The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Talked to people. Had a bit of luck."

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

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

"I'm freelance," Justin says.

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

"Nobody."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who are you, man?"

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

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

"Jesus God, man. God Christ."

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

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

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

"And they got it?"

"Everything, man. Every last bit, I swear."

"With a tape recorder?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What did Bluhm have to say to you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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