The Tears of Autumn (14 page)

“What are people saying about the Ngos since Diem and Nhu died?”

“That their luck ran out. In Vietnam, that’s always the explanation. We have no political analysts, only superstitions and fortune-tellers.”

“And killers.”

“Yes, we’ve always had a good cheap supply of those.”

“Do you think you have some sort of personal luck that keeps you alive, Luong?”

“Of course. Everyone believes that. Even some foreigners believe it, but not you yourself. I saw that in you from the first —you believe in nothing except the force of human intelligence. Isn’t that so?”

“I doubt even that.”

“I thought so. But there are other forces. One waits, and a force moves; it’s like water, soft and yielding, but also possessing great power.” Luong smiled.

“Lao-tzu,” Christopher said. “What’s your lucky number, Luong?”

Luong hesitated. “Eleven.”

“Has it come up lately?”

“Yes. Nhu wanted to kill me, you know. There were men waiting here for me while I was with you in Bangkok. But Diem and Nhu died while I was away, on November 1—the first day of the eleventh month, an eleven and a one, three elevens if you read from front and back.”

“What was Diem’s number?”

“That’s well known. Seven, double seven. He came to power on July 7, as you may know, too.”

“Does the number go on working after death?”

“I suppose so,” Luong said. “Any combination of sevens would be good for Diem’s spirit.”

“Would it make sense to honor his memory on a day seven days after his death, or fourteen days, or twenty-one?”

“Oh yes,” Luong said. “Triple seven, twenty-one, would be thought very auspicious… But you’re toying with our superstitions.”

“No, I try to understand these things. It isn’t necessary to believe in them to know they exist, even that they exert what you call force.”

“Well, perhaps one wouldn’t call such passive things a force.”

“What, then?”

Luong searched his mind for the French word. “An elegance,” he said.

3

No one in the tropics expects to see a white man at sunrise. Christopher did not live by the clock but by the rhythm of the place in which he found himself. In hot countries he moved on his targets in the cool of the morning. They were always surprised to see him. As he walked down Luong’s street under the stunted flowering trees, he received startled glances even from the children.

A few blocks away he found a taxi with its driver asleep in a patch of shade. He woke him and gave him the Truong toe’s address.

The Truong toe’s house was sealed. Shutters were fastened, doors locked. The house stood in a small park, and as Christopher walked among the flower beds and the palms it seemed to him that the noise of life parted at the gate and flowed around the walls of the garden. The babble of voices and the whine of scooter engines that filled the streets on all four sides of the narrow house were deadened. Christopher knew the noise was absorbed by the trees and the high wall cloaked with vines, but he thought, all the same, of the passive forces Luong had spoken about.

No one answered his knock. He stepped back and looked upward at the blank windows, then walked around the corner of the house to a terrace where bougainvillea grew over a trellis. Heavy iron lawn furniture, curlicued and painted white, was arranged in the shade; green mold crept up the legs of the chairs, designed to stand on a lawn beside the Loire. French doors opened on the terrace. Christopher saw someone in white robes move quickly across the room within. An entire wall was taken up by an ancestor’s shrine. Photographs of the dead and candle flames reflected in the panes of the terrace doors. The person inside was lighting a thicket of joss sticks on the shrine.

Christopher knocked again, and his fist rattled the glass. The white figure turned around; he saw it was a young woman who stood at the back of the room and stared at him. He knocked again, and drawing out his voice in the elongated tones of a Frenchman who has lived long in Asia, called,
“Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît!” The
girl came to the glass door, held up both palms, and shook her head violently.

Christopher rattled the door handle and spoke in a loud voice: “A word with you, mademoiselle.”

She opened the door and, using the
tu
form, said, “Shut up. This house is closed.”

“I know, and I understand,” Christopher said. “But I’ve come all the way from Paris to see the Truong toe.”

“He’s not receiving visitors.”

“I have an important message for him. It concerns his family.”

The girl let breath burst from her nostrils.
“This
family?” she asked incredulously, looking at the color of Christopher’s skin.

“Yes—truly it’s very important to the Truong toe.”

“Who are you? Have you a card?”

