The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [19]
“Spendthrift took those?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “I gave him a camera in the old days.”
“Spendthrift” was Nsango’s pseudonym; Hitchcock was a careful professional who believed even the Congolese might have microphones planted in hotel rooms.
“I’ll get this off this morning,” Hitchcock said. “The Cubans are news to me. Do you believe it?”
“Well, there are the photographs. And Spendthrift has never lied to us, despite our lack of reciprocity in that department.”
“You really thought we should have backed him all the way, didn’t you?”
“Yes. He was better than any of the alternatives.”
“Wrong tribe. Wrong time.”
“He didn’t take it personally,” Christopher said. “He believes he’s going to be running this country someday, and so do a lot of other people. His relationship with me is political money in the bank.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Hitchcock said. “You recoil in horror from giving any of these people guns—that’s the main reason Spendthrift struck out in ‘61. But if the world gets blown up, the bomb will be made with uranium and cobalt dug out of the Shinkolobwe by some black living in the Bronze Age.”
“It won’t be Spendthrift who drops the bomb.”
“Or gets blown up by it. How were things in Washington?”
“Ecstatic,” Christopher said. “The crisis managers are flying out to Saigon by the hundreds.”
“Terrific. I hope they take along a few of the ones we’ve got here. What time does your plane go?”
“Ten o’clock tonight.”
“Do you want to come out to the house for dinner?” Hitchcock asked. “I’ll send your scoop, manage a crisis or two, and pick you up at six.”
Hitchcock lived on the outskirts of Léopoldville in a large stucco house that still belonged to a Belgian trader. The Belgian fled to Brussels after Lumumba’s troops raped his wife during the mutiny in 1960. Hitchcock’s houseboys, three stocky men who laughed hysterically when he berated them in Lingala, were the same ones who had worked for the Belgian and opened the door to the drunken troops. One of the boys came into the darkened living room with a bottle of gin on a silver tray. He put it down and trotted across the tile floor, leaving the sweaty prints of his bare feet behind him. “Ice, glasses, tonic water, limes!” Hitchcock screamed. “We don’t drink the stuff out of the bottle, Antoine!”
Hitchcock’s wife flinched at the boy’s wild laugh. She was a frail woman with thinning gray hair; as Christopher watched her, she pulled the cloth of her dress away from her body and placed a wadded Kleenex between her breasts. “It’s the constant perspiration, it drives you mad,” she said. Her damp skin had a reddish shine, as though discontent had burned away its outer layers.
Hitchcock drank six glasses of gin and tonic before dinner. The boys served cold soup and a large grilled river fish whose muddy flesh was slightly bloody along the spine. “Do you enjoy uncooked food, Paul?” Theresa Hitchcock asked. “The boys are defeated by the electric stove. We’re all defeated.” She smiled brightly and pushed her limp hair away from her forehead. “You’ll excuse me? I have a headache.” She went up the stairs.
“I’m sending her home,” Hitchcock said. “She can’t cope here—I don’t know who can. My mother went mad as a hatter, you know. The old man told her to pray, but she thought the natives were going to gang her at any moment. Actually, they think white women are repulsive—like fish bellies.”
Hitchcock had escaped from God and the Congo when he was eighteen, on the last freighter to cross the southern Atlantic before the Germans began to torpedo Belgian ships. His parents were buried in Kasai, in the red dirt of their churchyard. Hitchcock had studied German and Russian. “My idea,” he told Christopher, “was to spend my life in cold climates. Whoever would have thought the Congo would become one of the hinges of American foreign policy? I grew up thinking uranium was good for curing cancer.”
In his mind, Hitchcock still lived in cold climates. He sat at the table with the remains of the fish congealing on his plate, and sweat blackening the armpits