Charles Mccarry: The Tears Of Autumn

“I believe it,” Molly said.

Cathy had not been content to let their marriage die. She set out to kill it. Christopher realized soon after he met her that he had never been so aroused by a female; his desire for her showed him a part of his nature he had not known to exist; he was seized by a biological force that had nothing to do with the mind, and he was driven to have her as, he supposed, a father would be seized by the instinct to kill the man who attacked his child. Cathy was a lovely girl with elongated gray eyes like a cat’s, perfect teeth, a straight nose, a lithe, frank body. She had been sent to college, and then to Europe to study languages and art, but she did nothing. She had superstitions, but no ideas; she had learned to play the piano and talk and wear clothes. She was beautiful and wanted to be nothing else. “What do you want?” Christopher asked her as they walked along a beach in Spain. “Not what other girls want-I’m not domestic. No children, no career. I want, Paul, a perfect union with a man.”

Cathy believed that she was different from all other human beings. Christopher was the first man in whom she had confided; she thought he was more like her in mind and soul than anyone else could be. When at last they went to bed, she was rapturous. But her passion was all she had. She had no skill as a lover and could not learn.

After a time she sensed that this was the trouble. Cathy wanted to satisfy Christopher. He wanted to reassure her. They made love constantly, in bed, in the car. She would meet him at the airport naked under a raincoat, and remove the coat as they drove home, pulling the wheel so that he would turn into the ruins at Ostia Antica, where they would lie behind the broken stones of an old wall, shuddering on the cold earth in a rainfall. Because she was an American and his wife, he told her about his work-the nature of his profession, not its details. She thought that he kept more from her than official secrets-that he could not forget some other woman whose name he wouldn’t reveal. She begged him to write about her. “You won’t give me what you are,” she said. “That’s all I want.”

Christopher loved to look at her. He bought her jewels and clothes and read to her. After a time, they lived in public as much as possible. They went to bullfights in Madrid, to the theater in London, they had restaurants they always went to and favorite drinks. Cathy loved to eat wild boar at Da Mario in the Via della Vite, she liked to sit up late on the sidewalk at Doney’s, drinking Negronis.

When Christopher was away, she would ride through Rome on summer nights in his convertible with the top down. Finally, while he was in Africa, she met an Italian actor. After Christopher came back, she kept up the affair. She found other lovers. She went back to the actor. She would come home to Christopher, still wet, and want to make love. Christopher knew the Italian-he took Dexedrine and it made him violent. He was a Maoist who hated America; Cathy, who looked like a girl in an American film, was something he wanted to spoil.

Finally Cathy decided to break off with the actor. She had left some things at his apartment, dresses, jewelry, books. When she arrived, in the afternoon, she found him waiting with a dozen of his friends, all Italian except for a couple of Scandinavian girls. They were drinking spumante. The actor pulled Cathy into the apartment and threw her into the center of the living room. He had arranged the furniture so that the chairs were all around the walls, like a theater in the round. While his friends watched, the actor beat her with his fists. He punched her breasts, smashed her face. It went on for a long time-her nose and the bones in her cheeks were broken, some of her teeth were knocked out.

Cathy went downstairs to a coffee bar and called Christopher. When he got to her, her face was a mass of blood. Her hair was soaked with blood. She had vomited on her clothes. She wore only one shoe. Christopher took her to the hospital. The car was open. “Put up the top,” she kept saying, “put up the top.”

“I see,” Molly said.

“Do you? Outside the hospital, I kissed her mouth. She was blinded by blood. I was enough like her by then that I would have pulled off her clothes right there, but they came out with a stretcher.”

That evening, seated at Doney’s while the crowd drifted by on the Via Veneto, they read the papers. Christopher saw, for the first time, photographs of the dead bodies of the Ngo brothers. Diem’s corpse was closer to the camera, and a broad streak of blood ran from the wound in his temple over his cheek.

“What happens to your piece on Diem now?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know. I cabled the magazine. They may want a fix, or they may not run it. They wanted something unflattering, but that may not seem appropriate to them now.”

“You saw him?”

“Only for a few minutes. It’s odd, you know, but no one knows anything about him, really. He was sealed up in his family, never talked to strangers. All the stuff about him in the papers was science fiction.”

Piero Cremona, wearing a perfectly pressed tan suit and a silk scarf around his neck, came out of the crowd, lifting his hand in greeting.

“The famous American correspondent is back from- where was it this time, Paul?”

Christopher shook hands. “How’s the world’s best-dressed Communist?” he said.

Cremona ran the fingernails of both hands down the breast of his jacket, making the silk whistle. “The true revolutionary blends into his environment,” Cremona said. “In the jungles of Vietnam, I would wear the branches of trees. Here, this is my camouflage.”

Cremona wrote political articles for L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. He signed his pieces with the nom de guerre he had used as a partisan; everyone but the police had forgotten the name Cremona was born with. Christopher avoided American reporters, and Americans generally, in Rome, but he had got to know a lot of Italians when he was learning the language. He never reported on them or carried out any intelligence activities in Italy; it was his rule never to operate in the country where he lived.

Cremona sat down with Christopher and Molly. He tapped the newspaper photograph of the dead Vietnamese. “The imperialist eagle devours its young, eh?” he said.

“Is that the line this week, Piero?”

“It’s the obvious truth, Paul. Read my piece tomorrow. Brilliant. I’ve just come from the typewriter.”

“Why is it so obvious? Corriere della Sera says the trigger was pulled by a South Vietnamese lieutenant.”

“Yes, and the junta in Saigon says Diem and Nhu committed suicide,” Cremona said. “Everyone knew it was going to happen-you have a man of action in the White House now. I predicted it weeks ago. A handful of dollars, a head full of bullets. Madame Nhu, when she was here last month, predicted it.”

“Well, if you’re right, it ought to be a very good thing for the revolution.”

“The best, dear Paul, the best. Ah, you capitalist-imperialists are so adept at fulfilling the predictions of Lenin. You are eager for your own doom. Up to now, you’ve been growling in Indochina like a caged tiger. Now you must bleed, Paul. There will be chaos-generals cannot run a government in a civil war. Their army has always been a joke, now their country will be a joke. The U.S. Marines will land-they must. You’re committed now to playing a bad hand.”

“Last time I saw you, you were telling me that Diem and Nhu were a couple of Nazis.”

“They were-but they were no joke,” Cremona said. “Well, I must leave you. Molly, why does a beautiful girl like you consort with this running dog of Wall Street?”