Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

Wolkowicz had given Christopher a car and a driver. “It’ll save us both trouble,” Wolkowicz said. “You don’t seem to care who knows where you go, and I can’t spare three men to sur-veille you until you get on the plane tonight.”

“Who’s the driver?”

“Pong’s his name. He’s a Thai, so he’s disinterested. He’ll take you where you want to go and wait outside-but don’t go off and leave him. I’m responsible to the cops until you get out of the country.”

The car was an air-conditioned Chevrolet with a two-way radio and local license tags. Pong was flicking dust from the waxed hood with a feather duster when Christopher emerged from Luong’s house. Under the tail of his long silk shirt, Pong wore a heavy revolver. One of Wolkowicz’s Swedish submachine guns was clipped under the dashboard, with three extra magazines stowed in polyethylene pouches tacked to the door. “Pong’s got a reputation around town,” Wolkowicz had said. “These people fear the Thais, and they couldn’t be more careful of old Pong if we painted shark’s teeth and a crazy eyeball on him, like a surplus B-26.”

Pong put his feather whisk in the trunk of the car and sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel until Christopher told him where to go. Then he moved off, turning the car into traffic as a good dancer would swing a woman onto a ballroom floor. He was a competent man.

All during the morning, while he was looking at Luong in his coffin and talking to Phuoc, Christopher had controlled the impulse to touch the photograph the Truong toe had given him. Now he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out the picture of Molly. He looked at his watch; he could not be in Rome in less than thirty-six hours. It was useless to send a telegram. Molly wasn’t trained, she wouldn’t know how to hide, she would think the cable was a joke. Christopher was not used to feeling emotion; he was as surprised by his fear for Molly as he had been by his love for her.

Pong maneuvered the clumsy car through traffic on the quais along the Ben Nghe Canal. Sampans lay in the foul water, their decks swarming with boatmen whose joints bulged on their thin bodies like knurs on diseased trees.

“Driving this car is like being in America,” Pong said, “so cool and quiet-I don’t like to get out.”

Christopher pressed the electric window control. The stench and noise of the canal and the heat of noon thrust through the open window like a beggar’s hand. Pong made a disgusted sound in his throat and stared at Christopher in the rear-view mirror. He turned north, toward the center of Cholon.

Yu Lung’s house was not far from the place where Christopher’s Citroen had exploded. The wreck had been hauled away, but broken glass still glittered on the pavement and the flames had left a long smudge across the face of a building. A soup vendor stood with his car where the Citroen had been, tapping on a block of wood with two sticks to attract customers.

They drove through the neighborhood twice before they found the house. Once, emerging from a sea of tin-roofed hovels, they found themselves across the city boundary, trapped on a narrow road through fields of paddy. Pong stepped on the accelerator and, reaching through the steering wheel, worked the action of the submachine gun to put a round in the chamber. He found a place to turn around by a group of huts; Pong pulled the wheel all the way over and skidded the tires in an arc through the dust. Christopher watched a young boy, astride a buffalo in a water hole, disappear in the cloud of dirt thrown upward by the wheels of the Chevrolet, and then come out the other side, not having moved while the slow wind moved the dust over him and the buffalo.

“Stop in the shade,” Christopher said, when they had passed Yu Lung’s house for the second time. He wrote six dates, each followed by a time of day, on a page of his notebook. Then he tore five hundred-dollar bills in half, put five halves in an envelope with the notebook page, and placed the other torn halves in his wallet.

“Pong, walk back so they don’t see the car,” he said, “and give this to whoever answers the door. Make an appointment for me to see Yu Lung after dark tonight-but not after nine o’clock. Tell him I want horoscopes for the men born under the first four dates and times-he’ll have to transpose the dates to the lunar calendar. I want to trace the connection between the birth dates and the last two dates, which are days and times when certain events took place. Have you got all that?”

Pong scowled and repeated Christopher’s instructions. “Who do I tell him is coming?” he asked. “He may not want to see an American.”

“Tell him I’m a friend of Lê Thu,” Christopher said. Pong tapped the submachine gun to call Christopher’s attention to it and stepped into the street. Pong rocked from side to side as he walked, as if the taut muscles of his squat body were disputing the signals from his brain.

When he came back, he nodded at Christopher. “Yu Lung will have the stuff for you at eight o’clock,” he said.

“Let’s have some lunch, then,” Christopher said.

“Barney told me not to leave the car.”

“Have you anything with you?”

“Sandwiches,” Pong said, holding up a packet. “I made them at Barney’s while you were telephoning the young lady.”

“You’re a good operator, Pong. Did you report that to Wolkowicz?”

“Yes, on the radio while I waited for you at the dead man’s house. That’s when he told me not to leave the car.”

Nicole was waiting at the table on the roof of the Majestic, a Coca-Cola before her and the city spread out beyond her soft profile. She wore a different French frock; her hair was bound with a broad white ribbon that passed over the top of her head. Christopher sat down with his back to the view, so that he could watch the door and the room.

“I’m a little surprised you came,” he said.

“You came last night when I invited you.”

“Yes. I hope you have a quieter journey home than I had.”

“You seem well. There’s a cut on your cheek.”

Christopher spoke to the waiter, who poured cassis in the bottom of a glass and filled it with white wine.

“You shouldn’t drink wine at midday in this climate,” Nicole said. “It’s very bad for the liver.” Her eyes looked beyond him as she watched ships move in the river.

“Well,” Christopher said, “have you any compliments or messages for me from the Truong toe?”

Nicole smiled, a sudden sly glint of teeth and eyes. “He doesn’t confide-I listen at doors. I listened last night, in Cho-lon. You took their breath away, you know.”

“Did I? Then they have very good self-control.”

“They don’t know how to deal with you. At first they thought you were insane.”

“And now?”

Nicole traced a pattern on the tablecloth with her fingernail, then looked up quickly into Christopher’s eyes. “They think you’re in a terrific hurry. That upsets them more than what you say you know, or suspect. They think you want to lay this theory out before the world as truth. They know you’re a journalist.”

“I’ve never concealed it.”

“They know what else you are. You conceal that.”

“Then I’m concealing it still. I’m only a journalist, Nicole. There’s no one behind what I’m doing.”

Nicole shuddered with impatience. “You suppose they don’t know where you slept last night, or whose car you have today? Come, Paul-really.”

“My embassy thought, for some reason, that I needed protection. I was glad to have it.”

Nicole looked at him again and laughed shrilly, almost in the tones of Phuoc’s laughter. The waiter brought them fish, poured more wine, and went away. Nicole ate deftly, saying nothing until she had cleared her plate. Her eyes moved busily over the landscape behind Christopher’s shoulder; the sun filtering through the green awning changed the hue of her skin as she turned into the light or away from it.