The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Justin arrived in the little town of Bielefeld near Hanover after two unsettling days of trains. As Atkinson he checked into a modest hotel opposite the railway station, made a reconnaissance of the town and ate an undistinguished meal. Come darkness, he delivered his letter. This is what spies do all the time, he thought, as he advanced on the unlit corner house. This is the watchfulness they learn from their cradles. This is how they cross a dark street, scan doorways, turn a corner: Are you waiting for me? Have I seen you somewhere before? But no sooner had he posted the letter than his common sense was taking him to task: forget the spies, idiot, you could have sent the damn thing round by taxi. And now by daylight, as he advanced on the corner house a second time, he was punishing himself with different fears: Are they watching it? Did they see me last night? Do they plan to arrest me as I arrive? Has someone phoned the Telegraph and discovered that I don't exist?

On the train journey he had slept little, and last night in the hotel not at all. He traveled with no bulky papers anymore, no canvas suitcases, laptops or attachments. Whatever needed to be preserved had gone to Ham's draconian aunt in Milan. What didn't, lay two fathoms deep on a Mediterranean seabed. Freed of his burden, he moved with a symbolic lightness. Sharper lines defined his features. A stronger light burned behind his eyes. And Justin felt this of himself. He was gratified that Tessa's mission was henceforth his own.

The corner house was a turreted German castle on five floors. The ground floor was daubed in jungle stripes which by daylight revealed themselves as parrot green and orange. Last night under the sodium lighting they had resembled flames of sickly black and white. From an upper floor a mural of brave children of all races grinned at him, recalling the waving children of Tessa's laptop. They were replicated live in a window on the ground floor, seated in a ring round a harassed woman teacher. A handmade display in the window next to them asked how chocolate grew, and offered curling photographs of cocoa beans.

Feigning disinterest, Justin first walked past the building, then turned abruptly left and sauntered up the pavement, pausing to study the nameplates of fringe medics and psychologists. In a civilized country you can never tell. A police car rolled by, tires crackling in the rain. Its occupants, one a woman, eyed him without expression. Across the street two old men in black raincoats and black homburg hats seemed to be waiting for a funeral. The window behind them was curtained. Three women on push-bikes glided toward him down the hill. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed the Palestinian cause. He returned to the painted castle and stood before the front door. A green hippo was painted on it. A smaller green hippo marked the doorbell. An ornate bay window like a ship's prow peered down on him. He had stood here last night to post his letter. Who peered down on me then? The harassed teacher in the window gestured to him to use the other door but it was closed and barred. He gestured his contrition in return.

"They should have left it open," she hissed at him, unappeased, when she had slid the bolts and hauled back the door.

Justin again apologized and trod delicately between the children, wishing them "gruss Dich" and "guten Tag," but his alertness put limits on his once-infinite courtesy. He climbed a staircase past bicycles and a perambulator, and entered a hall that to his wary eye seemed to have been reduced to life's necessities: a water fountain, a photocopier, bare shelves, piles of reference books and cardboard boxes stacked in piles on the floor. Through an open doorway he saw a young woman in horn-rimmed spectacles and a rollneck sitting before a screen.

"I'm Atkinson," he told her in English. "Peter Atkinson. I have an appointment with Birgit from Hippo."

"Why didn't you telephone?"

"I got into town late last night. I thought a note was best. Can she see me?"

"I don't know. Ask her."

He followed her down a short corridor to a pair of double doors. She pushed one open.

"Your journalist's here," she announced in German, as if "journalist" were synonymous with illicit lover, and strode back to her quarters.

Birgit was small and springy with pink cheeks and blonde hair and the stance of a cheerful pugilist. Her smile was quick and compelling. Her room was as sparse as the hall, with the same vague air of self-deprival.

"We have our conference at ten," she explained a little breathlessly as she grasped his hand. She was speaking the English of her e-mails. He let her. Mr. Atkinson did not need to make himself conspicuous by speaking German.

"You like tea?"

"Thanks. I'm fine."

She pulled two chairs to a low table and sat in one. "If it's about the burglary, we have really nothing to say," she warned him.

"What burglary?"

"It is not important. A few things were taken. Maybe we had too many possessions. Now we don't."

"When was this?"

She shrugged. "Long ago. Last week."

Justin pulled a notebook from his pocket and, Lesley-style, opened it on his knee. "It's about the work you do here," he said. "My paper is planning a series of articles on drug companies and the Third World. We're calling it "Merchants of Medicine." How the Third World countries have no consumer power. How big diseases are in one place, big profits in another." He had prepared himself to sound like a journalist but wasn't sure he was succeeding. ""The poor can't pay, so they die. How much longer can this go on? We seem to have the means, but not the will." That kind of thing."

To his surprise she was smiling broadly. "You want me to give you the answer to these simple questions before ten o'clock?"

"If you could just tell me what Hippo does, exactly — who finances you — what your remit is, as it were," he said severely.

She was talking, and he was writing in the notebook on his knee. She was giving him what he supposed was her party piece and he was pretending his hardest to listen while he wrote. He was thinking that this woman had been Tessa's friend and ally without meeting her, and that if they had met, both would have congratulated themselves on their choice. He was thinking that there can be a lot of reasons for a burglary and one of them is to provide cover to anyone installing the devices that produce what the Foreign Office is pleased to call Special Product, for mature eyes only. He was remembering his security training again, and the group visit to a macabre laboratory in a basement behind Carlton Gardens where students could admire for themselves the newest cute places for planting subminiature listening devices. Gone the flowerpots, lamp stands, ceiling roses, moldings and picture frames, enter pretty well anything you could think of from the stapler on Birgit's desk to her Sherpa jacket hanging from the door.

