The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Guido was waiting on the cottage doorstep, sporting a black coat that was too long for him and a school satchel that couldn't find anywhere on his shoulders to hang. In one spidery hand he clutched a tin box for his medicines and his sandwiches. It was six in the morning. The first rays of spring sun were gilding the cobwebs on the grass slope. Justin drove the jeep as close to the cottage as he could and Guido's mother watched from a window as Guido, rejecting Justin's hand, swung himself into the passenger seat, arms, knees, satchel, tin box and coattails, to crash at his side like a young bird at the end of his first flight.

"How long were you waiting there?" Justin asked, but Guido's only answer was a frown. Guido is a master of self-diagnosis, Tessa reminds him, much impressed by her recent visit to the sick kids' hospital in Milan. If Guido's ill he asks for the nurse. If he's very ill he asks for the Sister. And if he thinks he may be dying he asks for the doctor. And there's not one of them who doesn't come running.

"I must be at the school gates at five to nine," Guido told Justin stiffly.

"No problem." They were speaking English for Guido's pride.

"Too late, I arrive in class out of breath. Too early, I hang around and make myself conspicuous."

"Understood," said Justin and, glancing in the mirror, saw that Guido's complexion was waxy white, the way it looked when he needed a blood transfusion. "And in case you were wondering, we'll be working in the oil room, not the villa," Justin added reassuringly.

Guido said nothing, but by the time they reached the coast road the color had returned to his face. Sometimes I can't stand her proximity either, thought Justin.

The chair was too low for Guido and the stool was too high, so Justin went alone to the villa and fetched two cushions. But when he came back Guido was already standing at the pine desk, nonchalantly fingering the components of her laptop — the telephone connections for her modem, transformers for her computer and printer, the adapter and printer cables and finally her computer itself, which he handled with reckless disrespect, first flipping open the lid, then jamming the power socket into the laptop, but not — thank God — or not yet, connecting it to the mains. With the same cavalier confidence Guido shoved aside the modem, the printer and whatever else he didn't need and plonked himself onto the cushions on the chair.

"OK," he announced.

"OK what?"

"Switch on," said Guido in English, nodding at the wall socket at his feet. "Let's go." And he handed Justin the cable to plug in. His voice, to Justin's oversensitive ear, had acquired an unpleasant mid-Atlantic twang.

"Can anything go wrong?" Justin asked nervously.

"Like what, for instance?"

"Can we wipe it clean or something, by mistake?"

"By switching it on? No way."

"Why not?"

Guido grandly circumnavigated the screen with his scarecrow hand. "Everything that's in there she saved. If she don't save it, she don't want it, so it's not in there. Is that reasonable or is that reasonable?"

Justin felt a bar of hostility form at the front of his head, which was what happened to him when people talked computer gobbledygook at him.

"Then all right. If you say so. I'll switch on." And crouching, gingerly poked the plug into the wall socket. "Yes?"

"Oh man."

Reluctantly Justin dropped the switch and stood up in time to see absolutely nothing happen on the screen. His mouth went dry and he felt sick. I'm trespassing. I'm a clumsy idiot. I should have got an expert, not a child. I should have learned to work the bloody thing myself. Then the screen lit up and gave him a procession of smiling, waving African children lined up outside a tin-roofed health clinic, followed by an aerial view of colored rectangles and ovals scattered over a blue-gray field.

"What's that?"

"The desktop."

Justin peered over Guido's shoulder and read: My Briefcase… Network Neighborhood… Shortcut to Connect. "Now what?"

"You want to see files? I show you files. We go to files, you read."

"I want to see what Tessa saw. Whatever she was working on. I want to follow her footsteps and read whatever's in there. I thought I made that clear."

In his anxiety he was resenting Guido's presence here. He wanted Tessa for himself again, at the counting table. He wanted her laptop not to exist. Guido directed an arrow to a panel on the lower left side of Tessa's screen.

"What's that thing you're tapping?"

"The mouse pad. These are the last nine files she worked on. You want I show you the others? I show you the others, no problem."

A panel appeared, headed Open File, Tessa's Documents. He tapped again.

"She's got like twenty-five files in this category," he said.

"Do they have titles?"

Guido leaned to one side, inviting Justin to look for himself:

PHARMA

pharma-general

pharma-pollution

pharma-in-3rd world

pharma-watchdogs

pharma-bribes

pharma-litigation

pharma-cash

pharma-protest

pharma-hypocrisy

pharma-trials

pharma-fakes

pharma-cover-ups

PLAGUE

plague-history

plague-Kenya

plague-cures

plague-new

plague-old

plague-charlatans

TRIALS

Russia

Poland

Kenya

Mexico

Germany

Known-mortalities

Wanza

Guido was moving the arrow and tapping again. "Arnold. Who's this Arnold suddenly?" he demanded.

