The Tears of Autumn

"The Pentagon’s secret study of the Vietnam war discloses that President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. . . .

‘Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitments’ in Vietnam, the study finds. …

THE PENTAGON PAPERS, as published by

The New York Times

ONE

1

Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he had stopped writing poetry. Cathy, his wife, imagined that some earlier girl had poisoned his gift. She became hysterical in bed, believing that she could draw the secret out of his body and into her own, as venom is sucked from a snakebite. Christopher did not try to tell her the truth; she had no right to know it and could not have understood it. Cathy wanted nothing except a poem about herself. She wanted to watch their lovemaking in a sonnet. Christopher could not write it. She punished him with lovers and went back to America.

Now his new girl had found, in a flea market on the Ponte Sisto, the book of verses he had published fifteen years earlier, before he became a spy. Christopher read her letter in the Bangkok airport; her headlong sentences, covering the crisp airmail sheet, were like a photograph of her face. She made him smile. His flight was called over the loudspeaker in Thai; he waited for the English announcement before he moved toward the door, so that no one who might be watching him should guess that he understood the local language. His girl was waiting in Rome, changed by her discovery that he had once been able to describe what he felt.

Christopher walked across the scorched tarmac into the cool American airplane. He didn’t smile at the stewardess; his teeth were black with the charcoal he had chewed to cure his diarrhea. He had been traveling down the coast of Asia for three weeks, and he had spent the last night of his journey in Bangkok with a man he knew was going to die. The man was a Vietnamese named Luong. He thought Christopher’s name was Crawford.

They had met in the evening, when it was cool enough to remain outside, and walked together along the river while Luong delivered his report. Later, at a restaurant, the two of them ate Thai food, drank champagne, and talked in French about the future. Just before dawn, Christopher gave his agent money to pay for the girl, quiet and smooth as a child, who sat down beside Luong and placed her small hand in his lap. Luong smiled, closed his eyes, and ran his fingertips over the flowered material of the girl’s dress and onto the skin of her neck. No difference, silk and silk, he said. "Can you loan me some baht?" Christopher handed Luong two dirty Thai bank notes. Luong, his face reddened by drink, started to leave with the girl, then came back to Christopher. Is it true that these girls will dance on your spine before making love? he asked. Christopher nodded and gave him another hundred-baht note.

Christopher paid the bartender and left. He walked through the city with its smell of waste: dead vegetation, open drains, untreated diseases of the skin. The people who slept in the streets were awakening as the sun, coming up on the flat horizon, flashed into the city like light through the lens of a camera. A leper, opening his eyes and seeing a white man, showed Christopher his sores. Christopher gave him a coin and walked on.

When he reached the river, he hired a boatman to take him to the floating market. He had three hours to kill before going to the airport. It was cooler on the river, and he was just another white man among dozens who had risen early to be paddled past the grinning naked boys standing in the roiled waters and the market boats filled with odorless flowers and lovely fruits that had no taste. He bought some limes and shared them with the boatman.

The night before, in the toilet of a bar, Luong had put his thumbprint on a receipt for the money Christopher brought to him, his monthly stipend. While Luong cleaned the ink off his thumb with whiskey from the glass he had carried with him into the toilet, Christopher showed him the envelope. It was filled with Swiss francs, new blue hundred-franc notes. I’d better keep this till morning, Christopher said. Luong, who always ended the night with a girl, nodded. They agreed on a plan for a meeting in the morning, checking their watches to be sure that they showed the same time.

Now, as Luong slept, Christopher took the envelope out of his coat pocket. He put the stamp pad inside with the money, sealed it, and dropped it over the side of the boat. The white envelope twisted in the moving brown water of the Chao Phraya and disappeared.

