Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Thus the famous bond begins, which you know more about than I do, since you have it in front of you. Suddenly, Africa interests our man greatly. In six months it was bon voyage and over to you.

  “That’s about all I have, my boy. But I want to say something. You get these guys pretty rarely. He goes to extremes. He does that. But don’t look only at that. What I want to say is … the man is real. You know the Quakers during the war who wouldn’t cooperate with selective service? They called themselves absolutists. He’s like that …”

  Marion had injured him. Ray hated the idea that Marion was implying a distinction between the two of them, Ray and Marion, what they were, and Morel, of the kind that he seemed to be implying. I know what I am, he thought.

  “As a historical type he reminds me of Tommaso Campanella, although he probably won’t spend twenty-seven years in prison, although that might be what would make him happiest, you never know with these guys. Anyway, he was a relentless, amazing man.”

  It was time to hang up. Using the word prison had been a departure from the level of prudence established from the beginning. He didn’t like it. Marion was liable to very … what, very flowing presentations.

  “The key to the man is his mother, poor woman. I would say. She died of what the Romans called inedia. She ate less and less and then stopped eating altogether. For a long time, she concealed what she was up to and kept working at this place I mentioned. She was an extremist, in her way. She came from a famous antislavery family, abolitionist, people always on the right side of the issue when the Quakers were temporizing, some of them. It seems she conceived a horror of the world, or something. Imagine that. Her friend says she died of her disillusionment. She never asked for custody. She was in bad shape after the breakup. I saw the medical records. She was very petite, a very fine person. Very active person in the civil rights movement before she married and for a while after. His aunt had possession of his mother’s ashes and he went to some trouble to get a portion of them to take along to Africa.

  “So, my boy, now you have him. Leaving us was no gesture. He has nothing here, no property, not a dime in the bank. He sold all his stocks. He’s not a tourist.”

  That seemed to be all.

  “Goodnight, my boy. Be good.”

  “I will,” Ray said. He turned swiftly to the task of packing up.

  He hadn’t thanked his friend. What was wrong with him, not to have clicked?

  “Goodnight. Thank you,” he said to the device now cooling in his hands.

  18. The Piggery Had Its Uses

  It had taken a certain amount of art to get Ponatsego Mazumo properly disposed toward the mission Ray had for him. Money alone might have done it, of course, but that would have changed the relationship between them forever, and Pony was a fixture at the school and someone he had to work smoothly with for as far into the night as he could see. How much Pony believed of the rationale for Ray’s proposed operation was beside the point. What was important was that they both have an unsordid rationale they could coexist in respectably with one another. Rationale was a subheading in the Acquiring Assets segment of the agency training program he’d gone through. He’d done well in Rationale, but then he’d done well in most subjects, not excluding Flaps and Seals, which was boring.

  Pony was in a considering state, still, gazing up into the thatch. It was nearly dusk. They were seated across from one another at the conference table in Ray’s office. Pony was pursing and unpursing his lips. Ray had the feeling Pony was enjoying being there and might be prolonging things just for that reason. Not very many of Ray’s colleagues had been invited to visit Ray’s office. There was almost a deal. But Pony was obviously savoring the ambience. No place smelled better than Ray’s office. It was furniture polish, books, thatch, the pipe tobacco in the humidor whose lid he left cocked for a few minutes from time to time to remind him of the pleasures of the vice he had overcome.

