The Tears of Autumn (30 page)

3

With the door closed and the lights reflecting from its polished white walls, the interrogation room looked like the inside of a dry skull. Frankie Pigeon, naked, was tied by his wrists to a ring in the wall. Long yellow stains ran down the inside of his legs. He trembled uncontrollably. The floor was slick with the water he had regurgitated.

When Pigeon saw the door open, he pressed his knees together and turned his lower body to one side in a convulsive movement, to protect his genitals. He looked at Christopher, then closed his eyes tightly. His limp gray hair had fallen over his face. Pigeon’s chalky body had been powerful in youth; now it sagged, and his round stomach heaved in and out as he worked to control his breathing.

Christopher put his briefcase on the table.
“Buonasera,
Don Franco,” he said.

Pigeon did not open his eyes. Christopher turned off the overhead lights. Now only the table lamp, fitted with a brilliant photographic bulb, was burning. Christopher stood behind the lamp in the shadows. He removed a large hypodermic syringe from the leather case, and holding his hands in the light, filled it from an ampule of yellow liquid. He laid the syringe on a white towel. Then he focused the lamp on Pigeon’s face. His eyes were open, and he stared wildly at the syringe.

“This is a very unhealthy place, Don Franco,” Christopher said, continuing to speak Italian.

Frankie Pigeon tried to speak and failed; he closed his eyes, concentrated, and tried again. “You get nothing from me,” he said in English.

“We have time,” Christopher said. “You must be very cold.”

He put a chair in the center of the room, in front of the table, and untied Pigeon’s hands. Pigeon fell to the floor, shuddering. Christopher lifted him and helped him into the bathrobe. “Please sit down,” he said. He went back to the table and adjusted the light so that it shone on Pigeon’s haggard features, but did not altogether blind him. Pigeon sat with one flaccid leg wrapped around the other; his body shook and he wedged his hands between his crossed legs.

“I want you to understand your situation,” Christopher said. “It’s possible for you to remain in this room indefinitely. Conditions will not change, except to get worse. No one will find you.”

Pigeon had stopped trying to control his shivering. “They’ll find me,” he said, “and when they do, you bastard. . . .”

“No. You can forget about being rescued. It’s not realistic. Your men have no chance. You saw what happened in Calabria, within earshot of your house.”

Pigeon tried to speak again. It was difficult for him—his mouth opened and no voice came out. When finally he was able to utter sound, it was a high thin shriek; a beaded string of phlegm leaped out of his throat and fell through the beam of light.

“Who?”
he screamed.

Christopher didn’t answer. He waited until Pigeon had calmed a little before he touched the hypodermic with the tip of a finger. As he spoke to Pigeon, he tapped the glass barrel of the syringe with his fingernail.

“This hypodermic is filled with the live bacteria of Hansen’s disease,” Christopher said. “I wonder what you know about Hansen’s disease.”

Frankie Pigeon’s eyes were fixed on the syringe and on Christopher’s rhythmically tapping finger.

“Hansen’s disease is caused by the Mycobacterium
leprae,”
Christopher said, “which is why it’s more usually called leprosy. It’s a peculiar disease. The incubation period varies greatly Sometimes the disease develops in a year or two after infection, but sometimes fifteen or even twenty years can pass before any symptoms appear. All that time, the germ works inside the body. It takes various forms. The neural form may be the worst —lesions develop on the central nervous system. It causes madness, loss of sexual potency, loss of bowel control, and so on. It can paralyze the lungs or eat them away. Other forms cause the fingers, the nose, the toes—even whole legs and arms—to rot. Parts of the victim’s body just fall off. Lepers have a strong, disagreeable odor. There is no cure once the disease establishes itself.”

Pigeon pushed back his chair, the legs moving silently over the wet floor. He stood up, crouching with one hand on the back of the chair to keep himself from falling.

“Get away from me,” he cried.

Christopher covered the syringe with a corner of the towel. “I want some information,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your organization. There’s no question of your betraying your own people—I’ve no interest in them or their activities.”

Now that the syringe was out of sight, Pigeon was less agitated. But when he spoke, he stammered and his voice broke. He was not used to being powerless. “Those guys in the masks,” he said. “They don’t even know who I am.”

“No, they don’t. Here, Mr. Pigeon, you’re nobody.”

“They took fucking pictures of me!”

“Yes, those were their orders. We’ll keep the photographs. We may want to mail them to the United States, to certain of your friends.”

“Do that, and they’ll come after you.”

“Will they? I thought they’d be more likely to ask you if you talked, and what you talked about.”

“I want those pictures,” Pigeon said. “I’m not having any goddamn pictures of me with no clothes on and. . . .” He saw his fouled legs and turned his head aside, biting his lip like a shamed child.

“Let me tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “In 1956 you received a retainer of one hundred thousand dollars from a short bald man with a foreign accent who told you his name was Blanchard. You didn’t hear from Blanchard again until the last week in November of this year. You then received a cable from Naples stating that your Uncle Giuseppe had died. Following the plan Blanchard had given you seven years before, you went to an apartment on Cedar Street in Chicago, and received instructions for a job. You carried out the job. On November 25, two of your men, Anthony Rugged and Ronald Prince, went to the bank of Dolder und Co. in Zurich, and collected a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. They identified themselves with the code name
tortora,
which, as you know, means ‘pigeon’ in English.”

“You know so much, tell me what the job was,” Pigeon said.

Christopher picked up the hypodermic and depressed the plunger, so that a thin stream of the yellow serum squirted out of the needle and through the light. “That’s what you’re going to tell me,” he said.

“You can kill me!”

“No. I give you my word I won’t do that. Not with a gun or a knife, or anything quick.”

