Norman Rush - Mortals

Boyle looked like a composite. His body from neck to hips was pyramidal. There was a fat-distribution problem. His face tended to gauntness. He had once been much fatter, judging by the loose skin of his underjaw that hung like a keel fin from chin to throat. He would tug on this when he was annoyed with himself, Ray had noted. From a distance, Boyle’s face had a healthy look, but the Celtic ruddiness in his cheeks, seen close-up, came from concentrated traceries of broken capillaries. He was in his early fifties. His rather golden hair was worn crewcut and was dense, like lawn. His eyebrows, too, were blond and dense, tousled, the right eyebrow interrupted by a vertical blank space, a scar, evidence of some encounter threatening to his eye, and a little intimidating, as all facial scars hinting at personal combat tended to be. His eyes were blue, a dull blue. Boyle was supposed to be a Knight of Malta, if that meant anything. Ray recognized for what it was Boyle’s soft, heavily manipulative style of speech. Boyle would drift into speaking so softly at certain times that Ray would be forced into asking him to repeat something, which made Ray look bad instead of Boyle, of course. The point of speaking unduly softly was to keep the listener in a state of tense hyperattention and, in Boyle’s case, to keep him subject to the startle effect produced by the occasional shout or loud groan of disgust.

Lillian had ushered him to the conference room. He looked away, up at the ceiling, while Lillian pressed the combinations in. That was the protocol. He entered the conference room and closed the door behind him. Ludicrously, a panel in the wall of the conference room slid open. He passed through, into the secret space.

Boyle was there. The room was more a cubicle than a room. The blond oval conference table was stupidly oversized, given the dimensions of the cubicle. Fluorescent panels overhead provided dull, even light. Ray took his seat, facing Boyle across the widest part of the table. Boyle’s chair was thronelike. Ray had a folding chair. Weak airconditioning was at work. Boyle’s thick hands were at rest on a folder in front of him.

Ray had fantasized about doing a Life of this man. He could do a classic. Boyle was a field of signs indicating that he probably thought of his physical emanations as very bad things. He used a cologne and an aftershave. The two scents were separable. He used breath pastilles once or twice during every meeting. His nails were groomed. His nostrils were hairless and scoured-looking.

Boyle nodded, but before Ray could say anything Boyle opened his folder and began writing something on a sheet of paper inside it.

Ray waited. Boyle was mostly faithful to the Western business dress mode, to suits and ties, which was possible for him because he existed in an unbroken regime of airconditioning. His BMW was airconditioned. Boyle dressed expensively. His only apparent concession to the climate of Africa was that he wore, on occasion, peculiar mesh shirts with stiff collars, still technically dress shirts, of a kind Ray had never seen on any other human being.

It was Ray’s idea that another key to Boyle’s presentation of self was a need he felt to project physical threat, to remind you that he was a True Man. True Men could hurt you, physically. True Men needed you to keep it in mind that they are caged panthers. But Boyle, at least since the onset of his weight or glandular problem, was not going to be credibly able to imply in any way that he might be able to spring at you if you offended him. But he was used to having the power to do that, so he had shifted the threat to things that he did with his face, his eyes, his voice. The idea was to prevent the rise of any notion that Boyle was, in fact, only a former True Man. This was reminding him of discussions with his mother on the subject of manhood, true manhood.

Boyle kept writing.

Ray observed that they had finally gotten around to carpeting the cubicle. The rug was the color of celery.

Ray reminded himself to be smart about how he put things to Boyle today. He might throw in a little jargon, for example. Boyle loved team talk and Ray avoided it. Marion Resnick had shared his ironical attitude toward it. If he wanted to cinch getting Boyle’s okay for making Morel a person of interest, it might behoove Ray to throw some jargonese at him.

Boyle was writing and writing.

When it came to team language, there was a lot of it. How up to date he was was also a question. Radish meant a left group that the agency had created from the ground up. Hull was a more generic term and applied to groups under control, of whatever political complexion. Sources who gave you information for their own reasons and without accepting any kind of payment were called chums . In the old days the term for someone under control through the mechanism of blackmail was orphan . He hated this language. Then there were the noms de guerre certain agents were known by, certain agents who were specialists, dangerous people. There was the Seraph. There was the Cat in the Hat. Boyle ate and drank this pulp aspect of the agency, you could tell. Skit was the term for a major operation, something world-shaking, something where specialists took over. Skits were rare and had nothing to do, usually, with the contract arm, for which he thanked God. Skits were for line officers, specialists, and, a lot of the time, proxies from friendly other services. Skits were not his province. He had never seen one.

Ray couldn’t believe what was happening. But he had to be steady and he needed to be pleasant while this was happening to him, because those were the rules and he had to be able to act if some notion of how to undo this should come to him. One thing Boyle did that Marion never had was to announce at the start of every meeting just how long you had. Boyle had given him twenty minutes and more than half of that was gone and there had to be enough time within the twenty minutes for Ray to get paid. It was payday.

Boyle was saying no to making Davis Morel a person of interest. He was being adamant. He seemed to be saying that it was no, even to making him a provisional person of interest, which was unheard of if the case being made was as strong as his was.

It was taking a chance, but Ray decided he had to put the proposition to Boyle again, from a slightly different angle. Whatever I thought was interesting, Marion thought was interesting, which let me in for moments like this, that eat shit.

Ray put it conditionally. “If I wrote him up it wouldn’t have to be a full-dress thing. I can keep it crisp. And I could drop it if it turns out to look like what you say it is. It would be a probe, or a preprobe, you’d be authorizing.”

Boyle shook his head.

What Ray couldn’t believe, especially, was that Boyle the ultra, Boyle the Knight of Malta, was uninterested in what looked like it might be the start of a Pagan Liberation Front. Why was he uninterested in a fount of irreligion being set up? Maybe Ray had to broaden his picture of the stain that might spread from Morel if nobody stanched it and so on and so forth.

Ray went on. “Summing it up, it goes like this. You have this character and you know he has some kind of definite campaign in mind. We see the offprints he has ready to go. We see these handout cards. And the evidence is pretty good that he’s planning to make tapes. He brought a shit-load of blank cassette tapes with him. We know that. So that even the illiterates can get the message.

“Even if the only question we had about him was who in hell he thinks he is, it would be worth getting the answer. But anyway. There’s also the list of peculiar names he had. Well, as I told you, I did figure out what that is. It’s a list of South American tribes exterminated by the Christian soldiers of Spain, just in one part of South America. So the implication is pretty clear. Africa has tribes, Botswana has tribes, the white man cometh, you see the point. It’s a litany of murdered tribes. It’s not so hard to imagine where this kind of fragment might fit in, is it? By the way the list comes from a book called Land Without Evil , and the guy who wrote it was a Brit who was friendly with the KGB.