The Constant Gardener (24 page)

“Mr. Holmes is a great detective,” Guido replied, also in English, but without a smile.

“And what about the computer the signora gave you?” Justin asked, reverting to Italian. “Tessa said you were a big star. A genius, she told me. You used to e-mail each other passionately. I got quite jealous. Don't tell me you've abandoned your computer, Guido!”

The question provoked an outburst from the kitchen. “Of course he has abandoned it! He has abandoned everything! Four million lire, it cost her! All day long he used to sit at that computer, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. ”You make yourself blind,“ I tell him, ”you get sick from too much concentration.“ Now nothing. Even the computer must die.”

Still holding Guido's hand, Justin peered into his averted eyes. “Is that true?” he asked.

It was.

“But that's awful, Guido. That's a real waste of talent,” Justin complained, as Guido's smile began to dawn. “The human race is in serious need of good brains like yours. D'you hear me?”

“Maybe.”

“So do you remember Signora Tessa's computer, the one she taught you on?”

Of course Guido did—and with an air of great superiority, not to say smugness.

“All right, so it's not as good as yours. Yours is a couple of years younger and cleverer. Yes?”

Yes. Very much yes. And the smile widening.

“Well, I'm an idiot, Guido, unlike you, and I can't even work her computer with any confidence. And my problem is, Signora Tessa left a stack of messages on it, some of them for me, and I'm frightened to death of losing them. And I think she would like you to be the person who made sure I didn't lose them. OK? Because she wanted very much to have a son like you. And so did I. So the question is, will you come down to the villa and help me to read whatever is in her laptop?”

“You got the printer?”

“I have.”

“Disk drive?”

“That too.”

“CD drive? Modem?”

“And the handbook. And the transformers. And the cables, and an adapter. But I'm still an idiot, and if there's a chance of making a hash of it I will.”

Guido was already standing, but Justin tenderly drew him back to the table.

“Not this evening. Tonight you sleep, and tomorrow morning early, if you're willing, I'll come and fetch you in the villa jeep, but afterward you must go to school. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“You are too tired, Signor Justin,” Guido's mother murmured, setting coffee before him. “So much grief is bad for the heart.”

•      •      •

He had been on the island for two nights and two days, but if somebody had proved it was a week he would not have been surprised. He had taken the channel ferry to Boulogne, bought a train ticket for cash, and somewhere along his route a second ticket to a different destination, long before the first ticket was used up. He had shown his passport, to the best of his awareness, only once and cursorily, as he crossed into Italy from Switzerland by way of some precipitous and very beautiful mountain ravine. And it was his own passport. Of that too he was certain. Obedient to Lesley's instructions, he had sent Mr. Atkinson's ahead of him via Ham rather than risk being caught with two. But as to which ravine or which train—for that, he would have had to study a map, and make a guess at the town where he had boarded.

For much of the journey Tessa had ridden alongside him, and now and then they had shared a good joke together—usually after some deflating and irrelevant comment of Tessa's, delivered sotto voce. Other times, they had reminisced, shoulder to shoulder, heads back and eyes closed like an old couple, until abruptly she left him again, and the pain of grief overtook him like a cancer he had known all the time was there, and Justin Quayle mourned his dead wife with an intensity that exceeded his worst hours in Gloria's lower ground, or the funeral in Langata, or the visit to the mortuary, or the top floor of number four.

Finding himself standing on the railway station platform in Turin, he had taken a hotel room to clean up, then from a secondhand luggage shop purchased two anonymous canvas suitcases to contain the papers and objects that he had come to regard as her reliquary. And si, Signor Justin, the black-suited young lawyer, heir to the Manzini half of the partnership, had assured him—amid protestations of sympathy that were all the more painful for their sincerity—the hatboxes had arrived safely and on schedule, together with orders from Ham to hand over numbers five and six unopened to Justin personally—and if there was anything, but anything further at all that the young man could do, of a legal or professional or any other nature, then it went without saying that loyalty to the Manzini family did not end with the tragic death of the signora, et cetera. Oh, and of course there was the money, he added disdainfully —and counted out fifty thousand U.s. dollars in cash against Justin's signature. After which Justin withdrew to the privacy of an empty conference room, where he transferred Tessa's reliquary and Mr. Atkinson's passport to their new resting-place in the canvas suitcases and, soon afterward, took a taxi to Piombino where, by fortuitous timing, he was able to board a garish high-rise hotel, calling itself a ship, bound for Portoferraio on the island of Elba.

