The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [5]
Webster was short and muscular. He had once held the shot-put record at Yale. He wore the clothes he had had in college, fifteen years before, and shoes he had inherited from his father that were a half size too small for him. Though he was homely and had no luck with women, he was amused by Christopher’s good looks and the way girls came to him. “I’m the portrait you keep in your attic,” he told Christopher. “Each time you sin, I get another wart.”
Christopher, finishing his beer, remembered this and laughed aloud as in his mind he saw Webster as clearly as in life. The bartender took away his glass and didn’t ask if he wanted another drink.
In the safe house, an apartment on the sixth floor of an old building behind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Christopher ate the food that had been left in the refrigerator for him, took a shower, and sat down at a portable typewriter. He worked steadily on his report until he heard the morning traffic moving on the quais along the Seine. He wrote nothing about Luong, except to include the receipt for the money he had thrown into the river. He burned his notes and the typewriter ribbon and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
Then, placing the typed report inside the pillowcase, he went to bed and slept for twelve hours. He dreamed that his wife, standing with the light behind her in a room in Madrid where he had slept with another girl, told him that she had given birth; even asleep, his mind knew that he had no child, and he ended the dream.
3
Tom Webster’s apartment in the avenue Hoche had once belonged to a member of the Bonapartean nobility. Its salon preserved the taste of the marquis and his descendants. Caryatids with broken noses stood at the corners of the ceiling; rosy women picnicked on the grassy banks of a painted brook that flowed along the wainscoting.
“Tom makes fun of the decor,” said Sybille, his wife. “But really, in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s très luxe.”
“There’s no need for all that before the other guests come,” Webster said. “Paul knows that the chief decoration in all our houses is my scrotum, which you nailed to the wall years and years ago, Sybille.”
“Does Paul know that?” Sybille asked. “But then he’s trained to notice everything, isn’t he? Paul, Tom is always so glad to see you. He tells me in bed that you’re absolutely the best in the whole company. In bed—what is the significance of that, do you suppose?”
Sybille Webster was a quick woman who liked to pretend that she was married to a slow man. Her fine face was more beautiful in photographs than in life. There were pictures of her in every room, and these were an embarrassment to her; she cleared away the frames when she invited strangers into the house. Webster married her thinking that he would want sex with no one else for the rest of his life, and he still gazed through his glasses at his wife as if she were, at all times, whirling about the room in a ballet costume. It was he who had taken the photographs.
Christopher took the drink Sybille had made for him and kissed her on the cheek. He handed his report to Webster. “Read the first two contact reports, if you have a minute,” he said. “You may want to send something tonight.”
“Why are you so good at the work, Paul?” asked Sybille. “Do you know?”
“People trust him,” Webster said.
“Do they? Wouldn’t you think that word would get around?”
“Oh, I think it has, Sybille,” Christopher said. “You notice that Tom never leaves us alone.”
“He’s been that way ever since he started to flag,” Sybille said. “That was, oh, the fourth day of our honeymoon. He took me to New York—the Astor Hotel. I was just a simple virgin from Tidewater Virginia. So many memories. Tom used to go to the Astor when he was a soldier and meet interesting people in the bar.”
Sybille, sitting on the arm of Christopher’s chair with her legs crossed, pointed a finger at Webster, who never gave any sign that he heard the things she said about him.
Webster tapped the report. “This is hotter than a firecracker,