The Constant Gardener (29 page)

“We're leaving now. We could get stuck behind a tractor.”

“Look. Let me open her mailbox. OK? Somebody could have written to her. Maybe Arnold did. Don't you want to see in her mailbox? Maybe she sent you a message you haven't read. So I open the mailbox? Yes?”

Justin gently puts his hand on Guido's shoulder. “You'll be fine. Nobody's going to laugh at you. Everybody stays away from school now and then. That doesn't make you an invalid. It makes you normal. We'll look in her mailbox when you come back.”

•      •      •

The drive to Guido's school and back took Justin a long hour, and in that time he permitted himself no flights of fancy or premature speculation. When he regained the oil room he headed not for the laptop but for the pile of papers given him by Lesley in the van outside the cinema. Moving with greater confidence than he had brought to the laptop, he sorted his way to a photocopy of a clumsily handwritten letter on lined paper that had caught his eye during one of his first skirmishing raids. It was undated. It had “come to notice,” according to the attached minute initialed by Rob, between the pages of a medical encyclopedia that the two officers had found lying on the kitchen floor of Bluhm's apartment, slung there by frustrated burglars. The writing paper faded and old. The envelope addressed to the PO box of Bluhm's NGO. Postmark the old Arab slaving island of Lamu.

My own dear darling Arni,

I don't never forget our love or your embraices and goodness to me your dear friend. What a luck and bliss for me that you honeur our beautiful island for your holiday! I got to say thank you but it is to god I thank for your generos love and gifts and now the knoledge that will come to me in my studies thanks to you, plus motorbike. For you my darling man I work day and night, always glad in my heart to know that my darling is with me every step, holding and loving me.

And the signature? Justin, like Rob before him, struggled to decipher it. The style of the letter, as Rob's minute pointed out, suggested an Arabic hand, the writing being long and low with wellcompleted roundels. The signature, done with a flourish, appeared to possess a consonant at either end and a vowel between: Pip? Pet? Pat? Dot? It was useless to guess. For all anyone could tell, it was actually an Arabic signature.

But was the writer a woman or a man? Would an uneducated Arab woman from Lamu really write so boldly? Would she ride a motorbike?

Crossing the room to the pine desk Justin placed himself in front of the laptop but, instead of calling up Arnold again, sat staring at the blank screen.

•      •      •

“So who does Arnold love, actually?” he is asking her, with feigned casualness, as they lie side by side on the bed one hot Sunday evening in Nairobi. Arnold and Tessa have returned the same morning from their first field trip together. Tessa has declared it one of the experiences of her life.

“Arnold loves the whole human race,” she replies languidly. “Bar none.”

“Does he sleep with the whole human race?”

“He may. I haven't asked him. Do you want me to?”

“No. I don't think so. I thought I might ask him myself.”

“That won't be necessary.”

“Sure?”

“Certain sure.”

And kisses him. And kisses him again. Till she kisses him back to life.

“And don't ever ask me that question again,” she tells him, as an afterthought, as she lies with her face in the angle of his shoulder, and her limbs sprawled across his. “Let's just say Arnold lost his heart in Mombasa.” And she draws herself into him, head down and shoulders rigid.

•      •      •

In Mombasa?

Or in Lamu, a hundred and fifty miles up the coast?

Returning to the counting table, Justin selected this time Lesley's background report on “BLUHM, Arnold Moise, M.d., missing victim or suspect.” No scandal, no marriage, no known companion, no common-law wife recorded. In Algiers, Subject had lived in a hostel for young doctors of both sexes, occupying single accommodation. No Significant Other recorded with his NGO. Subject's next of kin given as his adoptive Belgian half sister, resident in Bruges. Arnold had never claimed travel or living expenses for a companion, and never required anything other than bachelor accommodation. Subject's trashed apartment in Nairobi was described by Lesley as “monkish with a strong air of abstinence.” Subject lived there alone and had no servant. “In his private life, Subject appears to do without creature comforts, including hot water.”

