Christopher saw the truth at dawn on the tenth day after the death of Kennedy. He woke shivering with cold and covered Molly with the blankets that had slipped to the floor during the night. A rooster crowed on the hillside above Siena, and as he watched from the open window of their hotel room, the town changed color in the growing light from burnt umber to rose.
In the first sunlight, two figures in black hurried across a field and into the edge of a woods. These Italian farnners going innocently to work triggered Christopher’s memory. Once again he saw men in black moving at a trot along the fringe of a forest, and an American in a flowered shirt lying in the weak morning light with the back of his head blown away.
The explanation struck like a bell in Christopher’s mind. He knew who had arranged the death of the President.
All his life, Christopher’s unconscious had released images, and he had learned to trust this trick of his mind. He often knew what men had done before they confessed their acts to him. (Cathy had thought him a fortune-teller. He had sometimes been able to see her lovers in her gestures-she would untie a scarf and pull the silk through her fist with a smile and Christopher would see her lifting her breast toward a stranger’s lips. “Did you see me, did you see me?” she would gasp. It excited Cathy to know she could walk through the gates of Christopher’s mind. She believed in dark powers.)
Christopher knew that this gift, which grew stronger as he grew older, was only a kind of logic. His senses received everything, he forgot nothing. Experience and information joined in the brain to provide explanations. It was like writing the first draft of a poem: words formed on the page without passing through the conscious mind.
Now, as he stood by the open window, he heard the plans being made for Kennedy’s murder. He saw the messages being passed, saw the look in the eyes of the conspirators, watched the tension flow out of their faces when news of success was brought to them. He felt their sense of triumph like an electrical charge between them. He himself had been a part of such scenes often enough. He wondered why it had taken him so long to realize the truth.
Christopher had seen many men die for politics, and he knew that politics was merely the excuse their murderers used. Men killed not for an idea but because they could not live with a personal injury. Now he made the simple connection between the injury and the President’s violent death. He understood the motive perfectly. He wondered if the murderers had foreseen that the death of Kennedy would drive the very memory of their existence out of the consciousness of the world.
Because they were who they were, the killers might have escaped suspicion forever. Christopher felt no anger, he wanted no revenge. The life he had led had burned away such feelings. He did not blame the murderers for what they had done. They had repaid an insult. He was only surprised that they had been able to do it so quickly. He would have expected them to be more patient, to choose a moment, such as Inauguration Day, when the humiliation would have been more intense. He supposed it had something to do with the stars; they would have horoscoped such an operation very carefully.
His mind worked tidily, sorting out the evidence he would need to illustrate the truth. Christopher hadn’t yet discovered the details-how the money was handled or whether money was necessary, how they found the assassin and perfected his will to kill. They could not have told him their reasons, or who they were. It must have been easy to convince him that nothing was left to luck, that they had the power to rescue him. Christopher understood what had happened and why it had been inevitable. Putting faces to his theory was a matter of professional routine. He knew where to go, which men to contact. He thought he might very well be killed.
Christopher and Molly had been together in Siena for three days. Molly had chosen the hotel: the Palazzo Ravizza, built by some nobleman in the seventeenth century and now restored for romantic tourists. Molly loved the cold floors, the whitewashed walls, the carved black furniture, the curtained bed. She would not let him use the electricity; she bought candles in the town and they went to sleep with tongues of light all around them.
There was a dead garden behind the hotel; they ate breakfast there, wearing heavy sweaters under their coats. At night Molly’s breath was scented with the white truffles she’d had for supper. They dined at a restaurant where the waiter brought a shallow basket heaped with truffles to their table: he would hold them under Molly’s nose one after the other until she selected the one she wanted. They ate pasta with truffles, truffled chicken, truffle soup. “The taste penetrates the brain,” Molly said. “Even you are beginning to taste like a truffle, Paul.”
The night before, as they walked across the brown dish of the Piazza del Campo, Molly began to sing in the dark. “Come le Rose”: this had been her favorite song ever since she had heard a street musician sing it at the table of an American couple at a sidewalk restaurant in Rome; the wife, gray-haired and wrinkled, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in Italy, had wept with happiness, though she could not understand the words.
