Charles Mccarry: The Tears Of Autumn

“Let’s have lunch,” he said at last. “Tomorrow, one o’clock at the Taillevent. I know you like the lobster there.”

“Fine,” Christopher said, and hung up. By the time he had climbed the stairs and ordered a beer at the bar, he had overcome the smile Webster’s voice had brought to his lips. Webster was not very good at telephone codes. After seven years, he knew that any name beginning with a C was Christopher’s telephone name. He was able to remember that “Margaret” was the euphemism for the safe house in the rue Bonaparte to which Christopher carried a key. It was the time-and-place formula that confused him. Christopher had spent many hours waiting alone in expensive restaurants like a disconsolate social climber because Webster was never sure whether to add or subtract seven hours from the time stated over the telephone for a meeting. Lunch at the Taillevent at one o’clock meant dinner at Webster’s apartment at eight o’clock.

In other ways, Webster was a skillful professional. When he was still in his twenties, he had saved a kingdom in the Near East by penetrating a revolutionary organization and turning it against itself, so that the terrorists murdered each other instead of their monarch. The king he saved was still his friend. Like all good intelligence officers, Webster knew how to form friendships and use the friends he made. No human action surprised him or touched his emotions.

Webster and Christopher needed to make no allowances for one another. They lived in a world where all personal secrets were known. They had been investigated before they were employed; everything that could be remembered and repeated about them was on file, the truth along with the gossip and the lies. Gossip and lies were valuable: much can be understood about a man by the untruths that are told about him. Once a year, on the anniversary of their employment, they submitted to a lie detector test. The machine measured their breathing, the sweat on their palms, their blood pressure and pulse, and it knew whether they had stolen money from the government, submitted to homosexual advances, been doubled by the opposition, committed adultery. The test was called the “flutter.” They would ask of a new man, “Has he been fluttered?” If the answer was no, the man was told nothing, not even the true name of his case officer.

To Webster, the flutter was the ordeal of brotherhood. He believed that those who went through it were cold in their minds, trained to observe and report but never to judge. They looked for flaws in men and were never surprised to find them: the polygraph had taught them so much about themselves- taught them that guilt can be read on human skin with a meter -that they knew what all men were.

They had no politics. They had no morals, except among themselves. They lied to everyone except their government, even to their children and the women they entered, about their purposes and their work. Yet they cared about nothing but the truth. They would corrupt men, suborn women, steal, remove governments to obtain the truth, cleansed of rationalization and every other modifier. To one another, they spoke only the truth. Their friendships were deeper than marriage. They needed each other’s trust as other men needed love.

Webster recited these things to Christopher when he was far gone in drink. They were true enough. Webster, a phlegmatic man, had tears in his eyes; he had lost a young American in Accra. The boy had been shot by members of the Ghanaian service, who thought murder was the way in which secret agents dealt with their enemies. “What that kid really liked about this life is what we all like,” Christopher said. “It’s like living in a book for boys.” Webster was outraged; he leaped at Christopher. “But he died! How many have you seen die? I can name them for you.” Christopher gave his old friend another drink. “No need; I remember,” he said. “But, Tom, be honest. If it had been you those black amateurs shot, what would have been your last thought?” Webster shook his head to clear the whiskey from his voice: “I’d laugh. It would be such a goddamn joke of a death.” Christopher lifted his glass. “Absent friends,” he said.

Webster was short and muscular. He had once held the shot-put record at Yale. He wore the clothes he had had in college, fifteen years before, and shoes he had inherited from his father that were a half size too small for him. Though he was homely and had no luck with women, he was amused by Christopher’s good looks and the way girls came to him. “I’m the portrait you keep in your attic,” he told Christopher. “Each time you sin, I get another wart.”

Christopher, finishing his beer, remembered this and laughed aloud as in his mind he saw Webster as clearly as in life. The bartender took away his glass and didn’t ask if he wanted another drink.

In the safe house, an apartment on the sixth floor of an old building behind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Christopher ate the food that had been left in the refrigerator for him, took a shower, and sat down at a portable typewriter. He worked steadily on his report until he heard the morning traffic moving on the quais along the Seine. He wrote nothing about Luong, except to include the receipt for the money he had thrown into the river. He burned his notes and the typewriter ribbon and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Then, placing the typed report inside the pillowcase, he went to bed and slept for twelve hours. He dreamed that his wife, standing with the light behind her in a room in Madrid where he had slept with another girl, told him that she had given birth; even asleep, his mind knew that he had no child, and he ended the dream.

Tom Webster’s apartment in the avenue Hoche had once belonged to a member of the Bonapartean nobility. Its salon preserved the taste of the marquis and his descendants. Caryatids with broken noses stood at the corners of the ceiling; rosy women picnicked on the grassy banks of a painted brook that flowed along the wainscoting.

“Tom makes fun of the decor,” said Sybille, his wife. “But really, in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s très luxe.”

“There’s no need for all that before the other guests come,” Webster said. “Paul knows that the chief decoration in all our houses is my scrotum, which you nailed to the wall years and years ago, Sybille.”

“Does Paul know that?” Sybille asked. “But then he’s trained to notice everything, isn’t he? Paul, Tom is always so glad to see you. He tells me in bed that you’re absolutely the best in the whole company. In bed -what is the significance of that, do you suppose?”

Sybille Webster was a quick woman who liked to pretend that she was married to a slow man. Her fine face was more beautiful in photographs than in life. There were pictures of her in every room, and these were an embarrassment to her; she cleared away the frames when she invited strangers into the house. Webster married her thinking that he would want sex with no one else for the rest of his life, and he still gazed through his glasses at his wife as if she were, at all times, whirling about the room in a ballet costume. It was he who had taken the photographs.

Christopher took the drink Sybille had made for him and kissed her on the cheek. He handed his report to Webster. “Read the first two contact reports, if you have a minute,” he said. “You may want to send something tonight.”

“Why are you so good at the work, Paul?” asked Sybille. “Do you know?”

“People trust him,” Webster said.

“Do they? Wouldn’t you think that word would get around?”

“Oh, I think it has, Sybille,” Christopher said. “You notice that Tom never leaves us alone.”

“He’s been that way ever since he started to flag,” Sybille said. “That was, oh, the fourth day of our honeymoon. He took me to New York-the Astor Hotel. I was just a simple virgin from Tidewater Virginia. So many memories. Tom used to go to the Astor when he was a soldier and meet interesting people in the bar.”