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The Constant Gardener

"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