“My education was a little too expensive for that, I’m afraid.”
“Lorbeer claims in his confession that while acting for KVH he obtained the validation of Dypraxa by means of flattery and bribery.
He describes buying health officials, fast-tracking clinical trials, purchasing drug registrations and import licences and feeding every bureaucratic hand in the food chain. In Moscow, a validation by top medical opinion-leaders could be bought for twenty-five thousand dollars. So he writes. The problem is that when you bribe one you must also bribe those you do not select, otherwise they will denigrate the molecule out of envy or resentment. In Poland it was not so different, but less expensive. In Germany, influence was more subtle but not very subtle. Lorbeer writes of a famous occasion when he chartered a jumbo jet for KVH and flew eighty eminent German physicians to Thailand for an educational trip.” She was smiling as she related this. “Their education was provided on the journey out, in the form of films and lectures, also Beluga caviar and extremely ancient brandies and whiskies. Everything must be of the finest quality, he writes, because the good doctors of Germany have been spoiled early. Champagne is no longer interesting to them. In Thailand, the physicians were free to do as they wished, but recreation was provided for those who wanted it, also attractive partners. Lorbeer personally organised a helicopter to drop orchids on a certain beach where the physicians and their partners were relaxing. On the flight home, no further education was needed. The physicians were educated out. All they had to remember was how to write their prescriptions and learned articles.”
But although she was laughing she was uneasy with this story, and needed to correct its impact.
“This does not signify that Dypraxa is a bad drug, Justin. Dypraxa is a very good drug that has not completed its trials. Not all doctors can be seduced, not all pharmaceutical companies are careless and greedy.”
She paused, aware that she was speaking too much, but Justin made no attempt to deflect her.
“The modern pharmaceutical industry is only sixty-five years old. It has good men and women, it has achieved human and social miracles, but its collective conscience is not developed. Lorbeer writes that the pharmas turned their backs on God. He has many biblical references I do not understand. Perhaps that is because I do not understand God.”
Carl had gone to sleep on the swing, so Justin lifted him out and, with his hand on his hot back, walked him softly up and down the tarmac.
“You were telling me how you telephoned Lara Emrich,” Justin reminded her.
“Yes, but I distracted myself deliberately because I am embarrassed that I was stupid. Are you comfortable or shall I take him?”
“I’m fine.”
The white Mercedes had stopped at the bottom of the hill. The two men were still sitting inside it.
“In Hippo we have assumed for years that our telephones are listened to, we have a certain pride about this. From time to time our mail is censored. We send ourselves letters and watch them come to us late and in a different condition. We have often fantasised about planting misleading information on the Organy.”
“The what?”
“It is Lara’s word. It is a Russian word from Soviet times. It means the organs of state.”
“I shall adopt it immediately.”
“So maybe the Organy listened to us laughing and rejoicing on the telephone when I promised Lara I would send her a copy of the document to Canada immediately. Lara said unfortunately she does not possess a fax machine because she has spent her money on lawyers and is not permitted to enter the hospital precincts. If she had possessed a fax machine, maybe there would be no problem today. She would have a copy of Lorbeer’s confession, even if we did not. Everything would be saved. Maybe. Everything is maybe. Nothing has a proof.”
“What about e-mail?”
“She has no e-mail any more. Her computer had a cardiac arrest on the day after she attempted to publish her article, and it has not recovered.”
She sat pink and stoical in her vexation.
“And therefore?” Justin prompted her.
“Therefore we have no document. They stole it when they stole the computer and the files and the tapes. I telephoned to Lara in the evening, five o’clock German time. Our conversation finished at maybe five-forty. She was emotional, very happy. I also. ‘Wait till Kovacs hears about this,’ she kept saying. So we talked a long time and laughed and I did not think to make a copy of Lorbeer’s confession until tomorrow. I put the document in our safe and locked it. It’s not an enormous safe but it is considerable. The burglars had a key. As they locked our doors when they left, so they locked our safe after they had stolen our document. When one considers these things they are obvious. Until then they do not exist. What does a giant do when he wants a key? He tells his little people to find out what safe we have, then he phones the giant who made the safe and asks him to have his little people make a key. In the world of giants, this is normal.”
