The Constant Gardener

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."