The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [100]
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.
Somewhere between the autostrada and the coast, Frankie Pigeon would be lying in a field. In the interrogation room, in the instant before he had begun to talk, Pigeon had risen from his chair, clasped his hands in front of his heart, and bent his knees as if he would fall to the floor in prayer unless someone supported him. He hadn’t been begging for his life: he knew he wouldn’t be killed. He wanted to be let go, so that he could return to the idea of himself he’d had before Eycken and Glavanis put the rubber siphon down his throat. Christopher, looking at his own hand on the steering wheel, had a quick vivid mental image of Eycken’s thumbless hands. After that he didn’t think of Pigeon again. “Pigeon does what he does for money,” Klimenko had said. “After you pay a man like that, you don’t owe him anything more.”
In Orvieto Christopher found a coffee bar just opening and sat by the window drinking caffè latte, alone with the teen-aged boy who worked the early shift. At eight o’clock the street filled up with Italians, as though the town had been turned upside down like a sack and its people spilled into the morning. Once, after a week in Switzerland and a drive through the night over the Saint Bernard, he and Molly had arrived at the same time of day in Torino. When she saw the Italians again, shouting and gesticulating, Molly had leaped up, spread her arms as if to embrace them, and cried, “The human race!”
Christopher walked through the crowd to the post office and mailed Pigeon’s confession and Dieter Dimpel’s photographs and Yu Lung’s horoscopes to himself in care of general delivery, Washington. The envelope would arrive by registered airmail in four days’ time.
He had put photocopies of all the evidence in an envelope addressed to Patchen’s post office box in Alexandria. After the clerk put stamps on this package, Christopher reached across the counter and touched his hand.
“Don’t cancel the stamps on that one,” he said. “I want it back.”
The clerk shrugged. “You’ll waste the postage.”
“That’s all right, I’ll arrange it another way.”
Outside the town, Christopher stopped the car and burned the envelope and its contents, grinding the ashes into the earth with the heel of his shoe.
It was the act of a romantic. Christopher laughed aloud at himself. But he was no longer under discipline; the information belonged to him and to the people from whom he had stolen it. Unlike Frankie Pigeon, the Truong toe was owed something: a sporting chance to stop Christopher from learning his last secret.
2
Christopher used the airport at Milan because it was less likely to be covered than the one in Rome. He turned in his rented car and bought a ticket for Salisbury. He used no special care: if he was being watched, there was no way in which he could avoid being seen. He carried one small bag containing a camera, a tape recorder, and the clothes he’d need.
He stopped at the newsstand and bought the Herald-Tribune and a paperback book. Nguyen Kim, wearing a coat with a fur collar, was standing behind him when he turned around.
“Hi, baby,” Kim said.
Christopher smiled and punched Kim lightly on the left side of the chest; Kim was carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster. Christopher put his hand into the pocket of his own raincoat and smiled again.
“Why