The Tears of Autumn

by Charles McCarry

  “Christmas.”

  Glavanis nodded rapidly and uttered a short, sharp laugh.

  While Glavanis and Eycken slept, Christopher tested the loudspeaker in the interrogation room and prepared the other things that would be needed there.

  Then he spent an hour in the darkroom. Dieter Dimpel’s photographs of the tortora file at Dolder und Co. were in per feet focus. Christopher ran the negatives through the enlarger, but made no prints. The bank records verified Klimenko’s story in every detail. There was one bit of information that Klimenko had omitted. It was an important fact, and Christopher concluded that Klimenko could not have known about it. If word of it ever got back to Moscow, big boils would burst all over the KGB.

  At five in the morning, Christopher woke Eycken and Glavanis and cooked breakfast for them. He drove them to the airport, and before Glavanis got out of the car he kissed Christopher on the cheek in the Greek style. “Happy Christmas,” he said.

  Christopher drove back to the villa on country roads that wound through muddy winter fields, put the car in the garage, and fell into a deep sleep in a locked room.

  2

  When he woke it was dark again. Although the furnace was operating, the huge marble living room was cold, and he started a fire of olive wood in the grate and sat before it, reading the short stories of Somerset Maugham. He was most of the way through the thick Penguin paperback when headlights flashed across the ceiling and he heard tires turning on the gravel drive. The car, a dusty blue Fiat 2300 with a Naples number, blinked its lights and continued to the back of the villa. Christopher heard the car doors slam and the hollow double ring of the trapdoor being opened and closed.

  Glavanis and Eycken were hungry. They still wore the ill-fitting peasant corduroys that Christopher had given them. Eycken drank three glasses of neat gin, one after the other, and pushed the bottle across the table.

  “It’s cold,” Glavanis said. “What I want is brandy.”

  Eycken went into the sitting room and came back with a new bottle of Martell. Glavanis drank from the bottle.

  When there was food before him, Glavanis said, “It was easy, Paul.”

  Glavanis and Eycken had hidden the car in the woods and waited until Frankie Pigeon came out at sunset for his evening walk across the fields. Two bodyguards, young men in American suits, walked beside him. Glavanis and Eycken shadowed Pigeon and his men, keeping inside the edge of the woods, until they were well out of sight of the house.

  “We just stepped out and walked right up to them, all smiles,” Glavanis said.

  Pigeon smiled at them. Glavanis and Eycken, dark and grinning, wearing work-stained clothes, were the sort of men Pigeon liked to talk to. When one of the bodyguards put a hand on the gun in his pocket, Pigeon gave him a playful backhanded slap on the arm. Pigeon wished Glavanis and Eycken Merry Christmas. In his blurred Italian, he called out a question: What did the sky say? Was it going to rain on Christmas?

  “We kept on smiling and shrugging,” Glavanis said, “and on the count of ten—Jan and I worked out the drill beforehand —we shot the bodyguards in the face with your .22 birdshot. There was practically no noise.”

  Eycken reached into his mouth, extracted a piece of steak gristle, and placed it on the edge of his plate. “I apologize to you,” he said to Christopher. “That’s a very good weapon. They just fell over backward and went out like a light. It draws a hell of a lot of blood. They must have thought they were dead.”

  “One shot is enough, usually,” Christopher said.

  “We gave them six rounds apiece,” Glavanis said. “They’ll be paying for girls from now on.”

  “Don’t worry,” Eycken said, “they’ll live.”

  “What about the man?” Christopher asked. He’d given them no name for Pigeon.

  “He tried to run,” Glavanis said. “I had to put some bird-shot in his leg, but he’s all right. I treated the wound.”

  “He saw your faces?”

  Glavanis waved away the question. “For a few seconds. He won’t remember. I’ve never seen a man so astonished. When I gave him the pills I held a gun against his head. He was shaking so badly one of the capsules fell out of his mouth. When I picked it up it was dry, Paul—he couldn’t make saliva.”

  “Is he blindfolded now?”

