the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. It was seven feet high and seven feet wide and he had brought it all the way back to Nairobi on the top of a matatu. Jake was very happy about the deal. A new 4x4 was easily bought. No one in Nairobi had as beautiful a door. But he was not answering it this morning.
There was a second shot. Gaby gave up jangling and went around the side of the house. She found Jake Aarons standing knee-deep in the pool in the quadrangle between the house’s two wings. He was dressed only in a pair of shorts with a red maple leaf on the left flank. In his left hand was a bottle of tequila, in his right a revolver. On the pool edge stood a full-length mirror. Gaby watched Jake take a long pull from the bottle, raise the gun at the mirror and blow a hole through the reflection of his own head. There were two other holes in the mirror; at groin and chest height.
‘Jake.’
He whirled, dropped the bottle, brought the gun to bear on the bridge of Gaby’s nose.
‘Jesus, Jake!’
The tequila bottle bobbed twice and went down. Jake lowered the weapon with a sigh.
‘He’s gone, Gaby. The bastard left me. Took my money, took all my fucking money, the little bitch. He packed his things and went and took my money.’
He grimaced like a silent scream and sat on the flagstone edge of the pool. The hand holding the gun dangled between his legs.
‘How did you find out, Gaby?’
‘Jake, I’m so sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. What you are is well-placed for a good career move. Over to our Chief East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Rush around with commiserations and sympathy and brown-nose rich old uncle with the legacy.’ He brought the gun out and aimed it again at Gaby. It seemed too heavy for him to hold. ‘Unwise to contemplate blackmailing a man with a gun and absolutely nothing to lose by using it.’
‘What kind of person do you take me for, Jake?’
‘The most terrible of persons: the ignorant manipulator. You play with lives, you can’t help it. You are irresistibly drawn to those who are in a position to advance you. You don’t know this, of course, and it’s your complete innocence that makes you ultimately unrefusable. That poor bastard Shepard you’re banging; have you any idea the conflict of loyalties you’re costing him? Of course you don’t, you haven’t the first idea what a monster you are, honey, and because I’m a terminal old fruit who can say absolutely anything he likes, you’re going to have to listen to it and learn by it.’
‘Hold on. T.P. doesn’t know about this?’
He laughed.
‘Oh, I have given myself away, haven’t I? Nobody knows save thee, me, the hospital and that fucking faithless bastard who said he’d stay with me always and high-tailed it with his dick between his legs when he found out that Ol’ Bwana Jake had gone down with the Scourge.’
Gaby cried out and covered her ears as Jake emptied the remaining chambers into the mirror. Birds rose from their roosts on the terracotta roof tiles with a clap of wings.
‘Do you want to know the irony of it? You probably don’t, but you’re going to hear it anyway. It didn’t even start as four. It started as a dose of three I reckon I picked up from some emergency dental work I had to get done over in Uganda a couple of years ago. Safe sex? I wrote the book on it. The condom kid, that’s me. Safe dentistry? They don’t tell you about that one. But what the hell, if you can afford the AZT, the interferon and the antibody transfusions, you won’t even get turned down for life insurance with a dose of three. The hospital keeps an eye on you and every other month or so takes a blood sample to make sure the HIV 3 virus hasn’t mutated into the HIV 4 variant. And everything was fine, until last month.’
‘Foa Mulaku.’ She had got the story because T.P. said Jake was sick. ‘T.P. did know about the HIV 3.’
‘T.P.’s known all along about the three. You misjudge him, Gaby. He may be the last honourable man in Broadcast Journalism. The hospital called me in: anomalous antibody proteins in my samples. You’re dead from the moment they say
‘And then the person you turn to for real empathy and understanding, because of all the times he’s told you he loves you, he cares for you, he’ll always be there for you, he’ll always help you and sustain you and empower you and carry you when the road gets too hard for you and all that Jonathan Livingstone Seagull/Personal Development shit, leaves you three lines on a sheet of file paper on the kitchen table saying he’s sorry, so sorry, but his life path is calling him on. Life path! Takes five thousand dollars of my money to help him down his yellow- brick life path!’
Jake threw the gun at a glossy starling standing on the paving, staring at him with its head inclined. It leaped away into the sky with a squawk.
‘So, how did you find out?’ Jake asked.
‘I got into the Global Aids Policy Unit database.’
‘Not legally, you didn’t. Who hacked it for you? Haran?’
He is in control here, Gaby thought. His sickness has given him mastery over guilt and sympathy and he knows he can make me do whatever he wants.
‘How long have you known about Haran?’
‘We all make deals with the devil. What’s he charging you?’
‘An eye for an eye. But Haran didn’t do the GAPU files. I did it myself. Stole the passwords from Miriam Sondhai.’
Jake Aarons pursed his lips and nodded. It was a combination of gestures Gaby could read well; his professional curiosity was stirring. He could not stop it any more than a kleptomaniac could stop stealing. It was his hope of salvation.
‘Stay there.’ He went into the house, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and boiled a kettle in his blue and yellow kitchen. It looked like the kitchen of a man who eats out a lot.
‘Tea? Earl Grey? Tequila’s piss. Tea is thinkin’ drinkin’.’ He brought a tray with pot and cups to the side of the pool and invited Gaby to dangle her feet in the water beside him. ‘Now, talk. Talk to me of things newsworthy, because it stops me having to think about all the things these little chips of protein in my blood are taking away from me.’ He poured two bowls. The set was Japanese, decorated under the glaze with Buddhist prayers. Gaby kicked off her boots and told him about the blood samples from UNECTA, and about the vanished William Bi and Peter Werther and the place they had been vanished to. She did not tell him that the HIV 4 victims were alive long after the virus should have killed them. She did not want to give Jake a shot at a salvation she was not sure she believed in herself.
Jake savoured his tea.
‘I think we are like the Trans-Canadian railroad builders who started at either coast and met up in the middle,’ he said. ‘Answer this: What’s the great UN lie about the Chaga?’
‘Anyone who goes deep never returns.’
‘Now listen to a story,’ Jake said. ‘Back in the early days, before the UN effort found its feet and most of the evacuation and containment strategies were left to the national governments, the Tanzanians set up camps at Moshi on the southern side of the mountain to take the Wa-chagga people who had been cleared from the higher slopes. There was a common belief then that the growth would stop when it reached the bottom of the mountain. Of course, it didn’t, so not only did the Tanzanians have several tens of thousands of Wa-chagga to evacuate from the resettlement camps, they also had eighty thousand residents of Moshi and God knows how many from the surrounding district. It’s no surprise that in the chaos they managed to lose a couple of hundred Wa-chagga. In fact, it’s a miracle they didn’t lose more. Officially, everyone from the camps is present and correct, but a little
