The Constant Gardener (51 page)

“And that of course helped you to betray him,” Justin suggests kindly, but his kindness is in vain, for Lorbeer's weeping is even worse than Woodrow's—howling, alienating, infuriating tears as he pleads for himself in mitigation. He loves that drug, man! It does not deserve to be publicly condemned! A few more years and it will take its place among the great medical discoveries of the age! All we've got to do, we've got to check the peak levels of toxicity, control the rate at which we admit it to the body! They're already working on that, man! By the time they hit the United States market, all those bugs will have disappeared, no problem! Lorbeer loves Africa, man, he loves all mankind, he is a good man, not born to bear such guilt! Yet even while he pleads and moans and rages, he contrives to raise himself mysteriously from defeat. He sits up straight. He draws back his shoulders and a smirk of superiority replaces his penitent's grief.

“Plus look at their relationship, man,” he protests, with ponderous insinuation. “Look at their ethical behavior. Whose sins are we speaking of here, precisely? I ask myself.”

“I don't think I quite follow you,” says Justin mildly, as a mental safety screen between himself and Lorbeer begins to form inside his head.

“Read the newspapers, man. Listen to the radio. Make up your own mind independently and tell me, please. What is this pretty married white woman doing traveling about with this handsome black doctor as her constant companion? Why does she call herself by her maiden name and not by the name of her rightful husband? Why does she parade herself at her lover's side in this very tent, man, brazenly, an adulteress and hypocrite, interrogating Markus Lorbeer about his personal morality?”

But the safety screen must have slipped somehow, for Lorbeer is staring at Justin as if he has seen death's very angel come to summon him to the judgment he so dreads.

“God Christ, man. You're him. Her husband. Quayle.”

•      •      •

The last food drop of the day has emptied the stockade of its workers. Leaving Lorbeer to weep alone in his tent, Justin sits himself on the hummock beside the air-raid shelter to enjoy the evening show. First, the pitch-black herons, swooping and circling as they announce the sunset. Then the lightning, driving away the dusk in long, trembling salvos, then the day's moisture rising in a white veil. And finally the stars, close enough to touch.

Out of the finely steered gossip of Whitehall and Westminster; out of parroted television sound bites and misleading images; out of the otiose minds of journalists whose duty to inquire extended no further than the nearest deadline and the nearest free lunch, a chapter of events was added to the sum of minor human history.

The formal elevation en poste—contrary to established practice—of Mr. Alexander Woodrow to the estate of British High Commissioner, Nairobi, sent ripples of quiet satisfaction through white Nairobi, and was welcomed by the indigenous African press. “A Quiet Force for Understanding” ran the subheadline on page three of the Nairobi Standard, and Gloria was “a breath of fresh air who would blow away the last cobwebs of British colonialism.”

Of Porter Coleridge's abrupt disappearance into the catacombs of official Whitehall, little was said but much implied. Woodrow's predecessor had been “out of touch with modern Kenya.” He had “antagonized hardworking ministers with his sermons on corruption.” There was even a suggestion, cleverly not enlarged upon, that he might have fallen foul of the vice he so condemned.

Rumors that Coleridge had been “hauled before a Whitehall disciplinary committee” and invited to explain “certain embarrassing matters that had arisen during his stewardship” were dismissed as idle speculation but not denied by the High Commission spokesman who had initiated them. “Porter was a fine scholar and a man of the highest principle. It would be unjust to deny his many virtues,” Mildren informed reliable journalists in an off-the-record obituary, and they duly read between the lines.

“FO Africa Tsar Sir Bernard Pellegrin,” an uninterested public learned, had “sought early retirement in order to take up a senior managerial post with the multinational pharmaceutical giant Karel Vita Hudson of Basel, Vancouver, Seattle and now of London” where, thanks to Pellegrin's “fabled skills at networking,” he would be at his most effective. A farewell banquet in the Pellegrins' honor was attended by a glittering assembly of Africa's High Commissioners to the Court of St. James and their wives. A witty speech by the South African delegate observed that Sir Bernard and his Lady might not have won Wimbledon, but they had surely won the hearts of many Africans.

