The Constant Gardener (28 page)

actual case histories and that—obviously,

Rob—technical discussion of symptoms,

indications, dosage—side effects, Rob- then it's like we said, it's down to your

manufacturer every time. We're talking

Basel, we're talking Seattle and we're

talking Vancouver. I mean, fuck. We would

be behaving with criminal irresponsibility,

wouldn't we, Viv, if we didn't immediately

turn to the experts for evaluation. That's not just

company policy. I'd say that was Holy

Writ here at ThreeBees, wouldn't you? BBB (eber): Absolutely. No question,

Doug. The chief insists. The moment there's a

problem, it's get KVH on the help line. Officer: What are you telling us? This is

ridiculous. What happens to paper in this

place, for Christ's sake? BBB (crick): I'm telling you that we're

hearing you and we'll mount a search and see what

we come up with. This isn't the civil service,

Rob. Or Scotland Yard. This is

Africa. We don't all march on our

fucking files, right? We got better ways

of spending our fucking time than-P. R. Oakey, QC: I think there

are two points here. Perhaps three. Can I

take them separately? The first is, how

certain are you officers that the meeting between Mrs.

Quayle, Dr. Bluhm and

representatives of ThreeBees that you're

referring to actually took place? Officer: As we already told you, we have

documentary evidence in Bluhm's handwriting,

from Bluhm's diary, that a meeting was arranged

for November 18 through Ms. Rampuri's

office. P. R. Oakey, QC: Arranged is one

thing, Lesley. Consummated is quite another.

Let's hope Ms. Rampuri has a good

memory. She conducts an awful lot of

meetings, you may be sure. My second

point is tone. Insofar as you are able to say,

would the alleged representations have been

adversarial in tone? Might there, for instance,

have been a whiff of litigation in the air? De

mortuis and so on, but from all one hears about

Mrs. Quayle, she wasn't exactly one

to pull her punches, was she? She was also a

lawyer, as you say. And Dr. Bluhm is

by way of being a professional watchdog in the

pharmaceutical field, I understand. We're

not dealing with nobodies. Officer: What if they were adversarial? If

somebody's died of a drug, people have got a right

to be adversarial. P. R. Oakey, QC: Well, obviously,

Rob, if Ms. Rampuri smelled a

claim in the air, or worse, or the chief

did, assuming he did indeed receive the written

materials, which is clearly open to question, then their

very first instinct would be to send them on to the

firm's legal department. Which would be another

place to look, wouldn't it, Doug? Officer: I thought you were their legal department. P. R. Oakey, QC: (humor) I'm a

last resort, Rob. Not a first resort.

I'm far too expensive. BBB (crick): We'll get back to you,

Rob. It's been our pleasure. Next time

let's make it lunch. But don't expect the

moon is my advice. It's like I say.

We don't spend all day filing paper here.

We have a lot of irons in the fire and as the

chief likes to say, ThreeBees does

business from the hip. That's how this

company became what it is today. Officer: We'd like one more moment of your time,

please, Mr. Crick. We're interested in

speaking to a gentleman named Lorbeer,

probably Dr. Lorbeer, of German,

Swiss or perhaps Dutch origin. I'm

afraid we don't have a first name for him but we

understand he's been closely involved with the career

of Dypraxa here in Africa. BBB (crick): On which side, Lesley? Officer: Does that matter? BBB (crick): Well, it does, rather. If

Lorbeer's a doctor, which you seem to think he

is, he's more likely to be with the

manufacturers than with us. ThreeBees

don't run to medics, you see. We're

laymen in the marketplace. Salesmen. So

it's try KVH again, I'm afraid, Les. Officer: Look, do you know Lorbeer or not?

We're not in Vancouver or Basel or

Seattle. We're in Africa. It's your

drug, your territory. You import the stuff,

you advertise it, distribute it and sell it.

We're telling you a Lorbeer has been

involved with your drug here in Africa. Have you

heard of Lorbeer or not? P. R. Oakey, QC: I think you've had

your answer, haven't you, Rob? Try the

manufacturers. Officer: How about a woman called Kovacs,

could be Hungarian? BBB (eber): A doctor too? Officer: Do you know the name? Never mind her

title. Has any of you heard the name

Kovacs? Female? In the context of

marketing this drug? BBB (crick): Try the phone book, I

should, Rob. Officer: There's also a Dr. Emrich we'd like

to talk to-P. R. Oakey, QC: Looks as though

you've drawn a blank, officers. I'm

awfully sorry we can't be more use to you.

