Free The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

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.
    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