Mortals

by Norman Rush

  If he was tense, it was understandable. He was in a vacant house, crouched over the phone he was going to use, trying not to worry about the phone accoutrements he had put together. There was a certain amount of jury-rigging involved. It was twilight, which meant it was still morning where Resnick would be calling from, Washington or thereabouts. In a minute he would hear the voice of a civilized man.

  He was sure he was safe. He was in an empty house for rent, in Broadhurst, which was a quiet district. He was showing no light. He was in the pantry off the kitchen and he could close himself in if there was some difficulty with the volume control on his descrambler unit, which was the only possible weak point in the work of art his technical setup constituted, in truth. Where he was positioned, he was out of sight. In the unlikely event of anyone noticing him in the house, he was a prospective renter sent there by an estate agent. He had some paperwork to justify his presence. He had the house key with the estate agent’s tag on it. All the utilities were on, but he had a torch in case the electricity went out, which could always happen. Explaining why a long extension had been spliced into the house-phone cord would be a little tricky in the event anyone made note of it. He would claim ignorance, be puzzled himself. Splicing in the extension had been the only way he could get the phone into the pantry where he needed to be. By the time anyone could get physically into the house he would have all his accoutrements and tools out of sight, packed away in his knapsack. He heard a crackle in the descrambler.

  He could get mournful at the drop of a hat, thinking about Marion’s downfall, but he knew very little about why it had happened. He had been an imbiber, which in the agency was part of the culture, a little like the use of chewing tobacco in professional baseball. People were cautioned or sent off to dry out, and their careers continued. Marion. Marion was a red wine maven, a Bordeaux maven. He called his glass of wine red joy. Why had Marion fallen? Marion was in the agency, whereas he was of the agency, which was perfect because it meant he had nothing to fear from the wars of the ins and the outs back in Langley, the fights between the Brahmin liberals and the papist ultras like Casey, which he didn’t care about. And now he was hearing about a Mormon beachhead in Clandestine Services. Marion had run the station well, as far as Ray knew. And how could anyone hate a man who was a Scrabble master and a collector of ancient Roman brothel tokens, sprintriae, they were called. But someone had hated him and now he was spending his mortal life running a Magic Marker through sensitive passages in documents going out under FOIA. He was a clerk.

  The descrambler was emitting definite crepitations. He rested his hand on it, a small model in black plastic about the size of a cigar box, to feel if it was warm. It was. These machines were astonishing. Anyone cutting into a transmission would get pure static. The smell of ammonia in the pantry was fairly strong. People are the same everywhere, he thought. The pantry shelves had been scrubbed, all except the top one, which Ray had checked out by standing on the first shelf.

  It was too bad that when the call came it wouldn’t be Marion’s natural voice. The descrambler had a way of flattening out tones and, depending on the setting, stretching out the delivery. He would cope. Also he would cope with the fact that this had to be a one-way transmission, Resnick to Finch. His role would be to signal that receiving was in progress by pressing a confirm key at intervals. It was remotely possible that Marion would employ a voice mask as an extreme added precaution. He hoped not. Ray was ready. The handset was clipped into place and he was holding down the hook switch. He was unsure how Aesopian Marion was going to feel he needed to be. It was normal prudence to avoid using the proper names of key parties in these communications, but he might go further. The phone rang. He released the hook switch. A sound like a weak moan came from the descrambler speaker. It was Marion.

  Marion began. It was too loud.

  Ray had to do something. It was much too loud. He stripped off his shirt, wildly, and bunched it against the speaker. It was still too loud. You can never relax, he thought. He needed something like a towel or blanket, which he didn’t have. The house was unfurnished. Desperately he thought of getting out of his bush shorts and adding them to the mufflage the shirt was providing inadequately.

  The sound wasn’t blaring, but it would be audible outside the house at this level. He couldn’t bear the idea of terminating the call.

