The Tears of Autumn (24 page)

“This has been very dangerous for me, coming to the same place at the same hours for three days,” Klimenko said.

“I’ve been away. I only got your message today.”

Klimenko had no hair and he was always cold. Even in Africa he wore a buttoned suit. He stared morosely at Christopher and pulled his fur hat tighter on his bald head; a sharp wind filled with rain blew the skirt of his coat and he leaned over and tucked it between his knees.

“I think you know what I want,” Klimenko said.

Christopher remained silent. The great building and the trees in its courtyards absorbed the detonation of the Roman traffic, so that he and Klimenko stood in a pool of silence at the back of the roof.

“You won’t answer me,” Klimenko said.

“You haven’t asked me a question, Gherman.”

Klimenko turned his back to Christopher and rocked up and down on his toes.

“I’m worn out,” he said, as if speaking to one of the Swiss guards pacing below them in the garden. He turned around again. “I want to make a contact,” he said.

The wind nearly took Klimenko’s hat and they both reached for it; Christopher caught it and Klimenko screwed it down again on his forehead.

“Paul,” he said. “We can only talk for ten minutes. Don’t waste the time. You know what I want.”

“I think so. But I can’t help you, Gherman. Walk into the American embassy. You can be there in ten minutes in a taxi.”

“Christopher—don’t do this. They
know.
I’ve been running for a week. Where do you think they expect me to go? They’re waiting outside the embassy in the Via Veneto. You know the system—a car is waiting around the corner. They’d have me before I could walk across the sidewalk.”

Christopher shrugged. “Then go to Paris or Bern.”

“You’re my only hope. I’ve been waiting for three days. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Look,” Klimenko said. “I have no more energy for charades.” He seized Christopher’s arm. “I told you, I’m worn out.”

Klimenko’s teeth chattered. He walked back and forth rapidly on the roof, swinging his arms around his body to warm it. He came back, close to Christopher, and spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“Paul—have I ever given a hint that I knew about you in all the years? Ever? How many times have I seen you, in how many places? We drank whiskey together in the bar of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. We had lunch in the Fin Bee in Geneva, as if we were friends. We talked about opera, the ballet, the way BOAC is always late.”

“I’m glad you have such tender memories,” Christopher said, “but if you think you know anything about me, you’re wrong.”

Klimenko stood up to his full height. He was still a foot shorter than Christopher. Holding his clenched fists at his sides, he said, “All right. In 1959 you were in the Sudan; a Pole named Miernik was killed by the natives in the desert and you brought his body out. In 1960 you were meeting an agent named Horst Bülow in front of the S-bahn station at the zoo in Berlin; he was run down by a black Opel and killed before your eyes. In 1962 you penetrated the Chinese operation in Katanga with Alphonse Nsango and gave him gold to pay for the juju that broke one of their insurgent groups. In 1961 you were in Laos talking to a certain Hmong who is now a general. Your case officer is Thomas R. Webster, who lives at 23-bis, avenue Hoche, Paris. The chief of clandestine operations in Washington is David Patchen, and in practice you are answerable only to him. I can go on.”

Christopher said, “If all that is true, why do you think I won’t shoot you right now?”

Klimenko opened his eyes. “You people don’t kill. We know that, too.”

Christopher was not surprised at the quality of Klimenko’s information, and he knew that Klimenko did not expect him to be startled.

Klimenko took Christopher’s arm and walked him around the gallery. The mossy slope of Michelangelo’s dome rose behind them. Christopher heard the wail of pipes, and saw a shepherd walking across the piazza below; the man wore a sheepskin tied around his waist with a rope and a red cap like the bagpiper he’d seen by the Tiber. Straining his eyes, Christopher saw that this man had a different face.

“They close this gallery at four-thirty,” Christopher said. “We’d better go down.”

“I didn’t come out empty-handed, Paul. I can show you samples.”

Klimenko’s voice was growing thinner, as if he had suddenly caught cold. “Name a place,” he said. “Just make sure it’s secure.”

“This is not my work.”

Christopher put a hand on Klimenko’s shoulder; the flesh was loose under his thick overcoat. Christopher had always liked the Russian, but he knew what mistakes he could make. “How long do you expect to stay operational if you go around in public like this?” he asked.