•      •      •

“The entire Muthaiga Club has convinced itself that our baby was put there by Arnold,” Justin is informing Tessa, perfectly amiably, as they eat their fish in an Indian restaurant on the edge of town. She is four months pregnant and though their conversation might not suggest it, Justin is more besotted with her than ever.

“Who's the entire Muthaiga Club?” she demands.

“Elena the Greek, I suspect. Conveyed to Gloria, conveyed to Woodrow,” he goes on cheerfully. “What I'm supposed to do about it I don't quite know. Drive you up there and make love to you on the billiards table might be a solution, if you're game.”

“Then it's double jeopardy, isn't it?” she says thoughtfully. “And double prejudice.”

“Double? Why?”

She breaks off, lowers her eyes, and gently shakes her head. “They're a prejudiced bunch of bastards—leave it at that.”

•      •      •

And at the time, he had done as she commanded. But no longer.

Why double? he asked himself, still staring at the screen.

Single jeopardy means Arnold's adultery. But double? Double is for what? For his race? Arnold is discriminated against for his supposed adultery and his race? Ergo a double discrimination?

Maybe.

Unless.

Unless the cold-eyed lawyer in her is speaking again: the same lawyer who decided to ignore a death threat rather than imperil her quest for justice.

Unless the first perceived prejudice was not directed against a black man who was supposedly sleeping with a married white woman, but against homosexuals at large, of whom Bluhm-though his detractors didn't know it—was one.

In such a case the cold-eyed, hot-hearted lawyer's reasoning would work this way:

Jeopardy the first: Arnold is homosexual but local prejudice does not allow him to admit it. If he admitted it, he would be unable to continue his relief work since Moi detests NGO'S as much as he hates homosexuals, and at the very least he would have Arnold flung out of the country.

Jeopardy the second: Arnold is forced to live in a state of deceit (see unfinished press article by ?). Instead of declaring his sexuality, he is driven to adopt the pose of playboy, thus attracting the criticism reserved for transracial adulterers.

Ergo: a double jeopardy.

And why, finally, does Tessa once more not confide this secret to her beloved husband, instead of leaving him with dishonorable suspicions that he will not, must not, cannot admit to, even to himself? he demanded of the screen.

He remembered the name of the Indian restaurant she was so fond of. Haandi.

•      •      •

The tides of jealousy that Justin had for so long held at bay suddenly broke banks and engulfed him. But it was jealousy of a new kind: jealousy that Tessa and Arnold had kept even this secret from him, together with all the others that they shared; that they had deliberately excluded him from their precious circle of two, leaving him to peer after them like a distraught voyeur, never knowing, for all her assurances, that there was nothing to see and never would be; that as Ghita had wanted to explain to Rob and Lesley before she shied away, no spark would ever fly; that the only relationship between them was precisely the brother-and-sister friendship of the sort Justin had described to Ham without, in his deepest heart, totally believing himself.

A perfect man, Tessa had called Bluhm once. Even Justin the skeptic had never thought of him in any other way. A man to touch the homoerotic nerve in all of us, he had once remarked to her in his innocence. Beautiful and soft-spoken. Courteous to friends and strangers. Beautiful from his husky voice to his rounded iron gray beard, to his long-lidded, plump African eyes that never strayed from you while he spoke or listened. Beautiful in the rare but timely gestures that punctuated his lucid, beautifully delivered, intelligent opinions. Beautiful from his sculpted knuckles to his feather-light, graceful body, trim and lithe as a dancer's and as disciplined in its withholding. Never brash, never unknowing, never cruel, although at every party and conference he encountered Western people so ignorant that Justin felt embarrassed for him. Even the old ones at the Muthaiga said it: that fellow Bluhm, my God, they didn't make blacks like him in our day, no wonder Justin's child bride has fallen for him.

So why in the name of all that's holy didn't you put me out of my misery? he demanded furiously of her, or the screen.

Because I trusted you and expected the same trust in return.

If you trusted me why didn't you tell me?

Because I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time.

Because I am a lawyer and where secrets are concerned—as she used to say—compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.

