The Constant Gardener (38 page)

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But it was his wife who had got him here. She had worked his hands free, untied his hood. She had raised him to his knees at the bedside and by stages helped him to the bathroom. Cheered on by her, he had hauled himself to a standing stoop with the aid of the bathtub, had turned on the shower tap and hosed down his face and shirtfront and the collar of his jacket, because he knew—she warned him—that if he undressed he would not be able to dress himself again. His shirtfront was filthy, his jacket was smeared with vomit but he managed to mop them fairly clean. He wanted to go back to sleep but she wouldn't let him. He tried to brush his hair but his arms wouldn't go that high. He had a twenty-four-hour stubble but it must stay there. Standing made his head swim and he was lucky to reach the bed before he toppled over. But it was on her advice that, lying in a seductive half swoon, he refused to pick up the telephone to the concierge or invoke the medical skills of Dr. Birgit. Trust nobody, Tessa told him, so he didn't. He waited till his world had righted itself, then stood up again and reeled across the room, grateful for its miserable size.

He had laid his raincoat over a chair. It was still there. To his surprise so was Birgit's envelope. He opened the wardrobe. The wall safe was built into the back of it, its door closed. He tapped out the date of his wedding day, almost fainting from the pain each time he prodded. The door popped open to reveal Peter Atkinson's passport slumbering peacefully inside. His hands battered but seemingly unbroken, he coaxed the passport out and fed it into his inside jacket pocket. He fought his way into his raincoat and contrived to button it at the neck, then at the waist. Determined to travel light, he possessed only a shoulder bag. His money was still inside it. He collected his shaving things from the bathroom and his shirts and underclothes from the chest of drawers and dropped them into it. He placed Birgit's envelope on top of them and closed the zip. He eased the strap over his shoulder and yelped like a dog at the pain. His watch said five in the morning and it seemed to be working. He lurched into the corridor and rolled himself along the wall to the lift. In the ground-floor lobby two women in Turkish costume were operating an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner. An elderly night porter dozed behind the reception desk. Somehow Justin gave his room number and asked for his bill. Somehow he got a hand into his hip pocket, detached the notes from their wad and added a fat tip “belatedly for Christmas.”

“Mind if I grab one of these?” he asked in a voice he didn't recognize. He was indicating a cluster of doorman's umbrellas that were jammed into a ceramic pot beside the door.

“Many as you like,” the old porter said.

The umbrella had a stout ash handle that came up to his hip. With its aid he crossed the empty square to the railway station. Reaching the steps that led up to the concourse he paused for a rest and was puzzled to find the porter at his side. He had thought it was Tessa.

“Can you make it?” the old man asked solicitously.

“Yes.”

“Shall I get your ticket?”

Justin turned and offered the old man his pocket. “Zurich,” he said. “Single.”

“First class?”

“Absolutely.”

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Switzerland was a childhood dream. Forty years ago his parents had taken him on a walking holiday in the Engadine and they had stayed in a grand hotel on a spit of forest between two lakes. Nothing had changed. Not the polished parquet or the stained glass or the stern-faced chatelaine who showed him to his room. Reclining on the daybed on his balcony, Justin watched the same lakes glistening in the evening sun, and the same fisherman huddled in his rowing boat in the mist. The days passed uncounted, punctuated by visits to the spa and the death knell of the dinner gong summoning him to solitary meals among whispery old couples. In a side street of old chalets, a pallid doctor and his woman assistant dressed his bruises. “A car smash,” Justin explained. The doctor frowned through his spectacles. His young assistant laughed.

By night his interior world reclaimed him, as it had every night since Tessa's death. Tolling at the marquetry desk in the window bay, doggedly writing to Ham with his bruised right hand, following the travails of Markus Lorbeer as retold by Birgit, then gingerly resuming his labor of love to Ham, Justin was conscious of a dawning sense of his own completion. If Lorbeer the penitent was in the desert, purging his guilt with a diet of locusts and wild honey, Justin too was alone with his destiny. But he was resolved. And in some dark sense purified. He had never supposed that his search would have a good end. It had never occurred to him that there could be one. To take up Tessa's mission—to shoulder her banner and put on her courage—was purpose enough for him. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.

But when he remembered the eternal night of the black hood and smelled his own vomit, when he surveyed the systematic bruising of his body, the oval imprints of yellow and blue that ran like colored musical notes across his trunk and back and thighs, he experienced a different kind of kinship. I'm one of you. I no longer tend the roses while you murmur over your green tea. You needn't lower your voices as I approach. I'm with you at the table, saying yes.

On the seventh day Justin paid his bill and, almost without telling himself what he was doing, took a post-bus and a train to Basel, to that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharmagiants have their castles. And there, from a frescoed palace, he posted a fat envelope to Ham's old dragon in Milan.

Then Justin walked. Painfully, but walked. First up a cobbled hill to the medieval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to freethinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river's edge, and from a children's playground gazed upward in near disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharmabillionaires, at their faceless barracks ranged shoulder to shoulder against the individual enemy. Orange cranes fussed restlessly above them. White chimneys like muted minarets, some checkered at the tip, some striped or dazzle-painted as a warning to aircraft, poured their invisible gases into a brown sky. And at their feet lay whole railways, marshaling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.

Drawn forward by a force he had ceased to define, Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of run-down housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant laborers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant treelined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and farther up, and then right up into the sky above his head that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.

