The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [49]
“Moving? How?”
“The VC are bringing it in from Cambodia, and from Laos, down the trail. I hear that the principal storage place is under the priest’s church—there are VC tunnels running under the village. They control that part of the countryside.”
“Then he is still running with the Communists?”
“Doing business with them. He’s buying. He has a great deal of money, it’s said, very suddenly. He never had any before.”
“How would one deal with him? Offer to buy? Threaten to expose him?”
“I wouldn’t make threats,” Luong said.
“Show me where he can be found, exactly.”
Luong drew a map on a page of Christopher’s notebook, showing the roads to the village. He drew a row ofX’s along the main line. “Ambushes at all these places recently,” he said. On another page he sketched the village, showing the church and the room where the priest lived. Christopher studied the pages for a moment, then ripped them out of the notebook and handed them back to Luong. “What’s his name?” he asked.
“With whites he uses the French style,” Luong said. “Jean-Baptiste Ho.”
Christopher stood up. Fatigue ran through his body like a painful injection. “Where can I get a car without papers?”
“Now? You’re going out there at night?”
“Yes. I can get back before daylight.”
Luong gave him the name of a garage. “There’s one more person I can ask tonight about the name,” he said. “I don’t want to meet here again—have you a place in the city?”
Christopher, so as not to say it aloud, wrote the address of Honey’s room and sketched the entrance. He looked at his watch. “I’ll be back at five o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Don’t come after it’s light.”
“If I have anything by five o’clock, I’ll come,” Luong said.
Christopher shook hands with him. “One more thing—if Lê Thu means the tears of autumn as a name, how do you say it in the ordinary way?
“In Vietnamese? Nuόe mằt mùa thu.”
“It’s more poetic in French.”
Luong smiled. “You hear music in the language you know,” he said.
6
The car was a Citroen with only thirty thousand kilometers on the odometer. Its soft fabric cushions and the air suspension took some of the ache out of Christopher’s back and legs. There was a checkpoint at the Thi Nghe Canal bridge where the highway joined the avenue leading into Saigon; a young guard took the thousand-piaster note clipped to Christopher’s press card and waved him through.
The Citroen made very little noise apart from the grip of its tires on the tar road. Christopher turned off the headlights, and by the time he was far enough away from Saigon to be in danger, he saw well enough in the starlight to drive as fast as the car would go. His eye followed the road through the trees and the low bushes, and the paddies shining in the darkness like coins. He saw no movement. He didn’t think that anyone would expect to see a darkened car moving at 150 kilometers an hour, or be able to hit it with gunfire.
On the dirt track leading into the village, Christopher went more slowly, but still dust blew in the open windows and coated the interior of the car. The church was a small building standing by itself beyond the huts that lined the principal street. Light from the altar candles leaked through its thin walls. Inside, there were a few long benches with their ends lying in deep shadow. Like Patchen’s house in Washington, the church was a place in which nothing involving human emotion had happened in a long time.
Christopher knocked, loudly, on the door behind the altar. The priest opened the door at once; behind him, the tiny room in which he lived was lit by a kerosine lantern. He wore a cassock, unbuttoned at the top so that his neck and his bony chest showed. Christopher heard a soft noise and saw a woman sitting upright on a plank bed; she turned her eyes aside and went to stand with her back against the wall at the far side of the room.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,” Christopher said. “I need your help.”
The little priest threw back his head and looked Christopher in the eye. “It’s very late,” he said. “It’s very dangerous, there are no army patrols