Mortals (91 page)

Ray turned his attention to the barricaded windows on either side of the door. They would have to pluck the fangs of broken glass out of the window frames first, then dislodge and push through the mixed barriers of planking and plywood and furniture as quietly as they could. Clearly some of the planking had been nailed in place, and there was some random interweaving of barbed wire throughout the different assemblages. But the whole project looked extremely improvised to Ray. But there would be noise involved there, too. How they could manage to enter like thieves in the night was the question.

Morel was trying something new. He was knocking softly on the door, very softly, politely. It seemed ludicrous and probably it was going to lead to nothing because he was tapping so softly.

He was knocking and then pausing and putting his ear to the door and then knocking again.

Something was happening just behind them. Ray spun around. What he saw looked like buried clothesline being jerked up into the air. But what he was really seeing was automatic weapons fire ranging for the first time along the area between the hotel and the sheds. Dust hung in the air. Somebody was firing close to them. The way back was threatened now. Morel was not paying attention. He was still knocking politely on the door.

The door opened a crack, and then a little wider, and Morel, beckoning wildly to Ray to follow, slipped inside. Ray was right behind him.

It was dark. They were in a hallway and there in the semidarkness, crowded to one side, was a body of people, Africans. When his eyes adapted he would count them. Morel’s eyes were better than his, obviously,
because he was already having exchanges, murmured exchanges in Setswana. These people knew him. He had visited them in the zoo cages. Morel was taking care of business, seeing to things. He seemed to be making sure that the door was securely relocked, for one thing. There were no more than a dozen people in the hallway.

Abruptly he needed to sit down. His knee was torturing him and his boots were uncomfortable. It was odd how pain went away during periods of excitement and fear and came back when you felt safer. He had to rest while he refilled, was the way he was thinking of it, while he refilled with his solid self. Outside in the open with death in the air and no cover to speak of, he had felt light and empty, untethered, light on his feet but inwardly light too. Sitting against the wall, he felt better by the moment, heavier.

The air was foul. Ray thought he could smell blood. The word ngaka was going around, meaning Morel was being identified as a doctor. That would make him popular. Doctors are always useful, Ray thought.

Ray felt useless. It would be helpful if he could get the right metaphor to apply to the life he was going to lead post-Iris. That would strengthen him. So far the images he had come up with were feeble. One of them had been to see his life as the plates and glasses and cutlery that miraculously remained undisturbed when the magician jerked the tablecloth out from under everything. It was an image that had no force. He thought, This is what you’ll do: You will think of your life in panels with one panel not necessarily having anything to do with the others. What he meant was that each panel in the triptych or whatever a four-framed or five-framed set of panels should be called, would be judged totally individually. If the first panel was beautiful and was by Maxfield Parrish the point would be to have the appropriate reaction to that and pay no attention to the next panel, which happened to be by Hieronymus Bosch depicting the same subjects as in the first panel except that in this panel they were in hell and it would be fine to be horrified. And then there would be the next panel.

He could see well enough to count the crowd. There were twelve people, men and women, no children, lined up pressed to the wall like caryatids. He thought, Hey that’s how useful I am, able to supply the right term for these poor bastards at a single bound, caryatids.

An old woman came over to him. He said, “Dumela, mma,” and she said nothing and he said “Dumela” again and she said nothing. And then he said, “I am useless,” and again she said nothing.

This hallway, at least, was in the hands of the victims and not the villains,
so Morel had been right. Or he had been right. One of them had been right. He didn’t know which one. He should be doing more. He should get up immediately. He had the impulse to shake hands with the caryatids, do something to reassure them because they were obviously frightened. They were in terror. He could tell that much. He made himself get to his feet.

Hell is where you don’t know anyone, he thought. Alarmingly, there was a white face floating toward him from the depths of the hallway. It was smiling. It was a face he should know.

He did know the face. It was Dwight Wemberg the long-lost coming toward him, the man driven mad by not being able to get his wife out of the ground, dead wife out of the ground. He looked dead himself. He was emaciated and oddly dressed. He was wearing a headband, unless it was a bandage, and he was in fatigues spotted with filth. He was carrying a rifle. He was smiling inordinately.

