The Constant Gardener (35 page)

Waiting, Justin fixed his gaze on the recumbent Carl.

“Maybe not directly, he is ambiguous. ”Lorbeer killed her with his treachery. He committed the sin of Judas, therefore he cut her throat with his bare hands and nailed Bluhm to the tree.“ When I was reading out these words to Lara, I asked her: ”Lara. Is Markus saying that he killed Tessa Quayle?“'”

“How did she reply?”

“Markus could not kill his worst enemy. That is his agony, she says. To be a bad man with a good conscience. She is Russian, very depressed.”

“But if he killed Tessa, he's not a good man, is he?”

“Lara swears it would be impossible. Lara has many letters from him. She can only love hopelessly. She has heard many confessions from him, but not this one, naturally. Markus is very proud of his sins, she says. But he is vain and exaggerates them. He is complicated, maybe a bit psychotic, which is why she loves him.”

“But she doesn't know where he is?”

“No.”

Justin's straight, unseeing stare had fixed on the deceptive twilight. “Judas didn't kill anyone,” he objected. “Judas betrayed.”

“But the effect was the same. Judas killed with his treachery.”

Another long contemplation of the twilight. “There's a missing character. If Lorbeer betrayed Tessa, who did he betray her to?”

“It was not clear. Maybe the Forces of Darkness. I have only what is in my memory.”

“The Forces of Darkness?”

“In the letter he talked of the Forces of Darkness. I hate this terminology. Does he mean KVH? Maybe he knows other forces.”

“Did the document mention Arnold?”

“The Abbott had a guide. In the document he is the Saint. The Saint had called out to Lorbeer in the hospital and told him the drug Dypraxa was an instrument of death. The Saint was more cautious than the Abbott because he is a doctor, and more tolerant because he has experience of human wickedness. But the greatest truth is with Emrich. Of this Lorbeer is certain. Emrich knows everything, therefore she is not allowed to speak. The Forces of Darkness are determined to repress the truth. That is why the Abbott had to be killed and the Saint crucified.”

“Crucified? Arnold?”

“In Lorbeer's fable the Forces of Darkness dragged Bluhm away and nailed him to a tree.”

They fell silent, both in some way ashamed.

“Lara says also that Lorbeer drinks like a Russian,” she added, in some kind of mitigation, but Justin was not to be deflected.

“He writes from the desert but he uses a courier service out of Nairobi,” he objected.

“The address was typed, the waybill was written by hand, the package was dispatched from the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi. The sender's name was difficult to read but I think it was McKenzie. Is that Scottish? If the package could not be delivered it should not be returned to Kenya. It should be destroyed.”

“The waybill had a number, presumably.”

“The waybill was attached to the envelope. When I put the document in the safe for the night I first put it back in the envelope. Naturally the envelope has also disappeared.”

“Get back to the courier service. They'll have a copy.”

“The courier service has no record of the package. Not in Nairobi, not in Hanover.”

“How do I find her?”

“Lara?”

The rain clattered on the tin roof and the orange lights of the city swelled and dwindled in the mist while Birgit tore a sheet of paper from her diary and wrote out a long telephone number.

“She has a house but not for much longer. Otherwise you must inquire at the university, but you must take care because they hate her.”

“Was Lorbeer sleeping with Kovacs as well as Emrich?”

“For Lorbeer it would not be unusual. But I believe the quarrel between the women was not about sex but about the molecule.” She paused, following his gaze. He was staring into the distance, but there was nothing to see but the far hilltops poking through the mist. “Tessa wrote often that she loved you,” she said quietly to his averted face. “Not directly, that was not necessary. She said you were a man of honor and when it was necessary you would be honorable.”

She was preparing to leave. He passed her the backpack and between them they strapped Carl into his baby pillion and fixed the plastic cape so that his sleepy head popped through the hole. She stood squat before him.

“So then,” she said. “You walk?”

“I walk.”

She pulled an envelope from inside her jacket.

“This is all I remember of Lorbeer's novel. I wrote it down for you. My handwriting is very bad but you will decipher it.”

“You're very kind.” He stuffed the envelope inside his raincoat.

“So have good walking then,” she said.

She was going to shake his hand but changed her mind and kissed him on the mouth: one stern, deliberate, necessarily clumsy kiss of affection and farewell while she held the bicycle steady. Then Justin held the bicycle while she buckled her shell helmet under her chin before swinging into the saddle and pedaling away down the hill.

