was it. If he was going to be shot to death and Iris was the last thing on his mind he wouldn’t mind.
Two was Africa. He had been happy in Africa and he was guilty about that and he would do something for Africa in the next act, because it looked bad for Africa, and not only Botswana. There was the virus, seropositivity as they called it, and Morel saying that it was going to be a holocaust. There was nothing he could do about it. Of course Morel no doubt thought the answer was to go and dynamite churches, and possibly Parliament as well. They were doing nothing, and Africa was slipping into the valley of the shadow of death. He didn’t know whose fault it was. He wanted Morel to be wrong about this and for science to come up with something. He prayed for it.
Three was the agency. He had to have mixed feelings about the agency. After all it had come into existence only after the West realized that the communists had organized a huge espionage machine larger and more aggressive and successful than anything in the West or even than the whole West together, and after the West realized that legal communist parties everywhere were being used as spotters and resources for spies, and after it became obvious the communists were setting new standards in ruthlessness, as in throwing oppositionists into crematoria during the Spanish Civil War. And then there had been the likelihood that the people at the top of the communist machine were clinically insane, paranoid, as the Moscow Trials demonstrated. So, all that was true. But then the agency had gone wrong, in places, in many places, in the marches of the empire, in Indonesia for sure, in Central America the same, in Afghanistan, and in Africa, especially in Malawi and Zaire, but not only there. And he knew that the agency was going to survive the collapse of the Russians and continue using its power dubiously, which was why he had to be out if he escaped this alive. Being in the agency meant making impossible judgments, weighing justifiable or virtuous acts against inexcusable ones, mainly because so much on either side of the equation remained secret.
The rifle was proving useful as a crutch. Four was English Literature. He loved it. It was always with him. He thought, On the roof I will do such things as will be the terror of the earth, but what they will be exactly I have no idea, like Tamburlaine. He had been attracted to the Elizabethans, Webster especially, but had decided they were too bloody. Imagine that, he thought.
The stair treads were fixed in a metal casing. There were no risers. He had to grasp at the treads above, using one hand only, and drag himself up, hellward. Sweat was sliding into his eyes but the best he could do to get rid of it was to rub his eyes against his shoulders, which was ineffective. He needed a spare arm. The smell of blood was making him ill.
Five was Rex. He wondered how anyone was supposed to compete with a brother whose first word was brioche and whose last word, according to what had been reported to Iris and relayed to Morel and then to him, whose last word was Mama. My first word was car, he thought. Apparently his parents had given Rex a bite of brioche at some early point and he had loved it and wanted more and voila. Ray had gotten tired of hearing about it and about Rex’s magnificent and precocious vocabulary in general. Rex had been impossible, but still, on his own end, Ray knew he had mismanaged things. He would do what he could for his brother, who was one of the
Something was bothering him.
It was the crank. The crank would make him look like an organ grinder. That would be the first impression. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him.
He had to get rid of the crank. When he appeared he would just hold his fist in a significant way at the side of the bundle and that would do it. It would have to.
He brought the rifle up onto the step he was standing on and got it between his left leg and the casing, holding it there by pressing his weight against it. With his right hand free, he pulled at the crank. It was difficult. He had done an excellent job of jamming it in among the tapework.
A wavering shadow fell over him as he struggled. He looked up.
It was too literary, or did he mean Gothic? There seemed to be a bird of prey, a vulture, clutching the rim of the opening at the top of the staircase, looking down at him, raising and lowering its wings, shivering them. It was small. Vultures were bigger. It must be a buzzard.
He wasn’t afraid. Everything was extreme. He was out of his element.
Because of the brightness he was staring up into he was getting more an impression of the beast than a clear image of it. A string of liquid dripped down from the bird, narrowly missing him. It was vile, whatever it was.
The crank he had been worrying and tugging at came free just then and he flung it underhand as hard as he could, blindly, in the direction of the bird. He hit the thing. It made a feminine-sounding utterance and jerked away and was gone.
Ray continued climbing. He felt urgency. He wanted Quartus. He wanted to bet someone that Quartus was there for him, on the roof.
He crawled out onto the roof. He had his rifle with him. He had dragged it up subtly behind him and now it was with him. The sky was very bright. The roof was a burning plain of white pebbles enclosed by a low ornamental parapet with regularly spaced embrasures, like the roofline of a medieval castle. The parapet was seamless along the edge of the roof.
He looked around as well as he could, keeping flat.
There were veins of smoke in the sky. Before, there had been streams of smoke, sheets of it.
He could see something of where he was and he was in luck. This sector of the roof, at the midpoint of the long transverse connecting the outward wings, was in the hands of the witdoeke. That much he could tell. He was in the midst of a group of witdoeke-wearing fighters, for which he thanked God. He was among them but to the rear of their main position. He counted about a dozen, exactly a dozen, fighters.
The pebbles were burning hot. He needed gloves. He needed water, also.
The fighters were disposed in an arc to his left, west-facing. They were utilizing everything available to them for cover while they fired. The shooting was sporadic but too loud when it came, too loud for him. These were his friends, shooting.
The core of the position was a complex of low-built galvanized iron utility sheds and a pair of absurdly large wooden water tanks set on a raised concrete foundation. No one was paying the least attention to him. The position they were defending was highly improvised. Men were dodging around, firing or just aiming, from beside the service sheds, from behind piled-up sacks of gypsum, if he was reading the lettering on one of the sacks correctly. One of the three sheds had been half kicked down and its siding appropriated and jammed in among the struts supporting the water tanks, augmenting the cover provided by the waist-high concrete base under the tanks. It was all very motley and ragged and people would have to be careful when they shot past their own forward positions.
He had to see more. He stood up. This was the obvious choice for a defensive position. The rooftop ran away blankly, featurelessly, on either hand all the way to the ends of the wings, so far as he could tell.
He wanted to see who was here. He wanted to shake people by the hand and tell them they were doing well, putting up a good fight, which seemed to be the case. He needed to introduce himself.
Standing, he could see where the villains were. They were around the elbow of the building and out at the end of the western wing, collected together there behind their own improvised barricade of ammunition lockers. He thought he saw Nemesis, but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, which had to be at least a hundred yards, and because of the heat-shimmer rising from the roof. He thought he could see some heavy weapons, tripod- mounted machine guns. They were more exposed than the witdoeke, but the range of their weapons was superior. He realized that having to fire at an angle toward the center disadvantaged the villains because they had to thread their fire through the crenellated parapet at two points.
Someone was yelling at him. He couldn’t tell who.
He decided to kneel. That would be nonthreatening. The roof surface was littered with spent shells. The witdoeke were miscellaneously armed. Some had hunting rifles but most were using assault rifles, the ones with the curved magazines whose name escaped him. He wondered where the witdoeke had gotten them. He had paid poor attention during firearms training at the agency and now he regretted it, but not much. He didn’t know if people were shouting at him, to him, he meant, or about him, to one another. There was a lot of shouting.
Someone was gesturing violently at him from beside one of the sheds. He raised his hands over his head. He hoped that was what they wanted.