Ray didn’t know what to do. There was the feeling that he should be reporting to someone that Wemberg was alive. But that was easy to dismiss because it was part of the past way of doing things. Boyle had been desperate to find Wemberg.

“Hello, man,” he said to Wemberg.

“Nice to see you. Why are you here?” Wemberg seemed happy.

“Well I was doing stuff for the ministry and these bastards caught me. I was doing site studies.”

“Our boys are the best,” Wemberg said.

“What boys?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll be okay. We got these guys trapped on the roof. We came down and you know what we did? We came in and blew their fuel pump to hell before they knew anything. Two of our boys. Anyway.”

“Dwight, you don’t look well.”

“Well you know what, I lost a lot of blood. But you know what, it’s good to see you. But what you better do and better do it fast is put one of these on.” He touched his headband.

“Okay,” Ray said.

“And the doctor too. You know why, because that’s how we know you’re with us, so we don’t shoot you.”

Morel came over to them. He exchanged greetings with Wemberg, bemusedly.

Ray said, “So Dwight is saying we need to put some kind of headband on, to identify us.”

Wemberg said, “Not headband,
witdoek
. That’s the correct term. Witdoek.”

Ray said, “Okay, fine.”

“You can find something around here.”

“You remember Dwight, don’t you, Davis?”

“From Gaborone. Sure.”

“Well I guess we can gather he’s joined up with Kerekang’s people, somehow. It’s pretty amazing. This is a war.”

Wemberg was nodding vigorously. He said, “Kerekang is here. He’s leading us. This is koevoet’s main base, you know. In this country.”

“You need to sit down,” Morel said to Wemberg.

“There’s no chairs,” Wemberg said.

“We’ll find something for you,” Morel said.

Wemberg said, to both of them, “You knew my wife. You know about that. What they did to me.”

Ray said, “I met Alice. And I think my wife knew her.”

“Your wife is Iris. I know her. I know you love your wife. You do. So you see how I feel. They wouldn’t tell me where she was buried at first, you know. Not even that.”

“I know,” Ray said.

“She’s asleep,” Wemberg said.

Ray nodded. It was disturbing. It was grotesque, too, seeing Wemberg standing there armed, injured, involved in killing. Obviously losing his wife had dislodged Wemberg from his normal life and left him exposed to violent propositions and outcomes and urgings. Pay attention to this, Ray thought. He wondered what it meant for him, if it was cautionary. He wanted to say something comforting to Wemberg but nothing was coming to him. Ray felt a tortured moment of envy. Wemberg’s love life was over, all his love-struggles, all the striving to get and keep one excellent person.
All life longs for the last day
was somebody’s line. That was exhaustion speaking. He would be fine.

Cries, sounds of running feet, came from the roof.

“What should we do to help?” Morel asked.

Wemberg answered, “I don’t know. They sent me down here to watch the stairs, I think they said.”

Morel said, “Sir, I would like to examine you, if I can. Just quickly.”

“Then you guard the stairs,” Wemberg said to Ray, handing his rifle to him. It was an Enfield, single-barreled, a .458, very heavy. There was a bullet in the chamber. Ray didn’t want the rifle, but he took it.

“Do you have any more bullets for it?”

“No.”

Morel was busy. He was now looking into some of the rooms opening off the hall. He had gotten a torch somewhere. He was being decisive. His solidity had returned. He was giving orders. He wanted to examine some of the caryatids too, not only Wemberg. People were doing as they were told. Morel’s solidity had returned faster than his had.

Morel had found the venue with the most light and was creating an examination room there out of nothing. He had chosen the rearmost room on the right and was overturning wooden crates and pushing them together to make a platform to sit on or lie on and he didn’t care about the rubbish and crockery he was spilling out and kicking aside.

In a moment, he had Wemberg sitting down, taking his shirt off.

Morel was moving too fast for Ray to be helpful.