•      •      •

I walk.

He walked, keeping to the center of the road, one eye for the darkening rhododendron bushes either side of him. Sodium lights burned every fifty meters. He scanned the black patches between. The night air smelled of apples. He reached the bottom of the hill and approached the parked Mercedes, passing ten yards from its bonnet. No light inside the car. Two men were sitting in the front, but to judge by their motionless silhouettes they were not the same two who had driven up the hill and down again. He kept walking and the car overtook him. He ignored it, but in his imagination the men were not ignoring him. The Mercedes reached a crossroads and turned left. Justin turned right, heading for the glow of the town. A taxi passed and the driver called out to him.

“Thank you, thank you,” he called back expansively, “but I prefer to walk.”

There was no answering call. He was on a pavement now, keeping to the outer edge. He made another crossing and entered a brightly lit side street. Dead-eyed young men and women crouched in doorways. Men in leather jackets stood on corners, elbows lifted, talking into cell phones. He made two more crossings and saw his hotel ahead of him.

The lobby was in the usual inescapable evening turmoil. A Japanese delegation was checking in, cameras were flashing, porters piling costly luggage into the only lift. Taking his place in the queue he pulled off his raincoat and slung it over his arm, favoring Birgit's envelope in the inside pocket. The lift descended, he stood back to let the women get in first. He rode to the third floor and was the only one to get out. The vile corridor with its sallow striplighting reminded him of the Uhuru Hospital. Television sets blared from every room. His own room was 311 and the door key was a piece of flat plastic with a black arrow printed on it. The din of competing television sets was infuriating him and he had a good mind to complain to somebody. How can I write to Ham with this din going on? He stepped into his room, laid his raincoat over a chair and saw that his own television set was the culprit. The chambermaids must have turned it on while they made up the room, and not bothered to turn it off when they left. He advanced on the set. It was showing the kind of program he particularly detested. A half-dressed singer was howling at full volume into a microphone to the delight of an ecstatic juvenile audience while illuminated snow wandered down the screen.

And that was the last thing Justin saw as the lights went out: snowflakes of light falling down his screen. A blackness descended over him, and he felt himself being punched and suffocated at the same time. Human arms clamped his own arms to his sides, a ball of coarse cloth was stuffed into his mouth. His legs were seized in a rugger tackle and crumpled under him and he decided he was having a heart attack. His theory was confirmed when a second blow crushed his stomach and knocked the last of the wind out of him, because when he tried to yell nothing happened, he had no voice or breath and the ball of cloth was gagging him.

He felt knees on his chest. Something was being tightened round his neck, he thought a noose, and he assumed he was going to be hanged. He had a clear vision of Bluhm nailed to a tree. He smelled male body lotion and had a memory of Woodrow's body odor and he remembered sniffing Woodrow's love letter to see if it smelled of the same stuff. For a rare moment there was no Tessa in his memory. He was lying on the floor on his left side and whatever had crushed his stomach crushed his groin with another awful blow. He was hooded but nobody had hanged him yet, and he was still lying on his side. The gag was making him vomit, but he couldn't get the vomit out of his mouth so it was going down his throat. Hands rolled him onto his back and his arms were stretched out, knuckles in the carpet, palms upward. They're going to crucify me like Arnold. But they weren't crucifying him, or not yet; they were holding his hands down and twisting them at the same time, and the pain was worse than he thought pain could be: in his arms, his chest and all over his legs and groin. Please, he thought. Not my right hand or how will I ever write to Ham? And they must have heard his prayer because the pain ceased and he heard a male voice, north German, maybe Berlin and quite cultured. It was giving an order to turn the swine back on his side and tie his hands behind him, and the order was being obeyed.

“Mr. Quayle. Do you hear me?”

The same voice but now in English. Justin didn't answer. But this was not a lack of civility, it was because he had managed to spew out his cloth gag at last and was vomiting again and the vomit was creeping round his neck inside the hood. The sound of the television set faded.

“That's enough, Mr. Quayle. You stop now, OK? Or you get what your wife got. You hear me? You want some more punishment, Mr. Quayle?”

With the second “Quayle” came another horrendous kick in the groin.

