Mortals (8 page)

R
ay wanted this to be quick. He had other things to do with what was left of his Saturday. This wasn’t his normal sort of work, anyway. He was filling in. He didn’t mind doing it but he wanted it over with quickly. It was a simple enough assignment. He was taking attendance, in essence.

He breathed on the front lenses of his binoculars, then wiped them clean with a tissue. He raised the binoculars and got a hard focus on the ridgeline of the low red hill above the donga where the Codukukwane Hotel dumped and occasionally burned its trash. His situation was perfect. His exit route back to the VW parked at the closest corner of the parking lot was a short straight line. He felt like reminding somebody that there were things he was very good at. This site was tricky. Here was a hotel stuck out all by itself in raw bush ten miles from Gaborone. The hotel proper, laid out flat against the road, was a thatched, one-story unpainted cement structure like a couple of boxcars set end to end. In its shadow, spaced irregularly around the back patio, were nine dank rondavels, or as the staff insisted on calling them, chalets. The site would be getting trickily active shortly.

His cover was perfect. The hotel was to his west. He was deep to the rear of it, behind a block of vacant utility sheds, backed by the main shed and nicely masked eastward by a bracket of clothesline loaded with freshly hung laundry, bed linen for the most part. I’m hidden, he thought. He liked being hidden, the moment, the act. He could admit it. Also he was well outside the fun zone developing around the patio and he should be long gone before the braai and the disco joy got too unrestrained. The hill he was studying was two hundred yards farther to his east. Parting the sheets anywhere gave him safe quick vantages of the rendezvous point his
targets thought was so secluded, somewhere toward the end of the highest terrace on the hill, where it dipped and made a shallow pocket. The sun was where it should be, in their eyes instead of his. He loved Iris. She was on his mind too much. It was a problem. Being obsessed with someone you had been married to for seventeen years was probably a first. He needed her to recede a little, was all.

He scanned the red rock and parched brush below the hill ridge until he found the hollow brake of sickle bush he wanted. His group was there, assembling in the blaze of noon. He was supposed to confirm attendee identities, one in particular. But his eyes began to burn and interfere. He had an odd impulse. He knew this group was doomed to go nowhere. It was in the cards. And his stupid impulse was to let them know, so they could all do something else. They were known. Stupidly he wanted to tell them. He needed a pause, was all.

Ray paused. The thing to do was calm down and realize that the problem with his eyes was something local, from something local. He clenched his lids shut four times, slowly. There must be something in the vicinity he was missing. He could be reacting to something chemical in the laundry drying all around him, a residue, fumes. Otherwise it made no sense.

He got up. This was too much crouching. He moved to a different point in the line of sheets and crouched again. He was safe here for now. But drunks or guys who found the men’s occupied could conceivably wander down into his bailiwick for relief, later. Or a dog could materialize because there was no goddamned control over dogs in Botswana or any part of Africa that he was aware of, none, the idea was in Africa’s future.

He tried the binoculars again, but his eyes were still tearing. He put the glasses down, cocked his fists, and dug at his eyes with the backs of his wrists. Don’t forget how good for you bananas are, Iris had said to him at breakfast. The bananas were for potassium, but why had she said it that way? Was there an unstated annex on the order of Remember about bananas when I’m not here to remind you, that is, when I leave you? Stop it, he said to himself.

He thought he smelled smoke. Smoke would be comforting. He inhaled hard. Smoke could be responsible for his eye situation. For braais, the Tswana sometimes used morula wood, which he would be willing to bet was loaded with resins, a greasewood almost. Also, they might have jazzed up the pit fire by slopping kerosene into it, speaking of fumes. He must be swimming in irritants. Just then the kind of music he
hated most began to jolt and blare from the patio, right when he needed to concentrate, naturally.