We've pulled out all the stops for you, but it just

doesn't seem to be our day.

Note added one week after this meeting took place:

Despite assurances from ThreeBees that searches were under way, we are informed that no papers, letters, case histories, e-mails or faxes from Tessa Abbott or Quayle or Arnold Bluhm have so far come to light. KVH deny all knowledge of them, so does the ThreeBees' legal department in Nairobi. Our attempts to recontact Eber and Crick have also proved unsuccessful. Crick is “attending a retraining course in South Africa,” Eber has been “moved to another department.” Replacements have not yet been appointed. Ms. Rampuri remains unavailable, “pending the restructuring of the company.”

RECOMMENDED: That Scotland Yard make direct representations to Sir Kenneth K. Curtiss with a request for a full statement of his company's dealings with the deceased and Dr. Bluhm, that he instruct his staff to mount a strenuous search for Ms. Rampuri's diary and the missing documents, and that Ms. Rampuri be produced immediately for interview.

[Initialed by Superintendent Gridley, but no action ordered or recorded.] APPENDIX

Crick, Douglas (doug) James, but. Gibraltar 10 Oct. 1970 (ex Criminal Records Office, MOD and judge Advocate General's Dept.)

Subject is the illegitimate son of Crick, David Angus, Royal Navy (dishonorable discharge). Crick senior served eleven years in U.k. jails for multiple offenses including two of manslaughter. He now lives lavishly in Marbella, Spain.

Crick, Douglas James (subject) himself arrived in U.k. from Gibraltar at age nine in the care of his father (see above) who was arrested on landing. Subject was given into care. While in care Subject came to notice in a succession of juvenile courts for varied offenses including drug peddling, grievous bodily harm, procuring and affray. He was also suspected of complicity in the gang murder of two black youths in Nottingham (1984) but not charged.

In 1989 Subject claimed to be a reformed character and volunteered for police service. He was rejected, but appears to have been retained as a part-time informant.

In 1990 Subject successfully volunteered for service with the British Army, received special forces training and was attached to British Army Intelligence, Northern Ireland on plainclothes assignment with the rank and entitlements of sergeant. Subject served three years in Ireland before being reduced to the rank of private and dishonorably discharged. No other record of his service is available.

Although D. J. Crick (subject) was presented to us as a public relations officer for House of ThreeBees, he was until recently better known as a leading light in their protection and security branch. He reportedly enjoys the personal confidence of Sir Kenneth K. Curtiss, for whom he has on many occasions acted as personal bodyguard, e.g., on Curtiss's visits to the Gulf, Latin America, Nigeria and Angola, in the last twelve months alone.

•      •      •

Bearding him at his farm, poor fellow, Tim Donohue is saying across the Monopoly board in Gloria's garden. Phone calls at unsociable hours. Rude letters left at his club. Sweep it under the carpet, our advice.

They kill, Lesley is saying in the darkness of the van in Chelsea. But you've noticed that.

With these memories still echoing in his head, Justin must have fallen asleep at the counting table because he woke to hear a dawn air battle of land birds versus seagulls that turned out on closer inspection to be not dawn but dusk. And at some point not long after that, he was bereft. He had read everything there was to read and he knew, if he had ever doubted it, that without her laptop he was looking at only a corner of the canvas.

Guido was waiting on the cottage doorstep, sporting a black coat that was too long for him and a school satchel that couldn't find anywhere on his shoulders to hang. In one spidery hand he clutched a tin box for his medicines and his sandwiches. It was six in the morning. The first rays of spring sun were gilding the cobwebs on the grass slope. Justin drove the jeep as close to the cottage as he could and Guido's mother watched from a window as Guido, rejecting Justin's hand, swung himself into the passenger seat, arms, knees, satchel, tin box and coattails, to crash at his side like a young bird at the end of his first flight.

“How long were you waiting there?” Justin asked, but Guido's only answer was a frown. Guido is a master of self-diagnosis, Tessa reminds him, much impressed by her recent visit to the sick kids' hospital in Milan. If Guido's ill he asks for the nurse. If he's very ill he asks for the Sister. And if he thinks he may be dying he asks for the doctor. And there's not one of them who doesn't come running.

“I must be at the school gates at five to nine,” Guido told Justin stiffly.

“No problem.” They were speaking English for Guido's pride.

“Too late, I arrive in class out of breath. Too early, I hang around and make myself conspicuous.”

