Kruger's Alp (19 page)

Heiden sat in a chair by the window, so still he might have been dead. His weight had continued to increase, his facial skin was stretched tight and shining over the bones, it had the texture of rubber on a beach ball blown up to bursting point. He stared out of the window because it was his job to look at people who visit the Square below, look for faces he might recognise, for it is a well-known fact that South Africans abroad will come and stand silently outside their Embassy, prompted perhaps by the same impulses that bring early morning observers to wait outside the walls of a prison where a hanging is to take place, or crowds to stand outside the palace walls when the monarch is dying.

In another window on the same floor sat the Reverend Pabst, ‘the holy hit man' they called him once, but a shambling wreck now, surrounded by empty cane spirit bottles and scraps of food. His career had been simple and brutal. God had instructed the Regime that His enemies should be identified and exterminated. Pabst went to work. A fine shot and a quick and efficient killer using his bare hands and no more than a length of fishing line, he had a considerable tally of victims to his credit. Sadly, unknown to himself, he had also killed, besides enemies of the Regime, certain members of the Regime, quite possibly tricked into doing so by other members of the Regime. He could no longer be allowed to roam loose. He sat in a chair with a small sub-machine gun in his lap. He would cradle it beneath his chin and sometimes even suck the snout-like barrel, pressing gently on the palm-release trigger. The gun was not loaded of course, and the door behind him was locked and bolted. Sometimes he would hurl himself at the window, mowing down imaginary hordes with his wicked little gun only to fall back in his chair with a streaming nose or broken tooth. The windows were thickly armour-plated. The old man would dribble and grin, dreaming of past assassinations.

Blanchaille passed by these dangers quite unknowing. It is not surprising. He was not known and would not have known the watchers in the windows. And besides, I saw in my dream that he had eyes for only one thing, a man on the other side of the busy street. He knew him instantly, despite the grey clerical suit, the dog-collar. His old clothes!

Blanchaille called his name, hopping from foot to foot on the edge of the Square while a steady stream of traffic surged between them. At first the man appeared not to hear. Blanchaille called again, and then, because the man appeared to be about to escape, without thinking he charged into the traffic. A large tourist bus
narrowly missed him. He stumbled and almost fell beneath the wheels of a taxi, the driver squealing to a halt and cursing him. But he reached the other side and seized the coat of the man now hurrying down the Strand, seized him almost at the same instant as the watchers in the windows above saw him and positively identified his quarry (with what consequences I dread to think!) as Trevor Van Vuuren.

CHAPTER 13

Now that the absconding priest, Theodore Blanchaille, met and talked with the policeman, Trevor Van Vuuren, is not in doubt. Where opinions differ concerns the motives which brought Van Vuuren to London and the fate he suffered there. The official version put out by the Regime is well-known and straightforward. Van Vuuren visited London in pursuit of the renegade cleric, Blanchaille, because he believed the man had information which might throw light on the murder of Anthony Ferreira. His quarry, realising that the law was closing in, lured the policeman into a trap.

That is why there are still those who talk of Van Vuuren ‘The Martyr'.

I saw things differently in my dream. I saw Blanchaille and Van Vuuren, arm in arm, making their way down the Strand. An odd picture they were, closer than ever to Lynch's predictions, for Blanchaille resembled a ruined Southern gambler in crumpled white suit and heavy stubble with his strange seal-like shuffle, the feet thrown out in a wide flipper shove, and Van Vuuren was the muscular priest beside him. They proceeded slowly down the street, the weightlifter and the punchbag. And so the short night passed.

They passed a bank which looked like a church and opposite it a station which looked to him like a palace and beside it a cinema showing a pornographic movie. Blanchaille had never seen a pornographic movie, he'd never seen a cinema advertise pornographic films. This one was called
Convent Girls,
and showed three naked blondes in nun's wimples running across a green field. ‘Hellfire passions behind the convent walls!' How he envied the potential of European Catholicism! No wonder Lynch had felt cheated in Africa. Blanchaille remembered the convent girls of his youth, shy creatures in sky-blue dresses, white panamas and short white ankle socks, shepherded by swathed and nimble-booted nuns patched in black and white, nipping at their heels like sheep-dogs. Van Vuuren was dressed in his friend's old cast-off clerical suit, rather dirty charcoal with ash-grey V-necked vest and dog-collar far too large for him so that it hung below his adam's apple like one of those loops one tosses over a coconut in a fairground. He had not
shaved and the black stubble gleamed on his chin in the early light, that pale English dawn light which comes on rather like a wan bureaucrat to give notice that the day ahead will once again be one of low horizons and modest expectations.

I heard their conversation which I record as accurately as possible.

‘Thanks for waiting.'

‘After seeing you plunge into the traffic in that suicidal manner I had to wait. If only to see if you made it.'

‘I had to make a run for it because I saw the look on your face when you spotted me. I thought you were going to bolt.'

‘I was. You don't want to be involved with me. I'm bad news, Blanchie.'

‘Why are you here?'

‘Because my people sent for me.'

