The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

And tuberculosis is megabucks: ask Karel Vita Hudson. Any day now the richest nations will be facing a tubercular pandemic, and Dypraxa will become the multibilliondollar earner that all good shareholders dream of. The White Plague, the Great Stalker, the Great Imitator, the Captain of Death is no longer confining himself to the wretched of the earth. He is doing what he did a hundred years ago. He is hovering like a filthy cloud of pollution over the West's own horizon, even if it is still their poor who are his victims.

Tessa is telling her computer, highlighting and underlining as she goes:

— One third of the world's population infected with the bacillus

— In the United States incidence has increased by 20 percent in seven years…

— One untreated sufferer transmits the disease on average to between ten and fifteen people a year…

— Health authorities in New York City have given themselves powers to incarcerate TB victims who do not willingly submit to isolation…

— 30 percent of all known TB cases are now drug-resistant…

The White Plague is not born in us, Justin reads. It is forced upon us by foul breath, foul living conditions, foul hygiene, foul water and foul administrative neglect.

Rich countries hate it because it is a slur on their good housekeeping, poor countries because in many of them it is synonymous with AIDS. Some countries refuse to admit they have it at all, preferring to live in denial rather than confess the mark of shame.

And in Kenya, as in other African countries, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased fourfold since the onset of the HIV virus.

A chatty e-mail from Arnold lists the practical difficulties of treating the disease in the field:

— Diagnosis demanding and prolonged. Patients must bring sputum samples on consecutive days.

— Lab work essential but microscopes often busted or stolen.

— No dye available to detect bacilli. Dye sold, drunk, run out, not replaced.

— Treatment takes eight months. Patients who feel better after a month abandon treatment or sell pills. Disease then returns in drug-resistant form.

— TB pills are traded on African black markets as cures for STD'S (sexually transmitted diseases). The World Health Organization insists that a patient taking a tablet should be watched while he or she swallows it. Result: a black market pill is sold "wet" or "dry" according to whether it's been in someone's mouth…

A bald postscript continues:

TB kills more mothers than any other disease. In Africa, women always pay the price. Wanza was a guinea pig, and became a victim.

As whole villages of Wanzas were guinea pigs.

* * *

Extracts from a page-four article in the International Herald Tribune:

"West Warned it, too, is Vulnerable to Drug-Resistant Strains of TB" by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times Service,

some passages highlighted by Tessa.

AMSTERDAM — DEADLY strains of drugresistant tuberculosis are increasing not just in poor countries but in wealthy Western ones, according to a report from the World Health Organization and other anti-Tb groups.

"It's a message: Watch out, guys, this is serious," said Dr. Marcos Espinal, the lead author of the report. "It's a potential major crisis in the future"…

But the most powerful weapon that the international medical community has for raising money is the specter that the unchecked explosion of cases in the Third World will let divergent strains merge into something incurable and highly contagious that will attack the West.

(footnote by Tessa, written in a mysteriously restrained hand, as if she is deliberately holding herself back from sensation:

"Arnold says, Russian immigrants to U.S., particularly those coming straight from the camps, carry all sorts of multiresistant strains of TB — ACTUALLY in a higher proportion to Kenya, where multi-resistant is NOT synonymous with HIV'-POSITIVE. A friend of his is treating very bad cases in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge area, and numbers are already frightening, he says. Incidence throughout U.S., amid crowded urban minority groups, said to be constantly increasing."

Or, put into the language that stock exchanges the world over understand: If the TB market performs as forecast, billions and billions of dollars are waiting to be earned, and the boy to earn them is Dypraxa — always provided, of course, that the preliminary canter over the course in Africa has not thrown up any disturbing side effects.

It is this thought that prompts Justin to return, as a matter of urgency, to the Uhuru Hospital in Nairobi. Hastening to the counting table, he again rummages in the police files and unearths six photocopied pages covered in Tessa's fever-driven scrawl as she struggles to record Wanza's case history in the language of a child.

Wanza is a single mother.

She can't read or write.

I met her in her village and again in Kibera slum. She got pregnant by her uncle who raped her and then claimed she had seduced him. This is her first pregnancy. Wanza left the village in order not to be raped again by her uncle, and also by another man who was molesting her.

