The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [25]
“I’m here with Lê Xuan,” he said. “Madame Nhu to you. I’m handling the press for her. It’s like handling a kissing contest for a leper.”
“How did you land that job?”
“I came out with the Nhu children when they left the country. That was one of the daughters I was just talking to.”
Kim pointed at the girl. She walked through the crowd with two Vietnamese men and got into a curtained limousine. “Don’t try anything,” Kim said. “Those guys have got guns.”
He told Christopher he had been looking for him for days and asked if Christopher was free for lunch. Molly was waiting in a restaurant. Christopher hesitated, then asked Kim to join them. There was no reason why Kim and Molly should not meet —Christopher could explain how he knew the man.
“A lot has happened since you left Saigon,” Kim said.
“Yes.”
“What will happen to your article about Diem? Did you rewrite it?”
“Yes, but the magazine will never use it,” Christopher said. “They’ve forgotten everything since the assassination.”
“I suppose they have. You mean the Kennedy assassination.”
Christopher frowned; he did not understand at once what Kim meant. Then he remembered the murders of Diem and Nhu. “Yes. The others seem a long time ago,” he said. “I was sorry about your president, Kim.”
“And I about yours,” said Kim. “Death comes alike to the high and the low.”
They found Molly waiting in the restaurant. She had reversed an emerald ring Christopher had given her, as she always did when she waited alone for him in Rome, so that it looked like a wedding band.
“What will I call you?” she asked Nguyên. “I can’t say Nguyên properly.”
“Call me Kim. I like it better. There are millions, and I do mean millions, of Nguyêns in my country. My family are the Nguyêns, of course—my ancestor was the original Nguyên Kim, king of southern Vietnam. Bao Dai, the last royal ruler in my country, was a cousin of mine. So was Ngo Dinh Diem, who supplanted Bao Dai. I have a complicated family history, sweetheart, but I’m a simple man. So call me Kim. Let’s have a bourbon on the rocks to start with.”
Molly saw Christopher smiling at Kim. “You didn’t tell me we were going to lunch with mod royalty,” she said.
Nguyen raised his hands in protest. “Not I,” he said. “I’m only a poor exile, hiding in Rome. I hope Paul still has his expense account. Until I can get to Beirut, I’m dead broke.”
“Beirut?” Christopher asked.
“I have certain resources there, in a bank. We have learned to look to the future in my family.”
“You seem to have had a bad time of it lately,” Molly said. “Is Madame Nhu still in Rome?”
“Until tomorrow. Then she and the children go to Paris. I don’t know why, but the French are pleased to have them.”
“Have you been with them here?” Christopher asked.
“Off and on. I’ve been arranging her press interviews. Would you like to have one? For you, Paul, only two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand. Do you get many takers?”
“A couple of Frenchmen, some obscure fellow from an American weekly paper in Geneva. They never print the quotes she wants them to print.”
“What are those?” Christopher asked.
“The truth,” Kim said. “Last week the truth frightened them. This week it’s in bad taste.”
“What exactly is this truth?”
“What everyone knows and nobody will print—that Diem and Nhu were killed by you Americans. It really is incredible the way your government controls the press.”
Kim’s dealings with the press corps in Saigon had left him contemptuous of American reporters. “Intellectual sluts,” he said. “Clowns, whores, sycophants.” Kim liked bourbon whiskey, and he had drunk a lot of it on Christopher’s last night in Saigon. Kim had unburdened himself. They had gone to the Restaurant Paprika for dinner; at the next table a group of drunken correspondents predicted to each other the downfall of Diem. “Six months ago those jokers thought Diem was the savior of Asia because I told them so,” Kim said. “This year they’re wise to Diem because of what