Christopher smiled at his own gesture. It was not likely that Luong would understand the message. He trusted Christopher. Luong knew, of course, that agents were sometimes sacrificed, but he did not consider himself an agent. He did things for Christopher and Christopher did things for him: though Christopher was white and Luong was brown, they had the same beliefs. This money, he asked once, it’s good money, from people like us? Christopher replied, Yes. Luong was a subtle man, but Christopher, throwing ten thousand francs in secret funds into a tropical river, did not really believe that the Vietnamese would understand that the loss of the money meant the loss of Christopher’s protection. It was more likely that he’d think there had been a mistake, that Christopher would come back, as he had always done. Luong would go back to Saigon and die.

Christopher was in no danger. If the secret police in Saigon interrogated Luong before they killed him, he would speak about a blond American named Crawford who believed in social justice and spoke unaccented French. Christopher had what no American is supposed to have, an ear for languages. He registered everything he heard, sense and tone, so that he understood even Oriental languages he had never studied after hearing them spoken for a few days. This trick was the fossil of his talent for poetry.

Luong can vomit all over the floor about you, said Wolkowicz, the man from the station in Saigon. The Vietnamese are never going to believe that an American can speak French the way you do. They’ll figure some Frenchman has been passing himself off to Luong as an American, and we’ll be off the hook.

At Luong’s expense. There’s no reason to let him be arrested. You know they don’t have any evidence he’s tied up with the VC. He’s not.

Wolkowicz put bread in his mouth and softened it with a sip of wine so he could chew it. Wolkowicz was self-conscious about his false teeth, but not for any cosmetic reason: his own teeth had been pulled by a Japanese interrogator in Burma during the Second World War, and there was a belief in the profession that a man who had been tortured, and stood up under it, could not afterward be trusted. He would know too well what to expect.

Since when do facts make any difference? Wolkowicz asked. There’s nothing you can do about this, Christopher.

Luong is in Bangkok, waiting to meet me. I can tell him to stay there.

What good would that do? Nhu told us he was going to grab Luong because he wanted to see if we’d warn him. If we do, Nhu will know we’ve been running Luong. We don’t need that. We have enough trouble with the bastard without giving him proof that Luong and that noisy little political party of his have an American case officer.

They’ll kill him, Christopher said.

They’ll kill him in Bangkok if they have to. We can’t salvage him without blowing you and the whole political operation. One agent isn’t worth it.

Do me a favor, will you? Call him by his name. He’s not an abstraction. He’s five feet six inches tall, twenty-nine years old, married, three children, a university graduate. For three years he’s done everything he’s been asked to do. We got him into this.

All right, so he’s flesh and blood, Wolkowicz said. He proved that when he struck out in Vientiane last month.

He’s not supposed to be an FI operator. He’s paid to act, not to steal information. Luong was not the only one who couldn’t find out what Do Minh Kha was doing in Vientiane in September.

Action is what I wanted from Luong. He’s supposed to be a boyhood chum of Do’s. He should have walked in on him, like I suggested.

Barney, Do would have shot him. He’s a chief of section of the North Vietnamese intelligence service. Do you think he doesn’t know who Luong works for?

I don’t know what Do knows, Wolkowicz said. I know Luong struck out on me.

Luong reported what he saw—Do and the girl, constantly together for three days. At least he brought you back photographs.

With no identification of the girl. Very useful.

Wolkowicz called for the check. They were sitting at a table at the Cercle Sportif. Do you notice anything unusual about that girl in the white bikini? he asked.

Christopher looked at a French girl who had just pulled herself out of the pool. She was wringing the water out of her long bleached hair, and her body curved like a dancer’s. No, he said.

She has no navel. Look again.

It was true. The girl’s belly was smooth except for a thin white surgical scar that ran through her tan into the waist of her bathing suit.

She had an umbilical hernia, said Wolkowicz, so she asked them to remove it when she had a cesarean. The clever Vietnamese just removed her belly button altogether.

The waiter went away with the signed chit.

Christopher, said Wolkowicz, you’re a conscientious officer, everybody knows that. But Luong is not your child. He’s an agent. Go to Bangkok. Meet him. Give him his pay. Wipe his eyes. But leave well enough alone.