Wanza says many people in her village were sick with bad coughs. Many of the men had AIDS, women too. Two pregnant women had recently died. Like Wanza, they had been visiting a medical center five miles away. Wanza did not want to use the same medical center any more. She was afraid their pills were bad. This shows that Wanza is intelligent since most native women have a blind faith in doctors, though they respect injections above pills.

In Kibera, a white man and a white woman came to see her. They wore white coats so she assumed they were doctors. They knew which village she had come from. They gave her some pills, the same pills she is taking in hospital.

Wanza says the man's name was Law-bear. I get her to say it many times. Lor-bear? Lor-beer? Lohrbear? The white woman who came with him did not speak her name but examined Wanza and took samples of her blood, urine and sputum.

They came to see her in Kibera twice more. They were not interested in other people in her hut. They told her she would be having her baby in the hospital because she was sick. Wanza was uneasy about this. Many pregnant women in Kibera are sick but they did not have their babies in hospital.

Lawbear said there would be no charges, all of the charges would be paid on her behalf. She did not ask who by. She says the man and woman were very worried. She did not like them to be so worried. She made a joke of this but they did not laugh.

Next day a car came for her. She was close to full term. It was the first time she had ridden in a car. Two days later Kioko her brother arrived at the hospital to be with her. He had heard she was in the hospital. Kioko can read and write and is very intelligent. Brother and sister love each other very much. Wanza is fifteen years old.

Kioko says that when another pregnant woman in the village was dying, the same white couple came to see her and took samples from her just as they had done with Wanza. While they were visiting the village they heard that Wanza had run away to Kibera. Kioko says they were very curious about her and asked him how to find her and wrote his instructions in a notebook. That is how the white couple found Wanza in Kibera slum and had her confined in the Uhuru for observation. Wanza is an African guinea pig, one of many who have not survived Dypraxa.

* * *

Tessa is talking to him across the breakfast table. She is seven months pregnant. Mustafa is standing where he always insists on standing, just inside the kitchen but listening at the partly opened door so that he knows exactly when to make more toast, pour more tea. Mornings are a happy time. So are evenings. But it is in the morning that conversation flows most easily.

"Justin."

"Tessa."

"Ready?"

"All attention."

"If I yelled Lorbeer at you — pow, just like that — what would you say to me?"

"Laurel."

"More."

"Laurel. Crown. Caesar. Emperor. Athlete. Victor."

"More."

"Crowned with — bay — bay leaves — laurel berry — rest on one's laurels — bloody laurels, victory won by violent war — why aren't you laughing?"

"So German?" she insists.

"German. Noun. Masculine."

"Spell it."

He did.

"Could it be Dutch?"

"I should think so. Nearly. Not the same but close, probably. Have you taken up crosswords or something?"

"Not anymore," she replies thoughtfully. And that, as quite often with Tessa the lawyer, is that. Compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.

* * *

No J, no G, no A, her notes continue. She means: Justin, Ghita and Arnold are none of them present. She is alone in the ward with Wanza.

15:23 Enter beef-faced white man and tall Slav-looking woman in white coats, Slav's open at the neck. Three other males in attendance. All wear white coats. Stolen Napoleonic bees on pockets. They go to Wanza's bedside, gawp at her.

Self: Who are you? What are you doing to her? Are you doctors?

They ignore me, stare at Wanza, listen to her breathing, check heart, pulse, temp, eyes, call "Wanza." No response.

Self: Are you Lorbeer? Who are you all? What are your names?

Slav woman: It is no concern of yours.

Exeunt.

Slav woman one tough bitch. Dyed black hair, long legs, wiggles hips, can't help it.

Like a guilty man caught in a felonious act, Justin swiftly slides Tessa's notes beneath the nearest pile of paper, springs to his feet and turns in horrified disbelief toward the oil room door. Somebody is beating on it very hard. He can see it trembling to the rhythm of the blows, and hear above the din the hectoring, horribly familiar, tenacre voice of an Englishman of the imperious class.

