Mortals (90 page)

Morel began kicking at the wall as hard as he could, with his good foot. Ray got up, but before joining him in his effort, scrutinized the crack structure developing in the wall, the crackage, as it was undoubtedly referred to among professionals in what, walls.

He thought, We have to kick scientifically because we are wearing ourselves out.

“Stop,” Ray said.

“Why?”

“We need to study the crackage so we bang at the right spot. Which would be right there.”

“The crackage,” Morel said, dryly.

“Right, the crack pattern.”

“It’s very important for you to have the right word for everything. Hey look, frankly I think you made that up.”

“I may have. I may
have
. I like the right descriptor being applied to the correct object. Vocabulary is important. Iris is the same way, about words. You’ll see. The working vocabulary of Americans is half what it was in 1950. That’s horrifying. I have students in this country with better vocabularies than Americans their age, English vocabulary.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Morel said, which infuriated Ray.

“Of course you do, you’re not deaf. And don’t ever use that expression again. Iris will think you’re an asshole. What I was saying is this, and I am being helpful, and it’s that you are going to come under a lot of pressure to play Scrabble, if you haven’t already. She loves it. I wasn’t good about it. She stopped trying to get me to play, over time. You may wind up playing Scrabble a lot, if you know what’s good for you. It’s just a word to the wise. About Scrabble my excuse was that I was doing English morning to night at St. James’s and that I wanted surcease from English. It was a mistake and we all make mistakes and sometimes a lot of small mistakes turn
into a gigantic mistake.” He felt okay. He hoped he had created for Morel a vista of postprandial board games being part of his utopia with Iris. He would bet that crackage was there in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Morel was going ahead without him, jerking and hauling with his hands at the wall in the wrong place, according to Ray’s judgment, when an astonishingly large segment of the wall, a jagged huge rind, came away.

They were free to go.

Morel said, “Okay, we have to leave now, and I think we should stick together whatever, out there.” It was an appeal, but it was unnecessary because Ray had already decided it would have to be that way. They would have to be brothers, temporarily. The man had a short leg.

Ray said, “It’s a deal. That’s the only way. Right.”

“Okay, good.”

Ray didn’t want to say what he was going to say next. It was going to sound like an ultimatum. It wasn’t. It was just a necessity. He said, “Okay, but look, first we need to get into the hotel to get my brother’s manuscript, if we can. I hope you don’t mind.”

Morel was going to object. Ray didn’t care.

“That makes no sense,” Morel said unhappily.

“I know it. But I have to. Look, you don’t have to go in with me. In fact, wait here if you want to, which is not exactly the protocol we agreed on. But that’s where I’m going first, if it’s physically possible, if it looks like I can get in. So wait here, I’ll go, I’ll come back, and then we jump out together. I have to try. Because I don’t know where we’re going to end up, how far from here we’re going to end up, hiding or whatever we do. The whole place could burn down while we’re watching it, burn from a distance, you see. Man, I have to.”

“Okay then that’s first thing. We’ll do it together. I need to find my bag, anyway. I think I saw it in the torture chamber over there. I’d like to get my car keys, too. We’ll try it together.”

The wall made a noise, a brief grinding noise, and they both jumped back in unison, like a dance team, Ray thought. They were abashed about doing that.

They had to get going. The wall was rotten. There was new crackage showing. They were both thinking the same thing, that the wall was unstable and something could happen. The wall could come down, the roof with it, they could be sitting up to their necks in thatch attracting attention.

Morel was afraid. It had helped that they had agreed to stick together
out in the maelstrom, but he was still breathing fast. It was not going to be possible to have a blueprint for every step.

Morel was gathering himself. He wanted to act well, outside. They both did. They both knew that the other might be the main surviving witness to how he had comported himself at the very end.

They had to go quickly. Ray had the urge to say, Shall we dance?

Morel wanted to lead. That was all right.

Morel was hesitating over whether to go out feet first or head first. He decided on head first. The clearance was just adequate. He proceeded very carefully, seeking to have as little contact with the wall as he could manage, put as little strain on it as possible, as he squeezed through. It was because the wall seemed delicate.