How long he remained there, alone, trapped like some insect at the triptych's base, he had no notion then or later. Sometimes it seemed to him that the building's wings were closing in to crush him. Sometimes they were toppling down on him. His knees gave way and he discovered he was sitting on a bench, on some bit of beaten ground where cautious women walked their dogs. He noticed a faint but pervasive smell and was for a moment returned to the mortuary in Nairobi. How long do I have to live here, he wondered, before I stop noticing the smell? Evening must have fallen because the coppered windows lightened. He made out moving silhouettes and winking pinpoints of computer blue. Why do I sit here? he asked her as he went on watching. What am I thinking of, except you?

She was sitting beside him, but for once she had no answer ready. I am thinking about your courage, he replied for her. I am thinking, it was you and Arnold against all this, while dear old Justin worried about keeping his flower beds sandy enough to grow your yellow freesias. I am thinking I don't believe in me anymore, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will—which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man—or woman —should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: Good evening, it's me your humble servant, Justin. I'm a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won.

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From Main Street of the little town Justin turned left and northwest onto Dawes Boulevard, taking the full blast of the prairie wind on his darkened face as he continued his wary examination of his surroundings. His three years as Economic Attache in Ottawa had not been wasted. Though he had never been here in his life, everything he saw was familiar to him. Snow from Halloween to Easter, he remembered. Plant after the first moon in June and harvest before the first hard frost in September. It would be several weeks yet before scared crocuses started appearing in the tufts of dead grass and on the bald prairie. Across the road from him stood the synagogue, feisty and functional, built by settlers dumped at the railroad station with their bad memories, cardboard suitcases and promises of free land. A hundred yards on rose the Ukrainian church and along from it the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists. Their car parks were got up like electrified horse pens so that the engines of the faithful could be warmed while their owners prayed. A line of Montesquieu drifted through his head: there have never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ.

Behind the houses of God stood the houses of Mammon, the industrial sector of the town. Beef prices must be through the floor, he reckoned. Why else would he be looking at Guy Poitier's spanking-new Delectable Porkmeat factory? And grain was faring no better by the looks of things—or what was a Sunflower Seed Pressing Company doing in the middle of a wheat field? And that cluster of timid folk standing around the old tenements down in the station square, they must be Sioux or Cree. The towpath turned a bend and led him north through a short tunnel. He emerged in a different country of boathouses and mansions with river frontage. This is where the rich Anglos mow their lawns and wash their cars and varnish their boats and fume about the Yids, the Ukies and those darned Indians on welfare, he decided. And up there on the hill, or as near to a hill as you get round here, stood his goal, the pride of the town, the jewel of eastern Saskatchewan, its academic Camelot, Dawes University, an organized medley of medieval sandstone, colonial redbrick and glass domes. Reaching a fork in the towpath, Justin scaled the short rise and by way of a 1920's Ponte Vecchio arrived at a crenellated gatehouse surmounted with a gilded coat of arms. Through its archway he was able to admire the immaculate medieval campus and its bronze founder, George Eamon Dawes Jr. himself, mine owner, railroad baron, lecher, land thief, Indian shooter and local saint resplendent on a granite plinth.

He kept walking. He had studied the handbook. The road widened and became a parade ground. The wind threw up grainy dust from the tarmac. On the far side of it stood an ivyclad pavilion and, enfolding it, three purpose-built blocks of steel and concrete. Long neon-lit windows sliced them into layers. A signboard in green and gold—Mrs. Dawes's favorite colors, thus the handbook —proclaimed in French and English the University Hospital for Clinical Research. A lesser sign said Outpatients. Justin followed it and came to a row of swing doors overhung by a curly concrete canopy and watched over by two bulky women in green topcoats. He wished them good evening and received a jolly greeting in return. Face frozen, his beaten body throbbing from the walk, hot snakes running up his thighs and back, he stole a last surreptitious glance behind him and strode up the steps.

The lobby was high and marbled and funereal. A large, awful portrait of George Eamon Dawes Jr. in hunting gear reminded him of the entrance hall of the Foreign Office. A reception desk, staffed by silver-haired men and women in green tunics, ran along one wall. In a moment they're going to call me “Mr. Quayle, sir” and tell me Tessa was a fine, fine lady. He sauntered down a miniature shopping mall. The Dawes Saskatchewan bank. A post office. A Dawes newsstand. McDonald's, Pizza Paradise, a Starbucks coffee shop, a Dawes boutique selling lingerie, maternity wear and bed jackets. He reached a convergence of corridors filled with the clank and squeak of trolleys, the growl of elevators, the tinny echo of quick heels and the peep of telephones. Apprehensive visitors stood and sat about. Staff in green gowns hurried out of one doorway and back through another. None wore golden bees on his pocket.

A large notice board hung beside a door marked Doctors Only. With his hands linked behind his back in a manner to denote authority, Justin examined the notices. Baby-sitters, boats and cars, wanted and on offer. Rooms to rent. The Dawes Glee Club, the Dawes Bible Study Class, the Dawes Ethics Society, the Dawes Scottish Reel and Eightsome Group. An anesthetist is looking for a good brown dog of medium height not less than three years old, “must be an ace hiker.” Dawes Loan Schemes, Dawes Deferred Payment Study Schemes. A service in the Dawes Memorial Chapel to give thanks for the life of Dr. Maria Kowalski—does anyone know what sort of music she used to like, if any? Rosters for Doctors on Call, Doctors on Vacation, Doctors on Duty. And a jolly poster announcing that this week's free pizzas for medical students arrive with compliments of Karel Vita Hudson of Vancouver—and why not come to our KVH Sunday Brunch and Film Show at the Haybarn Disco too? Just fill in the Please Invite Me form available with your pizza and get a free ticket to a lifetime's experience!