The Constant Gardener

Curtiss had houses from Monaco to Mexico and Donohue hated all of them. He hated their stink of iodine and their cowed servants and vibrating wooden floors. He hated their mirrored bars and odorless flowers that eyed you like the bored hookers Curtiss kept around him. In his mind Donohue lumped them together with the Rolls-Royces, the Gulfstream and the motor yacht as a single tasteless gin palace straddled over half a dozen countries. But most of all he hated this fortified farm stuck on the shores of Lake Naivasha with its razor-wire fences and security guards and zebra-skin cushions and red-tiled floors and leopard-skin rugs and antelope sofas and pink-lit mirrored booze cabinet and satellite television set and satellite telephone, and motion sensors and panic buttons and handheld radios — because it was to this house, to this room and to this antelope sofa that he had been summoned cap in hand at Curtiss's whim for the last five years, to receive whatever scraps the great Sir Kenny K in his erratic magnanimity had seen fit to toss into the eager jaws of British Intelligence. And it was to this place that he had been summoned again tonight, for reasons he had yet to learn, just as he was uncorking a bottle of South African white before sitting down to a bit of lake salmon with his beloved wife Maud.

"Here's how we see it, Tim, old boy, for better or worse,"

ran a tense, eyes-only signal, written in the vaguely Wodehousian style of Roger, his regional director in London.

"On the visible front you should maintain friendly contact to match the public face you have established over the last five years. Golf, the odd drink, the odd lunch, etc., sooner you than me. On the covert side you should continue to act natural and look busy since the alternatives — severance, subject's consequent outrage, etc. — are too ghastly to contemplate in the present crisis. For your personal information, all hell has broken out on both sides of the river here, and the situation changes from day to day but always for the worse."

"Why did you come by car then, anyway?" Curtiss demanded in an aggrieved tone, as he continued to gaze out over his African acres. "You could have had the Beechcraft if you'd asked for it. Doug Crick had a pilot standing by for you. Are you trying to make me feel bad or something?"

"You know me, chief." Sometimes, out of passive aggression, Donohue called him chief, a title reserved in eternity for the head of his own Service. "I'm a car driver. Open the car windows, blow the dust out. Nothing I like more."

"On these fucking roads? You're out of your mind. I told the Man. Yesterday. I lie. Sunday. "What's the very first fucking thing a punter sees when he arrives at Kenyatta and gets on his safari bus?"' I asked him. "It's not the fucking lions and giraffes. It's your roads, Mr. President. It's your crumbling, horrible roads." The Man sees what he wants, that's his trouble. Plus he flies wherever he can. "It's the same with your trains," I told him. "Use your fucking prisoners," I said, "you've got enough of them. Put your prisoners to work on the tracks and give your trains a chance." "Talk to Jomo," he says. "Which Jomo's that?"' I say. "Jomo my new transport minister," he says. "Since when?"' I say. "Since just now," he says. Fuck him."

"Fuck him indeed," said Donohue devoutly, and smiled the way he often smiled when there was nothing to smile about: with his long, drooping head tipped goatishly to one side and back a notch, his yellowed eyes twinkling, and missing nothing while he stroked the fangs of his mustache.

An unprecedented silence filled the great room. The African servants had walked back to their villages. The Israeli bodyguards, those who weren't policing the grounds, were in the gatehouse watching a kung fu movie. Donohue had been treated to a couple of quick garrotings while he waited to be allowed to pass. The private secretaries and the Somali valet had been ordered to the staff compound on the other side of the farm. For the first time in living history, not a single telephone was ringing in a Curtiss household. A month ago Donohue would have had to fight to get a word in, and threaten to remove himself unless Curtiss gave him a few clear minutes one to one. Tonight he would have welcomed the chirrup of the house telephone or the squawk of the satcom that stood scowling on its trolley beside the enormous desk.