The Tears of Autumn (6 page)

“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.”

4

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.

5

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.

Christopher paid the impassive waiter and walked away. The unlighted streets were deserted except for an occasional Congolese, asleep in the dirt. By day, the concrete buildings, painted white or rose or pale blue like the Belgian sky, showed tropical sores and lesions. Now they were dark shapes, too geometrical to be natural, but emitting no more light than the forest that lay a few hundred yards away. Christopher walked in the middle of the street, to avoid the doorways. When he looked back, he saw the faint reflection of the fire in the high branches of the tree by the café.

It was too dark to see the river, but he could hear it. A power launch passed, showing no lights, and Christopher heard the canoes rattling at their moorings in its wake. He walked along the bank until he saw the outlines of a river steamer; it had once been white and its blunt stern was clearly visible against the sky. Christopher, leaning against a piling, waited until he saw a tall man go aboard the steamer. Then Christopher climbed the gangplank, crossed the deck, and went down a ladder into the interior of the boat. A candle burned in a stateroom at the end of a narrow gangway, and Christopher walked toward its nervous light. He heard Nsango behind him, and stopped.

“My friend,” Nsango said.

Christopher turned around. The black, wearing the khaki shorts and torn singlet of a workman, embraced him. He took Christopher’s hand in his own dry fingers and led him to the stateroom.

“I’m sorry to make you wait,” Nsango said. “Did you come every night?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “Four times, but I never saw the light.”

Nsango laughed. “I was in the bush. I was waiting, too. But I knew you would come back tonight. I saw you in the café, reading your book.”

“Yes, I saw you across the boulevard.”

“Ah, what eyes!” Nsango spoke rapid French at the back of his throat, with many extra
m
sounds as if his own language struggled to reveal itself. “Well, what news?”

“The Congolese think you’re in Angola. Someone told the Portuguese you were camping along the frontier, and they told the police.”

“Are they looking for me there?”

“They’re watching the crossing points.”

“Good. I’ll go the other way.” He laughed again.

“How did you explain this journey?”

“I told them in the camp that political organization was needed in some villages I know about. They probably think I have a woman somewhere.”

“What’s going on in Katanga?” Christopher asked.

“It’s very quiet, my friend. I lose five or six men a week— they go back to their villages.”

“Do you tell them to go?”

“Yes, they’ll wait for me there. They don’t like the new foreigners.”

“There are new foreigners?”

“Yes, the Chinese have all gone away. They took their aspirin that made men bulletproof with them. But now we have others—some of them are black men.”

“Stop talking like a native, Nsango. Who are they?”

Nsango guffawed. “They fell from the sky on great white leaves, master. Oh, we were frightened!”

Christopher had seen this man, who had the best political brain in black Africa, trembling in fear because he believed a spirit had entered his body as he slept; he felt it devouring his liver like a maggot. Christopher had brought a juju man from the Ivory Coast and he removed the spirit, sending it into the body of the man who had cursed Nsango. Christopher had given the juju man fifty ounces of gold for his work. He and Nsango had used the sorcerer again to carry out an operation they hoped would result in Nsango’s becoming, in time, the prime minister of his country. They failed, and Nsango had gone back into the forest. Christopher knew he would never come out again, and Nsango, despite his diploma from the Sorbonne and his name that was known throughout the world, still feared enchantment and blamed it for his bad luck. Nsango was not, however, afraid of foreigners.

“They’re Cubans,” he told Christopher. “Three blacks, four whites.” He removed a stained envelope from the pocket of his shorts and handed it over. Inside was a roll of film and a sheet of paper on which the names the Cubans used were written in Nsango’s neat missionary-school hand.

“When did they come?” Christopher asked.

“Maybe a month ago. First there was this one.” Nsango pointed at the sheet of paper. “Manuel. He speaks good French. Then the others a few days afterward.”

“How did they find you?”

“I suppose the Chinese told them.”

“What do they want?”

“A revolution. They talk even more than the Chinese—we have meetings all the time. The men like it, there’s a lot of beer, and they brought some very good guns.”

“How many?”

“Ah, my friend, not so many. Some mortars. Not enough ammunition.”

“Are they issuing the weapons to your men?”

“No, they’re like the Chinese were at first. We must make our own weapons to make our own revolution. Spears and stones—Mao’s teachings. We killed a South African for them— the capitalists have that mercenary camp still outside Elisabeth-ville. We ambushed a jeep, the whites were drunk. One got away—he had a machine pistol, so we didn’t chase him.”

“Are you going back?”

“Yes, I’m the leader. We need the guns. The Cubans won’t stay forever.”

“Nsango, I think you’re taking a chance.”

“It’s better than prison. What do they say about me in the papers?”