"Justin! Come out, dear boy! Don't hide! We know you're there! Two dear friends bring gifts and comfort!"

Frozen, Justin remains incapable of response.

"You're skulking, dear boy! You're doing a Garbo! There's no need! It's us! Beth and Adrian! Your friends!"

Justin grabs the keys from the sideboard and, like a man facing execution, steps blindly into the sunlight, to be faced by Beth and Adrian Tupper, the Greatest Writing Duo of their Age, the world famous Tuppers of Tuscany.

"Beth. Adrian. How lovely," he declares, slamming the door behind him.

Adrian seizes him by the shoulders and drops his voice dramatically. "Dear boy. Justin. Whom the gods love. Mmh? Mmh? Manliness. Only thing," he intones, all on one confiding note of commiseration. "You're alone. Don't tell me. Terribly alone." Submitting to his embraces, Justin sees his two tiny, deep-set eyes searching greedily past his shoulder.

"Oh Justin, we really did love her so," Beth mews, stretching her tiny mouth into a pitiful downward curve, then straightening it up again to kiss him.

"Where's your man Luigi?" Adrian demands.

"In Naples. With his fiancee. They're getting married. In June," Justin adds uselessly.

"Should be here supporting you. World today, dear boy. No loyalty. No servant classes."

"The big one is for darting Tessa in memory, and the little one's for poor Garth, to be beside her," Beth explains in a tinny little voice that has somehow lost its echo. "I thought we'd plant them in remembrance, didn't I, Adrian?"

In the courtyard stands their pickup, its back ostentatiously laden with rustic logs for the benefit of Adrian's readers, who are invited to believe he cuts them for himself. Tied across them lie two young peach trees with plastic bags round their roots.

"Beth has these marvelous vibes," Tupper booms confidingly. "Wavelength, dear boy. Tuned in all the time, aren't you, darling? "We must take him trees," she said. Knows, you see. Knows."

"We could plant them now, then they'd be done, wouldn't they?" says Beth.

"After lunch," says Adrian firmly.

And one simple peasants' picnic — Beth's care package, as she calls it, consisting of a loaf of bread, olives and a trout each from our smokery, darling, just the three of us, over a bottle of your nice Manzini wine.

Courteous unto death, Justin leads them to the villa.

* * *

"Can't mourn forever, dear boy. Jews don't. Seven days is all they get. After that, they're back on their feet, rarin' to go. Their law, you see, darling," Adrian explains, addressing his wife as if she were an imbecile.

They are sitting in the salon under the cherubs, eating trout off their laps in order to satisfy Beth's vision of a picnic.

"All written down for them. What to do, who does it, how long for. After that, get on with the job. Justin should do the same. No good mooching, Justin. You must never mooch in life. Too negative."

"Oh, I'm not mooching," Justin objects, cursing himself for opening a second bottle of wine.

"What are you doing then?" Tupper demands as his small round eyes drill into Justin.

"Well, Tessa left a lot of unfinished business, you see," Justin explains lamely. "Well — there's her estate, obviously. And the charitable trust she had set up. Plus odds and ends."

"Got a computer?"

You saw it! thought Justin, secretly aghast. You can't have done! I was too quick for you, I know I was!

"Most important invention since the printing press, dear boy. Isn't it, Beth? No secretary, no wife, nothing. What do you use? We resisted it to begin with, didn't you, Beth? Mistake."

"We didn't realize," Beth explains, taking a very big pull of wine for such a small woman.

"Oh, I just grabbed whatever they have here," Justin replies, recovering his balance. "Tessa's lawyers shoved a bunch of disks at me. I commandeered the estate machine and plowed through them as best I could."

"So you've finished. Time to go home. Don't dither. G. Your country needs you."

"Well, not quite finished, actually, Adrian. I've still got a few days to go."

"Foreign Office know you're here?"

"Probably," said Justin. How does Adrian do this to me? Rob me of my defenses? Pry into the private places in my life where he has absolutely no business, and I stand by and let him?

A moratorium, during which, to his immense relief, Justin is subjected to an extraordinarily boring account of how the Greatest Writing Couple in the World was converted against all natural inclination to the Net — a dress rehearsal, no doubt, for another riveting chapter of Tuscan Tales, and another free machine from the manufacturers.

