The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [2]
“Luong is in Bangkok, waiting to meet me. I can tell him to stay there.”
“What good would that do? Nhu told us he was going to grab Luong because he wanted to see if we’d warn him. If we do, Nhu will know we’ve been running Luong. We don’t need that. We have enough trouble with the bastard without giving him proof that Luong and that noisy little political party of his have an American case officer.”
“They’ll kill him,” Christopher said.
“They’ll kill him in Bangkok if they have to. We can’t salvage him without blowing you and the whole political operation. One agent isn’t worth it.”
“Do me a favor, will you? Call him by his name. He’s not an abstraction. He’s five feet six inches tall, twenty-nine years old, married, three children, a university graduate. For three years he’s done everything he’s been asked to do. We got him into this.”
“All right, so he’s flesh and blood,” Wolkowicz said. “He proved that when he struck out in Vientiane last month.”
“He’s not supposed to be an FI operator. He’s paid to act, not to steal information. Luong was not the only one who couldn’t find out what Do Minh Kha was doing in Vientiane in September.”
“Action is what I wanted from Luong. He’s supposed to be a boyhood chum of Do’s. He should have walked in on him, like I suggested.”
“Barney, Do would have shot him. He’s a chief of section of the North Vietnamese intelligence service. Do you think he doesn’t know who Luong works for?”
“I don’t know what Do knows,” Wolkowicz said. “I know Luong struck out on me.”
“Luong reported what he saw—Do and the girl, constantly together for three days. At least he brought you back photographs.”
“With no identification of the girl. Very useful.”
Wolkowicz called for the check. They were sitting at a table at the Cercle Sportif. “Do you notice anything unusual about that girl in the white bikini?” he asked.
Christopher looked at a French girl who had just pulled herself out of the pool. She was wringing the water out of her long bleached hair, and her body curved like a dancer’s. “No,” he said.
“She has no navel. Look again.”
It was true. The girl’s belly was smooth except for a thin white surgical scar that ran through her tan into the waist of her bathing suit.
“She had an umbilical hernia,” said Wolkowicz, “so she asked them to remove it when she had a cesarean. The clever Vietnamese just removed her belly button altogether.”
The waiter went away with the signed chit.
“Christopher,” said Wolkowicz, “you’re a conscientious officer, everybody knows that. But Luong is not your child. He’s an agent. Go to Bangkok. Meet him. Give him his pay. Wipe his eyes. But leave well enough alone.”
“You mean let Nhu have him.”
“Nhu may not live forever,” said Wolkowicz.
On the airplane in Bangkok, a stewardess handed Christopher a hot towel. Stewardesses disliked him. He had no sexual thoughts about them; combed and odorless, in their uniforms, they seemed as artificial as airline food and drink. He had been in nine countries in twenty days, flying in and out of climates and time zones, changing languages and his name at each landing. His appetites and his emotions were suspended.
The jet turned over the city. Sunlight flashed on a pagoda that quivered on the brown plain like a column of crystal; Christopher knew that the pagoda was faced with broken blue china saucers, smashed in the hold of an English sailing ship by a storm a century before. He stood up when the seat-belt warning went out and removed his jacket. The jacket was wool because he was flying into a cold climate, and it was clammy with sweat. It was the last day of October, 1963, and it would be chilly in Paris, where he was going to make his report.
Christopher organized his mind, sorting out what he had learned and what he had done in the past twenty days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl who had no navel beside the pool in Saigon, the brown girl he had bought in Bangkok for Luong, and finally the girl in Rome who was waiting with his book of poems to make love to him.
Desire is not a