The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [10]
Peggy McKinney, flushed and smiling, took five small running steps toward the middle of the room. Planting her sharp heels in the carpet, legs apart, she said, “All together, folks— three cheers!”
Lifting her thin arm, bracelets jangling, she cried, “Hip, hip, hooray!” She repeated the cheer three times. No one joined in.
Sybille put a fist to her mouth; Tom Webster fumbled for a pocket comb and ran it through his hair.
“Paul,” Peggy cried, pointing a long finger. “Did you do this? I’ll bet you did, you sly spy—you were just out there in your false mustache.”
“No,” Christopher said. “I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did. I hope it really was the Vietnamese.”
“Oh, come on,” Peggy said.
“Peggy, I’m going to tell you once more. I didn’t know anything about this, and I want that to be clear to you. Don’t give me credit for murder, if you don’t mind.”
“Murder?” said Peggy. “Surgery.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sybille said. “Excuse me.” She left the room.
“Did I say something?” Peggy asked, touching Foley’s sleeve. “You’d think Sybille would be a little tougher, considering Tom’s line of work.”
“I guess Sybille’s got the idea that assassination is foul work,” Christopher said.
“Well, she can shed tears for both of us,” Peggy said. “What happened tonight—what’s the date? November 1, 1963—may show the world that the United States is going to take the initiative for a change. God knows they need to wake up to the reality of power in this world.”
“You think assassination is the way to wake them up?”
“Oh, Paul, come on—a petty Asiatic dictator and a secret-police chief.”
Christopher said, “Well, I have a plane to catch.”
Peggy shook hands with him. Foley stayed where he was, across the room, looking Christopher up and down as if he wanted to remember every detail of his appearance.
In the hall, Webster helped Christopher into his raincoat. “There’s one thing about this,” he said. “Luong should be all right.”
“Maybe,” Christopher said. “I don’t think they’d have had time to take him with them.”
Sybille came into the hall on tiptoe. She put her arms around Christopher. “Sorry I fled, love,” she said. “I’ve reached the age where everything reminds me of something that happened in the past. Wherever we go, it’s corpse after corpse. God, how I hate death and politics.”
Christopher walked up the shallow hill to the Etoile and found a taxi. The streets shone with rain. No one else was out walking. His mouth was dry with the metallic aftertaste of wine. He closed his eyes and tried not to hear the whine of the taxi’s tires: he did not want to use any of his senses. In his mind, as if it were a clear photograph projected on a screen, he saw Molly’s face, framed in russet hair and filled with belief. He had a sexual thought, his first in three weeks: it was a memory of the sun on her skin.
TWO
l
They were in Molly’s bed when she asked him about his poems. She lay on an elbow, her lips a little swollen, a strip of yellow sunlight running through her hair and across her cheek.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about your poetry?” Molly asked. “‘How odd,’ I thought, when I saw the traditional slim volume, all covered with coffee stains, lying in a barrow on the Ponte Sisto. ‘Here’s a chap with my lover’s name who writes poetry.’ Then I read them, and it was your voice, you infamous wretch.”
“I think I’d like dinner at Dal Bolognese tonight,” Christopher said.
“Ah, things of the flesh and things of the spirit. Such an odd combination in an American. I want to know what you were like when you wrote those verses.”
“Young.”
“What was she like, the girl in the sonnets?”
“Oh, Molly—that was fifteen years ago. I invented her.”
“Were you the man of her dreams?”
“She didn’t like me at all, and when the book was published she liked me even less. She said people would think she wasn’t a virgin.”
“But you loved her.”
“I was crazy about her.”
“What was her name? Tell.”
“Shirley.”
“Shirley? Jesus—didn’t that discourage you?”
“All right, what was the name of your first