The white Mercedes hadn’t moved. Perhaps that too was normal.
They have found a tin shelter. Rows of folded deckchairs stand chained like prisoners to either side of them. The rain rattles and pings on the tin roof and runs in rivulets at their feet. Carl has returned to his mother. He lies sleeping on her breast with his head tucked into her shoulder. She has unfolded a parasol and is holding it over him. Justin sits apart from them on the bench, hands linked between his knees in prayer and his head bowed over his hands. This is what I resented about Garth’s death, he remembers. Garth deprived me of my further education.
“Lorbeer was writing a roman,” she says.
“Novel.”
“Roman is a novel?”
“Yes.”
“Then this novel has the happy end at the beginning. Once upon a time there are two beautiful young woman doctors called Emrich and Kovacs. They are interns at Leipzig University in East Germany. The university has a big hospital. They are researching under the guidance of wise professors and they dream one day they will make a great discovery that will save the world. Nobody speaks of the god Profit, unless it is profit to mankind. At Leipzig hospital there are arriving many returning Russian Germans from Siberia and they have TB. In the Soviet prison camps the prevalence of TB was very high. All the patients are poor, all are sick and without defences, most have multi-resistant strains, many are dying. They will sign anything, they will try anything, they will not make trouble. So it is natural that the two young doctors have been isolating bacteria and experimenting with embryonic remedies for TB. They have tested with animals, maybe they tested also with medical students and other interns. Medical students have no money. They will be doctors one day, they are interested in the process. And in charge of their researches we have an Oberarzt—”
“Senior doctor.”
“The team is led by an Oberarzt who is enthusiastic for the experiments. All the team wants his admiration so all take part in the experiments. Nobody is evil, nobody is criminal. They are young dreamers, they have a sexy subject to analyse and the patients are desperate. Why not?”
“Why not?” Justin murmurs.
“And Kovacs has a boyfriend. Kovacs has always a boyfriend. Many boyfriends. This boyfriend is a Pole, a good fellow. Married, but never mind. And he has a laboratory. A small, efficient, intelligent laboratory in Gdansk. For love of Kovacs, the Pole tells her she can come and play in his laboratory whenever she has free time. She can bring whom she wants, so she brings her beautiful friend and colleague Emrich. Kovacs and Emrich research, Kovacs and the Pole make love, everyone is happy, nobody talks about the god Profit. These young people are looking only for honour and glory and maybe a bit promotion. And their studies produce positive results. Patients still die but they were dying anyway. And some live who would have died. Kovacs and Emrich are proud. They write articles for medical magazines. Their professor writes articles supporting them. Other professors support the professor, everyone is happy, everyone congratulates his neighbour, ther
e are no enemies, or not yet.”
Carl shuffles on her shoulder. She pats his back and blows softly on his ear. He smiles and goes back to sleep.
“Emrich also has a lover. She has a husband whose name is Emrich but he is not satisfactory, this is Eastern Europe, everyone has been married to everyone. Her lover’s name is Markus Lorbeer. He has a South African birth certificate, a German father and a Dutch mother and he is living in Moscow as a pharma agent, self-employed, but also as—as an entrepreneur who identifies interesting possibilities in the field of biotechnology and exploits them.”
“Talent spotter.”
“He is older than Lara by maybe fifteen years, he has swum in all the oceans, as we say, he is a dreamer as she is. He loves science, but never became a scientist. He loves medicine but is not a doctor. He loves God and the whole world, but he also loves hard currency and the god Profit. So he writes: ‘The young Lorbeer is a believer, he worships the Christian God, he worships women, but he worships also very much the god Profit.’ That is his downfall. He believes in God but ignores Him. Personally I reject this attitude but never mind. For a humanist, God is an excuse for not being humanistic. We shall be humanistic in the afterlife, meanwhile we make Profit. Never mind. ‘Lorbeer took God’s gift of wisdom’—I guess he means by this the molecule—‘and sold it to the Devil.’ I guess he means KVH. Then he writes that when Tessa came to see him in the desert, he told her the full extent of his sin.”
