Mortals

justify his presence. He had the house key with the estate agent’s tag on it. All the utilities were on, but he had a torch in case the electricity went out, which could always happen. Explaining why a long extension had been spliced into the house-phone cord would be a little tricky in the event anyone made note of it. He would claim ignorance, be puzzled himself. Splicing in the extension had been the only way he could get the phone into the pantry where he needed to be. By the time anyone could get physically into the house he would have all his accoutrements and tools out of sight, packed away in his knapsack. He heard a crackle in the descrambler.

He could get mournful at the drop of a hat, thinking about Marion’s downfall, but he knew very little about why it had happened. He had been an imbiber, which in the agency was part of the culture, a little like the use of chewing tobacco in professional baseball. People were cautioned or sent off to dry out, and their careers continued. Marion. Marion was a red wine maven, a Bordeaux maven. He called his glass of wine red joy. Why had Marion fallen? Marion was in the agency, whereas he was of the agency, which was perfect because it meant he had nothing to fear from the wars of the ins and the outs back in Langley, the fights between the Brahmin liberals and the papist ultras like Casey, which he didn’t care about. And now he was hearing about a Mormon beachhead in Clandestine Services. Marion had run the station well, as far as Ray knew. And how could anyone hate a man who was a Scrabble master and a collector of ancient Roman brothel tokens, sprintriae, they were called. But someone had hated him and now he was spending his mortal life running a Magic Marker through sensitive passages in documents going out under FOIA. He was a clerk.

The descrambler was emitting definite crepitations. He rested his hand on it, a small model in black plastic about the size of a cigar box, to feel if it was warm. It was. These machines were astonishing. Anyone cutting into a transmission would get pure static. The smell of ammonia in the pantry was fairly strong. People are the same everywhere, he thought. The pantry shelves had been scrubbed, all except the top one, which Ray had checked out by standing on the first shelf.

It was too bad that when the call came it wouldn’t be Marion’s natural voice. The descrambler had a way of flattening out tones and, depending on the setting, stretching out the delivery. He would cope. Also he would cope with the fact that this had to be a one-way transmission, Resnick to Finch. His role would be to signal that receiving was in progress by pressing a confirm key at intervals. It was remotely possible that Marion would employ a voice mask as an extreme added precaution. He hoped not. Ray was ready. The handset was clipped into place and he was holding down the hook switch. He was unsure how Aesopian Marion was going to feel he needed to be. It was normal prudence to avoid using the proper names of key parties in these communications, but he might go further. The phone rang. He released the hook switch. A sound like a weak moan came from the descrambler speaker. It was Marion.

Marion began. It was too loud.

Ray had to do something. It was much too loud. He stripped off his shirt, wildly, and bunched it against the speaker. It was still too loud. You can never relax, he thought. He needed something like a towel or blanket, which he didn’t have. The house was unfurnished. Desperately he thought of getting out of his bush shorts and adding them to the mufflage the shirt was providing inadequately.

The sound wasn’t blaring, but it would be audible outside the house at this level. He couldn’t bear the idea of terminating the call.

God save me, he thought, and struck the volume knob with the butt of his flashlight. It worked. Something did. It brought the volume down.

“Hello my darling,” Marion said, startling Ray. It was possible he was drinking. If he was it was a measure of the risk he had been asked to assume and Ray could forgive it, forgive everything.

“Hello my boy, are you there? Can you hear?” Ray tapped the confirm key. Marion’s voice was metallic but it was recognizable as his. There was no voice mask.

Methodically, Marion went through the basic biodata, part of which Ray already had. Marion was reading from notes. It was good to get exact dates.

In sum, the subject’s paternal family was of very haute black bourgeoisie origins, upper civil service, in Antigua. Then it had been Baltimore and then Cambridge, where the subject’s father had become a fixture at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Christian Morals. There was more that Ray already knew. Subject’s mother, now deceased, was white, a birthright Quaker. There would be more about her. There were no siblings. And so on.

As an only child, and only son, much had been expected of the subject, despite the disability he was born with, monobrevipodia, one leg shorter than the other. The subject’s mother had brought money, more money, into the family. Now the prep school list was complete.

“Mine eyes dazzle. She died young,” Marion said, quoting John Webster for no reason apparent to Ray, until he realized it must refer to the early death of Morel’s mother.

“Our subject was always a holy terror to his poor parents. He was precocious. He was enrolled in the divinity school for six months but quit and somehow slid over into the medical school, where he developed shall we say an outspoken attitude to the imperfections of orthodox medicine.

“The man is trouble. He left divinity school announcing that he was going to convert to Judaism because it was clear to him how dastardly Christianity had been to the Jews. He was threatening to do it out of solidarity, you understand me, not belief, because he had become, better yet, an atheist.

“There was some violence between father and son.

“Circumcision came into it. There were fights with his father when he said it would be easy to become a voluntary Jew, since he was already circumcised.

“He was something. I can give you his IQ, by the way… 170.”

Ray didn’t believe it. He would stake his life on it that this was a fluke or wrong. It was unnecessary information! But of course Marion had no notion of how Ray was involved with Morel or why he should be tender in anything he reported.

“Now we have some events florid enough for anyone, God knows. The subject’s mother dies after refusing to eat. It could be true. The subject’s mother left senior over his entrenched womanizing. Then senior remarries… wait I forgot to say junior had married a Nigerian woman. She was living with the subject but in senior’s very nice house. She divorces our subject and marries senior. How long before the divorce something had been going on is unknown.

“Junior gets his medical degree anyway.

“You would be amazed at the way this was handled at Harvard. There was a fistfight in Widener between father and son that never happened. There were other incidents.

“By the way when subject’s mother left the hearth, she became an administrator at a Quaker conference center, Powell House, far from Massachusetts. This was much earlier.

“They’re slick, at Harvard. The factors managed everything. Tap and show you can hear me, my boy.” Ray did.

“Our subject graduates, does his residency in internal medicine.

“So then our man becomes a public nuisance in Cambridge. He opens a practice in Cambridge, and over in Malden a storefront not for his practice but for, let me look at something, his organization, the Giordano Bruno Society. He founded it. They hold meetings attacking religion.

“He is the published author of two books, here they are, dEaTHICS, with the title done in clever typography, small d and small a and the rest caps, you get the point. And the other Theolatry, Mankind’s Curse. Both of these are published by Diagoras Press, Diagoras being the first atheist on record, as I know you know. He is, by the way, the founder of Diagoras Press and its only author.

“Someway he finds time to get qualified in chiropractic, certain varieties of massage, and medical hypnosis.

“His practice develops. He has a female following, largely female, which is not so surprising since this is unorthodox medicine. Does he miss his ex-wife, now his stepmother? Doesn’t look like it. He has girlfriends, several, from his patient population.

“You know how fucked I am here, by the way. I won’t go into it. I’m almost through with this. I’m almost out. Not a decade too soon. Please you’ve got to hit the confirm key every once in a while. You know how to do this. They hate me. You know how this works, hit the thing. Good. Thank you.