"And don't ever ask me that question again," she tells him, as an afterthought, as she lies with her face in the angle of his shoulder, and her limbs sprawled across his. "Let's just say Arnold lost his heart in Mombasa." And she draws herself into him, head down and shoulders rigid.
* * *
In Mombasa?
Or in Lamu, a hundred and fifty miles up the coast?
Returning to the counting table, Justin selected this time Lesley's background report on "BLUHM, Arnold Moise, M.d., missing victim or suspect." No scandal, no marriage, no known companion, no common-law wife recorded. In Algiers, Subject had lived in a hostel for young doctors of both sexes, occupying single accommodation. No Significant Other recorded with his NGO. Subject's next of kin given as his adoptive Belgian half-sister, resident in Bruges. Arnold had never claimed travel or living expenses for a companion, and never required anything other than bachelor accommodation. Subject's trashed apartment in Nairobi was described by Lesley as "monkish with a strong air of abstinence." Subject lived there alone and had no servant. "In his private life, Subject appears to do without creature comforts, including hot water."
* * *
"The entire Muthaiga Club has convinced itself that our baby was put there by Arnold," Justin is informing Tessa, perfectly amiably, as they eat their fish in an Indian restaurant on the edge of town. She is four months pregnant and though their conversation might not suggest it, Justin is more besotted with her than ever.
"Who's the entire Muthaiga Club?" she demands.
"Elena the Greek, I suspect. Conveyed to Gloria, conveyed to Woodrow," he goes on cheerfully. "What I'm supposed to do about it I don't quite know. Drive you up there and make love to you on the billiards table might be a solution, if you're game."
"Then it's double jeopardy, isn't it?" she says thoughtfully. "And double prejudice."
"Double? Why?"
She breaks off, lowers her eyes, and gently shakes her head. "They're a prejudiced bunch of bastards — leave it at that."
* * *
And at the time, he had done as she commanded. But no longer.
Why double? he asked himself, still staring at the screen.
Single jeopardy means Arnold's adultery. But double? Double is for what? For his race? Arnold is discriminated against for his supposed adultery and his race? Ergo a double discrimination?
Maybe.
Unless.
Unless the cold-eyed lawyer in her is speaking again: the same lawyer who decided to ignore a death threat rather than imperil her quest for justice.
Unless the first perceived prejudice was not directed against a black man who was supposedly sleeping with a married white woman, but against homosexuals at large, of whom Bluhm — though his detractors didn't know it — was one.
In such a case the cold-eyed, hot-hearted lawyer's reasoning would work this way:
Jeopardy the first: Arnold is homosexual but local prejudice does not allow him to admit it. If he admitted it, he would be unable to continue his relief work since Moi detests NGO'S as much as he hates homosexuals, and at the very least he would have Arnold flung out of the country.
Jeopardy the second: Arnold is forced to live in a state of deceit (see unfinished press article by?). Instead of declaring his sexuality, he is driven to adopt the pose of playboy, thus attracting the criticism reserved for transracial adulterers.
Ergo: a double jeopardy.
And why, finally, does Tessa once more not confide this secret to her beloved husband, instead of leaving him with dishonorable suspicions that he will not, must not, cannot admit to, even to himself? he demanded of the screen.
He remembered the name of the Indian restaurant she was so fond of. Haandi.
* * *
The tides of jealousy that Justin had for so long held at bay suddenly broke banks and engulfed him. But it was jealousy of a new kind: jealousy that Tessa and Arnold had kept even this secret from him, together with all the others that they shared; that they had deliberately excluded him from their precious circle of two, leaving him to peer after them like a distraught voyeur, never knowing, for all her assurances, that there was nothing to see and never would be; that as Ghita had wanted to explain to Rob and Lesley before she shied away, no spark would ever fly; that the only relationship between them was precisely the brother-and-sister friendship of the sort Justin had described to Ham without, in his deepest heart, totally believing himself.
A perfect man, Tessa had called Bluhm once. Even Justin the skeptic had never thought of him in any other way. A man to touch the homoerotic nerve in all of us, he had once remarked to her in his innocence. Beautiful and soft-spoken. Courteous to friends and strangers. Beautiful from his husky voice to his rounded iron gray beard, to his long-lidded, plump African eyes that never strayed from you while he spoke or listened. Beautiful in the rare but timely gestures that punctuated his lucid, beautifully delivered, intelligent opinions. Beautiful from his sculpted knuckles to his feather-light, graceful body, trim and lithe as a dancer's and as disciplined in its withholding. Never brash, never unknowing, never cruel, although at every party and conference he encountered Western people so ignorant that Justin felt embarrassed for him. Even the old ones at the Muthaiga said it: that fellow Bluhm, my God, they didn't make blacks like him in our day, no wonder Justin's child bride has fallen for him.
So why in the name of all that's holy didn't you put me out of my misery? He demanded furiously of her, or the screen.
Because I trusted you and expected the same trust in return.
If you trusted me why didn't you tell me?
Because I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time.
Because I am a lawyer and where secrets are concerned — as she used to say — compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
And tuberculosis is megabucks: ask Karel Vita Hudson. Any day now the richest nations will be facing a tubercular pandemic, and Dypraxa will become the multibilliondollar earner that all good shareholders dream of. The White Plague, the Great Stalker, the Great Imitator, the Captain of Death is no longer confining himself to the wretched of the earth. He is doing what he did a hundred years ago. He is hovering like a filthy cloud of pollution over the West's own horizon, even if it is still their poor who are his victims.
Tessa is telling her computer, highlighting and underlining as she goes:
— One third of the world's population infected with the bacillus
— In the United States incidence has increased by 20 percent in seven years…
— One untreated sufferer transmits the disease on average to between ten and fifteen people a year…
— Health authorities in New York City have given themselves powers to incarcerate TB victims who do not willingly submit to isolation…
— 30 percent of all known TB cases are now drug-resistant…
The White Plague is not born in us, Justin reads. It is forced upon us by foul breath, foul living conditions, foul hygiene, foul water and foul administrative neglect.
Rich countries hate it because it is a slur on their good housekeeping, poor countries because in many of them it is synonymous with AIDS. Some countries refuse to admit they have it at all, preferring to live in denial rather than confess the mark of shame.
And in Kenya, as in other African countries, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased fourfold since the onset of the HIV virus.