Justin sits up sharply.
“He says that? He told Tessa? When? In the hospital? Where did she come to see him? What desert? What on earth is he saying?”
“Like I told you, the document is a little crazy. He calls her the Abbott. ‘When the Abbott came to visit Lorbeer in the desert, Lorbeer wept.’ Maybe it is a dream, a fable. Lorbeer has become a penitent in the desert now. He is Elijah or Christ, I don’t know. It’s disgusting actually. ‘The Abbott called Lorbeer to account before God. Therefore at this meeting in the desert, Lorbeer explained to the Abbott the inmost nature of his sins.’ This is what he writes. His sins were evidently many. I don’t remember them all. There was the sin of self-delusion and the sin of false argument. Then comes the sin of pride, I think. Followed by the sin of cowardice. For this he does not excuse himself at all, which makes me happy actually. But probably he is happy too. Lara says he is only happy when he is confessing or making love.”
“He wrote all this in English?”
She nodded. “One paragraph he wrote like the English Bible, the next paragraph he was giving extremely technical data about the deliberately specious design of the clinical trials, the disputes between Kovacs and Emrich and the problems of Dypraxa when combined with other drugs. Only a very informed person could know such details. This Lorbeer I greatly prefer to the Lorbeer of Heaven and Hell, I will admit to you.”
“Abbott with a small A?”
“Large. ‘The Abbott recorded everything I told her.’ But there was another sin. He killed her.”
Waiting, Justin fixed his gaze on the recumbent Carl.
“Maybe not directly, he is ambiguous. ‘Lorbeer killed her with his treachery. He committed the sin of Judas, therefore he cut her throat with his bare hands and nailed Bluhm to the tree.’ When I was reading out these words to Lara, I asked her: ‘Lara. Is Markus saying that he killed Tessa Quayle?’”
“How did she reply?”
“Markus could not kill his worst enemy. That is his agony, she says. To be a bad man with a good conscience. She is Russian, very depressed.”
“But if he killed Tessa, he’s not a good man, is he?”
“Lara swears it would be impossible. Lara has many letters from him. She can only love hopelessly. She has heard many confessions from him, but not this one, naturally. Markus is very proud of his sins, she says. But he is vain and exaggerates them. He is complicated, maybe a bit psychotic, which is why she loves him.”
“But she doesn’t know where he is?”
“No.”
Justin’s straight, unseeing stare had fixed on the deceptive twilight. “Judas didn’t kill anyone,” he objected. “Judas betrayed.”
“But the effect was the same. Judas killed with his treachery.”
Another long contemplation of the twilight. “There’s a missing character. If Lorbeer betrayed Tessa, who did he betray her to?”
“It was not clear. Maybe the Forces of Darkness. I have only what is in my memory.”
“The Forces of Darkness?”
“In the letter he talked of the Forces of Darkness. I hate this terminology. Does he mean KVH? Maybe he knows other forces.”
“Did the document mention Arnold?”
“The Abbott had a guide. In the document he is the Saint. The Saint had called out to Lorbeer in the hospital and told him the drug Dypraxa was an instrument of death. The Saint was more cautious than the Abbott because he is a doctor, and more tolerant because he has experience of human wickedness. But the greatest truth is with Emrich. Of this Lorbeer is certain. Emrich knows everything, therefore she is not allowed to speak. The Forces of Darkness are determined to repress the truth. That is why the Abbott had to be killed and the Saint crucified.”
“Crucified? Arnold?”
“In Lorbeer’s fable the Forces of Darkness dragged Bluhm away and nailed him to a tree.”
They fell silent, both in some way ashamed.
“Lara says also that Lorbeer drinks like a Russian,” she added, in some kind of mitigation, but Justin was not to be deflected.
“He writes from the desert but he uses a courier service out of Nairobi,” he objected.