“Understood,” said Justin and, glancing in the mirror, saw that Guido's complexion was waxy white, the way it looked when he needed a blood transfusion. “And in case you were wondering, we'll be working in the oil room, not the villa,” Justin added reassuringly.

Guido said nothing, but by the time they reached the coast road the color had returned to his face. Sometimes I can't stand her proximity either, thought Justin.

The chair was too low for Guido and the stool was too high, so Justin went alone to the villa and fetched two cushions. But when he came back Guido was already standing at the pine desk, nonchalantly fingering the components of her laptop —the telephone connections for her modem, transformers for her computer and printer, the adapter and printer cables and finally her computer itself, which he handled with reckless disrespect, first flipping open the lid, then jamming the power socket into the laptop, but not—thank God—or not yet, connecting it to the mains. With the same cavalier confidence Guido shoved aside the modem, the printer and whatever else he didn't need and plonked himself onto the cushions on the chair.

“OK,” he announced.

“OK what?”

“Switch on,” said Guido in English, nodding at the wall socket at his feet. “Let's go.” And he handed Justin the cable to plug in. His voice, to Justin's oversensitive ear, had acquired an unpleasant mid-Atlantic twang.

“Can anything go wrong?” Justin asked nervously.

“Like what, for instance?”

“Can we wipe it clean or something, by mistake?”

“By switching it on? No way.”

“Why not?”

Guido grandly circumnavigated the screen with his scarecrow hand. “Everything that's in there she saved. If she don't save it, she don't want it, so it's not in there. Is that reasonable or is that reasonable?”

Justin felt a bar of hostility form at the front of his head, which was what happened to him when people talked computer gobbledygook at him.

“Then all right. If you say so. I'll switch on.” And crouching, gingerly poked the plug into the wall socket. “Yes?”

“Oh man.”

Reluctantly Justin dropped the switch and stood up in time to see absolutely nothing happen on the screen. His mouth went dry and he felt sick. I'm trespassing. I'm a clumsy idiot. I should have got an expert, not a child. I should have learned to work the bloody thing myself. Then the screen lit up and gave him a procession of smiling, waving African children lined up outside a tin-roofed health clinic, followed by an aerial view of colored rectangles and ovals scattered over a blue-gray field.

“What's that?”

“The desktop.”

Justin peered over Guido's shoulder and read: My Briefcase … Network Neighborhood … Shortcut to Connect. “Now what?”

“You want to see files? I show you files. We go to files, you read.”

“I want to see what Tessa saw. Whatever she was working on. I want to follow her footsteps and read whatever's in there. I thought I made that clear.”

In his anxiety he was resenting Guido's presence here. He wanted Tessa for himself again, at the counting table. He wanted her laptop not to exist. Guido directed an arrow to a panel on the lower left side of Tessa's screen.

“What's that thing you're tapping?”

“The mouse pad. These are the last nine files she worked on. You want I show you the others? I show you the others, no problem.”

A panel appeared, headed Open File, Tessa's Documents. He tapped again.

“She's got like twenty-five files in this category,” he said.

“Do they have titles?”

Guido leaned to one side, inviting Justin to look for himself:

PHARMA pharma-general pharma-pollution pharma-in-3rd world pharma-watchdogs pharma-bribes pharma-litigation pharma-cash pharma-protest pharma-hypocrisy pharma-trials pharma-fakes pharma-cover-ups

PLAGUE plague-history plague-Kenya plague-cures plague-new plague-old plague-charlatans

TRIALS Russia Poland Kenya Mexico Germany Known-mortalities Wanza

Guido was moving the arrow and tapping again. “Arnold. Who's this Arnold suddenly?” he demanded.

“A friend of hers.”

“He's got documents too. Jesus, has he got documents!”

“How many?”

“Twenty. M.” Another tap. “Bits and Bobs. That some kind of British idiom?”

“Yes, it's English. Not American, perhaps, but certainly English,” Justin replied huffily. “What's that? What are you doing now? You're going too fast.”

“No, I'm not. I'm going slow for you. I'm looking in her briefcase, how many folders she got. Wow. She got a lot of folders. Folder one, folder two. Then more folders.” He pressed again. His phony American was driving Justin mad. Where did he pick it up? He's been seeing too many American films. I shall speak to the headmaster. “See this? This is her recycle bin. Here's where she puts whatever she's thinking of throwing out.”

“But she didn't, presumably. Throw them out.”

“What's there, she don't throw out. What's not, she did.” Another tap.

“What's AOL?” Justin asked.

