The Constant Gardener (41 page)

“What is it?”

“It is nothing. It is predictable.”

They are in the town square. A small gray car of indeterminate make stands alone beneath an orange lamp. It is very dirty despite the frost. It has a wire coat-hanger for a radio aerial. Stared at this way, it has something ominous and unprotected about it. It is a car waiting to explode.

“Is it yours?” Justin asks.

“Yes. But it is no good.”

The great spy belatedly observes what Lara has already spotted. The front offside tire is flat.

“Don't worry. We'll change the wheel,” Justin says boldly, forgetting for a ludicrous moment the ferocious cold, his bruised body, the late hour and any last considerations of operational security.

“It will not be sufficient,” she replies with appropriate gloom.

“Of course it will. We'll turn the engine on. You can sit in the car and keep warm. You've got a spare wheel and a jack, haven't you?”

But by now they have reached the far pavement and he has seen what she has anticipated: the nearside tire is also flat. Seized by a need for action, he attempts to break free of her but she clings onto him and he understands that it is not the cold that is causing her to shiver.

“Does this happen a lot?” he asks.

“Frequently.”

“Do you call a garage?”

“At night they will not come. I find a taxi home. In the morning when I return, I have a parking ticket. Maybe also a ticket regarding the unsafe condition of the car. Sometimes they are towing it away and I must collect it from an inconvenient location. Sometimes there is no taxi but tonight we are fortunate.”

He follows her gaze and sees to his surprise a taxi parked in a far corner of the square with its interior lights burning and its engine running and one figure huddled at the wheel. Still holding his arm, she urges him forward. He goes along with her for a few yards, then stops, his internal alarm bells sounding.

“Do cabs normally sit around town as late as this?”

“It is not important.”

“Yes, it is, actually. V.”

Releasing himself from her gaze he becomes aware of a second cab pulling up behind the first. Lara sees it too.

“You are being ridiculous. Look. Now we have two cabs. We can take one each. Maybe we take only one. Then I shall first accompany you to your hotel. We shall see. It is unimportant.” And forgetting his condition, or simply losing patience with him, she tugs again at his arm, with the result that he stumbles and breaks free of her and stands in front of her, blocking her way.

“No,” he says.

No meaning, I refuse. Meaning, I have seen the unlogic of this situation. If I was rash before, I shall not be rash now, and nor will you. The coincidences are too many. We are in the empty square of a godforsaken town in the middle of the tundra on a freezing March night when even the town's one horse is asleep. Your car has been deliberately disabled. One taxi stands conveniently available, a second has now joined it. Who else are the taxis waiting for but us? Is it not reasonable to assume that the people who disabled your car are the same people who would like us to ride in theirs?

But Lara is not accessible to this scientific argument. Waving her arm at the nearer driver, she is striding forward to claim him. Justin grabs her by the other arm, stops her in midstride and hauls her back. The action infuriates her as much as it hurts him. She has had enough of being pushed around.

“Leave me alone. Get away from me! Give that back!”

He has seized her Russian bag. The first cab is pulling out from the curb. The second is pulling out behind it. Speculatively? In support? In a civilized country you can never tell.

“Get back to the car,” he orders her.

“What car? It is useless. You are mad.”

She is pulling at her Russian bag but he is rummaging in it, shoving aside her papers, tissues and whatever else obstructs his search. “Give me the car keys, Lara, please!”

He has found her purse inside the bag and opened it. He has the keys in his hand—a whole bunch of them, enough to get into Fort Knox. Why the hell does a single woman in disgrace need so many keys? He is sidling toward her car, sorting through her keys, shouting “Which is it? Which is it?” drawing her with him, keeping the shopping bag away from her, dragging her into the lamplight where she can pick out the car key for him—which she does, vituperatively, vindictively, holding it up to him and jeering at him.

“Now you have the key to a car with flat tires! Do you feel better now? Do you feel a big man?”

Is this how she talked to Lorbeer?

The cabs are edging round the square toward them, nose to tail. Their posture is inquisitive, not yet aggressive. But there is stealth to them. There is evil purpose, Justin is convinced: an air of menace and premeditation.

