The Constant Gardener (42 page)

The spare bedroom was in the basement. With its barred window looking into the garden it reminded him of Gloria's lower ground. He slept till five, wrote to Ham's aunt for an hour, dressed and crept upstairs intending to leave a note for Lara and take his chances of a lift into town. She was sitting in the window bay smoking a cigarette and wearing the clothes she had worn last night. The ashtray beside her was full.

“You may take a bus to the train station from the top of the road,” she said. “It will leave in one hour.”

She made him coffee and he drank it at a table in the kitchen. Neither of them seemed disposed to discuss the night's events.

“Probably just a bunch of crazy muggers,” he said once, but she remained sunk in her own meditations.

Another time he asked her about her plans. “How much longer have you got this place for?”

A few days, she replied distractedly. Maybe a week.

“What will you do?”

It would depend, she replied. It was not important. She would not starve.

“Go now,” she said suddenly. “It is better that you wait at the bus stop.”

As he left she stood with her back to him and her head tipped tensely forward, as if she were listening to a suspicious sound.

“You will be merciful with Lorbeer,” she announced.

But whether this was a prediction or a command, he couldn't tell. 20

“What the fuck does your man Quayle think he's playing at, Tim?” Curtiss demanded, swinging his huge body round on one heel to challenge Donohue down the echoing room. It was big enough for a good-sized chapel, with teak poles for rafters, and doors with prison hinges and tribal shields on the log-cabin walls.

“He's not our man, Kenny. He never was,” Donohue replied stoically. “He's straight Foreign Office.”

“Straight? What's straight about him? He's the most devious sod I ever heard of. Why doesn't he come to me if he's worried about my drug? The door's wide open. I'm not a monster, am I? What does he want? Money?”

“No, Kenny. I don't think so. I don't think money's what's on his mind.”

That voice of his, thought Donohue, while he waited to learn why he had been sent for. I'll never get rid of it. Bullying and wheedling. Lying and self-pitying. But bullying its favorite mode by far. Rinsed but never laundered. The shadow of his Lancashire backstreet still peeping through, to the despair of all those elocution tutors who came and left at night.

“What's bugging him then, Tim? You know him. I don't.”

“His wife, Kenny. She had an accident. Remember?”

Curtiss swung back to the great picture window and lifted his hands, palms upmost, appealing to the African dusk for reason. Beyond the bulletproof glass lay darkening lawns, at the end of them a lake. Lights twinkled on the hillsides. A few early stars penetrated the deep-blue evening mist.

“So his wife gets hers,” Curtiss reasoned, in the same plaintive tone. “A bunch of bad boys went wild on her. Her piece of the black stuff did her over, what do I know? The way she was carrying on, she was asking for it. This is Turkana we're talking about, not fucking Surrey. But I'm sorry, yes? Very, very sorry.”

But not perhaps as sorry as you ought to be, thought Donohue.

Curtiss had houses from Monaco to Mexico and Donohue hated all of them. He hated their stink of iodine and their cowed servants and vibrating wooden floors. He hated their mirrored bars and odorless flowers that eyed you like the bored hookers Curtiss kept around him. In his mind Donohue lumped them together with the Rolls-Royces, the Gulfstream and the motor yacht as a single tasteless gin palace straddled over half a dozen countries. But most of all he hated this fortified farm stuck on the shores of Lake Naivasha with its razor-wire fences and security guards and zebra-skin cushions and red-tiled floors and leopard-skin rugs and antelope sofas and pink-lit mirrored booze cabinet and satellite television set and satellite telephone, and motion sensors and panic buttons and handheld radios—because it was to this house, to this room and to this antelope sofa that he had been summoned cap in hand at Curtiss's whim for the last five years, to receive whatever scraps the great Sir Kenny K in his erratic magnanimity had seen fit to toss into the eager jaws of British Intelligence. And it was to this place that he had been summoned again tonight, for reasons he had yet to learn, just as he was uncorking a bottle of South African white before sitting down to a bit of lake salmon with his beloved wife Maud.

“Here's how we see it, Tim, old boy, for better or worse,” ran a tense, eyes-only signal, written in the vaguely Wodehousian style of Roger, his regional director in London. “On the visible front you should maintain friendly contact to match the public face you have established over the last five years. Golf, the odd drink, the odd lunch, etc., sooner you than me. On the covert side you should continue to act natural and look busy since the alternatives—severance, subject's consequent outrage, etc.—are too ghastly to contemplate in the present crisis. For your personal information, all hell has broken out on both sides of the river here, and the situation changes from day to day but always for the worse.”

