3
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.”