Mortals

been amazed that someone so much beyond his reach had wanted him. In the future any search to be made for a new companion would be undertaken by a bespectacled man, not that that should make a giant difference. But still it was interesting. The design of glasses had improved. Iris always said that when the subject of his possibly needing glasses came up. He would get the best glasses he could. But how would he know which ones were the best? He would figure it out. Morel was a little younger, of course, but as he remembered it, Morel needed reading glasses. We all need glasses, ultimately, he thought, feeling stupid. Because obviously what he was doing was trying to tally up ways, however trivial, in which he was the better man than Gunga Din. It was as though he was preparing for an event, a debate or argument that would decide who Iris would cleave to on the basis of one of them getting a higher score in enumerated qualities.

There was still time to stop, reverse, and turn back to Nokaneng, if he acted immediately. He had been driving with great circumspection and deliberation, out of consideration for his knee. Reversing and swinging around and getting the hell out of there would demand some vigorous moves. And it would conflict with what he thought of as his Trajectory. It would truncate everything. He would discover one of three things, up ahead, or of four things. One would be that this was lifti lifti, a random hitchhiker, innocent. One would be that the person blocking the road was goromente, legitimate. Another was that the man was one of the counterinsurgency specialists from koevoet over in SouthWest. They were killers. He knew that they were present and operating against his friend Kerekang and Kerekang’s friends. And he knew in his bones that Boyle was involved with bringing these teams on board. It would be their job to do the cupping. Mercenaries were scum. They would be setting up cups where they were the only power. Of course the final discovery possible would be that this would be someone from ISA he could communicate with and who would get him to Kerekang. The odds on that were small. But that was what he wanted more than life because he had advice for Kerekang. He was full of important advice. It was keeping him awake at night. He drove forward, at a crawl. You are in the rapids, he thought.

The man in the road wasn’t police, not in any kind of uniform, which might mean he was a hitchhiker. He did look civilian. He was wearing cargo pants, sandals and not boots, a workshirt whose sleeves had been torn off at the shoulder, revealing arms on the huge side, intimidatingly huge arms, in fact. Let me call you Nemesis, Ray thought.

Nemesis was trying to look amiable. He was smiling broadly. And he was doing something clever. He was wearing a baseball cap with the bill pulled sharply down. His big smile was in evidence but the rest of his face was innocently, supposedly, obscure. He was showing himself to be demonstrably unarmed, his hands empty. But he did have a bandanna loosely tied around his neck. If things got critical, it could be pulled up. Mercenaries hated to have their faces seen.

Ray came to a halt. The tone of the encounter was changing already. Ray was receiving peremptory beckoning signals from his nemesis. This was the cup, the edge of the cup.

There was definitely an encampment off in the saw grass. He could make out the tops of tents. There were vehicles under camouflage netting, olive drab bakkies and a jeep. They had selected a good spot to bivouac. The saw grass was thick and the elephant grass was very high. You had to be on top of them to know anyone was there.

The question was whether they would want to take him for questioning or send him back to Nokaneng, kick him out.

The smiling man approached. He was a young fellow. He was keeping his head down, making a show of studying something on the ground. He came to the driver’s side and motioned to Ray that it should be cranked open. Ray hesitated, until he noted in the rearview mirror that a bakkie had come from nowhere and edged into the road behind him, closing it. Ray opened the window.

“Can you step down to me, rra?” the smiling man asked.

There had been no greetings, no dumelas, no entshwarele.

“Dumela, rra,” Ray said. It would be an interesting datum if his nemesis knew English but not Setswana. He could be Ovambo, in that case.

“You must step down, rra.”

“What is it about? You aren’t BDF. I am going to Etsha, so what is this?” He sounded obstreperous to himself, more obstreperous than was exactly wise.

“The road is closed from here, rra, for safety.”

“By whose order, rra?”

“It is goromente, rra. Can you please step to me.”

Ray sat unmoving, seized by an anxiety he knew was irrelevant. He had a thick section of Strange News in a clipboard on the seat beside him. He had to guard it. He didn’t know how much of the manuscript Iris had managed to photocopy before she’d thrust it on him. Maybe none of it. The whole process of getting it into his hands had been frenzied, here, and, as he understood it, back in the States. He needed to get it out of sight before he opened the doors of the cab. He had to do it deftly. He thought he could. It felt urgent. There were ink notations in his brother’s own maddening minuscule hand on the pages. His brother was dying, or dead. That was news he was going to receive. He had to get the manuscript under the seat and he could do it now while the smiling was still going on and his nemesis was still bothering to deal coyly with him, his gaze off-center. The Land Cruiser cab sat high, meaning that sight lines were in his favor if he tried to bury the act of ditching the manuscript within the business of bending and reaching to unlock the passenger-side door. He would have to move like lightning.

He hesitated. He didn’t know what he wanted to happen. He wanted to escape this in the easiest way he could, but he wanted to know what it was, too. He wanted that more. People experienced this who had never asked for it, never deserved it. At the far end of every avenue twisting off from each of his mundane exercises undertaken for the agency, at the extreme far end, was the possibility of something like this for someone who, unlike himself, had never volunteered for it, roadblocks and worse, roadblocks that were gateways to the unimaginable. But now he had to safeguard Strange News.

He said, “Gosiame, rra. I will come out.”

He unlocked the door on his side and then proceeded to stretch over to accomplish his little trick. He got hold of the clipboard and was spiriting it under the seat when he was caught. He had miscalculated and the smiling man, no longer smiling, in fact with his lower face covered by the bandanna, was on him, having jerked the driver’s-side door open without further ado. It was war, then. He felt like a fool. Nemesis pulled him out of the cab, swung him out of the way, and clambered up into the cab himself, emerging clutching Strange News.

Nemesis had associates and here they were, wearing balaclavas despite the impossible heat. There were four of them. They were in camouflage outfits. One was carrying an assault rifle, an Uzi.

The thing to do was to look indignant and baffled for as long as he could. He had to hold down his impulse to beg his nemesis to be careful with the manuscript. That would be idiotic. He wanted to. His knee was bad again. It had been improving. But he had nearly fallen when he’d been pulled out of the vehicle and he hadn’t been able to protect his knee.

He was not going to be allowed to remain in the shade, narrow and minimal as it was, of the Land Cruiser. Nemesis beckoned him out into the road, into full sun. An associate ran forward with a camp stool, but it was for Nemesis. Ray would have to sit on the hot ground. The arrangement was that he would sit with his back to whatever was going on with the vehicle. He would be able to hear the rough interrogation his vehicle was undergoing at the hands of the associates, but not see it. Nemesis would be able to see it, direct it.

The questioning was about to begin. Nemesis tucked the hanging point of his bandanna up under the material binding his cheeks and nose, so that his mouth would be free to shout clearly, to imprecate, whatever his plan was. Ray was having a moment of strength. It was strange. Nemesis kept his cap on, but he raised the bill just enough to let him see Ray without impediment.

A sheaf of papers, Ray’s documents, taken from the glove box, was handed to Nemesis, who went tediously through them.

Nemesis said, “Your passport, rra. I must see it.”

“It should be there.”

“Nyah. Where is it?”

“It should be there. You are alarming me. It must be there.”

“Nyah, I have some things. I have your driver’s license, your third-party certificate papers, and these Letters