When Molly began to sing, Christopher let go of her hand and stopped where he stood. She walked onward a few steps, then turned and ceased singing in the middle of a phrase. She smiled and lifted a hand in apology. “Am I making too much racket?” she asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just realized that I love you.”
Molly stood absolutely still, the smile still on her lips, her hand still raised, the sleeve of her coat pulled away from the bare skin of her wrist.
“Paul,” she said, whispering as though she thought a whisper might make him understand her better. “Paul, it’s all right to be happy.”
In the morning, at the open window, Christopher remembered the look and sound of her and he realized, with a thrill of surprise, that he wanted his own life to continue.
They had lost a week in Rome before going to Siena. When he reached his apartment on the day after Kennedy’s assassination, after the long taxi ride from the airport, he found his telephone ringing. It was Tom Webster; he made no effort to deceive the recording devices that monitored international calls out of France.
“I don’t know what you can do about this in Rome,” Webster said. “But there’s total priority on this problem. This Oswald was a defector to the Soviet Union. He was in Russia from 1959 until June, 1962. The Russians are going crazy. They expect SAC over Moscow any minute. They keep telling everyone they didn’t do it.”
“I believe them,” Christopher said. “Why would they?”
“I know. But it’s a possibility that has to be considered. Headquarters wants maximum information from every point in the world. Who do you know down there, or anywhere, who might know something about this rotten bastard?”
“You want me to tell you over the phone?”
“Yes. Fuck it.”
“You know all the names. There’s no one in this town, except a couple of people who’d just be guessing.”
“What about that journalist?”
“He’d just repeat the line, whatever it is. I can’t believe they’d do it, Tom. Not with a man like Oswald. If I were the Russians, I’d think it was an attempt to put the blame on them. It might be.”
“Let them worry about that,” Webster said. “Our job is to tap in wherever we can and find out what we can. Anything. Every detail. Try the journalist-you never know.”
Christopher met Piero Cremona in the Galleria Colonna. The brass band was playing waltzes as usual, and the music made Cremona angry.
“Italians!” he said. “There should be no music today.”
Christopher was exhausted. He had not changed the clothes he wore on the flight from Léopoldville, and his shirt smelled of the sweat he had shed in the Congo. There was a newspaper on every table in the café, and a photograph of the dead President on every front page.
“How do you feel, my friend?” Cremona asked.
“I don’t know, Piero.”
“You Americans kill whole countries and it doesn’t bother you,” Cremona said. “But for America to be wounded-ah!”
“You enjoy the spectacle?”
Cremona tapped his coffee cup with a spoon. “No, I detest it,” he said. “Politics is politics. Life is life. I hate Washington since the war-they don’t understand misery. They don’t know how to look into the mind of most of mankind, they think suffering-real suffering, which is at the center of everyone’s history but America’s-does not matter. But Americans are different, individual Americans. I saw them come into Italy in 1943, into an enemy country. They were alive, those soldiers, and they wanted everyone else to be alive, too. They handed out food, they screwed the girls, they got drunk. I’ve never forgotten how they were. There is a goodness in your people, Paul. I’m very sad for them today. Maybe even I think there should be one country in the world where suffering is not permitted to exist.”
“I expected you to tell me that this assassination is a small thing, compared to Hiroshima.”
“No,” Cremona said. “This is no small thing. Nothing is so terrible as to kill a symbol. The Japanese were Japanese; when a hundred thousand of them were vaporized by the atomic bomb, very few considered that anything important had happened to the human race. They were yellow creatures. The death of a hundred thousand Englishmen, maybe even a hundred thousand Italians, would have been different.”
“Only the death of white men matters?” Christopher said.
“To Christians, yes. Do you think the whole Northern Hemisphere would be in a spasm of mourning if some brown president had been shot through the brain? This murdered man is an American. If a madman can kill an American president, then what is certain? ‘Ah,’ the miserable of the world will say, ‘it’s not possible, after all, to bribe history.’ Everyone thought America could do it.”
“You think Oswald is a madman?”
“Of course.”
“It seems he’s a Communist,” Christopher said.
