Adrian seizes him by the shoulders and drops his voice dramatically. “Dear boy. Justin. Whom the gods love. Mmh? Mmh? Manliness. Only thing,” he intones, all on one confiding note of commiseration. “You’re alone. Don’t tell me. Terribly alone.” Submitting to his embraces, Justin sees his two tiny, deep-set eyes searching greedily past his shoulder.
“Oh Justin, we really did love her so,” Beth mews, stretching her tiny mouth into a pitiful downward curve, then straightening it up again to kiss him.
“Where’s your man Luigi?” Adrian demands.
“In Naples. With his fiancée. They’re getting married. In June,” Justin adds uselessly.
“Should be here supporting you. World today, dear boy. No loyalty. No servant classes.”
“The big one is for darling Tessa in memory, and the little one’s for poor Garth, to be beside her,” Beth explains in a tinny little voice that has somehow lost its echo. “I thought we’d plant them in remembrance, didn’t I, Adrian?”
In the courtyard stands their pick-up, its back ostentatiously laden with rustic logs for the benefit of Adrian’s readers, who are invited to believe he cuts them for himself. Tied across them lie two young peach trees with plastic bags round their roots.
“Beth has these marvellous vibes,” Tupper booms confidingly. “Wavelength, dear boy. Tuned in all the time, aren’t you, darling? ‘We must take him trees,’ she said. Knows, you see. Knows.”
“We could plant them now, then they’d be done, wouldn’t they?” says Beth.
“After lunch,” says Adrian firmly.
And one simple peasants’ picnic—Beth’s care package, as she calls it, consisting of a loaf of bread, olives and a trout each from our smokery, darling, just the three of us, over a bottle of your nice Manzini wine.
Courteous unto death, Justin leads them to the villa.
“Can’t mourn for ever, dear boy. Jews don’t. Seven days is all they get. After that, they’re back on their feet, rarin’ to go. Their law, you see, darling,” Adrian explains, addressing his wife as if she were an imbecile.
They are sitting in the salon under the cherubs, eating trout off their laps in order to satisfy Beth’s vision of a picnic.
“All written down for them. What to do, who does it, how long for. After that, get on with the job. Justin should do the same. No good mooching, Justin. You must never mooch in life. Too negative.”
“Oh, I’m not mooching,” Justin objects, cursing himself for opening a second bottle of wine.
“What are you doing then?” Tupper demands as his small round eyes drill into Justin.
“Well, Tessa left a lot of unfinished business, you see,” Justin explains lamely. “Well—there’s her estate, obviously. And the charitable trust she had set up. Plus odds and ends.”
“Got a computer?”
You saw it! thought Justin, secretly aghast. You can’t have done! I was too quick for you, I know I was!
“Most important invention since the printing press, dear boy. Isn’t it, Beth? No secretary, no wife, nothing. What do you use? We resisted it to begin with, didn’t you, Beth? Mistake.”
“We didn’t realise,” Beth explains, taking a very big pull of wine for such a small woman.
“Oh, I just grabbed whatever they have here,” Justin replies, recovering his balance. “Tessa’s lawyers shoved a bunch of disks at me. I commandeered the estate machine and ploughed through them as best I could.”
“So you’ve finished, Time to go home. Don’t dither. Go. Your country needs you.”
“Well, not quite finished, actually, Adrian. I’ve still got a few days to go.”
“Foreign Office know you’re here?”
“Probably,” said Justin. How does Adrian do this to me? Rob me of my defences? Pry into the private places in my life where he has absolutely no business, and I stand by and let him?
A moratorium, during which, to his immense relief, Justin is subjected to an extraordinarily boring account of how the Greatest Writing Couple in the World was converted against all natural inclination to the Net—a dress rehearsal, no doubt, for another riveting chapter of Tuscan Tales, and another free machine from the manufacturers.
“You’re running away, dear boy,” Adrian warns severely as the two men untie the peach trees from the truck and cart them to the cantina for Justin to plant later. “Something called duty. Oldfashioned word these days. Longer you put it off, harder it’ll be. Go home. They’ll welcome you with open arms.”
