The Tears of Autumn (21 page)

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.”

l

“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?”

“Yes, the geomantic factors. You understand the principle of geomancy, of course—one orients oneself to the natural world on the basis of harmony with the five natural elements, which are fire, water, metal, wood, and earth. None of these three men seems to have been in harmony with the world. In Vietnamese terms, they were all under the influence of the Ma Than Vong.”

“Which is?”

“A very colorful and malevolent force—the tightening-knot ghost. Ma Than Vong goads men to suicide, or into situations where their violent death is inevitable. One of the men, this one—a foreigner, I believe—am I correct?”

Christopher nodded. Yu Lung had shown him Kennedy’s horoscope.

“The foreigner was a powerful man,” Yu Lung said, “but his particular nemesis was Ma A Phien, whom the Vietnamese call the opium ghost. This man was predisposed to a death in the pleasures. Also, he was much involved with the
am,
the female spirit that stands for darkness and is associated with death. As for the others, who must be Vietnamese, there was a long period of the influence of
duong,
or the male spirit of light, or life. Then this force conjoins with the
am
spirit of the other man, and they are lost.”

“By whose error?”

“Their own, of course. As I said, we are dealing with predisposition, not predetermination. The horoscope is incomplete, as you must realize.”

“Incomplete? In what way?”

“There are other individuals involved. One in particular, who I could guess is a Vietnamese related in some way to the other two. Perhaps he lives elsewhere than in the place where his two relatives live, or lived. He exerts a force after their death. It’s a key force. Without knowing his stars, you will not understand the others.”

Yu Lung rocked back in his swivel chair with a faint squeal of metal springs and folded his hands on his stomach. “Would you care for some tea,” he asked, “or a glass of scotch whiskey?” Yu Lung’s face was circular like his charts—a small pursed mouth, a broad nose that moved when he smiled, arched eyebrows.

“It’s the other man in whom I am interested,” Christopher said.

Yu Lung laughed. “I thought it might be. You haven’t the look of a man who pays five hundred dollars out of idle curiosity.” He pulled Scotch tape from a dispenser and stuck the torn American bills together. “Have you chosen between tea and scotch?” he asked.

“Nothing, thank you. I may say you work swiftly from very limited information.”

Yu Lung shrugged. “It’s a settled science. One learns the principles, and if one has the gift, the situation opens itself very quickly.”

“One would almost think that you had dealt with these particular horoscopes before.”

“Ah, perhaps,” Yu Lung said. “They are unique. All horoscopes are.”

“Then you’d remember if you had done them before?”

“Yes, I’d remember. You say you are a friend of Lê Thu. How did you come by that name?”

“By chance,” Christopher said, “though I suppose your philosophy would not accept that explanation.”

Yu Lung waved a pudgy hand. “Chance is an accurate word in your language. A geomancer would call it the function
of feng shut
—the geomantic conditions. What you’d describe as being in the right place at the right time. These beliefs are ancient. Your people once held to them, like everyone else. They’re preserved in your language, though you no longer hear the real meanings in what you say.”

“You know something of Lê Thu, do you not?”

“I?” Yu Lung said. “It’s a common Vietnamese name, quite a sad one—they might give it to a second child if the first had died, in order to discourage the bad spirits from taking this child as well.”

“I was also a friend of Vuong Van Luong,” Christopher said. “I believe you spoke to him a couple of nights ago.”

“Luong. Yes, he came here.”

“And asked about Lê Thu.”

“I could tell him nothing of importance.”

“He was shot dead after he left you,” Christopher said.

“Not for that name, I think,” Yu Lung said. He had a habit of widening his eyes when he lied. He held Christopher’s money in his hands, counting it over and over again.

“What are the ethics of your profession?” Christopher asked. “Your consultations are secret, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes, absolutely. These are intimate matters.”

“Do you keep records?”

“Of course. Clients come back. One keeps a complete profile of the case. Principles are fixed, but conditions change. One wants to see how forces have behaved in the past, so as to apply their logic to the future.”

Christopher smiled at the man. “What is the maximum period of time over which a horoscope may be kept?”

“It’s quite indefinite, but of course one can compute in terms of an adult lifetime. Thirty years. Say ten thousand days —that has a certain ring to it.”

“I should think five thousand days would give one a complete picture.”

“Fairly complete. Not all, but enough.”

Christopher put a thick envelope on Yu Lung’s desk. The fortune-teller kept his eye away from it. He drew one of the horoscope sheets toward him. With a red pencil he drew circles around groups of ideograms that ran down the edge of the paper. “The system I use is uniform,” he said. “The top group is the date, place, time of birth. The next group is the name of the individual, if I have it. All the Chinese characters below are the description of the individual’s fate. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Yu Lung straightened the pages, squaring their edges by tapping them on the glass top of his desk. He went to his file cabinet, unlocked it, and inserted the papers in a file so that a corner protruded from the top. Christopher’s envelope still lay on the desk top.

“And now,” Yu Lung said, “I must insist that you take a glass of scotch with me. It’s quite an extraordinary bottle of Chivas Regal. I had it from a foreigner. I’ll fetch it, if you’ll be so kind as to wait.”

Yu Lung left the room. Christopher took the file folder from the open drawer of the steel cabinet and opened it. There were seven sheets of drawing paper in addition to the ones Yu Lung had prepared for him. Christopher used Yu Lung’s scissors to clip the ideograms from the edges of all the sheets. He put the long strips of rice paper, covered with Yu Lung’s flowing calligraphy, in his inside pocket, with Molly’s photograph. He closed the file and pushed in the lock.