  God save me, he thought, and struck the volume knob with the butt of his flashlight. It worked. Something did. It brought the volume down.

  “Hello my darling,” Marion said, startling Ray. It was possible he was drinking. If he was it was a measure of the risk he had been asked to assume and Ray could forgive it, forgive everything.

  “Hello my boy, are you there? Can you hear?” Ray tapped the confirm key. Marion’s voice was metallic but it was recognizable as his. There was no voice mask.

  Methodically, Marion went through the basic biodata, part of which Ray already had. Marion was reading from notes. It was good to get exact dates.

  In sum, the subject’s paternal family was of very haute black bourgeoisie origins, upper civil service, in Antigua. Then it had been Baltimore and then Cambridge, where the subject’s father had become a fixture at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Christian Morals. There was more that Ray already knew. Subject’s mother, now deceased, was white, a birthright Quaker. There would be more about her. There were no siblings. And so on.

  As an only child, and only son, much had been expected of the subject, despite the disability he was born with, monobrevipodia, one leg shorter than the other. The subject’s mother had brought money, more money, into the family. Now the prep school list was complete.

  “Mine eyes dazzle. She died young,” Marion said, quoting John Webster for no reason apparent to Ray, until he realized it must refer to the early death of Morel’s mother.

  “Our subject was always a holy terror to his poor parents. He was precocious. He was enrolled in the divinity school for six months but quit and somehow slid over into the medical school, where he developed shall we say an outspoken attitude to the imperfections of orthodox medicine.

  “The man is trouble. He left divinity school announcing that he was going to convert to Judaism because it was clear to him how dastardly Christianity had been to the Jews. He was threatening to do it out of solidarity, you understand me, not belief, because he had become, better yet, an atheist.

  “There was some violence between father and son.

  “Circumcision came into it. There were fights with his father when he said it would be easy to become a voluntary Jew, since he was already circumcised.

  “He was something. I can give you his IQ, by the way … 170.”

  Ray didn’t believe it. He would stake his life on it that this was a fluke or wrong. It was unnecessary information! But of course Marion had no notion of how Ray was involved with Morel or why he should be tender in anything he reported.

  “Now we have some events florid enough for anyone, God knows. The subject’s mother dies after refusing to eat. It could be true. The subject’s mother left senior over his entrenched womanizing. Then senior remarries … wait I forgot to say junior had married a Nigerian woman. She was living with the subject but in senior’s very nice house. She divorces our subject and marries senior. How long before the divorce something had been going on is unknown.

  “Junior gets his medical degree anyway.

  “You would be amazed at the way this was handled at Harvard. There was a fistfight in Widener between father and son that never happened. There were other incidents.

  “By the way when subject’s mother left the hearth, she became an administrator at a Quaker conference center, Powell House, far from Massachusetts. This was much earlier.

  “They’re slick, at Harvard. The factors managed everything. Tap and show you can hear me, my boy.” Ray did.

  “Our subject graduates, does his residency in internal medicine.

  “So then our man becomes a public nuisance in C
ambridge. He opens a practice in Cambridge, and over in Malden a storefront not for his practice but for, let me look at something, his organization, the Giordano Bruno Society. He founded it. They hold meetings attacking religion.

  “He is the published author of two books, here they are, dEaTHICS, with the title done in clever typography, small d and small a and the rest caps, you get the point. And the other Theolatry, Mankind’s Curse. Both of these are published by Diagoras Press, Diagoras being the first atheist on record, as I know you know. He is, by the way, the founder of Diagoras Press and its only author.

  “Someway he finds time to get qualified in chiropractic, certain varieties of massage, and medical hypnosis.

  “His practice develops. He has a female following, largely female, which is not so surprising since this is unorthodox medicine. Does he miss his ex-wife, now his stepmother? Doesn’t look like it. He has girlfriends, several, from his patient population.

