Mortals (13 page)

He turned to go back. There was no time to climb the grand stairway that led from the plaza up to the second-floor terrace café of the President Hotel. It was loud but pleasant up there, under the awning.

It was an open balcony-terrace and you could survey the whole plaza.
In the old days someone from one branch or another of the South African security services had almost always been undercover there from noon through seven. You could set your watch by the Boers. How it would work now was going to be interesting. He liked the terrace, whose staircase had been useful to him for crisscross quick-turnover message drops more than once. For old times’ sake he went up the broad steps as far as the first quarter turn and for luck touched the pediment of the newel lamp mounted just where you would put your hand for steadiness if you were hurrying. It was easy to slip something into or out of the slot under the base of the lamp particularly if you planned the crisscross for a moment when the stairs would be packed.

The Capitol Cinema opposite the President Hotel across the plaza was considered magnificent by most of the population. It was still the only movie palace in the entire country. The presidential family had a box permanently reserved for it. The theater was the size of a hangar and its facade glittered with bits of mica and broken glass. A problem was that the atmosphere and protocol established in the audiences who attended the kung fu movies that ran six days out of seven carried over when pictures like
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
or
Chariots of Fire
were being shown. Then the foregathered serious expat moviegoing public would be in a state of agony as, say, displays of sadness by white characters were being hugely jeered at. But the Capitol Cinema had its usefulnesses, too. The permanent uproar made it a good place to meet.

For a while the Libyans had used the popcorn seller to pass interesting items to certain people, including a handgun, which unfortunately had spilled out onto the floor along with the popcorn at the feet of a local constable when somehow the recipient of the gun was tripped up by person or persons unknown. He thought O Libya, Libya, give up. There were so many stories about the absurd Libyans that would never be told.

He had to get going.

He was nervous. Admittedly he was nervous. I have this feeling, Iris had said, I have this feeling of wanting to apologize to the world. Then there had been a baffling discussion that he had not been in need of.

He entered the American Library. There would be a wait. Lillian, the librarian, was occupied. The library was empty. He sat down at a reading table, on one of the tubular chairs whose Naugahyde seats were the precise color of Pepto-Bismol.

The discussion with Iris had gone weirdly. When she said she wanted to apologize to the world did world mean social world or natural world, the earth? She wasn’t sure, but mainly she had meant the natural world,
maybe
. The feeling was with her a lot. Well, why did she think it was? Was it vocational, which was about all he could think of, in the sense that she wasn’t doing anything significant with her inner potential?… but that would be the social world, wouldn’t it? Well yes and no, but it was more the natural world because for example every tree that you saw was a representation of something in nature
doing its best
. There was something about the environment here, she’d said. It was so difficult for everyone, for everything. It was a very severe place. Then she had introduced a discussion about the term entelechy, discussion about doing your best by your entelechy. No tree is a failure, she had said, and neither were the saplings that don’t make it, they’re both just trees living out their programs, do you wish I were a tree, my dear? Everything was a bucket of fishhooks lately, that he had to get something from the bottom of.

How much Lillian knew about him was open to speculation. He was pretending to read, now, while he waited.

What he meant when he thought the words
Nobody knows who I am
, which he was doing a lot lately and which had a soothing effect on him, was that anyone who judged him as wanting in any one of the several capacities he was at work in would be judging in ignorance. That was the thing. No one who knew him knew everything he was doing. In order to judge him fairly it would be necessary to know what his whole array was, which no one did, so whatever judgments were being made of him he could take with equanimity.

He was an array. He was an ensemble. He was three things, on the surface. He was a scholar who was also a teacher. But he had another subtler task, which was to vindicate the art and genius of a supreme poet, the maligned and ignored and throneless John Milton. Ray saw himself as an agent for Milton. When Auden said that when Yeats died he
became
, he Yeats,
became
his admirers, he was talking about what Ray was for Milton, too. Milton had
become
the shrinking circle of his true admirers, and they had
become
Milton. Ray was an agent for Milton because he perceived something about Milton … there was a secret in Milton.

So.

And then of course he was a member of an intelligence agency, but a particular kind of member. He wasn’t an officer, he was contract, which
meant he could go or stay, which was a sort of freedom, a good thing. He was engaged in the overall business of bringing out into the light designs that for their own usually bad reasons certain people wanted kept hidden. He would defend his country as a decent package of forces. He had thought about this to the point of exhaustion. America represented a decent package of forces. Of course all governments were evil, or had a level of evil within them, but in the case of America wasn’t it fair to say that being evil was forced on it by lesser and more corrupt other governments, would-be empires, fragments of old imperialisms, thug states, actual lunatic-run states like Libya, and so on? It was his feeling that now that it was over with Russia, America could relax into its natural shape, couldn’t it? And when it came to working for the agency and judging the agency itself within the scheme of things, there was the consideration that working for the agency resembled working for a giant pharmaceutical more than anything else. Sometimes the pharmaceutical giant got it wrong. It put out the Dalkon Shield, say. But the overall effect of the pharmaceutical was to provide help against disease and suffering, wasn’t it? So there it was. And of course he was a patriot. He exchanged his automobile magazine for a copy of the
Partisan Review
.

It was a good idea to review all this because there was not the slightest doubt he was going to be put through one of Iris’s great inquests, in which the foundations of everything they had agreed to do together would be excavated. A point she’d needed to understand was that each of the kinds of work he did depended on the others. It was a conglomerate. He knew all the questions that were looming up: Why were they still in Botswana or anywhere in Africa, for that matter? Couldn’t he teach in the U.S. so that she could pursue some kind of career, could be near her friends and her sister? What exactly was it he did for the agency beyond the little he had been willing to tell her, and didn’t she have the right to know a few details, for example how much danger might he conceivably get into, and so on, like that. And he would have to swear again that he had never killed anyone.