"A friend of hers."

"He's got documents too. Jesus, has he got documents!"

"How many?"

"Twenty. M." Another tap. "Bits and Bobs. That some kind of British idiom?"

"Yes, it's English. Not American, perhaps, but certainly English," Justin replied huffily. "What's that? What are you doing now? You're going too fast."

"No, I'm not. I'm going slow for you. I'm looking in her briefcase, how many folders she got. Wow. She got a lot of folders. Folder one, folder two. Then more folders." He pressed again. His phony American was driving Justin mad. Where did he pick it up? He's been seeing too many American films. I shall speak to the headmaster. "See this? This is her recycle bin. Here's where she puts whatever she's thinking of throwing out."

"But she didn't, presumably. Throw them out."

"What's there, she don't throw out. What's not, she did." Another tap.

"What's AOL?" Justin asked.

"America Online. I.s.p. Internet Service Provider. Whatever she got from AOL and kept, she stored it in this program, same as her old e-mails. New messages, you've got to go on-line to get them. You want to send messages, you've got to go on-line to send them. No on-line, no new messages in or out."

"I know that. It's obvious."

"You want I go on-line?"

"Not yet. I want to see what's in there already."

"All of it?"

"Yes."

"Then you've got like days of reading. Weeks, maybe. All you do, you point the mouse and you click. You want to sit where I'm sitting?"

"You're absolutely sure nothing can go wrong?" Justin insisted, lowering himself into the chair while Guido stood himself behind him.

"What she saved is saved. It's like I said. Why else would she save it for?"

"And I can't lose it?"

"Holy smoke, man! Not unless you click on delete. Even if you click on delete, it's going to ask you, Justin, are you sure you want to delete? If you're not sure, you say no. You press no. Press no means, No. I'm not sure. Click. That's all there is. Go for it."

Justin is cautiously tapping his way through Tessa's labyrinth while Guido the tutor stands patronizingly at his side, incanting commands in his mid-Atlantic cybervoice. When a procedure is new to Justin or confuses him, he calls a break, takes a sheet of paper and writes out the moves to Guido's imperious dictation. New landscapes of information are unfolding before his eyes. Go here, go there, now go back to here. It's all too vast, you ranged too wide, I'll never catch you up, he tells her. If I read for a year, how will I ever know I've found what you were looking for?

* * *

Handouts from the World Health Organization.

Records of obscure medical conferences held in Geneva, Amsterdam and Heidelberg under the aegis of yet another unheard-of outpost of the United Nations' sprawling medical empire.

Company prospectuses extolling unpronounceable pharmaceutical products and their life-enhancing virtues.

Notes to herself. Memos. A shocking quotation from Time magazine, framed with exclamation marks, raised in bold capitals and visible across the room to those who have eyes and do not avert them. A terrifying generality to galvanize her search for the particular:

IN 93 CLINICAL TRIALS RESEARCHERS ENCOUNTERED 691 ADVERSE REACTIONS BUT REPORTED ONLY 39 TO THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH.

A whole folder devoted to PW. Who in God's name is PW when she's at home? Despair. Take me back to the paper I understand. But when he clicks on Bits and Bobs, there is PW again, staring him in the face. And after one more click, all is clear: PW is short for Pharma Watch, a self-styled cyber-underground notionally based in Kansas with "a mission to expose the excesses and malpractices of the pharmaceutical industry," not to mention "the inhumanity of self-styled humanitarians who are ripping off the poorest nations."

Reports of so-called off-Broadway conferences among demonstrators planning to converge on Seattle or Washington, D.C., to make their feelings known to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

High talk of "The Great American Corporate Hydra," and the "Monster Capital." A frivolous article from heaven knows where entitled "Anarchism Is Back in Style."

He clicks again to find the word "Humanity" under attack. "Humanity" is Tessa's H-word, he discovers. Whenever she hears it, she confides to Bluhm in a chatty e-mail, she reaches for her revolver.

Every time I hear a pharma justifying its actions on the grounds of Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit, and that's not because I'm pregnant. It's because I'm reading at the same time how the U.S. pharmagiants are trying to extend the life of their patents so that they can preserve their monopoly and charge what they damn well like and use the State Dept. to frighten the Third World out of manufacturing their own generic products at a fraction of the price of the branded version. All right, they've made a cosmetic gesture on AIDS drugs. But what about —

* * *

I know all that, he thinks, and clicks back to the desktop, thence to Arnold's Documents.

