The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [101]
Kim closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked very tired and less boyish. No expression showed on his face. He put his hands behind his back and they walked together past the long row of ticket counters.
“Just like the movies,” Kim said. “All I want is a chance to talk to you.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know your buddies out there burned down a church right after you left?”
“No.”
“Well, they did. It’s very upsetting. That and the picture you mailed to the Truong toe.”
They were in a passageway now. Christopher put his back to the wall and gazed at Kim.
“The question is this,” Kim said. “Are you going to stop fooling around, or not?”
“In time.”
“How much time do you think you’re going to have? You can’t work without traveling, Paul. You’ll leave traces.”
“Everyone leaves traces, even the Truong toe.”
“You’re not going to find traces of him. Even he doesn’t know all the details of what you’re after.”
“No, I don’t suppose he does.”
“He wanted me to tell you that,” Kim said, “and that’s extraordinary. He says nothing to anyone outside the family. The old man admires you, you know.”
Christopher waited. There was nothing he wanted to say.
“He asked me to give you a message,” Kim said. “He had nothing to do with what happened to Luong. He didn’t even know about it until after you left Saigon.”
“Tell him I know that.”
Kim came a step closer. “There’s more,” he said. “He knows you’re not worried about yourself. He accepts that. But your girl is something else. You have to worry about her.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. I know something now I didn’t know twenty minutes ago. I thought the girl was with you. Now I know she’s not. It simplifies the hunt.”
Kim paused, peering up into Christopher’s face, expecting him to reply. He frowned, as if exasperated with a stupid person, and went on.
“He told me to tell you this: there is no limit of time. You’d have to hide her for the rest of her life.”
“And what will he do with Nicole?”
“Protect her, as long as he lives. But he’s old, and when he dies, Nicole will be just a girl.” Kim, his hands still behind him, rose on his toes. “Believe me,” he said, “if you go on, if you don’t stop, Molly will have rice in her mouth.”
Christopher did not understand Kim’s words at first; then he remembered Luong in his coffin with a grain of rice between his lips: food for the Celestial Dog.
“Why threaten Molly?” he asked. “Why not kill me?”
“The old man thinks you’re not afraid of death.”
Christopher said, “What makes him think I’m afraid of guilt?”
Kim dropped his hands to his sides and walked away down the passageway, his unbuttoned overcoat billowing around his hurrying figure.
3
The flight to Salisbury, through Khartoum and Nairobi, took eleven hours. Americans were not required to have a visa to enter Rhodesia, and Christopher, white and blond, passed through customs unnoticed. He took a domestic flight to Lusaka and found the man he wanted in the bar of the Ridgeway Hotel that night. He had used him once before, and he would not have used him again if he had been in less of a hurry.
They left in darkness, but when the light plane rose to its cruising altitude they could see the sunrise. It wasn’t a long flight, along the brown Kafue River, above tan plains, and then, beyond the Congolese frontier, over a higher savannah that was the color of cheap green paint.
The pilot sideslipped between the trees and landed on a straight stretch of clay road. A herd of black and white goats, no larger than spaniels, bounded out of the way of the taxiing plane.
“That was Kipushi you saw up ahead,” the pilot said. “It’s an hour’s walk. You can catch a ride to Elisabethville from there. I daren’t land you closer without papers—they’re hateful bastards, the Baluba.”
THIRTEEN
1
The day went by slowly, fried by the morning sun, flogged by the afternoon rain. The war had not been over for long, and Elisabethville had the atmosphere of a city whose residents, driven out