“Not the train, not the plane, I’m afraid. As I said, they didn’t have time to tell me anything.”
And Justin waits once more, pen obediently poised, to be told about that old Russian-made plane they keep in Juba.
“Those crazy Muslims in Juba, they make dumb bombs like cannon-balls. They take them up, then they roll them down the fuselage of that old plane and drop them on Christian villages, man! ‘Here you are, Christians! Here’s a nice love letter from your Muslim brothers!’ And these dumb bombs are very effective, you better believe me, Peter. Those boys have mastered the art of aiming them very straight. Oh yes! And those bombs are so volatile that the crew make damn sure they get rid of them before they land their old plane back in Juba!”
From beneath the bookmaker’s umbrella the field radio is announcing the approach of another Buffalo. First comes the laconic voice of Loki, then the captain in the air, calling in for contact. Hunched to the set, Jamie reports good weather, firm ground and no security problems. The diners hastily depart but Lorbeer remains in his place. With a snap, Justin closes his notebook and under Lorbeer’s gaze feeds it into his shirt pocket alongside his pens and reading spectacles.
“Well, Brandt. Lovely goat stew. I’ve a few special-interest questions, if that’s all right by you. Is there somewhere we could sit for an hour without being interrupted?”
Like a man leading the way to his place of execution Lorbeer guides Justin across a patch of trodden grassland strewn with sleeping tents and washing lines. A bell-shaped tent is set apart from them. Hat in hand, Lorbeer holds back the flap for Justin and contrives a hideous grin of servility as he lets him go first. Justin stoops, their eyes meet and Justin sees in Lorbeer what he has seen already when they were in the tukul, but now with greater clarity: a man terrified by what he resolutely forbids himself to see.
24
The air inside the tent is acrid and compressed and very hot, the smells are of rotten grass and stale clothes that no amount of washing can get clean. There is one wooden chair and in order to free it Lorbeer must remove a Lutheran Bible, a volume of Heine’s poetry, a baby-style fleecy sleeping suit and a food monitor’s emergency backpack with radio and protruding beacon. Only then does he offer the chair to Justin, before squatting himself on the edge of a bony camp bed six inches from the ground, ginger head in hands, damp back heaving as he waits for Justin to speak.
“My paper is interested in a controversial new TB cure called Dypraxa—manufactured by Karel Vita Hudson and distributed in Africa by the House of ThreeBees. I notice you don’t have it on your shelves. My paper thinks your real name is Markus Lorbeer and you’re the good fairy who saw the drug onto the market,” Justin explains, as he once more opens his notebook.
Nothing about Lorbeer stirs. The damp back, the ginger-golden head, the sodden pressed-down shoulders remain motionless in the aftershock of Justin’s words.
“There’s a growing clamour about Dypraxa’s side-effects, as I’m sure you know,” Justin goes on, turning a page and consulting it. “KVH and ThreeBees can’t keep their fingers in the dam for ever. You might be wise to get your word in ahead of the field.”
Sweat pouring off them, two victims of the same disease. The heat inside the tent so soporific that there is a risk in Justin’s mind they will both succumb to it, and fall into a sleeping sickness, side by side. Lorbeer embarks on a caged prowling of the tent’s circumference. This is how I endured the confinement of the lower ground, thinks Justin, as he watches his prisoner pause and startle himself in a tin mirror, or consult a wooden cross pinned to the canvas above his bedhead.
“God Christ, man. How the hell did you find me?”
“Talked to people. Had a bit of luck.”
“Don’t bullshit me, man. Luck nothing. Who’s paying you?”
Still pacing. Shaking his head to free it of sweat. Swinging round as if he expects to find Justin on his heels. Staring at him with suspicion and reproach.
“I’m freelance,” Justin says.
“To hell you are, man! I bought journalists like you! I know all your rackets! Who bought you?”
“Nobody.”
“KVH? Curtiss? I made them money, for Christ’s sake!”
“And they made money for you too, didn’t they? According to my paper, you own one-third of forty-nine per cent of the companies that patented the molecule.”
“I renounced it, man. Lara renounced it. It was blood money. ‘Take it,’ I told them. ‘It’s yours. And on the Day of Judgment, may God preserve you all.’ Those were my words to them, Peter.”
