Mortals (94 page)

He ran to retrieve the rifle and returned with it to the alcove, where he let himself collapse, sinking down against the door, to get his breath. He was hungry.

He had to go up there now. He supposed his idea was to terrify people into doing something he ordered them to. He would decide how to act once he saw what he was going to be confronted with, that is, whether he should act like a fou, a nut, or like a coldblooded type, a zealot but cold.

He started up the stairs. He couldn’t let go of the gun. He thought, Anyway, we are all fragile puddings, doomed slumping puddings trying to stay hard as long as we can. It was conceivable he was just about to expose himself to sudden death. He had to get himself in order, be clear, concentrate his mind. He couldn’t set aside more time to do it because he’d already dithered enough. He had to be in order, though. He would give
himself until he got to the top of the stairway to the roof. He would have to be succinct. But he had to mount the stairs very deliberately anyway, because he had to avoid slipping in the blood on the stairs and because he had to favor his knees, his right knee, spare it for whatever exertions were going to be called for.

He began the ascent. The angle was not quite vertical and there was no railing to grip. Dragging the rifle up with him, behind him, was difficult and made for slower going. He wanted to be clear, as clear about what he was doing as Yeats’s Irish airman.

One, step one, was Iris, and there was nothing to say about Iris beyond love and the size of his loss and that was it. If he was going to be shot to death and Iris was the last thing on his mind he wouldn’t mind.

Two was Africa. He had been happy in Africa and he was guilty about that and he would do something for Africa in the next act, because it looked bad for Africa, and not only Botswana. There was the virus, seropositivity as they called it, and Morel saying that it was going to be a holocaust. There was nothing he could do about it. Of course Morel no doubt thought the answer was to go and dynamite churches, and possibly Parliament as well. They were doing nothing, and Africa was slipping into the valley of the shadow of death. He didn’t know whose fault it was. He wanted Morel to be wrong about this and for science to come up with something. He prayed for it.

Three was the agency. He had to have mixed feelings about the agency. After all it had come into existence only after the West realized that the communists had organized a huge espionage machine larger and more aggressive and successful than anything in the West or even than the whole West together, and after the West realized that legal communist parties everywhere were being used as spotters and resources for spies, and after it became obvious the communists were setting new standards in ruthlessness, as in throwing oppositionists into crematoria during the Spanish Civil War. And then there had been the likelihood that the people at the top of the communist machine were clinically insane, paranoid, as the Moscow Trials demonstrated. So, all that was true. But then the agency had gone wrong, in places, in many places, in the marches of the empire, in Indonesia for sure, in Central America the same, in Afghanistan, and in Africa, especially in Malawi and Zaire, but not only there. And he knew that the agency was going to survive the collapse of the Russians and continue using its power dubiously, which was why he had to be out if he escaped this alive. Being in the agency meant making impossible judgments, weighing justifiable or virtuous acts against inexcusable
ones, mainly because so much on either side of the equation remained secret.

The rifle was proving useful as a crutch. Four was English Literature. He loved it. It was always with him. He thought, On the roof I will do such things as will be the terror of the earth, but what they will be exactly I have no idea, like Tamburlaine. He had been attracted to the Elizabethans, Webster especially, but had decided they were too bloody. Imagine that, he thought.

The stair treads were fixed in a metal casing. There were no risers. He had to grasp at the treads above, using one hand only, and drag himself up, hellward. Sweat was sliding into his eyes but the best he could do to get rid of it was to rub his eyes against his shoulders, which was ineffective. He needed a spare arm. The smell of blood was making him ill.

Five was Rex. He wondered how anyone was supposed to compete with a brother whose first word was brioche and whose last word, according to what had been reported to Iris and relayed to Morel and then to him, whose last word was Mama. My first word was car, he thought. Apparently his parents had given Rex a bite of brioche at some early point and he had loved it and wanted more and voilà. Ray had gotten tired of hearing about it and about Rex’s magnificent and precocious vocabulary in general. Rex had been impossible, but still, on his own end, Ray knew he had mismanaged things. He would do what he could for his brother, who was one of the
aoroi
, the dead-too-early. He didn’t know why he remembered that. In any case, if he lived, he was going to do a Life of his brother, a vignette, and maybe a chapbook of the best bits and pieces from
Strange News
.

