The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [15]
“Foley ordered me to destroy any report you’d filed on that theory of Carson Wendell’s about the 1960 election,” Patchen said. “I told him there was no report.”
“Did he believe that?”
“Of course not. He’s got the idea we run a gossip mill. You may have to write something, so he can burn it in his ashtray.”
Christopher smiled.
“He wanted you fired,” Patchen said. “The Director put a handwritten note in your file explaining that you were responding to a direct request for information and had no political motive.”
“Does Foley believe that?”
“How could he? He lives on loyalty to one man, the President. He’s had no experience with coldhearted bastards like you. No one but us can see that information is just information. Foley thinks you’re an enemy if you don’t agree with everything the President does, one hundred percent.”
“So now everyone agrees with assassination?”
Patchen lifted his bad leg, using both hands, and crossed it over the other one. “Foley thought you were being emotional,” he said. “I could kick Tom Webster’s ass for bringing you two together.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Patchen hesitated. It was not like Christopher to ask for information he didn’t need to have.
“The outfit had nothing to do with what happened to Diem and Nhu,” he said.
“Foley didn’t seem very surprised at the news.”
“I can’t explain Foley, or what he does,” Patchen said.
Patchen opened his briefcase with a snap; he had had enough of this subject. He handed Christopher a newspaper clipping, the obituary of an Asian political figure who had died the week before of a heart attack.
“Did you see this? It isn’t often that an agent dies of natural causes.”
Christopher read the obituary. It said that the Asian would be remembered by history for three things: his autobiography, which made the world aware of the struggle of a whole people through the description of the author’s own life; the Manifesto of 1955, which had influenced political thought and action throughout the Third World; and the statesman’s success in driving Communists out of the political life of his country.
“Not even a chuckle?” Patchen asked.
Christopher shook his head. It was a convention that agents, even after they were dead, were called by their code names, never by their own. The Asian’s pseudonym had been “Ripsaw.”
“How much of Ripsaw’s autobiography actually happened in his life?” Patchen asked.
“Most of the anecdotes were true as he told them to me. I just put in the parts where he had deep, deep thoughts. The Manifesto of 1955 I wrote on a plane, going down from Japan. It was the universal text—I’d done things like it before for some of the Africans. There just happened to be a guy from the Times in-country when Ripsaw issued it, so it got publicity.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny, the way the Times is always reporting on you, and it doesn’t know you exist?”
“That’s what newspapers are for.”
“Yes, to explain the real world.”
“There is no real world, David.”
Patchen smiled at the irony. He took back the clipping and closed his briefcase. He sat for a long moment with his good eye closed and a hand over the other one, sipping from his glass of whiskey. He took his hand away from his face and stared at Christopher.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I got out your file and read it; you’ve been through a lot in twelve years. You’re losing your humor, Paul. I’ve seen it happen to others who stay in the field too long, do too much.”
“Seen what happen?”
“Professional fatigue. I believe, in the case of Christians, it’s called