The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  “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 alo
ng 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.”