“Why did you come by car then, anyway?” Curtiss demanded in an aggrieved tone, as he continued to gaze out over his African acres. “You could have had the Beechcraft if you'd asked for it. Doug Crick had a pilot standing by for you. Are you trying to make me feel bad or something?”

“You know me, chief.” Sometimes, out of passive aggression, Donohue called him chief, a title reserved in eternity for the head of his own Service. “I'm a car driver. Open the car windows, blow the dust out. Nothing I like more.”

“On these fucking roads? You're out of your mind. I told the Man. Yesterday. I lie. Sunday. ”What's the very first fucking thing a punter sees when he arrives at Kenyatta and gets on his safari bus?“' I asked him. ”It's not the fucking lions and giraffes. It's your roads, Mr. President. It's your crumbling, horrible roads.“ The Man sees what he wants, that's his trouble. Plus he flies wherever he can. ”It's the same with your trains,“ I told him. ”Use your fucking prisoners,“ I said, ”you've got enough of them. Put your prisoners to work on the tracks and give your trains a chance.“ ”Talk to Jomo,“ he says. ”Which Jomo's that?“' I say. ”Jomo my new transport minister,“ he says. ”Since when?“' I say. ”Since just now,“ he says. Fuck him.”

“Fuck him indeed,” said Donohue devoutly, and smiled the way he often smiled when there was nothing to smile about: with his long, drooping head tipped goatishly to one side and back a notch, his yellowed eyes twinkling, and missing nothing while he stroked the fangs of his mustache.

An unprecedented silence filled the great room. The African servants had walked back to their villages. The Israeli bodyguards, those who weren't policing the grounds, were in the gatehouse watching a kung fu movie. Donohue had been treated to a couple of quick garrotings while he waited to be allowed to pass. The private secretaries and the Somali valet had been ordered to the staff compound on the other side of the farm. For the first time in living history, not a single telephone was ringing in a Curtiss household. A month ago Donohue would have had to fight to get a word in, and threaten to remove himself unless Curtiss gave him a few clear minutes one to one. Tonight he would have welcomed the chirrup of the house telephone or the squawk of the satcom that stood scowling on its trolley beside the enormous desk.

With his wrestler's back still turned to Donohue, Curtiss had adopted what for him was a ruminative pose. He was wearing what he always wore in Africa: white shirt with double cuffs and gold ThreeBees links, navy blue trousers, lacquered shoes with cockscombs at the sides and a gold watch thin as a penny round his great hairy wrist. But it was the black crocodile belt that held Donohue's attention. With other fat men of his acquaintance, the belt ran low at the front and the gut hung over it. But with Curtiss the belt stayed dead level like a perfect line drawn across the center of an egg, giving him the appearance of an enormous Humpty-Dumpty. His mane of dyed black hair was swept back Slav-style from his wide forehead and duck's-arsed at the nape. He was smoking a cigar and frowning each time he drew on it. When the cigar bored him, he would leave it smoldering on whatever priceless piece of furniture came to hand. When he wanted it, he would accuse the staff of stealing it.

“You know what the bastard's up to now, I suppose,” he demanded.

“Moi?”

“Quayle.”

“I don't think I do. Should I?”

“Don't they tell you? Or don't they care?”

“Perhaps they don't know, Kenny. All I've been told is, he's taking up his wife's cause—whatever that was—that he's out of touch with his employers, and he's flying solo. We know his wife owned a place in Italy and there's a theory that's where he may have gone to earth.”

“What about fucking Germany?” Curtiss interrupted.

“What about fucking Germany?” Donohue asked, mimicking a style of speech he detested.

“He was in Germany. Last week. Poking around a bunch of long-haired liberal do-gooders who've got their knives into KVH. If it hadn't been for me being soft, he'd be off the voters' list by now. But your boys back in London don't know that, do they? They're not bothered. They've got better things to do with their time. I'm talking to you, Donohue!”

Curtiss had swung round to face him. His huge upper body had dropped into a crouch, his crimson jaws were struck forward. He had one hand thrust into a pocket of his tentlike trousers. With the other he clutched the cigar, lighted end leading, affecting to hammer it like a red-hot tent peg into Donohue's head.