“Oh, Paul-you? You know what a Communist is. This man is a sick romantic. They didn’t want him in the Soviet Union, they didn’t want him anywhere.”
“Have you found anyone who knows anything about him?”
“Everyone knows all about him. He occurs everywhere, sometimes he acts.”
“What do the Russians say?”
“They’d kill him if they could,” Cremona said. “I had a drink with Klimenko, the Tass man, last night. They’re very angry.”
“And very scared.”
“Yes-and who can blame them?” Cremona drew a mushroom cloud in the air with a quick movement of his hands.
Oswald was dead when Christopher met Nguyên Kim on the Spanish Steps. Descending the stairway, he saw Kim speaking to a Vietnamese girl by the fountain in the center of the Piazza di Spagna. They were nodding vigorously in the Vietnamese way, and the tones of their language, like minor chords played on a complicated instrument, drifted through the noisy Roman square.
Christopher kept walking, hoping to pass by without being noticed. But Kim saw him, said a hurried good-bye to the girl, and rushed to greet him. A camera jounced against Kim’s chest as he trotted over the cobblestones, dodging among the green taxis that swarmed around the fountain.
“Paul,” he cried, “Paul, baby!”
Kim had learned to speak show-business English at UCLA; he held a master’s degree in communications. He and Christopher had met often in Saigon. Kim knew Christopher as a journalist. He had acted as an unofficial press agent for his cousins, the Ngos; it was he who had taken Christopher to Ngo Dinh Nhu’s reception.
“I’m here with Lê Xuan,” he said. “Madame Nhu to you. I’m handling the press for her. It’s like handling a kissing contest for a leper.”
“How did you land that job?”
“I came out with the Nhu children when they left the country. That was one of the daughters I was just talking to.”
Kim pointed at the girl. She walked through the crowd with two Vietnamese men and got into a curtained limousine. “Don’t try anything,” Kim said. “Those guys have got guns.”
He told Christopher he had been looking for him for days and asked if Christopher was free for lunch. Molly was waiting in a restaurant. Christopher hesitated, then asked Kim to join them. There was no reason why Kim and Molly should not meet -Christopher could explain how he knew the man.
“A lot has happened since you left Saigon,” Kim said.
“Yes.”
“What will happen to your article about Diem? Did you rewrite it?”
“Yes, but the magazine will never use it,” Christopher said. “They’ve forgotten everything since the assassination.”
“I suppose they have. You mean the Kennedy assassination.”
Christopher frowned; he did not understand at once what Kim meant. Then he remembered the murders of Diem and Nhu. “Yes. The others seem a long time ago,” he said. “I was sorry about your president, Kim.”
“And I about yours,” said Kim. “Death comes alike to the high and the low.”
They found Molly waiting in the restaurant. She had reversed an emerald ring Christopher had given her, as she always did when she waited alone for him in Rome, so that it looked like a wedding band.
“What will I call you?” she asked Nguyên. “I can’t say Nguyên properly.”
“Call me Kim. I like it better. There are millions, and I do mean millions, of Nguyêns in my country. My family are the Nguyêns, of course-my ancestor was the original Nguyên Kim, king of southern Vietnam. Bao Dai, the last royal ruler in my country, was a cousin of mine. So was Ngo Dinh Diem, who supplanted Bao Dai. I have a complicated family history, sweetheart, but I’m a simple man. So call me Kim. Let’s have a bourbon on the rocks to start with.”
Molly saw Christopher smiling at Kim. “You didn’t tell me we were going to lunch with mod royalty,” she said.
Nguyen raised his hands in protest. “Not I,” he said. “I’m only a poor exile, hiding in Rome. I hope Paul still has his expense account. Until I can get to Beirut, I’m dead broke.”
“Beirut?” Christopher asked.
“I have certain resources there, in a bank. We have learned to look to the future in my family.”
“You seem to have had a bad time of it lately,” Molly said. “Is Madame Nhu still in Rome?”
“Until tomorrow. Then she and the children go to Paris. I don’t know why, but the French are pleased to have them.”
“Have you been with them here?” Christopher asked.