  “You know how fucked I am here, by the way. I won’t go into it. I’m almost through with this. I’m almost out. Not a decade too soon. Please you’ve got to hit the confirm key every once in a while. You know how to do this. They hate me. You know how this works, hit the thing. Good. Thank you.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t care. They’ll never find out.

  “I am the fox.”

  You are and so am I, Ray thought.

  “Harvard, speaking of Harvard, did you know that the people who invented the idea of giving points for alumni parents were the factors at Harvard, so they could cut down on the number of Jews they would have to admit?

  “I’ve got to tell you something annoying I hate. My wife joined Al-Anon, you know what that is. Just to put pressure on me I don’t need. She thinks I’m an alcoholic. The whole world runs on somebody being able to have a drink once in a while.

  “Let me tell you something. My mind is wandering.

  “One thing I can let you know. At a certain place of work, you can forget Jews. Believe me and prosit, you will never see us at the top here again, not until they drive Israel into the sea. Then maybe.”

  This was about the Pollard case and its ramifications. Marion should leave this alone. He willed him to get back on the subject, so to speak.

  “This is what I did for you. I talked to two of his girlfriends …”

  Ray was amazed. No doubt Marion had contacted them by phone on the pretense of doing a full field investigation for some nonexistent government job for Morel, which was the way it was done and which was highly illegal. Marion was surrounding the news with silence so that Ray would appreciate the significance of it. He did. He was not in a position to do anything in return for Marion, which Marion knew. This was more than he deserved. Ray hit the confirm key.

  “So what I got was that the man is a gentleman. They had nothing but good things to say. Both of them were academics and they both volunteered that their relationships had come to an end because they were relocating, essentially. Both had married other people. They seemed to miss him. They were both ex-patients and they both seemed to think he had fixed up whatever it was they went to him for in the first place. I couldn’t get off the phone with one of them. She wanted to talk about the man. So.”

  Ray pressed the confirm key. A pause began that worried Ray. It went on. It was impossible not to wonder if something had gone wrong. He reviewed Marion’s delivery to date. Marion had been careful.

  People had no idea how careful you had to be these days if you wanted not to be picked up. In a way he found it hard to believe himself, how amazing the seining operation being run from New Zealand, Echelon Dictionary, was, in what it could do, which was to process the entire spectrum of nonencrypted communications of every sort … phone, radio, fax, electronic … worldwide. He wasn’t supposed to know about Dictionary, but Marion had told him about it, mainly to make fun of it. Marion thought seining was stupid. It cost billions. What it did was capture and scan any and all digitized communications for key words, like Arafat or bomb or Mandela, store the ones of interest, use them to trace down the senders. But all you needed to do to defeat Dictionary was to camouflage your referents, use a little circumlocution, as Marion was doing adequately so far. Dictionary was run by the National Security Agency but the Central Intelligence Agency was a partaker, in a big way. There was a race angle to Dictionary that Marion hated. It wasn’t just all the noncommunist White Guys International, oh no. It was Anglo-Saxon—the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand. It occurred to him that Marion’s bad luck in the agency might have something to do with indiscretions in other quarters about Dictionary. Marion had felt strongly about it, he knew that. The pause was continuing. It was distressing. Of course Dictionary was monstrous. He thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christ compared to the air we breathe. Make it The State compared to the air we breathe, he thought. Marion was back.

  “Let’s see. I ought to mention his radio program, half anti-God and half against aspartame. It gives you brain damage if you take it with MSG, if you’re a rat. It was alternative radio. Got nowhere. He stabs at things, now this now that. Trying to find a nerve, I guess. He organized some picket lines against circumcision at Harvard General. Nobody got arrested. He’s clean up and down. Not even a traffic violation.

  “You can see the picture emerging. He’s out for trouble. He wants to be a Jew, doloris causa, and put his father out of business.

  “So at the same time he’s evolving as a professional irritant he’s making a mint with his practice.

  “I think the man is a devil. There are people around you could call devils. Divils, the Irish call them.” Rex is a devil, Ray thought.