“No—no card. But give him this.”

Christopher wrote on a page of his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to the girl. She folded the note without reading it, dropped her eyes, and closed the door again, turning the key in the lock. She pointed a finger toward the front of the house, and he went around to the main door. Fifteen minutes passed before it opened. The girl, striding in her
ao dai
like a Frenchwoman, led him through odors of fish sauce, furniture polish, candle smoke down a narrow hall to a room filled with books. She adjusted the blinds so that strips of light ran across the polished tile floor, and left him alone.

The Truong toe let Christopher wait for a long time. When he came in, he wore Vietnamese dress, white to signify his mourning. Without shaking hands, he sat down, holding the page from Christopher’s notebook between his thumb and forefinger. “Why do you bring me this message?” he asked.

“I wished to meet you. I thought you would want to have this information.”

“Well, then?”

“Your nephew, Ngo Tan Khoi, was garrotted after he entered his car in the parking lot of the casino at Divonne-les-Bains, on March 8,1958,” Christopher said. “He was buried that same night in the bottom of an open grave in the town of Gex, eight kilometers away. A woman named Marie-Thérèse Hec-quet, for whom the grave had been prepared, was buried in it on March 9.”

“By whom was he killed?”

“Not by your enemies. He was mistaken for a heroin dealer named Hoang Tan Khoi by the people who killed him. Your relative and the heroin dealer had the same given names and they were both Vietnamese.”

“Who were these people?”

Christopher gave him the names of the French gangsters. “Machelon is dead,” he said. “Gaboni is still in business; if one wishes to hire him, one leaves one half of a thousand-franc note in an envelope with the doorman of the Russian restaurant in the rue de Passy, in Paris. Gaboni will appear on the following Monday, at ten o’clock, in the public toilet on the Champs-Elysées, near the place Clemenceau.”

“How do you have this information?”

“I had it from Machelon.”

“Of what interest is it to me?”

“You now have it, in any case. I thank you for seeing me. Good-bye.”

Christopher uncrossed his legs and gripped the arms of his chair, as if to rise.

The Truong toe handed Christopher the notebook page. It was a gesture to establish trust; he was returning the evidence. “And you are what—a policeman? You speak like a Frenchman, but you don’t have the manners of the French.”

“I’m not a policeman. This is a personal matter—I greatly admired the late Ngo Dinh Diem. I knew him slightly. When he was murdered, I wished to express my sympathies.”

“You choose a bizarre method.”

Christopher put the page of the notebook in his pocket. “If I knew who killed Diem and his brother, I would tell you that,” he said.

The Truong toe moved his hand and let it fall back in his lap. “How did you know of me?”

“I made inquiries. Your existence is not a secret. The dead boy in France—he was a member of the Ngo
chi,
was he not?”

The Truong toe opened his eyes. There was nothing involuntary about his expression of surprise; he wished Christopher to understand that he respected his knowledge.

“Yes,” the Truong toe said. “We had hoped he wasn’t dead, but of course there was no other explanation.”

Christopher looked into the flat face of the Truong toe; the old skin stretched over the bones of his head like the ruined glaze of a china plate recovered from the ashes of a burned house. The old man had the light behind him, so even the faint expressions he allowed himself could not always be seen.

“It did not matter to the parents,” Christopher asked, “that Khoi was a Communist and an agent of Ho Chi Minh?”

“One accepts what a son becomes in politics. There is no choice.”

“I would be glad,” Christopher said, “if you could tell me something about President Diem. I met him only twice, but I thought him a great man.”

The Truong toe folded his hands. “Many thought him a tyrant,” he said. “He was not much loved outside Vietnam. Even in his own country, many never understood him. He hadn’t the gift of the popular gesture. He once said that it was impossible for him to feel guilt.”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “‘He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.’”

“Lao-tzu. You’re a surprising man.”

“One may read as one wishes. Do you believe President Diem loved his world, which was Vietnam, as he loved his own body?”

“They were the same,” the Truong toe said. “And now the one is dead and the other is dismembered,”

“The family is partly in the North, partly in the South. Is it dismembered?”

“No, the family is one.”

“And acts as one?”