“America Online. I.s.p. Internet Service Provider. Whatever she got from AOL and kept, she stored it in this program, same as her old e-mails. New messages, you've got to go on-line to get them. You want to send messages, you've got to go on-line to send them. No on-line, no new messages in or out.”

“I know that. It's obvious.”

“You want I go on-line?”

“Not yet. I want to see what's in there already.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you've got like days of reading. Weeks, maybe. All you do, you point the mouse and you click. You want to sit where I'm sitting?”

“You're absolutely sure nothing can go wrong?” Justin insisted, lowering himself into the chair while Guido stood himself behind him. “What she saved is saved. It's like I said. Why else would she save it for?”

“And I can't lose it?”

“Holy smoke, man! Not unless you click on delete. Even if you click on delete, it's going to ask you, Justin, are you sure you want to delete? If you're not sure, you say no. You press no. Press no means, No. I'm not sure. Click. That's all there is. Go for it.”

Justin is cautiously tapping his way through Tessa's labyrinth while Guido the tutor stands patronizingly at his side, incanting commands in his mid-Atlantic cybervoice. When a procedure is new to Justin or confuses him, he calls a break, takes a sheet of paper and writes out the moves to Guido's imperious dictation. New landscapes of information are unfolding before his eyes. Go here, go there, now go back to here. It's all too vast, you ranged too wide, I'll never catch you up, he tells her. If I read for a year, how will I ever know I've found what you were looking for?

•      •      •

Handouts from the World Health Organization.

Records of obscure medical conferences held in Geneva, Amsterdam and Heidelberg under the aegis of yet another unheard-of outpost of the United Nations' sprawling medical empire.

Company prospectuses extolling unpronounceable pharmaceutical products and their life-enhancing virtues.

Notes to herself. Memos. A shocking quotation from Time magazine, framed with exclamation marks, raised in bold capitals and visible across the room to those who have eyes and do not avert them. A terrifying generality to galvanize her search for the particular:

IN 93 CLINICAL TRIALS RESEARCHERS ENCOUNTERED 691 ADVERSE REACTIONS BUT REPORTED ONLY 39 TO THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH.

A whole folder devoted to PW. Who in God's name is PW when she's at home? Despair. Take me back to the paper I understand. But when he clicks on Bits and Bobs, there is PW again, staring him in the face. And after one more click, all is clear: PW is short for Pharma Watch, a selfstyled cyberunderground notionally based in Kansas with “a mission to expose the excesses and malpractices of the pharmaceutical industry,” not to mention “the inhumanity of self-styled humanitarians who are ripping off the poorest nations.”

Reports of so-called off-Broadway conferences among demonstrators planning to converge on Seattle or Washington, D.c., to make their feelings known to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

High talk of “The Great American Corporate Hydra,” and the “Monster Capital.” A frivolous article from heaven knows where entitled “Anarchism Is Back in Style.”

He clicks again to find the word “Humanity” under attack. “Humanity” is Tessa's Hword, he discovers. Whenever she hears it, she confides to Bluhm in a chatty e-mail, she reaches for her revolver.

Every time I hear a pharma justifying its actions on the grounds of Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit, and that's not because I'm pregnant. It's because I'm reading at the same time how the U.s. pharmagiants are trying to extend the life of their patents so that they can preserve their monopoly and charge what they damn well like and use the State Dept. to frighten the Third World out of manufacturing their own generic products at a fraction of the price of the branded version. All right, they've made a cosmetic gesture on AIDS drugs. But what about-•      •      •

I know all that, he thinks, and clicks back to the desktop, thence to Arnold's Documents.

“What's this?” he asks sharply, lifting his hands from the keyboard as if to disclaim responsibility. For the first time in their relationship, Tessa is demanding a password of him before she will let him in. Her command is finite: PASSWORD, PASSWORD, like a brothel sign winking on and off.

“Shit,” says Guido.

“Did she have a password when she taught you how to work this thing?” Justin demands, ignoring this scatological outburst.

Guido puts one hand across his mouth, leans forward and with his other hand types five characters. “Me,” he says proudly.

Five asterisks appear, otherwise nothing.

“What are you doing?” Justin demands.

“Typing my name. Guido.”

“Why?”

“That was the password,” he says, dropping into voluble Italian in his nervousness. “The I isn't an I. It's a one. The O's a naught. Tessa was crazy about that stuff. In a password, you had to have at least one numeral. She insisted.”

“Why am I looking at stars?”