"What's this?" he asks sharply, lifting his hands from the keyboard as if to disclaim responsibility. For the first time in their relationship, Tessa is demanding a password of him before she will let him in. Her command is finite: PASSWORD, PASSWORD, like a brothel sign winking on and off.

"Shit," says Guido.

"Did she have a password when she taught you how to work this thing?" Justin demands, ignoring this scatological outburst.

Guido puts one hand across his mouth, leans forward and with his other hand types five characters. "Me," he says proudly.

Five asterisks appear, otherwise nothing.

"What are you doing?" Justin demands.

"Typing my name. Guido."

"Why?"

"That was the password," he says, dropping into voluble Italian in his nervousness. "The I isn't an I. It's a one. The O's a naught. Tessa was crazy about that stuff. In a password, you had to have at least one numeral. She insisted."

"Why am I looking at stars?"

"Because they don't want you to see "Guido"! Otherwise you could look over my shoulder and read the password! It didn't work! "Guido" is not her password!" He buries his face in his hands.

"So what we can do is guess," Justin suggests, trying to calm him.

"Guess how? Guess what? How many guesses do they give you? Like three!"

"You mean, if we guess wrong we don't get there," Justin says, valiantly trying to make light of the problem. "Hey. You. Come out of there."

"Damn right we don't!"

"All right, then. Let's think. What other numerals are made from letters?"

"Three could be E back to front. Five could be S. There's half a dozen of them. M. It's awful — " still from inside his hands.

"And what happens exactly when we run out of chances?"

"It locks up and won't try anymore. What do you think?"

"Ever?"

"Ever!"

Justin hears the lie in his voice and smiles.

"And you think three shots is all we get?"

"Look, I'm not a lexicon, OK? I'm not a handbook. What I don't know, I don't say. It could be three. It could be ten. I've got to go to school. Maybe you should call the helpline."

"Think. After Guido, what's her favorite thing?"

Guido's face at last emerges from his hands. "Y. Who do you think? Justin!"

"She wouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because it's her kingdom, not mine."

"You're just guessing! You're ridiculous. Try Justin. I'm right, I know I am!"

"Look. After Justin, what's her next favorite thing?"

"I wasn't married to her. OK? You were!"

Justin thinks Arnold, then Wanza. He tries Ghita, entering the I as a 1. Nothing happens. He emits a nervous scoffing sound that says this childish game is beneath him, but this is because his mind is stretching in all directions and he doesn't know which to follow. He thinks of Garth her dead father, and Garth her dead son, and rules them both out on aesthetic and emotional grounds. He thinks of Tessa but she is not an egomaniac. He thinks ARNO1D and ARN0LD and ARN01D but Tessa would not be so crass as to block Arnold's file with a password saying Arnold. He flirts with Maria, which was her mother's name, then with Mustafa, then Hammond, but none presses itself upon him as a code name or password. He looks down into her grave and watches the yellow freesias on the lid of her coffin disappear under the red soil. He sees Mustafa standing in the Woodrows' kitchen, clutching his basket. He sees himself in his straw hat tending them in the garden in Nairobi and again here in Elba. He enters the word freesia, typing the I as 1. Seven asterisks appear but nothing happens. He enters the same word again, typing the S as 5.

"Will it still have me?" he asks softly.

"I'm twelve years old, Justin! Twelve!" He relents a little. "You got maybe one more try. Then it's curtains. I resign, OK? It's her laptop. Yours. Leave me out of this."

He enters freesia a third time, leaving the S as 5 but turning the 1 back to an I, and finds himself staring at an unfinished polemical essay. With the aid of his yellow freesias he has invaded the file called Arnold and met a tract on human rights. Guido is dancing round the room.

"We got it! I told you! We're fantastic! She's fantastic!"

* * *

Why are Africa's Gays Forced to Stay in the Closet?

Hear the comfortable words of that great arbiter of public decency, President Daniel

Arap Moi:

"Words like lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African languages."-Moi, 1995.

"Homosexuality is against African norms and religions and even in religion it is considered a great sin." — Moi, 1998.

Unsurprisingly, Kenya's Criminal Code obediently agrees with Moi one hundred percent. Sections 162–165 lay down a term of FIVE TO FOURTEEN YEARS' IMPRISONMENT for "Carnal Knowledge Against the Order of Nature." The law goes further:

— Kenyan law defines any sexual relations between men as a CRIMINAL ACT.