“Why can’t we plant them now?” Beth asks.
“Too emotional, darling. Let him do it on his own. God bless you, dear boy. Wavelength. Most important thing in the world.”
So what were you? Justin demanded of Tupper as he stared after their departing pick-up: a fluke or a conspiracy? Did you jump or were you pushed? Did the smell of blood bring you—or did Pellegrin? At various stages of Tupper’s over-publicised life, he had graced the BBC and a vile British newspaper. But he had also worked in the large back rooms of secret Whitehall. Justin remembered Tessa at her naughtiest. “What do you think Adrian does with all the intelligence he doesn’t put into his books?”
He returned to Wanza, only to discover that Tessa’s six-page diary of her ward-companion’s illness petered to an unsatisfying end. Lorbeer and his team visit the ward three more times. Arnold twice challenges them, but Tessa does not hear what is said. It is not Lorbeer but the sexy Slav woman who physically examines Wanza, while Lorbeer and his acolytes look uselessly on. What happens after that happens at night while Tessa is asleep. Tessa wakes, screams and yells but no nurses come. They are too frightened. Only with the greatest difficulty does Tessa find them and force them to admit that Wanza is dead and her baby has gone back to her village.
Replacing the pages among the police papers, Justin once more addressed the computer. He felt bilious. He had drunk too much wine. His trout, which must have escaped the smoker at half-time, sat like rubber in his belly. He dabbed at a few keys, thought of going back to the villa and drinking a litre of mineral water. Suddenly he was staring at the screen in horrified disbelief. He stared away, shook his head to clear it, resumed his staring. He buried his face in his hands to wipe away the fuzziness. But when he looked again the message was still there.
THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN
ILLEGAL OPERATION.
YOU MAY LOSE ANY UNSAVED DATA IN
ALL WINDOWS THAT ARE RUNNING.
And below the death sentence, a row of boxes set out like coffins for a mass funeral: click the one you would most like to be buried in. He hung his hands at his sides, rolled his head around, then with his heels cautiously backed his chair away from the computer.
“Damn you, Tupper!” he whispered. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.” But he meant: damn me.
It’s something I did, or didn’t. I should have put the wretched brute to sleep.
Guido. Get me Guido.
He looked at his watch. School ends in twenty minutes but Guido has refused to be picked up. He prefers to take the school bus like all other normal boys, thank you, and he’ll ask the driver to hoot when he drops him at the gates—at which point, Justin is graciously permitted to fetch him in the jeep. There was nothing for it but to wait. If he made a dash to beat the bus, chances were he would reach the school too late and have to dash back. Leaving the computer to sulk he returned to the counting table in an attempt to restore his spirits with the hard paper he so vastly preferred to the screen.
PANA Wire Service (09/24/97)
In 1995, sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of new tuberculosis cases of any global region, as well as a high rate of TB and HIV co-infection, according to the World Health Organization . . .
I knew that already, thank you.
Tropical Mega-Cities Will Be Hells on Earth
As illegal logging, water and land pollution and unbridled oil extraction destroy the Third World’s ecosystem, more and more Third World rural communities are forced to migrate to citie
s in search of work and survival. Experts predict the rise of tens and perhaps hundreds of tropical mega-cities attracting vast new slum populations of lowest-paid labour, and producing unprecedented rates of killer diseases such as tuberculosis . . .
He heard the honking of a distant bus.
“So you screwed up,” Guido said with satisfaction, when Justin led him to the scene of the disaster. “Did you go into her mailbox?” He was already tapping the keys.
“Of course not. I wouldn’t know how to. What are you doing?”
“Did you add any material and forget to save it?”
“Absolutely no. Neither, nor. I wouldn’t.”
“Then it’s nothing. You didn’t lose any,” said Guido serenely in his computer interglot, and with a few more gentle taps, nursed the machine back to health. “Can we go on-line now? Please?” he begged.
“Why should we?”