  “No, but he’s wearing the handcuffs. There was nobody behind us on the autostrada. No one saw the car. The only problem is the police, and it’s a holiday.”

  “They won’t call the police,” Christopher said. “You may as well get some sleep. You can start in on him in twelve hours. That ought to be enough.”

  Christopher went downstairs and checked the locks on the steel door. Through the peephole he could hear Frankie Pigeon breathing, heavily and quickly, and the shuffle of his bare feet over the stone floor. Christopher had transferred some electronic music from a record to a tape, playing the record over until the tape contained twelve hours of harsh, dissonant noise. He switched on the tape recorder, which was attached to the loudspeakers inside the interrogation room, and turned the volume to the maximum. The music was so loud that it set up vibrations in the steel door. Before he went to bed, he turned on all the alarm systems.

  Christopher was drinking coffee the following afternoon when Glavanis and Eycken came downstairs. They had coffee with cognac in it, and Glavanis put two large steaks under the broiler.

  Christopher said, “How much money did the man have on him?”

  Glavanis shrugged. “None. The bodyguards had about two thousand in dollars, plus maybe two hundred thousand lire.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “What about our pay?” Eycken asked.

  “That, too.”

  “What do you want him to spill?” Glavanis asked.

  “I’ll ask the final questions when you think he’s ready. Just work on him.”

  “We have to ask him something,” Glavanis said. “Otherwise one can’t make the psychological progression—there’s no reason to put on more pressure if he isn’t asked a question he refuses to answer. It’s not logical. There’s no focus of fear.”

  “Keep asking about a million dollars. Tell him you know he received it. Just keep hammering on that.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, for now. Talk to him through the loudspeakers—I’ve rigged a microphone. There’s a light for his eyes if you want it.”

  “What about the water?”

  Christopher hesitated. “If you need it, but be careful. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”

  Eycken sipped his coffee, making a windy noise with his lips. “I have a lot of faith in water,” he said.

  Glavanis washed the dishes before they went downstairs. They wore woolen ski masks that concealed their faces and muffled their voices. Eycken’s black beard curled from the bottom of his mask.

  They worked for almost three hours. No sound of any kind filtered into the upstairs. Christopher watched a Clark Gable movie, dubbed in Italian, on television. Finally he heard the steel door scrape over the stone floor of the cellar, and Glavanis’s light footsteps on the stairs.

  Glavanis came into the sitting room with his mask still on. “He’s ready,” he said. “Jan is with him. He’s a mess, Paul—he can’t control himself.”

  Glavanis pinched his nostrils shut through the mask, laughed when this reminded him that he still had it on, and stripped it off his head. He smoothed his short black hair with both hands.

  “He’s primitive, that man,” Glavanis said. “At first he kept screaming that he was going to kill us. Jan kept pouring water down his throat through the tube. In the end, he went to pieces in a bad way, he kept on saying ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was very strange—we gave him no pain, just the water.”

  “Is he coherent?”

  “More or less. He’s afraid Jan will drown him again. The water is very effective.”

  “All right, let him rest for a few minutes. Turn off the lights and lock the door. I’ll be right down.”
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  Christopher went upstairs and put on an Italian suit, with the ribbon of a decoration in the lapel. With a gray wig and mustache and rimless spectacles Christopher looked different enough that Glavanis reached for his pocket when he saw him coming down the stairs. Christopher was carrying a small leather case, the kind used by doctors to transport hypodermics. He had draped a heavy dressing gown over one arm. Before he went into the cellar he removed his wristwatch and put it in his pocket; there were thousands like it, but he did not want Pigeon to remember it.

  3

  With the door closed and the lights reflecting from its polished white walls, the interrogation room looked like the inside of a dry skull. Frankie Pigeon, naked, was tied by his wrists to a ring in the wall. Long yellow stains ran down the inside of his legs. He trembled uncontrollably. The floor was slick with the water he had regurgitated.