Something was bothering him.

It was the crank. The crank would make him look like an organ grinder. That would be the first impression. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him.

He had to get rid of the crank. When he appeared he would just hold his fist in a significant way at the side of the bundle and that would do it. It would have to.

He brought the rifle up onto the step he was standing on and got it between his left leg and the casing, holding it there by pressing his weight against it. With his right hand free, he pulled at the crank. It was difficult. He had done an excellent job of jamming it in among the tapework.

A wavering shadow fell over him as he struggled. He looked up.

It was too literary, or did he mean Gothic? There seemed to be a bird of prey, a vulture, clutching the rim of the opening at the top of the staircase,
looking down at him, raising and lowering its wings, shivering them. It was small. Vultures were bigger. It must be a buzzard.

He wasn’t afraid. Everything was extreme. He was out of his element.

Because of the brightness he was staring up into he was getting more an impression of the beast than a clear image of it. A string of liquid dripped down from the bird, narrowly missing him. It was vile, whatever it was.

The crank he had been worrying and tugging at came free just then and he flung it underhand as hard as he could, blindly, in the direction of the bird. He hit the thing. It made a feminine-sounding utterance and jerked away and was gone.

Ray continued climbing. He felt urgency. He wanted Quartus. He wanted to bet someone that Quartus was there for him, on the roof.

He crawled out onto the roof. He had his rifle with him. He had dragged it up subtly behind him and now it was with him. The sky was very bright. The roof was a burning plain of white pebbles enclosed by a low ornamental parapet with regularly spaced embrasures, like the roofline of a medieval castle. The parapet was seamless along the edge of the roof.

He looked around as well as he could, keeping flat.

There were veins of smoke in the sky. Before, there had been streams of smoke, sheets of it.

He could see something of where he was and he was in luck. This sector of the roof, at the midpoint of the long transverse connecting the outward wings, was in the hands of the witdoeke. That much he could tell. He was in the midst of a group of witdoeke-wearing fighters, for which he thanked God. He was among them but to the rear of their main position. He counted about a dozen, exactly a dozen, fighters.

The pebbles were burning hot. He needed gloves. He needed water, also.

The fighters were disposed in an arc to his left, west-facing. They were utilizing everything available to them for cover while they fired. The shooting was sporadic but too loud when it came, too loud for him. These were his friends, shooting.

The core of the position was a complex of low-built galvanized iron utility sheds and a pair of absurdly large wooden water tanks set on a raised concrete foundation. No one was paying the least attention to him. The position they were defending was highly improvised. Men were dodging around, firing or just aiming, from beside the service sheds, from behind piled-up sacks of gypsum, if he was reading the lettering on one of
the sacks correctly. One of the three sheds had been half kicked down and its siding appropriated and jammed in among the struts supporting the water tanks, augmenting the cover provided by the waist-high concrete base under the tanks. It was all very motley and ragged and people would have to be careful when they shot past their own forward positions.

He had to see more. He stood up. This was the obvious choice for a defensive position. The rooftop ran away blankly, featurelessly, on either hand all the way to the ends of the wings, so far as he could tell.

He wanted to see who was here. He wanted to shake people by the hand and tell them they were doing well, putting up a good fight, which seemed to be the case. He needed to introduce himself.

Standing, he could see where the villains were. They were around the elbow of the building and out at the end of the western wing, collected together there behind their own improvised barricade of ammunition lockers. He thought he saw Nemesis, but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, which had to be at least a hundred yards, and because of the heat-shimmer rising from the roof. He thought he could see some heavy weapons, tripod-mounted machine guns. They were more exposed than the witdoeke, but the range of their weapons was superior. He realized that having to fire at an angle toward the center disadvantaged the villains because they had to thread their fire through the crenellated parapet at two points.

