The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [55]
“And what, in your opinion, is that mystery?”
“A pride in your murders. It’s not a quality that’s confined to Vietnam. There’s a tribe in Ghana that believes no one dies a natural death—when a man dies, they use magic to find who in the tribe has killed him, and by what spell. Then the dead man’s son is given his father’s sandals. When he grows big enough to wear them, he kills his father’s murderer. Eventually, of course, he too is killed in revenge. It goes on, generation after generation.”
“You think the Vietnamese question is as simple as that?”
“I think the human question is as simple as that, Nicole. Intellectual systems are developed to justify the exchange of death; the system of the Ghanaian tribe is as sensible as Christianity or your own family’s sense of aristocracy, or what the Americans call the dignity of the individual. In Germany, two thousand years of Christian teaching produced the SS. In Vietnam, two thousand years of colonialism produced this slaughter of peasants Ho Chi Minh calls a revolution and Diem never put a name to. It required only a hundred years of technology to produce the Hiroshima bomb. All achieved the same results— murder without guilt.”
Nicole put down her knife and fork and leaned back in her chair, peering at Christopher as if his words had formed a frame around him. “You believe in nothing, then,” she said.
“I believe in consequences,” Christopher replied.
SEVEN
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Cholon was alive at night. The Chinese were everywhere, crouching in the street to eat rice, moving quickly through the din of voices and loudspeaker music on errands, exchanging goods for money. Christopher drove the Citroen through the boiling crowd; pedestrians banged on the thin metal hood to let him know that they were there.
“We’d do better to walk,” Nicole said.
Christopher parked the car; the gray Simca that had followed them from the hotel stopped a block behind. Two Vietnamese, shorter than the Chinese who filled the street, got out of the Simca and vanished into the crowd.
Nicole led Christopher through a series of alleys; the mob thinned and finally disappeared altogether as they entered a narrow dirt street lined with the windowless walls of warehouses. Nicole opened a door that squealed across a concrete floor and grasped Christopher’s wrist, guiding him along a walkway past piles of crates.
They went down a stairway and through a passage with dank earthen walls. Streams of rats whimpered around their feet in the darkness. At the end of the tunnel they climbed another stairway and Nicole rapped at a door. They were let into a dark hall that smelled of incense by a young Chinese. He opened another door, let them go through, and closed it behind them.
The Truong toe, dressed like a peasant in pajamas, sat on a divan; the priest, Jean-Baptiste, crouched on a mat on the floor, with his legs crossed under him and his feet clasped in his hands. Nicole knelt, poured three cups of tea, and handed them to the men. She and the Truong toe spoke to one another in Vietnamese. Christopher understood most of what they said; the Truong toe merely wanted to know if Christopher had come willingly. “He has no fear,” the priest said, “there must be a reason why.” Nicole left the room.
Christopher, leaving his tea untouched, faced the two old men. He supposed they might be sixty, but it was impossible to tell with Asians; one year they were fresh with youth, and the next their skulls came through their flesh as if their corpses were eager to escape into the grave.
“I’m glad to see you safe,” the Truong toe said. “You take chances, going about at night as you do.”
“He takes certain precautions, I’m sure,” the priest said. “Your car is quite all right?”
The priest sniffed loudly and scratched his ribs. His eyes and his voice were clear, and his tic was quiet.
“Last night you asked my cousin, here, certain questions,” the Truong toe said. “I am intrigued to know your purpose.”