“Off and on. I’ve been arranging her press interviews. Would you like to have one? For you, Paul, only two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand. Do you get many takers?”
“A couple of Frenchmen, some obscure fellow from an American weekly paper in Geneva. They never print the quotes she wants them to print.”
“What are those?” Christopher asked.
“The truth,” Kim said. “Last week the truth frightened them. This week it’s in bad taste.”
“What exactly is this truth?”
“What everyone knows and nobody will print-that Diem and Nhu were killed by you Americans. It really is incredible the way your government controls the press.”
Kim’s dealings with the press corps in Saigon had left him contemptuous of American reporters. “Intellectual sluts,” he said. “Clowns, whores, sycophants.” Kim liked bourbon whiskey, and he had drunk a lot of it on Christopher’s last night in Saigon. Kim had unburdened himself. They had gone to the Restaurant Paprika for dinner; at the next table a group of drunken correspondents predicted to each other the downfall of Diem. “Six months ago those jokers thought Diem was the savior of Asia because I told them so,” Kim said. “This year they’re wise to Diem because of what some kid in the American Embassy tells them. You can have them the same way you can have dumb girls in California-put your hand between their legs and tell ‘em you love ‘em. They don’t have minds-they have a clitoris between their ears.”
Now he poured wine into Christopher’s glass. “Did you hear about the other Ngo brother?” Kim asked. “Ngo Dinh Can -a vicious tyrant and torturer, Molly sweetheart. He used to run central Vietnam.”
“I heard he was in jail.”
“Chi Hoa prison, where the French used to crush yellow testicles. You know how Can got there? He went to the American consulate in Hué and asked for asylum. The Americans handed him over to the generals. I’d say Can has about a month to live. No doubt CBS will film the firing squad, so the world can see what happens to people who don’t cooperate with the Americans.”
“You’re talking to an American, you know,” Molly said.
“I know. That’s the wonderful thing about them. They don’t mind being insulted.” Kim reached across the table and punched Christopher on the biceps. “Well,” he said, “I guess you’ve got a big story in the States now. Are you working on it?”
“No, I haven’t even heard from the magazine. The people who were in Dallas are the only ones who are writing this week.”
“It’s a great tragedy when a leader dies like that,” Kim said. “There’s no sense in it. A people just falls to its knees. Even the Americans-even you, I’ll bet, Paul. It’s a blow that strikes every person in the country.”
“In the world, I should have thought,” Molly said.
“Yes, I saw in the paper that Khrushchev cried,” Kim said. “No one hates a murdered man if he’s an American. These Kennedys were the real royalty of the modern age-too bad their reign was so brief.”
They began to eat their spaghetti. “This is pretty good,” Kim said. “I taste eggs and smoked pork. There should be more pepper in it.”
Christopher said, “I must say you seem pretty cheerful, Kim, for a man without a country.”
“Oh, I’ll get by,” Kim said. “We lose the country every once in a while, but we always get it back. We know a secret, Paul -in the end, nobody really wants Vietnam but us. All the rest of you have to learn that the hard way.”
“Do you really think either branch of your family will ever get back in power?”
“Who knows?” Kim said. “Kings never come back, that’s for sure. But the Ngos-that’s another matter. They’re very hard people.”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “But they’re dead.”
“Diem and Nhu are dead. Would you say the Kennedys are finished because the one who happened to be President has been shot?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“People like the Kennedys and the Ngos always recover. One martyr wipes out all the bad memories. The Ngos have two martyrs.”
“Are the two families really comparable?” Molly asked. “After all, the Kennedys are in America.”
“What difference does that make?” Kim asked.
“They’ll be safe there.”
“Molly, my dear!” said Kim. “John Kennedy’s funeral is tomorrow.”
“That was the work of a lunatic,” Molly said.
“Agreed. Will you now tell me that the assassination of Diem and Nhu was the work of sane men?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Molly said.
“You’re offended to have the two assassinations compared,” Kim said. “Why should grief belong only to the Kennedys and the Americans?”
“It shouldn’t. But, forgive me, Kennedy’s death was more important.”
