Mortals

by Norman Rush

  …

  Lillian was looking at him with a kind of horrified expression. He must have been talking to himself. He needed to concentrate on Boyle, who was certainly taking his time.

  When Boyle had taken over, all the procedures had changed. The flexibility had gone out of the relationships, his with Boyle, at least. He assumed it was the same for the others. All the irony went away, what there had been. Boyle’s mission seemed to be that everyone needed to be reminded that all their activities were life and death, at some level. The cover at this embassy for the chief of station was consular officer. It always had been. And with Marion it had been perfectly okay to pop by upstairs on ostensible school business, say to discuss arrangements for student scholarships in the U.S. that the consular office had a lot to do with, pop in and talk about the real stuff, his assignments, how they were going. Marion had always let him read the Foreign Press Intelligence Summary cables that kept piling up. Now all that was dead. When he turned things in, Boyle never had much to say. Calls at the consular office had to be based on dire emergency only.

  Now there was a whole new drill around seeing Boyle face to face. The embassy, a narrow three-story building, looked outward onto the parking lot flanking the mall. The American Library was built into the side of the embassy building and opened on one of the alleys that cut through from the parking lot to the concourse itself. The American Library had always been a physically separate entity. Somehow Boyle had arranged for the construction of a secret spiral staircase, housed in a tube stairwell, to connect his second-floor offices to the library’s inmost conference room. In fact, the old conference room in the rear had been divided in half for the purpose of creating a new, secret meeting place for Boyle’s use. Boyle’s access to the room was by way of a secret panel rather than a conventional doorway. Ray had never seen Boyle enter or exit the back cubicle. He was always in place, set to go, when Ray was let in. There was a new keypad lock on the door to the main conference room, and two keypads for the lock on the inner door. Ray had the combination to the first door only. Lillian had to punch him through. He understood that the tube stairwell was a tight fit for Boyle, which wouldn’t be surprising. Boyle tended to look flushed, often, when they met in back. In fact, he always did.

  A few Batswana students had come in to read magazines. Ray wanted to get started with Boyle, but nothing was happening. Finally there was a signal. Lillian murmured something to Ray about picking up the photocopies he had come for. That was standard. He was glad to be leaving the reading room because a fine, gnawing, sourceless hum hung in the air, and something smelled powerfully of solvent. Lillian was thin, cold, and officious. She was a Motswana. She had studied library science in the United States. She had been posted to Dar es Salaam prior to coming home. She was about forty, he guessed. He always skipped offering her the traditional greetings, unless there were Batswana present, because he had gotten the distinct impression that she regarded the act as being condescending. Looking at her now, he wondered if Lillian was a genuine Motswana. She was very Nilotic, very elongated, with what the Batswana call “long eyes.” She had arrived in the country simultaneously with Boyle.

  Boyle looked like a composite. His body from neck to hips was pyramidal. There was a fat-distribution problem. His face tended to gauntness. He had once been much fatter, judging by the loose skin of his underjaw that hung like a keel fin from chin to throat. He would tug on this when he was annoyed with himself, Ray had noted. From a distance, Boyle’s face had a healthy look, but the Celtic ruddiness in his cheeks, seen close-up, came from concentrated traceries of broken capillaries. He was in his early fifties. His rather golden hair was worn crewcut and was dense, like lawn. His eyebrows, too, were blond and dense, tousled, the right eyebrow interrupted by a vertical blank space, a scar, evidence of some encounter threatening to his eye, and a little intimidating, as all facial scars hinting at personal combat tended to be. His eyes were blue, a dull blue. Boyle was supposed to be a Knight of Malta, if that meant anything. Ray recognized for what it was Boyle’s soft, heavily manipulative style of speech. Boyle would drift into speaking so softly at certain times that Ray would be forced into asking him to repeat something, which made Ray look bad instead of Boyle, of course. The point of speaking unduly softly was to keep the listener in a state of tense hyperattention and, in Boyle’s case, to keep him subject to the startle effect produced by the occasional shout or loud groan of disgust.

