The Constant Gardener

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.