Chaga

Lip gloss. Small change. Stamps. Card for the hospital car park. Keys. Other people’s things. An envelope with a Somali stamp, franked Mogadishu. Silver propelling pencil. Paracetamol. Madonnas do not need paracetamol, or feminine hygiene products. A little flat address book, corners reinforced with Scotch tape. On the cover a brown man with kohl and a curling black moustache groped under the dress of a brown woman with kohl and no moustache. Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book.

Madonnas certainly do not have Indian Erotic Art Birthday Books.

She took the book to the coffee table, flicked through the pages of exquisite tantric couplings and anniversaries. Don’t Forget above a miniature of a green-skinned woman having her vulva licked by a man with his little fingers crooked in a spiritual attitude. Underneath, long codes of letters and digits.

Thirty-six minutes. She would be coming up on the big intersection at the bottom of University Road.

Gaby pulled up the PDU’s rollscreen and hooked it to its frame. The liquid crystal-impregnated plastic blinked start-up icons at her. She stroked the touch panel and opened up the directory. The call connection to the Kenyatta Hospital was made in seconds. A cigarette would be desperately good, Gaby thought. For a fatal instant she almost succumbed. She clicked for the Global Aids Policy Unit. Password queries interrogated her. She typed in the first of the codes in the birthday book. She went straight through to the Virology Department. Jesus, Miriam, take more care. It’s a sharp-toothed world that you’re running through in your red lycra suit. Another interrogative. Try the next on the list.

Invalid password.

Number three, then.

Invalid password.

Sweaty palms moment. Three strikes and you are out. Dare she run the risk that the next code on the list would be wrong too and alert the firewall defences? Fuck it. She’d faced down Azeri BTR 60s and Hart Assault helicopters.

HBP37FFONLHJC162XC.

No wonder she wrote them down.

The rollscreen filled with icons. Miriam’s workspace volumes pulsed hot. The answer could be in them, or it could be in any of the other hundreds of nested files. Up to now it had all been balls and adrenalin. Now came the work, to the metronome footfalls of Miriam Sondhai on the streets of Nairobi.

Gaby pulled down a find menu and typed in blood and/or samples. Twenty two files found, the PDU told her. She picked the first from the pop-up menu. It was a database of cell culture samples from an ongoing experiment into the relationship between the HIV 4 virus and the nuclear material of helper T-cells.

File two. Monthly staff blood test results. Joseph Isangere; confirmed antibody reaction. Jesus.

File three: blood types and organ-donor registrations.

File four: a locked file on the results of staff blood and urine tests for drug use. They’ll let you know someone has caught the terrible thing they work with, but it’s top secret if they toke a little sensimilla of an evening to get the damned viruses and the things they do out of their minds.

Twenty-three minutes. Miriam Sondhai would be on Uhuru Highway, beating along the earth sidewalks past the bus queues and the matatu touts, the city on her left; the bleached, dismembered park on her right: liquid and beautiful as Gaby had seen her that first morning from T.P.’s Landcruiser.

File five. Open sesame.

HIV 4 test referrals. Promising. It was a hell of a database. Fifteen thousand entries. Gaby set up search parameters for Kajiado, UNECTA, Unit 12. She held her breath as the command Find any went through to the hospital. Do not think about how long it will take to come through the cell net onto the PDU, she told herself. Do not think that at the end of Uhuru Highway Miriam Sondhai is on the way back. Do not think that there may be a hundred watch-dogs set to bark at the scent of any of these parameters you have set.

The search failed on Kajiado and Unit 12, but on UNECTA it threw three hundred names at her. Some had been found under UNECTA as accommodation address or employer. The majority – two hundred and eighty-three – cited UNECTA as source of referral.

‘Result,’ she whispered. Seventeen minutes. Ticking clock, pounding feet, heaving breath, hammering heart. She could copy the data onto the discs she had brought and be safely back at Shepard’s before Miriam Sondhai stripped down for her shower. But if they were the wrong records, she would have to break in to the hospital system again.

Check your source before you commit, Gaby. A thousand hacks in the welfare line will tell you impatience was their downfall.

She displayed the list of names.

Naomi Rukavindi, formerly of Moshi, in Kilimanjaro District of Tanzania; you will do for a start. There was a bad Photo-Me image of a startled-looking woman with nice hair and grinning teeth, there were statistics of age and physiology, several entry points that could be opened by password and sheets of antibody counts and lymphocyte activity curves and immune response deviations. At the top of the screen a number indicated that this was page 36 of 36. Three-weekly samples, Mombi had said. One hundred and eight weeks. Over two years monitoring the progress of a disease that killed in six months. Gaby clicked up find first and on a hunch spread it beside page 36. The counts and the ratios and the histograms and the curves matched exactly. She scrolled through the file, graph after graph. There was no discrepancy.

‘You should be dead, Mrs Naomi Rukavindi,’ Gaby whispered.

She sampled other UNECTA referrals. The first file was forty-eight pages, the shortest three. None of them showed any deterioration in condition. Not one had died of the killer HIV 4.

The face at the top of that most recent three-page file belonged to William Bi, wife’s sister-in-law’s nephew to Tembo.

She glanced at her watch.

Five minutes.

Christ.

She unwrapped the disc she had brought, carefully stuffing the cellophane wrapper into her bag as the PDU formatted it. Copy file, she commanded and watched the sands run through the digital hour-glass while she imagined Miriam Sondhai coming up Nkrumah Avenue, past the chain-link fence around the primary school. What if the traffic has been light? What if she has not been held up at the junction of the keepie-leftie? At any moment she might hear the pad of running soles on red brick.

The copy completed. She checked the hard disc for fingerprints before shutting down. And don’t forget the rollscreen. Jesus, the thing’s still warm. She was out the door when she saw the Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book on the coffee table.

Had the handbag been open or closed? Knowing Miriam, she bet on closed. The mahogany door shut heavily. She was halfway to the car when she remembered to reset the alarm. The armed light winked at her.

Plus one minute. Into extra time. She got into the hired pickup, started it and as she glanced into the rearview to move off she saw Miriam Sondhai come around the corner in Nyrere Avenue. Go. Go. Go. She glanced into her mirror again at the turn into Ondaatje Avenue and saw Miriam swing off the footpath into her drive.

Five cigarettes and a quarter of a bottle of Shepard’s sacramental Wild Turkey stopped her hands shaking enough to load the disc into her PDU and open up the stolen database. The icon unfolded in a list view. Fifteen thousand HIV 4 referrals, arranged alphabetically, starting with Aa, ending with Zy.

Aa being for Aarons. Jake H.

38

She heard the first shot as she was jangling the wind-chimes outside the front door.

Jake Aarons had a very beautiful front door. He had swopped it with a Makonde carver for his 4x4 down on