  The deal would come. Cash hunger was overwhelming in this part of the world, or rather cattle hunger was, which was what the cash was for. The Scandinavians wanted there to be a cooperative movement in the worst way … hypermarkets, sorghum mills, garages. In theory it was a good idea, an excellent way to get prices down for the marginal farmers who were at the mercy of the transplanted Boer businessmen. But the movement was perpetually collapsing because petty cash was always disappearing and these were not undertakings that could run without a petty cash system. So the Danes and the Swedes were endlessly topping up the co-op cashboxes and finding themselves reluctantly having to bring charges against various pillars of the community, the big cattlemen who had joined the cooperatives precisely because there was sure to be loose money around, cash, the pula they could use to sustain their herds during the drought. Cattle ownership equaled manhood. It went deep. People would rather let their cattle die during drought times than sell them while they still could to the abattoir. It was subtle. Selling the cattle diminished the numbers in a way that letting the buggers die naturally did not, somehow. It was important to be known in perpetuity as having been the owner of a herd of maximum size. This was the famous insoluble offtake problem they kept complaining about over at AID. Pony’s cattle post was at Pandamatenga, north of Francistown, far from Gaborone. Ray didn’t know how many beasts Pony had. It was impermissible in the culture to ask that question, but Batswana seemed always to know that about each other, somehow. It was occult. Apparently anything could be a fundamental object of desire to somebody … yams, pigs, beadwork, extra wives, real estate, gold, shoes.

  Pony was twenty-five. He was slim, very dark-skinned, with good presence and good English. He was a definite blade. He was unhappy working for the bursar as a clerk, or as he described it, as a scribe. He dressed above his means. The cream-colored safari kit he was wearing today was pricier than anything Ray owned. It was tightly cut, according to the mode. The breast pocket of Pony’s shirt jacket bore a monogram so lavishly worked that it stood up off the cloth like a brooch. Pony was guarded, like most Bakalanga. He was a defiant Kalanga, keeping the nail of the little finger of his right hand long, out two inches or so, and filed to a point, for use as a nosepick, was the story. Ray had never really seen it employed in that way. The Kalanga had a right to be guarded, since they not unreasonably saw themselves as a minority tribe not popular with the majority Bangwaketse and their allies, as scapegoats-in-waiting should something go seriously wrong in Botswana, especially something wrong in Botswana’s intermittently tense relations with Zimbabwe, where the other three-quarters of the Bakalanga lived uneasily in a condition of similar underappreciation by the Shona and the Ndebele who ran the show there. In Botswana, the Kalanga were denied the use of their language in the schools, which rankled. They were a nation, in fact, or a micronation.

  For some time, he and Pony had been what he would call attuned to one another. They had gotten into conversation in the school library and Pony had remarked that Kyle Innis, the head of the maths department, was violently of the opinion that the collapse of Russia had been the result of a conspiracy among the capitalist powers to destroy the great homeland of socialism before the Russians had a chance to integrate computers into the running of the collective system, which had been all that was lacking to make the planned economy fully competitive with capitalism. This conspiracy had involved the Poles and the Pope. What was interesting to Ray was that Innis’s Marxism had always been, up until then, totally crypto. It had been the debacle of the Soviet system that had brought it out, obviously. Ray thought there were probably others like Innis, keeping quiet and waiting for Mother Russia to ripen into true socialism someday soon and then getting the message, Drinks, gentlemen! and the pub was closing for good. Pony had asked Innis if by socialism he meant communism, which had made Innis glare at him before answering Of course.

  Ray decided that they should go for a stroll, to wrap this up. Pony was agreeable.

  Outside, Ray steered them in a direction that would take them away from the frequented p
arts of the campus and toward a feature of the place that could always be expected to be clear of humanity of any kind, the piggery. The stench of the facility, which was being incompetently managed, guaranteed privacy. They kept hiring and losing people who claimed to be competent as pigherds, or whatever the correct job title was. The wire-fence enclosure containing the two remaining pigs, sows, was in need of replacement, although in their present state of lethargy, the pigs hardly seemed to need containment at all. The piggery had its uses, and Ray had voted against closing it, the last of the school’s small-stock projects, siding with Curwen, who had a sentimental ruralist streak stemming no doubt from his jolly childhood on the great estate in Northumbria his family owned. The piggery was raggedly shielded by a horseshoe planting of dry gray elephant grass reaching to a height of seven or eight feet. As they approached the site, Ray noted that Pony put his hands in his pockets to raise his pants cuffs well clear of the pismire, which was what it was, extending far outward from the pen, which had been moved around the area in the past.

