The Constant Gardener (50 page)

“Those bastards in Khartoum, they got tanks and gunships up there, Peter. They're tearing the poor Africans to pieces. You go up there, see for yourself, man. If the bombardments don't do the job, they got ground troops to go in and do it for them, no problem. Those troops rape and slaughter to their hearts' content. And who's helping them? Who's clapping from the touchlines? The multinational oil companies!”

His indignant voice is holding the floor. Conversations round him must compete or die and most are dying.

“The multis love Khartoum, man! ”Boys,“ they say, ”we respect your fine fundamentalist principles. A few public floggings, a few hands cut off, we admire that. We want to help you any which way we can. We want you to use our roads and our airstrips just as much as you like. Just don't you go letting those lazy African bums in the towns and villages stand in the way of the great god Profit! We want those African bums ethnically cleansed out of the way just as bad as you boys in Khartoum want it! So here's some nice oil revenues for you, boys. Go buy yourselves some more guns!“ You hear that, Salvation? Peter, you writing this down?”

“Every word, thank you, Brandt,” says Justin quietly to his notebook.

“The multis do the devil's work, I tell you, man! One day they will end up in hell where they belong, and they better believe it!” He cringes theatrically, his great hands shielding his face. He is acting the part of Multinational Man facing his Maker on the Day of Judgment. “”It wasn't me, Lord. I was only obeying orders. I was commanded by the great god Profit!“ That Multinational Man, he's the one who gets you hooked on cigarettes, then sells you the cancer cure you can't afford to pay for!”

He's the one who sells us untried medicines too. He's the one who fast-streams clinical trials and uses the wretched of the earth as guinea pigs.

“You want coffee?”

“I'd love some. Thank you.”

Lorbeer leaps to his feet, seizes Justin's soup mug and rinses it with hot water from a thermos as a prelude to filling it with coffee. Lorbeer's shirt is stuck to his back, revealing billows of trembling flesh. But he doesn't stop talking. He has developed a terror of silence.

“Did the boys down in Loki tell you about the train, Peter?” he yells, drying the mug with a piece of tissue plucked out of the rubbish bag beside him. “This damned old train that comes south at walking speed like three times a year?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“It comes down the old railway that you British laid, OK? The train does. Like in the old movies. It's protected by wild horsemen from the north. This old train resupplies every Khartoum garrison on its route from north to south. OK?”

“OK.”

Why is he sweating so? Why are his eyes so haunted and questing? What secret comparison is he making between the Arab train and his own sins?

“Man! That train! Right now it's stuck between Ariath and Aweil, two days' hike from here. We got to pray God to make sure the river stays flooded, then maybe the bastards don't come this way. They make Armageddon wherever they go, I tell you. They kill everyone. Nobody can stop them. They're too strong.”

“Which bastards are we talking about here exactly, Brandt?” Justin asks, jotting again in his notebook. “I lost the plot there for a moment.”

“The wild horsemen are the bastards, man! Do you think they get paid for protecting that train? Not a bean, man. Not a drachma. They do it for free, out of the goodness of their kind hearts! Their reward, that's the killing and the raping their way through the villages. It's the setting fire to them. It's kidnapping the young guys and girls to take back north when the train is empty! It's stealing every damn thing they don't burn.”

“Ah. Got it.”

But the train isn't enough for Lorbeer. Nothing is enough if it threatens to bring silence in its wake, and expose him to questions he dare not hear. His haunted eyes are already searching desperately for a sequel.

“They told you about the plane then?—the Russian-made plane, man, older than Noah's ark, the plane they keep down in Juba? Man, that's some story!”

“Not the train, not the plane, I'm afraid. As I said, they didn't have time to tell me anything.”

And Justin waits once more, pen obediently poised, to be told about that old Russian-made plane they keep in Juba.

“Those crazy Muslims in Juba, they make dumb bombs like cannon balls. They take them up, then they roll them down the fuselage of that old plane and drop them on Christian villages, man! ”Here you are, Christians! Here's a nice love letter from your Muslim brothers!“ And these dumb bombs are very effective, you better believe me, Peter. Those boys have mastered the art of aiming them very straight. Oh yes! And those bombs are so volatile that the crew make damn sure they get rid of them before they land their old plane back in Juba!”