Seated as far from the king-sized television set as he could get, the only guest in a gigantic plastic self-service dining room on the sixth deck, with the suitcases either side of him, Justin treated himself indiscriminately to a seafood salad, a salami baguette and half a bottle of really bad red wine. Docking at Portoferraio, he was afflicted by a familiar sense of weightlessness as he fought his way through the unlit bowels of the ship's lorry park while foul-mannered drivers revved their engines or simply drove straight at him, shoving him and his suitcases against the bolted iron casing of the hull to the amusement of unemployed porters looking on.

It was dusk and deep winter and bitterly cold as he scrambled shivering and furious onto the quayside, and the few pedestrians moved with unaccustomed haste. Fearful of being recognized or worse still pitied, his hat pulled low over his brow, he dragged his suitcases to the nearest waiting taxi and established to his relief that the driver's face was unfamiliar to him. On the twenty-minute journey the man inquired whether he was German and Justin replied that he was Swedish. The unpremeditated answer served him well, for the man asked no further questions.

The Manzini villa lay low against the island's northern shore. The wind was blowing straight off the sea, rattling palm trees, whipping over stone walls, slapping shutters and roof tiles and making the outbuildings creak like old rope. Alone in the faltering moonlight Justin remained standing where the cab had dropped him, at the entrance to a flagstoned courtyard with its ancient water pump and olive press, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. The villa loomed ahead of him. Two lines of poplar trees, planted by Tessa's grandfather, marked the walk from its front door to the sea's edge. One by one, Justin distinguished retainers' cottages, stone staircases, gateposts, and shadowy bits of Roman masonry. Not a light burned anywhere. The estate manager was in Naples, according to Ham, gadding with his fiancee. Housekeeping was entrusted to a pair of itinerant Austrian women who called themselves painters and were camped in a disused chapel on the other side of the estate. The two laborers' cottages, converted by Tessa's mother the dottoressa, a title the island preferred to contessa, and christened Romeo and Giulietta for the benefit of German tourists, were the responsibility of a letting agency in Frankfurt.

So welcome home, he told Tessa, in case she was a bit slow on the uptake after all the zigzag traveling.

The villa keys were kept on a ledge inside the wooden cladding of the water pump. First you take off the lid, darling—like so—then you reach your arm in and if you're lucky you hoick them out. Then you unlock the front door to the house and take your bride to the bedroom and make love to her, like so. But he didn't take her to the bedroom, he knew a better place. Picking up the canvas suitcases once more, he struck out across the courtyard. As he did so the moon obligingly lifted itself clear of the clouds, lighting his way for him and throwing white bars between the poplars. Reaching the farthest corner of the courtyard he passed by way of a narrow alley resembling an ancient Roman backstreet to an olive-wood door on which was carved a Napoleonic heraldic bee in honor—thus the family legend—of the great man himself who, treasuring the good conversation and even better wine of Tessa's great-great-grandmother, had appointed himself a frequent guest at the villa during his ten restless months of exile.

Justin selected the largest of the keys and turned it. The door groaned and yielded. This is where we counted our money, she is telling him severely, in her role of Manzini heiress, bride and tour guide. Today the superb Manzini olives are shipped to Piombino to be pressed like any other. But in my mother the dottoressa's time this room was still the Holy of Holies. It was where we recorded the oil, jar by jar, before we stored it at a preciously preserved temperature in the cantina downstairs. It was here that—you're not listening.

“That's because you are making love to me.”

You are my husband and I shall make love to you whenever I wish. Pay close attention. In this room the weekly wage was counted into every peasant's hand, and signed for, usually with a cross, in a ledger larger than your English Doomsday Book.

“Tessa, I can't—”

You can't what? Of course you can. You are extremely resourceful. Here also we received our chain gangs of life prisoners from the house of correction on the other side of the island. Hence the spy hole in the door. Hence the iron rings in the wall where the prisoners could be fastened while they were waiting to be taken to the olive groves. Are you not proud of me? A descendant of slave masters?

