The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [23]
Christopher and Molly had been together in Siena for three days. Molly had chosen the hotel: the Palazzo Ravizza, built by some nobleman in the seventeenth century and now restored for romantic tourists. Molly loved the cold floors, the whitewashed walls, the carved black furniture, the curtained bed. She would not let him use the electricity; she bought candles in the town and they went to sleep with tongues of light all around them.
There was a dead garden behind the hotel; they ate breakfast there, wearing heavy sweaters under their coats. At night Molly’s breath was scented with the white truffles she’d had for supper. They dined at a restaurant where the waiter brought a shallow basket heaped with truffles to their table: he would hold them under Molly’s nose one after the other until she selected the one she wanted. They ate pasta with truffles, truffled chicken, truffle soup. “The taste penetrates the brain,” Molly said. “Even you are beginning to taste like a truffle, Paul.”
The night before, as they walked across the brown dish of the Piazza del Campo, Molly began to sing in the dark. “Come le Rose”: this had been her favorite song ever since she had heard a street musician sing it at the table of an American couple at a sidewalk restaurant in Rome; the wife, gray-haired and wrinkled, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in Italy, had wept with happiness, though she could not understand the words.
When Molly began to sing, Christopher let go of her hand and stopped where he stood. She walked onward a few steps, then turned and ceased singing in the middle of a phrase. She smiled and lifted a hand in apology. “Am I making too much racket?” she asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just realized that I love you.”
Molly stood absolutely still, the smile still on her lips, her hand still raised, the sleeve of her coat pulled away from the bare skin of her wrist.
“Paul,” she said, whispering as though she thought a whisper might make him understand her better. “Paul, it’s all right to be happy.”
In the morning, at the open window, Christopher remembered the look and sound of her and he realized, with a thrill of surprise, that he wanted his own life to continue.
2
They had lost a week in Rome before going to Siena. When he reached his apartment on the day after Kennedy’s assassination, after the long taxi ride from the airport, he found his telephone ringing. It was Tom Webster; he made no effort to deceive the recording devices that monitored international calls out of France.
“I don’t know what you can do about this in Rome,” Webster said. “But there’s total priority on this problem. This Oswald was a defector to the Soviet Union. He was in Russia from 1959 until June, 1962. The Russians are going crazy. They expect SAC over Moscow any minute. They keep telling everyone they didn’t do it.”
“I believe them,” Christopher said. “Why would they?”
“I know. But it’s a possibility that has to be considered. Headquarters wants maximum information from every point in the world. Who do you know down there, or anywhere, who might know something about this rotten bastard?”
“You want me to tell you over the phone?”
“Yes. Fuck it.”
“You know all the names. There’s no one in this town, except a couple of people who’d just be guessing.”
“What about that journalist?”
“He’d just repeat the line, whatever it is. I can’t believe they’d do it, Tom. Not with a man like Oswald. If I were the Russians, I’d think it was an attempt to put the blame on them. It might be.”
“Let them worry about