Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

“Did he believe that?”

“Of course not. He’s got the idea we run a gossip mill. You may have to write something, so he can burn it in his ashtray.”

Christopher smiled.

“He wanted you fired,” Patchen said. “The Director put a handwritten note in your file explaining that you were responding to a direct request for information and had no political motive.”

“Does Foley believe that?”

“How could he? He lives on loyalty to one man, the President. He’s had no experience with coldhearted bastards like you. No one but us can see that information is just information. Foley thinks you’re an enemy if you don’t agree with everything the President does, one hundred percent.”

“So now everyone agrees with assassination?”

Patchen lifted his bad leg, using both hands, and crossed it over the other one. “Foley thought you were being emotional,” he said. “I could kick Tom Webster’s ass for bringing you two together.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

Patchen hesitated. It was not like Christopher to ask for information he didn’t need to have.

“The outfit had nothing to do with what happened to Diem and Nhu,” he said.

“Foley didn’t seem very surprised at the news.”

“I can’t explain Foley, or what he does,” Patchen said.

Patchen opened his briefcase with a snap; he had had enough of this subject. He handed Christopher a newspaper clipping, the obituary of an Asian political figure who had died the week before of a heart attack.

“Did you see this? It isn’t often that an agent dies of natural causes.”

Christopher read the obituary. It said that the Asian would be remembered by history for three things: his autobiography, which made the world aware of the struggle of a whole people through the description of the author’s own life; the Manifesto of 1955, which had influenced political thought and action throughout the Third World; and the statesman’s success in driving Communists out of the political life of his country.

“Not even a chuckle?” Patchen asked.

Christopher shook his head. It was a convention that agents, even after they were dead, were called by their code names, never by their own. The Asian’s pseudonym had been “Ripsaw.”

“How much of Ripsaw’s autobiography actually happened in his life?” Patchen asked.

“Most of the anecdotes were true as he told them to me. I just put in the parts where he had deep, deep thoughts. The Manifesto of 1955 I wrote on a plane, going down from Japan. It was the universal text-I’d done things like it before for some of the Africans. There just happened to be a guy from the Times in-country when Ripsaw issued it, so it got publicity.”

“Don’t you think it’s funny, the way the Times is always reporting on you, and it doesn’t know you exist?”

“That’s what newspapers are for.”

“Yes, to explain the real world.”

“There is no real world, David.”

Patchen smiled at the irony. He took back the clipping and closed his briefcase. He sat for a long moment with his good eye closed and a hand over the other one, sipping from his glass of whiskey. He took his hand away from his face and stared at Christopher.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I got out your file and read it; you’ve been through a lot in twelve years. You’re losing your humor, Paul. I’ve seen it happen to others who stay in the field too long, do too much.”

“Seen what happen?”

“Professional fatigue. I believe, in the case of Christians, it’s called religious melancholy. Do you play with the thought of getting out? I know you like to be with this girl Molly.”

“Sometimes I play with the thought. I’m tired of the travel, and once or twice a year I meet someone I’d rather not lie to.”

“Molly wouldn’t be enough for you, you know, any more than poetry was, or your wife. You say there’s no real world, but if there is one, it consists of you and maybe a dozen other operators like you on both sides. You ought to be intoxicated.”

“Maybe I am.”

“No. Your agents are intoxicated. Foley is intoxicated. That’s why you don’t like him-you know how easily you could use him if he was a foreigner.”

“Well, I’m going back out. I have to meet Spendthrift in Léopoldville later this week, and after that I want to see what’s left of the network in Vietnam.”

“Who knows?” Patchen said. “You may find the atmosphere improved in Saigon. The embassy’s traffic is full of bounce and optimism.”

“I’ll bet. Do you think the Foleys have any idea of what’s going to happen to them out there?”

Patchen stood up. When he spoke, he turned the dead side of his face toward Christopher. “They’re a funny bunch,” he said. “They’re bright. They believe in action, and at first that seemed refreshing. But they’re almost totally innocent. They have about as much experience as you and I had when we were recruited, and there’s no way to season them. They got into the White House and opened the safe, and the power they discovered took their breath away. ‘Christ, let’s use it!’ Power really does corrupt. They think they can do anything they like, to anyone in the world, and there’ll be no consequences.”

“But there always are.”

“You know that,” Patchen said. “For those who never smell the corpse, there’s no way of knowing.”

On his way out of America, Christopher stopped in New York to have lunch with the managing editor of his magazine. The man was fascinated with the internal politics of the magazine. In his eyes, Christopher was a good writer who delivered six articles a year according to his contract.

Christopher had been offered the contract after he wrote profiles of a dozen foreign statesmen whom no other journalist had been able to interview. It was good cover, but it created a security problem; Christopher could not be revealed to the editors.

The Director called the chairman of the board of the magazine; the two old men had been at Princeton together. The Director explained that Christopher was an intelligence operative in addition to being a writer. It was arranged that Christopher’s salary, twenty thousand dollars a year, would be donated in a discreet way to the favorite charity of the chairman of the board. He either saw no reason to inform the editor of the magazine of Christopher’s connection with the government, or forgot about it. In any case, no one at the magazine had ever mentioned a suspicion of Christopher.

The managing editor drank three martinis before lunch. He told Christopher he had thrown away his profile of Ngo Dinh Diem.

“My eyes glazed over,” he said. “Diem was boring enough when he was alive. Who’s going to read about a dead dinosaur? There’s no American angle.”

He asked Christopher to write five thousand words on the new Pope.

Christopher, alone, sat in a sidewalk café in Léopoldville. It had grown too dark to read, and the book he had brought with him lay closed on the table. Its pages, like Christopher’s shirt and the tablecloth, were swollen with moisture.

Three gaunt adolescent boys ran among the tables of the café. Two of them carried armloads of wood, and the third clutched a piece of meat. It appeared to be the ribs of a large animal and it had begun to spoil; Christopher smelled its rancid odor. The boys crouched by a mimosa tree a few yards from the café and started a fire. The flames burst upward, licking the bole of the tree, silhouetting the thin boys, who threw the meat into the fire and danced away from its heat.

The child who had been carrying the meat darted away from his friends and came to Christopher’s table, giggling as he ran. He was a leper. He snatched Christopher’s unfinished bottle of beer from the table and ran away, hugging it against his chest with a fingerless hand. Back at the fire, he and his companions passed the bottle from mouth to mouth.