  When Pigeon saw the door open, he pressed his knees together and turned his lower body to one side in a convulsive movement, to protect his genitals. He looked at Christopher, then closed his eyes tightly. His limp gray hair had fallen over his face. Pigeon’s chalky body had been powerful in youth; now it sagged, and his round stomach heaved in and out as he worked to control his breathing.

  Christopher put his briefcase on the table. “Buonasera, Don Franco,” he said.

  Pigeon did not open his eyes. Christopher turned off the overhead lights. Now only the table lamp, fitted with a brilliant photographic bulb, was burning. Christopher stood behind the lamp in the shadows. He removed a large hypodermic syringe from the leather case, and holding his hands in the light, filled it from an ampule of yellow liquid. He laid the syringe on a white towel. Then he focused the lamp on Pigeon’s face. His eyes were open, and he stared wildly at the syringe.

  “This is a very unhealthy place, Don Franco,” Christopher said, continuing to speak Italian.

  Frankie Pigeon tried to speak and failed; he closed his eyes, concentrated, and tried again. “You get nothing from me,” he said in English.

  “We have time,” Christopher said. “You must be very cold.”

  He put a chair in the center of the room, in front of the table, and untied Pigeon’s hands. Pigeon fell to the floor, shuddering. Christopher lifted him and helped him into the bathrobe. “Please sit down,” he said. He went back to the table and adjusted the light so that it shone on Pigeon’s haggard features, but did not altogether blind him. Pigeon sat with one flaccid leg wrapped around the other; his body shook and he wedged his hands between his crossed legs.

  “I want you to understand your situation,” Christopher said. “It’s possible for you to remain in this room indefinitely. Conditions will not change, except to get worse. No one will find you.”

  Pigeon had stopped trying to control his shivering. “They’ll find me,” he said, “and when they do, you bastard. . . .”

  “No. You can forget about being rescued. It’s not realistic. Your men have no chance. You saw what happened in Calabria, within earshot of your house.”

  Pigeon tried to speak again. It was difficult for him—his mouth opened and no voice came out. When finally he was able to utter sound, it was a high thin shriek; a beaded string of phlegm leaped out of his throat and fell through the beam of light.

  “Who?” he screamed.

  Christopher didn’t answer. He waited until Pigeon had calmed a little before he touched the hypodermic with the tip of a finger. As he spoke to Pigeon, he tapped the glass barrel of the syringe with his fingernail.

  “This hypodermic is filled with the live bacteria of Hansen’s disease,” Christopher said. “I wonder what you know about Hansen’s disease.”

  Frankie Pigeon’s eyes were fixed on the syringe and on Christopher’s rhythmically tapping finger.

  “Hansen’s disease is caused by the Mycobacterium leprae,” Christopher said, “which is why it’s more usually called leprosy. It’s a peculiar disease. The incubation period varies greatly Sometimes the disease develops in a year or two after infection, but sometimes fifteen or even twenty years can pass before any symptoms appear. All that time, the germ works inside the body. It takes various forms. The neural form may be the worst —lesions develop on the central nervous system. It causes madness, loss of sexual potency, loss of bowel control, and so on. It can paralyze the lungs or eat them away. Other forms cause the fingers, the nose, the toes—even whole legs and arms—to rot. Parts of the victim’s body just fall off. Lepers have a strong, disagreeable odor. There is no cure once the disease establishes itself.”

  Pigeon pushed back his chair, the legs moving silently over the wet floor. He stood up, crouching with one hand on the back of the chair to keep himself from falling.

  “Get away from me,” he cried.

  Christopher covered the syringe with a corner of the towel. “I want some information,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your organization. There’s no question of your betraying your own people—I’ve no interest in them or their activities.”

  Now that the syringe was out of sight, Pigeon was less agitated. But when he spoke, he stammered and his voice broke. He was not used to being powerless. “Those guys in the masks,” he said. “They don’t even know who I am.”

  “No, they don’t. Here, Mr. Pigeon, you’re nobody.”

  “They took fucking pictures of me!”

  “Yes, those were their orders. We’ll keep the photographs. We may want to mail them to the United States, to certain of your friends.”