"You're running away, dear boy," Adrian warns severely as the two men untie the peach trees from the truck and cart them to the cantina for Justin to plant later. "Something called duty. Old-fashioned word these days. Longer you put it off, harder it'll be. Go home. They'll welcome you with open arms."

"Why can't we plant them now?" Beth asks.

"Too emotional, darling. Let him do it on his own. God bless you, dear boy. Wavelength. Most important thing in the world."

So what were you? Justin demanded of Tupper as he stared after their departing pickup: a fluke or a conspiracy? Did you jump or were you pushed? Did the smell of blood bring you — or did Pellegrin? At various stages of Tupper's overpublicized life, he had graced the BBC and a vile British newspaper. But he had also worked in the large back rooms of secret Whitehall. Justin remembered Tessa at her naughtiest. "What do you think Adrian does with all the intelligence he doesn't put into his books?"

* * *

He returned to Wanza, only to discover that Tessa's six-page diary of her ward companion's illness petered to an unsatisfying end. Lorbeer and his team visit the ward three more times. Arnold twice challenges them, but Tessa does not hear what is said. It is not Lorbeer but the sexy Slav woman who physically examines Wanza, while Lorbeer and his acolytes look uselessly on. What happens after that happens at night while Tessa is asleep. Tessa wakes, screams and yells but no nurses come. They are too frightened. Only with the greatest difficulty does Tessa find them and force them to admit that Wanza is dead and her baby has gone back to her village.

Replacing the pages among the police papers, Justin once more addressed the computer. He felt bilious. He had drunk too much wine. His trout, which must have escaped the smoker at halftime, sat like rubber in his belly. He dabbed at a few keys, thought of going back to the villa and drinking a liter of mineral water. Suddenly he was staring at the screen in horrified disbelief. He stared away, shook his head to clear it, resumed his staring. He buried his face in his hands to wipe away the fuzziness. But when he looked again the message was still there.

THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION.

YOU MAY LOSE ANY UNSAVED DATA IN ALL WINDOWS THAT ARE RUNNING.

And below the death sentence, a row of boxes set out like coffins for a mass funeral: click the one you would most like to be buried in. He hung his hands at his sides, rolled his head around, then with his heels cautiously backed his chair away from the computer.

"Damn you, Tupper!" he whispered. "Damn you, damn you, damn you." But he meant: damn me.

It's something I did, or didn't. I should have put the wretched brute to sleep.

Guido. Get me Guido.

He looked at his watch. School ends in twenty minutes but Guido has refused to be picked up. He prefers to take the school bus like all other normal boys, thank you, and he'll ask the driver to hoot when he drops him at the gates — at which point, Justin is graciously permitted to fetch him in the jeep. There was nothing for it but to wait. If he made a dash to beat the bus, chances were he would reach the school too late and have to dash back. Leaving the computer to sulk he returned to the counting table in an attempt to restore his spirits with the hard paper he so vastly preferred to the screen.

PANA WIRE SERVICE (09-24-97)

In 1995, sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of new tuberculosis cases of any global region, as well as a high rate of TB and HIV coinfection, according to the World Health Organization…

I knew that already, thank you.

TROPICAL MEGACITIES WILL BE HELLS ON EARTH

As illegal logging, water and land pollution and unbridled oil extraction destroy the Third World's ecosystem, more and more Third World rural communities are forced to migrate to cities in search of work and survival. Experts predict the rise of tens and perhaps hundreds of tropical megacities attracting vast new slum populations of lowest-paid labor, and producing unprecedented rates of killer diseases such as tuberculosis…

He heard the honking of a distant bus.

* * *

"So you screwed up," Guido said with satisfaction, when Justin led him to the scene of the disaster. "Did you go into her mailbox?" He was already tapping the keys.

"Of course not. I wouldn't know how to. What are you doing?"

"Did you add any material and forget to save it?"

"Absolutely no. Neither, nor. I wouldn't."

"Then it's nothing. You didn't lose any," said Guido serenely in his computer interglot, and with a few more gentle taps, nursed the machine back to health. "Can we go on-line now? Please?" he begged.