  Lillian had ushered him to the conference room. He looked away, up at the ceiling, while Lillian pressed the combinations in. That was the protocol. He entered the conference room and closed the door behind him. Ludicrously, a panel in the wall of the conference room slid open. He passed through, into the secret space.

  Boyle was there. The room was more a cubicle than a room. The blond oval conference table was stupidly oversized, given the dimensions of the cubicle. Fluorescent panels overhead provided dull, even light. Ray took his seat, facing Boyle across the widest part of the table. Boyle’s chair was thronelike. Ray had a folding chair. Weak airconditioning was at work. Boyle’s thick hands were at rest on a folder in front of him.

  Ray had fantasized about doing a Life of this man. He could do a classic. Boyle was a field of signs indicating that he probably thought of his physical emanations as very bad things. He used a cologne and an aftershave. The two scents were separable. He used breath pastilles once or twice during every meeting. His nails were groomed. His nostrils were hairless and scoured-looking.

  Boyle nodded, but before Ray could say anything Boyle opened his folder and began writing something on a sheet of paper inside it.

  Ray waited. Boyle was mostly faithful to the Western business dress mode, to suits and ties, which was possible for him because he existed in an unbroken regime of airconditioning. His BMW was airconditioned. Boyle dressed expensively. His only apparent concession to the climate of Africa was that he wore, on occasion, peculiar mesh shirts with stiff collars, still technically dress shirts, of a kind Ray had never seen on any other human being.

  It was Ray’s idea that another key to Boyle’s presentation of self was a need he felt to project physical threat, to remind you that he was a True Man. True Men could hurt you, physically. True Men needed you to keep it in mind that they are caged panthers. But Boyle, at least since the onset of his weight or glandular problem, was not going to be credibly able to imply in any way that he might be able to spring at you if you offended him. But he was used to having the power to do that, so he had shifted the threat to things that he did with his face, his eyes, his voice. The idea was to prevent the rise of any notion that Boyle was, in fact, only a former True Man. This was reminding him of discussions with his mother on the subject of manhood, true manhood.

  Boyle kept writing.

  Ray observed that they had finally gotten around to carpeting the cubicle. The rug was the color of celery.

  Ray reminded himself to be smart about how he put things to Boyle today. He might throw in a little jargon, for example. Boyle loved team talk and Ray avoided it. Marion Resnick had shared his ironical attitude toward it. If he wanted to cinch getting Boyle’s okay for making Morel a person of interest, it might behoove Ray to throw some jargonese at him.

  Boyle was writing and writing.

  When it came to team language, there was a lot of it. How up to date he was was also a question. Radish meant a left group that the agency had created from the ground up. Hull was a more generic term and applied to groups under control, of whatever political complexion. Sources who gave you information for their own reasons and without accepting any kind of payment were called chums. In the old days the term for someone under control through the mechanism of blackmail was orphan. He hated this language. Then there were the noms de guerre certain agents were known by, certain agents who were specialists, dangerous people. There was the Seraph. There was the Cat in the Hat. Boyle ate and drank this pulp aspect of the agency, you could tell. Skit was the term for a major opera
tion, something world-shaking, something where specialists took over. Skits were rare and had nothing to do, usually, with the contract arm, for which he thanked God. Skits were for line officers, specialists, and, a lot of the time, proxies from friendly other services. Skits were not his province. He had never seen one.

  Ray couldn’t believe what was happening. But he had to be steady and he needed to be pleasant while this was happening to him, because those were the rules and he had to be able to act if some notion of how to undo this should come to him. One thing Boyle did that Marion never had was to announce at the start of every meeting just how long you had. Boyle had given him twenty minutes and more than half of that was gone and there had to be enough time within the twenty minutes for Ray to get paid. It was payday.

  Boyle was saying no to making Davis Morel a person of interest. He was being adamant. He seemed to be saying that it was no, even to making him a provisional person of interest, which was unheard of if the case being made was as strong as his was.