You mean let Nhu have him.

Nhu may not live forever, said Wolkowicz.

On the airplane in Bangkok, a stewardess handed Christopher a hot towel. Stewardesses disliked him. He had no sexual thoughts about them; combed and odorless, in their uniforms, they seemed as artificial as airline food and drink. He had been in nine countries in twenty days, flying in and out of climates and time zones, changing languages and his name at each landing. His appetites and his emotions were suspended.

The jet turned over the city. Sunlight flashed on a pagoda that quivered on the brown plain like a column of crystal; Christopher knew that the pagoda was faced with broken blue china saucers, smashed in the hold of an English sailing ship by a storm a century before. He stood up when the seat-belt warning went out and removed his jacket. The jacket was wool because he was flying into a cold climate, and it was clammy with sweat. It was the last day of October, 1963, and it would be chilly in Paris, where he was going to make his report.

Christopher organized his mind, sorting out what he had learned and what he had done in the past twenty days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl who had no navel beside the pool in Saigon, the brown girl he had bought in Bangkok for Luong, and finally the girl in Rome who was waiting with his book of poems to make love to him.

Desire is not a thing that stops with death,

but joins the corpse and fetus breath to breath.…

Christopher remembered what he had written well enough, but not so well as he remembered what had made him write. His grandfather’s death had given him his first poem, eight quatrains in Tennyson’s voice. The old man, lying in a hospital with the tubes removed from his arms so that he might die in his own time, thought that he was in a railroad station; as he ran for his train he met his friends, and they were young again: Mae Foster! Your cheeks are as red as the rose! … Caroline! You’re wearing the white dress I always loved! Christopher’s last poem was written in his own voice after he slept with a girl whose brother, who trusted Christopher as Luong did, had died for nothing. She sobbed all through the act.

After the girl had gone to sleep, Christopher wrote a sonnet and left it beside her; rhyme and meter came as easily to him as the technique of sex, and had as little to do with love. This happened in Geneva, on a night when snow had fallen, so that the gray city under its winter clouds gave off a little light. Christopher, as he stepped off the curb, was nearly hit by a car. The incident did not frighten him. It interrupted his behavior, as a slight electric shock will cause a schizophrenic to cross over in the mind from one personality to another. He saw what his poems had become: another part of his cover, a way of beautifying what he did. He went back to the bedroom of the sleeping girl and burned what he had written. She found the ashes when she woke, and knowing what they were because Christopher had written her other poems, considered them more romantic than the sonnet.

Do you wish to sleep? the stewardess asked.

No, said Christopher. Give me a large whiskey.

2

Christopher walked out of the Aérogare des Invalides, under the bare elms along the Seine. Autumn chill, smelling of wet pavement and the river, went through his clothes and dried the sweat on his spine. He walked across the Pont Alexandre-III, where he had once kissed his wife and tasted the orange she had eaten. The winged horses on the roof of the Grand Palais were black against the electric glow above the city. The French do have the courage of their vulgarity, Cathy had said when, as a bride, she had first seen these colossal bronze animals trying to fly away with the ugliest building in France.

There were two policemen on the bridge. Each carried a submachine gun under his cape. Christopher walked by them and waited until he was in the shadows at the other end of the bridge before checking again to see that he was not being followed. Christopher knew Paris better than any city in America. He had learned to speak French in Paris, had written his book of poems and discovered how to take girls to bed there, but he no longer loved it. More, even, than most places in the world, Paris was a city where his nationality was deplored and his profession was despised; he could not stay there long without being watched.

Near the Madeleine, Christopher went into a café, bought a jeton, and called his case officer. When Tom Webster answered, Christopher heard the click of the poor equipment the French used to tap Webster’s telephone. The volume of their speech faded and increased as the recording machine in the vault under the Invalides pulled power out of the line.

Tom? Calisher here.

They spoke in English because Webster did not understand French easily; he was slightly deaf, and he had learned Arabic as a young officer. The effort, Webster said, had been so great that it had destroyed his capacity to learn any other foreign tongue.