“Is it central locking?” he is yelling. “Does the key open all the doors at once?”

She doesn't know or she's too furious to answer. He is on one knee, her shopping bag wedged under his arm, trying to get the key into the passenger door. He is rubbing away the ice with his fingertips and his skin is sticking to the metalwork and his muscles are howling as loud as the voices in his head. She is tugging at the Russian shopping bag and yelling at him. The car door opens and he seizes hold of her.

“Lara. For the love of heaven. Will you please be so kind as to shut up and get into the car now!”

The use of courteous emphasis is well judged. She stares at him in disbelief. He has her bag in his hand. He hurls it into the car. She darts after it like a dog after a ball, lands on the passenger seat as he slams the door. Justin steps back into the road and heads round the car. As he does so the second cab overtakes the first and accelerates at him, sending him leaping for the curb. The cab's front wing snaps vainly at his flying coat as it passes him. Lara pushes open the driver's door from inside. Both cabs come to a halt in the middle of the road forty yards behind them. Justin turns the key in the ignition. The windscreen wipers are thick with frost but the rear window is fairly clear. The engine coughs like an old donkey. At this time of night? it is saying. In this temperature? Me? He turns the key again.

“Have you got petrol in this thing?”

In the driving mirror he makes out two men climbing out of each cab. The second pair must have been hiding in the back below the window line. One man carries a baseball bat, another an object that Justin concludes successively to be a bottle, a hand grenade or a life preserver. All four men are walking deliberately toward the car. By God's will the engine catches. Justin revs and releases the handbrake. But the car is automatic and Justin for the life of him can't remember how automatic cars work. So having put the car into drive he restrains it with the foot brake until sanity prevails. The car finally lurches forward, shaking and protesting. The steering wheel is as stiff as iron in his grasp. In the mirror, the men break into a trot. Justin cautiously accelerates, the front wheels shriek and bump but somehow the car is going along despite itself, it is actually gathering speed to the alarm of their pursuers who no longer trot but run. They are dressed for the occasion, Justin notices, in bulky tracksuits and soft boots. One wears a sailor's woolen hat with a bobble on it, and he's the one with the baseball bat. The rest wear fur hats. Justin glances at Lara. She has one hand to her face, the fingers crammed between her teeth. Her other hand clutches the console in front of her. Her eyes have closed and she is whispering, perhaps praying, a thing that Justin finds puzzling since until now he has regarded her as godless, in contrast to her lover, Lorbeer. They are leaving the little square and bumping and farting down a poorly lit street of terraced cottages fallen on hard times.

“Where's the brightest part of town? The most public?” he asks her.

Lara shakes her head.

“Where's the station?”

“It is too far. I have no money.”

She seems to think they are going to escape together. Smoke or steam is rising from the bonnet and a frightful smell of burning rubber reminds him of student riots in Nairobi, but he continues to accelerate while in the mirror he watches the men running and he muses again on what fools they are and how badly they do these things, it must be their training. And how a better commanded team would never have left the cars behind. And how the best thing they could do if they had any sense would be turn round now-or maybe just two of them turn round—and run like hell back to their cars, but they show no sign of doing this, perhaps because they are coming closer and everything depends on who gives up first, this car or those men. A sign in French and English warns him of an approaching crossroads. As a Sunday philologist, he finds himself comparing the two languages.

“Where's the hospital?” he asks her.

She takes her fingers out of her mouth. “Dr. Lara Emrich is not permitted to enter the precincts of the hospital,” she intones.

He laughs for her, determined to buck her up. “Oh well, we can't go there then, can we? Not if it's forbidden. Come on. Where is it?”

“To the left.”

“How far?”

“In normal conditions it will be very little time.”

“How little?”

“Five minutes. If there is no traffic, less.”

