Mortals (77 page)

Night came again.

H
e came out of sleep raggedly, resisting coming out. The eruption of noise and light, whatever it had been, was already over. It had been brief. There had been flailing shafts of light, a crashing sound, unlocking and slamming and relocking of the shed doors. Now there was nothing evident. He had been dreaming and then his dream had been wrecked around him and he was out of it, in the black present.

He felt he should be afraid, but he had no energy for it. He should be afraid because there was a change. He was no longer alone in his prison room. Someone was breathing heavily and brokenly muttering and beginning to move around.

Ray waited to do something. He thought that probably he should get into a fighting crouch, but it was all he could do to sustain the sitting position he had achieved, his back to the rough wall. The darkness was seamless and absolute.

There were different possibilities. This could be part of the torture. A madman could have been dumped in on him. That kind of thing was done. It could be someone who would keep him awake. That was torture and more than torture in the shape he was in. It could be an animal. It wasn’t an animal. It could be someone injured in some way he would be unable to do anything about, who would keep him awake.

He was going to say something as soon as he could penetrate what the new arrival was doing. He was doing something. He was apparently crawling around the edges of the room, feeling out the space. That was not an unintelligent thing to do. He had no idea how much the new arrival had been able to notice when he was hurled into the room. Not
much, he would bet. It would be better for Ray to say something to this person before, in his explorations, the man stumbled across him.

He was going to say something first. That would be best. And instead of the plain Dumela greeting he would use the more honorific Dumela morena, Good day sir, why not? And then it would be O tswa kae, to find out where his new mate came from, was journeying from, and then finally O mang, Who are you? And he would watch his delivery, keeping it soft and nonbelligerent. His enunciation was going to be strange because his lips had swollen up and his mouth was so dry.

“Dumela morena,” he said, partly for practice. He had tried to keep it pleasant.

His words produced a charged stillness.

And then he was leapt on crushingly. Large strong hands found his throat and gripped it.

He grappled with his attacker, struggling to get a purchase anywhere on his head, his nose, ears. By the feel of his hair he was an African and he had been eating onions, something that gave Ray a twinge of hunger, oddly.

A voice he knew growled, “O mang?” But with the pressure on his throat he couldn’t reply, but he knew who it was. He did. He would be all right.

It was
Morel
. Somehow it was Morel.

Feelings of relief and hatred confused together swept hotly through him. He fought to get the breath to speak.

“It’s me,” he managed to say, trying to sound like himself.

Morel let him go.

“This is you, Finch. This is you. I found you,” Morel said. It was Morel’s strong voice but higher than usual, lifted into a higher register by fatigue and fear. Fear was there. Ray heard male elation and triumph in Morel’s voice. He had done something.

“Is Iris all right?” Ray asked urgently.

“I can’t believe this. Yes, Iris. No she’s fine, except over you. No she got frantic about you. Nothing coming in, no news. You know. Ah God. That’s why I came. No she was threatening to come up to look for you herself and I stopped her. She was going to come. So I stopped her, I came. It was the only way I could do it. She was raising hell at the embassy and getting nothing, getting the runaround worse than you can imagine. You don’t know. She gets insane. You don’t know.

“Ah man, this is you, but man, you
smell
. I smell blood. Have you got a
torch, a match, any light so I can take a look? I don’t have my bag. They took it.”

Ray was amazed. Morel was not acknowledging the secret. That was interesting.

Ray laughed. “They’ve been hitting me. I’ve been hit. That’s all. I think I’m okay. There’s no light, nothing for light, sorry. My head hurts. I’ve got a scalp wound but it’s scabbing up okay, I think. I clot fast.”

“Sit still,” Morel said. He was talking unusually rapidly, for him, skating over the one thing, the one thing. He lightly touched his palm to the back of Ray’s head. He blew his breath out in a meaningful way.

“What?” Ray asked.

“I don’t like it, man. Did you lose consciousness at any point? Think if you did. Shit, I need light to see this. We’ve got to get you cleaned up. You better get flat, stay flat until I can look at you. What the fuck is this place?