“Spoken to whom exactly?” Justin enquires, writing. “Curtiss? Someone at KVH?” Lorbeer’s face is a mask of terror. “Or to Crick, perhaps. Ah yes. I see. Crick was your link at ThreeBees.”
And he writes down Crick in his notebook, one letter at a time, because his hand is sluggish from the heat. “But Dypraxa wasn’t a bad drug, was it? My paper thinks it was a good drug that went too fast.”
“Fast?” The word bitterly amuses him. “Fast, man? Those boys in KVH wanted trial results so fast they couldn’t wait till tomorrow breakfast.”
A huge explosion stops the world. First it is Khartoum’s Russian-made plane from Juba dropping one of its dumb bombs. Then it is the wild horsemen from the north. Then it is the savage battle for the Bentiu oilfields that has arrived at the food station’s gates. The tent shakes, sags and braces itself for a new attack. Guyropes wince and sob as sheets of water crash onto the canvas roof. Yet Lorbeer seems not to have noticed the attack. He stands at the centre of the tent with one hand pressed to his brow as if he has forgotten something. Justin pulls back the tent flap and through sheets of rain counts three tents dead and two more dying before his eyes. Water is spouting from the washing on the lines. It has made a lake of the grass and is rising in a tide against the wooden walls of the tukul. It is crashing in freak waves over the rush roof of the air-raid shelter. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it stops.
“So Markus,” Justin proposes, as if the thunderstorm has cleared the air inside the tent as well as out. “Tell me about the girl Wanza. Was she a turning-point in your life? My paper thinks she was.”
Lorbeer’s bulging eyes remain fixed on Justin. He makes to speak but no words come.
“Wanza from a village north of Nairobi. Wanza who moved to Kibera slum. And was taken to the Uhuru Hospital to have her baby. She died and her baby lived. My paper believes she shared a ward with Tessa Quayle. Is that possible? Or Tessa Abbott, as she sometimes called herself.”
And still Justin’s voice is even and dispassionate, as becomes your objective reporter. And this dispassion is in many ways unfeigned, for he does not take easily to having a man at his mercy. The responsibility is more than he wishes. His instincts for vengeance are too weak. A plane zooms low overhead on its way to the drop zone. Lorbeer’s eyes lift to it in feeble hope. They have come to save me! They haven’t. They have come to save Sudan.
“Who are you, man?”
It has taken him a lot of courage to get the question out. But Justin ignores it.
“Wanza died. So did Tessa. So did Arnold Bluhm, a Belgian aid worker and doctor and her good friend. My paper believes that Tessa and Arnold came up here to speak to you just a couple of days before they were killed. My paper also believes that you confessed yourself to Tessa and Arnold on the matter of Dypraxa and—this is only supposition, of course—as soon as they had gone, betrayed them to your former employers in order to reinsure yourself. Perhaps by means of a radio message to your friend Mr Crick. Does that ring any bells at all?”
“Jesus God, man. God Christ.”
Markus Lorbeer is burning at the stake. He has seized the central tent pole in both arms and with his head pressed to it is hugging it to himself as if to shelter from the onslaught of Justin’s remorseless questioning. His head is raised to Heaven in agony, his mouth whispers and implores inaudibly. Rising, Justin carries his chair across the tent and sets it at Lorbeer’s heels, th
en takes him by the arm and lowers him into it.
“What were Tessa and Arnold looking for when they came here?” he enquires. His questions are still formulated with a deliberate casualness. He wishes for no more sobbing confessions, and no more appeals to God.
“They were looking for my guilt, man, my shameful history, my sin of pride,” Lorbeer whispers in reply, dabbing his face with a sopping piece of rag hauled from the pocket of his shorts.
“And they got it?”
“Everything, man. Every last bit, I swear.”
“With a tape recorder?”
“With two, man! That woman had no faith in one alone!” With an inward smile, Justin acknowledges Tessa’s legal acumen. “I abased myself totally before them. I gave them the naked truth before the Lord. There was no way out. I was the last link in the chain of their investigations.”
“Did they say what they intended to do with the information you had given them?”
