The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [67]
She drew back her hand. “All that means nothing.” She touched her temples. “You believe one lives in this part of the body, but I live in my three souls and my nine spirits, and there are a thousand vital points in my body. Each one of which touches a time or a date or a number in the lunar calendar, which you cannot even understand. I never speak my own name, nor does anyone who loves me. You haven’t time, if you lived here for another fifty years, to begin to understand.”
Christopher put a forefinger on her brow; she made no movement to avoid it. “If your brain stops,” he said, “then all this wonderful system of mysteries stops, too, doesn’t it?”
“In this body, yes. There are other forms, other forces that go on.”
“You seem determined to convince me that Vietnamese culture is a secret code.”
“And you seem determined not to believe me.”
Christopher called for the bill. While he counted out the money, Nicole sat watching him, her upper lip caught between her thumb and forefinger. Christopher remembered how he had closed Luong’s dead mouth, and again saw the grain of rice between his lips, magic against the Celestial Dog. It took him a moment to realize that Nicole’s long fingernail was pressing into the back of his hand. When he looked up, she removed it, leaving a white half-moon on his sunburnt skin.
In Vietnamese she said, “My name is Dao. I was born in Hanoi. I am twenty-three. All that is worth loving will die around me before I have a child.”
Christopher, giving no sign that he understood her language, folded his napkin into a neat triangle. “We seem to be back where we began,” he said. “I thought we might to beyond gibberish today.”
“You really don’t believe in the importance of anything I’ve told you, do you?”
“Oh, yes, I believe in its importance, and you’ve taught me quite a lot,” Christopher said. “But if there is one certain thing about codes, it’s this—they can be broken. Tell the Truong toe I thank him again for the photograph he gave me last night. Tell him, too, that I have some pictures of my own.”
“I don’t understand that message.”
“The Truong toe will understand. Like me—and like Diem and Nhu—he believes in consequences.”
EIGHT
l
“Barney ordered me not to leave you,” Pong said. His eyes darted over the crowd in the narrow street outside Yu Lung’s house. There was enough light to see movement, but not enough to distinguish faces. Bicycles drifted by, and an occasional motor scooter sounded its horn, scattering pedestrians and cyclists as it plunged past the parked car.
“If you stay here with the car you’ll draw attention,” Christopher said. “Go somewhere else, and come by again at exactly nine o’clock. I’ll be here.”
A cyclist peered angrily through the windshield and hammered on the hood of the car.
Pong said, “Okay, nine o’clock. If you’re not here, I’ll come inside.”
He drove away through the crowd, touching the horn lightly in a series of Morse dots to clear the way ahead of him. Christopher was annoyed by Pong’s unnecessary noise. Then he realized it made no difference—secrecy was of no further use to him in Saigon.
Yu Lung’s house had a blind front except for a frame of carved wood, painted red, around the door. The lintel was low, and Christopher ducked his head to enter. A servant with a large flashlight showed him down a long hall to the back of the house. They walked past rooms filled with noise—plaintive Chinese music playing on a gramophone, loud voices, the beating of a spoon against a pot in the kitchen. But the hall itself was dead space. It was impossible to guess what sort of people lived behind the closed doors.
After the noise and the pungent smell of the house, Christopher did not expect to find Yu Lung looking as he did. The fortune-teller was a man of forty with a round prosperous belly under a checkered vest and a gold watch chain. He greeted Christopher not in a dim room hung with incense and calligraphy but in a brightly lighted office, sitting at a polished desk with gray-steel file cabinets behind him. There were two