From beneath the bookmaker's umbrella the field radio is announcing the approach of another Buffalo. First comes the laconic voice of Loki, then the captain in the air, calling in for contact. Hunched to the set, Jamie reports good weather, firm ground and no security problems. The diners hastily depart but Lorbeer remains in his place. With a snap, Justin closes his notebook and under Lorbeer's gaze feeds it into his shirt pocket alongside his pens and reading spectacles.

“Well, Brandt. Lovely goat stew. I've a few special-interest questions, if that's all right by you. Is there somewhere we could sit for an hour without being interrupted?”

Like a man leading the way to his place of execution Lorbeer guides Justin across a patch of trodden grassland strewn with sleeping tents and washing lines. A bell-shaped tent is set apart from them. Hat in hand, Lorbeer holds back the flap for Justin and contrives a hideous grin of servility as he lets him go first. Justin stoops, their eyes meet and Justin sees in Lorbeer what he has seen already when they were in the tukul, but now with greater clarity: a man terrified by what he resolutely forbids himself to see.

The air inside the tent is acrid and compressed and very hot, the smells are of rotten grass and stale clothes that no amount of washing can get clean. There is one wooden chair and in order to free it Lorbeer must remove a Lutheran Bible, a volume of Heine's poetry, a baby-style fleecy sleeping suit and a food monitor's emergency backpack with radio and protruding beacon. Only then does he offer the chair to Justin, before squatting himself on the edge of a bony camp bed six inches from the ground, ginger head in hands, damp back heaving as he waits for Justin to speak.

“My paper is interested in a controversial new TB cure called Dypraxa-manufactured by Karel Vita Hudson and distributed in Africa by the House of ThreeBees. I notice you don't have it on your shelves. My paper thinks your real name is Markus Lorbeer and you're the good fairy who saw the drug onto the market,” Justin explains, as he once more opens his notebook.

Nothing about Lorbeer stirs. The damp back, the ginger-golden head, the sodden pressed-down shoulders remain motionless in the aftershock of Justin's words.

“There's a growing clamor about Dypraxa's side effects, as I'm sure you know,” Justin goes on, turning a page and consulting it. “KVH and ThreeBees can't keep their fingers in the dam forever. You might be wise to get your word in ahead of the field.”

Sweat pouring off them, two victims of the same disease. The heat inside the tent so soporific that there is a risk in Justin's mind they will both succumb to it, and fall into a sleeping sickness, side by side. Lorbeer embarks on a caged prowling of the tent's circumference. This is how I endured the confinement of the lower ground, thinks Justin, as he watches his prisoner pause and startle himself in a tin mirror, or consult a wooden cross pinned to the canvas above his bedhead.

“God Christ, man. How the hell did you find me?”

“Talked to people. Had a bit of luck.”

“Don't bullshit me, man. Luck nothing. Who's paying you?”

Still pacing. Shaking his head to free it of sweat. Swinging round as if he expects to find Justin on his heels. Staring at him with suspicion and reproach.

“I'm freelance,” Justin says.

“To hell you are, man! I bought journalists like you! I know all your rackets! Who bought you?”

“Nobody.”

“KVH? Curtiss? I made them money, for Christ's sake!”

“And they made money for you too, didn't they? According to my paper, you own one-third of forty-nine percent of the companies that patented the molecule.”

“I renounced it, man. Lara renounced it. It was blood money. ”Take it,“ I told them. ”It's yours. And on the Day of Judgment, may God preserve you all.“ Those were my words to them, Peter.”

“Spoken to whom exactly?” Justin inquires, writing. “Curtiss? Someone at KVH?” Lorbeer's face is a mask of terror. “Or to Crick, perhaps. Ah yes. I see. Crick was your link at ThreeBees.”

And he writes down Crick in his notebook, one letter at a time, because his hand is sluggish from the heat. “But Dypraxa wasn't a bad drug, was it? My paper thinks it was a good drug that went too fast.”

“Fast?” The word bitterly amuses him. “Fast, man? Those boys in KVH wanted trial results so fast they couldn't wait till tomorrow breakfast.”

