boarding pass, and tagged his baggage.

“How much delay in the flight?” Christopher asked.

“That airplane will never be late!” said the clerk with another laugh.

Christopher took his passport out of his pocket, marked the page on which his visa was stamped with his boarding pass, and walked toward the passport control. A young Belgian priest carrying a transistor radio stepped in front of him. He tapped Christopher’s green passport with his finger.

“You’re an American?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Your President has been shot.”

“What?”

“President Kennedy-he’s dead. Listen.”

He turned up his radio. A Frenchman’s voice on Radio Léopoldville was reading the news from Dallas. It was nine o’clock in the Congo, two o’clock in Dallas. The news was still a simple bulletin.

Christopher went back to the ticket counter and lifted the clerk’s telephone. He dialed the American embassy. The duty officer did not say hello. He picked up the phone and said, “Yes, it’s true. President Kennedy has been assassinated. The vice-president is safe. The President is dead. We have no details. Please hang up now.” Christopher hung up the phone, nodded to the startled clerk, and walked toward the passport control.

Christopher never forgot anything. The tone of his mother’s voice, the smell of a leper in Addis Ababa, the telephone number of the embassy in Kabul, the looks of a man killed by a car in Berlin as he crossed the street to meet him moved constantly through his mind. Now he thought of nothing. He went to the windows and looked out through the rain at the glistening jets drawn up on the tarmac. He felt a hand on his arm; the priest was beside him again.

“There’s nothing more on the radio,” the priest said. “They’re playing music. Do you go to Brussels?”

“No, Rome.”

“You’re crying. Would you like to pray with me?”

“No, Father. I don’t believe.”

“It’s a frightful thing.”

Christopher thought the priest was talking about his rejection of faith. “For some,” he said.

“For all. President Kennedy was a great man. That death should come like that to him-he was like a young prince.”

“Yes, it’s a great shock.”

“You must have loved your President.”

“I love my country,” Christopher said.

“It’s the same thing, perhaps.”

“Ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have said so, Father. Now I think you’re right.”

It was dawn when Christopher arrived in Rome. He bought the newspapers and read them in the deserted waiting room at Fiumicino while he waited for his call to Paris to go through. Sybille answered the Websters’ phone.

“Tom’s at the embassy,” she said. “They’ve been up all night. We all have.”

“Tell him I’m home if he wants me.”

“I will. God, Paul, how I’m feeling this!”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “The next time you see your friend Peggy, ask her what she thinks of assassination now.”