  It was taking a chance, but Ray decided he had to put the proposition to Boyle again, from a slightly different angle. Whatever I thought was interesting, Marion thought was interesting, which let me in for moments like this, that eat shit.

  Ray put it conditionally. “If I wrote him up it wouldn’t have to be a full-dress thing. I can keep it crisp. And I could drop it if it turns out to look like what you say it is. It would be a probe, or a preprobe, you’d be authorizing.”

  Boyle shook his head.

  What Ray couldn’t believe, especially, was that Boyle the ultra, Boyle the Knight of Malta, was uninterested in what looked like it might be the start of a Pagan Liberation Front. Why was he uninterested in a fount of irreligion being set up? Maybe Ray had to broaden his picture of the stain that might spread from Morel if nobody stanched it and so on and so forth.

  Ray went on. “Summing it up, it goes like this. You have this character and you know he has some kind of definite campaign in mind. We see the offprints he has ready to go. We see these handout cards. And the evidence is pretty good that he’s planning to make tapes. He brought a shit-load of blank cassette tapes with him. We know that. So that even the illiterates can get the message.

  “Even if the only question we had about him was who in hell he thinks he is, it would be worth getting the answer. But anyway. There’s also the list of peculiar names he had. Well, as I told you, I did figure out what that is. It’s a list of South American tribes exterminated by the Christian soldiers of Spain, just in one part of South America. So the implication is pretty clear. Africa has tribes, Botswana has tribes, the white man cometh, you see the point. It’s a litany of murdered tribes. It’s not so hard to imagine where this kind of fragment might fit in, is it? By the way the list comes from a book called Land Without Evil, and the guy who wrote it was a Brit who was friendly with the KGB.

  “So okay, and the operation he has in mind, from what little we know from this distance, the operation has the potential to get all the religious groups in the country upset, once they hear about it. The Muslims are already upset, for other reasons. And don’t forget that this character is going to be identified as what he is, one of us, an American, which may be something we don’t particularly need on our plate, this part-time Antichrist being one of us.”

  Ray was going on too long and he knew it, but he couldn’t make himself stop. He had to put everything out. He hated the slings and arrows of staircase wisdom. Also it was getting to be so tough to get face to face with Boyle that he had to seize the moment. Boyle wasn’t liking this, which wasn’t fine. But he had to lay it all out.

  Ray said, “Another piece of this, and I’m sure you know all about it, is that Doctor Morel has two patients in the cabinet. The Secretary for the Office of the President and the Minister of Local Government and Lands. You know, we’re not the only people in Gaborone aware of this. Everybody knows it. You mention Morel’s name and people tell you how he saved Montshwa, or rather how first he saved Fabius and then Montshwa. They were in the delegation that went to Boston. This is the story that’s around. Fabius had some sort of leg problem and somebody sent him to Morel. And then Montshwa’s back seized up and Fabius had liked Morel so much he brought Montshwa to him and the rest is history. They walk, they run, they dance …”

  “Lookit,” Boyle said, hard, which only showed Ray how long Boyle must have been out of contemporary U.S. culture. Lookit was a class-descriptor … lower class, and anyway it was long out of use. Even he knew that. Of course now Boyle was trying to be hard with him.

  “Now lookit,” Boyle said. “None of this matters, and …”

  Ray interrupted. “Wait, I’m not saying this character is Rasputin or Stephen Ward. I don’t think he is. But. But. Wait, I lost my train of thought. I think it was … he just gets here, he hardly gets here and he has friends in high places and people are noticing him and … sorry, I lost it.”

  “Lookit,” Boyle said.

  Again Ray stopped him. “Wait, before I forget this … I didn’t mention this before and you might want to consider it.

  “Okay, let’s set aside all the friends in high places and think about this. I mentioned how one of the subjects our friend seems interested in agitating around is circumcision. I did mention it, didn’t I? But what I didn’t mention is bogwera.

