The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [70]
Yu Lung left the room. Christopher took the file folder from the open drawer of the steel cabinet and opened it. There were seven sheets of drawing paper in addition to the ones Yu Lung had prepared for him. Christopher used Yu Lung’s scissors to clip the ideograms from the edges of all the sheets. He put the long strips of rice paper, covered with Yu Lung’s flowing calligraphy, in his inside pocket, with Molly’s photograph. He closed the file and pushed in the lock.
Yu Lung, when he returned with the whiskey, did not glance at the file cabinet. He handed Christopher his glass before he poured whiskey into it, and smiled when Christopher held the empty tumbler up to the light.
“Will you spoil it with ice?” he asked.
Christopher shook his head. They touched glasses.
“You’ve spent a good deal of time in the East,” Yu Lung said. “You’ve learned our manners—you don’t make sudden noises or laugh in that peculiar way Europeans have. They guffaw and stare at one, expecting that one will put on an expression that exactly matches their own. One is not, after all, a mirror.”
“Living in Saigon has not made you into a Vietnamese, Yu Lung.”
“No,” Yu Lung said, “though I was born here, like my father. We Chinese who live abroad call ourselves hua-chiao. The words mean ‘sojourning Chinese.’ A sojourn is by definition temporary. One of our poets said we are like migrating birds with our souls flying ahead of us to China; we take no interest in our landing places or even in our journey—we beat our wings violently, in pursuit of our souls. Vietnam is where I live, my dear fellow—but it is not my world.”
Yu Lung widened his eyes in self-mockery. “I think one glass of scotch is quite enough for me,” he said.
Christopher’s envelope, containing fifty one-hundred-dollar bills, still lay untouched on the desk. Yu Lung had not acknowledged its existence. Christopher walked along the hallway behind Yu Lung. Outside Yu Lung’s bright modern office, they were back in China. When Yu Lung drew close to shake hands, he gave off the bitter unused smell of an old man.
2
Pong was late. Christopher crossed the street and stood with his back against the wall of a tin shack. Cyclists and pedestrians moved over the beaten earth of the street. No one turned a face in Christopher’s direction; he might have been as invisible as one of the spirits Yu Lung had spoken about. A new moon shone beyond the mist of Saigon’s lights.
Pong came into the street driving too fast, blinking the lights to clear people away from the car. As he reached Christopher, he threw open the front door and slowed only enough to let him scramble into the seat beside him. Pong’s eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror.
“That gray Simca picked me up after I left you,” Pong said. “I lost them for a while, but you can’t hide this big car.”
“Do you think they’re still on you?”
“They were five minutes ago. They’ve got yellow headlights.”
Christopher looked out the rear window. “Go out to the quais and head west,” he said. “Let them find us.”
“We should go back to the house.”
“They’d be outside when we came out again. Let them follow.”
Pong turned the car toward the canals. The two-way radio crackled. Christopher switched it off. “Turn off the dashlights,” he said. “You may have to drive in the dark after a while.”
As they made the long curve where the Doi Canal turned south, yellowish light flashed from the mirror onto Pong’s face. “There they are,” he said.
“Keep going,” Christopher said. “When we get into the paddy, turn off the lights and drive fast. They can’t keep up.”
They were still within the city limits, but the car was racing through the swamps and paddy of the rural Seventh District, on the southwestern edge of Saigon.
“You know there are VC all over the Seventh District at night, don’t you?” Pong asked. He pulled his revolver from its holster and laid it gently on the seat between them.
“I know. How far to the first big curve, so you can stop without their seeing your brake lights?”
“Maybe two kilometers,