I’m staying with Margaret tonight, Christopher said.

Then you’ve got better things to do than come over for a drink, Webster said.

Christopher smiled. Webster’s tone of voice told him that he was proud of this quick-witted reply; he thought it made the conversation sound natural. Webster paused, sorting out with an almost audible effort the simple code they used on the telephone.

Let’s have lunch, he said at last. Tomorrow, one o’clock at the Taillevent. I know you like the lobster there.

Fine, Christopher said, and hung up. By the time he had climbed the stairs and ordered a beer at the bar, he had overcome the smile Webster’s voice had brought to his lips. Webster was not very good at telephone codes. After seven years, he knew that any name beginning with a C was Christopher’s telephone name. He was able to remember that Margaret was the euphemism for the safe house in the rue Bonaparte to which Christopher carried a key. It was the time-and-place formula that confused him. Christopher had spent many hours waiting alone in expensive restaurants like a disconsolate social climber because Webster was never sure whether to add or subtract seven hours from the time stated over the telephone for a meeting. Lunch at the Taillevent at one o’clock meant dinner at Webster’s apartment at eight o’clock.

In other ways, Webster was a skillful professional. When he was still in his twenties, he had saved a kingdom in the Near East by penetrating a revolutionary organization and turning it against itself, so that the terrorists murdered each other instead of their monarch. The king he saved was still his friend. Like all good intelligence officers, Webster knew how to form friendships and use the friends he made. No human action surprised him or touched his emotions.

Webster and Christopher needed to make no allowances for one another. They lived in a world where all personal secrets were known. They had been investigated before they were employed; everything that could be remembered and repeated about them was on file, the truth along with the gossip and the lies. Gossip and lies were valuable: much can be understood about a man by the untruths that are told about him. Once a year, on the anniversary of their employment, they submitted to a lie detector test. The machine measured their breathing, the sweat on their palms, their blood pressure and pulse, and it knew whether they had stolen money from the government, submitted to homosexual advances, been doubled by the opposition, committed adultery. The test was called the flutter. They would ask of a new man, Has he been fluttered? If the answer was no, the man was told nothing, not even the true name of his case officer.

To Webster, the flutter was the ordeal of brotherhood. He believed that those who went through it were cold in their minds, trained to observe and report but never to judge. They looked for flaws in men and were never surprised to find them: the polygraph had taught them so much about themselves—taught them that guilt can be read on human skin with a meter —that they knew what all men were.

They had no politics. They had no morals, except among themselves. They lied to everyone except their government, even to their children and the women they entered, about their purposes and their work. Yet they cared about nothing but the truth. They would corrupt men, suborn women, steal, remove governments to obtain the truth, cleansed of rationalization and every other modifier. To one another, they spoke only the truth. Their friendships were deeper than marriage. They needed each other’s trust as other men needed love.

Webster recited these things to Christopher when he was far gone in drink. They were true enough. Webster, a phlegmatic man, had tears in his eyes; he had lost a young American in Accra. The boy had been shot by members of the Ghanaian service, who thought murder was the way in which secret agents dealt with their enemies. What that kid really liked about this life is what we all like, Christopher said. It’s like living in a book for boys. Webster was outraged; he leaped at Christopher. But he died! How many have you seen die? I can name them for you. Christopher gave his old friend another drink. No need; I remember, he said. But, Tom, be honest. If it had been you those black amateurs shot, what would have been your last thought? Webster shook his head to clear the whiskey from his voice: I’d laugh. It would be such a goddamn joke of a death. Christopher lifted his glass. Absent friends, he said.

Webster was short and muscular. He had once held the shot-put record at Yale. He wore the clothes he had had in college, fifteen years before, and shoes he had inherited from his father that were a half size too small for him. Though he was homely and had no luck with women, he was amused by Christopher’s good looks and the way girls came to him. I’m the portrait you keep in your attic, he told Christopher. Each time you sin, I get another wart.