“I'm afraid you're ahead of me, Kenny,” Donohue replied equably. “Is my Office tracking Quayle? you ask. I haven't an earthly. Are precious national secrets at risk? I doubt it. Is our valued source Sir Kenneth Curtiss in need of protection? We never promised to protect you commercially, Kenny. I don't think there's an institution in the world that would do that, if I may say so, financial or other. And survive.”

“Fuck you!” Curtiss had flattened both vast hands on the great refectory table and was steering himself along it like a gorilla as he headed in Donohue's direction. But Donohue smiled his fanged smile and sat his ground. “I can bury your fucking Service single-handed if I want, d'you know that?” Curtiss screamed.

“My dear chap, I never doubted it.”

“I buy lunch for the boys who pay you your money. I give them binges on my fucking boat. Girls. Caviar. Bubbly. They get offices from me election time. Cars, cash, secretaries with good tits. I do business with companies that make ten times what your shop spends in a year. If I told them what I know, you'd be history. So fuck you, Donohue.”

“You too, Curtiss, you too,” Donohue murmured wearily, like a man who has heard it all before, which he had.

All the same, inside his operational skull he was wondering very hard what on earth these histrionics were leading up to. Curtiss had thrown tantrums before, God knows. Donohue could no longer count the times he had sat here waiting for a storm to blow over or—if the insults became too vile to ignore—staged a tactical retreat from the room until Kenny decided it was time to call him back and apologize, sometimes with the assistance of a crocodile tear or two. But tonight Donohue had the feeling of sitting in a booby-trapped house. He remembered the clinging look Doug Crick gave him at the gate, the extra deference in his “Oh good evening, Mr. Donohue, sir, I'll tell the chief immediately.” He was listening with increasing unease to the deathly stillness each time Curtiss's manic outbursts echoed to nothing.

In the picture window two slow-marching Israelis in shorts passed by, leading rebellious guard dogs. Huge yellow fever trees dotted the lawn. Colobus monkeys skipped between them, driving the dogs crazy. The grass was lush and perfect, watered by the lake.

“Your mob's paying him!” Curtiss accused Donohue suddenly, striking out a hand and dropping his voice for effect. “Quayle's your man! Right? Acting on your orders so that you can screw me. Right?”

Donohue offered a knowing smile. “Dead right, Kenny,” he said placatingly. “Completely wrongheaded and cuckoo but otherwise bang on the nail.”

“Why are you doing this to me? I've a right to know! I'm Sir fucking Kenneth Curtiss! I have subscribed—last year alone—half a fucking million quid to party funds. I have provided you—British fucking Intelligence —with nuggets of pure gold. I have performed, voluntarily, certain services for you of a very, very tricky sort—I have—”

“Kenny,” Donohue interrupted quietly. “Shut up. Not in front of the servants, OK? Now listen to me. Why should we have the slightest interest in encouraging Justin Quayle to shaft you? Why should my Service—stretched to its limits and under heavy fire in Whitehall as usual—why should we want to shoot ourselves in the foot by sabotaging a valuable asset like Kenny K?”

“Because you've sabotaged every other fucking thing in my life, that's why! Because you've had the City banks call me in! Ten thousand British jobs are at risk, but who gives a fuck when we're putting the boot into Kenny K? Because you've warned your political friends to wash their hands of me before I go down the tube. Haven't you? Haven't you? I said haven't you?”

Donohue was busily separating the information from the question. The City banks have called him in? Does London know? And if they do, why in God's name didn't Roger warn me?

“I'm sorry to hear that, Kenny. When did the banks do that?”

“What the fuck does it matter when? Today. This afternoon. By phone and fax. The phone to tell me, the fax in case I forgot, hard copy to follow in case I didn't read the fucking fax.”

Then London does know, thought Donohue. But if they know, why did they leave me dangling? Resolve later. “Did the banks offer any reason for their decision, Kenny?” he asked solicitously.

“Their grave ethical concern about certain trade practices is uppermost in their minds. What fucking practices? What fucking ethics? Their idea of ethics is a small county east of London. Loss of market confidence is also said to be a worry. Who the fuck caused that then? They did! Unsettling rumors is another. Screw them. I've been there before.”