A spectacular rise from the ashes by “that latter-day Houdini of the City” Sir Kenneth Curtiss was welcomed by friend and foe alike. Only a minority of Cassandras insisted that Kenny's rise was purely optical and the breakup of House of ThreeBees nothing less than an act of daylight sandbagging. These carping voices did not impede the great populist's elevation to the House of Lords where he insisted upon the title of Lord Curtiss of Nairobi and Spennymoor, the latter being his humble place of birth. Even his many critics in Fleet Street had to concede, if wryly, that ermine became the old devil.

The Evening Standard's “Londoner's Diary” made amusing weather of the long-awaited retirement of that incorruptible old crime stopper Superintendent Frank Gridley of Scotland Yard, “known affectionately to the London underworld as Old Gridiron.” In reality, retirement was the last thing that lay in store for him. One of Britain's leading security companies was poised to snap him up just as soon as he had taken his wife on a long-promised holiday on the island of Majorca.

The departure of Rob and Lesley from the police service received by contrast no publicity at all, though insiders noted that one of Gridley's last acts before leaving the Yard had been to press for the removal of what he termed “a new breed of unscrupulous careerists” who were giving the force a bad name.

Ghita Pearson, another would-be careerist, was not successful in her application for acceptance as an established British foreign servant. Although her examination results were good to excellent, confidential reports from the Nairobi High Commission gave cause for concern. Ruling that she was “too easily swayed by her personal feelings,” Personnel Department advised her to wait a couple of years and reapply. Her mixed race, it was emphasized, was not a factor.

No question mark at all, however, hung over the unhappy passing of Justin Quayle. Deranged by despair and grief, he had taken his own life at the very spot where his wife Tessa had been murdered only weeks before. His swift loss of mental balance had been an open secret among those entrusted with his welfare. His employers in London had gone to every length short of locking him up in an effort to save him from himself. The news that his trusted friend Arnold Bluhm was also his wife's murderer had dealt the final blow. Traces of systematic beating around his abdomen and lower body told their own sad story to the tightly knit group of insiders who were privy to the secret: in the days leading up to his death, Quayle had resorted to self-flagellation. How he had come by the fatal weapon—an assassin's short-barreled .38 pistol in excellent condition with five soft-nosed bullets remaining in the chamber—was a mystery unlikely to be resolved. A rich and desperate man bent upon his own destruction is sure to find a way. His final resting place in Langata cemetery, the press noted with approval, had reunited him with his wife and child.

The permanent government of England, on which her transient politicians spin and posture like so many table dancers, had once more done its duty: except, that is, in one small but irritating respect. Justin, it seemed, had spent the last weeks of his life composing a “black dossier” purporting to prove that Tessa and Bluhm had been murdered for knowing too much about the evil dealings of one of the world's most prestigious pharmaceutical companies, which so far had contrived to remain anonymous. Some upstart solicitor of Italian origin—a relation of the dead woman to boot—had come forward and, making free use of his late clients' money, retained the services of a professional troublemaker who hid behind the mask of public relations agent. The same hapless solicitor had allied himself with a firm of supercharged City lawyers famous for their pugnacity. The house of Oakey, Oakey and Farmeloe representing the unnamed company, challenged the use of clients' funds for this purpose, but without success. They had to content themselves with serving writs on any newspaper that dared take up the story.

Yet some did, and the rumors persisted. Scotland Yard, called in to examine the material, publicly declared it “baseless and a bit sad” and declined to forward it to the Crown Prosecution Service. But the lawyers for the dead couple, far from throwing in the sponge, resorted to Parliament. A Scottish MP, also a lawyer, was suborned, and tabled an innocuous parliamentary question of the Foreign Secretary concerning the health of the African continent at large. The Foreign Secretary batted it away with his customary grace, only to find himself grappling with a supplementary that went for the jugular.

Quite: Has the Foreign Secretary knowledge of any

written representations made to his department

during the last twelve months by the late,

tragically murdered Mrs. Tessa

Quayle? A: I require notice of that question. Quite: Is that a “no” I'm hearing? A: I have no knowledge of such representations made

during her lifetime. Quite: Then she wrote to you posthumously, perhaps?