So another great inquest was coming. He could feel it in his bones. These things were cyclical and got more harrowing each time, but undoubtedly the collapse of Russia, the astonishing collapse of all that power, was telling her it was the moment to dismiss what he did, did for the agency. He knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that the war was over, the game was over, so he could flap his wings and relocate
his talents, which she mistook for something they never were … probably his fault … but take his talents and liberate them in some venue she would like much better. She was feeling that for the first time she had on her side historical argument he would be forced to agree with.

In his work for the agency he was an
array
, too. Because he was more than a collector. In the course of providing useful information he produced art. He was a writer. Back in McLean at the Biographic Registry, they knew it. They called what he wrote Profiles, but he called what he wrote Lives. He knew that his Lives had been used, at one time, as examples during agent training. Blessed Marion Resnick had said so. And he knew it from others. And his Lives existed materially and would be kept and someday might even be found, when the true history of the world was written, but that wasn’t important. No matter what kind of cretin took over some station or other temporarily, his Lives would slide past him and into the chute and into the archives and there would always or someday be someone to see what they were. It was probably happening occasionally now, as people referred to them for one utilitarian reason or another. He had access to unique materials and had been given unique latitude and he was turning his reports into something of clear literary merit, something more important than their immediate function. Marion had understood the art in what he produced because Marion was civilized. But enough on that. Except that Iris didn’t appreciate what it meant to him, the ways in which it was right for him as an artist. He had given her Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
to read, once, and she had never finished it. Basically, what he wrote went straight to posterity, is the way he liked to think about it, without needing to be nastily reviewed in the
Washington Post
, say, or the
New Republic
. And there was no being overlooked when the prizes came out, no sweating over grant applications, no begging for the attention of literary agents, no being remaindered … He sighed heavily, drawing a look from Lillian.

Where was Boyle?

But an inquest was coming. Fortunately, she loved him. She always returned to the subject of why he had gotten involved with the agency in the first place, and he was always fairly frank about it. At the start, a lot of it had probably been the being asked, solicited, by someone he respected, a genuine scholar, someone for whom it was obvious there was no contradiction between the agency and everything that high, humane scholarship was supposed to mean. But ninety percent of it, he thought, was his sheer aversion to mystery, and that went with his curiosity about how things worked in the world, and he would definitely talk more to Iris
about that. Knowing how power worked was a form of power. It was seductive. She loved him.

There was a lot to say on the subject. He had an earned right to object to the mysterious. His childhood had been warped by mystery. Why his own brother hated him so violently was a mystery. What had given Rex the right, Rex who was younger, the right to always call him a baby, repeatedly? There were other examples. His father had died mysteriously. He had driven their Hudson into a tree in Contra Costa County, not far from the eastern end of the tunnel that goes through the Berkeley Hills. The accident site had been an approach road to one of the parks in that area, probably Tilden, so why his father had been going fast on it, fast enough to somehow lose control and crash, was mysterious. It had been foggy but not that foggy. And there had been a mystery guest in the car, a young man, at least that was what the first guy on the scene had reported. There had been a shaken-up young guy in the car, who left the scene of the accident during the time it took for the motorist who found the crash to hunt up the police. The theory was that the young guy must have been a hitchhiker. He was never found. That had been it. His father had been lavishly insured, as it developed, so that the family got to feel guilty at being better off with him gone than they had been before, which had been nice for them. And then his mother’s almost instant remarriage, or engagement, rather, and then remarriage, had been mysterious, marrying a mystery man who picked her up at her own husband’s funeral, a guy who had wandered into the wrong service, supposedly. His father’s service had been held in one of the massive funeral homes where there would be four or five funerals going on at once, and Milo had taken a wrong turn and ended up standing in the back at the wrong funeral and being struck dumb by the widow’s beauty. Milo had been younger than his mother. And he knew the lawyer who was managing the insurance claim, they’d found out much later, at a point when no one but Ray thought that was interesting in any way at all. Then there had been the long so-called engagement and then, bingo, the marriage. Milo had been a surety agent, as he preferred to be referred to, rather than bail bondsman, which is what he was. In fact he had been the leading bail bondsman in San Francisco, very successful, with franchises operating in Modesto, Sacramento, and San Diego. There was money. His mother had adapted completely to Milo, but
overnight
adapted to someone who carried a snubnosed revolver and from the neck up looked more like the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician than anything else, with his slicked-back hair and pencil mustache. Where in hell had he come from,
really? After they got married they went on vacations incessantly. And mysteriously Milo had liked Rex, and hated
him
, a complete reversal of the existing sibling-preference situation, caused by nothing he could think of that he’d done, nothing. He’d continued being earnestly himself, so far as he could reconstruct. He still wondered if there are funeral gigolos, a type, certain types who go to funerals on the off chance they can get next to the widow. In any case, next it was Milo shot to death in his office by somebody who was never caught.

That was almost sensationally mysterious. And then it had turned out that Milo was also insured to the hilt. And then, mystery of mysteries, his mother, now ensconced with a certain amount of splendor in a deluxe retirement community in Corte Madera, had, after a lifetime of inaction, taken up golf, at which she had become stellar. She played in tournaments for senior women amateurs and won trophies regularly. Her face appeared on magazines! Her whole life, now, was golf. And she had been
actively mocking
about sports of all kinds, as far back as he could remember. He could still hear her distinctive, hacking laugh. Her attitude had even been influential with him, to tell the truth. He had never really cared about sports.