The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [22]
“You must have loved your President.”
“I love my country,” Christopher said.
“It’s the same thing, perhaps.”
“Ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have said so, Father. Now I think you’re right.”
It was dawn when Christopher arrived in Rome. He bought the newspapers and read them in the deserted waiting room at Fiumicino while he waited for his call to Paris to go through. Sybille answered the Websters’ phone.
“Tom’s at the embassy,” she said. “They’ve been up all night. We all have.”
“Tell him I’m home if he wants me.”
“I will. God, Paul, how I’m feeling this!”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “The next time you see your friend Peggy, ask her what she thinks of assassination now.”
THREE
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Christopher saw the truth at dawn on the tenth day after the death of Kennedy. He woke shivering with cold and covered Molly with the blankets that had slipped to the floor during the night. A rooster crowed on the hillside above Siena, and as he watched from the open window of their hotel room, the town changed color in the growing light from burnt umber to rose.
In the first sunlight, two figures in black hurried across a field and into the edge of a woods. These Italian farnners going innocently to work triggered Christopher’s memory. Once again he saw men in black moving at a trot along the fringe of a forest, and an American in a flowered shirt lying in the weak morning light with the back of his head blown away.
The explanation struck like a bell in Christopher’s mind. He knew who had arranged the death of the President.
All his life, Christopher’s unconscious had released images, and he had learned to trust this trick of his mind. He often knew what men had done before they confessed their acts to him. (Cathy had thought him a fortune-teller. He had sometimes been able to see her lovers in her gestures—she would untie a scarf and pull the silk through her fist with a smile and Christopher would see her lifting her breast toward a stranger’s lips. “Did you see me, did you see me?” she would gasp. It excited Cathy to know she could walk through the gates of Christopher’s mind. She believed in dark powers.)
Christopher knew that this gift, which grew stronger as he grew older, was only a kind of logic. His senses received everything, he forgot nothing. Experience and information joined in the brain to provide explanations. It was like writing the first draft of a poem: words formed on the page without passing through the conscious mind.
Now, as he stood by the open window, he heard the plans being made for Kennedy’s murder. He saw the messages being passed, saw the look in the eyes of the conspirators, watched the tension flow out of their faces when news of success was brought to them. He felt their sense of triumph like an electrical charge between them. He himself had been a part of such scenes often enough. He wondered why it had taken him so long to realize the truth.
Christopher had seen many men die for politics, and he knew that politics was merely the excuse their murderers used. Men killed not for an idea but because they could not live with a personal injury. Now he made the simple connection between the injury and the President’s violent death. He understood the motive perfectly. He wondered if the murderers had foreseen that the death of Kennedy would drive the very memory of their existence out of the consciousness of the world.
Because they were who they were, the killers might have escaped suspicion forever. Christopher felt no anger, he wanted no revenge. The life he had led had burned away such feelings. He did not blame the murderers for what they had done. They had repaid an insult. He was only surprised that they had been able to do it so quickly. He would have expected them to be more patient, to choose a moment, such as Inauguration Day, when the humiliation would have been more intense. He supposed it had something to do with the stars; they would have horoscoped such an operation very carefully.
His mind worked tidily, sorting out the evidence he would need to illustrate the truth. Christopher hadn