“Maybe you gone deaf a bit. We leave you a little note, OK? On your bed. When you wake up, you read this little note and you remember. Then you go back to England, hear me? You don't ask no more bad questions. You go home, you be a good boy. Next time we kill you like Bluhm. That's a very long process. You hear me?”

Another kick to the groin rammed the lesson home. He heard the door close.

•      •      •

He lay alone, in his own darkness and his own vomit, on his left side with his knees drawn to his chin and his hands tied back to back behind him and the inside of his skull on fire from the electric pains that were tearing through his body. He lay in a black agony taking a roll call of his shattered troops—feet, shins, knees, groin, belly, heart, hands—and confirmed that they were all present, if not correct. He stirred in his bonds and had a sensation of rolling into burning charcoal. He lay still again and a terrible pleasure began to wake in him, spreading in a victorious glow of self-knowledge. They did this to me but I have remained who I am. I am tempered. I am able. Inside myself there's an untouched man. If they came back now, and did everything to me again, they would never reach the untouched man. I've passed the exam I've been shirking all my life. I'm a graduate of pain.

Then either the pain eased or nature came to his aid, because he dozed, keeping his mouth tight shut and breathing with his nose through the stinking, sodden black night of his hood. The television set was still on, he could hear it. And if his sense of orientation hadn't gone astray he was looking at it. But the hood must be double-lined because he couldn't see so much as a flicker of it, and when, at huge cost to his hands, he rolled onto his back, he saw no hint of ceiling lights above him, although they had been lit as he wandered into the room, and he had no memory of hearing them switched off as his torturers departed. He rolled onto his side and panicked for a while, waiting for the strong part of himself to fight its way back to the top again. Work it out, man. Use your stupid head, it's the only thing they left intact. Why did they leave it intact? Because they wanted no scandal. Which is to say, whoever sent them wanted no scandal. “Next time we kill you like Bluhm”—but not this time, however much they might have wished it. So I scream. Is that what I do? I roll around on the floor, kick furniture about, kick the party walls, kick the television set and generally go on behaving like a maniac until somebody decides that we are not two passionate lovers lost in the outer reaches of sado-masochism, but one bound and beaten Englishman with his head in a bag?

The trained diplomat painstakingly sketched out the consequences of such a discovery. The hotel calls the police. The police take a statement from me and call the local British Consulate, in this case Hanover, if we still have one there. Enter the Duty Consul, furious to be called away from his dinner to inspect yet another bloody Distressed British Subject, and his knee-jerk response is to check my passport —which passport scarcely matters. If it's Atkinson's, we have a problem because it's forged. One phone call to London establishes. If it's Quayle's, we have a different problem, but the likely upshot will be much the same: the first plane back to London without the option, an unwholesome Welcome Home Committee waiting to receive me at the airport.

His legs were not bound. Until now he had been reluctant to separate them. He did so, and his groin and belly caught fire and his thighs and shins followed quickly afterward. But he could definitely separate his legs, and he could tap his feet together again and hear his heels click. Emboldened by this discovery, he took the extreme step, rolled onto his stomach and let out an involuntary scream. Then he bit his lips together so that he didn't scream again.

But he stayed doggedly face down. Patiently, careful not to disturb his neighbors in the bedrooms either side, he began working on his bonds.

17

The plane was an elderly twin-engined Beechcraft on U.n. charter with a rawhide fifty-year-old captain from Johannesburg and a burly African copilot with sidewhiskers, and one white cardboard lunch box on each of its nine torn seats. The airport was Wilson, next to Tessa's grave, and as the plane sweated and waited on the runway Ghita strained to catch sight of her burial mound through the window and wondered how much longer she would have to wait for her headstone. But all she saw was silverbacked grass and a red-robed tribesman with a staff standing on one leg over his goats, and a herd of gazelles twitching and grazing under blueblack cloud stacks. She had wedged her travel bag under her seat but the bag was too big and she had to splay her churchy shoes to make space for it. It was terribly hot in the plane and the captain had already warned the passengers that there could be no air-conditioning until the plane took off. In the zip compartment she had stowed her briefing notes and her credentials as the British High Commission's delegate from EADEC. In the main compartment, her pajamas and a change of clothes. I'm doing this for Justin. I'm following in Tessa's footsteps. I have no need to feel ashamed of my inexperience or duplicity.