  There were two parts to the deal with Pony. One had to do with a bad investment he’d made in a haulier. Pony had advanced money to a friend for the purchase of a used Bedford. The truck and the friend had slipped south across the very porous border with South Africa near Ramotswa. Pony had information that the truck had been licensed and registered for business in Mafeking instead. In exchange for Pony’s help with his project, his operation, Ray would cover Pony’s four-hundred-pula loss, as a grant, in addition to arranging, through unspecified friends at the American embassy, for Pony to receive exact information on his absconded friend’s whereabouts, so that a face-to-face meeting could occur, something Pony desperately wanted.

  For Ray’s part, he decided to tell Pony he was asking for help because certain people at St. James’s were concerned that, through Rra Innis or others, there might be formed at the school a cell of students sympathizing with the very unclear and possibly dangerous ideas of one Samuel Kerekang, who had recently founded a cyclostyled journal, Kepu/The Mattock, copies of which had been spotted circulating among the upper forms. There had been, as Pony knew, a confidential struggle, long-standing, to keep another, older, political group, the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Society, out of St. James’s, if only to prevent the students from attaching themselves through hot feelings and idealism to an idea whose time had come and gone and in the process being stamped with an association that could dog them forever, when, as many of them would, they applied for government posts. The school had been successful to date in the struggle against MELS. An aspect of this problem involved the Bakalanga students in particular. As Pony well knew, they faced enough difficulty in working themselves upward in government without taking on anything else that might come to constitute a drawback. Pony understood clearly. That had been an important touch.

  That was the larger design. His object being to secure Pony without nakedly making him a pure asset, this design had seemed best. There was a light breeze coming from the west. They maneuvered to keep themselves upwind of the pen.

  The school needed to know much more about this person Kerekang, but he was very secretive in the way he was forwarding his program. He was closely vetting the people he invited to his little meetings here and there. It would be unwise for Pony to go directly into these meetings, even if it could be arranged. The school was anxious to learn all it could, even if only to determine that this man’s materials were innocent. But indirection was needed. The idea was that Pony should be brought together with Kerekang by seeming accident, in another venue he was lately being seen in, lecture meetings being given by an American against God and religion. Kerekang was active in these meetings. Ray wanted Pony to become an attender and to secretly tape the colloquies and presentations, especially those where Kerekang made some points. Even if Kerekang was not present, Pony should tape these proceedings, just to supply background. They needed a full picture. They needed to know what the relationship between these men was. In any case, Pony would form a connection to Kerekang, enough of a connection so that the school could determine what he was about. And when he became known to Kerekang, Pony would consult with Ray and they would see what should come next. If there was more to do, Pony would be compensated for his time. But it might all be done with very quickly. There was nothing complicated about the taping process. The recording unit was a Sony M5 the size of a deck of cards, something Pony had seen Ray use in preparing students for declamations and recitations, except that this model happened to be voice-activated.

  There was one last element to the deal still outstanding. It had to be finessed. They were inside the elephant grass hedge, effectively hidden. The sows were asleep. Ray hoped they were asleep. The wind had relented.

  Pony wanted to sign something, by which he meant he wanted something signed, a letter in his file saying that he had attended these meetings in behalf of the school and not because he was drawn to them for any other reason. He wanted to sign something, or rather he wanted to put his signature chop on something. Many educated Batswana signed documents and letters with complex ideograms only distantly related to the letters composing their names. Pony’s chop was the most extravagant Ray had ever encountered, a vast scrawl executed in a flash and always, strangely enough, identical, document to document. Pony had a need for that act. It would have to be circumvented, for obvious reasons. The operation had to be traceless. The operation he was constructing served his own needs perfectly. He would be able to mollify Boyle with the appearance of circumspect action against Kerekang. And he would have the beginnings of what he needed for his private campaign against Morel. Boyle would surely see the supposed logic of all this. He would frame it differently for him, of course, but Boyle would have to go for it because he wanted Kerekang so much. Ray would get Morel, and sooner rather than later. He wanted his essence. He wanted Morel’s essence on a stick, proof of what he was. Pony was referring to the authorizing document he wanted from Ray as a charter.