— It hasn't even heard of sexual relations between women.

What is the SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE of this antediluvian attitude?

— Gay men marry or carry on affairs with women in order to conceal their sexuality.

— They live in misery and so do their wives.

— No sex education is offered to gay men, even in the midst of Kenya's long-denied AIDS epidemic.

— Sections of Kenyan society are forced to live in a state of deceit. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, priests and even politicians go in terror of blackmail and arrest.

— A self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and oppression is created, dragging our society still deeper into the mire.

Here the article stops. Why?

And why in heaven's name do you file an incomplete polemical piece about gay rights under Arnold and lock it away with a password?

Justin wakes to Guido's presence at his shoulder. He has returned from his peregrinations and is leaning forward, peering at the screen in puzzlement.

"It's time I drove you to school," Justin says.

"We don't need to go yet! We've got another ten minutes! Who's Arnold? Is he gay? What do gay guys do? My mom goes crazy if I ask her."

"We're leaving now. We could get stuck behind a tractor."

"Look. Let me open her mailbox. OK? Somebody could have written to her. Maybe Arnold did. Don't you want to see in her mailbox? Maybe she sent you a message you haven't read. So I open the mailbox? Yes?"

Justin gently puts his hand on Guido's shoulder. "You'll be fine. Nobody's going to laugh at you. Everybody stays away from school now and then. That doesn't make you an invalid. It makes you normal. We'll look in her mailbox when you come back."

* * *

The drive to Guido's school and back took Justin a long hour, and in that time he permitted himself no flights of fancy or premature speculation. When he regained the oil room he headed not for the laptop but for the pile of papers given him by Lesley in the van outside the cinema. Moving with greater confidence than he had brought to the laptop, he sorted his way to a photocopy of a clumsily handwritten letter on lined paper that had caught his eye during one of his first skirmishing raids. It was undated. It had "come to notice," according to the attached minute initialed by Rob, between the pages of a medical encyclopedia that the two officers had found lying on the kitchen floor of Bluhm's apartment, slung there by frustrated burglars. The writing paper faded and old. The envelope addressed to the PO box of Bluhm's NGO. Postmark the old Arab slaving island of Lamu.

My own dear darling Arni,

I don't never forget our love or your embraices and goodness to me your dear friend. What a luck and bliss for me that you honeur our beautiful island for your holiday! I got to say thank you but it is to god I thank for your generos love and gifts and now the knoledge that will come to me in my studies thanks to you, plus motorbike. For you my darling man I work day and night, always glad in my heart to know that my darling is with me every step, holding and loving me.

And the signature? Justin, like Rob before him, struggled to decipher it. The style of the letter, as Rob's minute pointed out, suggested an Arabic hand, the writing being long and low with wellcompleted roundels. The signature, done with a flourish, appeared to possess a consonant at either end and a vowel between: Pip? Pet? Pat? Dot? It was useless to guess. For all anyone could tell, it was actually an Arabic signature.

But was the writer a woman or a man? Would an uneducated Arab woman from Lamu really write so boldly? Would she ride a motorbike?

Crossing the room to the pine desk Justin placed himself in front of the laptop but, instead of calling up Arnold again, sat staring at the blank screen.

* * *

"So who does Arnold love, actually?" he is asking her, with feigned casualness, as they lie side by side on the bed one hot Sunday evening in Nairobi. Arnold and Tessa have returned the same morning from their first field trip together. Tessa has declared it one of the experiences of her life.

"Arnold loves the whole human race," she replies languidly. "Bar none."

"Does he sleep with the whole human race?"

"He may. I haven't asked him. Do you want me to?"

"No. I don't think so. I thought I might ask him myself."

"That won't be necessary."

"Sure?"

"Certain sure."

And kisses him. And kisses him again. Till she kisses him back to life.

"And don't ever ask me that question again," she tells him, as an afterthought, as she lies with her face in the angle of his shoulder, and her limbs sprawled across his. "Let's just say Arnold lost his heart in Mombasa." And she draws herself into him, head down and shoulders rigid.

* * *

In Mombasa?

Or in Lamu, a hundred and fifty miles up the coast?

