Mortals (40 page)

There was one last element to the deal still outstanding. It had to be finessed. They were inside the elephant grass hedge, effectively hidden. The sows were asleep. Ray hoped they were asleep. The wind had relented.

Pony wanted to sign something, by which he meant he wanted something signed, a letter in his file saying that he had attended these meetings in behalf of the school and not because he was drawn to them for any other reason. He wanted to sign something, or rather he wanted to put his signature chop on something. Many educated Batswana signed documents and letters with complex ideograms only distantly related to the letters composing their names. Pony’s chop was the most extravagant Ray had ever encountered, a vast scrawl executed in a flash and always, strangely enough, identical, document to document. Pony had a need for that act. It would have to be circumvented, for obvious reasons. The operation had to be traceless. The operation he was constructing served his own needs perfectly. He would be able to mollify Boyle with the appearance of circumspect action against Kerekang. And he would have the beginnings of what he needed for his private campaign against Morel. Boyle would surely see the supposed logic of all this. He would frame it differently for him, of course, but Boyle would have to go for it because he wanted Kerekang so much. Ray would get Morel, and sooner rather than later. He wanted his essence. He wanted Morel’s essence on a stick, proof of what he was. Pony was referring to the authorizing document he wanted from Ray as a charter.

Pony said, “So you can see, rra, why I must have this charter.”

Ray answered, “Of course, rra, just as I would in your place. But consider that, as to material in the files at school, really how safe is anything from prying eyes … you see?”

“Rra, I take your point.” Pony thought for a moment. “So then I might take this for my personal holding, someway like that?”

“No, because no matter how safely you think you have hidden a thing, strange things can happen.” Ray was improvising. This had to go away. He was thinking of fantasy solutions like drawing up a document in vanishing ink. He would have to come up with a stall.

He was being reflective. While he reflected, he extracted a packet of pula from his hip pocket and slid half the packet into an envelope. He was going to offer two hundred pula, half of the amount agreed on, as a down payment or rather surety, as they would call it here.

Ray said, “May we do this? Once you attend for a time or so and bring me some material, we can sit down and see if you still want some kind of charter. You may not. There may be nothing to any of this. In the meantime I can think of what’s best, whether I should hold some document for you in my files, or what. And meantime let me give you surety, now, for half what we agreed on.”

He had surprised Pony. The breeze was up again. They danced to a new position on the other side of the pen.

Ray said, “Of course, I can find someone else if you say no. I think I can.”

“No, rra, that will be just all right,” Pony said. He waited for Ray to press the money on him.

They left, hurrying. Pony was ashamed. Ray loved him for it.

R
ay had two pieces of intelligence for Boyle, one that Boyle would want but that Ray was not going to give him, and one that Boyle ought to want but wouldn’t and that Ray was going to try to force on him. Both pieces of information had come to Ray via sheer luck, with the assistance in one case of another force he distrusted, intuition. And both pieces of information had left him shaken. He had something critical on Kerekang, an extension and confirmation of what he had already concluded, but new.

It was doubtless the suggestion of guidedness in human affairs that luck and intuition stood for that he hated. There was no design, no occult design. Odd conjunctions not even rising to the status of coincidence also annoyed him, like the odd fact that the previous chief of station had been a collector of ancient Roman whorehouse tokens and the present one was secretly notorious within the agency for his practice of founding high-end whorehouses as part of his collection regime wherever he was posted.

What Boyle would not get out of him was that he knew where Dwight Wemberg was. He couldn’t believe the way he had come to know this fact. Something had told him to go over to the university library to see if he could find the complete original copy of the
International Review of Social History
, Volume One, Number Six, from which the palm-copier sample reading that was in his file had been taken and used to impugn Kerekang, who had made the mistake of abandoning his reading long enough to go and empty his bladder. At the side of Ray’s mind had been the shadow of an intention to see, at the same time, if he could look up any of Marianne Wormser’s early papers on Milton, to reassure himself
that he had been right that she was unpromising. So he had gone there, following his whim or whatever it should be called. He had never gotten to Wormser.