“I’ll get a torch from these bastards. I’m a doctor.”

“So how will you get them to give you a torch?”

“I’ll yell, I’ll kick the fucking doors …”

“Believe me, don’t. They won’t even come. Conserve your strength. It gets light in the morning, not bright clear but enough, you know. You can see. It’s like twilight but you can see …

“Listen to me, the best thing is if you can rest. They get started early around here. I don’t know what they have on the schedule for you, but they start early.

“There’s another pallet you can sleep on. In fact there are three more, so you can take your choice. It’s cold, so you have to fold a pallet in two and sleep in the fold. It’s easier if you jam yourself into a corner.

“And let’s see. Okay, you said Iris is okay, so when were you in touch with her last? Because now she’ll be worrying about you too, won’t she?” He let his words come out a little more darkly than he’d intended.

“No she’s all right. I talked to her from Maun two three days ago.” Ray could see that Morel wanted to rip through any matter relating to Iris at high speed. He understood why. He had a secret. He was nervous. Too bad for him.

Ray wanted the light to come for his own reasons. He wanted to see Morel with the eyes, the eyes of what, a cuckold. He wanted to see what she was seeing that he had missed. This was not a good subject matter for the moment at hand. Hell was another man’s cock going into your beloved’s cunt. That was the long and the short of it, so to speak. He had
to have light so he could see guilt, the signs and traces. He was not going to accuse Morel of anything in the total dark and let him get away with anything. He was going to get him in the light of day and get the answer clear as hell and see it.

Morel was arranging his pallet. And he was giving a brief travelogue that was uninteresting to Ray, his difficulty in renting a vehicle, his cleverness in certain situations, all boring and all beside the point.

There was a silence when Morel was settled, but a short one.

Morel’s voice was coming closer. He said, “You know who these people are, don’t you? You do. You know what’s going on up here. You know what this is.”

“I have an idea,” Ray said.

“You know what they want,” Ray said.

“I have an idea.”

Now he could hardly hear what Morel was saying. He had to ask him to speak up.

“Do you think it’s safe for us to talk? I mean, I know we have to keep our voices down. But what do you think?”

“You mean have they got this place wired? Don’t worry. They’re not even taping the interrogations. You don’t know how primitive this operation is. They’ve got their hands full. They have to get out of here fast. They know that.

“They want to get one man, Kerekang. That’s all they want. They think I can help them with that, but they’re afraid to go too far with me because I’m white and they figure people are going to be looking for me. Like you, for example.

“They’re not going to go too hard on anybody white.”

“Oh that makes me feel good,” Morel said.

“Don’t worry. You’re white. You’re included. You’re American. To them you’re white.”

“Listen …”

“Doctor, don’t bother.”

Morel had moved his pallet closer yet. “We should keep our voices down, though, just out of prudence … right?”

“I don’t think it matters. But let’s do that.

“And I’m sorry you got into this. You were saying how you found me. I’m sorry if I wasn’t listening. Say it again. So go ahead.” He needed to be fair to Morel, who was just newly into this nightmare that he himself had had a chance to get used to. He had taken a risk to come looking for his lover’s husband. Probably he’d expected to fail creditably but instead this
had happened and he was in hell, for his trouble. Probably he had just wanted credit for a good try. That could be unfair. There is a kind of heroism that stupidity or ignorance allows to happen, Ray thought.

Morel wanted to keep on conversing, or if not conversing, just talking, describing his situation to himself, trying to do that over and over until he had something he could accommodate. Because not everything he was saying was being said for Ray’s benefit. He was being repetitive. And he had again moved his pallet closer.

Ray was getting desperate about sleep. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful or inhospitable, if that was the word.

Morel was expressing himself in fragments.

