explanation for the pervasiveness of this unsophisticated penmanship among literate Batswana.
Ray could only skim the lists. Morel was a sexophile or sexologist of some kind. There were numerous books on the history of sexual customs. Victor had put stars next to these titles. There were books on the history of imprisonment, of punishments. There were histories of freemasonry. And this was very nice, a little collection of popular books unmasking the CIA, so
He would take the lists and go over them in detail later. His visits to Customs had to be kept brief. He had decided on sixty rands for Victor’s payment. It was very generous. He had the bills ready.
Victor had checked the manifests on Morel’s professional effects and discovered that there were two expensive photocopy machines in the shipment. They were state of the art machines, in Ray’s judgment. He thanked Victor for everything, but there was more, something more Victor wanted him to see. Ray tried to be patient.
His feelings about the emerging character Morel appeared to be were complicated. He looked at this image from two angles. From one angle Morel seemed unexceptionable, a sort of educated proselytizing crank, flamboyant, who might even add a little texture to the intellectual life of the expatriate community, which could use it. Ray would hardly describe himself as religious in any acting-out sense, which wasn’t what he meant. He meant he wasn’t an observing religious type in any way. So he had no personal animus against what this Morel obviously had in mind to do. Ray felt, if he had to put it in a capsule way, that the Christian religion had worked out fairly well as the medium for a tolerable and variegated and improving set of societies. He had no profound thoughts on the subject. Maybe religion was going to evolve away ultimately and maybe not. Maybe decent societies could have been based on something else. He couldn’t say. But as it was, Christianity had done about the best. Christianity gave us Milton, not to mention Bach and all the rest. And there was Botswana, which was a decent and placid country that was doing all right as it was. There was something goodhearted about Botswana. And it was a religious country, evangelized from top to bottom. It didn’t need a Morel. By the numbers, Botswana was doing better than any other country in Africa. Christianity or the mindset bound up with it at least was helpful to the country, so far as he could judge. He’d never thought of himself as a limb of Christendom but of course in a way he was, and so be it. There was some potential for religious friction down the road. The Hindus wanted a temple. The Bahai were around. There were enough Muslims in town to support a mosque, and a mosque had been put up, and there was already some unhappiness with the volume the recorded muezzin calls were being played at. There had been a shortlived attempt, crushed by the government, by Domkrag, to insist that a live muezzin give the hourly calls, because of course that could bother nobody, human lung power being limited. But the Muslims had been able to prove that live muezzins were being phased out everywhere in Islam. So there were these recorded calls to prayer and the difficulty was that the Muslims were claiming that they were keeping the volume down when the experience of householders in the vicinity was that they weren’t, in fact. He was lucky they didn’t live in the vicinity. Iris would freak. The point was that Botswana was working, in a continent where almost nothing else was. It was developing a stratum of people who could communicate with you in your own vocabulary. Rex had been so precocious that he’d decided at eight or nine he didn’t want to have pets because you couldn’t converse with them, ergo they were a waste of time. Ray had wanted pets but he hadn’t been willing to have them and be the only one responsible for pet chores. They had let Rex refuse to bear any responsibility. And the goddamned dogs they’d had early on loved Rex. So ultimately there had been no pets. What was his point? The heat was getting him.
“You are just dreaming, rra,” Victor said.
“Sorry.”
Victor was handling a framed eight by ten photograph. It was a professionally done portrait, head and shoulders. He was holding it up for Ray.
Davis Morel was black. Ray could see that Victor harbored some additional disapproval over that. Morel was black, though lighter skinned than an African, in the medium range. It had to be Morel because the subject was seated at a desk and there were medical reference books on a shelf behind him. If the photograph was recent, Morel was in his early forties. He was conventionally handsome and was giving a rather dry smile and overall a rather standardly forthright expression. Ray thought the expression was detectably self-consciously forthright, but maybe not. He was looking for slyness, without luck. Morel had an athletic bearing. He had a strong neck and wide shoulders. His hairline was very good, his hair close-cropped, not graying. He was an advertisement for his services, if nothing else. There was no jewelry on show. His suit was expensive. Sometimes Ray felt he could get deeper into a photograph if he looked aside from the main image slightly. He would say that, as faces go, Morel’s seemed to be on the large side. He was square-faced and his grooming was perfect. His chin and his nose-tip each showed a distinct cleft. The flesh under his eyes was tight.
He returned the photograph to Victor, who resecured it in the bubblepack swathings it had come in.
Ray was a little unhappy and he knew why. He had been looking for something in the photograph that probably had to do with an old fantasy of his. At some point after getting into intelligence he had realized that something was lacking. His great enemy, some great personal enemy, was missing. He had no great antagonist. He knew this was literary and adolescent, and when it came to his mind, he had always laughed it away. But the truth was that the people he dealt with and processed and wrote up were in general not very smart or interesting and many of them were essentially just venal, which was unsatisfactory if you let it be. You could find it boring. The Russians and their creatures had been a blank system to him—and he noticed he was referring to them nowadays in the past tense, which was a sign of truth as to how things stood in the world. He had never had to work very hard to corrupt his targets, when that had been necessary, and it had been slightly bitter to learn that. The element of hard struggle was pretty intermittent in his work. Of course, he had chosen to work at a certain level in the game. He wasn’t a thug. In fact he took pride in the certainty that he had never directly injured anyone in all his years in intelligence, not once, directly. And of course he had chosen to work in the borderlands of the struggle. He saw himself as a provider of truths that others would make use of, for good or ill, the morality of what they did with them being their problem and not his. It was where he was comfortable being, which was why this great enemy notion was so regressive and why he rejected it. It was essentially literary. But literature has power over us, he thought.
Ray wanted to look at the photograph again, but he was sweating, and it was late, so he decided against it. Victor had one last thing for Ray to see. He was rooting around in a different carton.
Morel looked disappointingly average, or did he mean above average? It was going to be interesting to find out why he had come to Botswana when everything about him suggested that he could get whatever he wanted out of life easily enough in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the venue he was departing from. He was smart, smart enough to get a medical degree of some kind, at least, he was black, he was presentable, a man for all races so to speak, and the way the apparatus of opportunity was configured right now in the United States meant that someone like this would have to take courses to learn how to miss the boat. Morel represented a commodity in short supply, unlike white male middle-aged academics in the humanities with degrees from nonstellar institutions, a category of commodity he knew something about. Morel appeared to be in his prime, moreover. American professionals coming to Africa to perform benefactions during sabbaticals or when they were past their prime made one kind of sense. But Morel had to be in his peak earning period. And he appeared to be coming to stay. And he was, according to the immigration paperwork, coming unsponsored, which meant that this was a personally driven and personally funded choice. And there was the question of choosing Botswana, which had its attractions but which was not picturesque, except up north. Something was off center. There was something here to pursue. The agency would see it his way.
Victor was gesturing at a jumble of shoes he’d pulled out for Ray’s inspection.
Ray went over to look. They were all either high shoes or low boots. In every pair the inner heel, the inner right heel, had been built up significantly. There were many more shoes in the carton and they were all like these, Victor assured him.
Perfection is rare, Ray thought.
