Mortals

had been hideous in Angola, with the agency supporting Savimbi and holding hands with the Chinese and the fucking Boers but with the whole thing being run, thank God, out of Kinshasa, so he had been able to look at it as something happening in a different compartment. His role had been tightly held to keeping Botswana clean and tidy, as the tee shirt said, the decent rational country Botswana. There was no defense for what the agency had done in Guatemala, Boyle’s longest posting. That had to be said, sometime.

He wanted to hurt Boyle, but he wanted to protect himself when he did.

Ray said, “Well if I write a report, for myself, I might put it aside, just put it aside in case anything happened to me. Safeguard it.” He was afraid he had been stupid, saying that. He wanted to rush past it, leave it as a seed, a germ, but rush past it.

Boyle seemed astonished. He leaned forward menacingly.

Ray rushed on, saying, “You brought koevoet in…”

“What’s that? What’s koevoet?”

“Don’t do that. You know what it is.”

“I know what it was. It doesn’t exist anymore. SWAPO kicked them out. So I understand.”

It was infuriating. Ray was seeing what had happened more and more clearly. He had been sent out under conditions of panic on a reconnaissance that became supernumerary thanks to his brilliant foot-dragging through the Kalahari with Keletso. And in the meantime other sources of information had opened up to Boyle and the services of koevoet had been arranged for without reference to anything Ray had been doing.

Ray’s face was hot. He said, “Have you got anything to drink?”

Boyle said, “You’re not supposed to drink, are you?” That was unkind. Boyle knew that that was an ancient problem. It meant he had been reading his file all the way back to the beginning, in preparation for this.

Boyle reached down and brought up a liter bottle of club soda. He pushed it across the table. And he produced a paper cup. Ray filled the cup and drank, using the interval to get himself under better control.

Ray said, “Listen to me. You know what you did and I know what you did. You fucking panicked. You didn’t want anybody to figure out that you had Kerekang here in Gaborone looking all over the government for any kind of job and you screwed that up for him and he took off for the bush and then he turns into Kerekang the Incendiary. That’s one thing. And then when the trouble started up north you panicked again. It should have been a police matter. You had crimes against property going on. If you had left the man alone he would have been running boys’ clubs, for Christ’s sake. You wouldn’t listen.”

Boyle was tense. “They were killing cattle. You can call it property if you want but that’s not how the culture feels about it. It’s like religion, the cattle. It’s not my religion but it’s their religion.”

Ray went on. “It could have been handled by the police, by the police, although maybe not as fast as you might’ve wanted. And then when you found out some of the sons and daughters of the top men in Domkrag were involved you panicked again. And look, I’m stupid too. Somebody I thought I could use to get the stuff on Kerekang you wanted turned out to be a hustler and a thief and that didn’t help. It made everything impossible. I know that. Everything would have been placid if nobody had done anything, for a change. But anyway. So it didn’t look good, the unrest up north, and you overreached like crazy. You got money on the side for koevoet. I know you. You got a lot of people killed. Including Kerekang. It didn’t have to be.”

Boyle was going to suffer. Ray would see to it. Stories would appear in the local press, and that would do it… and if that wasn’t enough, Morel would work on it, too.

“Keep your voice down,” Boyle said.

“Why? I thought this place was soundproof…”

“Keep it down,” Boyle shouted.

“Go ahead, shout. You’re incompetent. You think this is Guatemala and it isn’t. You could do anything you wanted in Guatemala. Man, you’re in danger. If it comes out about koevoet you’ll look like a monkey in Washington. It’s all over for your white pals in South Africa, too, and I can tell you it’s going to be new times when the Bureau of State Security is run by black guys. And think how they would just love to hear about you and koevoet, how they’d like that, you fuck.”

Ray got to his feet, breathing furiously. He picked up the soda water bottle and the paper cup and poured himself another drink. He swallowed the drink, then threw the bottle and cup on the floor. He wanted to do more. He swept the letter opener and the banker’s lamp off the table. They were in darkness. He laughed.

He said, “You think you can hide this? Go ahead. But I tell you… you leave me alone. I’m through here. I’m getting out of this business and I’m getting out of this country and I won’t think about you. But you’re fucked, Boyle. Do you think they’ll keep you in the field, you fuckup?”

Boyle began coughing. Ray found the door and pounded on it.

The librarian, alarmed, let him out. He gave her a particularly friendly smile. There were many people he would be unlikely to see again, and she was one of them. He would have to see Boyle again, of course, to finish everything up legally, but it would be upstairs, never again in the secret chamber, which was nice.

37. I Want to Go Up There

This is the day, Ray thought. He had been allowing himself to cooperate, without acknowledging it, with Iris’s various stratagems of delay. But that was over. It had gone on for days and it was making him feel like a fool. It was making her look like a fool, or pathetic, but she apparently didn’t care. She didn’t want him to go. He assumed it was because she wanted to prolong his presence until she could determine what it was that she really wanted, and what she could get to happen following from that. But it could be anything. It could be that she was trying to stall his departure in the hope that when he left he would take with him a more positive picture of her in his mind than he currently had. Aside from the delays she was contriving, she was being lovely to him. Or it could be that what was acting on her was her sheer unreadiness for the gulf, the dangling problems, that coming apart as abruptly as they were doing would generate. He was doing his level best to clear up problems in advance. But there would be more to come. That couldn’t be helped. And there were problems that they would have to dispose of together by long distance, by phone and letters. They would have to be in touch.

He was mastering his sadness. He had stopped describing his sadness to himself, stopped saying This is killing me. And that had been a help. His sadness was going to be a permanent possession, but he had to reduce it, compress it, so that other less sad items could fit in around it. And he had gone through a few days of routine depressed nihilism and come out of it. That was taken care of. What is humanity for?… except more of Itself, had been a pseudo-aphorism that had come to him. And that had been accompanied by images of himself, a childless man, using up his life in the service of the increase in numbers of all the others. And then there had been grim ruminations about literature, ruminations questioning why, if he had truly lost interest in humanity, he was concerning himself with understanding the pathetic signs and scratchings, which was what literature amounted to, the signs and scratchings of the uninteresting entity mankind, and teaching was handing the signs and the scratches on. And then he had indulged in fantasies of some essential monastic existence separated from books in every way. Every city is a necropolis was another dark observation from his lapse into nihilism. A more pointless truism would be hard to think up. Its only function was to inspire gloom. But he had come through.

They were working together, ostensibly, to get through the last of the papers he might want to take with him. She was the family archivist. He was considerately and as usual not demanding access to her aerie, her room of her own, so that he could get the job done with dispatch. He was describing what he wanted to look at and she would go in to find it and it would take her forever but she would finally come out with what he had asked for. She was always apologetic about how long it was taking. And she was keeping him supplied, in his place on the sofa, at the vast glass coffee table he would shortly never see again, with tea and delectables, like the sandwich, teewurst on a sesame seed bun, he was just finishing. Some things that had taken her too long to find had been genuinely misplaced, like his brother’s death certificate. It was possible that her filing system was less of a marvel than he had been led to believe it was. But still it was taking too long. Today she was doing something more than just finding sets of papers for him. She was completing some other task. That was what he was picking up. According to