(Laughter.)

In the written and verbal exchanges that followed, the Foreign Secretary first denied all knowledge of the documents, then protested that in view of pending legal actions they were sub judice. After “further extensive and costly research” he finally admitted to having “discovered” the documents, only to conclude that they had received all the attention they merited, then or now, “having regard for the disturbed mental condition of the writer.” Imprudently, he added that the documents were classified.

Quite: Does the Foreign Office regularly

classify writings of people of disturbed mental

condition? (Laughter.) A: In cases where such writings could cause

embarrassment to innocent third parties, yes. Quite: Or to the Foreign Office, perhaps? A: I am thinking of the needless pain that could be

inflicted on the deceased's close

relatives. Quite: Then be at peace. Mrs. Quayle had no

close relatives. A: These are not however the only interests I am

obliged to consider. Quite: Thank you. I think I have heard the answer

I was waiting for.

Next day a formal request for the release of the Quayle papers was presented to the Foreign Office and backed by an application to the High Court. Simultaneously, and surely not by coincidence, a parallel initiative was mounted in Brussels by lawyers for friends and family of the late Dr. Arnold Bluhm. During the preliminary hearing, a racially varied crowd of mischief makers dressed in symbolic white coats paraded for television cameras outside the Brussels Palace of Justice and brandished placards bearing the slogan Nous Accusons. The nuisance was quickly dealt with. A string of cross-petitions by the Belgian lawyers ensured that the case would run for years. However, it was now common knowledge that the company in question was none other than Karel Vita Hudson.

•      •      •

“Up there, that's the Lokomormyang range,” Captain McKenzie informs Justin over the intercom. “Gold and oil. Kenya and Sudan been fighting about it for well on a hundred years. Old maps give it to the Sudan, new ones give it to Kenya. I reckon somebody slipped the cartographer a backhander.”

Captain McKenzie is one of those tactful men who knows exactly when to be irrelevant. His chosen plane this time is a Beech Baron with twin engines. Justin sits beside him in the copilot's seat, listening without hearing, now to Captain McKenzie, now to the banter of other pilots in the vicinity: “How are we today, Mac? Are we above the cloud level or below?” —“Where the hell are you, man?”—“A mile to your right and a thousand feet below you. What's happened to your eyesight?” They are flying over flat brown slabs of rock, darkening into blue. The clouds are thick above them. Vivid red patches appear where the sun breaks through to strike the rock. The foothills ahead of them are tousled and untidy. A road appears like a vein among the muscles of the rock.

“Cape Town to Cairo,” McKenzie says laconically. “Don't try it.”

“I won't,” Justin promises dutifully.

McKenzie banks the plane and descends, following its path. The road becomes a valley road, weaving along a ridge of snaking hills.

“Road to the right there, that's the road Arnold and Tessa took, Loki to Lodwar. Great if you don't mind bandits.”

Coming awake, Justin peers deeply into the pale mist ahead of him, and sees Arnold and Tessa in their jeep with dust on their faces and the box of disks bobbing between them on the bench seat. A river has joined the Cairo road. It is called the Tagua, McKenzie says, and its source is high up in the Tagua mountains. The Taguas are eleven thousand feet high. Justin politely acknowledges this information. The sun goes in, the hills turns blue-black, menacing and separate, Tessa and Arnold vanish. The landscape is again godless, not a man or beast in any direction.

“Sudanese tribesmen come down from the Mogila range,” McKenzie says. “In their jungle they wear nothing. Coming south they get all shy, wear these little bits of cloth. And boy, can they run!”

Justin gives a polite smile as brown treeless mountains rise crooked and half buried from the khaki earth. Behind them he makes out the blue haze of a lake.

“Is that Turkana?”

“Don't swim in it. Not unless you're very fast. Freshwater. Great amethysts. Friendly crocodiles.”

Flocks of goat and sheep appear below them, then a village and a compound.

“Turkana tribesmen,” McKenzie says. “Big shoot-out last year over livestock thefts. Best to steer clear of 'em.”

“I shall,” Justin promises.

McKenzie looks squarely at him, a prolonged, interrogative stare. “Not the only people to steer clear of, they tell me.”