Ray prepared to follow. Morel was out. Before Ray could enter, Morel’s hand appeared in the gap. He seemed to think Ray could use help, this time. Morel was all right. He was doing his best. Ray hissed at him, to move him back. Ray got through very neatly. They were free.

Morel wanted something. He wanted to shake hands. They did. Morel was vibrating, vibrating, not trembling. He was wound up. He was gesturing about something. He wanted to say something in Ray’s ear, apparently.

“I think we should whisper,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“If we have to communicate, we should. But mostly we should use gestures, watch each other. Give signals.”

Ray didn’t want to laugh, but it was funny. Morel needed a manual, a new manual for each fifteen minutes. And it was funny to worry about being overheard in the pandemonium unfolding around them. He was adapting to the steady sound of firing. The most concentrated popping sounds were coming from the front side of the hotel, around the corner from them, to their right, and it was likeliest that the shooters would be in the second-story rooms, or on the roof. That was something to keep in mind. If there were shooters moving around on the roof the chances that they would be spotted were better, that had to be communicated to Morel.

The smoke was thick. He was grateful for it but they had to get away from it. His eyes were stinging. He rubbed them. When he opened his eyes, Morel was gone.

It was nothing. Morel had dashed off to look at the dead man. He was crouching over him.

Ray went after Morel full of irritation. They had an understanding.

But he knew what Morel was doing. He was being Hippocratic. He was a doctor. All I need to hear right now is that the guy is alive and wants his boots back, Ray thought. But he wasn’t alive. Half his neck was gone. Ray should have mentioned that to Morel earlier. Morel was asserting himself, making the point that he was a doctor and so
this
was the first thing that had to be done.

Ray tapped Morel on the shoulder and signaled urgently that they had to proceed. Morel was shaking his head sadly. Ray mouthed the words
We must go
. Morel was being irritating.

What next? Ray thought. Because Morel was dodging around patently looking for something to cover the body with, which was a piety they had no time for. And there was nothing around they could use for the purpose except the smoldering laundry, which he was not going to mention. Everything Morel was doing was a piety and maddening when they had urgent things to do.

He took hold of Morel’s arm and yanked on it, to stop him. They had to make use of these periods of intense fire, like the present one, for their riskier movements when they had to operate without cover. They had to exploit the distraction of their captors. That was the theory. Their task was to dash across the open ground between the sheds and the hotel and find their way into the hotel by getting lucky and opening one of the three doors or breaking one of them or by breaking in through a window and then finding the room they wanted … and getting what they needed and then splitting with it and getting back across the open ground and then up and away and out into the veld and into a ditch, that was all. He had to get this through to Morel. The deafening racket of the guns was going to be helpful if they had to smash anything noisily, too.

Morel broke away from him and ran in the wrong direction. The man was a nightmare.

Ray followed. Morel was up to something new. He was investigating the other sheds, planning to. He had gotten the doors open on the shed nearest theirs and was disappearing into it. Ray caught up with him.

The shed was empty. It was identical to the one they had been kept in.

“Good,” Morel said, walking past Ray on his way to the next shed.

“What are we doing?” Ray asked.

“I just realized it, but we can’t go over there until we see if there’s anybody in these other sheds. We can’t abandon them and then have something happen to us.”

“Okay, but this wasn’t the plan.”

“But you see why we have to do this.”

“I see why you want to, but the fact is if they’re locked in the way we were it’s not going to be possible to help them.”

“No, but that would suggest we ought to look for keys over in the hotel, say, or tools, an ax, a hatchet, even. We could chop them out, chop the doors down. But we need to know. Also they might join us. Help us.”

Morel was knocking at the doors of another shed. There were only three more to check, after this one.

