THE CONSTANT GARDENERA Novel by JOHN LE CARREFrightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and raveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. What he might know and what he ultimately learns make him suspect among his own colleagues and a target for the profiteers who killed his wife.A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carre portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.Published by: SCRIBNER. NEW YORK.Copyright 2001 by David CornwellJohn le Carre was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. His novels include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Our Game, The Tailor of Panama, and Single and Single. John le Carre lives in Cornwall.PRAISE FOR JOHN LE CARRE"Le Carre is more than just a great storyteller. He captures the zeitgeist itself." — TOM WOLFE"He is one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English." — CHICAGO SUNTIMES"A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer with an occasional bent for sentiment." — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL"No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well read and well regarded." — SCOTT TUROW"Le Carre has a great talent for entangling his audience in the sticky tape of complexity, paradox, and irony, and much of the pleasure in his stories is following the same dense, dark path as his characters." — NEW YORK DAILY NEWS"Any reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carre of his subject can now feel a measure of relief. If anything, his subject of East-West misunderstanding has grown richer, and he now possesses vast new territories to mine." — THE NEW YORK TIMES"He has reinvented the realistic spy story as the supreme theater of paradox, where heroism breeds vice, and virtue is a quite accidental by-product of impudent crimes." — TIME"Le Carre is one of the best novelists — of any kind — we have." — VANITY FAIR
ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRE:
CALL FOR THE DEAD
A MURDER OF QUALITY
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
THE LOOKING GLASS WAR
A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY
THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
THE HONORABLE SCHOOLBOY
SMILEY'S PEOPLE
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL
A PERFECT SPY
THE RUSSIA HOUSE
THE SECRET PILGRIM
THE NIGHT MANAGER
OUR GAME
THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
SINGLE AND SINGLE
For Yvette Pierpaoli who lived and died giving a damn
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? "
Andrea del Sarto" by Robert Browning
The news hit the British High Commission in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Sandy Woodrow took it like a bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through his divided English heart. He was standing. That much he afterwards remembered. He was standing and the internal phone was piping. He was reaching for something, he heard the piping so he checked himself in order to stretch down and fish the receiver off the desk and say, "
In short, just another bloody Monday in late January, the hottest time in the Nairobi year, a time of dust and water shortages and brown grass and sore eyes and heat ripping off the city pavements; and the jacarandas, like everybody else, waiting for the long rains.
Exactly why he was standing was a question he never resolved. By rights he should have been crouched behind his desk, fingering his keyboard, anxiously reviewing guidance material from London and incomings from neighboring African missions. Instead of which he was standing in front of his desk and performing some unidentified vital act — such as straightening the photograph of his wife Gloria and two small sons, perhaps, taken last summer while the family was on home leave. The High Commission stood on a slope, and its continuing subsidence was enough to tilt pictures out of true after a weekend on their own.
Or perhaps he had been squirting mosquito spray at some Kenyan insect from which even diplomats are not immune. There had been a plague of "Nairobi eye" a few months back, flies that when squidged and rubbed accidentally on the skin could give you boils and blisters, and even send you blind. He had been spraying, he heard his phone ring, he put the can down on his desk and grabbed the receiver: also possible, because somewhere in his later memory there was a color-slide of a red tin of insecticide sitting in the out tray on his desk. So, "Woodrow here," and the telephone jammed to his ear.
"Oh, Sandy, it's Mike Mildren. Good morning. You alone by any chance?"
Shiny, overweight, twenty-four-year-old Mildren, High Commissioner's private secretary, Essex accent, fresh out from England on his first overseas posting — and known to the junior staff, predictably, as Mildred.
Yes, Woodrow conceded, he was alone. Why?
"Something's come up, I'm afraid, Sandy. I wondered if I might pop down a moment actually."
"Can't it wait till after the meeting?"
"Well, I don't think it can really — no, it can't," Mildren replied, gathering conviction as he spoke. "It's Tessa Quayle, Sandy."
A different Woodrow now, hackles up, nerves extended. Tessa. "What about her?" he said. His tone deliberately incurious, his mind racing in all directions. Oh Tessa. Oh Christ. What have you done now?
"The Nairobi police say she's been killed," Mildren said, as if he said it every day.
"Utter nonsense," Woodrow snapped back before he had given himself time to think. "Don't be ridiculous. Where? When?"
"At Lake Turkana. The eastern shore. This weekend. They're being diplomatic about the details. In her car. An unfortunate accident, according to them," he added apologetically. "I had a sense that they were trying to spare our feelings."
"