He had written what he wanted to write and she had apparently said what she wanted to say, because she was standing up and peering into a stack of pamphlets on a bookshelf, looking for some background reading she could give him as a prelude to getting him out of her office in time for her ten o'clock conference. While she hunted she talked distractedly about the German Federal Drug Agency and declared it to be a paper tiger. And the World Health Organization gets its money from America, she added with disdain — which means it favors big corporations, reveres profit and doesn't like radical decisions.

"Go to any WHO assembly — what do you see?" she asked rhetorically, handing him a bunch of pamphlets. "Lobbyists. PR people from the big pharmas. Dozens of them. From one big pharma, maybe three or four. "Come to lunch. Come to our weekend get-together. Have you read this wonderful paper by Professor So-and So?"' And the Third World is not sophisticated. They have no money, they are not experienced. With diplomatic language and maneuvering, the lobbyists can get behind them easy."

She had stopped speaking and was frowning at him. Justin was holding up his open notebook for her to read. He was holding it close to his face so that she could see his expression while she read his message; and his expression, he hoped, was quelling and reassuring at the same time. In support of it he had extended the forefinger of his free left hand by way of warning.

I AM TESSA QUAYLE'S HUSBAND AND I DO NOT TRUST THESE WALLS. CAN YOU MEET ME THIS EVENING AT FIVE-THIRTY IN FRONT OF THE OLD FORT?

She read the message, she looked past his raised finger at his eyes and kept looking at them while he filled the silence with the first thing that came into his head.

"So are you saying that what we need is some kind of independent world body that has the power to override these companies?" he demanded, with unintentional aggression. "Cut down their influence?"

"Yes," she replied, perfectly calmly. "I think that would be an excellent idea."

He walked past the woman in the rollneck and gave her the kind of cheery wave he thought appropriate to a journalist. "All done," he assured her. "Just off. Thank you for your cooperation" — so there's no need to telephone the police and tell them you have an impostor on the premises.

He tiptoed through the classroom and tried once more to woo a smile from the harassed teacher. "For the last time," he promised her. But the only people who smiled were the kids.

In the street the two old men in raincoats and black hats were still waiting for the funeral. At the curbside two stern young women sat in an Audi saloon, studying a map.

He returned to his hotel and on a whim inquired at the desk whether he had mail. No mail. Reaching his room, he tore the offending page from his notebook, then the page beneath it because the imprint had come through. He burned them in the hand basin and put on the extractor to get rid of the smoke. He lay on his bed wondering what spies did to kill time. He dozed and was woken by his phone. He lifted the receiver and remembered to say, "Atkinson." It was the housekeeper, "checking," she said. Excuse her, please. Checking what, for God's sake? But spies don't ask those questions aloud. They don't make themselves conspicuous. Spies lie on white beds in gray towns and wait.

* * *

Bielefeld's old fort stood on a high green mound overlooking cloud-laden hills. Car parks, picnic benches and municipal gardens were laid out among the ivy-covered ramparts. In warmer months it was a favored spot for the townspeople to perambulate down tree-lined avenues, admire the regiments of flowers and eat beery lunches in the Huntsman's Restaurant. But in the gray months the place had the air of a deserted playground in the clouds, which was how it looked to Justin this evening as he paid off his taxi and, early by twenty minutes, made what he hoped was a casual reconnaissance of his chosen rendezvous. The empty car parks, sculpted into the battlements, were pitted with rainwater. From sodden lawns, rusted signs warned him to control his dog. On a bench beneath the battlements, two veterans in scarves and overcoats sat bolt upright, observing him. Were they the same two old men who had worn black homburg hats this morning while they waited for the funeral? Why do they stare at me like this? Am I Jewish? Am I a Pole? How long before your Germany becomes just another boring European country?

One road only led to the fort and he strolled along it, keeping at the crown in order to avoid the trenches of fallen leaves. When she arrives I'll wait till she parks before I speak to her, he decided. Cars too have ears. But Birgit's car had no ears because it was a bicycle. At first sight she resembled some kind of ghostly horsewoman, urging her reluctant steed over the brow of the hill while her plastic cape filled behind her. Her fluorescent harness resembled a Crusader's cross. Slowly the apparition became flesh, and she was neither a winged seraph nor a breathless messenger from the battle, but a young mother in a cape riding a bicycle. And from the cape protruded not one head but two, the second belonging to her jolly blond son, strapped into a child's pillion seat behind her — and measuring, to Justin's inexpert eye, about eighteen months on the Richter scale.

And the sight of them both was so entirely pleasant to him, and so incongruous, and appealing, that for the first time since Tessa's death he broke out in real, rich, unrestrained laughter.

"But at such short notice, how should I get a baby-sitter?" Birgit demanded, offended by his mirth.

"You shouldn't, you shouldn't! It doesn't matter, it's wonderful. What's his name?"

"Carl. What's yours?"

Carl sends his love… The elephant mobile you sent Carl drives him completely crazy… I hope very much your baby will be as beautiful as Carl.

He showed her his Quayle passport. She examined it, name, age, photograph, shooting frank looks at him between.