His eyes were streaming. If he could dredge up the funny side of this, very fast, that might be brilliant. That was a thought. Something was making this happen. If sadness of some kind had anything to do with it he should try to get down to the hilarious side that everything supposedly has. Not that sadness did. There was another reason he should try this, something he could almost remember, something he remembered feeling uncomfortable about when Iris mentioned it, which should remind him. He almost had it. He had it, Iris reading a clipping to him proving that if you force yourself to smile your brainwaves change after the fact, proving you’re happier no matter how rotten you felt when you started smiling, what
shit
, but true, apparently.

But what was something funny? It was like amateur theatricals, sticking his head out when he jerked these sheets back and forth. That was amusing. What else, lately? The goat eating the kneesock doesn’t count, he thought. But the panic had been real, when he’d thought the goat had a gargantuan tongue, and when he’d tried to formulate what the panic was all about, the answer seemed to be that it related to some fear of his that the world wanted to be abnormal, or rather was abnormal.

To hell with it, he was going to go home.

A
nother thing he could take pride in was this. To find out if something of interest to him had turned up in Customs, all he had to do was drive out to the airport mid-lunchtime on Tuesdays and Fridays, roll past the arrival/departures hall, and notice if a whitewashed cobblestone in the ornamental collar encircling one of the thorn trees shading the scatter of tables near the curry and pap kiosk had been displaced inwise enough to reveal a black daub on the stone adjoining. All his contact had to do was come out a little early for his platter of bangers and mealie, disarrange the landscaping a matter of millimeters with a nudge of his foot, and nudge everything back to normalcy later on. All Ray had to do was park, go up to the prefab kiosk, and commiserate with the poor woman who was baking to death inside it while he bought an orange Fanta from her. Then he would wander along the cyclone fence to the back gate of the Customs warehouse, always being careful to have in his hand an envelope or folded sheet of paper to suggest that he had legitimate business in Customs, which he often did, in connection with shipments of schoolbooks or supplies for St. James. Clearing schoolbooks through Customs was a chore he had volunteered for on the second day of his employment at the school.

He was proud of all his systems. He had five signal or drop arrangements in play around the city at the moment, all of them simplicity itself, and foolproof so far. The airport was an ideal nexus because it was such an active setting, usually so crowded. A lot of people drove out to the airport for lunch. The airport management had yet to figure out that concessionaires are supposed to charge more for food sold at the airport, not less. The curry was extremely cheap.

Today the black mark was showing, so he drew into the parking lot, parked, and locked his Beetle, not forgetting to take along his paperwork dummy, a kraft envelope.

A new and bigger airport was going up on a site farther from town, near Mmadinare. He would have to adapt. He preferred small airports, or was it just that he was so used to this one?… its homely khaki main building with the black, white, and blue national colors painted in stripes across the front above the window … the presentation of various national flags over the main entrance unchanged and untended since the day the flags were raised. He wondered if anyone had ever complained about the sunbleached, bedraggled condition of the flags? Probably not, since all of them were getting equal disrespect. He liked the faint permanent insult of kerosene in the air. From the kiosk, he looked out at a nondescript escarpment wavering in the distance behind the heat waves rising from the runway.

He bought a pine nut soda and drank half of it leaning against the railings around the Independence Monument, a boulder set in a bed of white pebbles and bearing an enameled representation of the national logo, a medley of black and white hands seemingly pulling in opposite directions on a quoit. I belong here, Ray thought.

He went around to the back of the Customs complex and waited. Victor would see him.

His man was hardly the only asset in the airport. Ray was pretty sure the British had their own contact in Customs, as they did in the Air Botswana office. The Russians had tried to line up someone in the control tower. He wasn’t quite sure how it was done, but the Americans, the Brits, and the Russians, at least, had regular and early access to the air passenger lists. Two other intelligence services had contacts in Immigration. The Chinese had assets in the maintenance staff. It can’t be helped, he thought, airports are of interest … it looks like an airport but …

He felt cold for a moment. A good idea was not to let the image of a society invisibly occupied at certain key points by people who aren’t what they purport to be get out of hand. And it was important not to forget the South Africans, who were in here somewhere.

