Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

“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.