Mortals

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.

The heat in the warehouse was intense. There were no fans, nothing. Victor needs God if he’s going to work in here, he thought. Ray was sweating heavily. He would have to stop at home for a fresh shirt.

“We must be more fast, rra,” Victor said. “There are many many of this.” Victor was handing him books. “And this.”

Ray was looking at a thick trade paperback, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, by Weston La Barre, self-evidently an attack on or deconstruction of religion from the standpoint of anthropology. The jacket comments confirmed that. There was a slip of paper inserted into the book. On it was an extract copied from the book’s epigraph, a quotation from Lucretius. It read… primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango carmina… Beneath it, in pencil, was somebody’s translation, which read… I would teach of high matters and imaginings, and proceed to loose the mind from tight knots of religion. The translation could be improved on, Ray thought, but the point was clear.

There were ten copies of this item in the shipment, and the same number of another and more recent work by this same Weston La Barre, Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion, this from a reputable publisher, the University of Oklahoma Press.

Victor handed him, gravely, a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

Something was coalescing here. The shipment was for a Doctor Davis Morel, a medical doctor coming in as a working immigrant, according to the code entry Victor pointed out on his copy of the doctor’s immigration paperwork. So they were not dealing with an accredited scholar or teacher of any kind. This was something else. Doctor Morel would be located on Tshekedi Crescent, in their neighborhood, or almost. He looked again at the code entry on the immigration carbon. Morel had been granted indefinite duration, a rare thing these days.

Somehow Victor had listed everything. There was a separate listing of all the books and pamphlets—many pamphlets—present in multiple copies. La Barre was at the head of the list, followed by The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby, at nine copies, and then by The Illusion of Immortality by Corliss Lamont, at seven copies. Victor was no fool. One look at the titles of the pamphlets alone, which were from a miscellany of free-thought sources, would have been all it took to convince him that the shipment constituted an arsenal of irreligion and that Morel was the Antichrist if not the Great Beast himself. Some of the pamphlet titles struck Ray as fairly inflammatory… Is God a Jew? The Church & the Nazis, Hinduism and Paranoia. This was more than some crank’s personal collection. Multiple copies meant that the point was propaganda. Victor had seen that straight off.

Victor was presenting him with sheet after sheet of inventory, one sheet at a time. That was to emphasize how very many sheets there were, of course, and it was unnecessary because Ray was aware that a huge amount of effort had gone into this. He was considering how much extra he should pay Victor for all this. He looked at Victor’s typically Tswana handwriting. It was painstaking. The individually printed letters in their roundness and the way they were spaced recalled the school copybook style you were expected to outgrow. He loved Victor, he loved the man for his work. Probably Victor had never gone beyond Standard Four, like most Batswana, which might be an