"You told her she was waghalsig," he said, and watched her frown become a smile as she hauled off her cape and wound it up and gave him the bike to hold so that she could unbuckle Carl from his seat. And having released Carl and set him on the road, she unstrapped a saddlebag and turned her back to Justin so that he could load up the backpack she was wearing: Carl's bottle, a packet of Knackebrot, spare nappies and two ham and cheese baguettes wrapped in greaseproof paper.

"You have eaten today, Justin?"

"Not much."

"S. We can eat. Then we shall not be so nervous. Carlchen, du machst das bitte nicht. We can walk. Carl will walk forever."

Nervous? Who's nervous? Affecting to undertake a study of the menacing rain clouds, Justin swung himself slowly round on his heel, head in air. They were still there, two old sentries sitting to attention.

* * *

"I don't know how much stuff actually went missing," Justin complained, when he had told her the story of Tessa's laptop. "I had the impression there was a lot more correspondence between the two of you that she hadn't printed out."

"You did not read about Emrich?"

"That she had emigrated to Canada. But she was still working for KVH."

"You do not know what her position is now — her problem?"

"She quarreled with Kovacs."

"Kovacs is nothing. Emrich has quarreled with KVH."

"What on earth about?"

"Dypraxa. She believes she has identified certain very negative side effects. KVH believes she has not."

"What have they done about it?" asked Justin.

"So far they have only destroyed her reputation and her career."

"That's all."

"That's all."

They walked without speaking for a while, with Carl stalking out ahead of them, diving for decaying horse chestnuts and having to be restrained before he put them in his mouth. Evening fog had formed a sea across the rolling hills, making islands of their rounded tops.

"When did this happen?"

"It is happening still. She has been dismissed by KVH and dismissed again by the Regents of Dawes University in Saskatchewan and the governing body of the Dawes University Hospital. She tried to publish an article in a medical journal concerning her conclusions regarding Dypraxa but her contract with KVH had a confidentiality clause, therefore they suited her and suited the magazine and no copies were allowed."

"Sued. Not suited. Sued."

"It's the same."

"And you told Tessa about this? She must have been thrilled."

"Sure. I told her."

"When?"

Birgit shrugged. "Maybe three weeks ago. Maybe two. Our correspondence has also disappeared."

"You mean they crashed your computer?"

"It was stolen. In our burglary. I had not downloaded her letters and I had not printed them. So."

So, Justin agreed silently. "Any idea who took it?"

"Nobody took it. With corporations it is always nobody. The big boss calls in the sub-boss, the sub-boss calls in his lieutenant, the lieutenant speaks to the chef of corporate security who speaks to the sub-chef who speaks to his friends who speak to their friends. And so it is done. Not by the boss or the sub-boss or the lieutenant or the sub-chef. Not by the corporation. Not by anybody at all, actually. But still it is done. There are no papers, no checks, no contracts. Nobody knows anything. Nobody was there. But it is done."

"What about the police?"

"Oh, our police are most industrious. If we have lost a computer, tell the insurance company and buy a new one, don't come bothering the police. Did you meet Wanza?"

"Only in hospital. She was already very ill. Did Tessa write to you about Wanza?"

"That she was poisoned. That Lorbeer and Kovacs had come to visit her in the hospital and that Wanza's baby survived, but Wanza did not. That the drug killed her. Maybe a combination killed her. Maybe she was too thin, not enough body fat to handle the drug. Maybe if they had given her less, she would have lived. Maybe KVH will fix the pharmacokinetics before they sell it in America."

"She said that? Tessa did?"

"Sure. "Wanza was just another guinea pig. I loved her, they killed her. Tessa.""

Justin was already protesting. For heaven's sake, Birgit, what about Emrich? If Emrich, as one of the discoverers of the drug, has declared it unsafe, then surely- Birgit cut him short. "Emrich exaggerates. Ask Kovacs. Ask KVH. The contribution of Lara Emrich to the discovery of the Dypraxa molecule was completely minimal. Kovacs was the genius, Emrich was her laboratory assistant, Lorbeer was their Svengali. Naturally because Emrich was also the lover of Lorbeer, her importance has been made bigger than the reality."

"Where's Lorbeer now?"

"It is not known. Emrich doesn't know, KVH doesn't know — says it doesn't — for the last five months he has been completely invisible. Maybe they killed him also."

"Where's Kovacs?"

"She is traveling. She is traveling so much that KVH can never tell us where she is or where she will be. Last week she was in Haiti, maybe, three weeks ago she was in Buenos Aires or Timbuktu. But where she will be tomorrow or next week is a mystery. Her home address is naturally confidential, her telephone also."

Carl was hungry. One minute he was placidly trailing a piece of twig through a puddle, the next he was yelling blue murder for food. They sat on a bench while Birgit fed him from the bottle.

"If you were not here he would feed himself," she said proudly. "He would walk along like a little drunkard with the bottle in his mouth. But now he has an uncle to watch him, so he requires your attention." Something in what she said reminded her of Justin's grief. "I am so sorry, Justin," she murmured. "How can I say it?" But so swiftly and softly that for once it was not necessary for him to say "thank you" or "yes, it's terrible" or "you're very kind" or any other of the meaningless phrases he had learned to mouth when people felt obliged to say the unsayable.

* * *

They were walking again and Birgit was reliving the burglary.