There is no traffic, but there is steam or smoke belching out of the bonnet, the road surface is icy cobble, the speedometer is reading an optimistic fifteen miles an hour at most, the men in the mirror show no sign of tiring, there is no sound except for the lumpy whine of spinning wheel-rims like a thousand fingernails scraping on blackboards. Suddenly to Justin's amazement the road ahead becomes a frosted parade ground. He sees the crenellated gatehouse and the Dawes heraldic crest garishly floodlit ahead of him, and to his left the ivy-covered pavilion and its three satellite blocks of steel and glass looming like icebergs above it. He drags the steering wheel to the left and increases his pressure on the accelerator, to no avail. The speedometer registers nought miles an hour, but that's ridiculous because they are still moving, if only just.

“Who do you know?” he shouts at her.

She must have been asking herself the same question. “Phil.”

“Who's Phil?”

“A Russian. An ambulance driver. Now he is too old.”

She reaches into the back of the car for her bag, takes out a packet of cigarettes—not Sportsmans—lights one and hands it to him, but he ignores it.

“The men have gone,” she says, keeping the cigarette for herself.

Like a faithful mount that has run its last, the car dies under them. The front axle collapses, acrid black smoke oozes from the bonnet, a frightful grinding from beneath them announces that the car has found its final resting place at the center of the parade ground. Watched by a pair of drug-eyed Cree in kapok coats, Justin and Lara clamber out of the car.

•      •      •

Phil's business premises consisted of a white wooden box beside an ambulance park. It contained a stool, a telephone, a rotating red light, a coffee-stained electric heater and a calendar that was permanently opened at December, a month when a lightly dressed female Santa Claus offers her naked backside to grateful male carol singers. Phil sat on the stool, talking into the telephone, wearing a leather cap with earflaps. His face was leather too, cracked and lined and polished, then dusted over with silver stubble. When he heard Lara's voice speaking Russian he did what old prisoners do: kept his head still and his hooded eyes looking straight ahead of him while he waited to have it proved to him that he was being addressed. Only when he was sure did he face her, and become what Russian men of his age become in the presence of beautiful younger women: a little mystical, a little shy, a little abrupt. Phil and Lara spoke for what seemed to Justin an unnecessary eternity, she in the doorway with Justin lurking like an unacknowledged lover in her shadow, and Phil from his stool, his gnarled hands knotted on his lap. They asked—as Justin supposed—after each other's families, and how Uncle this or Cousin that was doing, until finally Lara stood back to let the old man push past her, which he did by holding her quite gratuitously by the waist before trotting down the ramp of an underground car park.

“Does he know you're banned?” Justin asked.

“It is not important.”

“Where's he gone?”

No answer but none was needed. A shiny new ambulance was pulling up beside them, and Phil in his leather cap was at the wheel.

•      •      •

Her house was new and rich, part of a luxury lakeside development built to accommodate the favorite sons and daughters of Messrs. Karel Vita Hudson of Basel, Vancouver and Seattle. She poured him a whisky and for herself a vodka, she showed him the Jacuzzi, and demonstrated the sound system and the eye-level multi-functional supermicrowave oven and, with the same wry detachment, indicated the point along her fence where the Organy parked when they came to watch over her, which happened most days a week, she said, usually from around eight in the morning, depending on the weather, until nightfall unless there was an important hockey match in which case they left earlier. She showed him the absurd night sky in her bedroom, the cupola of white plaster that was pierced with tiny lights to imitate the stars, and the dimmer that turned them up or down to the whim of the occupants of the great round bed beneath it. And there was a moment that they both watched come and go when it seemed possible they might themselves become the occupants—two outlaws from the system consoling one another, and what could be more reasonable than that? But Tessa's shadow came between them and the moment passed without either of them commenting on it. Justin commented on the icons instead. She had half a dozen of them: Andrew, Paul and Simon Peter and John and the Virgin Mother herself, with tin haloes and their attenuated hands at prayer or held up to bestow a blessing or signify the Trinity.

“I suppose Markus gave you those,” he said, acting confused by this renewed display of unlikely religiosity.

She put on her gloomiest scowl.

“It is a totally scientific position. If God exists, he will be grateful. If not, it is irrelevant.” And blushed when he laughed, then laughed too.