The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [43]
“What was Diem’s number?”
“That’s well known. Seven, double seven. He came to power on July 7, as you may know, too.”
“Does the number go on working after death?”
“I suppose so,” Luong said. “Any combination of sevens would be good for Diem’s spirit.”
“Would it make sense to honor his memory on a day seven days after his death, or fourteen days, or twenty-one?”
“Oh yes,” Luong said. “Triple seven, twenty-one, would be thought very auspicious… But you’re toying with our superstitions.”
“No, I try to understand these things. It isn’t necessary to believe in them to know they exist, even that they exert what you call force.”
“Well, perhaps one wouldn’t call such passive things a force.”
“What, then?”
Luong searched his mind for the French word. “An elegance,” he said.
3
No one in the tropics expects to see a white man at sunrise. Christopher did not live by the clock but by the rhythm of the place in which he found himself. In hot countries he moved on his targets in the cool of the morning. They were always surprised to see him. As he walked down Luong’s street under the stunted flowering trees, he received startled glances even from the children.
A few blocks away he found a taxi with its driver asleep in a patch of shade. He woke him and gave him the Truong toe’s address.
The Truong toe’s house was sealed. Shutters were fastened, doors locked. The house stood in a small park, and as Christopher walked among the flower beds and the palms it seemed to him that the noise of life parted at the gate and flowed around the walls of the garden. The babble of voices and the whine of scooter engines that filled the streets on all four sides of the narrow house were deadened. Christopher knew the noise was absorbed by the trees and the high wall cloaked with vines, but he thought, all the same, of the passive forces Luong had spoken about.
No one answered his knock. He stepped back and looked upward at the blank windows, then walked around the corner of the house to a terrace where bougainvillea grew over a trellis. Heavy iron lawn furniture, curlicued and painted white, was arranged in the shade; green mold crept up the legs of the chairs, designed to stand on a lawn beside the Loire. French doors opened on the terrace. Christopher saw someone in white robes move quickly across the room within. An entire wall was taken up by an ancestor’s shrine. Photographs of the dead and candle flames reflected in the panes of the terrace doors. The person inside was lighting a thicket of joss sticks on the shrine.
Christopher knocked again, and his fist rattled the glass. The white figure turned around; he saw it was a young woman who stood at the back of the room and stared at him. He knocked again, and drawing out his voice in the elongated tones of a Frenchman who has lived long in Asia, called, “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît!” The girl came to the glass door, held up both palms, and shook her head violently.
Christopher rattled the door handle and spoke in a loud voice: “A word with you, mademoiselle.”
She opened the door and, using the tu form, said, “Shut up. This house is closed.”
“I know, and I understand,” Christopher said. “But I’ve come all the way from Paris to see the Truong toe.”
“He’s not receiving visitors.”
“I have an important message for him. It concerns his family.”
The girl let breath burst from her nostrils. “This family?” she asked incredulously, looking at the color of Christopher’s skin.
“Yes—truly it’s very important to the Truong toe.”
“Who are you? Have you a card?”
“No—no card. But give him this.”
Christopher wrote on a page of his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to the girl. She folded the note without reading it, dropped her eyes, and closed the door again, turning the key in the lock. She pointed a finger toward the front of the house,