“I drove up to Maun. That was easy. Your assistant is still around there, waiting for you, I guess. He got through to Iris the one time. By the way the whole top of the country is out of commission … Emergency area. They keep saying it’s temporary and being vague about bandits coming down from Caprivi, some bullshit story … You know this. So I found him, and it was a problem because he wanted to come along. He just gave me bare basics, where he’d seen you last and so on. I don’t know if I should have brought him. I didn’t want the responsibility. Also I had what he could tell me. Also I didn’t think this would take long … I don’t know why. So I came. I’d had to fight once already with your wife about coming along, big fight, so I was … I’d fought on the issue and I said no to him. You hear what I’m saying …”

“Doctor, I do but we’ve got to sleep, if we can. I do, anyway.”

“I know, yeah. And they don’t tell you anything. These people. They don’t tell you anything.

“They tied me up. Blindfold. But I had to come up here.”

Ray thought, Sure you did because you love her, you fucking miserable what,
cock
. He said, “So you came up Route 14 and they snagged you at Nokaneng. I don’t know why they didn’t just turn you around, though. Did you use my name, mention me? Bad if you did. Did you?”

“I did.”

Morel didn’t know it, but his voice was being studied by Ray, because there was going to be a discussion, an interrogation, about Iris that would let the truth escape, get it out. That was coming. He was getting a base reading of Morel and how he sounded when he was delivering true things, trivial things. Morel would try to lie. It wouldn’t work.

“I shouldn’t have,” Morel said.

It was clear as a bell that the one thing Morel was never going to want to admit was the truth about his cock and Iris. But Ray would get the
truth however he had to, keeping in mind that they needed each other, he and Morel, to survive this, survive koevoet, get out okay, if possible.

Morel would defend his innocence with his life. It didn’t matter. The answer was there, burning. I have my ways, Ray thought.

“They took my boots,” Morel said. He could barely say it.

Ray said, “They took mine too. They tend to do that.” He was sorry for Morel. He was going to be hobbling around. One of his legs was shorter than the other and it was going to be humiliating and ugly. Ray wanted to say something that would help, but there was nothing to say. Pity was his enemy.

It was colder than it had been recently, unless he was wrong and it was just that his reserves were depleted. He had to fortify himself with sleep. Morel had to shut up.

“Listen,” Morel said, being relentless.

“We’ve
got
to sleep. And I mean now. It takes work.”

“Yeah, but listen. One thing I have to tell you tonight. I’ll tell you why I have to. We don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re in charge. They could separate us anytime, right? She sent me up to tell you this.”

Ray was rigid. The secret was burning its way out into the open. He could smell the smoke. He was afraid. He wasn’t ready. It was asking too much. He was thirsty. He was clenching up and it was making his wounds blaze. He would prefer to be up and around when the news came. That would be his preference. He had no strength.

“Listen, this is what I have to tell you. She wanted me to tell you personally, if she couldn’t herself …”

“What
, please,” Ray said, his voice unnatural.

“Your brother died two weeks ago. I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” was all he could come out with. He was in agony at the news and at the interposition of this news over the secret yet to come, to be extracted. Life is pain, he thought. He had taken too long to do what he could, what he should have, for his brother. Iris had pushed him, but it had been too late.

He began to groan.

Morel said, “She said you had to know. It wasn’t painful for him at the end. I’m really sorry.”

Ray wanted to press his forehead hard against the wall. He thought it would help. He was sure it would.

He got on all fours and set his head against the wall. He groaned more. He released low, grinding groans.

Morel was distressed and came closer.

“When I get my bag back, I’ll give you something,” Morel said.

Ray slipped down and lay on his side.

“You must have been close,” Morel said.

“
No
, no we were not. There’s no point talking about it. I knew it was going to happen. In fact I think I knew it already had happened. I really did. There were signs.”

“Your wife thought it was important for you to know.”

“My wife. Of course she would. She probably would have liked me to go for the funeral. She could have gone herself. I don’t care what she does. That isn’t what I mean. Look, she was closer to Rex than I was. She liked him. He was a queer duck. He wrote some stuff I have to get back from these cocksuckers. It’s too complicated to explain. How is my mother doing? Did Iris mention her?”