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
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.
Another 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…