"I arrived at the office in the morning — my colleague Roland is at a conference in Rio — it is otherwise a normal day. The doors are locked, I must unlock them as usual. At first I notice nothing. That is the point. What burglar locks doors behind him when he leaves? The police asked us this question also. But our doors were locked without question. The place is not tidy, but that is normal. In Hippo we clean our own rooms. We cannot afford to pay a cleaner and sometimes we are too busy or too lazy to clean for ourselves."

Three women on push-bikes rode solemnly by, circled the car park and returned, passing them on their way down the hill. Justin remembered the three women cyclists of this morning.

"I go to check the telephone. We have an answering machine at Hippo. A normal hundred-mark affair, but a hundred marks nevertheless, and nobody has taken it. We have correspondents all over the world, so we must have an answering machine. The tape is missing. Oh shit, I think, who took the stupid tape? I go to the other office to look for a new tape. The computer is missing. Oh shit, I think, who is the idiot who has moved the computer and where did they put it? It's a big computer on two stories but to move it is not impossible, it has wheels. We have a new girl, a trainee lawyer, a great girl actually but new. "Beate, darling," I say, "where the hell is our computer?"' Then we start to look. Computer. Tapes. Disks. Papers. Files. Missing and the doors locked. They take nothing else of value. Not the money in the money box, not the coffee machine or the radio or the television or the empty tape recorder. They are not drug addicts. They are not professional thieves. And to the police they are not criminals. Why should criminals lock doors? Maybe you know why."

"To tell us," Justin replied after a long pause.

"Please? To tell us what? I don't understand."

"They locked the doors on Tessa too."

"Explain, please. What doors?"

"Of the jeep. When they killed her. They locked the jeep doors so that the hyenas wouldn't take away the bodies."

"Why?"

"They were telling us to be afraid. That's the message they put on Tessa's laptop. To her or to me. "Be warned. Don't go on with what you're doing." They sent her a death threat too. I only found out about it a few days ago. She never told me."

"Then she was brave," said Birgit.

She remembered the baguettes. They sat on another bench and ate them while Carl munched a rusk and sang, and the two old sentries marched sightlessly past them down the hill.

"Was there a pattern to what they took? Or was it wholesale?"

"It was wholesale, but there was also a pattern. Roland says there was no pattern, but Roland is relaxed. He is always relaxed. He is like an athlete whose heart beats at half the normal speed so that he can run faster than anyone else. But only when he wishes. When it is useful to go fast he goes fast. When nothing can be done he stays in bed."

"What was the pattern?" he asked.

She has Tessa's frown, he noticed. It is the frown of professional discretion. As with Tessa, he made no effort to break through her silence.

"How did you translate waghalsig?" she demanded at length.

"Reckless, I think. Daredevilish, perhaps. Why?"

"Then I too was waghalsig," said Birgit.

Carl wanted to be carried, which she said was unheard of. Justin could safely insist on shouldering the burden. There was business while she unbuckled her backpack and extended the straps for him and — only when she was satisfied with the fit-lifted Carl into it and exhorted him to be well behaved with his new uncle.

"I was worse than waghalsig. I was a full idiot." She bit her lip, hating herself for what she had to tell. "We had a letter brought to us. Last week. Thursday. It came by courier from Nairobi. Not a letter, a document. Seventy pages. About Dypraxa. Its history and its aspects and its side effects. Positive and negative, but mostly negative in view of the fatalities and side effects. It was not signed. It was in all scientific respects objective, but in other respects a little bit crazy. Addressed to Hippo, not to anyone by name. Just Hippo. To the Lords and Ladies of Hippo."

"In English?"

"English but not written by an Englishman, I think. Typed, so we do not know the handwriting. It contained many references to God. You are religious?"

"No."

"But Lorbeer is religious."

* * *

The drizzle had turned to occasional fat spots of rain. Birgit was sitting on a bench. They had come upon a scaffold of children's swings fitted with crossbars across the seats to keep them safe. Carl needed to be lifted into one and pushed. He was fighting sleep. A catlike softness had descended over him. His eyes were half closed and he was smiling while Justin pushed him with obsessive caution. A white Mercedes with Hamburg registration plates came slowly up the hill, passed them, made a circle in the flooded car park and came slowly back. One male driver, one male passenger beside him. Justin remembered the two women in the parked Audi this morning as he stepped into the street. The Mercedes drove back down the hill.

"Tessa said you speak all languages," Birgit said.

"That doesn't mean I have anything to say in them. Why were you waghalsig?"

"You will please call it stupid."

"Why were you stupid?"

"I was stupid because when the courier delivered the document from Nairobi, I was excited and I telephoned to Lara Emrich in Saskatchewan and I told her, "Lara darling, listen, we have received a long, anonymous, very mystical, very crazy, very authentic history of Dypraxa, no address, no date, from somebody who I think is Markus Lorbeer. It tells about the fatalities of the drug combination and it will greatly help your case." I was so happy because the document is actually called after her name. It is titled "Dr. Lara Emrich is right." "It is crazy," I told her, "but it is fierce like a political statement. Also very polemical, very religious, and very destructive of Lorbeer." "Then it is by Lorbeer," she says. "Markus is whipping himself. It is normal.""

"Have you met Emrich? Do you know her?"

