He's the one who sells us untried medicines too. He's the one who fast-streams clinical trials and uses the wretched of the earth as guinea pigs.
"You want coffee?"
"I'd love some. Thank you."
Lorbeer leaps to his feet, seizes Justin's soup mug and rinses it with hot water from a thermos as a prelude to filling it with coffee. Lorbeer's shirt is stuck to his back, revealing billows of trembling flesh. But he doesn't stop talking. He has developed a terror of silence.
"Did the boys down in Loki tell you about the train, Peter?" he yells, drying the mug with a piece of tissue plucked out of the rubbish bag beside him. "This damned old train that comes south at walking speed like three times a year?"
"I'm afraid not."
"It comes down the old railway that you British laid, OK? The train does. Like in the old movies. It's protected by wild horsemen from the north. This old train resupplies every Khartoum garrison on its route from north to south. OK?"
"OK."
Why is he sweating so? Why are his eyes so haunted and questing? What secret comparison is he making between the Arab train and his own sins?
"Man! That train! Right now it's stuck between Ariath and Aweil, two days' hike from here. We got to pray God to make sure the river stays flooded, then maybe the bastards don't come this way. They make Armageddon wherever they go, I tell you. They kill everyone. Nobody can stop them. They're too strong."
"Which bastards are we talking about here exactly, Brandt?" Justin asks, jotting again in his notebook. "I lost the plot there for a moment."
"The wild horsemen are the bastards, man! Do you think they get paid for protecting that train? Not a bean, man. Not a drachma. They do it for free, out of the goodness of their kind hearts! Their reward, that's the killing and the raping their way through the villages. It's the setting fire to them. It's kidnapping the young guys and girls to take back north when the train is empty! It's stealing every damn thing they don't burn."
"Ah. Got it."
But the train isn't enough for Lorbeer. Nothing is enough if it threatens to bring silence in its wake, and expose him to questions he dare not hear. His haunted eyes are already searching desperately for a sequel.
"They told you about the plane then? — the Russian-made plane, man, older than Noah's ark, the plane they keep down in Juba? Man, that's some story!"
"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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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 clamor 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 forever. 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 percent 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 inquires, 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."