"Why should we?"

"To get her mail, for Chrissakes! There's hundreds of people out there sent her e-mails every day and you won't read them. What about the people who want to send you their love and sympathy? Don't you want to know what they said? There's e-mails from me in there she never answered! Maybe she never read them!"

Guido was on the verge of tears. Taking him gently by the shoulders, Justin sat him on the stool before the keyboard.

"Tell me what the risk is," he suggested. "Give me the worst case."

"We risk nothing. Everything's saved. There isn't a worst case. We're doing the absolutely simplest things with this computer. If we crash, it's like before. I'll save any new e-mails. Tessa saved everything else. Trust me."

Guido attaches the laptop to its modem and offers Justin one end of a length of flex. "Pull out the telephone line and plug this in. Then we're all hooked up."

Justin does as he is told. Guido taps and waits. Justin is looking over his shoulder. Hieroglyphics, a window, more hieroglyphics. A pause for prayer and contemplation, followed by a full-screen message switching off and on like an illuminated sign, and an exclamation of disgust from Guido.

Hazardous Zone!!

THIS IS A HEALTH WARNING.

DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT. CLINICAL TRIALS HAVE ALREADY INDICATED THAT FURTHER RESEARCH CAN ATTRACT FATAL SIDE EFFECTS. FOR YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT YOUR HARD DISK HAS BEEN CLEANSED OF TOXIC MATTER.

For a deluded few seconds Justin has no serious concerns. He would have liked, in better circumstances, to sit down at the counting table and pen an angry letter to the manufacturers objecting to their hyperbolic style. On the other hand, Guido has just demonstrated that their bark is worse than their bite. So he is about to exclaim something like, "Oh it's them again, they really are the limit," when he sees that Guido's head has sunk into his neck as if he has been hit by a bully, and his upturned fingers have bunched like dead spiders either side of the laptop, and his face, what Justin can see of it, has returned to its pretransfusion pallor.

"Is it bad?" Justin asks softly.

Flinging himself eagerly forward like an air pilot in crisis, Guido clicks through his emergency procedures. In vain apparently, for he flings himself upright again, slaps a palm to his forehead, closes his eyes, and lets out a frightful groan.

"Just tell me what's happening," Justin pleads. "Nothing is this serious, Guido. Tell me." And when Guido still does not reply, "You've switched off. Right?"

Transfixed, Guido nods.

"And now you're unplugging the modem."

Another nod. The same transfixion.

"Why do you do this?"

"I'm rebooting."

"What does that mean?"

"We wait one minute."

"Why?"

"Maybe two."

"What will that do?"

"Give it time to forget. Settle it down. This is not natural, Justin. This is real bad." He has reverted to computer American. "This isn't a bunch of socially inadequate young males having some fun. Very sick people have done this to you, believe me."

"To me or to Tessa?"

Guido shakes his head. "It's like somebody hates you." He switches the computer on again, lifts himself on his stool, draws a long breath like a sigh in reverse. And Justin to his delight sees the familiar line of happy black kids waving at him from the screen.

"You've done it," he exclaims. "You're a genius, Guido!"

But even as he says this the kids are replaced by a jaunty little hourglass impaled by a white, diagonal arrow. Then they too disappear, leaving only a blue-black infinity.

"They killed it," Guido whispers.

"How?"

"They put a bug on you. They told the bug to wipe the hard disk clean and they left you a message telling you what they'd done."

"Then it's not your fault," says Justin earnestly.

"Did she download?"

"Whatever she printed out, I've read."

"I'm not talking printing! Did she make disks?"

"We can't find them. We think she may have taken them up north."

"What's up north? Why didn't she email them up north? Why does she have to carry disks up north? I don't read it. I don't get it."

Justin is remembering Ham and thinking of Guido. Ham's computer had a virus too.

"You said she e-mailed you a lot," he says.

"Like once a week. Twice. If she forgot one week, twice the next." He is speaking Italian. He is a child again, as lost as the day when Tessa found him.

"Have you looked at your e-mail since she was killed?"

Guido shakes his head in vigorous denial. It was too much for him. He couldn't.