  “I think the point was to make himself a spectacle in Cambridge, under his father’s nose. That was the original thing, I believe.

  “Then. Father dead, stroke, in 1989. Religious ceremony at the funeral, of course, subject will not attend. Who knows if it played a part that his ex was the grieving widow.

  “Not only would he not attend, but he mourned his father outside on the sidewalk by giving out copies of a pamphlet, Was Christ a Nut? during the funeral service. I have one. Should you want it.

  “But it gets even worse. The papers covered it. Somehow it had been arranged for the flyers to, well, fly down on the mourners inside the church, courtesy one of the subject’s followers, no doubt. I forgot to mention that senior died on vacation in the Caribbean, on a beach, and that a certain columnist wondered if the stroke was sun-induced or son-induced, s-o-n. The papers have it that the widow came out and spat in the subject’s face, and she did, but she missed.

  “Man, he was being notorious! What fun! But it was getting to be more than that. The widow, by the way, is with … a major international financial institution. She’s an economist. She’s no longer in the Cambridge area.”

  Ray realized that Marion had started to identify Morel’s ex-wife’s workplace as the World Bank, something Ray already knew, but had stopped out of prudence.

  “Senior I should add was a majestic figure, patrician, fine head, fine voice, very tall, both legs the same length.

  “So with senior gone, and senior’s wife relocating, he continues his practice. And I have to say that as a healer, people swear by him. They still do. He had to limit his clientele, because the way he proceeds is to talk to you in extenso about your probably defective view of life compared to his. You get a reading list and a pamphlet casting doubt on the existence of God along with your foot rub and recipe cards. He calls it eclectic medicine. You have to deal with his notion that God-belief is toxic, something it’s better not to swallow, credulism is his term, I believe. All he asks is that you contemplate his proposition, not that you accept it as a condition of treatment. He was especially good with musculoskeletal problems. Headaches too. I’m trying to see if I missed anything … Yes, he went to Taiwan for six months to get a certificate in Chinese herbs.”

  Marion’s theory was that Morel, with his father and ex-wife off the scene, had suffered a certain
deceleration. There were only two notable events in the period between senior’s death and the subject’s great encounter with a particular African gentleman and subsequent decision to leave Cambridge for Africa forever. One event had been a shortlived lawsuit against the Catholic Church for consumer fraud or false advertising. The subject had encouraged a young woman whose psychological reaction to an exorcism performed by a priest, an employee of the diocese, had been severe, to hold the church liable. It was very convoluted. The church sponsored various spots on television, which the subject had attempted to construe as advertising for a package of doctrines of which many were manifestly false, such as the assertion that demons existed. That had gone nowhere. The only other event was obscure. He had irritated a certain group not of interest to the extent that they broke the windows of the subject’s storefront. But this was a group not … of … interest. There was a pause.

  Ray was puzzled. Marion was letting him think. Ray saw it. The emphasis on not of interest had been meant to signify the presence of an acronym, NOI, Nation of Islam. He hit the confirm key twice, hoping that Marion would understand he was signaling that he got the message.

  Marion began recounting, with extreme circumspection, the coming together of Davis Morel and the chronic bad back of the Minister of Local Government and Lands of the Government of Botswana, Petrus Tshenelo. There had been an investment promotion exercise at Harvard starring Tshenelo, the scheduled main speaker and presenter at the event. Ray knew a lot about Tshenelo. He was a power in Domkrag. He was bright. His back had gone out on the eve of the seminar, immobilizing him. Regular medicine had failed to help him. Then it had been exit-orthodox-medicine-pursued-by-a-bear, and enter Doctor Morel, recommended by a porter who had been restored to paid servitude by him. Tshenelo had been magically restored. Marion added a stray detail about Morel’s fees. Apparently you paid only if you felt he had helped you. You could pay above a reasonable minimum if you chose to and could afford it and many of the overprivileged did.