Someone was yelling at him. He couldn’t tell who.

He decided to kneel. That would be nonthreatening. The roof surface was littered with spent shells. The witdoeke were miscellaneously armed. Some had hunting rifles but most were using assault rifles, the ones with the curved magazines whose name escaped him. He wondered where the witdoeke had gotten them. He had paid poor attention during firearms training at the agency and now he regretted it, but not much. He didn’t know if people were shouting at him, to him, he meant, or about him, to one another. There was a lot of shouting.

Someone was gesturing violently at him from beside one of the sheds. He raised his hands over his head. He hoped that was what they wanted.

He had a theory of what had happened with the villains. They were stuck. His theory was that originally they had gone up and installed themselves on that part of the roof in order to rain fire on attackers coming from the direction of the pan. And that would have been an ideal site for an emplacement. But then somehow Kerekang had gotten a team into the building and up onto the roof by stealth. And now the villains had their backs to the pan, from which some light gunfire was still proceeding.
And something was keeping them from rappeling down the building, which surely they were equipped to do, although possibly not. But of course that would mean abandoning equipment they couldn’t let fall into Ichokela’s hands, Kerekang’s people’s hands. And then likeliest of all was that Kerekang had shooters on the ground close enough to make rappeling unthinkable. That was his theory of the situation.

He thought he should push his rifle farther away from him. He leaned toward it, reaching, which led to actual screaming from some of the witdoeke. He was being misunderstood. He had wanted to give a reassuring sign.

“Dumela,” he shouted.

He pointed at his forehead. “Witdoek, ke witdoek,” he shouted.

Someone came up behind him and pressed a gun barrel into his back.

Impulsively, he stood up and turned around.

A young man, a boy, really, was pointing a pump-action shotgun at him. He was in a state of alarm and confusion. He was retreating a few steps. Ray realized he knew the boy, from the university. He was wearing bush shorts, and a tee shirt from the main craft shop in the capital. It was a sky-blue tee shirt and bore the legend Keep Botswana Tidy. Iris had bought three of those shirts to give as presents. The young man was wearing his witdoek, like his comrades. I would like to have comrades, Ray thought.

Ray said, “Dumela, rra. I believe I know you from university. I am a teacher, rra. I am from St. James’s. Ke mang St. James’s.”

The boy was thin. The combat boots he was wearing belonged on sturdier legs than his. It was wrong for this boy to be here. It was altogether wrong. He had to do something. The boy was moving further back. He slid the pump action forward and back. Obviously it was the bundle on Ray’s chest. It had to be that.

Ray slapped the bundle, prompting the young man to drop to a crouch, a firing stance.

“No,” Ray said, slapping the bundle even more heartily and forcing himself to smile.

Two other fighters, older and rougher and more rustic-looking men, approached, their rifles aimed at him. It was peculiar, because everyone in the encounter was hunched over, stooping to one degree or another, out of prudence. And that reminded him that he needed to get his head down too. He was taller than any of the three people he was dealing with. He doubted that the two new arrivals spoke English. He would tell them he was with them, that he was their friend.

“Ke tsala. Witdoek. Ke tsala.”

The older men wanted him to do something about the bundle. He wasn’t going to. The damned loops around his neck were cutting into his flesh and it would be his pleasure to get the whole thing off him just for ten minutes but there was no way he was going to relinquish it in the circumstances he was in.

He addressed the boy, the student, whose name was coming to him. It was Kevin. And his last name was coming to him and it was Tsele. He had been a member of the Student Representative Council. They had spoken. Kevin had been a firebrand of some kind.

Ray said, “Kevin, listen to me. I am Professor Finch. I am here to help you. Look, this is only a manuscript, here. You can feel it. I will hold my hands all the way up, like this. You feel it. I know what you think. But this is paper in here, a book.”