"As I knew Tessa. By e-mail. So we are e-friends. In the paper it said Lorbeer was six years in Russia, two years under old Communism, four years under the new chaos. I tell this to Lara who knows it already. According to the paper, Lorbeer was the agent for certain Western pharmas, lobbying Russian health officials, selling them Western drugs, I tell her. According to the paper, in six years he had dealings with eight different health ministers. The paper provides a saying regarding this period and I am about to tell it to Lara when she interrupts me and tells me what the saying is, exactly as it stands in the document. "The Russian health ministers arrived in a Lada and left in a Mercedes." It is a favorite joke of Lorbeer's, she tells me. This confirms for both of us that Lorbeer is the writer of the document. It is his masochistic confession. Also from Lara I learn that Lorbeer's father was a German Lutheran, very Calvinistic, very strict, which accounts for his son's morbid religious conceptions and his desire to confess. Do you know medicine? Chemistry? A little biology perhaps?"

"My education was a little too expensive for that, I'm afraid."

"Lorbeer claims in his confession that while acting for KVH he obtained the validation of Dypraxa by means of flattery and bribery. He describes buying health officials, fast-tracking clinical trials, purchasing drug registrations and import licenses and feeding every bureaucratic hand in the food chain. In Moscow, a validation by top medical opinion leaders could be bought for twenty-five thousand dollars. So he writes. The problem is that when you bribe one you must also bribe those you do not select, otherwise they will denigrate the molecule out of envy or resentment. In Poland it was not so different, but less expensive. In Germany, influence was more subtle but not very subtle. Lorbeer writes of a famous occasion when he chartered a jumbo jet for KVH and flew eighty eminent German physicians to Thailand for an educational trip." She was smiling as she related this. "Their education was provided on the journey out, in the form of films and lectures, also Beluga caviar and extremely ancient brandies and whiskies. Everything must be of the finest quality, he writes, because the good doctors of Germany have been spoiled early. Champagne is no longer interesting to them. In Thailand, the physicians were free to do as they wished, but recreation was provided for those who wanted it, also attractive partners. Lorbeer personally organized a helicopter to drop orchids on a certain beach where the physicians and their partners were relaxing. On the flight home, no further education was needed. The physicians were educated out. All they had to remember was how to write their prescriptions and learned articles."

But although she was laughing she was uneasy with this story, and needed to correct its impact.

"This does not signify that Dypraxa is a bad drug, Justin. Dypraxa is a very good drug that has not completed its trials. Not all doctors can be seduced, not all pharmaceutical companies are careless and greedy."

She paused, aware that she was speaking too much, but Justin made no attempt to deflect her.

"The modern pharmaceutical industry is only sixty-five years old. It has good men and women, it has achieved human and social miracles, but its collective conscience is not developed. Lorbeer writes that the pharmas turned their backs on God. He has many biblical references I do not understand. Perhaps that is because I do not understand God."

Carl had gone to sleep on the swing, so Justin lifted him out and, with his hand on his hot back, walked him softly up and down the tarmac.

"You were telling me how you telephoned Lara Emrich," Justin reminded her.

"Yes, but I distracted myself deliberately because I am embarrassed that I was stupid. Are you comfortable or shall I take him?"

"I'm fine."

The white Mercedes had stopped at the bottom of the hill. The two men were still sitting inside it.

"In Hippo we have assumed for years that our telephones are listened to, we have a certain pride about this. From time to time our mail is censored. We send ourselves letters and watch them come to us late and in a different condition. We have often fantasized about planting misleading information on the Organy."

"The what?"

"It is Lara's word. It is a Russian word from Soviet times. It means the organs of state."

"I shall adopt it immediately."

"So maybe the Organy listened to us laughing and rejoicing on the telephone when I promised Lara I would send her a copy of the document to Canada immediately. Lara said unfortunately she does not possess a fax machine because she has spent her money on lawyers and is not permitted to enter the hospital precincts. If she had possessed a fax machine, maybe there would be no problem today. She would have a copy of Lorbeer's confession, even if we did not. Everything would be saved. Maybe. Everything is maybe. Nothing has a proof."

"What about e-mail?"

"She has no e-mail anymore. Her computer had a cardiac arrest on the day after she attempted to publish her article, and it has not recovered."

She sat pink and stoical in her vexation.

"And therefore?" Justin prompted her.

"Therefore we have no document. They stole it when they stole the computer and the files and the tapes. I telephoned to Lara in the evening, five o'clock German time. Our conversation finished at maybe five-forty. She was emotional, very happy. I also. "Wait till Kovacs hears about this," she kept saying. So we talked a long time and laughed and I did not think to make a copy of Lorbeer's confession until tomorrow. I put the document in our safe and locked it. It's not an enormous safe but it is considerable. The burglars had a key. As they locked our doors when they left, so they locked our safe after they had stolen our document. When one considers these things they are obvious. Until then they do not exist. What does a giant do when he wants a key? He tells his little people to find out what safe we have, then he phones the giant who made the safe and asks him to have his little people make a key. In the world of giants, this is normal."

The white Mercedes hadn't moved. Perhaps that too was normal.

* * *

They have found a tin shelter. Rows of folded deck chairs stand chained like prisoners to either side of them. The rain rattles and pings on the tin roof and runs in rivulets at their feet. Carl has returned to his mother. He lies sleeping on her breast with his head tucked into her shoulder. She has unfolded a parasol and is holding it over him. Justin sits apart from them on the bench, hands linked between his knees in prayer and his head bowed over his hands. This is what I resented about Garth's death, he remembers. Garth deprived me of my further education.

"Lorbeer was writing a roman," she says.

"Novel."

"Roman is a novel?"

"Yes."

