The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [53]
The métis behind the reception desk, who had his father’s Norman nose and his mother’s small bones and almond eyes, spoke English to Christopher as a matter of course. He said he had no room. When Christopher replied in French, the métis pushed a registration card across the desk and took a key from the rack. “Pièce d’identité?” Christopher handed him his American passport, and the clerk gave back a resentful look— he had lost his first bribe of the day through trickery.
Christopher sent the bellboy for the suitcase he had left at the Alitalia office. He shaved and took a bath; the tepid water coughed from the tap, rusty and smelling faintly of the river. He sat down and wrote a letter to Patchen. Using the English section of a Collins French-English pocket dictionary, he converted the words he had written into groups of numbers corresponding to the page, line, and column where they were found in the book. It was not a satisfactory dictionary for use in a book code; heroin did not appear, and he had to render the word as “next-stage morphine derivative.” He might as well have been writing in German, he thought. Christopher burned the paper on which he had written his draft, and put the thin sheet covered with rows of numbers into an envelope with an American airmail stamp already affixed. He did not address the envelope.
Before he went to sleep, Christopher took no precautions apart from the useless one of locking the door. Precautions would serve no purpose. If Luong had been killed as a warning, Christopher himself would not be killed until whoever was running the assassins decided that Christopher had not taken the warning. The two men could have killed Christopher easily enough in the alley when they met him face to face. Or, if they wished to be artistic, they could have shot him after letting him discover Luong’s body. The killers had no distinguishing features, they looked like any other young Vietnamese sharing a motor scooter and looking for a way to make a little money out of the war.
Each time Christopher began to dream, he reached into that part of his mind and stopped the pictures. Nevertheless, he saw the man run down in Berlin again, and a youth in Algiers with a bullet coming out his back in a plume of blood as if he had thrown a glass of wine over his shoulder, and Luong’s photograph on a grave marker with a bright sacred heart glowing on his chest. While the Truong toe drank tea, Jean-Baptiste Ho showed Christopher pictures of all the Ngo dead, arranged among candles in the room in Siena where he had repeated to Molly that he loved her. Touching Christopher’s arm as if he were an old friend, the priest said, “It would be beautiful to die of disgust, but you will not.”
9
When Christopher awoke, he went to the American embassy and mailed his letter to Patchen, scribbling the false name and the post-office-box number in Washington across the envelope at the moment he dropped the envelope in the box. He knew it would reassure Patchen to see that the message had passed through the U.S. mail only. It was undecipherable without the book that was the key to the code, but ciphers are incriminating in themselves.
The crowd of foreigners on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel reminded Christopher of travelers on the deck of a ship. Everything that interested them lay inside the rails; the Vietnamese, as alike as gulls, went by on the sidewalk, locked in a language that made no sense to white men. Christopher saw four Americans he knew, all of them journalists. He sat at the other end of the terrace with his back to their table and ordered a vermouth cassis. In the street, ordinary women in ao dai and trousers and bar girls in miniskirts that spoiled the grace of their slender bodies were out walking; a rawboned American girl carrying an armload of packages strode through the crowd, whistling a love song, her hair swinging.
Christopher waited. Dark had fallen, and most of the people on the terrace had gone inside to have dinner, when the girl came. She had changed out of her white