The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [12]
When Christopher was away, she would ride through Rome on summer nights in his convertible with the top down. Finally, while he was in Africa, she met an Italian actor. After Christopher came back, she kept up the affair. She found other lovers. She went back to the actor. She would come home to Christopher, still wet, and want to make love. Christopher knew the Italian—he took Dexedrine and it made him violent. He was a Maoist who hated America; Cathy, who looked like a girl in an American film, was something he wanted to spoil.
Finally Cathy decided to break off with the actor. She had left some things at his apartment, dresses, jewelry, books. When she arrived, in the afternoon, she found him waiting with a dozen of his friends, all Italian except for a couple of Scandinavian girls. They were drinking spumante. The actor pulled Cathy into the apartment and threw her into the center of the living room. He had arranged the furniture so that the chairs were all around the walls, like a theater in the round. While his friends watched, the actor beat her with his fists. He punched her breasts, smashed her face. It went on for a long time—her nose and the bones in her cheeks were broken, some of her teeth were knocked out.
Cathy went downstairs to a coffee bar and called Christopher. When he got to her, her face was a mass of blood. Her hair was soaked with blood. She had vomited on her clothes. She wore only one shoe. Christopher took her to the hospital. The car was open. “Put up the top,” she kept saying, “put up the top.”
“I see,” Molly said.
“Do you? Outside the hospital, I kissed her mouth. She was blinded by blood. I was enough like her by then that I would have pulled off her clothes right there, but they came out with a stretcher.”
2
That evening, seated at Doney’s while the crowd drifted by on the Via Veneto, they read the papers. Christopher saw, for the first time, photographs of the dead bodies of the Ngo brothers. Diem’s corpse was closer to the camera, and a broad streak of blood ran from the wound in his temple over his cheek.
“What happens to your piece on Diem now?” Molly asked.
“I don’t know. I cabled the magazine. They may want a fix, or they may not run it. They wanted something unflattering, but that may not seem appropriate to them now.”
“You saw him?”
“Only for a few minutes. It’s odd, you know, but no one knows anything about him, really. He was sealed up in his family, never talked to strangers. All the stuff about him in the papers was science fiction.”
Piero Cremona, wearing a perfectly pressed tan suit and a silk scarf around his neck, came out of the crowd, lifting his hand in greeting.
“The famous American correspondent is back from— where was it this time, Paul?”
Christopher shook hands. “How’s the world’s best-dressed Communist?” he said.
Cremona ran the fingernails of both hands down the breast of his jacket, making the silk whistle. “The true revolutionary blends into his environment,” Cremona said. “In the jungles of Vietnam, I would wear the branches of trees. Here, this is my camouflage.”
Cremona wrote political articles for L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. He signed his pieces with the nom de guerre he had used as a partisan; everyone but the police had forgotten the name Cremona was born with. Christopher avoided American reporters, and Americans generally, in Rome, but he had got to know a lot of Italians when he was learning the language. He never reported on them or carried out any intelligence activities in Italy; it was his rule never to operate in the country where he lived.
Cremona sat down with Christopher and Molly. He tapped the newspaper photograph of the dead Vietnamese. “The imperialist eagle devours its young, eh?” he said.
“Is that the line this week, Piero?”
“It’s the obvious truth, Paul. Read my piece tomorrow. Brilliant. I’ve just come from the typewriter.”
“Why is it so obvious? Corriere della