"Then this novel has the happy end at the beginning. Once upon a time there are two beautiful young woman doctors called Emrich and Kovacs. They are interns at Leipzig University in East Germany. The university has a big hospital. They are researching under the guidance of wise professors and they dream one day they will make a great discovery that will save the world. Nobody speaks of the god Profit, unless it is profit to mankind. At Leipzig Hospital there are arriving many returning Russian Germans from Siberia and they have TB. In the Soviet prison camps the prevalence of TB was very high. All the patients are poor, all are sick and without defenses, most have multi-resistant strains, many are dying. They will sign anything, they will try anything, they will not make trouble. So it is natural that the two young doctors have been isolating bacteria and experimenting with embryonic remedies for TB. They have tested with animals, maybe they tested also with medical students and other interns. Medical students have no money. They will be doctors one day, they are interested in the process. And in charge of their researches we have an Oberarzt — "

"Senior doctor."

"The team is led by an Oberarzt who is enthusiastic for the experiments. All the team wants his admiration so all take part in the experiments. Nobody is evil, nobody is criminal. They are young dreamers, they have a sexy subject to analyze and the patients are desperate. Why not?"

"Why not?" Justin murmurs.

"And Kovacs has a boyfriend. Kovacs has always a boyfriend. Many boyfriends. This boyfriend is a Pole, a good fellow. Married, but never mind. And he has a laboratory. A small, efficient, intelligent laboratory in Gdansk. For love of Kovacs, the Pole tells her she can come and play in his laboratory whenever she has free time. She can bring whom she wants, so she brings her beautiful friend and colleague Emrich. Kovacs and Emrich research, Kovacs and the Pole make love, everyone is happy, nobody talks about the god Profit. These young people are looking only for honor and glory and maybe a bit promotion. And their studies produce positive results. Patients still die but they were dying anyway. And some live who would have died. Kovacs and Emrich are proud. They write articles for medical magazines. Their professor writes articles supporting them. Other professors support the professor, everyone is happy, everyone congratulates his neighbor, there are no enemies, or not yet."

Carl shuffles on her shoulder. She pats his back and blows softly on his ear. He smiles and goes back to sleep.

"Emrich also has a lover. She has a husband whose name is Emrich but he is not satisfactory, this is Eastern Europe, everyone has been married to everyone. Her lover's name is Markus Lorbeer. He has a South African birth certificate, a German father and a Dutch mother and he is living in Moscow as a pharma agent, self-employed, but also as — as an entrepreneur who identifies interesting possibilities in the field of biotechnology and exploits them."

"Talent spotter."

"He is older than Lara by maybe fifteen years, he has swum in all the oceans, as we say, he is a dreamer as she is. He loves science, but never became a scientist. He loves medicine but is not a doctor. He loves God and the whole world, but he also loves hard currency and the god Profit. So he writes: "The young Lorbeer is a believer, he worships the Christian God, he worships women, but he worships also very much the god Profit." That is his downfall. He believes in God but ignores Him. Personally I reject this attitude but never mind. For a humanist, God is an excuse for not being humanistic. We shall be humanistic in the afterlife, meanwhile we make Profit. Never mind. "Lorbeer took God's gift of wisdom" — I guess he means by this the molecule — "and sold it to the devil." I guess he means KVH. Then he writes that when Tessa came to see him in the desert, he told her the full extent of his sin."

Justin sits up sharply.

"He says that? He told Tessa? When? In the hospital? Where did she come to see him? What desert? What on earth is he saying?"

"Like I told you, the document is a little crazy. He calls her the Abbott. "When the Abbott came to visit Lorbeer in the desert, Lorbeer wept." Maybe it is a dream, a fable. Lorbeer has become a penitent in the desert now. He is Elijah or Christ, I don't know. It's disgusting actually. "The Abbott called Lorbeer to account before God. Therefore at this meeting in the desert, Lorbeer explained to the Abbott the inmost nature of his sins." This is what he writes. His sins were evidently many. I don't remember them all. There was the sin of self-delusion and the sin of false argument. Then comes the sin of pride, I think. Followed by the sin of cowardice. For this he does not excuse himself at all, which makes me happy actually. But probably he is happy too. Lara says he is only happy when he is confessing or making love."

"He wrote all this in English?"

She nodded. "One paragraph he wrote like the English Bible, the next paragraph he was giving extremely technical data about the deliberately specious design of the clinical trials, the disputes between Kovacs and Emrich and the problems of Dypraxa when combined with other drugs. Only a very informed person could know such details. This Lorbeer I greatly prefer to the Lorbeer of heaven and hell, I will admit to you."

"Abbott with a small A?"

"Large. "The Abbott recorded everything I told her." But there was another sin. He killed her."

Waiting, Justin fixed his gaze on the recumbent Carl.

"Maybe not directly, he is ambiguous. "Lorbeer killed her with his treachery. He committed the sin of Judas, therefore he cut her throat with his bare hands and nailed Bluhm to the tree." When I was reading out these words to Lara, I asked her: "Lara. Is Markus saying that he killed Tessa Quayle?"'"

"How did she reply?"

"Markus could not kill his worst enemy. That is his agony, she says. To be a bad man with a good conscience. She is Russian, very depressed."

"But if he killed Tessa, he's not a good man, is he?"

"Lara swears it would be impossible. Lara has many letters from him. She can only love hopelessly. She has heard many confessions from him, but not this one, naturally. Markus is very proud of his sins, she says. But he is vain and exaggerates them. He is complicated, maybe a bit psychotic, which is why she loves him."