The exercise was developing a French-farcelike feeling, with Morel bounding around but managing to look over his shoulder half the time, with doors being pulled open and slammed shut, Morel disappearing and reappearing. Ray stayed gamely with Morel until it was over. All the sheds were vacant and none contained anything useful to them. Ray wondered if Morel was coming up with these virtuous procrastinations because he feared going into the enemy’s citadel and was at some level hoping it would blow up or burn down before they had to go there. He dismissed the suspicion. He didn’t want to think ill of Morel, if he could help it. He was going to have dealings with Morel into eternity, it felt like. He would have to keep on top of how Morel was treating Iris, someway. He should be able to work something out with friends in Botswana. Morel was going to be in his life. He was losing a wife but he was gaining an ex-wife, was the way to look at it. And what was the correct term for his relationship to his former wife’s new husband? There should be a term for that, there were so many of them in the culture.

They were back at their own shed, poised to sprint across the open ground to the hotel.

Morel led. Ray decided to stop halfway, in the lee of a monumental terracotta urn set on a high pedestal. The rim of the urn came to the level of his neck. There was refuse in the urn. Dead vines trailed out of it. There were mates to the urn dotted around the grounds, five or six of them. Something made him not want to leave the spot. He didn’t know what it was.

He knew what it was about the urn. It was an erotic memory featuring an urn and his wife. It was long ago. They had been visiting someone or using a house that had been loaned to them and there had been an urn at the center of a patio and Iris had run out of their room in the middle of the night, naked, and had posed variously, leaning against it, to tease him. And then there had been magnificent sex. Something like that would never happen to him again. That was a fact. He wondered if when people, couples, got old they stopped fucking at some point sheerly because it seemed like such a frail copy of what they had once been able to do with
joy and strength, if they stopped out of homage to their earlier fucking selves. Morel was shaking him.

He made himself run the rest of the way. He collapsed when he got to the hotel wall. He had breathed in too much smoke, in his exertions. He needed something like a bandanna, or better yet a gas mask. His feet were painful. Morel was sitting on the ground next to him. It was hopeless, but Ray wanted to convey to Iris that if they stayed together, or if they
had
stayed together, depending on which fork in the path he was at when he was expressing himself … he was losing the thread, but he wanted her to know that if it was up to him they would be
old
lovers, going on and doing it forever, however it looked, however disreputable anyone else might find them if they discovered what they were doing, the two old birds.

Morel was trying the door. Ray was certain that this was the exterior door he had been taken through to be abused. The door was locked.

It was a single door. Morel had his good leg up, his foot against the frame, and was jerking fiercely at the doorknob. He gave up.

“We need an ax,” he said. He was winded. He was barely able to say anything.

“You keep saying that.”

Ray got up to take a turn at pulling and hauling. He was positioning himself when he thought he heard something inside, through the door. He thought he heard someone coming.

He mouthed the words
Someone is coming
.

“We need a plan,” Morel whispered.

“Like what kind of plan?”

“Like, you stand back when they open the door and I’ll fucking jump them before they know it. Or I’ll stand there and you jump them. Whatever you want.”

“They could be armed.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be out of sight. They’ll be looking at you. Try to get them to step out toward you. We can do this. Try to look sick or something so they come out.”

They poised themselves to do something. They would be swift about it. But nothing happened. There was silence.

The door they wanted to open was painted with dark pink enamel which was scaling badly in places, revealing a bright red undercoat. It was reminiscent of afflicted flesh, to Ray. It reminded him of a plate in a medical text on skin conditions. That was where his mind was. And the wooden door was a massive, medieval piece of work, not a candidate for brute force.

Morel seemed to be in charge of getting them inside. He was alternately feeling exquisitely along the edges of the door and looking over his shoulder at Ray with expressions that seemed to be asking Ray not to be impatient, communicating that progress was being made. The door was a dilemma because trying to break it down, assuming they could find a way to do that, ran the risk of attracting the wrong attention from the interior, with the result that they would only have succeeded in escaping back into captivity. It was a possibility he was responsible for because of his insistence on making a good-faith effort to retrieve his brother’s manuscript. He accepted that. He had to, was all. He could imagine bursting in and Quartus coming up to them saying, Hello,
entrez
, nice to see you again, take
that
. But the furor and action was on the roof, so far as they could tell. There was now some shouting mixing in with the rattle of gunfire.