The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [0]
AUTUMN
ALSO BY CHARLES MCCARRY
Old Boys
The Miernik Dossier
The Secret Lovers
The Better Angels
The Last Supper
The Bride of the Wilderness
Second Sight
Shelley’s Heart
Lucky Bastard
CHARLES
MCCARRY
THE TEARS OF
AUTUMN
DUCKWORTH OVERLOOK
London and New York
This edition first published in UK in 2009 by
Duckworth Overlook
90-93 Cowcross Street
London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk
www.ducknet.co.uk
Copyright © 1974 by Charles McCarry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, as a photocopy, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Mobipocker ISBN: 978-0-7156-3961-7
ePub ISBN: 978-0-7156-4048-7
Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-0-7156-4049-4
For Mother
“To the living, one owes consideration;
to the dead, only the truth.”
—VOLTAIRE (Lettres Sur Oedipe)
“The Pentagon’s secret study of the Vietnam war discloses that President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. . . .
“‘Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitments’ in Vietnam, the study finds. . . .”
—THE PENTAGON PAPERS, as published by
The New York Times
THETEARSOF
AUTUMN
ONE
1
Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he had stopped writing poetry. Cathy, his wife, imagined that some earlier girl had poisoned his gift. She became hysterical in bed, believing that she could draw the secret out of his body and into her own, as venom is sucked from a snakebite. Christopher did not try to tell her the truth; she had no right to know it and could not have understood it. Cathy wanted nothing except a poem about herself. She wanted to watch their lovemaking in a sonnet. Christopher could not write it. She punished him with lovers and went back to America.
Now his new girl had found, in a flea market on the Ponte Sisto, the book of verses he had published fifteen years earlier, before he became a spy. Christopher read her letter in the Bangkok airport; her headlong sentences, covering the crisp airmail sheet, were like a photograph of her face. She made him smile. His flight was called over the loudspeaker in Thai; he waited for the English announcement before he moved toward the door, so that no one who might be watching him should guess that he understood the local language. His girl was waiting in Rome, changed by her discovery that he had once been able to describe what he felt.
Christopher walked across the scorched tarmac into the cool American airplane. He didn’t smile at the stewardess; his teeth were black with the charcoal he had chewed to cure his diarrhea. He had been traveling down the coast of Asia for three weeks, and he had spent the last night of his journey in Bangkok with a man he knew was going to die. The man was a Vietnamese named Luong. He thought Christopher’s name was Crawford.
They had met in the evening, when it was cool enough to remain outside, and walked together along the river while Luong delivered his report. Later, at a restaurant, the two of them ate Thai food, drank champagne, and talked in French about the future. Just before dawn, Christopher gave his agent money to pay for the girl, quiet and smooth as a child, who sat down beside Luong arid placed her small hand in his lap. Luong smiled, closed his eyes, and ran his fingertips over the flowered material of the girl’s dress and onto the skin of her neck. “No difference, silk and silk,” he said. “Can you loan me some baht?” Christopher handed Luong two dirty Thai bank notes. Luong, his face reddened by drink, started to leave with the girl, then came back to Christopher. “Is it true that these girls will dance on your spine before making love?” he asked. Christopher nodded and gave him