“Because they don't want you to see ”Guido“! Otherwise you could look over my shoulder and read the password! It didn't work! ”Guido“ is not her password!” He buries his face in his hands.

“So what we can do is guess,” Justin suggests, trying to calm him.

“Guess how? Guess what? How many guesses do they give you? Like three!”

“You mean, if we guess wrong we don't get there,” Justin says, valiantly trying to make light of the problem. “Hey. Y. Come out of there.”

“Damn right we don't!”

“All right, then. Let's think. What other numerals are made from letters?”

“Three could be E back to front. Five could be S. There's half a dozen of them. M. It's awful—” still from inside his hands.

“And what happens exactly when we run out of chances?”

“It locks up and won't try anymore. What do you think?”

“Ever?”

“Ever!”

Justin hears the lie in his voice and smiles.

“And you think three shots is all we get?”

“Look, I'm not a lexicon, OK? I'm not a handbook. What I don't know, I don't say. It could be three. It could be ten. I've got to go to school. Maybe you should call the help line.”

“Think. After Guido, what's her favorite thing?”

Guido's face at last emerges from his hands. “Y. Who do you think? Justin!”

“She wouldn't do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's her kingdom, not mine.”

“You're just guessing! You're ridiculous. Try Justin. I'm right, I know I am!”

“Look. After Justin, what's her next favorite thing?”

“I wasn't married to her. OK? You were!”

Justin thinks Arnold, then Wanza. He tries Ghita, entering the I as a 1. Nothing happens. He emits a nervous scoffing sound that says this childish game is beneath him, but this is because his mind is stretching in all directions and he doesn't know which to follow. He thinks of Garth her dead father, and Garth her dead son, and rules them both out on aesthetic and emotional grounds. He thinks of Tessa but she is not an egomaniac. He thinks arnoead and ARN0LD & ARN01D but Tessa would not be so crass as to block Arnold's file with a password saying Arnold. He flirts with Maria, which was her mother's name, then with Mustafa, then Hammond, but none presses itself upon him as a code name or password. He looks down into her grave and watches the yellow freesias on the lid of her coffin disappear under the red soil. He sees Mustafa standing in the Woodrows' kitchen, clutching his basket. He sees himself in his straw hat tending them in the garden in Nairobi and again here in Elba. He enters the word freesia, typing the I as 1. Seven asterisks appear but nothing happens. He enters the same word again, typing the S as 5.

“Will it still have me?” he asks softly.

“I'm twelve years old, Justin! Twelve!” He relents a little. “You got maybe one more try. Then it's curtains. I resign, OK? It's her laptop. Yours. Leave me out of this.”

He enters freesia a third time, leaving the S as 5 but turning the 1 back to an I, and finds himself staring at an unfinished polemical essay. With the aid of his yellow freesias he has invaded the file called Arnold and met a tract on human rights. Guido is dancing round the room.

“We got it! I told you! We're fantastic! She's fantastic!” •      •      • Why are Africa's Gays Forced to Stay in the Closet?

Hear the comfortable words of that great arbiter of public decency, President Daniel Arap Moi:

“Words like lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African languages.”-Moi, 1995.

“Homosexuality is against African norms and religions and even in religion it is considered a great sin.”—Moi, 1998.

Unsurprisingly, Kenya's Criminal Code obediently agrees with Moi one hundred percent. Sections 162-165 lay down a term of FIVE TO FOURTEEN YEARS' IMPRISONMENT for “Carnal Knowledge Against the Order of Nature.” The law goes further:

—Kenyan law defines any sexual relations

between men as a CRIMINAL ACT. —It hasn't even heard of sexual relations

between women.

What is the SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE of this antediluvian attitude? —Gay men marry or carry on affairs with

women in order to conceal their sexuality. —They live in misery and so do their wives. —No sex education is offered to gay men, even in

the midst of Kenya's long-denied AIDS

epidemic. —Sections of Kenyan society are forced

to live in a state of deceit. Doctors,

lawyers, businessmen, priests and even

politicians go in terror of blackmail and

arrest. —A self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and

oppression is created, dragging our society

still deeper into the mire.

Here the article stops. Why?

And why in heaven's name do you file an incomplete polemical piece about gay rights under Arnold and lock it away with a password?

Justin wakes to Guido's presence at his shoulder. He has returned from his peregrinations and is leaning forward, peering at the screen in puzzlement.

“It's time I drove you to school,” Justin says.

“We don't need to go yet! We've got another ten minutes! Who's Arnold? Is he gay? What do gay guys do? My mom goes crazy if I ask her.”