The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [44]
The Truong toe let Christopher wait for a long time. When he came in, he wore Vietnamese dress, white to signify his mourning. Without shaking hands, he sat down, holding the page from Christopher’s notebook between his thumb and forefinger. “Why do you bring me this message?” he asked.
“I wished to meet you. I thought you would want to have this information.”
“Well, then?”
“Your nephew, Ngo Tan Khoi, was garrotted after he entered his car in the parking lot of the casino at Divonne-les-Bains, on March 8,1958,” Christopher said. “He was buried that same night in the bottom of an open grave in the town of Gex, eight kilometers away. A woman named Marie-Thérèse Hec-quet, for whom the grave had been prepared, was buried in it on March 9.”
“By whom was he killed?”
“Not by your enemies. He was mistaken for a heroin dealer named Hoang Tan Khoi by the people who killed him. Your relative and the heroin dealer had the same given names and they were both Vietnamese.”
“Who were these people?”
Christopher gave him the names of the French gangsters. “Machelon is dead,” he said. “Gaboni is still in business; if one wishes to hire him, one leaves one half of a thousand-franc note in an envelope with the doorman of the Russian restaurant in the rue de Passy, in Paris. Gaboni will appear on the following Monday, at ten o’clock, in the public toilet on the Champs-Elysées, near the place Clemenceau.”
“How do you have this information?”
“I had it from Machelon.”
“Of what interest is it to me?”
“You now have it, in any case. I thank you for seeing me. Good-bye.”
Christopher uncrossed his legs and gripped the arms of his chair, as if to rise.
The Truong toe handed Christopher the notebook page. It was a gesture to establish trust; he was returning the evidence. “And you are what—a policeman? You speak like a Frenchman, but you don’t have the manners of the French.”
“I’m not a policeman. This is a personal matter—I greatly admired the late Ngo Dinh Diem. I knew him slightly. When he was murdered, I wished to express my sympathies.”
“You choose a bizarre method.”
Christopher put the page of the notebook in his pocket. “If I knew who killed Diem and his brother, I would tell you that,” he said.
The Truong toe moved his hand and let it fall back in his lap. “How did you know of me?”
“I made inquiries. Your existence is not a secret. The dead boy in France—he was a member of the Ngo chi, was he not?”
The Truong toe opened his eyes. There was nothing involuntary about his expression of surprise; he wished Christopher to understand that he respected his knowledge.
“Yes,” the Truong toe said. “We had hoped he wasn’t dead, but of course there was no other explanation.”
Christopher looked into the flat face of the Truong toe; the old skin stretched over the bones of his head like the ruined glaze of a china plate recovered from the ashes of a burned house. The old man had the light behind him, so even the faint expressions he allowed himself could not always be seen.
“It did not matter to the parents,” Christopher asked, “that Khoi was a Communist and an agent of Ho Chi Minh?”
“One accepts what a son becomes in politics. There is no choice.”
“I would be glad,” Christopher said, “if you could tell me something about President Diem. I met him only twice, but I thought him a great man.”
The Truong toe folded his hands. “Many thought him a tyrant,” he said. “He was not much loved outside Vietnam. Even in his own country, many never understood him. He hadn’t the gift of the popular gesture. He once said that it was impossible for him to feel guilt.”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “‘He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.’”
“Lao-tzu. You’re a surprising man.”
“One