“Not long. You see what’s happened to my nerves.”

“Why did you come out? You’ve always been a loyal Russian, haven’t you?”

The skin of Klimenko’s sagging face was blotched, brown and white like the meat of a bitten pear. “Loyal to Russia, yes —and I still am. I no longer agree with the line.”

“It’s no different than it ever was.”

“No. But I am. One gets tired. Doubts become more important—Klimenko’s Law: as life shortens, misgivings magnify.”

“Then I’m sorry you’ve come to the wrong man.”

“I can tell you how the arms come to the V. C. through Cambodia,” Klimenko said in a rush of words. “I can tell you what we are going to do with the structure of the Cuban intelligence service. I can give you names you don’t have. There’s been a change in the funding system—I set it up, I know the banks and the account numbers. Paul, don’t be foolish.”

Christopher shook his head.

“I know what you think,” Klimenko said. “You’re worried about your cover. But you have no cover with us. We know about you—we’ve known for years. When you begin thinking about yourself you lose your profession. I know.”

A Vatican guard appeared in the stairway door. “The gallery is closing,” he said in Italian.

“Do you want to go down first?” Christopher asked.

Klimenko uttered a little laugh; he was in possession of himself again.

“It’s comic how I fit the defector’s pattern,” he said. “I tell you how I love Russia, and offer you her secrets in exchange for safety. It’s no wonder people like you and me exist, Paul—men are so predictable, so easy to use. I know what you’ll do next. We’d better set up a meeting now. I don’t want to use the telephone anymore.”

“Gherman, I won’t see you again. I can’t help you. What I’m telling you is not technique, it’s the truth.”

“You don’t believe in the quality of the merchandise.”

“I care nothing about it one way or the other.”

“Signori,”
the guard said, “you must descend now. The gallery is closing.”

Klimenko fluttered his gloved hand impatiently at the guard. He turned his back on the man and again put his face close to Christopher.

“There was an operation in the States last month,” he said. “The code word was Weedkiller. A million dollars went through a certain Swiss bank. An American got the money. A million dollars, Paul. Think about that.”

“When?”

“The money went into the bank in Zurich on November 25. It was taken out the next day, just before the bank closed.”

“By whom?”

Klimenko looked aside. “I don’t tell you that now. When we meet again, when I have assurances—but not on this roof, in the rain.”

“You’ll have assurances when I have this information,” Christopher said.

“Weedkiller?”

“Yes. All of it.”

“Tomorrow,” Klimenko said. “I can’t wait longer than that.”

Christopher nodded and smiled at the guard, who had come onto the gallery and was walking toward them with his arms thrown out and his shoulders shrugged to show that he was at the end of his patience.

“All right,” Christopher said. “Five o’clock in the morning, in the Protestant cemetery behind the Porta San Paolo. I’ll meet you on Shelley’s grave.”

“Romantic,” Klimenko said.

He walked away, leaving Christopher to talk to the remonstrating guard, who might remember him.

3

In one of the souvenir shops near Saint Peter’s, Christopher bought a postcard of John XXIII. He took a taxi to the main post office in the Piazza San Silvestro and, using the typewriter at the telegraph office, typed the name and address Nsango used in Elisabethville on it. In the message space he typed a Christmas greeting in French and signed the message with three initials. He could speak like a Frenchman, but his handwriting was plainly American.

He dropped the card in the airmail box outside and walked next door to the long-distance telephone office. When the call came through, the clerk put him in Cabin 10 as usual, and he could hear the tap sputtering on the line. Sybille answered.

“You’re coming for Christmas!” she said.

“No, I want to invite you down here.”

“My dear, we can’t. We’d have to charter an extra plane to carry the presents my husband has bought me to make up for his guilty conscience.”

“Is he there?”

“At five-thirty? Have you forgotten already what it is to be chained to a machine gun like a poor German private, rat-tatting away for the Fatherland?”

“Will you give him a message? Tell him I’d like to have lunch with him. Write down the date and time carefully—you know what his memory is.”

Christopher gave her a formula that would bring Webster, if he understood it, to Rome the following afternoon.