Ray stood watching. You have to be a weight lifter if you’re going to use one of these .458s, he thought.

Morel said, “You know what you can do?”

“What would that be?”

“You could go look for my bag. I need it.” Morel was shining the torch into Wemberg’s mouth. Morel’s face was bright with sweat.

“No, I can’t,” Ray said.

“What do you mean? Why can’t you?”

“I have to guard the stairs. I saw a stairway at the back.”

“Oh come on.”

“Also how can I see anything? These rooms are dark.”

“I need my bag. It’s more urgent. There’s not much light in the room but there’s enough. If you need me I’ll run in with the torch. Just shout.”

Someone handed Ray a burning candle.

“Good,” Morel said. “Find the interrogation room if you can. They went through my bag in front of me there.”

Ray felt like an idiot. He had an urgent mission, finding
Strange News
, and that coincided with looking for Morel’s bag, and he had been standing around witlessly objecting to things.

“I’m going,” Ray said. Morel was picking at cumbersome bandaging fixed across Wemberg’s upper chest. The strips were cut from towels. The inner strips were bloodsoaked. As he left the room, Ray heard Wemberg saying something about fainting, about Morel not worrying if that happened because it had happened before and he was all right. It was Ray who felt faint.

Ray decided that the first room on the left, as you entered the building,
would be the interrogation chamber, based on his reckonings when he had been blindfolded, counting his steps. The door wasn’t locked, but it would only open so far, a few inches. He butted against it first with his shoulder and then with his rump. Obviously he was accumulating bruises without even knowing it. Everything felt tender. His strength was going. Two caryatids were watching, not helping. He beckoned to them and they all pushed together and the way was clear. Gum tree poles and furled carpets inexpertly placed against the wall on the side of the door had been the culprits. They had fallen over. He was in.

And this was the place. There was the table, Quartus’s chair, his own chair.

He felt proud of himself, being there again, looking around. He had to guard the candle and keep it from flickering out. He had to proceed slowly.

He was making out features of the chamber new to him, like the two iron hooks screwed into a ceiling beam directly above the chair he had been abused in. He approached the chair with the idea of sitting in it valedictorily. He couldn’t see why he shouldn’t. But the chair seat and the floor immediate to it reeked of urine. Someone had been beaten into incontinence there, someone else. He recoiled.

The floor was a debris field, a display of cigarette butts and empty soda cans and, here and there, roses. He was amazed, but only until he realized that the roses were wads of bloodstained tissue.

He felt like destroying something. He could at least kick Quartus’s table over.

But first he had to dispose of the hunting knife lying on the table. He didn’t want to touch it. He motioned for one of the two Africans who had entered the room with him to take it.

The old man came forward reluctantly. Ray pointed at the knife, more than once, but the old man remained hesitant, not taking it.

Ray introduced himself hurriedly. He didn’t catch the man’s name. He bowed and waved in the direction of the woman caryatid who was there, hanging back, but ready to help. He had been afraid when the old man had thrown himself against the door, imagining him shattering like a rickety character in a cartoon.

There was a correct way to touch hands, which was what the standard greetings gesture came down to. The most you ever got in greetings was a soft, the softest and briefest, handshake. You were supposed to hold the fingers of your left hand, slightly cupped, against the wrist of your right hand as you reached forward. He was overburdened. How could he
give proper greetings? He had to drag the Enfield around with him and his right hand was out of action. It was being slowly entombed in melted wax.

He let go of the gun, for a start. He had to free his hands. He supposed that he could ask the old man to take charge of the gun for him, as well as the knife, although there was something odd about the idea. Now he knew why the great white hunters had always had gun bearers. Guns were encumbrances and they were heavy.

He didn’t like the idea of asking the woman to be his candle bearer, either. It was an unpleasant job. The wax was hot and annoying. He needed to move around with the candle so he could look into corners and there was something uncomfortable about the prospect of directing the woman to do that for him.

The gun was on the floor. He was stuck. The few small things he had to do seemed mountainous.