Charles Mccarry: The Tears Of Autumn

“They’ll kill him,” Christopher said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She has no navel. Look again.”

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

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

The waiter went away with the signed chit.

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

“You mean let Nhu have him.”

“Nhu may not live forever,” said Wolkowicz.

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

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

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

Desire is not a thing that stops with death,

but joins the corpse and fetus breath to breath…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tom? Calisher here.”

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

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

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

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