The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [41]
Christopher had two cups of coffee and went out into the rain again. By the time he had walked to Montparnasse, the rain had stopped and Paris was filled with its winter light, a dull atmosphere of mother-of-pearl. There was no one in the street behind the Select where he had parked his car. He felt inside the left rear fender until he found the transmitter Webster had put there. It was attached with a strong adhesive, and Christopher broke a fingernail prying it loose. He stuck it under the tailgate of a truck with Nice license plates.
Christopher headed north, toward Brussels. He reached the airport there by noon. In the tax-free shop he bought Molly a ring shaped like a cobra with rubies for eyes. That afternoon in the sunlight in Piazza del Popolo, he watched her slip it on her finger.
“A stealthy gift,” she said. “What lovely surprise have you in store for me next?”
“I’m going to the Far East tomorrow,” Christopher said.
“Christ. You just got back from there.”
“I promise to love you the whole time I’m gone,” Christopher said.
Molly removed the ring and put it on the table between them.
“Don’t mock me in daylight with the things I say in the dark,” she said. “One day I’m going to leave you alone in bed, Paul, and tell you nothing when I return except that I love you. You’ll find the reassurance means quite a lot.”
SIX
1
The girl led him down one final dark street. This quarter of Saigon was all but silent, but Christopher knew it by day, and its clamor persisted in the heavy air, like rifle shots in the hours after a skirmish. He met the girl in a bar on Tu Do Street. He thought she might be seventeen. She spoke no French; her languages were Cochinese dialect and soldier English.
“My name is Honey,” she told Christopher. “It rhymes with money.”
She led him up an outside staircase, tapping his arm so that he would see the boy sleeping on the landing outside her door and step over the curled body.
When Christopher told her what he wanted, she did not ask his reasons. “You’re not a bad man?” she said. Christopher said that he was not, and she believed him at once, as if no one had ever lied to her.
Christopher gave her money and she turned around modestly and tucked it away somewhere under her dress. As frail as a child’s wrist, she sat on the bed and wove her hair into a long black braid.
“Maybe I can go visit my mother while you stay here,” she said, speaking as quickly as the thought crossed her face.
“No,” Christopher said, “I want you to be here, so that you can say I’m with you and deal with the people—I speak no Vietnamese.”
Honey finished her braid and pulled her dress over her head. She wore narrow pants printed with bright northern flowers, daisies or black-eyed susans; her skin was almost the color of the dyed blossoms.
Christopher smiled at her, and she drew in her breath to make her breasts larger. “You change your mind?” she asked.
“No,” Christopher said, “I just want you to be my sister for a few days, and not bring anyone else to this room.”
She pulled a mat from under the bed and unrolled it on the floor. “Then I better sleep down here, brother,” she said. She lay down on her back, drew her braid over her shoulder, and grasping it in both small hands, went to sleep.
Christopher covered her with a sheet and lay down on the bed. Honey had lighted a joss stick; its scent mingled with the stench that poured through the window like dust with sunlight. She made no noise as she slept. Christopher turned on his side and closed his eyes.
The girl had no papers, she had told him; therefore she had no existence, and if he came and went in the dark, they should both be safe enough. Heat, as palpable as the odors in the room, closed around his body.
2
Before it was light, Christopher started walking through the city again. He lost himself twice in cluttered dead-end streets, but he found Luong’s house before the sun had wakened anyone.
Luong’s wife, wearing a Western