“To get her mail, for Chrissakes! There’s hundreds of people out there sent her e-mails every day and you won’t read them. What about the people who want to send you their love and sympathy? Don’t you want to know what they said? There’s e-mails from me in there she never answered! Maybe she never read them!”
Guido was on the verge of tears. Taking him gently by the shoulders, Justin sat him on the stool before the keyboard.
“Tell me what the risk is,” he suggested. “Give me the worst case.”
“We risk nothing. Everything’s saved. There isn’t a worst case. We’re doing the absolutely simplest things with this computer. If we crash, it’s like before. I’ll save any new e-mails. Tessa saved everything else. Trust me.”
Guido attaches the laptop to its modem and offers Justin one end of a length of flex. “Pull out the telephone line and plug this in. Then we’re all hooked up.”
Justin does as he is told. Guido taps and waits. Justin is looking over his shoulder. Hieroglyphics, a window, more hieroglyphics. A pause for prayer and contemplation, followed by a full-screen message switching off and on like an illuminated sign, and an exclamation of disgust from Guido.
Hazardous Zone!!
THIS IS A HEALTH WARNING.
DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT.
CLINICAL TRIALS HAVE ALREADY INDICATED THAT FURTHER RESEARCH CAN ATTRACT FATAL SIDE-EFFECTS. FOR YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT YOUR HARD DISK HAS BEEN
CLEANSED OF TOXIC MATTER.
For a deluded few seconds Justin has no serious concerns. He would have liked, in better circumstances, to sit down at the counting table and pen an angry letter to the manufacturers objecting to their hyperbolic style. On the other hand, Guido has just demonstrated that their bark is worse than their bite. So he is about to exclaim something like, “Oh it’s them again, they really are the limit,” when he sees that Guido’s head has sunk into his neck as if he has been hit by a bully, and his upturned fingers have bunched like dead spiders either side of the laptop, and his face, what Justin can see of it, has returned to its pre-transfusion pallor.
“Is it bad?” Justin asks softly.
Flinging himself eagerly forward like an air pilot in crisis, Guido clicks through his emergency procedures. In vain apparently, for he flings himself upright again, slaps a palm to his forehead, closes his eyes and lets out a frightful groan.
“Just tell me what’s happening,” Justin pleads. “Nothing is this serious, Guido. Tell me.” And when Guido still does not reply, “You’ve switched off. Right?”
Transfixed, Guido nods.
“And now you’re unplugging the modem.”
Another nod. The same transfixion.
“Why do you do this?”
“I’m rebooting.”
“What does that mean?”
“We wait one minute.”
“Why?”
“Maybe two.”
“What will that do?”
“Give it time to forget. Settle it down. This is not natural, Justin. This is real bad.” He has reverted to computer-American. “This isn’t a bunch of socially inadequate young males having some fun. Very sick people have done this to you, believe me.”
“To me or to Tessa?”
Guido shakes his head. “It’s like somebody hates you.” He switches the computer on again, lifts himself on his stool, draws a long breath like a sigh in reverse. And Justin to his delight sees the familiar line of happy black kids waving at him from the screen.
“You’ve done it,” he exclaims. “You’re a genius, Guido!”
But even as he says this the kids are replaced by a jaunty little hourglass impaled by a white, diagonal arrow. Then they too disappear, leaving only a blue-black infinity.
“They killed it,” Guido whispers.
“How?”
“They put a bug on you. They told the bug to wipe the hard disk clean and they left you a message telling you what they’d done.”
“Then it’s not your fault,” says Justin earnestly.
“Did she download?”
“Whatever she printed out, I’ve read.”
“I’m not talking printing! Did she make disks?”
“We can’t find them. We think she may have taken them up north.”
“What’s up north? Why didn’t she e-mail them up north? Why does she have to carry disks up north? I don’t read it. I don’t get it.”
Justin is remembering Ham and thinking of Guido. Ham’s computer had a virus too.
“You said she e-mailed you a lot,” he says.
“Like once a week. Twice. If she forgot one week, twice the next.” He is speaking Italian. He is a child again, as lost as the day when Tessa found him.