"But she doesn't know where he is?"

"No."

Justin's straight, unseeing stare had fixed on the deceptive twilight. "Judas didn't kill anyone," he objected. "Judas betrayed."

"But the effect was the same. Judas killed with his treachery."

Another long contemplation of the twilight. "There's a missing character. If Lorbeer betrayed Tessa, who did he betray her to?"

"It was not clear. Maybe the Forces of Darkness. I have only what is in my memory."

"The Forces of Darkness?"

"In the letter he talked of the Forces of Darkness. I hate this terminology. Does he mean KVH? Maybe he knows other forces."

"Did the document mention Arnold?"

"The Abbott had a guide. In the document he is the Saint. The Saint had called out to Lorbeer in the hospital and told him the drug Dypraxa was an instrument of death. The Saint was more cautious than the Abbott because he is a doctor, and more tolerant because he has experience of human wickedness. But the greatest truth is with Emrich. Of this Lorbeer is certain. Emrich knows everything, therefore she is not allowed to speak. The Forces of Darkness are determined to repress the truth. That is why the Abbott had to be killed and the Saint crucified."

"Crucified? Arnold?"

"In Lorbeer's fable the Forces of Darkness dragged Bluhm away and nailed him to a tree."

They fell silent, both in some way ashamed.

"Lara says also that Lorbeer drinks like a Russian," she added, in some kind of mitigation, but Justin was not to be deflected.

"He writes from the desert but he uses a courier service out of Nairobi," he objected.

"The address was typed, the waybill was written by hand, the package was dispatched from the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi. The sender's name was difficult to read but I think it was McKenzie. Is that Scottish? If the package could not be delivered it should not be returned to Kenya. It should be destroyed."

"The waybill had a number, presumably."

"The waybill was attached to the envelope. When I put the document in the safe for the night I first put it back in the envelope. Naturally the envelope has also disappeared."

"Get back to the courier service. They'll have a copy."

"The courier service has no record of the package. Not in Nairobi, not in Hanover."

"How do I find her?"

"Lara?"

The rain clattered on the tin roof and the orange lights of the city swelled and dwindled in the mist while Birgit tore a sheet of paper from her diary and wrote out a long telephone number.

"She has a house but not for much longer. Otherwise you must inquire at the university, but you must take care because they hate her."

"Was Lorbeer sleeping with Kovacs as well as Emrich?"

"For Lorbeer it would not be unusual. But I believe the quarrel between the women was not about sex but about the molecule." She paused, following his gaze. He was staring into the distance, but there was nothing to see but the far hilltops poking through the mist. "Tessa wrote often that she loved you," she said quietly to his averted face. "Not directly, that was not necessary. She said you were a man of honor and when it was necessary you would be honorable."

She was preparing to leave. He passed her the backpack and between them they strapped Carl into his baby pillion and fixed the plastic cape so that his sleepy head popped through the hole. She stood squat before him.

"So then," she said. "You walk?"

"I walk."

She pulled an envelope from inside her jacket.

"This is all I remember of Lorbeer's novel. I wrote it down for you. My handwriting is very bad but you will decipher it."

"You're very kind." He stuffed the envelope inside his raincoat.

"So have good walking then," she said.

She was going to shake his hand but changed her mind and kissed him on the mouth: one stern, deliberate, necessarily clumsy kiss of affection and farewell while she held the bicycle steady. Then Justin held the bicycle while she buckled her shell helmet under her chin before swinging into the saddle and pedaling away down the hill.

* * *

I walk.

He walked, keeping to the center of the road, one eye for the darkening rhododendron bushes either side of him. Sodium lights burned every fifty meters. He scanned the lack patches between. The night air smelled of apples. He reached the bottom of the hill and approached the parked Mercedes, passing ten yards from its bonnet. No light inside the car. Two men were sitting in the front, but to judge by their motionless silhouettes they were not the same two who had driven up the hill and down again. He kept walking and the car overtook him. He ignored it, but in his imagination the men were not ignoring him. The Mercedes reached a crossroads and turned left. Justin turned right, heading for the glow of the town. A taxi passed and the driver called out to him.

"Thank you, thank you," he called back expansively, "but I prefer to walk."

There was no answering call. He was on a pavement now, keeping to the outer edge.

He made another crossing and entered a brightly lit side street. Dead-eyed young men and women crouched in doorways. Men in leather jackets stood on corners, elbows lifted, talking into cell phones. He made two more crossings and saw his hotel ahead of him.

The lobby was in the usual inescapable evening turmoil. A Japanese delegation was checking in, cameras were flashing, porters piling costly luggage into the only lift. Taking his place in the queue he pulled off his raincoat and slung it over his arm, favoring Birgit's envelope in the inside pocket. The lift descended, he stood back to let the women get in first. He rode to the third floor and was the only one to get out. The vile corridor with its sallow strip-lighting reminded him of the Uhuru Hospital. Television sets blared from every room. His own room was 311 and the door key was a piece of flat plastic with a black arrow printed on it. The din of competing television sets was infuriating him and he had a good mind to complain to somebody. How can I write to Ham with this din going on? He stepped into his room, laid his raincoat over a chair and saw that his own television set was the culprit. The chambermaids must have turned it on while they made up the room, and not bothered to turn it off when they left. He advanced on the set. It was showing the kind of program he particularly detested. A half-dressed singer was howling at full volume into a microphone to the delight of an ecstatic juvenile audience while illuminated snow wandered down the screen.