‘I couldn't believe it when I saw you. I said to myself, that's Trevor, but it can't be. He's at home.'

‘This is home for me, Blanchie.'

‘Who are your people?'

‘The Azanian Liberation Front.'

‘The ALF – your people? Since when?'

‘From as far back as I can remember. I went with the Communion wafer still sticking to my palate, straight from my last Corpus Christi procession, and told them I wanted to enlist. I had a meeting with old Vilakaze, he was still boss in those days. I must have been the first, perhaps the only, white schoolboy member of the Azanian Liberation Front. When I was ready to leave school the Front said to me, go back and work for the Government. Join the police. Fall asleep in the arms of the Regime. We will wake you when you're needed.'

‘What? All this time, Trevor, an agent for the Front?'

‘All this time. A special sort of policeman, just as Lynch predicted. I kept the faith, like I told you. In my own way. Then, a couple of days ago, soon after I had seen you in Balthazar Buildings I got a message from London. My job was over. I could come home. I took the plane. When I arrived at the airport there was another message waiting for me. I was to go to the Embassy. It seemed strange. The Embassy is one of those places I would have expected to avoid. But then I'm a soldier. I take orders. The Front says go and I go. Even so, I was surprised no one met me at Heathrow. I didn't expect a band and streamers, but I thought someone might have shown up. So I came here, expecting someone familiar. But not a
sign of anyone, until you came along. Don't take this amiss, Blanchie, but you were hardly what I expected.'

‘Why do you say you're bad news?'

‘Well, I should have been met, you see. Something's very wrong.'

‘I was met.'

And Blanchaille told him about Magdalena, about their meeting at the airport, about her flat, omitting the details of her extraordinary attack on him, about the watchers outside the fishmonger's.

‘Apple Two,' said Van Vuuren and laughed. ‘Who do you think Apple One is?'

Van Vuuren was pale in the early morning light. Blanchaille was put in mind neither of the policeman he had been nor the priest he now resembled. Blanchaille could smell the fear on him. He was sweating though it was still cool in the dawn, breathing heavily, lifting his face, the nostrils flaring and sniffing deeply as if by the couple of inches this gave him he might find pure air easier to breathe. Blanchaille was reminded of a buffalo he'd once seen looking for water, plunging into a swamp and drinking and drinking until he moved in too far and could not pull himself out. Half-submerged, with his curved horns pointed above the water line, the beast struggled to free himself only to sink all the more securely into the mud until only the line of his back and the flashing horns were visible and the long wet muzzle with just the nostrils clear, sucking at the air, taking in a little water each time with a rivelled hiss. A little more water each time and the brown eyes blinked and bulged helplessly as the animal slipped deeper. It fought for each breath, a gurgling hiss of air and water passing into the nostrils. Then the buffalo gave a convulsive jerk, let its body sink and angled its head up in the air fighting the nostrils clear; he heard the clogged snuffle, more laboured, more lengthy, the watery intake and then, suddenly, nothing – just an ear and the horns and the silence. Why did Van Vuuren make him think of that?

‘Who sent for you?'

‘Kaiser himself.'

Blanchaille didn't pursue the subject.