“In matters that concern the oneness of the family, when it can. But it is weak, compared to the apparatus of the state and the weapons of the world.”

“So are all families,” Christopher said. “When the American President was killed, as Diem had been killed, I wondered if the members of
his
family had any thoughts about your family.”

“Because we had similar sorrows? I would be surprised. We live far away, in a weak country.”

“The assassinations came close together—only twenty-one days, three weeks, separated them.”

“The Americans live in another world,” the Truong toe said. “How can they compare their situation with ours? We cannot touch such beings. Perhaps time will touch them.”

Christopher stood up. “When you communicate with Ngo Tan Khoi’s parents,” he said, “tell them I am sorry to have brought such news—and to have brought it so late.”

The Truong toe, his hands folded in his white lap, called out a phrase in Vietnamese. The young woman reappeared and led Christopher to the door.

“What’s your name?” Christopher asked.

She gave him a contemptuous glance and remained silent.

“If you want to be worthy of the Truong toe, you must learn to hide your feelings,” Christopher said.

She opened the door and dropped her eyes, as if looking at the color of his skin offended her.

Christopher walked through the muffled atmosphere of the garden. Two Vietnamese in European clothes lounged by the gate. Christopher saw the outline of revolver butts under the thin white stuff of their identical shirts. The men watched him get into his waiting taxi, then one of them crossed the street to use the telephone in a shop.

Christopher told the driver to take him to the Continental Palace Hotel. He walked past the desk and up the stairs. It was still very early in the morning, and the maids were not yet active. He found an unlocked room from which the luggage had been removed. Closing the door behind him, he sat down on the soiled bed and used the telephone to call Wolkowicz.

4

Wolkowicz imagined that he was stalked by murderous enemies. He carried a heavy revolver in a shoulder holster and a smaller pistol strapped to the calf of his leg. A young Marine armed with a submachine gun drove Wolkowicz to work in the embassy and home again in a Mercedes with armored doors and bullet-proof windows. Wolkowicz’s villa was surrounded by a concrete wall, and the house itself had been fitted with steel doors and shutters. There were submachine guns, steel helmets, and flak vests in every closet.

Christopher rang the bell and saw Wolkowicz’s eye at the peephole. In the dark hall, Wolkowicz worked clumsily to refasten the bolts and locks with his left hand. He carried a pistol in his right hand and a newborn pig under his arm.

“I was just about to feed the snake,” Wolkowicz said. “Have a drink if you want one.”

Christopher made himself a gin and tonic with big clear ice cubes from Wolkowicz’s American refrigerator.

“Nhu, where the hell are you?” Wolkowicz said. “Come on, baby, we haven’t got all night He hides during the day, half the time I can’t find him.”

Wolkowicz shifted the pig to his left hand and replaced the revolver in his shoulder holster. He got down on his knees and looked under the furniture. “There you are, you son of a bitch,” he said. “Come on out.”

A young python glided from beneath the sofa and lifted its flat head. The pig squirmed sleepily in Wolkowicz’s arms.

“I have to dope the pig, otherwise the house gets wrecked in the chase,” Wolkowicz said. “I gave this one a Miltown in a can of beer. He’s feeling no pain.”

“Where’d you get the snake?” Christopher asked.

“Phnom Penh,” Wolkowicz said. “I had to go over to see Pete. The Cambodians run around with pythons draped around their necks. This is a nice one—I bought him from a taxi driver. He had him on the seat beside him. The problem is getting food for him. You don’t have to feed him often, but he’ll only eat live stuff. He likes chickens, but I can’t stand the noise.”

Wolkowicz put the pig on the floor and sat down heavily beside Christopher on the sofa. “You ever seen this done?” he asked. “It’s kind of interesting.”

The snake watched the pig fixedly. The drugged pig seemed surprised that it was unable to run; it gave a faint squeal and staggered toward the sofa. Wolkowicz gave it back to the python. With much slower movements than Christopher had expected, the snake attacked, wrapping itself around the pig’s small body. The pig struggled briefly, then subsided, uttering a series of thin squeals like a baby drifting to sleep. Its head thumped on the floor.