Mortals

“So then you don’t want me to pursue this in any way.”

“Shape or form. No.”

“Even if I pick up something.”

“No. Nope. Don’t pick anything up. Don’t. Don’t touch him, don’t think about him, don’t have dreams about him. I’m sorry if you think he’s fascinating. He isn’t. Anyway there’s somebody else I need you for, if I can ever get to it.

“Also, and this is a minor thing, but this is the way I want it, I don’t want anything on paper necessarily, from you. Unless you want to come in here and write it here and hand it straight in. I guess that would be okay except that it ties up the room. I guess we could try it. The fact is what I would prefer, and I think we are going to get to this, is for you to come in when you have something and just tape it here. Put it on a tape, it’s the fastest way. You can abbreviate. What I don’t want is you working on profiles on paper outside this room, because you know and I know what can happen. Now. I understand it’s not going to be as polished. It’s not the same thing writing it in here out of your head or taping it. But I don’t want you hit by a truck and there is all this interesting material, you know, in your backpack. I don’t want that. The people here do not know how to drive. I love them but they cannot fucking drive. Maybe in fifty years. And I know how careful you are and how you keep all your notes safe when you write. I know all that. I know you have your burn box, I know you always use it. But I want to get away from paper.”

Ray felt his face getting hot. It was possible he had brought this on himself by fighting to get Morel. That would mean it was a punishment that might be reversed at some point, if he what, if he what, if he could think of something to get it reversed, like what? Boyle was dropping back into his more middle-class presentation of self, showing collegiality now. Everything is a trap, Ray thought.

Boyle wouldn’t stop. “I see your stuff and your stuff is beautiful, I grant you. And Marion told me all about it and how they love it at McLean. I looked at your file and it’s beautiful. You know. So I don’t say categorically don’t write, but it has to be in here, and how you can fit that in I don’t venture to say. You need to shorten up anyway, if you want to write. But the fact is that if I have it on tape I can do something else while I listen. You know. I have my problems with time the same as you do. Whatever I need to do I can do. I can replay if I need to. I can listen to you on the can and get two things done at once. You know. And. We might make an exception and you could tape either here or in back, sometimes, upstairs. I could fix it up as an exception. Part of it is that I have more stuff I have to read than I can handle. I’m buried in it. So as I say we’re definitely going to tape only, fairly soon. It makes sense because you get more on tape faster and anyway we can go from tape to text through a machine if we need an extract.”

I need to comprehend this, Ray thought. If he thinks he can make me quit with this shit I have news for him because patiens shall be my song: He may have been lying about Morel, why Morel is nothing to us, or he may not, why would he though?… I can’t think in here.

From left to right on the table in front of Ray were an open pack of Rothman’s brand cigarettes and a pale blue desk blotter in a leatherette holder, on which rested the file folder Boyle had brought. Boyle’s thick hands rested overlapped on the folder, right hand on top, Boyle’s absurd involved gold Knights of Malta ring, if that’s what it was, gleaming on his middle finger. It was impossible not to be curious about what the ring meant, but it was also impossible to show you were curious because that meant you were someone unable to place such a ring, correctly identify its provenance, the device on it. So the task was not to fixate on it while it glinted away at you, big, big enough to have a secret compartment, like a Borgia ring. Boyle was waiting for him to assent, Boyle invariably had an open pack of cigarettes on display. It was there as a memento mori, in a way, and signified that time was fleeting and that Boyle couldn’t wait to get upstairs and have a smoke. There was no smoking in the conference room. There were no ashtrays. You always knew you were keeping Boyle from having a smoke. You were intended to remember that, because it would keep you crisp and succinct.

Ray thought, I hate your fucking face, and said, “We can manage this. I um I appreciate… your time problems… your…” Then he didn’t know what else to say. This is obedience, he thought.

“We’re fine,” Boyle said, just as Ray said, “No we’re fine.” Ray was embarrassed.

