“Yes, sir.”
He didn’t hear them leave. For a while he heard no sounds at all, except for the odd popping of the lake, and the putter of an occasional fishing boat. He heard a jackal howl, and a lot of backchat from a family of vultures that had commandeered a doum palm down on the lakeside. And he heard Tessa telling him that if she had it all to do again, this was still where she would want to do her dying, in Africa, on her way to heading off a great injustice. He drank some water, stood up, stretched and wandered over to the paint marks because that was where he knew for a surety that he was close to her. It didn’t take much working out. If he put his hands on the marks he was about eighteen inches from her, if you discounted the width of the car door. Or maybe twice that much if you imagined Arnold in between. He even managed to have a bit of a laugh with her because he’d always had the devil’s own job persuading her to wear her seat belt. On potholed African roads, she had argued, with her usual stubbornness, you were better off hanging loose: at least you could weave and dodge around inside the car instead of being plonked like a sack of potatoes into every bloody crater. And from the paint marks he made his way to the bottom of the gully and, hands in pockets, stood beside the dried-up river bed, staring back at the spot where the jeep had come to rest and imagining poor Arnold being hauled senseless from it, to be taken to his place of prolonged and terrible execution.
Then, as a methodical man, he returned to the boulder he had chosen as his sitting place when he first came here, and sat down on it again, and devoted himself to the study of a small blue flower not unlike the phlox that he had planted in the front garden of their house in Nairobi. But the problem was, he was not absolutely sure the flower belonged to the place where he was seeing it, or whether in his mind he had transplanted it from Nairobi or, come to think of it, from the meadows surrounding his hotel in the Engadine. Also his interest in flora generally was at a low ebb. He no longer wished to cultivate the image of a sweet chap passionately interested in nothing except phlox, asters, freesias and gardenias. And he was still reflecting on this transition in his nature when he heard the sound of an engine from the direction of the shore, first the little explosion of it as it sprang to life, then its steady chugging as it faded into the distance. Mickie’s decided to have a go after all, he thought; for your true fisherman, rising fish at dusk are an irresistible temptation. And after that, he remembered his attempts to persuade Tessa to go fishing with him, which invariably ended with no fish but a lot of undisciplined lovemaking, which was perhaps why he was so keen on persuading her. And he was still humorously contemplating the logistics of making love in the bottom of a small boat when he had a different idea about Mickie’s fishing expedition, namely that it wasn’t happening.
Mickie didn’t mess about, change his mind, give in to whims.
That wasn’t Mickie at all.
The thing about Mickie that you knew the moment you set eyes on him, and Tessa had said the same, was that this fellow was your born family retainer, which was why, to be honest, it was easy to confuse him with Mustafa.
So Mickie hadn’t gone fishing.
But he’d gone. Whether he’d taken the poisonous Abraham with him was a moot point. But Mickie had gone, and the boat had gone. Back across the lake—that boat’s engine had faded and faded.
So why had he gone? Who had told him to go? Paid him to go? Ordered him to go? Threatened him if he didn’t go? What message had Mickie received, over his boat’s radio, or man to man from another boat or somebody on the shore, that had persuaded him, against all the natural lines of his good face, to walk out on a job when he hadn’t been paid for it? Or had Markus Lorbeer the compulsive Judas taken out some more insurance with his friends in the industry? He was still mulling over this possibility when he heard another engine, this time from the direction of the road. The dusk was falling quickly by now, and the light already fickle, so he might have expected a passing car at this hour to put on its sidelights at the very least, but this one—car or whatever—hadn’t done so, which was a puzzle to him.
One thought he had—probably because the car was moving at a snail’s pace—was that it was Ham, driving at his habitual five miles an hour below the speed limit, come to announce that Justin’s letters to the ferocious aunt in Milan had been safely received, and that Tessa’s great injustice would shortly be righted on the lines of her oft-stated conviction that the System must be forced to mend its own ways from within. Then he thought: it’s not a car at all, I’ve got it wrong. It’s a small plane. Then the sound stopped altogether which almost succeeded in convincing him it had been an illusion in the first place—that he was hearing Tessa’s jeep, for instance, and any second it was going to pull up just above him on the road there and she was going to hop out wearing both Mephisto boots, and come skipping down the slope to congratulate him on taking over where she’d left off. But it wasn’t Tessa’s jeep, it didn’t belong to anyone he knew. What he was looking at was the elusive shape of a long-wheelbase jeep or four-track—no, safari truck—either dark blue or dark green, in the fast-vanishing light it was hard to tell, and it had stopped in exactly the spot where he had just been watching Tessa. And although he had been expecting something of the kind ever since he had returned to Nairobi—even in a remote way wishing for it, and had therefore regarded Donohue’s warning to him as superfluous—he greeted the sight with an extraordinary sense of exultation, not to say completion. He had met her betrayers, of course—Pellegrin, Woodrow, Lorbeer. He had rewritten her scandalously discarded memorandum for her—if in a piecemeal form, but that couldn’t be avoided. And now, it seemed, he was about to share with her the last of all her secrets.