“Ah, Realpolitik in such a beautiful young girl. Really, we backward people have no chance against you-even your women think in terms of power relationships.”
“And yours don’t?” Christopher said. “Didn’t you just mention someone called Madame Nhu?”
Kim had been drinking a great deal of wine. When the waiter brought the second course, he asked for another liter. His face was flushed and his voice vibrated. The conversation excited him.
“Lê Xuan is a remarkable woman,” he said. “She is more Ngo than the Ngos. I’ll tell you a little family history. She comes from a Buddhist family, a very important family called Tran. She always felt that she was the least favorite child-she fought against her mother and father, she hardly tolerates her sister. She married Nhu when she was sixteen. She became a Catholic and an activist, she was imprisoned by the Viet Minh, she found out that the only real power for any human being is in a family that will die for its principles. In the confusion of the Japanese withdrawal in ‘45, one of her husband’s brothers was killed by Ho Chi Minh; Ho apologized to Diem and offered him half of his power, but Diem refused. Ho had killed his brother. Even Diem’s country was not so important as that. Diem and Nhu triumphed, they fell-Lê Xuan saw all that happen. She has not lost heart, she knows the family goes on. There are many, many members of that family. She is one of them as she was never one of her own family. It means everything to her. She believes the family will rise again. She knows its strength.”
Christopher watched Kim as he spoke. The Vietnamese had ceased eating; he pushed back his plate and poured more wine. He was speaking in a low, hard voice, his eyes fixed on Molly’s. He seemed to have forgotten Christopher was there, and Christopher was content to let him go on.
“Its strength?” Molly said. “It’s a family in ruins, hated in its own country, despised in the world, with its leaders destroyed by their own soldiers.”
“So it would seem,” Kim said. “It’s good for the Ngos if the world believes that-especially now. That is part of their power, the insults of their enemies.”
“I don’t see any power there-I’m sorry,” Molly said. She was angry.
“Oh, the Ngos have power,” Kim said. “They’re a force of nature. You can’t understand it, Molly, but they’re a great family. They forget nothing, they forgive nothing. Do you understand French? Ils cracheront de leurs tombes.”
Kim’s speech had begun to blur. He shook his head violently, his small face was deeply flushed. Christopher knew the signs; Kim’s capacity for alcohol was small, and he would soon need to go to sleep.
“Your Kennedys are not powerful in themselves,” Kim said. “They live in a powerful country, that’s all. They were working with their hands, unable to read, when the Nguyêns were kings of the land, and the Ngos were already wise men.”
The waiter brought the bill. Kim handed it to Christopher without looking at it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and folded it carefully before putting it down at the table. He patted Molly’s hand and pushed his chair back across the floor; the chair fell with a clatter behind him, but Kim did not look around.
He lifted his camera to his eye. “Smile,” he said. “I want a souvenir of this most wonderful lunch.” He took four photographs, quickly. He nodded, and walked out of the restaurant, carefully avoiding the chairs around the empty tables.
Molly watched him go. She closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled at Christopher.
“That’s a bitter little man,” she said. “What was that bit in French?”
“Il cracheront de leurs tombes,” Christopher translated. “They would spit out of their graves.’”
Finally they went to Siena. Christopher wanted to be in a quiet place. For a week he thought of nothing but Molly. They walked through the old town with its thin campanile and its buildings that were the color of dry earth. The afternoons turned cold and they lay in bed, reading a novel aloud to one another. They drank hot chocolate with sweet Italian brandy in it. They woke each other often in the night. Afterward, Molly pushed her heavy hair away from her face and looked down, smiling, into Christopher’s face. She fed the cats that gathered around her in the cafes. Christopher loved her so intensely that he felt her move in his own body.
It was Molly who liked to sleep with the window open. When the cold wakened Christopher on the last day in Siena, he noticed again that Molly slept with her lips parted, so that she seemed to be smiling over the day she had just lived through. It was only a few seconds after he had covered her and touched her hair that he went to the window, looked out, and realized what it was that Nguyên Kim, who looked like a brown child, had said to him in the restaurant in Rome.
Christopher went downstairs and booked one seat on an afternoon flight from Rome to the United States.