And that was the last thing Justin saw as the lights went out: snowflakes of light falling down his screen. A blackness descended over him, and he felt himself being punched and suffocated at the same time. Human arms clamped his own arms to his sides, a ball of coarse cloth was stuffed into his mouth. His legs were seized in a rugger tackle and crumpled under him and he decided he was having a heart attack. His theory was confirmed when a second blow crushed his stomach and knocked the last of the wind out of him, because when he tried to yell nothing happened, he had no voice or breath and the ball of cloth was gagging him.

He felt knees on his chest. Something was being tightened round his neck, he thought a noose, and he assumed he was going to be hanged. He had a clear vision of Bluhm nailed to a tree. He smelled male body lotion and had a memory of Woodrow's body odor and he remembered sniffing Woodrow's love letter to see if it smelled of the same stuff. For a rare moment there was no Tessa in his memory. He was lying on the floor on his left side and whatever had crushed his stomach crushed his groin with another awful blow. He was hooded but nobody had hanged him yet, and he was still lying on his side. The gag was making him vomit, but he couldn't get the vomit out of his mouth so it was going down his throat. Hands rolled him onto his back and his arms were stretched out, knuckles in the carpet, palms upward. They're going to crucify me like Arnold. But they weren't crucifying him, or not yet; they were holding his hands down and twisting them at the same time, and the pain was worse than he thought pain could be: in his arms, his chest and all over his legs and groin. Please, he thought. Not my right hand or how will I ever write to Ham? And they must have heard his prayer because the pain ceased and he heard a male voice, north German, maybe Berlin and quite cultured. It was giving an order to turn the swine back on his side and tie his hands behind him, and the order was being obeyed.

"Mr. Quayle. Do you hear me?"

The same voice but now in English. Justin didn't answer. But this was not a lack of civility, it was because he had managed to spew out his cloth gag at last and was vomiting again and the vomit was creeping round his neck inside the hood. The sound of the television set faded.

"That's enough, Mr. Quayle. You stop now, OK? Or you get what your wife got. You hear me? You want some more punishment, Mr. Quayle?"

With the second "Quayle" came another horrendous kick in the groin.

"Maybe you gone deaf a bit. We leave you a little note, OK? On your bed. When you wake up, you read this little note and you remember. Then you go back to England, hear me? You don't ask no more bad questions. You go home, you be a good boy. Next time we kill you like Bluhm. That's a very long process. You hear me?"

Another kick to the groin rammed the lesson home. He heard the door close.

* * *

He lay alone, in his own darkness and his own vomit, on his left side with his knees drawn to his chin and his hands tied back to back behind him and the inside of his skull on fire from the electric pains that were tearing through his body. He lay in a black agony taking a roll call of his shattered troops — feet, shins, knees, groin, belly, heart, hands — and confirmed that they were all present, if not correct. He stirred in his bonds and had a sensation of rolling into burning charcoal. He lay still again and a terrible pleasure began to wake in him, spreading in a victorious glow of self-knowledge. They did this to me but I have remained who I am. I am tempered. I am able. Inside myself there's an untouched man. If they came back now, and did everything to me again, they would never reach the untouched man. I've passed the exam I've been shirking all my life. I'm a graduate of pain.

Then either the pain eased or nature came to his aid, because he dozed, keeping his mouth tight shut and breathing with his nose through the stinking, sodden black night of his hood. The television set was still on, he could hear it. And if his sense of orientation hadn't gone astray he was looking at it. But the hood must be double-lined because he couldn't see so much as a flicker of it, and when, at huge cost to his hands, he rolled onto his back, he saw no hint of ceiling lights above him, although they had been lit as he wandered into the room, and he had no memory of hearing them switched off as his torturers departed. He rolled onto his side and panicked for a while, waiting for the strong part of himself to fight its way back to the top again. Work it out, man. Use your stupid head, it's the only thing they left intact. Why did they leave it intact? Because they wanted no scandal. Which is to say, whoever sent them wanted no scandal. "Next time we kill you like Bluhm" — but not this time, however much they might have wished it. So I scream. Is that what I do? I roll around on the floor, kick furniture about, kick the party walls, kick the television set and generally go on behaving like a maniac until somebody decides that we are not two passionate lovers lost in the outer reaches of sado-masochism, but one bound and beaten Englishman with his head in a bag?

The trained diplomat painstakingly sketched out the consequences of such a discovery. The hotel calls the police. The police take a statement from me and call the local British Consulate, in this case Hanover, if we still have one there. Enter the Duty Consul, furious to be called away from his dinner to inspect yet another bloody Distressed British Subject, and his knee-jerk response is to check my passport — which passport scarcely matters. If it's Atkinson's, we have a problem because it's forged. One phone call to London establishes. If it's Quayle's, we have a different problem, but the likely upshot will be much the same: the first plane back to London without the option, an unwholesome Welcome Home Committee waiting to receive me at the airport.

His legs were not bound. Until now he had been reluctant to separate them. He did so, and his groin and belly caught fire and his thighs and shins followed quickly afterward. But he could definitely separate his legs, and he could tap his feet together again and hear his heels click. Emboldened by this discovery, he took the extreme step, rolled onto his stomach and let out an involuntary scream. Then he bit his lips together so that he didn't scream again.

But he stayed doggedly face down. Patiently, careful not to disturb his neighbors in the bedrooms either side, he began working on his bonds.