Returning to the counting table, Justin selected this time Lesley's background report on "BLUHM, Arnold Moise, M.d., missing victim or suspect." No scandal, no marriage, no known companion, no common-law wife recorded. In Algiers, Subject had lived in a hostel for young doctors of both sexes, occupying single accommodation. No Significant Other recorded with his NGO. Subject's next of kin given as his adoptive Belgian half-sister, resident in Bruges. Arnold had never claimed travel or living expenses for a companion, and never required anything other than bachelor accommodation. Subject's trashed apartment in Nairobi was described by Lesley as "monkish with a strong air of abstinence." Subject lived there alone and had no servant. "In his private life, Subject appears to do without creature comforts, including hot water."

* * *

"The entire Muthaiga Club has convinced itself that our baby was put there by Arnold," Justin is informing Tessa, perfectly amiably, as they eat their fish in an Indian restaurant on the edge of town. She is four months pregnant and though their conversation might not suggest it, Justin is more besotted with her than ever.

"Who's the entire Muthaiga Club?" she demands.

"Elena the Greek, I suspect. Conveyed to Gloria, conveyed to Woodrow," he goes on cheerfully. "What I'm supposed to do about it I don't quite know. Drive you up there and make love to you on the billiards table might be a solution, if you're game."

"Then it's double jeopardy, isn't it?" she says thoughtfully. "And double prejudice."

"Double? Why?"

She breaks off, lowers her eyes, and gently shakes her head. "They're a prejudiced bunch of bastards — leave it at that."

* * *

And at the time, he had done as she commanded. But no longer.

Why double? he asked himself, still staring at the screen.

Single jeopardy means Arnold's adultery. But double? Double is for what? For his race? Arnold is discriminated against for his supposed adultery and his race? Ergo a double discrimination?

Maybe.

Unless.

Unless the cold-eyed lawyer in her is speaking again: the same lawyer who decided to ignore a death threat rather than imperil her quest for justice.

Unless the first perceived prejudice was not directed against a black man who was supposedly sleeping with a married white woman, but against homosexuals at large, of whom Bluhm — though his detractors didn't know it — was one.

In such a case the cold-eyed, hot-hearted lawyer's reasoning would work this way:

Jeopardy the first: Arnold is homosexual but local prejudice does not allow him to admit it. If he admitted it, he would be unable to continue his relief work since Moi detests NGO'S as much as he hates homosexuals, and at the very least he would have Arnold flung out of the country.

Jeopardy the second: Arnold is forced to live in a state of deceit (see unfinished press article by?). Instead of declaring his sexuality, he is driven to adopt the pose of playboy, thus attracting the criticism reserved for transracial adulterers.

Ergo: a double jeopardy.

And why, finally, does Tessa once more not confide this secret to her beloved husband, instead of leaving him with dishonorable suspicions that he will not, must not, cannot admit to, even to himself? he demanded of the screen.

He remembered the name of the Indian restaurant she was so fond of. Haandi.

* * *

The tides of jealousy that Justin had for so long held at bay suddenly broke banks and engulfed him. But it was jealousy of a new kind: jealousy that Tessa and Arnold had kept even this secret from him, together with all the others that they shared; that they had deliberately excluded him from their precious circle of two, leaving him to peer after them like a distraught voyeur, never knowing, for all her assurances, that there was nothing to see and never would be; that as Ghita had wanted to explain to Rob and Lesley before she shied away, no spark would ever fly; that the only relationship between them was precisely the brother-and-sister friendship of the sort Justin had described to Ham without, in his deepest heart, totally believing himself.

A perfect man, Tessa had called Bluhm once. Even Justin the skeptic had never thought of him in any other way. A man to touch the homoerotic nerve in all of us, he had once remarked to her in his innocence. Beautiful and soft-spoken. Courteous to friends and strangers. Beautiful from his husky voice to his rounded iron gray beard, to his long-lidded, plump African eyes that never strayed from you while he spoke or listened. Beautiful in the rare but timely gestures that punctuated his lucid, beautifully delivered, intelligent opinions. Beautiful from his sculpted knuckles to his feather-light, graceful body, trim and lithe as a dancer's and as disciplined in its withholding. Never brash, never unknowing, never cruel, although at every party and conference he encountered Western people so ignorant that Justin felt embarrassed for him. Even the old ones at the Muthaiga said it: that fellow Bluhm, my God, they didn't make blacks like him in our day, no wonder Justin's child bride has fallen for him.

So why in the name of all that's holy didn't you put me out of my misery? He demanded furiously of her, or the screen.

Because I trusted you and expected the same trust in return.

If you trusted me why didn't you tell me?

Because I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time.

Because I am a lawyer and where secrets are concerned — as she used to say — compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.