Christopher, finishing his beer, remembered this and laughed aloud as in his mind he saw Webster as clearly as in life. The bartender took away his glass and didn’t ask if he wanted another drink.

In the safe house, an apartment on the sixth floor of an old building behind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Christopher ate the food that had been left in the refrigerator for him, took a shower, and sat down at a portable typewriter. He worked steadily on his report until he heard the morning traffic moving on the quais along the Seine. He wrote nothing about Luong, except to include the receipt for the money he had thrown into the river. He burned his notes and the typewriter ribbon and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Then, placing the typed report inside the pillowcase, he went to bed and slept for twelve hours. He dreamed that his wife, standing with the light behind her in a room in Madrid where he had slept with another girl, told him that she had given birth; even asleep, his mind knew that he had no child, and he ended the dream.

3

Tom Webster’s apartment in the avenue Hoche had once belonged to a member of the Bonapartean nobility. Its salon preserved the taste of the marquis and his descendants. Caryatids with broken noses stood at the corners of the ceiling; rosy women picnicked on the grassy banks of a painted brook that flowed along the wainscoting.

Tom makes fun of the decor, said Sybille, his wife. "But really, in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s très luxe."

There’s no need for all that before the other guests come, Webster said. Paul knows that the chief decoration in all our houses is my scrotum, which you nailed to the wall years and years ago, Sybille.

Does Paul know that? Sybille asked. "But then he’s trained to notice everything, isn’t he? Paul, Tom is always so glad to see you. He tells me in bed that you’re absolutely the best in the whole company. In bed—what is the significance of that, do you suppose?"

Sybille Webster was a quick woman who liked to pretend that she was married to a slow man. Her fine face was more beautiful in photographs than in life. There were pictures of her in every room, and these were an embarrassment to her; she cleared away the frames when she invited strangers into the house. Webster married her thinking that he would want sex with no one else for the rest of his life, and he still gazed through his glasses at his wife as if she were, at all times, whirling about the room in a ballet costume. It was he who had taken the photographs.

Christopher took the drink Sybille had made for him and kissed her on the cheek. He handed his report to Webster. Read the first two contact reports, if you have a minute, he said. You may want to send something tonight.

Why are you so good at the work, Paul? asked Sybille. Do you know?

People trust him, Webster said.

Do they? Wouldn’t you think that word would get around?

Oh, I think it has, Sybille, Christopher said. You notice that Tom never leaves us alone.

He’s been that way ever since he started to flag, Sybille said. That was, oh, the fourth day of our honeymoon. He took me to New York—the Astor Hotel. I was just a simple virgin from Tidewater Virginia. So many memories. Tom used to go to the Astor when he was a soldier and meet interesting people in the bar.

Sybille, sitting on the arm of Christopher’s chair with her legs crossed, pointed a finger at Webster, who never gave any sign that he heard the things she said about him.

Webster tapped the report. This is hotter than a firecracker, he said. Do you think Diem and Nhu are really in touch with the North?

Why not? They sure as hell don’t trust Washington anymore.

What was Nhu like at the party?

Polite. I didn’t ask him to his face what he was planning. Wolkowicz didn’t like that.

Screw Wolkowicz. All he wants to do is clean out wastebaskets.

Well, he’s expected to know everything that happens in Vietnam, Christopher said. He doesn’t see any sense in the things I do, running people like Luong. It upsets the police liaison. In a way, he’s being logical. What good is building democratic institutions to Wolkowicz? Diem and Nhu don’t like it, and they know who’s doing it.

What about Luong? Webster asked. He drained his glass and held it out to Sybille to be refilled.

Nhu is going to pick him up and kill him. They’ll torture him a little first for appearances’ sake.

Webster stared at Christopher for a second, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Did you warn him off?

I was instructed not to, Christopher said.

Webster put his glasses back on his nose and resumed reading.

Sybille brought them another drink. "It surely is difficult for me not to overhear some of the things you two say