The shops had just reopened and the streets were teeming. Christopher went into a jewelry store and bought an opal ring for Molly. He put it in his pocket and walked into the Rinascente next door; the department store was so crowded that he moved sideways through a pack of unmoving Italians. He went to the top of the store on the escalator and came back down the stairs, leaving by the front entrance. By the time he reached the taxi stand behind the Galleria Colonna across the street, he was certain that he was still alone.

He rang his own doorbell six times, four long and two short. Molly tapped on the inside of the door four times, and he rang again twice. He heard the locks turning and the chain rattling, and Molly opened the door. She held a bottle of champagne in her hand.

“Can you open this without fumbling?” she asked. “It’s three thousand lire the bottle, you know.”

Sitting on the sofa, Christopher told Molly to close her eyes. He put the opal ring on her finger.

“It’s beautiful,” Molly said. “But aren’t opals supposed to bring bad luck?”

“A little superstition will do us good. Gaze into the stone, Molly, and live each day as if it were your last.”

“What a wonderful sense of humor you have. Is all this business really a joke to you?”

“Isn’t it a joke? Think of it—some little fellow with hate in his heart, deadly dramatic, stalking us in Christmas week. If he exists, he wouldn’t even have been told who we are or why he’s supposed to kill us. All he asks is a chance to be taken seriously.”

“I take him seriously.”

“Take his gun seriously, and his delusions,” Christopher said. “But not him. He’s just a man, and a weak and stupid one or he wouldn’t let himself be used. We know about him. That cancels his value.”

Molly kissed him. She wore no scent or makeup; he had always thought her as clean as a child. Molly did not like the image.

“After this morning,” she said, “I go on the premise that anything is permissible. I’ve been reading your poems again. Explain what you meant by these lines:

“In the cave where my father grows,

He sees my son undoubling from a rose.”

“Christ, Molly, I don’t know. It rhymed.”

“Open up,” she said, pointing a finger.

“I loved my father,” Christopher said. “He lived his whole life without doing anyone any harm. I think I hoped, if I ever had a child, that it would manage to stay innocent, the way the old man did.”

“What was the cave?”

“Silence. He stopped speaking when he was about fifty.”

“Stopped speaking? Altogether? Why? Was he mad?”

“My mother thought so,” Christopher said. “So did I, for a while. Then I began to read a little more and I realized that he would have been treated as a holy man in most places in the world.”

“On the other hand, he could have been mad.” “That’s possible. He refused to give evidence.” “Not a word, not a gesture, to the end of his life?” “Nothing.”

“You behave as if you think what he did was rather beautiful.”

“Oh, I do,” Christopher said.

4

Christopher heated milk in the dark kitchen and drank a cup of cocoa before he woke Molly so that she could lock the door after him. She had slept naked and he embraced her long body, still warm from the blankets. He stood in the hall until he heard all the locks fall into place.

It took him ten minutes to inspect his car. It was still dark and he had no flashlight. He felt the motor with his hands and lay on his back on the cold cobblestones and ran his fingers over the frame. The car had been standing in the rain for a week and the engine started reluctantly.

Christopher drove up the Tiber, crossed it on the Ponte Milvio where Constantine had seen the sign of the Cross, and came down the opposite bank. The streets were empty. When he parked the car and walked into the cemetery, there was enough light to see the tips of the cypresses against a sky filled with sailing clouds.

He walked on the grass among the headstones to avoid the noise of his footsteps on the gravel pathways.

At precisely five o’clock, Klimenko, wrapped in his long overcoat, emerged from a row of cypresses. The Russian walked without hesitation to Shelley’s grave, and Christopher thought again about Klimenko’s tendency to make mistakes: he must have come to the cemetery the evening before and marked the spot.

“Good morning, Paul.”

“Gherman. Did you case this place last night?”

“Why?”

“You knew right where to find Shelley.”

“I came earlier this morning. No one has picked me up.”

Klimenko lifted his feet, in pointed Italian shoes, one after the other out of the wet grass. “Nevertheless, I’d like to get under cover as soon as possible,” he said. “All this standing about in the open isn’t good.”