The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [48]
When he emerged into a quiet street, he was still alone. He didn’t understand it; by now the Truong toe’s men or the secret police should have picked him up. He walked for a mile or more on side streets, doubling back and wandering into cul-de-sacs as if he were lost, but there was no one behind him. Finally he turned and walked straight toward the glow and racket of Tu Do Street.
In the Pussycat Night Club, Honey sat on the lap of a Special Forces master sergeant. She wore his green beret on the back of her head and drank from a bottle of champagne. The sergeant’s bare forearm, covered with tattoos, encircled her. Christopher finished a bitter beer at the bar and walked across the room. Honey saw him and pointed a derisive thumb at the sergeant, whose face was buried in the hair at the back of her neck. Christopher winked at her. She wore the sergeant’s badges and ribbons on her dress, and she inflated her chest as she had done the night before and giggled again.
Over the urinal, Luong had written 1230 Airborne. Christopher spat on his thumb and wiped out the message; the blue ballpoint ink stained the ridges of his thumbprint, and he went back to the bar and scrubbed it off with beer and his handkerchief.
Honey put her hands on the bar beside him and said, “You coming home tonight?”
Christopher, watching the sergeant in the mirror, said, “Yes, but very late. Don’t let the sergeant fall asleep.”
Honey’s face, like that of a bride in a photographer’s shop window, was fixed in innocence.
Luong took Christopher’s arm and led him through his darkened house to the bedroom. A picture of Christ, vermilion heart glowing through a white winding sheet, hung over the bed. Christopher had seen the original in Saint Peter’s.
“It’s not good to meet here,” Luong said. “My wife wonders who you are.”
“You can’t go out at night.”
“I can. But carefully. I have something about this name, Lê Thu.”
Christopher was tired; he moved so that his back was against the head of the bed.
“I haven’t put a person to the name yet,” Luong said, “but there is something about it—it startled some of the people I asked.”
“Startled them? Why?”
“I think perhaps there is no person, that this is a false name —but I suppose you expected that. U, as you know, comes from the old Chinese. It means, or suggests, ‘tears.’ Thu means ‘autumn’ in Vietnamese—therefore, ‘the tears of autumn.’”
Christopher nodded. “As Lê Xuan—Madame Nhu’s name —means the tears of spring.”
“Exactly. I asked a man who takes messages into the countryside if he had ever heard the name. His reaction was interesting. He said nothing, as if he were thinking, and then something connected in his memory. He advised me to forget the name, and left me.”
“Did you go on asking after that?”
“No. I had already asked others. There is a man I might see, but he’s not in Saigon. He’s in a village on the way to Bien Hoa. I had no reason to go today, but perhaps tomorrow I can drive there. We have a party cell in the village—he has not been unfriendly.”
“Who is he?”
“He was a Catholic priest when the French were here. They thought he was running with the Viet Minh and they tortured him. They say he’s a eunuch. He still lives in the church and wears priest’s clothes.”
“Does he still run with the Communists?”
Luong shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a remote connection of the Ngos—his grandfather married one of their women while the Catholics were still in the North.”
“Would he talk to me?”
“Not for money. Maybe for curiosity. There’s talk about you —you went to see the Truong toe, I hear. They’ve been asking about a man who must be you. They think you’re French, despite your looks.”
“They haven’t tried to contact me,” Christopher said.
“They can’t find you in any of the places you should be.”
“And if I talk to this priest?”
“Then they’ll find you.”
“He reports to them?”
“He’s their relative, my friend. You’re a foreigner,” Luong said. “There’s a way to deal with him, Crawford. He’s doing some business with opium—a lot more of the stuff has been moving in the last few weeks, I hear.