The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [99]
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Glavanis said. “He did see our faces.”
“He won’t want to see them again. He has no idea where he is now, or where to look for you.”
“All the same, Paul—if you have what you want.. . .”
“There’s an operational reason why he must stay alive.”
Glavanis rested his brown eyes, which were as steady and as liquid as those of a young bride, on Christopher for a moment, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You always have a reason to let them live,” he said. “One day you’ll wish you hadn’t been so merciful.”
Christopher shook hands with both men. He stared at Eycken’s thumbless hands, and looked questioningly at Glavanis.
“It’s all right,” Glavanis said. “Eycken wore rubber gloves all the time we were downstairs.”
As soon as he heard the car go down the drive, Christopher put the villa in order. Glavanis and Eycken had left nothing behind but fingerprints; he removed those with furniture polish and a cloth. He photographed Pigeon’s confession and developed the film.
Before he left, he entered the interrogation room again. He recalled Frankie Pigeon’s clogged treble voice, answering the final questions.
“What did Ruby say when you gave him the contract?”
“Nothing. He was overjoyed to hit that faggot.”
“Didn’t he ask for money?”
“What did Jack want with money?” Pigeon had asked. “He thought he was going to get the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
TWELVE
1
Christopher knew where Alvaro Urpi prayed. Each morning Urpi walked down the Tiber, crossed the river on the Ponte Palatino, and spent the first three hours after sunrise on his knees in the church of Saint Sabina. Urpi liked the place because it was named for a saint who was converted to Christianity by her slave, because it was almost barren of decoration, with great white columns standing in its nave—and because one could look through a peephole into a hidden garden and see an orange tree grown from the seeds of a tree planted seven hundred years before by Saint Dominic, a Spaniard who had the mind of a Moor, as Urpi had the mind of a Chinese.
Christopher waited at the back of the church while a young priest said Mass and Urpi finished his prayers. Christopher went with him to look at the orange tree and listen to the story again. “Dominic has a better immortality than stone,” Urpi said, and blushed, made shy by the poetry of his thought.
They went back to the Vatican together; Urpi walked like a Chinese, in small rapid steps with his arms held stiff at his sides and his eyes on the pavement. He showed Christopher his translation of Yu Lung’s horoscopes. Christopher needed some help with the Latin: Urpi moved a finger from Yu Lung’s ideograms to his own crowded handwriting, his eyes darting like a bird’s from the material to Christopher’s face as he explained the difficulties of the translations.
“As I said, it’s obscure, metaphorical,” Urpi said. “But it’s plain that five men are involved. Three of them—two brothers and a foreign enemy—are marked for death. Also a woman who appears to be a virgin, and who has a relationship to three of the men. Her horoscope has to do with a journey and a message.”
“Can you construe her destination and the message?” Christopher asked.
“Oh yes. That part is plain enough.”
“And you’re certain of the identities of the persons who commissioned the horoscopes?”
Urpi nodded, reading out the Latin phrases. He pronounced very clearly. Christopher cleared his mind, memorizing what Urpi told him.
Urpi gathered together Yu Lung’s manuscript and his Latin text and handed them to Christopher. “What is being discussed in these horoscopes is murder,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Strange that they should express the crime in such beautiful language,” Urpi said.
Before he left Rome, Christopher again drove past his apartment. The Truong toe’s men were still there, but they had got under cover; they sat together