Lorbeer’s eyes opened very wide but his lips remained closed and his body so motionless that for a second Justin wondered whether he had died a merciful death, but it seemed he was only remembering. Suddenly he was speaking very loudly, his words mounting to a scream as he fought to get them out.
“They would present it to the one man in Kenya they trusted. They would take the whole story to Leakey. Everything they had collected. Kenya should solve Kenya’s problem, she said. Leakey was the man to do it. That was their conviction. They warned me. She did. ‘Markus, you better hide yourself, man. This place is not safe for you any more. You got to find yourself a deeper hole, or they will kill you to pieces for betraying them to us.’”
It is hard for Justin to recreate Tessa’s actual words from Lorbeer’s strangled voice, but he does his best. And certainly he has no problem with the general drift of what she must have said, since Tessa’s first concern would always have been for Lorbeer rather than herself. And “kill you to pieces” was undoubtedly one of her expressions.
“What did Bluhm have to say to you?”
“He was right down to earth, man. Told me I was a charlatan and a traitor to my trust.”
“And that of course helped you to betray him,” Justin suggests kindly, but his kindness is in vain, for Lorbeer’s weeping is even worse than Woodrow’s—howling, alienating, infuriating tears as he pleads for himself in mitigation. He loves that drug, man! It does not deserve to be publicly condemned! A few more years and it will take its place among the great medical discoveries of the age! All we’ve got to do, we’ve got to check the peak levels of toxicity, control the rate at which we admit it to the body! They’re already working on that, man! By the time they hit the United States market, all those bugs will have disappeared, no problem! Lorbeer loves Africa, man, he loves all mankind, he is a good man, not born to bear such guilt! Yet even while he pleads and moans and rages, he contrives to raise himself mysteriously from defeat. He sits up straight. He draws back his shoulders and a smirk of superiority replaces his penitent’s grief.
“Plus look at their relationship, man,” he protests, with ponderous insinuation. “Look at their ethical behaviour. Whose sins are we speaking of here, precisely, I ask myself.”
“I don’t think I quite follow you,” says Justin mildly, as a mental safety screen between himself and Lorbeer begins to form inside his head.
“Read the newspapers, man. Listen to the radio. Make up your own mind independently and tell me, please. What is this pretty married white woman doing travelling about with this handsome black doctor as her constant companion? Why does she call herself by her maiden name and not by the name of her rightful husband? Why does she parade herself at her lover’s side in this very tent, man, brazenly, an adulteress and hypocrite, interrogating Markus Lorbeer about his personal morality?”
But the safety screen must have slipped somehow, for Lorbeer is staring at Justin as if he has seen death’s very angel come to summon him to the judgment he so dreads.
“God Christ, man. You’re him. Her husband. Quayle.”
The last food drop of the day has emptied the stockade of its workers. Leaving Lorbeer to weep alone in his tent, Justin sits himself on the hummock beside the air-raid shelter to enjoy the evening show: first the pitch-black herons, swooping and circling as they announce the sunset. Then the lightning, driving away the dusk in long, trembling salvoes, then the day’s moisture rising in a white veil. And finally the stars, close enough to touch.
25
Out of the finely steered gossip of Whitehall and Westminster; out of parroted television soundbites and misleading images; out of the otiose minds of journalists whose duty to enquire extended no further than the nearest deadline and the nearest free lunch, a chapter of events was added to the sum of minor human history,
The formal elevation en poste—contrary to established practice—of Mr Alexander Woodrow to the estate of British High Commissioner, Nairobi, sent ripples of quiet satisfaction through white Nairobi, and was welcomed by the indigenous African press. “A Quiet Force for Understanding” ran the sub-headline on page three of the Nairobi Standard, and Gloria was “a breath of fresh air who would blow away the last cobwebs of British colonialism.”
Of Porter Coleridge’s abrupt disappearance into the catacombs of official Whitehall, little was said but much implied. Woodrow’s predecessor had been “out of touch with modern Kenya.” He had “antagonised hard-working ministers with his sermons on corruption.” There was even a suggestion, cleverly not enlarged upon, that he might have fallen foul of the vice he so condemned.