  “Bogwera is a ritual. See, at one time the Tswana circumcised their young men in these bogwera camps when they reached puberty. Well the tradition died down until very recently and now it’s coming back, the same as traditional medicine is. It’s part of a cultural revival. You can read notices announcing bogwera camps in Dikgang. They’re big.

  “Right, so someone coming out saying that circumcision is for idiots is not going to be popular. I mean, my guess is that the arguments that are going to be made against it are going to be that it’s medically stupid, primarily. And there’s one more point, just quickly, about circumcision, which is that most of the Tswana tribes, maybe all of them, used to do it, but the Zulus, and there are a lot of Zulus in the mix in this country, some of them doing quite well, and the Zulus don’t do it, they think it’s stupid. There’s bad blood, historically, over the issue between the Xhosas, of which there are plenty here, especially around Mahalapye, and the Zulus. And this was because Shaka stopped circumcising his guys because it took them out of circulation just when they should be getting into shape for warmaking. The Xhosas actually see the Zulus as unclean because of it. It’s serious. Down in the Republic it’s part of the problem between the Zulus in Inkatha and the ANC, which is mostly Xhosa. Anyway, we have both groups intermingled up here. So potentially any kind of open campaigning on the issue is going to be inflammatory in a number of directions. You see my point.”

  Ray was parched. There was never ever anything to drink available in the room. He realized that the room had been made smaller by the newly installed soundproofing that Boyle had ordered. Ceiling and walls were now covered with porous sheathing, a good idea if Boyle was going to have free use of his shouting option. The room ate sound. That was why Ray was parched. It was voice-strain. He should always get a drink of water before he saw Boyle.

  Boyle’s long, slow sigh was meant to say that Ray was being taxing. That was fine. He had said everything he could. Ray gathered himself.

  Boyle began. “Okay, let me just say it so you understand it. I don’t give a fuck about this chiropractor. Wait till he sees it here. I know these guys who want to save the world, believe me I know them. This fucker will go home in six months when he sees it here. More like six weeks. This is some kind of prima donna who thinks he’s too good to be a fucking chiropractor, so he decides he should be some stupid intellectual savior instead. I know him. Don’t bother me with people like this shithead. This guy is black. He was living in Cambridge, for Christ’s sake, so wait until he sees it here. Cape Town, someplace like that, he might end up in, not here. With these black characters it’s a romantic black bourgeoisie thing about Africa and it takes ab
out six weeks until they say uh-oh. Cambridge, Boston, places you can have a lot of fun. Believe me I know enough about this character to know he means nothing to us, and I mean nothing, zero, zero squared. These cards he’s going to hand out. I wish I could be there and see the expression on the faces over at the takeaway. It’s a joke. Believe me that this is a guy who likes to eat out. He was living on the best street in Cambridge. I know his story. He was up against all the local geniuses they have around Cambridge. So out here he’s the biggest genius around. Fuck him. It’s a safari, believe me. Over here in the bulrushes he’s going to be Moses, a light to the nations, whatever. This is a man with his head up his own ass and finding it very interesting in there, very interesting, gee.”

  Boyle carried a menthol inhaler which he dug out now and applied to his nostrils.

  Boyle went on. “Believe me, when he was in Cambridge what he was was a chiropractor. Now he comes over here and he’s the light of the world. But tell me something. Why didn’t the light of the world write a book instead? He never published a thing, so far as I know. Why not? Believe me when I say this guy is going to self-destruct. Besides I know twenty ways to get him out of here if he fucks around to any degree. I don’t need to know a thing about this guy I don’t already know. I …”

  Ray couldn’t help himself. He broke in again.

  “Yeah, but you’re leaving out Fabius and Montshwa. They swear by him. What about his protection? What about …”

  Boyle said, “You know, words fail me with you. There is no protection I can’t break. You don’t know a thing about what I can do. I don’t mean to beat up on your idea, but I don’t think you understand a lot of things you should.”