The four men faced each other, Foley and Trumbull in chairs on one side of a coffee table, Christopher and Patchen on a sofa on the other side. Christopher watched Foley. As he read, his face tightened. Once or twice he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. He finished the last page, closed the folder, and tossed it on the coffee table. A photograph fell to the floor, the picture of the dead gunmen by the paddy in Saigon. Patchen picked it up and put it back into the file folder.
“That’s pretty rough reading,” Trumbull said. “David, what’s Paul’s background?”
“Christopher has been decorated twice for his work. He is a very senior officer. Within the outfit, his skill and his accuracy have never been questioned.”
Foley cleared his throat. “He’s also Patchen’s best and oldest friend,” he said.
“That’s irrelevant,” Patchen said. “The question before us is this report.”
Trumbull peered over his glasses. “Paul,” he said, “I’d like a little more flavor before I make a comment. Tell us how you see this.”
“It’s all there, in the report.”
“I mean in your own words.”
“Those are my own words, Mr. Trumbull.”
“I know that, boy. What I want you to do is talk us through it.”
Foley got to his feet, went to the bar, and made himself another drink. He took his glass to the window and stood there, looking into the quiet street.
“The truth is plain enough,” Christopher said. “Before I go into it, I want to ask you a question.”
Trumbull said, “Ask away.”
“What exactly was the role of the U.S. government in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem?”
Trumbull stared for a moment at Foley’s rigid back. Then he said to Patchen, “Tell him.”
“I think you already know, Paul,” Patchen said. “In simple terms, we countenanced it. We knew it was being planned. We offered advice. We provided support. We encouraged the plot. We welcomed the results.”
“Who exactly is ‘we’?” Christopher asked.
“It was a White House project. They handled it, for the most part, with their staff and their communications. The foreign-policy establishment ran errands. There was no plan to kill Diem and Nhu.”
“No plan? What did you people imagine was going to happen to them?”
“There’s no point in arguing that now, Paul. What happened, happened.”
J. D. Trumbull had been gazing idly at Dennis Foley’s back. Now he turned his eyes, set in nests of wrinkles, on Christopher.
“Old Dennis told me you were upset about Diem and Nhu and how they died,” he said. “I think that speaks well of you, Paul. But it reminds me of what Harry Truman said about the bleeding hearts who kept on weeping and gnashing their teeth and crying shame and damnation after we dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Truman said he heard a lot about all those dead Japs, but damn little about the drowned American sailors at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. You’ve got to keep your eye on the whole balance sheet.”
“You just got through reading the balance sheet, Mr. Trumbull.”
“Well, maybe. What you’ve given us in this report is just bare bones, Paul. I’d still like to hear it from your own lips, if you think you’re ready to talk to us now.”
“This seems redundant,” Christopher said. “The facts are in my report. All the rest-how I operated and why, what people looked like when I spoke to them, how much money it cost -is background noise. If it helps you to understand, I can tell you all that.”
“Do that,” Trumbull said. “I’m just an old country lawyer. I’d like to hear how you fellows do the things you do.”
At that, Patchen smiled at last and picked up his glass of scotch. Trumbull had been sipping his own whiskey for some moments, and he rattled the ice in his empty glass and gave Patchen an inquiring look. Patchen fetched him another drink.
2
Christopher began to speak.
“The report deals with the main question-who assassinated President Kennedy and why-and with two incidental pieces of information,” he said. “These treat with the murder of Oswald, and with the possibility that heroin and other drugs will be used as weapons of war against U.S. troops in Vietnam. The Oswald murder-execution would be a better word-and the heroin just popped up in the course of the search for information about the assassination. There is no doubt about the truth of the matter where the assassinations of Kennedy and Oswald are concerned. As to the heroin, Patchen and the outfit can pursue it. It’s more important than the other two questions, because you can still do something about it. It’s intelligence. The rest of what I reported is just explanation.”
Trumbull leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’m learning,” he said. “You fellows are a cold bunch.”
“I’ll deal first with the Kennedy assassination,” Christopher said. “This is the way it happened: Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother, believed for some time that the Kennedy Administration wanted to overthrow their regime and replace it with a more pliant one. The Ngos knew that a coup was being plotted-they knew everything that went on in Saigon. There is collateral intelligence in the files on these two points. I reported some of it myself while the Ngo brothers were still alive.
“Around the beginning of September, Diem and Nhu gave up all hope that they could survive. They were realists; they knew the power of the United States and the ambitions of the South Vietnamese generals. Diem and Nhu expected to be overthrown, and I believe they knew their enemies would kill them. They made plans to revenge themselves-to spit out of their graves, as one of their relatives put it. You have to understand that they didn’t want revenge for personal reasons. They regarded the coup and their own murders as an insult to their family and to the Vietnamese nation.
“It’s normal in South Asia for people, even educated people, to horoscope important projects. They believe there are forces beyond human intelligence that have an effect on the acts of men-you can smile, Mr. Trumbull, but if you don’t understand that reality, and give it due weight, you’ll be making an arrogant mistake. You may think horoscopy is primitive, but it exists, and it’s used as a matter of course throughout the tropical world.
“You’ve seen that there are two sets of horoscopes, both drawn by the Chinese Yu Lung in Saigon. The first set was drawn up on September 8,1963. It predicted, quite accurately, that Diem and Nhu would be murdered and that the murder would be instigated by a powerful foreigner.
“On the basis of that horoscope, Diem and Nhu alerted their family. The head of the family, the Truong toe, who is identified in my report, took over the planning for the revenge of the deaths of Diem and Nhu. After reading Yu Lung’s horoscopes, no one in the family doubted that the murders would occur, and soon. Nor did they doubt the broker for these murders would be the President of the United States.
“On September 12 Yu Lung drew up the second set of horoscopes. September 12 was the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s marriage. You have the translations. The men horoscoped were Diem and Nhu again, President Kennedy, a North Vietnamese intelligence officer named Do Minh Kha, and Do Minh Kha’s grown-up daughter. Her name is Dao-or, in French, Nicole. In addition to a reading of zodiacal signs relating to these five persons, Yu Lung drew up an elaborate geo-mantic scheme. This showed the places, the geographical locations, where the feng shui, or the good and evil forces that act on men, would be strongest.
“Yu Lung’s readings confirmed that death was certain for Diem and Nhu. The family had already decided-through logic, not magic-that John F. Kennedy would be the murderer of their relatives. Yu Lung’s horoscope, based on the precise hour, date, and year of Kennedy’s birth and other public information -when and where he was wounded in the war, was stricken with his illness, was married, when his child died, when his older brother was killed-showed that there were patches in the lunar calendar in which Kennedy was vulnerable to violent death.