Rumours that Coleridge had been “hauled before a Whitehall disciplinary committee” and invited to explain “certain embarrassing matters that had arisen during his stewardship” were dismissed as idle speculation but not denied by the High Commission spokesman who had initiated them. “Porter was a fine scholar and a man of the highest principle. It would be unjust to deny his many virtues,” Mildren informed reliable journalists in an off-the-record obituary, and they duly read between the lines.
“FO Africa Tsar Sir Bernard Pellegrin,” an uninterested public learned, had “sought early retirement in order to take up a senior managerial post with the multinational pharmaceutical giant Karel Vita Hudson of Basel, Vancouver, Seattle and now of London” where, thanks to Pellegrin’s “fabled skills at networking,” he would be at his most effective. A farewell banquet in the Pellegrins’ honour was attended by a glittering assembly of Africa’s High Commissioners to the Court of St James and their wives. A witty speech by the South African delegate observed that Sir Bernard and his Lady might not have won Wimbledon, but they had surely won the hearts of many Africans.
A spectacular rise from the ashes by “that latter-day Houdini of the City” Sir Kenneth Curtiss was welcomed by friend and foe alike. Only a minority of Cassandras insisted that Kenny’s rise was purely optical and the break-up of House of ThreeBees nothing less than an act of daylight sandbagging. These carping voices did not impede the great populist’s elevation to the House of Lords where he insisted upon the title of Lord Curtiss of Nairobi and Spennymoor, the latter being his humble place of birth. Even his many critics in Fleet Street had to concede, if wryly, that ermine became the old devil.
The Evening Standard’s “Londoner’s Diary” made amusing weather of the long-awaited retirement of that incorruptible old crime-stopper Superintendent Frank Gridley of Scotland Yard, “known affectionately to the London underworld as Old Gridiron.” In reality, retirement was the last thing that lay in store for him. One of Britain’s leading security companies was poised to snap him up just as soon as he had taken his wife on a long-promised holiday on the island of Majorca.
The departure of Rob and Lesley from the police service received by contrast no publicity at all, though insiders noted that one of Gridley’s last acts before leaving the Yard had been to press for the removal of what he termed “a new breed of unscrupulous careerists” who were giving the Force a bad name.
Ghita Pearson, a
nother would-be careerist, was not successful in her application for acceptance as an established British foreign servant. Although her examination results were good to excellent, confidential reports from the Nairobi High Commission gave cause for concern. Ruling that she was “too easily swayed by her personal feelings,” Personnel Department advised her to wait a couple of years and reapply. Her mixed race, it was emphasised, was not a factor.
No question mark at all, however, hung over the unhappy passing of Justin Quayle. Deranged by despair and grief, he had taken his own life at the very spot where his wife Tessa had been murdered only weeks before. His swift loss of mental balance had been an open secret among those entrusted with his welfare. His employers in London had gone to every length short of locking him up in an effort to save him from himself. The news that his trusted friend Arnold Bluhm was also his wife’s murderer had dealt the final blow. Traces of systematic beating around his abdomen and lower body told their own sad story to the tightly knit group of insiders who were privy to the secret: in the days leading up to his death, Quayle had resorted to self-flagellation. How he had come by the fatal weapon—an assassin’s short-barrelled .38 pistol in excellent condition with five soft-nosed bullets remaining in the chamber—was a mystery unlikely to be resolved. A rich and desperate man bent upon his own destruction is sure to find a way. His final resting-place in Langata cemetery, the press noted with approval, had reunited him with his wife and child.
The permanent government of England, on which her transient politicians spin and posture like so many table dancers, had once more done its duty: except, that is, in one small but irritating respect. Justin, it seemed, had spent the last weeks of his life composing a “black dossier” purporting to prove that Tessa and Bluhm had been murdered for knowing too much about the evil dealings of one of the world’s most prestigious pharmaceutical companies which so far had contrived to remain anonymous. Some upstart solicitor of Italian origin—a relation of the dead woman to boot—had come forward and, making free use of his late clients’ money, retained the services of a professional troublemaker who hid behind the mask of Public Relations Agent. The same hapless solicitor had allied himself with a firm of supercharged City lawyers famous for their pugnacity. The house of Oakey, Oakey & Farmeloe, representing the unnamed company, challenged the use of clients’ funds for this purpose, but without success. They had to content themselves with serving writs on any newspaper that dared take up the story.