‘I can still remember my last Corpus Christi procession,' said Van Vuuren. ‘I see us all gathered outside the railway station getting ready for the march to the Cathedral. The Children of Mary in blue cloaks and white veils; a platoon from the Society of St Vincent de Paul, male pillars of the Church in their grey flannel suits and their neat side partings; nuns running excitedly to and fro with their veils
fluttering in their faces, all freshly scrubbed and shining with anticipation of the treat to come; young men and women of the various religious sodalities, very pink and pious and most disturbingly calm about it all. Contingents, squads, whole battalions of priests forming up beneath the banners. A small group of White Fathers appeared in that strange outfit they wore that gave them a slightly sporting look, like female bowlers; and of course Franciscans with their bunching brown robes, tightly roped around the waist; and throngs of tiny boys and girls who'd made their first Communion that morning, girls in bridal flounces with flowers in their hair and little boys in bow ties all carrying baskets of flowers with which to strew the streets. We were all formed up in a procession and at the head was the Bishop, the unspeakable Blashford, decked out in gold vestments and flanked by assistant priests and served by an army of altar boys, incense bearers, boat boys, bell ringers and acolytes, all attending His Grace who was bearing aloft the gold and silver monstrance with its small circular glass window behind which you glimpsed the sacred host, the white and sacred heart of the golden sun, the rays of which were suggested in the jagged, spiky ruby-tipped petals of the monstrance, a sight to dazzle and astound the faithful. Behind the ranks of altar boys, the great crowd of assistant priests in white surplices. I remember how the onlookers began to form, how they used to crowd the streets which were usually very empty on Sunday and watched with blank incomprehension as the Corpus Christi procession in all its gaudy Roman glory snaked forward, chanted, sang, knelt, shuffled up from its knees and staggered on again. Fluttering above the Bishop and the monstrance was the silken canopy supported on four poles by members of the Knights of De Gama wearing broad sashes and white gloves. The crowds gawped. The white people looked stern and unimpressed; behind them the blacks giggled and pointed and shook their heads at this fantastic spectacle of mad pilgrims in curious costumes following their gorgeous leader beneath his wind-rippled canopy. The white spectators put their hands in their pockets and struck attitudes of contempt. The Africans gave little outbreaks of spontaneous applause, as if they were watching a varsity rag procession and admiring the different floats. I remember they saved their best applause for the little band of black Christians who traditionally brought up the rear of the procession, usually wearing religious costumes of their own design, long white flowing albs, shimmering chains of holy medals clinking on coloured ribbons worn around the neck, roughly cut wooden staffs in their
hands. These wild prophets received a special police escort. Occasionally there were fights as a group of white bystanders isolated and assaulted some chosen black spectator, raining blows and kicks upon the victim for reasons you never understood – I mean you could hardly stop and ask. And the police moved in and rescued the fallen man with the customary arrest. Every so often, you remember, we stopped and knelt. I can still smell the hot tar. The old hands spread a handkerchief. Sometimes horses had passed that way and you could smell the dung. There were oil stains right there in the middle of the road. There we knelt in the middle of the city, on a bright Sunday morning, the whole great procession reciting the rosary, a vast murmur rising and falling. Do you remember how the spectators often shrieked if the holy water sprinkled by the priests accidentally touched them? And they would wave away the fog of incense with their newspapers. You remember how they used to cough and give artificial little explosions of irritation to show how much they disapproved of it all? And you remember how embarrassed we were? I was anyway. I knelt there and prayed that the buildings would topple and cover me. We had to endure
hours
of it! pretending that nothing strange or bizarre was happening, that this was what you did every Sunday morning, you got dressed up in crazy clothes and went out and knelt in the middle of the road while the traffic policemen kept the cars away. You remember the traffic policemen? They stood at the intersections and wore those black jodhpurs, black tunic, grey shirt, the sunglasses, and the black peak cap. They said the uniform was modelled on that of the SS. I knelt there and prayed for the earth to open or the sky to fall, or for bolts of lightning to obliterate the entire procession in an instant, or for bombs to go off, or for a madman armed with a sten gun to burst upon the scene and mow down every living soul. I prayed for a message: “Lord, tell me what to do.” And the message came back: “Join the ALF, my son. It is the only act of faith left to you. You kneel here on the hot tarmac, foolish, exposed, embarrassed. You are that comical thing – a white man in Africa. Repent whilst there is still time, join the Front. . .” It was a religious conversion. The Front ordered me into the police force. I knew my friends would see it as an act of treachery, but I could live with that. Let my friends think of me as the traitor-policeman. Let them spit at me. I could take it. For the Cause. For the Front! Actually, at the time I think I was suffering from a kind of religious mania. Luckily it had no outward sign. I mean it didn't issue in fainting fits or speaking in tongues or stigmata or levitation
or uncontrolled miracles. All of that would have been rather inappropriate in a police officer, as you can imagine. And there was a short period when I experimented with flagellation, making a small branched whip with half a dozen tails securely attached to a short wooden stock and I beat myself with this whip but there were immediate difficulties. Probably few people know it, but it's not possible to direct the whip so as to avoid marking oneself on the neck or wrist, and these are places where the weals might show and so arouse suspicion. And then I had myself a hairshirt made of horsehair and wool and wore it next to the skin for over a week. Not very practical either. It was hot, you see. I'd sweat. And the sweat would saturate the hair on the shirt and the shirt clung to me underneath my tunic and gave me a very odd shape. One or two of my colleagues asked if I was putting on weight. It was a very odd time for me.'

Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and Van Vuuren, though unaware of it, talked and walked their way up the Strand, around Covent Garden and by degrees into Soho. And it was in Soho that they first noticed the black cab trailing along behind them and saw that it carried none other than their old mentor, Father Ignatius Lynch.

And Blanchaille remembered the famous black beret in the Airport Palace, and knew why it was there before him.

Stories abound concerning the conversation Blanchaille and Van Vuuren had with their old master at that strange meeting in Soho, once they had recovered from their astonishment. How they noted his tremendous excitement as well as his weariness. (This is hardly surprising when you consider the old man had achieved a lifetime's dream in escaping from Africa, helped no doubt by the pistachio-flavoured banknotes he had borrowed from the money poor Ferreira had left Blanchaille.) Yet having made good his escape from Africa at last, why come looking for them? Lynch cut short such enquiries. In fact, as I saw in my dream, he did most of the talking, telling them for the last time that his time was short and he was not much longer for this world and as if to emphasise it, he kept the taxi waiting, meter ticking over. Indeed, he implied that they might not be much longer for this world either. He reminded them that they were babes abroad, that neither had ever been out of the country before except for their living history lessons he'd provided years before. He said they wouldn't ever have known that they were now in Soho had he not told them, and grave dangers awaited them.
All his talk was of death, while the meter ticked. And for once it seemed true, this expectation of his own end. He was smaller, thinner, more frail than they had ever seen him before. It was by a fragile, grinning, big-eared wraith that they were addressed in a Soho street.