The Constant Gardener

Ghita lay on her bed with the door open. She was staring at the ceiling, not knowing whether to weep or pray. She had always assumed that Bluhm was dead, but the vileness of his death was worse than anything she had feared. She wished she could return to the simplicities of her convent school, and recover her belief that it was God's will that man should rise so high and stoop so low. On the other side of the wall, Justin was back at her desk, writing by pen because pen was what he liked although she had offered him her laptop. The plane to Loki was due to leave Wilson at seven, which meant he would be gone in an hour. She wished she could share the rest of his journey, but knew that no one could. She had offered to drive him to the airport but he preferred to take a taxi from the Serena Hotel.

"Ghita?"

He was knocking on her door. She called, "It's all right," and rose to her feet.

"I'd like you, please, to post this for me, Ghita," Justin said, handing her a fat envelope addressed to a woman in Milan. "She's not a girlfriend, in case you're curious. She's my lawyer's aunt" — a rare smile — "and here's a letter for Porter Coleridge at his club. Don't use the Field Post Office, if you don't mind. And no courier service or anything. The normal Kenyan mails are quite reliable enough. Thank you immeasurably for all your help."

At which she could restrain herself no longer, and threw her arms round him, and herself against him, and held him as if she were holding on to life itself until he prized himself free.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Captain McKenzie and his copilot Edsard sit in the Buffalo's cockpit, and the cockpit is a raised platform in the nose of the Buffalo's fuselage, with no dividing doors to shield the crew from their cargo — or the cargo, for that matter, from the crew. And directly below the platform, one step down from it, some thoughtful soul has provided a low russet-colored Victorian armchair of the sort an elderly family retainer might pull up before the kitchen fire on a winter's evening, and clamped its feet to the deck by means of improvised iron shoes. And that is where Justin sits, with a headset over his ears and frayed nylon ribbons like a child's walking harness round his belly, while he receives the wisdom of Captain McKenzie and Edsard and occasionally removes his headset to take questions from a white Zimbabwean girl called Jamie who has made herself comfortable amid a tethered mountain of brown packing cases. Justin has tried to offer her his chair but McKenzie has stopped him with a firm, "You're here." At the tail end of the fuselage, six Sudanese women in robes crouch in varying attitudes of stoicism or stark terror. One of them is vomiting into a plastic bucket kept handy for the purpose. Quilted panels of shiny gray line the plane's roof, red launch lines dangle from a cable beneath them, their metal-lined tips dancing to the thunder of the engines. The fuselage grunts and heaves like an old iron horse dragged back for one more war. There is no sign of air-conditioning or parachute. A blistered red cross on a wall panel indicates medical supplies. Below it runs a line of jerry cans marked "Kerosene" and tied together with twine. This is the journey Tessa and Arnold made and this is the man who flew them. This is their last journey before their last journey.

"So you're Ghita's friend," McKenzie had observed, when Sudan Sarah brought Justin to his tukul back in Loki and left them alone together.

"Yes."

"Sarah tells me you had a travel document issued to you by the South Sudanese office in Nairobi, but you've mislaid it. That right?"

"Yes."

"Mind if I take a look at your passport?"

"Not at all." Justin hands him his Atkinson passport.

"What's your line of country, Mr. Atkinson?"

"Journalist. The London Telegraph. I'm writing a piece on the U.N.'s Operation Lifeline Sudan."

"That's a real pity just when OLS needs all the publicity it can get. Seems silly to let a little piece of paper stand in the way. Know where you lost it?"

"I'm afraid I don't."

"We're ferrying mostly cases of soya oil today. Plus a few care packages for the boys and girls in the field. Pretty much the normal milk round, if you're interested."

"I am."

"Do you object to sitting on the floor of a jeep under a pile of blankets for an hour or two?"

"Not in the least."

"Then I think we're in business, Mr. Atkinson."

And thereafter McKenzie has clung doggedly to this fiction. On the plane, as he might for any journalist, he describes the workings of what he proudly calls the most expensive anti-starvation operation ever mounted in the history of mankind. His information comes in metallic bursts that do not always rise above the din of the engines.