Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

“The worst thing you can do is dramatize,” Christopher said. “I have to go away at least twice in the next few days and I can’t leave you alone. You’ll be all right with Tom and Sybille. They’re used to this kind of situation. They know what to do.”

“And what does one do?”

“Routine precautions,” Christopher said. “A doctor working in a cholera epidemic takes the necessary injections, boils his drinking water, burns his clothes. It’s the same idea-the play-acting, the secrecy, and the codes, and the loud music so that you can talk in a room that may be bugged-all that is the way agents immunize themselves. They may die anyway, but if they take the proper precautions, the chances are against it.”

“All right,” Molly said. “But all this business of solving the crime of the century annoys me so. It’s an interruption. It’s almost Christmas, Paul. I thought we’d be together. I build up these scenes for the two of us in my imagination, and then they don’t play.”

“I promise you I’ll be in Zermatt on New Year’s Eve. It’s a much better holiday than Christmas.”

Molly closed her eyes and put her fingertips on the lids. “I have to be so passive-all our life together I’ve waited for you to come back, waited for you to feel love, waited for you to speak,” she said. “Now I have to wait for you to prevent my dying, and the odd thing is, I’m less concerned about being murdered than about being alone for a week.”

“It’ll be over very soon.”

“I know it will,” Molly said. “Help me to get this stuff off the bed. Before I go I’d like to hold the clean part of you between my legs once more.”

Webster went ahead of them in another car the next morning. They met him on the road to the airport by the ruins of Ostia Antica. Webster turned his back while they kissed, and watched the road behind them. There was still no sign of danger.

Christopher wondered what the Truong toe was waiting for.

Christopher was alone, and that was his advantage. He controlled the rhythm of the operation. Driving back to Rome along the Ostia road, he calculated that he had eight days of safe time left. He thought it would be enough. It is almost impossible for a national police force to keep track of a single agent who continues to move, if the agent takes elementary precautions. For Christopher’s opposition, who dared not go outside their own small circle for help, it was hopeless. They could not know where he was going or what he was doing. Their only chance was to catch Christopher in the open and kill him. He didn’t think they would be able to do that.

He parked his car near the railroad station in a no-parking zone. After he had checked his baggage, he called the police and complained that the car was blocking traffic. By the time he made two more phone calls, the police wrecker arrived and towed his car away. He knew it would be under twenty-four-hour guard in the impoundment lot outside the walls of the city. It was the last place the Truong toe’s men would look for it.

He phoned the Hertz rental agency in Milan and reserved a car for pickup in the late afternoon. At the telegraph office in the railroad station he sent a money order to a man in Ajaccio with a terse message that reminded him how little his methods differed from Klimenko’s; the thought caused him to smile as he handed in the cable form and the money, and the clerk gave him a puzzled look: it was odd that a man, sending news of a brother’s death in Christmas week, should look so cheerful.

Finally, Christopher checked the train schedule for Milan again and reserved a first-class seat on the 9:40 express. It was still only 7:30 when he walked out of the terminal and took a cab to the Vatican.

Alvaro Urpi had never taken holy orders, but he had come to resemble a monk. He waited for Christopher in a corner of the Vatican library, his broad face still shining with the effect of his morning prayers. Urpi was the son of a Portuguese soldier and a Chinese woman, and his dark features were such a combination of Iberian and Cantonese peasantry that he might have passed in either country as a native. He was twelve, and already sexually corrupted, when the priests took him off the streets of Macao and taught him to read and write. Before he was wenty, the Dominicans discovered his talent for scholarship, and he never for the next forty years lived outside the Church, or wanted to.

Urpi spoke and wrote every known dialect of Chinese. He had all but forgotten Portuguese, however, and when Christopher had brought him a letter from a relative in Macao, Urpi had had to construe it into Latin before he could understand it. Urpi’s relative had wanted him to find a place in a nunnery for one of his nieces. The girl had never taken the veil; she went to live with a policeman. But Urpi had rediscovered his family through Christopher.

“Paul,” he said, “have you brought me some photographs from Macao? How are they out there?”

“Not this time, Alvaro. I’ve come to ask a favor.”

“Ah.”

Urpi moved a stack of books from his desk to the floor, so that he would be able to see Christopher when they sat down. Urpi worked at a carved table, surrounded by battlements of volumes with ideograms stamped on their spines. A great pile of Chinese manuscript, Urpi’s lifework, stood in the middle of the desk.

Christopher handed him the dozen strips of paper he had clipped from the borders of Yu Lung’s horoscopes.

Urpi examined the calligraphy through a magnifying glass. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses pushed up on his forehead, but Christopher had never seen him use them. Urpi was very near-sighted. When he read, he used the magnifying glass and put his face close to the print, giving soft grunts of frustration.

Urpi touched Yu Lung’s ideograms with his blunt farmer’s fingers. “Lovely work,” he said. “A very fine brush.”

“Can you translate these for me, Alvaro?”

“Yes, yes,” Urpi said, “but it will take some time. These are complex thoughts, very poetically expressed. This man writes a very old Chinese, and he uses Taoist imagery. How odd. What is he?”

“A horoscoper.”

Urpi looked up, shocked at the word. “Oh, my, Paul.”

“Don’t you want to do it?”

“But of course. I didn’t know you had these superstitions.”

“I haven’t. I just want to know what the manuscript says. In great detail.”

“It will be difficult to render the spirit, you know. This is a rare idiom. May I have a little time?”

“Three days?”

Urpi looked at the long strips of paper again. “All right. But in the end, it may mean nothing to you. You’d have to know what and whom he was writing about and make deductions, even after it was translated. What language do you want it in?”

“Whatever suits you best, Alvaro.”

“Latin is easiest for me-that’s what I’m used to, and I have the Latin equivalents for Chinese words already in my mind.”

“Latin will be fine.”

“Good. The day after Christmas, then. I’ll be here from six in the morning, as always. When do you go to Macao again?”

“Not soon, Alvaro. What do you hear from the family?”

“No Christmas message. I thought you might be bringing it to me. It takes me back, you know-I have grand-nephews now who are as old as I was when th.3 Franciscans took me in. I’m sure they’re as bad as I was-thieves, liars, full of lust. Ah, well, God is waiting for them.”

“I expect so, Alvaro. Please guard those papers well. I’ll want them back.”

“They’re safe here,” Urpi said, indicating the thick walls and the slow figures in black that moved among the books. He waved a hand and put his head down among his books and papers, the magnifying glass against his eye.