A second truck had pulled up behind the first. He heard light footsteps and made out the fast-moving shapes of fit men in bulky clothes crouching at the run. He heard a man or woman whistle and an answering whistle from behind him. He imagined, and perhaps it was true, that he caught a whiff of Sportsman cigarette smoke. The darkness grew suddenly deeper as lights came on around him and the brightest of them picked him out, and held him in its beam.
He heard a sound of feet sliding down white rock.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Let me rush to the protection of the British High Commission in Nairobi. It is not the place I described, for I have never been inside it. It is not staffed by the people I have described, for I have never met nor spoken to them. I met the High Commissioner a couple of years back, and we had a ginger beer together on the verandah of the Norfolk Hotel and that was all. He bears not the least resemblance, externally or otherwise, to my Porter Coleridge. As to poor Sandy Woodrow—well, if there were a Head of Chancery at all in the British High Commission in Nairobi as I write, you may be sure he would be a diligent and upstanding man or woman who never covets a colleague’s spouse or destroys inconvenient documents. But there isn’t. Heads of Chancery in Nairobi, as in many other British Missions, have fallen to the axe of time.
In these dog days when lawyers rule the universe, I have to persist with these disclaimers, which happen to be perfectly true. With one exception nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world, whether we are thinking of Woodrow, Pellegrin, Landsbury, Crick, Curtiss and his dreaded House of ThreeBees, or Messrs Karel Vita Hudson, also known as KVH. The exception is the great and good Wolfgang of the Oasis Lodge, a character so imprinted upon the memory of all who visit him that it would be ridiculous to attempt to create a fictional equivalent. In his sovereignty, Wolfgang raised no objection to my traducing his name and voice.
There is no Dypraxa, never was, never will be. I know of no wonder-cure for TB that has recently been launched on the African market or any other—or is about to be—so with luck I shall not be spending the rest of my life in the law courts or worse, though nowadays you can never be sure. But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the rea
lity, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.
On a happier note, let me warmly thank those who helped me and are willing to have their names mentioned, as well as others who helped me and for good reasons are not.
Ted Younie, a longtime and compassionate observer of the African scene, first whispered pharmaceuticals in my ear and later purged my text of several solecisms.
Dr David Miller, a physician with experience of Africa and the Third World, first suggested tuberculosis as the way, and opened my eyes to the costly and sophisticated campaign of seduction waged by pharmaceutical companies against the medical profession.
Dr Peter Godfrey-Faussett, a senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, gave me precious expert advice, both at the outset, and again at the manuscript stage.
Arthur, a man of many trades and son of my late American publisher Jack Geoghegan, told me horrendous tales of his time as a pharma man in Moscow and Eastern Europe. Jack’s benign spirit presided over us.
Daniel Berman of Médecins Sans Frontières in Geneva provided me with a briefing that was three-star Michelin: worth the whole journey.
BUKO Pharma-Kampagne of Bielefeld in Germany—not to be confused with Hippo in my novel—is an independently financed, under-manned body of sane, well-qualified people who struggle to expose the misdeeds of the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in its dealings with the Third World. If you are feeling generous, please send them some money to help them continue their work. As medical opinion continues to be insidiously and methodically corrupted by the pharma-giants, BUKO’s survival assumes ever greater importance. And BUKO not only helped me greatly. They actually urged me to extol the virtues of responsible pharmaceutical companies. For love of them, I tried here and there to do as they asked, but it wasn’t what the story was about.
Both Dr Paul Haycock, a veteran of the international pharma industry, and Tony Allen, an old Africa hand and pharma consultant with a heart and an eye, gave me freely of their advice, knowledge and good humour, and graciously suffered my assaults on their profession—as indeed did the hospitable Peter, who prefers to remain modestly in the shadows.
I received help from several sterling individuals in the United Nations. None had the smallest notion of what I was about; nevertheless I suspect it is tactful not to name them.
With sadness, I have also decided not to name the people in Kenya who generously gave me their assistance. As I write, news is coming in of the death of John Kaiser, an American priest from Minnesota who worked in Kenya for the last thirty-six years. His body was found in Naivasha, fifty miles north-west of Nairobi. It had a bullet wound to the head. A shotgun was found close by. Mr Kaiser was a longtime outspoken critic of the Kenyan government’s human rights policies, or lack of them. Accidents like that can happen again.
In describing the tribulations of Lara in chapter eighteen, I drew on several cases, particularly in the North American continent, where highly qualified medical researchers have dared to disagree with their pharmaceutical paymasters and suffered vilification and persecution for their pains. The issue is not about whether their inconvenient findings were correct. It is about individual conscience in conflict with corporate greed. It is about the elementary right of doctors to express unbought medical opinions, and their duty to acquaint patients with the risks they believe to be inherent in the treatments they prescribe.
And lastly, if you should ever chance to find yourself on the island of Elba, please do not fail to visit the beautiful old estate that I appropriated for Tessa and her Italian forebears. It is called La Chiusa di Magazzini, and is the property of the Foresi family. The Foresis make red, white and rosé wines and liqueurs from their own vineyard, and an immaculate oil from their own olive orchard. They have a few cottages that you may rent. There is even an oil room where those in search of answers to life’s great riddles may seek temporary seclusion.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
DECEMBER 2000
John le Carré, The Constant Gardener
(Series: # )
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