A huge explosion stops the world. First it is Khartoum's Russian-made plane from Juba dropping one of its dumb bombs. Then it is the wild horsemen from the north. Then it is the savage battle for the Bentiu oil fields that has arrived at the food station's gates. The tent shakes, sags and braces itself for a new attack. Guy ropes wince and sob as sheets of water crash onto the canvas roof. Yet Lorbeer seems not to have noticed the attack. He stands at the center of the tent with one hand pressed to his brow as if he has forgotten something. Justin pulls back the tent flap and through sheets of rain counts three tents dead and two more dying before his eyes. Water is spouting from the washing on the lines. It has made a lake of the grass and is rising in a tide against the wooden walls of the tukul. It is crashing in freak waves over the rush roof of the air-raid shelter. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it stops.

“So Markus,” Justin proposes, as if the thunderstorm has cleared the air inside the tent as well as out. “Tell me about the girl Wanza. Was she a turning point in your life? My paper thinks she was.”

Lorbeer's bulging eyes remain fixed on Justin. He makes to speak but no words come.

“Wanza from a village north of Nairobi. Wanza who moved to Kibera slum. And was taken to the Uhuru Hospital to have her baby. She died and her baby lived. My paper believes she shared a ward with Tessa Quayle. Is that possible? Or Tessa Abbott, as she sometimes called herself.”

And still Justin's voice is even and dispassionate, as becomes your objective reporter. And this dispassion is in many ways unfeigned, for he does not take easily to having a man at his mercy. The responsibility is more than he wishes. His instincts for vengeance are too weak. A plane zooms low overhead on its way to the drop zone. Lorbeer's eyes lift to it in feeble hope. They have come to save me! They haven't. They have come to save Sudan.

“Who are you, man?”

It has taken him a lot of courage to get the question out. But Justin ignores it.

“Wanza died. So did Tessa. So did Arnold Bluhm, a Belgian aid worker and doctor and her good friend. My paper believes that Tessa and Arnold came up here to speak to you just a couple of days before they were killed. My paper also believes that you confessed yourself to Tessa and Arnold on the matter of Dypraxa and—this is only supposition, of course—as soon as they had gone, betrayed them to your former employers in order to reinsure yourself. Perhaps by means of a radio message to your friend Mr. Crick. Does that ring any bells at all?”

“Jesus God, man. God Christ.”

Markus Lorbeer is burning at the stake. He has seized the central tent pole in both arms and with his head pressed to it is hugging it to himself as if to shelter from the onslaught of Justin's remorseless questioning. His head is raised to heaven in agony, his mouth whispers and implores inaudibly. Rising, Justin carries his chair across the tent and sets it at Lorbeer's heels, then takes him by the arm and lowers him into it.

“What were Tessa and Arnold looking for when they came here?” he inquires. His questions are still formulated with a deliberate casualness. He wishes for no more sobbing confessions, and no more appeals to God.

“They were looking for my guilt, man, my shameful history, my sin of pride,” Lorbeer whispers in reply, dabbing his face with a sopping piece of rag hauled from the pocket of his shorts.

“And they got it?”

“Everything, man. Every last bit, I swear.”

“With a tape recorder?”

“With two, man! That woman had no faith in one alone!” With an inward smile, Justin acknowledges Tessa's legal acumen. “I abased myself totally before them. I gave them the naked truth before the Lord. There was no way out. I was the last link in the chain of their investigations.”

“Did they say what they intended to do with the information you had given them?”

Lorbeer's eyes opened very wide but his lips remained closed and his body so motionless that for a second Justin wondered whether he had died a merciful death, but it seemed he was only remembering. Suddenly he was speaking very loudly, his words mounting to a scream as he fought to get them out.

“They would present it to the one man in Kenya they trusted. They would take the whole story to Leakey. Everything they had collected. Kenya should solve Kenya's problem, she said. Leakey was the man to do it. That was their conviction. They warned me. She did. ”Markus, you better hide yourself, man. This place is not safe for you anymore. You got to find yourself a deeper hole, or they will kill you to pieces for betraying them to us.“”

It is hard for Justin to recreate Tessa's actual words from Lorbeer's strangled voice, but he does his best. And certainly he has no problem with the general drift of what she must have said, since Tessa's first concern would always have been for Lorbeer rather than herself. And “kill you to pieces” was undoubtedly one of her expressions.

“What did Bluhm have to say to you?”

“He was right down to earth, man. Told me I was a charlatan and a traitor to my trust.”