By night his interior world reclaimed him, as it had every night since Tessa's death. Tolling at the marquetry desk in the window bay, doggedly writing to Ham with his bruised right hand, following the travails of Markus Lorbeer as retold by Birgit, then gingerly resuming his labor of love to Ham, Justin was conscious of a dawning sense of his own completion. If Lorbeer the penitent was in the desert, purging his guilt with a diet of locusts and wild honey, Justin too was alone with his destiny. But he was resolved. And in some dark sense purified. He had never supposed that his search would have a good end. It had never occurred to him that there could be one. To take up Tessa's mission — to shoulder her banner and put on her courage — was purpose enough for him. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.
But when he remembered the eternal night of the black hood and smelled his own vomit, when he surveyed the systematic bruising of his body, the oval imprints of yellow and blue that ran like colored musical notes across his trunk and back and thighs, he experienced a different kind of kinship. I'm one of you. I no longer tend the roses while you murmur over your green tea. You needn't lower your voices as I approach. I'm with you at the table, saying yes.
On the seventh day Justin paid his bill and, almost without telling himself what he was doing, took a post-bus and a train to Basel, to that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharmagiants have their castles. And there, from a frescoed palace, he posted a fat envelope to Ham's old dragon in Milan.
Then Justin walked. Painfully, but walked. First up a cobbled hill to the medieval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to free thinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river's edge, and from a children's playground gazed upward in near disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharma-billionaires, at their faceless barracks ranged shoulder to shoulder against the individual enemy. Orange cranes fussed restlessly above them. White chimneys like muted minarets, some checkered at the tip, some striped or dazzle-painted as a warning to aircraft, poured their invisible gases into a brown sky. And at their feet lay whole railways, marshaling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.
Drawn forward by a force he had ceased to define, Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of run-down housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant laborers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant tree-lined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and farther up, and then right up into the sky above his head that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.
How long he remained there, alone, trapped like some insect at the triptych's base, he had no notion then or later. Sometimes it seemed to him that the building's wings were closing in to crush him. Sometimes they were toppling down on him. His knees gave way and he discovered he was sitting on a bench, on some bit of beaten ground where cautious women walked their dogs. He noticed a faint but pervasive smell and was for a moment returned to the mortuary in Nairobi. How long do I have to live here, he wondered, before I stop noticing the smell? Evening must have fallen because the coppered windows lightened. He made out moving silhouettes and winking pinpoints of computer blue. Why do I sit here? he asked her as he went on watching. What am I thinking of, except you?
She was sitting beside him, but for once she had no answer ready. I am thinking about your courage, he replied for her. I am thinking, it was you and Arnold against all this, while dear old Justin worried about keeping his flower beds sandy enough to grow your yellow freesias. I am thinking I don't believe in me anymore, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will — which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man — or woman — should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: Good evening, it's me your humble servant, Justin. I'm a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won.
* * *
From Main Street of the little town Justin turned left and northwest onto Dawes Boulevard, taking the full blast of the prairie wind on his darkened face as he continued his wary examination of his surroundings. His three years as Economic Attache in Ottawa had not been wasted. Though he had never been here in his life, everything he saw was familiar to him. Snow from Halloween to Easter, he remembered. Plant after the first moon in June and harvest before the first hard frost in September. It would be several weeks yet before scared crocuses started appearing in the tufts of dead grass and on the bald prairie. Across the road from him stood the synagogue, feisty and functional, built by settlers dumped at the railroad station with their bad memories, cardboard suitcases and promises of free land. A hundred yards on rose the Ukrainian church and along from it the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists. Their car parks were got up like electrified horse pens so that the engines of the faithful could be warmed while their owners prayed. A line of Montesquieu drifted through his head: there have never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ.
Behind the houses of God stood the houses of Mammon, the industrial sector of the town. Beef prices must be through the floor, he reckoned. Why else would he be looking at Guy Poitier's spanking-new Delectable Porkmeat factory? And grain was faring no better by the looks of things — or what was a Sunflower Seed Pressing Company doing in the middle of a wheat field? And that cluster of timid folk standing around the old tenements down in the station square, they must be Sioux or Cree. The towpath turned a bend and led him north through a short tunnel. He emerged in a different country of boathouses and mansions with river frontage. This is where the rich Anglos mow their lawns and wash their cars and varnish their boats and fume about the Yids, the Ukies and those darned Indians on welfare, he decided. And up there on the hill, or as near to a hill as you get round here, stood his goal, the pride of the town, the jewel of eastern Saskatchewan, its academic Camelot, Dawes University, an organized medley of medieval sandstone, colonial redbrick and glass domes. Reaching a fork in the towpath, Justin scaled the short rise and by way of a 1920's Ponte Vecchio arrived at a crenellated gatehouse surmounted with a gilded coat of arms. Through its archway he was able to admire the immaculate medieval campus and its bronze founder, George Eamon Dawes Jr. himself, mine owner, railroad baron, lecher, land thief, Indian shooter and local saint resplendent on a granite plinth.