The trembling of Pigeon’s body intensified. He stared into the light, then turned his whole body away from its glare. He swallowed noisily. When at last he was able to speak, he did so in a rapid soprano voice, like a
castrato.

Christopher had to ask him only two or three questions. When Pigeon was done, Christopher left the room, taking the hypodermic with him, and the spool of tape on which he had recorded Pigeon’s hysterical spillage of what he had done to earn Klimenko’s money.

Upstairs, Christopher typed out a summary of Pigeon’s statement on a single sheet of foolscap. When he was finished, he removed the ribbon from the typewriter and put the spools in his pocket; on his way back to the interrogation room, he dropped the ribbon into the red coals of the furnace and watched it burn.

Frankie Pigeon sat where Christopher had left him, his bloodless legs intertwined, his hands gripping the seat of the folding chair. Christopher put the sheet of foolscap on the table and told Pigeon to read it. He ran his empty eyes over the paper.

“Sign it, and give me your right hand,” Christopher said. He inked each of Pigeon’s limp fingers and rolled them over the paper, so that he had a full set of prints to authenticate the signature that ran drunkenly down the page.

He left Pigeon staring at his own hand, blackened by the ink. He still wore a large diamond on his small finger.

4

In the kitchen Glavanis and Eycken were playing piquet with fierce concentration. When they finished the hand, Christopher gave them their pay.

“Give the man this injection,” Christopher said, handing Glavanis the hypodermic. “He’ll be terrified, so you’ll have to subdue him.”

“What is it?”

“It’ll knock him out for eight hours or so, it’s harmless. He thinks it’s leprosy germs. Dress him, and blindfold and gag him. Drive north on the Via Flaminia and drop him in a field, away from the main roads, at least three hundred kilometers from Rome. Then turn in the car at Auto Maggiore in Milan and leave the country.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Glavanis said. “He did see our faces.”

“He won’t want to see them again. He has no idea where he is now, or where to look for you.”

“All the same, Paul—if you have what you want.. . .”

“There’s an operational reason why he must stay alive.”

Glavanis rested his brown eyes, which were as steady and as liquid as those of a young bride, on Christopher for a moment, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You always have a reason to let them live,” he said. “One day you’ll wish you hadn’t been so merciful.”

Christopher shook hands with both men. He stared at Eycken’s thumbless hands, and looked questioningly at Glavanis.

“It’s all right,” Glavanis said. “Eycken wore rubber gloves all the time we were downstairs.”

As soon as he heard the car go down the drive, Christopher put the villa in order. Glavanis and Eycken had left nothing behind but fingerprints; he removed those with furniture polish and a cloth. He photographed Pigeon’s confession and developed the film.

Before he left, he entered the interrogation room again. He recalled Frankie Pigeon’s clogged treble voice, answering the final questions.

“What did Ruby say when you gave him the contract?”

“Nothing. He was overjoyed to hit that faggot.”

“Didn’t he ask for money?”

“What did Jack want with money?” Pigeon had asked. “He thought he was going to get the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

1

Christopher knew where Alvaro Urpi prayed. Each morning Urpi walked down the Tiber, crossed the river on the Ponte Palatino, and spent the first three hours after sunrise on his knees in the church of Saint Sabina. Urpi liked the place because it was named for a saint who was converted to Christianity by her slave, because it was almost barren of decoration, with great white columns standing in its nave—and because one could look through a peephole into a hidden garden and see an orange tree grown from the seeds of a tree planted seven hundred years before by Saint Dominic, a Spaniard who had the mind of a Moor, as Urpi had the mind of a Chinese.

Christopher waited at the back of the church while a young priest said Mass and Urpi finished his prayers. Christopher went with him to look at the orange tree and listen to the story again. “Dominic has a better immortality than stone,” Urpi said, and blushed, made shy by the poetry of his thought.

They went back to the Vatican together; Urpi walked like a Chinese, in small rapid steps with his arms held stiff at his sides and his eyes on the pavement. He showed Christopher his translation of Yu Lung’s horoscopes. Christopher needed some help with the Latin: Urpi moved a finger from Yu Lung’s ideograms to his own crowded handwriting, his eyes darting like a bird’s from the material to Christopher’s face as he explained the difficulties of the translations.

“As I said, it’s obscure, metaphorical,” Urpi said. “But it’s plain that five men are involved. Three of them—two brothers and a foreign enemy—are marked for death. Also a woman who appears to be a virgin, and who has a relationship to three of the men. Her horoscope has to do with a journey and a message.”

“Can you construe her destination and the message?” Christopher asked.

“Oh yes. That part is plain enough.”

“And you’re certain of the identities of the persons who commissioned the horoscopes?”

Urpi nodded, reading out the Latin phrases. He pronounced very clearly. Christopher cleared his mind, memorizing what Urpi told him.

Urpi gathered together Yu Lung’s manuscript and his Latin text and handed them to Christopher. “What is being discussed in these horoscopes is murder,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Strange that they should express the crime in such beautiful language,” Urpi said.

Before he left Rome, Christopher again drove past his apartment. The Truong toe’s men were still there, but they had got under cover; they sat together in the Citroën, two men asleep and the other on watch. The man awake was as youthful as Luong, with a lock of hair like Luong’s falling into his eyes. He bent his head toward a cupped match and lit his cigarette as Christopher drove by. There was nothing to be done about the Vietnamese: they broke no law as they waited for the opportunity to kill Christopher or kidnap Molly. He was glad to have them there, watching his empty flat, waiting for him to come back.

It was not yet full daylight when he reached the autostrada and turned north. There was a moon in the western sky and one of the planets shone beyond it. The road behind Christopher was clear. Only a few big trucks were moving at that time of day. No living soul knew exactly where he was, or where he was going.