Boyle appreciated obedience, and was showing he did, Ray understood, by considerately opening the folder he was pushing toward him and swinging it around so that Ray could begin reading immediately. Boyle relapped his hands, this time with his ring hand underneath, his seal of power withdrawn, a sign of collegiality restored because Ray was being good. All of Boyle’s inlays were gold, Ray had noted during one of the few times he had experienced Boyle laughing at something. He had no idea why that had come back to him.

Ray opened the folder, acutely aware that it behooved him to show there and then that he could absorb like a demon. He had to be in control. He had to kill his grievances for the time being, but truly kill them, including the recurrent feeling that life was just one goddamned unannounced test after another, which hurt because given the state of the world, he had a right to relax, they all did, the entire agency, not only himself.

The subject was a Motswana, Samuel Kerekang, forty, single, recently returned to the country after a protracted, successful, and, reading between the lines, heroic pursuit of a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Edinburgh no less.

His hatred of Boyle was interfering. An itch between his shoulder blades began to gnaw. Another thing about the new improved inner sanctum he was trapped in with Boyle was that it was hotter than before, despite the fact that it was supposedly served by the same airconditioning system that cooled the rest of the installation. He was seeing himself as the assistant who gets into the slotted box the magician pushes swords through from every conceivable angle, and who has to defeat the tangle of swords through sheer contortionism.

Boyle was watching him read, watching him rather than turning to some little piece of makework as a courtesy, such as reading something himself. Maybe it was possible Boyle would change as time went on. He was not completely unadaptable. Somehow he had figured out that he should stop wearing the stupid bolo ties he had showed up in during the transition with Resnick. Maybe Resnick had said something. And he had stopped going around in the totally inappropriate guayaberas he had brought with him from Central America, flimsy things that let his mat of chest hair show like a dark shield, dark not blond or red blond like his hair, by the way. Without looking up to check, he knew that Boyle was studying him.

The room was oppressive, its windowlessness especially. He was seized with the desire to tell Boyle something he wouldn’t want to hear, to wit, that everybody knew his secure room had a secret connection to the embassy upstairs. Somebody with the contractors had let it out. So Boyle had created a farce, like a set for a farce on a stage, French farce with doors opening and closing and people popping in and out. It struck Ray that this was a piece of true intelligence, a secret blown, true news.

Ray was finding Kerekang admirable, so far. His odyssey through various polytechnics in the U.K., the struggle for bursaries, and his final triumph at the University of Edinburgh, it was all admirable. The man was a prize, from the standpoint of the country, a jewel. This is pointless, he thought.

Softly, and as though in passing, Ray said, “At some point I may come back to Morel…” He waited for a murmur, a grunt, anything, from Boyle, but nothing came, only a penetrating silence. My life is important, Ray thought, appearances notwithstanding. He read harder. Boyle would give him nothing.

The feeling of confinement afflicting him came as a surprise, because, so far as he knew, he was especially resistant to that problem, judging by his occasional misadventures in tight places like crawl spaces and closets. Boyle would be amazed to know that Ray wanted to approve of him. It was a general rule of life that things went better if you liked whomever fate happened to give you as your boss. So now Boyle was launched on a program to make that permanently impossible.

He was dealing with a miscellany, not a coherent, unified profile. Even so, all he would normally need was one pass at a collection like this. But something there was that didn’t want him to perform. He was retaining proper names, but not much more. He was going to have to reread, selectively and only a little, but it was still rereading, which Boyle would detect. This was a rag rug. He had to hurry. There was a stopwatch feature on Boyle’s Rolex. This ragbag he had been handed was one more test, Ray thought.

Various British entities had been tracking Kerekang, MI5 and an office Ray had never heard of in the Overseas Development Ministry, but there were also some data from American sources. There was a skimpy contribution from the American consulate in Edinburgh. The American interest had to be explained by Kerekang’s two trips to the University of Michigan at Lansing for special certificate study. The prose in the biodata piece was laughable, below the level usually found in the most routine profiling done by political-economic officers in American