The Constant Gardener

Switzerland was a childhood dream. Forty years ago his parents had taken him on a walking holiday in the Engadine and they had stayed in a grand hotel on a spit of forest between two lakes. Nothing had changed. Not the polished parquet or the stained glass or the stern-faced chatelaine who showed him to his room. Reclining on the daybed on his balcony, Justin watched the same lakes glistening in the evening sun, and the same fisherman huddled in his rowing boat in the mist. The days passed uncounted, punctuated by visits to the spa and the death knell of the dinner gong summoning him to solitary meals among whispery old couples. In a side street of old chalets, a pallid doctor and his woman assistant dressed his bruises. "A car smash," Justin explained. The doctor frowned through his spectacles. His young assistant laughed.

By night his interior world reclaimed him, as it had every night since Tessa's death. Tolling at the marquetry desk in the window bay, doggedly writing to Ham with his bruised right hand, following the travails of Markus Lorbeer as retold by Birgit, then gingerly resuming his labor of love to Ham, Justin was conscious of a dawning sense of his own completion. If Lorbeer the penitent was in the desert, purging his guilt with a diet of locusts and wild honey, Justin too was alone with his destiny. But he was resolved. And in some dark sense purified. He had never supposed that his search would have a good end. It had never occurred to him that there could be one. To take up Tessa's mission — to shoulder her banner and put on her courage — was purpose enough for him. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.

But when he remembered the eternal night of the black hood and smelled his own vomit, when he surveyed the systematic bruising of his body, the oval imprints of yellow and blue that ran like colored musical notes across his trunk and back and thighs, he experienced a different kind of kinship. I'm one of you. I no longer tend the roses while you murmur over your green tea. You needn't lower your voices as I approach. I'm with you at the table, saying yes.

On the seventh day Justin paid his bill and, almost without telling himself what he was doing, took a post-bus and a train to Basel, to that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharmagiants have their castles. And there, from a frescoed palace, he posted a fat envelope to Ham's old dragon in Milan.

Then Justin walked. Painfully, but walked. First up a cobbled hill to the medieval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to free thinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river's edge, and from a children's playground gazed upward in near disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharma-billionaires, at their faceless barracks ranged shoulder to shoulder against the individual enemy. Orange cranes fussed restlessly above them. White chimneys like muted minarets, some checkered at the tip, some striped or dazzle-painted as a warning to aircraft, poured their invisible gases into a brown sky. And at their feet lay whole railways, marshaling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.

Drawn forward by a force he had ceased to define, Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of run-down housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant laborers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant tree-lined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and farther up, and then right up into the sky above his head that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.