Boyle had agreed to see him, in the consular office, this time. Ray was in one of the holding cubicles, in a box, essentially, in a tan wood-veneer-over-chipboard box, sitting in an Eames chair, with the fine hum of the fluorescent lighting for entertainment. When Boyle was ready for him a buzzer on the door would sound and a red light set in the wall would begin flashing, a light concealing a CCTV minicam and an audio ear. The miking of these cubicles had always struck Ray as pointless. The surveillance in the cubicles was being imposed on people who had already passed through two metal detectors, so what could anyone possibly be expected to detect?

For the record he was there on school business, carrying his permanently pending file of names to be proposed for Phelps-Stokes fellowships. It was time to redo the file. Some of the candidates on it were dead. That file and the exhibit he had especially prepared for Boyle on the Kerekang matter were contained in the red rope portfolio on his lap, and he noticed, now, that his palms were sweating enough to leave marks on the portfolio. He dried his hands in his pockets, irritated at himself, because the sweat marks were just the kind of small thing Boyle might pick up on. The fact was that Kerekang was not a communist, not a socialist, not a follower of Karl Marx. He was a follower, if that was the word, of someone else altogether, Karl Marlo, a thinker of a different kidney completely. Ray had the proof in his hands.

My life is taking forever, he thought. At the university library he had found bound volumes of the
International Review of Social History
in the stacks, but only from 1980 onward. The card catalog entry was partly illegible, but seemed to say that the earlier years of the journal were in one of the storage areas. He knew the library and was known there. He had made his way to the box rooms, as the storage rooms were called. In the first one he entered, he’d found what he’d come for. The box room was in chaos, with slopes of vandalized, hurt, and deaccessioned books reaching from the overburdened worktable surfaces to the edges of the room. He had had to walk on books to get to the wall shelving, where, displayed at eye level, he found the back issues, unbound, of the
International Review of Social History
. The lot was tagged as scheduled for microfilming, but the order was dated May 1981. Nothing was happening with these periodicals, he’d decided. He’d slipped the number he wanted into the waistband of his bush shorts, under his shirt.

At that point, he had found Wemberg’s hiding place. A smell, a faint rankness, had arrested his attention. On three sides, the space between the top of the main worktable and the floor had been walled with stacked books, the walling partially masked by the drifts and dumps of spilled books lying against it. On the fourth side, the space was closed with a sheet of cardboard, which he shifted to the side. He’d had to strike matches to see inside the cave. He had cursed the Lion matches for the flimsy, sputtering, unreliable product they were. Inside the cave he had found a pallet, a sakkie containing soiled clothing, a water bottle, and a framed photograph of Alice Wemberg. On impulse he’d taken all the bills he had in his wallet, about fifty pula, and tucked them under the frame of the photograph, obscuring Alice Wemberg’s face so that Wemberg, in his distraction, wouldn’t miss seeing the money. Then Ray had left. Thinking now about Wemberg was upsetting him, again. There was nothing he could do for the man without too much danger to himself. He felt for Wemberg. He identified with him, another poor bastard going mad over a beloved woman. With Iris away, he was feeling more of a bond with Wemberg than before. He was worried that leaving the money had been stupid, that it might startle and unnerve Wemberg and lead him to abandon his hideout, which was a sensible hideout, well located because that end of the library building faced rough, blank bushveld, so that Wemberg would be able to duck in and out without being observed, especially at night. He had to turn his thoughts away from this. There was nothing he could do.

Boyle was taking his time, per usual. Ray took out his exhibit and shuffled through it. If he did say so himself, it was conclusive against the idea that Kerekang was any kind of socialist or revolutionary. The whole misreading had begun with the sloppy job of copying the article’s title, slashing across it to yield

when the correct full title was “Karl Marlo, Guild Socialism, and the Revolution of 1848.” In Marxian terms, Karl Marlo had been a reactionary. He had been a defender of the guilds. He had been an opponent of industrialism. He had wanted the extension of the guild system, with its masters and apprentices and its slow, merit-based upward mobility and employment stability.

