"Not to my knowledge, no," says Justin, smiling at "fatwa."
Rob doesn't let it go. "Based on — I don't know — some bad experience she and Arnold had in their fieldwork, say — malpractice of some kind — of the pharmaceutical sort? Only she was pretty big on the medical side of things, wasn't she? And so's Kenny K, when he's not on the golf course with Moi's Boys or buzzing round in his Gulf-stream buying a few more companies."
"Oh indeed," says Justin — but with such an air of detachment, if not downright disinterest, that there is clearly no prospect of further enlightenment.
"So if I told you that Tessa and Arnold had made repeated representations to numerous departments of the far-flung House of ThreeBees over recent weeks — had written letters, made phone calls and appointments and had persistently been given the runaround for their trouble — you would still be saying this was not something that had come to your notice in any shape or form. That's a question."
"I'm afraid I would."
"Tessa writes a string of furious letters to Kenny K personally. They're hand-delivered or registered. She phones his secretary three times a day and bombards him with e-mails. She attempts to doorstep him at his farm at Lake Naivasha and at the entrance to his illustrious new offices, but his boys tip him off in time and he uses the back stairs, to the great entertainment of his staff. All this would be total news to you, so help you God?"
"With or without God's help, it is news to me."
"Yet you don't seem surprised."
"Don't I? How odd. I thought I was astonished. Perhaps I am not betraying my emotions as I should," Justin retorts, with a mixture of anger and reserve that catches the officers off their guard, for their heads lift to him, almost in salute.
* * *
But Justin is not interested in their responses. His deceptions come from an entirely different stable to Woodrow's. Where Woodrow was busily forgetting, Justin is being assailed from all sides by half-recovered memories: shreds of conversation between Bluhm and Tessa that in honor he had compelled himself not to hear, but that now come drifting back to him; her exasperation, disguising itself as silence, whenever the omnipresent name of Kenny K is spoken in her hearing — for example, his imminent elevation to the House of Lords, which in the Muthaiga Club is predicted as a racing certainty — for example, the persistent rumors of a giant merger between ThreeBees and a multinational conglomerate even vaster than itself. He is remembering her implacable boycott of all ThreeBees products — her antiNapoleonic crusade, as she ironically dubbed it — from the household foods and detergents that Tessa's domestic army of down-and-outs was not allowed to buy on pain of death to the ThreeBees roadside cafeterias and gasoline stations, car batteries and oils that Justin was forbidden to make use of when they were out driving together — and her furious cursing whenever a ThreeBees billboard with Napoleon's stolen emblem leered at them from the hoardings.
"We're hearing radical a lot, Justin," Lesley announces, emerging from her notes to break into his thoughts once more. "Was Tessa radical? Radical's like militant where we come from. "If you don't like it, bomb it" sort of thing. Tessa wasn't into that stuff, was she? Nor was Arnold. Or were they?"
Justin's answer has the weary ring of repeated drafting for a pedantic Head of Department.
"Tessa believed that the irresponsible quest for corporate profit is destroying the globe, and the emerging world in particular. Under the guise of investment, Western capital ruins the native environment and favors the rise of kleptocracies. So ran her argument. It is scarcely a radical one these days. I have heard it widely canvassed in the corridors of the international community. Even in my own committee."
He pauses again while he recalls the unlovely sight of the vastly overweight Kenny K driving off from the first tee of the Muthaiga Club in the company of Tim Donohue, our overaged head spy.
"By the same argument, aid to the Third World is exploitation under another name," he resumes. "The beneficiaries are the countries that supply the money on interest, local African politicians and officials who pocket huge bribes, and the Western contractors and arms suppliers who walk away with huge profits. The victims are the man in the street, the uprooted, the poor and the very poor. And the children who will have no future," he ends, quoting Tessa and remembering Garth.
"Do you believe that?" Lesley asks.
"It's a little late for me to believe anything," Justin replies meekly, and there is a moment's quiet before he adds — less meekly — "Tessa was that rarest thing: a lawyer who believes in justice."
"Why were they heading for Leakey's place?" Lesley demands when she has silently acknowledged this statement.
"Perhaps Arnold had business up there for his NGO. Leakey is not one to disregard the welfare of native Africans."
"Perhaps," Lesley agrees, writing thoughtfully in a green-backed notebook. "Had she met him?"
"I do not believe so."
"Had Arnold?"
"I have no idea. Perhaps you should put the question to Leakey."
"Mr. Leakey never heard of either one of them till he turned on his television set last week," Lesley replies, in a tone of gloom. "Mr. Leakey spends most of his time in Nairobi these days, trying to be Moi's Mr. Clean and having a hard time getting his message over."
Rob glances at Lesley for her approval and receives a veiled nod. He cranes himself forward and gives the tape recorder an aggressive shove in Justin's direction: speak into this thing.
"So what's the white plague then, when it's at home?" he demands, implying by his hectoring tone that Justin is personally responsible for its spread. "The white plague," he repeats, when Justin hesitates. "What is it? Come on."
A stoical immobility has once more settled over Justin's face. His voice retreats into its official shell. Paths of connection are again opening before him, but they are Tessa's and he will walk them alone.
"The white plague was once a popular term for tuberculosis," he pronounces. "Tessa's grandfather died of the disease. As a child she witnessed his death. Tessa possessed a book of the same title." But he didn't add that the book had been lying at her bedside until he had transferred it to the Gladstone bag.
Now it is Lesley's turn to be cautious. "Did she take a special interest in TB for that reason?"
"Special I don't know. As you have just said, her work in the slums gave her an interest in a range of medical matters. Tuberculosis was one of them."
"But if her grandfather died of it, Justin — "
"Tessa particularly disliked the sentimentalism that attaches to the disease in literature," Justin goes on severely, talking across her. "Keats, Stevenson, Coleridge, Thomas Mann — she used to say that people who found TB romantic should have tried sitting at her grandfather's bedside."
Rob again consults Lesley with his eyes, and again receives her silent nod. "So would it surprise you to hear that in the course of an unauthorized search of Arnold Bluhm's apartment we found a copy of an old letter he had sent to the head of ThreeBees' marketing operation, warning him of the side effects of a new shortcourse, antituberculosis drug that ThreeBees are peddling?"
Justin does not hesitate for a second. The perilous line of questioning has reactivated his diplomatic skills. "Why should it surprise me? Bluhm's NGO takes a close professional interest in Third World drugs. Drugs are the scandal of Africa. If any one thing denotes the Western indifference to African suffering, it's the miserable shortage of the right drugs, and the disgracefully high prices that the pharmaceutical firms have been exacting over the last thirty years" — quoting Tessa but without attribution. "I'm sure Arnold has written dozens of such letters."