Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

“What you were saying to my uncles last night-were you serious?” she asked.

“About revealing what they had done? Absolutely.”

“If they have done such a thing-let us have that plainly understood.”

“All right. It isn’t proved that they did.”

“You think the proof would have the effect you described? Would the Americans leave?”

“Yes.”

“It’s logical,” Nicole said. “The Americans would do what you say in the open, before the world. But what would they do secretly?”

Christopher shrugged. “I don’t know. Not much. After all, it was a fair enough exchange.”

Nicole drew in her breath. “You are cold-blooded. Would you speak in this way to an American?”

“I’ve done so. They don’t like it any more than you do, Nicole.”

Nicole touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. “Leave Vietnam,” she said. “You don’t understand us.”

“Don’t I? Tell me about yourself, Nicole. Where were you born? What were your schools? What is your future?”

She drew back her hand. “All that means nothing.” She touched her temples. “You believe one lives in this part of the body, but I live in my three souls and my nine spirits, and there are a thousand vital points in my body. Each one of which touches a time or a date or a number in the lunar calendar, which you cannot even understand. I never speak my own name, nor does anyone who loves me. You haven’t time, if you lived here for another fifty years, to begin to understand.”

Christopher put a forefinger on her brow; she made no movement to avoid it. “If your brain stops,” he said, “then all this wonderful system of mysteries stops, too, doesn’t it?”

“In this body, yes. There are other forms, other forces that go on.”

“You seem determined to convince me that Vietnamese culture is a secret code.”

“And you seem determined not to believe me.”

Christopher called for the bill. While he counted out the money, Nicole sat watching him, her upper lip caught between her thumb and forefinger. Christopher remembered how he had closed Luong’s dead mouth, and again saw the grain of rice between his lips, magic against the Celestial Dog. It took him a moment to realize that Nicole’s long fingernail was pressing into the back of his hand. When he looked up, she removed it, leaving a white half-moon on his sunburnt skin.

In Vietnamese she said, “My name is Dao. I was born in Hanoi. I am twenty-three. All that is worth loving will die around me before I have a child.”

Christopher, giving no sign that he understood her language, folded his napkin into a neat triangle. “We seem to be back where we began,” he said. “I thought we might to beyond gibberish today.”

“You really don’t believe in the importance of anything I’ve told you, do you?”

“Oh, yes, I believe in its importance, and you’ve taught me quite a lot,” Christopher said. “But if there is one certain thing about codes, it’s this-they can be broken. Tell the Truong toe I thank him again for the photograph he gave me last night. Tell him, too, that I have some pictures of my own.”

“I don’t understand that message.”

“The Truong toe will understand. Like me-and like Diem and Nhu-he believes in consequences.”

“Barney ordered me not to leave you,” Pong said. His eyes darted over the crowd in the narrow street outside Yu Lung’s house. There was enough light to see movement, but not enough to distinguish faces. Bicycles drifted by, and an occasional motor scooter sounded its horn, scattering pedestrians and cyclists as it plunged past the parked car.

“If you stay here with the car you’ll draw attention,” Christopher said. “Go somewhere else, and come by again at exactly nine o’clock. I’ll be here.”

A cyclist peered angrily through the windshield and hammered on the hood of the car.

Pong said, “Okay, nine o’clock. If you’re not here, I’ll come inside.”

He drove away through the crowd, touching the horn lightly in a series of Morse dots to clear the way ahead of him. Christopher was annoyed by Pong’s unnecessary noise. Then he realized it made no difference-secrecy was of no further use to him in Saigon.

Yu Lung’s house had a blind front except for a frame of carved wood, painted red, around the door. The lintel was low, and Christopher ducked his head to enter. A servant with a large flashlight showed him down a long hall to the back of the house. They walked past rooms filled with noise-plaintive Chinese music playing on a gramophone, loud voices, the beating of a spoon against a pot in the kitchen. But the hall itself was dead space. It was impossible to guess what sort of people lived behind the closed doors.

After the noise and the pungent smell of the house, Christopher did not expect to find Yu Lung looking as he did. The fortune-teller was a man of forty with a round prosperous belly under a checkered vest and a gold watch chain. He greeted Christopher not in a dim room hung with incense and calligraphy but in a brightly lighted office, sitting at a polished desk with gray-steel file cabinets behind him. There were two telephones and a photograph of his wife and her young children in a gold frame on the desk. Yu Lung rose from his chair with a smile and shook hands with Christopher. The pressure of his hand was firm and quick.

“Yu Lung,” he said. “You’re a friend of-who was it again?”

“Le Thu.” Christopher found himself smiling broadly-Yu Lung had made magic efficient.

Christopher took the torn halves of the five one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and laid them on the desk. The Chinese produced his own portions of the torn bills from a desk drawer and spent a moment fitting them together on the glass top of his desk.

“Is the fee satisfactory?” Christopher asked.

“I’ve drawn the horoscopes for you,” Yu Lung said. He spread six sheets of rice paper over the top of the desk. On each sheet he had drawn a circle; symbols connected by lines lay within the circle. A vertical row of Chinese characters ran down the edge of each page. Yu Lung looked expectantly at Christopher.

“I’m afraid I can’t read these without assistance,” Christopher said.

Yu Lung nodded. “As you no doubt suspected, there is a remarkable conjunction of forces between the four men and the two dates you gave me. The fates are acting quite strongly on one other. Do you wish a classical interpretation, or a Vietnamese reading?”

“Vietnamese, to begin with,” Christopher said.

“I thought you might, so I’ve added the geomantic factors as well. Briefly, three of these men are either dead already or will be on”-he ran his finger down a lunar calendar- “the next conjunction of their forces, which will occur, in Western time, seven years from now on the dates you gave me for the events.”

He pushed aside the charts that he had drawn for Kennedy, Diem, and Nhu on the basis of their birth dates and times.

“This fourth man,” Yu Lung said, tapping the Truong toe’s chart, “is active in the fates of the others. I see no danger for him. You understand, you’ve asked me to work from very limited information.”

“I’m impressed with what you’ve done. How much faith have you in your results?”

“Well, you understand that the basis of horoscopy in our system is that the stars and all the other portents predispose rather than predetermine an individual’s fate. A man’s acts can alter his reading-in other words, he can avoid destruction through wisdom, or cheat himself of good fortune through stupidity. But the forces here are quite clear.”

“And the factors other than horoscopy?”