Mortals

some level. The cover at this embassy for the chief of station was consular officer. It always had been. And with Marion it had been perfectly okay to pop by upstairs on ostensible school business, say to discuss arrangements for student scholarships in the U.S. that the consular office had a lot to do with, pop in and talk about the real stuff, his assignments, how they were going. Marion had always let him read the Foreign Press Intelligence Summary cables that kept piling up. Now all that was dead. When he turned things in, Boyle never had much to say. Calls at the consular office had to be based on dire emergency only.

Now there was a whole new drill around seeing Boyle face to face. The embassy, a narrow three-story building, looked outward onto the parking lot flanking the mall. The American Library was built into the side of the embassy building and opened on one of the alleys that cut through from the parking lot to the concourse itself. The American Library had always been a physically separate entity. Somehow Boyle had arranged for the construction of a secret spiral staircase, housed in a tube stairwell, to connect his second-floor offices to the library’s inmost conference room. In fact, the old conference room in the rear had been divided in half for the purpose of creating a new, secret meeting place for Boyle’s use. Boyle’s access to the room was by way of a secret panel rather than a conventional doorway. Ray had never seen Boyle enter or exit the back cubicle. He was always in place, set to go, when Ray was let in. There was a new keypad lock on the door to the main conference room, and two keypads for the lock on the inner door. Ray had the combination to the first door only. Lillian had to punch him through. He understood that the tube stairwell was a tight fit for Boyle, which wouldn’t be surprising. Boyle tended to look flushed, often, when they met in back. In fact, he always did.

A few Batswana students had come in to read magazines. Ray wanted to get started with Boyle, but nothing was happening. Finally there was a signal. Lillian murmured something to Ray about picking up the photocopies he had come for. That was standard. He was glad to be leaving the reading room because a fine, gnawing, sourceless hum hung in the air, and something smelled powerfully of solvent. Lillian was thin, cold, and officious. She was a Motswana. She had studied library science in the United States. She had been posted to Dar es Salaam prior to coming home. She was about forty, he guessed. He always skipped offering her the traditional greetings, unless there were Batswana present, because he had gotten the distinct impression that she regarded the act as being condescending. Looking at her now, he wondered if Lillian was a genuine Motswana. She was very Nilotic, very elongated, with what the Batswana call “long eyes.” She had arrived in the country simultaneously with Boyle.

Boyle looked like a composite. His body from neck to hips was pyramidal. There was a fat-distribution problem. His face tended to gauntness. He had once been much fatter, judging by the loose skin of his underjaw that hung like a keel fin from chin to throat. He would tug on this when he was annoyed with himself, Ray had noted. From a distance, Boyle’s face had a healthy look, but the Celtic ruddiness in his cheeks, seen close-up, came from concentrated traceries of broken capillaries. He was in his early fifties. His rather golden hair was worn crewcut and was dense, like lawn. His eyebrows, too, were blond and dense, tousled, the right eyebrow interrupted by a vertical blank space, a scar, evidence of some encounter threatening to his eye, and a little intimidating, as all facial scars hinting at personal combat tended to be. His eyes were blue, a dull blue. Boyle was supposed to be a Knight of Malta, if that meant anything. Ray recognized for what it was Boyle’s soft, heavily manipulative style of speech. Boyle would drift into speaking so softly at certain times that Ray would be forced into asking him to repeat something, which made Ray look bad instead of Boyle, of course. The point of speaking unduly softly was to keep the listener in a state of tense hyperattention and, in Boyle’s case, to keep him subject to the startle effect produced by the occasional shout or loud groan of disgust.

Lillian had ushered him to the conference room. He looked away, up at the ceiling, while Lillian pressed the combinations in. That was the protocol. He entered the conference room and closed the door behind him. Ludicrously, a panel in the wall of the conference room slid open. He passed through, into the secret space.

