The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [79]
The shops had just reopened and the streets were teeming. Christopher went into a jewelry store and bought an opal ring for Molly. He put it in his pocket and walked into the Rinascente next door; the department store was so crowded that he moved sideways through a pack of unmoving Italians. He went to the top of the store on the escalator and came back down the stairs, leaving by the front entrance. By the time he reached the taxi stand behind the Galleria Colonna across the street, he was certain that he was still alone.
He rang his own doorbell six times, four long and two short. Molly tapped on the inside of the door four times, and he rang again twice. He heard the locks turning and the chain rattling, and Molly opened the door. She held a bottle of champagne in her hand.
“Can you open this without fumbling?” she asked. “It’s three thousand lire the bottle, you know.”
Sitting on the sofa, Christopher told Molly to close her eyes. He put the opal ring on her finger.
“It’s beautiful,” Molly said. “But aren’t opals supposed to bring bad luck?”
“A little superstition will do us good. Gaze into the stone, Molly, and live each day as if it were your last.”
“What a wonderful sense of humor you have. Is all this business really a joke to you?”
“Isn’t it a joke? Think of it—some little fellow with hate in his heart, deadly dramatic, stalking us in Christmas week. If he exists, he wouldn’t even have been told who we are or why he’s supposed to kill us. All he asks is a chance to be taken seriously.”
“I take him seriously.”
“Take his gun seriously, and his delusions,” Christopher said. “But not him. He’s just a man, and a weak and stupid one or he wouldn’t let himself be used. We know about him. That cancels his value.”
Molly kissed him. She wore no scent or makeup; he had always thought her as clean as a child. Molly did not like the image.
“After this morning,” she said, “I go on the premise that anything is permissible. I’ve been reading your poems again. Explain what you meant by these lines:
“In the cave where my father grows,
He sees my son undoubling from a rose.”
“Christ, Molly, I don’t know. It rhymed.”
“Open up,” she said, pointing a finger.
“I loved my father,” Christopher said. “He lived his whole life without doing anyone any harm. I think I hoped, if I ever had a child, that it would manage to stay innocent, the way the old man did.”
“What was the cave?”
“Silence. He stopped speaking when he was about fifty.”
“Stopped speaking? Altogether? Why? Was he mad?”
“My mother thought so,” Christopher said. “So did I, for a while. Then I began to read a little more and I realized that he would have been treated as a holy man in most places in the world.”
“On the other hand, he could have been mad.” “That’s possible. He refused to give evidence.” “Not a word, not a gesture, to the end of his life?” “Nothing.”
“You behave as if you think what he did was rather beautiful.”
“Oh, I do,” Christopher said.
4
Christopher heated milk in the dark kitchen and drank a cup of cocoa before he woke Molly so that she could lock the door after him. She had slept naked and he embraced her long body, still warm from the blankets. He stood in the hall until he heard all the locks fall into place.
It took him ten minutes to inspect his car. It was still dark and he had no flashlight. He felt the motor with his hands and lay on his back on the cold cobblestones and ran his fingers over the frame. The car had been standing in the rain for a week and the engine started reluctantly.
Christopher drove up the Tiber, crossed it on the Ponte Milvio where Constantine had seen the sign of the Cross, and came down the opposite bank. The streets were empty. When he parked the car and walked into the cemetery, there was enough light to see the tips of the cypresses against a sky filled with sailing clouds.
He walked on the grass among the headstones to avoid the noise of his footsteps on the gravel pathways.
At precisely five o’clock, Klimenko, wrapped in his long overcoat, emerged from a row of cypresses. The