“In Léopoldville, nothing. But I see your name written on walls all over town: everyone believes you’re alive. In Brussels, that your movement still is dangerous, and that you are more so.

“What would you do about these Cubans?”

“Let them stay,” Christopher said. “It’s better to have someone you know than to wait for someone you don’t know to show up.”

Nsango picked up the candle and held it next to Christopher’s face so that he could watch his expression as he answered the question Nsango always asked.

“You still think I have no chance?”

“I don’t say that. I can’t help you—you have the wrong allies.”

“But if, after all, I win, you’ll be my friend, and your friends will expect me to remember past favors?”

“That’s what they’ll expect,” Christopher said. “They’re not always realistic.”

“We’ll see. When will you come back?”

“I don’t know. If you want to see me, send a postcard. The one with the elephants if it’s urgent. I’ll use a postcard with a picture of Pope John. I’ll come to Elisabethville on the sixth day after the postmark, ten o’clock at night. I don’t think you should come to Léopoldville again—at least, not to meet me.”

Christopher took a key out of his pocket and gave it to Nsango. “Deposit box 217, Banque de Haute Katanga, Elisabethville,” he said. “In case you need it, there’s a ticket to Algiers, a thousand dollars, and a passport with a visa for Algeria. It’s a Camerounian passport, so don’t go there.”

“What good would I be to the movement, or to you, in Algiers?” Nsango said. “The old soldiers’ home for revolutionaries.”

“What good would you be dead?” Christopher asked.

6

Trevor Hitchcock knocked on the door of Christopher’s hotel room at six in the morning. He was the son of missionaries, and he had spent his childhood in the Congo; he worked in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and drank through the night. His Presbyterian father had taught him to make no concessions to the climate and Hitchcock never went out in the sun without a coat and a tie and a Panama hat.

“Father made more converts than anyone in Kasai province,” Hitchcock once told Christopher. “He thanked God for smiling on the Presbyterians. Then he learned, after about five years, that it was because he sweated like a hog butcher in his black suits and his celluloid collars. The Congolese thought he smelled like a human being—the other missionaries, who wore shorts and took baths, smelled dead to them. That’s what whites are called in the Lingala language—the dead.”

Hitchcock read the cable Christopher had drafted in longhand after his meeting with Nsango. “What’s the film?” he asked.

“As I said in the cable, pictures of the Cubans. Also photographs of some of their documents.”

“Spendthrift took those?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “I gave him a camera in the old days.”

“Spendthrift” was Nsango’s pseudonym; Hitchcock was a careful professional who believed even the Congolese might have microphones planted in hotel rooms.

“I’ll get this off this morning,” Hitchcock said. “The Cubans are news to me. Do you believe it?”

“Well, there are the photographs. And Spendthrift has never lied to us, despite our lack of reciprocity in that department.”

“You really thought we should have backed him all the way, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He was better than any of the alternatives.”

“Wrong tribe. Wrong time.”

“He didn’t take it personally,” Christopher said. “He believes he’s going to be running this country someday, and so do a lot of other people. His relationship with me is political money in the bank.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Hitchcock said. “You recoil in horror from giving any of these people guns—that’s the main reason Spendthrift struck out in ‘61. But if the world gets blown up, the bomb will be made with uranium and cobalt dug out of the Shinkolobwe by some black living in the Bronze Age.”

“It won’t be Spendthrift who drops the bomb.”

“Or gets blown up by it. How were things in Washington?”

“Ecstatic,” Christopher said. “The crisis managers are flying out to Saigon by the hundreds.”

“Terrific. I hope they take along a few of the ones we’ve got here. What time does your plane go?”

“Ten o’clock tonight.”

“Do you want to come out to the house for dinner?” Hitchcock asked. “I’ll send your scoop, manage a crisis or two, and pick you up at six.”

Hitchcock lived on the outskirts of Léopoldville in a large stucco house that still belonged to a Belgian trader. The Belgian fled to Brussels after Lumumba’s troops raped his wife during the mutiny in 1960. Hitchcock’s houseboys, three stocky men who laughed hysterically when he berated them in Lingala, were the same ones who had worked for the Belgian and opened the door to the drunken troops. One of the boys came into the darkened living room with a bottle of gin on a silver tray. He put it down and trotted across the tile floor, leaving the sweaty prints of his bare feet behind him. “Ice, glasses, tonic water, limes!” Hitchcock screamed. “We don’t drink the stuff out of the bottle, Antoine!”

Hitchcock’s wife flinched at the boy’s wild laugh. She was a frail woman with thinning gray hair; as Christopher watched her, she pulled the cloth of her dress away from her body and placed a wadded Kleenex between her breasts. “It’s the constant perspiration, it drives you mad,” she said. Her damp skin had a reddish shine, as though discontent had burned away its outer layers.