His man, Victor Mfolwe, was an elder in the Zionist Christian Church and looked the part, in his gauntness, the gravity of his manner, and in his unvarying costume, an aged but immaculate black business suit with a Zed CC medal and swatch always pinned to the left lapel. All Ray’s payments to Victor, in South African rands at Victor’s request, were referred to by both of them as church donations. The Zed CC was an enigma.

The main body of the church was across the border in the Transvaal. It was well known that they had an accommodation with the South African government. But he had no reason to distrust Victor, who had been productive for him. He shook the gate to attract Victor’s attention. He meant to find out more about the Zed CC when he had the time.

Victor arrived, inwardly on fire over something, his eyes alive.

Ray was let in fumblingly. Normally Victor was deft and quick.

Ray couldn’t see any need to run, but they were going to, apparently. Victor never showed excitement, so this was puzzling.

The interior of the warehouse was divided into cagements that locked individually. The cage Victor had led them to was one of the larger ones. Again Victor was having difficulty addressing the combination lock. He stopped to dry his hands on the tails of the dustcoat he wore over his suit. The sides of the cage had been draped with blue tarpaulins and a worklight had been dropped over into the cage. They entered.

Victor closed them in, composed himself, and remembered that he had neglected to greet Ray.

“Dumela, rra,” he said.

“Dumela.”

“O tsogile jang?”

“Ke tsogile sentle, wena o tsogile jang?”

“Ke tsogile sentle.”

Victor made a slight involuntary hunching movement revealing his relief that the ritual exchange of greetings had been accomplished.

There were ten shipping cartons, the maximum size, all marked as containing personal effects. They were here because although they had originated as seat freight, the last leg of their transportation had been via air, from Durban.

Well thank God for the South Africans, Ray thought, they make it so easy for us, they probe into everything. Every carton had been opened and contemptuously and halfheartedly resealed. Stickers had been applied stating that the examination of the cartons had been undertaken for reasons of security. The South Africans hadn’t just sampled the shipment. For some reason they’d opened all ten boxes. That was interesting in itself. Why had they wanted to be so thorough? This kind of thing was so routine with the South Africans that the government of Botswana had given up protesting. It was time to get to work. What they were going to do was called, in the trade, canvassing.

“It is most bad, rra,” Victor said, presumably so bad that he had to hold up his hand to block Ray’s advance on the carton that had been pulled to
the middle of the enclosure as the prime exhibit. The top flaps of the carton were standing upright.

Victor delicately extracted and gravely handed to Ray a framed art reproduction the size of a serving tray. The glass was webbed with fine cracks. Even before he was able to fully make it out, Ray knew he was being handed something wonderful, by which he meant promising in some unknown intuited way. Victor held the worklight up so that Ray could see what this was. Victor’s hand was shaking.

He loved his men. His private name for his string of informants was his catena, his chain. He loved them. At that moment he loved them all, but he loved Victor for being transfigured in this way and for finding something that he was sure, for no good reason, was going to be more than interesting. He was grateful and he was having these moments of gratitude lately a little more frequently than he was comfortable with, but in this case it was justified. He had a sense.

Of course, catena was an indulgence prompted by his lack of opportunity to make use of his little Latin and less Greek. Victor wanted him to react. He had more to show. The carton appeared to be solidly filled with books and papers. Victor had already made a little selection.

The oil painting reproduced was of a surreal subject, a body on a beach, a reverse mermaid, a figure with human female legs and genitals and the head and body of a fish. There was a suggestion that this chimera was pregnant. This was a quality reproduction. This must be obscene, Ray thought. He felt it was. The figure was lying on the beach and there were breakers in the background. There was a title label on the frame, reading
Collective Invention
. This was a Magritte. He had never seen it before. He knew who Magritte was, but this painting was unfamiliar. Victor wanted him to be upset. He wasn’t, but he showed distaste sufficient to release Victor to continue. The painting was a joke, of course. But it did point backward to a sensibility that was interesting and basically unpleasant. Why did the creature have to look pregnant? If the picture was meant to be hung in display, the Batswana would get a sort of bemused jolt out of it. There was something arrogant about it.