  “Do that, and they’ll come after you.”

  “Will they? I thought they’d be more likely to ask you if you talked, and what you talked about.”

  “I want those pictures,” Pigeon said. “I’m not having any goddamn pictures of me with no clothes on and. . . .” He saw his fouled legs and turned his head aside, biting his lip like a shamed child.

  “Let me tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “In 1956 you received a retainer of one hundred thousand dollars from a short bald man with a foreign accent who told you his name was Blanchard. You didn’t hear from Blanchard again until the last week in November of this year. You then received a cable from Naples stating that your Uncle Giuseppe had died. Following the plan Blanchard had given you seven years before, you went to an apartment on Cedar Street in Chicago, and received instructions for a job. You carried out the job. On November 25, two of your men, Anthony Rugged and Ronald Prince, went to the bank of Dolder und Co. in Zurich, and collected a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. They identified themselves with the code name tortora, which, as you know, means ‘pigeon’ in English.”

  “You know so much, tell me what the job was,” Pigeon said.

  Christopher picked up the hypodermic and depressed the plunger, so that a thin stream of the yellow serum squirted out of the needle and through the light. “That’s what you’re going to tell me,” he said.

  “You can kill me!”

  “No. I give you my word I won’t do that. Not with a gun or a knife, or anything quick.”

  The trembling of Pigeon’s body intensified. He stared into the light, then turned his whole body away from its glare. He swallowed noisily. When at last he was able to speak, he did so in a rapid soprano voice, like a castrato.

  Christopher had to ask him only two or three questions. When Pigeon was done, Christopher left the room, taking the hypodermic with him, and the spool of tape on which he had recorded Pigeon’s hysterical spillage of what he had done to earn Klimenko’s money.

  Upstairs, Christopher typed out a summary of Pigeon’s statement on a single sheet of foolscap. When he was finished, he removed the ribbon from the typewriter and put the spools in his pocket; on his way back to the interrogation room, he dropped the ribbon into the red coals of the furnace and watched it burn.

  Frankie Pigeon sat where Christopher had left him, his bloodless legs intertwined, his hands gripping the seat of the folding chair. Christopher put the sheet of foolscap on the table and told Pigeon to read it. He ran his
empty eyes over the paper.

  “Sign it, and give me your right hand,” Christopher said. He inked each of Pigeon’s limp fingers and rolled them over the paper, so that he had a full set of prints to authenticate the signature that ran drunkenly down the page.

  He left Pigeon staring at his own hand, blackened by the ink. He still wore a large diamond on his small finger.

  4

  In the kitchen Glavanis and Eycken were playing piquet with fierce concentration. When they finished the hand, Christopher gave them their pay.

  “Give the man this injection,” Christopher said, handing Glavanis the hypodermic. “He’ll be terrified, so you’ll have to subdue him.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’ll knock him out for eight hours or so, it’s harmless. He thinks it’s leprosy germs. Dress him, and blindfold and gag him. Drive north on the Via Flaminia and drop him in a field, away from the main roads, at least three hundred kilometers from Rome. Then turn in the car at Auto Maggiore in Milan and leave the country.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Glavanis said. “He did see our faces.”

  “He won’t want to see them again. He has no idea where he is now, or where to look for you.”

  “All the same, Paul—if you have what you want.. . .”

  “There’s an operational reason why he must stay alive.”

  Glavanis rested his brown eyes, which were as steady and as liquid as those of a young bride, on Christopher for a moment, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You always have a reason to let them live,” he said. “One day you’ll wish you hadn’t been so merciful.”

  Christopher shook hands with both men. He stared at Eycken’s thumbless hands, and looked questioningly at Glavanis.

  “It’s all right,” Glavanis said. “Eycken wore rubber gloves all the time we were downstairs.”

  As soon as he heard the car go down the drive, Christopher put the villa in order. Glavanis and Eycken had left nothing behind but fingerprints; he removed those with furniture polish and a cloth. He photographed Pigeon’s confession and developed the film.