“Immeasurably.”

Then why are you locking the door? Am I your prisoner?

“Eternally.”

The oil room was low and raftered, the windows set too high for prying eyes, whether money was being counted, or prisoners chained, or two newlyweds were making languorous love on the upright leather sofa that sat primly against the seaward wall. The counting table was flat and square. Two carpenter's workbenches loomed behind it in arched recesses. Justin needed all his strength to drag them over the flagstones and position them as wings either side of it. Above the door ran a line of ancient bottles scavenged from the estate. Fetching them down, he dusted each with his handkerchief before setting them on the table to use as paperweights. Time had stopped. He felt no thirst or hunger, no need of sleep. Placing one suitcase on each workbench he drew out his two most treasured bundles and laid them on the counting table, careful to choose the very center lest in grief or madness they took it into their heads to hurl themselves over the edge. Cautiously he began undressing the first bundle, layer by layer —her cotton housecoat, her angora cardigan, the one she had worn the day before she left for Lokichoggio, her silk blouse, still with her scent around the neck—until he held the unveiled prize in his hands: one sleek gray box twelve inches by ten with the logo of its Japanese maker blazoned on the lid. Unscathed by days and nights of hellish solitude and travel. From the second bundle, he extracted the accessories. When he had done this, he gingerly transported the whole assembly piece by piece to an old pine desk at the other end of the room.

“Later,” he promised her aloud. “Patience, woman.”

Breathing more easily, he took a radio alarm clock from his hand luggage and fiddled with it until he had the local wavelength for the BBC World Service. All through his journey he had kept abreast of the fruitless search for Arnold. Setting the alarm to the next hourly bulletin he turned his attention to the uneven heaps of letters, files, press cuttings, printouts and bundles of official-looking papers of the sort that, in another life, had been his refuge from reality. But not tonight, not by any stretch. These papers offered no refuge from anything, whether they were Lesley's police files, Ham's record of Tessa's imperious demands of him, or her own carefully ordered wads of letters, essays, newspaper cuttings, pharmaceutical and medical texts, messages to herself from the notice board in her workroom, or her fevered jottings in the hospital, retrieved by Rob and Lesley from their hiding place in Arnold Bluhm's apartment. The radio had switched itself on. Justin lifted his head and listened. Of the missing Arnold Bluhm, doctor of medicine, suspected killer of British envoy's wife Tessa Quayle, the announcer had once again nothing to say. His devotions over, Justin delved among Tessa's papers until he found the object he had determined to keep beside him throughout his explorations. She had brought it with her from the hospital—the only thing of Wanza's that they left behind. She had retrieved it from an unemptied waste bin next to Wanza's abandoned bed. For days and nights after her return, it had stood like an accusing sentinel on her workroom desk: one small cardboard box, red and black, five inches by three, empty. From there it had made its way to the center drawer, where Justin had found it during his overhasty search of her possessions. Not forgotten, not rejected. But relegated, flattened, shoved aside while she gave herself to more immediate matters. The name Dypraxa printed in a band on all four sides, the leaflet showing indications and contra-indications inside the box. And three jokey little gold bees in arrow formation on the lid. Opening it, restoring it to its status as a box, Justin placed it at the center of an empty shelf on the wall directly before him. Kenny K thinks he's Napoleon with his ThreeBees, she had whispered to him in her fever. And their sting is fatal, did you know that? No, darling, I didn't know, go back to sleep.

•      •      •

To read.

To travel.

To slow down his head.

To accelerate his wits.

To charge and yet stand still, to be as patient as a saint, and impulsive as a child.

Never in his life had Justin been so eager for knowledge. There was no more time for preparation. He had been preparing night and day ever since her death. He had withheld, but he had prepared. In Gloria's ghastly lower ground, he had prepared. In his interviews with the police, when the withholding had been at moments almost unbearable, still in some sleepless corner of his head, he had prepared. On the interminable flight home, in Alison Landsbury's office, in Pellegrin's club, in Ham's office and at number four, while a hundred other things were going on in his mind, he had prepared. What he needed now was one huge plunge into the heart of her secret world; to recognize each signpost and milestone along her journey; to extinguish his own identity and revive hers; to kill Justin, and bring Tessa back to life.