  Pony said, “So you can see, rra, why I must have this charter.”

  Ray answered, “Of course, rra, just as I would in your place. But consider that, as to material in the files at school, really how safe is anything from prying eyes … you see?”

  “Rra, I take your point.” Pony thought for a moment. “So then I might take this for my personal holding, someway like that?”

  “No, because no matter how safely you think you have hidden a thing, strange things can happen.” Ray was improvising. This had to go away. He was thinking of fantasy solutions like drawing up a document in vanishing ink. He would have to come up with a stall.

  He was being reflective. While he reflected, he extracted a packet of pula from his hip pocket and slid half the packet into an envelope. He was going to offer two hundred pula, half of the amount agreed on, as a down payment or rather surety, as they would call it here.

  Ray said, “May we do this? Once you attend for a time or so and bring me some material, we can sit down and see if you still want some kind of charter. You may not. There may be nothing to any of this. In the meantime I can think of what’s best, whether I should hold some document for you in my files, or what. And meantime let me give you surety, now, for half what we agreed on.”

  He had surprised Pony. The breeze was up again. They danced to a new position on the other side of the pen.

  Ray said, “Of course, I can find someone else if you say no. I think I can.”

  “No, rra, that will be just all right,” Pony said. He waited for Ray to press the money on him.

  They left, hurrying. Pony was ashamed. Ray loved him for it.

  19. Two Pieces of Intelligence

  Ray had two pieces of intelligence for Boyle, one that Boyle would want but that Ray was not going to give him, and one that Boyle ought to want but wouldn’t and that Ray was going to try to force on him. Both pieces of information had come to Ray via sheer luck, with the assistance in one case of another force he distrusted, intuition. And both piece
s of information had left him shaken. He had something critical on Kerekang, an extension and confirmation of what he had already concluded, but new.

  It was doubtless the suggestion of guidedness in human affairs that luck and intuition stood for that he hated. There was no design, no occult design. Odd conjunctions not even rising to the status of coincidence also annoyed him, like the odd fact that the previous chief of station had been a collector of ancient Roman whorehouse tokens and the present one was secretly notorious within the agency for his practice of founding high-end whorehouses as part of his collection regime wherever he was posted.

  What Boyle would not get out of him was that he knew where Dwight Wemberg was. He couldn’t believe the way he had come to know this fact. Something had told him to go over to the university library to see if he could find the complete original copy of the International Review of Social History, Volume One, Number Six, from which the palm-copier sample reading that was in his file had been taken and used to impugn Kerekang, who had made the mistake of abandoning his reading long enough to go and empty his bladder. At the side of Ray’s mind had been the shadow of an intention to see, at the same time, if he could look up any of Marianne Wormser’s early papers on Milton, to reassure himself that he had been right that she was unpromising. So he had gone there, following his whim or whatever it should be called. He had never gotten to Wormser.

  Boyle had agreed to see him, in the consular office, this time. Ray was in one of the holding cubicles, in a box, essentially, in a tan wood-veneer-over-chipboard box, sitting in an Eames chair, with the fine hum of the fluorescent lighting for entertainment. When Boyle was ready for him a buzzer on the door would sound and a red light set in the wall would begin flashing, a light concealing a CCTV minicam and an audio ear. The miking of these cubicles had always struck Ray as pointless. The surveillance in the cubicles was being imposed on people who had already passed through two metal detectors, so what could anyone possibly be expected to detect?