And tuberculosis is megabucks: ask Karel Vita Hudson. Any day now the richest nations will be facing a tubercular pandemic, and Dypraxa will become the multibilliondollar earner that all good shareholders dream of. The White Plague, the Great Stalker, the Great Imitator, the Captain of Death is no longer confining himself to the wretched of the earth. He is doing what he did a hundred years ago. He is hovering like a filthy cloud of pollution over the West's own horizon, even if it is still their poor who are his victims. Tessa is telling her computer, highlighting and underlining as she goes:

—One third of the world's population infected with the

bacillus —In the United States incidence has

increased by 20 percent in seven years … —One untreated sufferer transmits the disease

on average to between ten and fifteen people a year

… —Health authorities in New York City have

given themselves powers to incarcerate TB

victims who do not willingly submit

to isolation … —30 percent of all known TB cases are

now drug-resistant …

The White Plague is not born in us, Justin reads. It is forced upon us by foul breath, foul living conditions, foul hygiene, foul water and foul administrative neglect.

Rich countries hate it because it is a slur on their good housekeeping, poor countries because in many of them it is synonymous with AIDS. Some countries refuse to admit they have it at all, preferring to live in denial rather than confess the mark of shame.

And in Kenya, as in other African countries, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased fourfold since the onset of the HIV virus.

A chatty e-mail from Arnold lists the practical difficulties of treating the disease in the field:

—Diagnosis demanding and prolonged. Patients

must bring sputum samples on consecutive

days. —Lab work essential but microscopes often

busted or stolen. —No dye available to detect bacilli.

Dye sold, drunk, run out, not replaced. —Treatment takes eight months. Patients

who feel better after a month abandon treatment

or sell pills. Disease then returns in

drug-resistant form. —TB pills are traded on African

black markets as cures for STD'S

(sexually transmitted diseases). The World

Health Organization insists that a patient

taking a tablet should be watched while he or she

swallows it. Result: a black market

pill is sold “wet” or “dry” according to whether

it's been in someone's mouth …

A bald postscript continues:

TB kills more mothers than any other disease. In Africa, women always pay the price. Wanza was a guinea pig, and became a victim.

As whole villages of Wanzas were guinea pigs.

•      •      •

Extracts from a page-four article in the International Herald Tribune: “West Warned it, too, is Vulnerable to DrugResistant Strains of TB” by Donald G. Mcationeil Jr., New York Times Service, some passages highlighted by Tessa.

AMSTERDAM—DEADLY strains of drugresistant tuberculosis are increasing not just in poor countries but in wealthy Western ones, according to a report from the World Health Organization and other anti-Tb groups.

“It's a message: Watch out, guys, this is serious,” said Dr. Marcos Espinal, the lead author of the report. “It's a potential major crisis in the future” …

But the most powerful weapon that the international medical community has for raising money is the specter that the unchecked explosion of cases in the Third World will let divergent strains merge into something incurable and highly contagious that will attack the West.

(footnote by Tessa, written in a mysteriously restrained hand, as if she is deliberately holding herself back from sensation: Arnold says, Russian immigrants to U.s., particularly those coming straight from the camps, carry all sorts of multiresistant strains of TB—ACTUALLY in a higher proportion to Kenya, where multiresistant is NOT synonymous with HIV'-POSITIVE. A friend of his is treating very bad cases in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge area, and numbers are already frightening, he says. Incidence throughout U.s., amid crowded urban minority groups, said to be constantly increasing.)

Or, put into the language that stock exchanges the world over understand: If the TB market performs as forecast, billions and billions of dollars are waiting to be earned, and the boy to earn them is Dypraxa—always provided, of course, that the preliminary canter over the course in Africa has not thrown up any disturbing side effects.

It is this thought that prompts Justin to return, as a matter of urgency, to the Uhuru Hospital in Nairobi. Hastening to the counting table, he again rummages in the police files and unearths six photocopied pages covered in Tessa's fever-driven scrawl as she struggles to record Wanza's case history in the language of a child.