The whole thing was interesting. And Marlo had hated the liberals, who were for the industrial system, more than anything, which ought to recommend him to the liberal-hating Boyle, except that the historical context was so wildly different. What Kerekang wanted in Botswana was something like what Marlo had wanted. He had been influenced by Marlo and by an American named Borsodi. He wanted households to raise their own food and have fruit trees and raise small stock and sell any surplus on the open market. What was so terrible about that? There was a cosmic joke going on here. The reason Marlo had hated liberals was because they wanted to open everything up to the market, which he knew would mean doom for the guilds, and he had been right. Kerekang was an individualist, rightly judged. He wanted every family to be allocated an equal plot and house and access to water and he had schemes for raising a variety of agricultural products and taking the surplus for sale, which would sustain the family. You would have a base and you couldn’t be turned out into the street, like the homeless, but you could do wage work on the side, to the degree you chose. It was yeoman democracy, more than anything. It was Jeffersonian. It was innocent.

Ray had photocopied the entire twenty-page article. And he had made a separate presentation sheet consisting of excerpts, highlighted, because he knew Boyle would never read the original piece. Ray was doing this out of principle. It would be against his best interest if Boyle paid attention, because of the scheme he had going with Pony. But if Boyle decided to forget Kerekang, Ray would send Pony for a couple of visits to Morel without authorization. Ray would have what he wanted, Morel au naturel, talking the talk.

Of course there was an unusable aspect of Marlo that might endear him to Boyle if he ever looked into it. The great expanded guild system Marlo had proposed was for everybody but Jews. It wasn’t that Marlo had been anti-Semitic, but he had been a man of his time. Boyle had no excuse for his own attitudes and he had no idea how much Ray knew about them thanks to the beloved Marion Resnick. Boyle was Jew-fixated. He blamed the Jew Kissinger for leading Nixon to break the wall around China, which had led them to go capitalist enough to become an enormous economic as well as military threat. The idea was that they should have been left alone to doldrum along with their inefficient communist system. Boyle was an ultra. Ray thought, If you’re politically insane, things will leak out no matter who you are: and Marion can’t be blamed for talking about Boyle. Boyle hated the African National Congress not
because blacks were going to come to power through it but because Jews, some of the greatest stars of the ANC, were, and of course communism was the invention of a Jew and Jews had been prominent in getting it going in Russia, and Lenin was a Jew, or half-Jew … That was Boyle. He had to live with him.

The waiting he was being put through was deliberate. He decided to read through his exhibit, sampling it.

“If the guilds were to play an important part in Germany’s future they would have to stand for more than simply the selfish demands of their class … the road back was closed; the future demanded more than nostalgia; it would not accept mere selfishness … the guildsmen were aware of the need for a more general appeal and a wider vision; that they were was largely due to the efforts of one Karl Marlo—the social theorist of the German guild movement during the years of revolution.”

Learn something new every day was Resnick’s line. Socrates, when he was about to drink the hemlock, made everybody in the room shut up so he could hear the end of a song, new to him, being sung in the street. Ray knew the name of the singer, if he could remember it … Stesichorus.

“Marlo was not a guildsman; he was a chemistry teacher in a trade school in Kassel, Kurhessen.” He had been a technician, like Kerekang.

“Marlo’s native province was a land of small villages surrounded by carefully cultivated fields and inhabited by peasants and the master tailors, smiths, bakers, carpenters, and shoemakers of the guilds, who, with their journeymen and apprentices, formed a comprehensive guild system as yet undisturbed by free enterprise and still protected by ancient monopolies and a determined insistence on prerogatives and precedent. It was here that Marlo carried on his social research and here that he found an ‘organization of labor’ whose principles he hoped to see embodied in an economic order which would protect Germany from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.”