Boyle was there. The room was more a cubicle than a room. The blond oval conference table was stupidly oversized, given the dimensions of the cubicle. Fluorescent panels overhead provided dull, even light. Ray took his seat, facing Boyle across the widest part of the table. Boyle’s chair was thronelike. Ray had a folding chair. Weak airconditioning was at work. Boyle’s thick hands were at rest on a folder in front of him.

Ray had fantasized about doing a Life of this man. He could do a classic. Boyle was a field of signs indicating that he probably thought of his physical emanations as very bad things. He used a cologne and an aftershave. The two scents were separable. He used breath pastilles once or twice during every meeting. His nails were groomed. His nostrils were hairless and scoured-looking.

Boyle nodded, but before Ray could say anything Boyle opened his folder and began writing something on a sheet of paper inside it.

Ray waited. Boyle was mostly faithful to the Western business dress mode, to suits and ties, which was possible for him because he existed in an unbroken regime of airconditioning. His BMW was airconditioned. Boyle dressed expensively. His only apparent concession to the climate of Africa was that he wore, on occasion, peculiar mesh shirts with stiff collars, still technically dress shirts, of a kind Ray had never seen on any other human being.

It was Ray’s idea that another key to Boyle’s presentation of self was a need he felt to project physical threat, to remind you that he was a True Man. True Men could hurt you, physically. True Men needed you to keep it in mind that they are caged panthers. But Boyle, at least since the onset of his weight or glandular problem, was not going to be credibly able to imply in any way that he might be able to spring at you if you offended him. But he was used to having the power to do that, so he had shifted the threat to things that he did with his face, his eyes, his voice. The idea was to prevent the rise of any notion that Boyle was, in fact, only a former True Man. This was reminding him of discussions with his mother on the subject of manhood, true manhood.

Boyle kept writing.

Ray observed that they had finally gotten around to carpeting the cubicle. The rug was the color of celery.

Ray reminded himself to be smart about how he put things to Boyle today. He might throw in a little jargon, for example. Boyle loved team talk and Ray avoided it. Marion Resnick had shared his ironical attitude toward it. If he wanted to cinch getting Boyle’s okay for making Morel a person of interest, it might behoove Ray to throw some jargonese at him.

Boyle was writing and writing.

When it came to team language, there was a lot of it. How up to date he was was also a question. Radish meant a left group that the agency had created from the ground up. Hull was a more generic term and applied to groups under control, of whatever political complexion. Sources who gave you information for their own reasons and without accepting any kind of payment were called chums. In the old days the term for someone under control through the mechanism of blackmail was orphan. He hated this language. Then there were the noms de guerre certain agents were known by, certain agents who were specialists, dangerous people. There was the Seraph. There was the Cat in the Hat. Boyle ate and drank this pulp aspect of the agency, you could tell. Skit was the term for a major operation, something world-shaking, something where specialists took over. Skits were rare and had nothing to do, usually, with the contract arm, for which he thanked God. Skits were for line officers, specialists, and, a lot of the time, proxies from friendly other services. Skits were not his province. He had never seen one.

Ray couldn’t believe what was happening. But he had to be steady and he needed to be pleasant while this was happening to him, because those were the rules and he had to be able to act if some notion of how to undo this should come to him. One thing Boyle did that Marion never had was to announce at the start of every meeting just how long you had. Boyle had given him twenty minutes and more than half of that was gone and there had to be enough time within the twenty minutes for Ray to get paid. It was payday.

Boyle was saying no to making Davis Morel a person of interest. He was being adamant. He seemed to be saying that it was no, even to making him a provisional person of interest, which was unheard of if the case being made was as strong as his was.

It was taking a chance, but Ray decided he had to put the proposition to Boyle again, from a slightly different angle. Whatever I thought was interesting, Marion thought was interesting, which let me in for moments like this, that eat shit.

Ray put it conditionally. “If I wrote him up it wouldn’t have to be a full-dress thing. I can keep it crisp. And I could drop it if it turns out to look like what you say it is. It would be a probe, or a preprobe, you’d be