“Have you looked at your e-mail since she was killed?”
Guido shakes his head in vigorous denial. It was too much for him. He couldn’t.
“So maybe we could go back to your house, and you could see what’s there. Would you mind? I’m not interfering?”
Driving up the hill and into the darkening trees, Justin thought of nothing and nobody but Guido. Guido was a wounded friend and Justin’s one aim was to take him safely home to his mother, and restore his calm and make sure that from here on Guido was going to stop moping, and get on with being a healthy, arrogant little genius of twelve instead of a cripple whose life had ended with Tessa’s death. And if, as he suspected, they—whoever they were—had done to Guido’s computer what they had done to Ham’s and Tessa’s, then Guido must be consoled and, so far as it was possible, have his mind set at rest. That was Justin’s sole priority, excluding all other aims and emotions, because to entertain them meant anarchy. It meant deflecting himself from the path of rational enquiry and confusing the quest for vengeance with the quest for Tessa.
He parked and with a sense of last things put his hand under Guido’s arm. And Guido, somewhat to Justin’s surprise, did not shake himself free. His mother had made a stew with fresh-baked bread that she was proud of, so on Justin’s insistence they ate it first, the two of them, and praised it while she kept guard over them. Then Guido fetched his computer from his bedroom and for a while they didn’t go on-line, but sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of them, reading Tessa’s bulletins about the sleepy lions she had seen on her travels, and the TERRIBLY playful elephants that would have sat on her jeep and squashed it if she had given them half a chance and the really DISDAINFUL giraffes who are NEVER happy unless somebody is admiring their elegant necks.
“You want a disk of all her e-mails?” Guido asked, sensing correctly that Justin had seen as much of this as he could take.
“That would be very kind,” said Justin very politely. “Then I want you to make copies of your work so that I can read it at my leisure and write to you: essays, your homework and all the things you would have wanted Tessa to see.”
The disks duly made, Guido replaced the telephone flex with the flex attached to the modem, and they watched a fine herd of Thomson’s gazelles in full gallop before the screen went dark. But when Guido tried to click back to the desktop he was forced to declare in a husky voice t
hat the hard disk had been wiped clean just like Tessa’s, but without that crazy message about clinical trials and toxicity.
“And she didn’t send you anything to keep for her,” Justin asked, sounding to himself like a customs officer.
Guido shook his head.
“Nothing that you were to pass on to anyone—she didn’t use you as a post office or anything like that?”
More shakes of the head.
“So what material have you lost that is important to you?”
“Only her last messages,” Guido whispered.
“Well, that makes two of us.” Or three if you include Ham, he was thinking. “So if I can handle it, you can. Because I was married to her. OK? Perhaps there was some bug in her machine that infected your machine. Is that possible? She picked something up and passed it on to you by mistake. Yes? I don’t know what I’m talking about, do I? I’m guessing. What I’m really telling you is, we’ll never know. So we might just as well say ‘tough luck’ and get on with our lives. Both of us. Yes? And you’ll order whatever you need to get yourself set up again. Yes? I’ll tell the office in Milan that’s what you’re going to do.”
Reasonably confident that Guido was restored, Justin took his leave; which was to say he drove down the hill again to the villa, and parked the jeep in the courtyard where he had found it, and from the oil room carried her laptop to the seashore. He had been told on various training courses, and he was willing to believe, that there were clever people who could retrieve the text from computers supposedly wiped clean. But such people were on the official side of life to which he no longer belonged. It crossed his mind to contact Rob and Lesley somehow and prevail on them to assist him, but he was reluctant to embarrass them. And besides, if he was honest, there was something contaminated about Tessa’s computer, something obscene that he would like to be rid of in a physical sense.
By the light of a half-hidden moon, therefore, he walked the length of a rickety jetty, passing on his way an ancient and rather hysterical notice declaring that whoever ventured further did so at their peril. Having reached the jetty’s end, he then consigned her raped laptop to the deep before returning to the oil room to write his heart out until dawn.