The Constant Gardener

Still pacing. Shaking his head to free it of sweat. Swinging round as if he expects to find Justin on his heels. Staring at him with suspicion and reproach.

"I'm freelance," Justin says.

"To hell you are, man! I bought journalists like you! I know all your rackets! Who bought you?"

"Nobody."

"KVH? Curtiss? I made them money, for Christ's sake!"

"And they made money for you too, didn't they? According to my paper, you own one third of forty-nine percent of the companies that patented the molecule."

"I renounced it, man. Lara renounced it. It was blood money. "Take it," I told them. "It's yours. And on the Day of Judgment, may God preserve you all." Those were my words to them, Peter."

"Spoken to whom exactly?" Justin inquires, writing. "Curtiss? Someone at KVH?" Lorbeer's face is a mask of terror. "Or to Crick, perhaps. Ah yes. I see. Crick was your link at ThreeBees."

And he writes down Crick in his notebook, one letter at a time, because his hand is sluggish from the heat. "But Dypraxa wasn't a bad drug, was it? My paper thinks it was a good drug that went too fast."

"Fast?" The word bitterly amuses him. "Fast, man? Those boys in KVH wanted trial results so fast they couldn't wait till tomorrow breakfast."

A huge explosion stops the world. First it is Khartoum's Russian-made plane from Juba dropping one of its dumb bombs. Then it is the wild horsemen from the north. Then it is the savage battle for the Bentiu oil fields that has arrived at the food station's gates. The tent shakes, sags and braces itself for a new attack. Guy ropes wince and sob as sheets of water crash onto the canvas roof. Yet Lorbeer seems not to have noticed the attack. He stands at the center of the tent with one hand pressed to his brow as if he has forgotten something. Justin pulls back the tent flap and through sheets of rain counts three tents dead and two more dying before his eyes. Water is spouting from the washing on the lines. It has made a lake of the grass and is rising in a tide against the wooden walls of the tukul. It is crashing in freak waves over the rush roof of the air-raid shelter. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it stops.

"So Markus," Justin proposes, as if the thunderstorm has cleared the air inside the tent as well as out. "Tell me about the girl Wanza. Was she a turning point in your life? My paper thinks she was."

Lorbeer's bulging eyes remain fixed on Justin. He makes to speak but no words come.

"Wanza from a village north of Nairobi. Wanza who moved to Kibera slum. And was taken to the Uhuru Hospital to have her baby. She died and her baby lived. My paper believes she shared a ward with Tessa Quayle. Is that possible? Or Tessa Abbott, as she sometimes called herself."

And still Justin's voice is even and dispassionate, as becomes your objective reporter. And this dispassion is in many ways unfeigned, for he does not take easily to having a man at his mercy. The responsibility is more than he wishes. His instincts for vengeance are too weak. A plane zooms low overhead on its way to the drop zone. Lorbeer's eyes lift to it in feeble hope. They have come to save me! They haven't. They have come to save Sudan.

"Who are you, man?"

It has taken him a lot of courage to get the question out. But Justin ignores it.

"Wanza died. So did Tessa. So did Arnold Bluhm, a Belgian aid worker and doctor and her good friend. My paper believes that Tessa and Arnold came up here to speak to you just a couple of days before they were killed. My paper also believes that you confessed yourself to Tessa and Arnold on the matter of Dypraxa and — this is only supposition, of course — as soon as they had gone, betrayed them to your former employers in order to reinsure yourself. Perhaps by means of a radio message to your friend Mr. Crick. Does that ring any bells at all?"

"Jesus God, man. God Christ."

Markus Lorbeer is burning at the stake. He has seized the central tent pole in both arms and with his head pressed to it is hugging it to himself as if to shelter from the onslaught of Justin's remorseless questioning. His head is raised to heaven in agony, his mouth whispers and implores inaudibly. Rising, Justin carries his chair across the tent and sets it at Lorbeer's heels, then takes him by the arm and lowers him into it.

"What were Tessa and Arnold looking for when they came here?" he inquires. His questions are still formulated with a deliberate casualness. He wishes for no more sobbing confessions, and no more appeals to God.

"They were looking for my guilt, man, my shameful history, my sin of pride," Lorbeer whispers in reply, dabbing his face with a sopping piece of rag hauled from the pocket of his shorts.

"And they got it?"

"Everything, man. Every last bit, I swear."

"With a tape recorder?"