“The address was typed, the waybill was written by hand, the package was despatched from the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi. The sender’s name was difficult to read but I think it was McKenzie. Is that Scottish? If the package could not be delivered it should not be returned to Kenya. It should be destroyed.”
“The waybill had a number, presumably.”
“The waybill was attached to the envelope. When I put the document in the safe for the night I first put it back in the envelope. Naturally the envelope has also disappeared.”
“Get back to the courier service. They’ll have a copy.”
“The courier service has no record of the package. Not in Nairobi, not in Hanover.”
“How do I find her?”
“Lara?”
The rain clattered on the tin roof and the orange lights of the city swelled and dwindled in the mist while Birgit tore a sheet of paper from her diary and wrote out a long telephone number.
“She has a house but not for much longer. Otherwise you must enquire at the university, but you must take care because they hate her.”
“Was Lorbeer sleeping with Kovacs as well as Emrich?”
“For Lorbeer it would not be unusual. But I believe the quarrel between the women was not about sex but about the molecule.” She paused, following his gaze. He was staring into the distance, but there was nothing to see but the far hilltops poking through the mist. “Tessa wrote often that she loved you,” she said quietly to his averted face. “Not directly, that was not necessary. She said you were a man of honour and when it was necessary you would be honourable.”
She was preparing to leave. He passed her the backpack and between them they strapped Carl into his baby-pillion and fixed the plastic cape so that his sleepy head popped through the hole. She stood squat before him.
“So then,” she said. “You walk?”
“I walk.”
She pulled an envelope from inside her jacket.
“This is all I remember of Lorbeer’s novel. I wrote it down for you. My handwriting is very bad but you will decipher it.”
“You’re very kind.” He stuffed the envelope inside his raincoat.
“So have good walking then,” she said.
She was going to shake his hand but changed her mind and kissed him on the mouth: one stern, deliberate, necessarily clumsy kiss of affection and farewell while she held the
bicycle steady. Then Justin held the bicycle while she buckled her shell-helmet under her chin before swinging into the saddle and pedalling away down the hill.
I walk.
He walked, keeping to the centre of the road, one eye for the darkening rhododendron bushes either side of him. Sodium lights burned every fifty metres. He scanned the black patches between. The night air smelled of apples. He reached the bottom of the hill and approached the parked Mercedes, passing ten yards from its bonnet. No light inside the car. Two men were sitting in the front, but to judge by their motionless silhouettes they were not the same two who had driven up the hill and down again. He kept walking and the car overtook him. He ignored it, but in his imagination the men were not ignoring him. The Mercedes reached a crossroads and turned left. Justin turned right, heading for the glow of the town. A taxi passed and the driver called out to him.
“Thank you, thank you,” he called back expansively, “but I prefer to walk.”
There was no answering call. He was on a pavement now, keeping to the outer edge. He made another crossing and entered a brightly lit side street. Dead-eyed young men and women crouched in doorways. Men in leather jackets stood on corners, elbows lifted, talking into cellphones. He made two more crossings and saw his hotel ahead of him.
The lobby was in the usual inescapable evening turmoil. A Japanese delegation was checking in, cameras were flashing, porters piling costly luggage into the only lift. Taking his place in the queue he pulled off his raincoat and slung it over his arm, favouring Birgit’s envelope in the inside pocket. The lift descended, he stood back to let the women get in first. He rode to the third floor and was the only one to get out. The vile corridor with its sallow strip-lighting reminded him of the Uhuru Hospital. Television sets blared from every room. His own room was three-eleven and the door key was a piece of flat plastic with a black arrow printed on it. The din of competing television sets was infuriating him and he had a good mind to complain to somebody. How can I write to Ham with this din going on? He stepped into his room, laid his raincoat over a chair and saw that his own television set was the culprit. The chambermaids must have turned it on while they made up the room, and not bothered to turn it off when they left. He advanced on the set. It was showing the kind of programme he particularly detested. A half-dressed singer was howling at full volume into a microphone to the delight of an ecstatic juvenile audience while illuminated snow wandered down the screen.