"So maybe we could go back to your house, and you could see what's there. Would you mind? I'm not interfering?"

Driving up the hill and into the darkening trees, Justin thought of nothing and nobody but Guido. Guido was a wounded friend and Justin's one aim was to take him safely home to his mother, and restore his calm and make sure that from here on Guido was going to stop moping, and get on with being a healthy, arrogant little genius of twelve instead of a cripple whose life had ended with Tessa's death. And if, as he suspected, they — whoever they were — had done to Guido's computer what they had done to Ham's and Tessa's, then Guido must be consoled and, so far as it was possible, have his mind set at rest. That was Justin's sole priority, excluding all other aims and emotions, because to entertain them meant anarchy. It meant deflecting himself from the path of rational inquiry and confusing the quest for vengeance with the quest for Tessa.

He parked andwitha sense of last things put his hand under Guido's arm. And Guido, somewhat to Justin's surprise, did not shake himself free. His mother had made a stew with fresh-baked bread that she was proud of, so on Justin's insistence they ate it first, the two of them, and praised it while she kept guard over them. Then Guido fetched his computer from his bedroom and for a while they didn't go on-line, but sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of them, reading Tessa's bulletins about the sleepy lions she had seen on her travels, and the TERRIBLY playful elephants that would have sat on her jeep and squashed it if she had given them half a chance and the really DISDAINFUL giraffes who are NEVER happy unless somebody is admiring their elegant necks.

"You want a disk of all her e-mails?" Guido asked, sensing correctly that Justin had seen as much of this as he could take.

"That would be very kind," said Justin very politely. "Then I want you to make copies of your work so that I can read it at my leisure and write to you: essays, your homework and all the things you would have wanted Tessa to see."

The disks duly made, Guido replaced the telephone flex with the flex attached to the modem, and they watched a fine herd of Thomson's gazelles in full gallop before the screen went dark. But when Guido tried to click back to the desktop he was forced to declare in a husky voice that the hard disk had been wiped clean just like Tessa's, but without that crazy message about clinical trials and toxicity.

"And she didn't send you anything to keep for her," Justin asked, sounding to himself like a customs officer.

Guido shook his head.

"Nothing that you were to pass on to anyone — she didn't use you as a post office or anything like that?"

More shakes of the head.

"So what material have you lost that is important to you?"

"Only her last messages," Guido whispered.

"Well, that makes two of us." Or three if you include Ham, he was thinking. "So if I can handle it, you can. Because I was married to her. OK? Perhaps there was some bug in her machine that infected your machine. Is that possible? She picked something up and passed it on to you by mistake. Yes? I don't know what I'm talking about, do I? I'm guessing. What I'm really telling you is, we'll never know. So we might just as well say "tough luck" and get on with our lives. Both of us. Yes? And you'll order whatever you need to get yourself set up again. Yes? I'll tell the office in Milan that's what you're going to do."

Reasonably confident that Guido was restored, Justin took his leave; which was to say he drove down the hill again to the villa, and parked the jeep in the courtyard where he had found it, and from the oil room carried her laptop to the seashore. He had been told on various training courses, and he was willing to believe, that there were clever people who could retrieve the text from computers supposedly wiped clean. But such people were on the official side of life to which he no longer belonged. It crossed his mind to contact Rob and Lesley somehow and prevail on them to assist him, but he was reluctant to embarrass them. And besides, if he was honest, there was something contaminated about Tessa's computer, something obscene that he would like to be rid of in a physical sense.

By the light of a half-hidden moon, therefore, he walked the length of a rickety jetty, passing on his way an ancient and rather hysterical notice declaring that whoever ventured further did so at their peril. Having reached the jetty's end, he then consigned her raped laptop to the deep before returning to the oil room to write his heart out until dawn.

* * *

Dear Ham,

Here's the first of what I hope will be a long line of letters to your kind aunt. I don't want to appear maudlin but if I go under a bus I would like you please to hand all the documents personally to the most bloody-minded, unclubbable member of your profession, pay him the earth and start the ball rolling. That way we'll both be doing Tessa a good turn. As ever, Justin