Kruger's Alp (25 page)

CHAPTER 19

They wandered about in the general area of Clarens until they struck the little road set back from the lake and lined with large nineteenth-century villas, one of which they knew immediately from a hundred slides and photographs Father Lynch had shown them over the years. Then, too, there was the familiar flag flying from a first-floor balcony. It was growing dark, the sun was setting behind the further mountains lighting the clouds from below so they seemed not so much clouds as daubs of black and gold on the deepening blue of the sky. Even though there were lights in the upper storey of the house, the shutters on the lower floors were closed. The last of the tourists had departed. They would not gain entry until the following morning.

As it happened there were a number of garden chairs and a small, circular steel table at the bottom of a short flight of stairs which led from the front of the house into the garden. Here, though cold, they slept until some time after midnight when they were roughly awoken.

They knew him even though he wasn't wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts with the golden beaches, the coconut palms and the brilliant sunsets, even though he carried a revolver which he waved at them ordering them into the house.

Once inside, Blanchaille marvelled at his outfit. A raw silk suit extremely crumpled as if it had been slept in, no tie, shirt collar twisted, his laces undone as if he'd just shoved his feet into his shoes before coming outside and wafting off him good and strong were waves of liquor. He'd been drinking, drinking most of the night, Blanchaille guessed. He was aware of a hallway, the smell of polish, photographs on the walls, Kruger everywhere, and to his right a staircase which carried the large warning:
No Admittance to the Public.
At the top of the stairs stood a woman in a blue dressing-gown.

‘What have you got there, Gus?' she asked grumpily.

They recognised her immediately, of course, that slightly imperious, dark, faintly hawk-like profile – those handsome rather beaky good looks, the eagle priestess, Secretary of the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel.

‘Oh Ernie Nokkles where are you now?' Kipsel whispered.

‘Spies are what I've got here,' said the big wild man.

‘Tourists,' Blanchaille countered.

‘Normal times for that. Normal opening times. It's rare that pilgrims, whatever their fervour, camp in the grounds. Isn't that so, Trudy – isn't that so?' he appealed to the haughty figure in blue above them.

‘I'd say, from the look of them, you've picked up a couple of bums, that's what I'd say. Who are you boys?'

They told her.

‘Not
the
Kipsel?'

Kipsel sighed and admitted it.

‘And I know you,' said Kuiker to Blanchaille. ‘You used to be Father Theo of the Camps.'

‘And you used to be Gus Kuiker, Minister of Parallel Equilibriums and Ethnic Autonomy.'

Above their heads Trudy Yssel laughed harshly. ‘You really picked a couple of wise-guys this time. As if we don't have problems! When will you learn to leave well alone?' She spun on her heel.

‘Come on, Trudy,' the Minister implored. ‘Give a man a break. I caught 'em.'

But she was gone.

Another woman bustled along the corridor. Frizzy grey hair and a cross red face. She carried a broom and a pan. She looked at Kipsel and Blanchaille with horror. ‘Now whom have you invited? I told the Minister that he can't have any more people here. This house isn't designed for guests, it's a museum. I'm sorry but they must go away, they can find a hotel, or a guest-house. The Minister must understand, we can't have no more people here.' She began sweeping the floor vigorously.

‘I'm sorry, Mevrou Fritz, but you see, these aren't guests,' said Kuiker, ‘These are prisoners.'

‘Prisoners, guests, it's all the same to me. Where will the Minister put them? I keep trying to explain to the Minister. This house is not made for staying in. It's made for looking at. Every day at ten I open the doors and let the people in to look. They look, sign the visitors' book and leave.'

‘I'll lock them in the cellar,' said Kuiker.

Kuiker took his prisoners down into the cellar, which turned out to be a warm and well-lit place built along the best Swiss lines to accommodate a family at the time of a nuclear blast and was
equipped with all conveniences, central heating, wash-lines, food and toilets. Kuiker producing a length of rope, ordered Blanchaille to tie Kipsel to the hot-water pipes and then did the same for Blanchaille, despite the complaints of Mevrou Fritz who pointed out, not unreasonably, that she would be extremely put off when she did her ironing by the sight of these two men trussed up like chickens, staring at her. Kuiker's response was to turn on her and bellow. His face turned purple, the veins stood out in his neck. Mevrou Fritz flung aside her broom and fled with a shriek.

Kuiker whispered rustily in Blanchaille's ear. ‘Soon the house will be open to tourists. You will hear them passing overhead. Examining the relics, paying their respects to the memory of Uncle Paul. Make any attempt to get attention and you'll be dealt with. That's a promise.' And to prove it he struck Blanchaille across the face with his pistol.

They sat trussed like chickens all day. At one stage Mevrou Fritz came in and used the ironing table, complaining increasingly about their presence and of the trouble which the arrival of Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel had caused her. ‘This is Government property. I'm here as a housekeeper, I see to it that the tourists don't break things or take things. I sell them postcards. I polish the floors. I dust the Kruger deathbed and I straighten the pictures. It is dull and lonely work, far from home and the last thing I expect is to have to share my extremely cramped quarters with a jumped-up little hussy who's too big for her boots and a Government minister on the run who spends most of the day drinking. And now I have prisoners in the cellar.'

Blanchaille and Kipsel were not fed. They were released from their chairs only to go to the lavatory and then only under Gus Kuiker's gun.

Later that night Trudy Yssel lay in bed. Down the corridor from the small spare bedroom they could hear the continual low grumblings of Mevrou Fritz now relegated to this little corner of the house, as if, she said, she were a bloody servant, or a skivvy.

Minister Gus Kuiker poured whisky into a tooth glass. Trudy Yssel looked at him. It was hard to believe that this unshaven drunk was the Minister confidently tipped to succeed President Bubé. But then she considered her own position. Despite the attempt to maintain appearances, the carefully groomed nails, the chiffon négligé, the impeccable hair, it was hard to believe that she was the Secretary of the Department of Communications.

‘What do you recommend, Trudy?'

Trudy looked at him pityingly. ‘Why ask me? You brought them in here. Now you deal with them. Why couldn't you have left them in the garden? Then they would have come in at the official time, with all the other tourists, looked around and left. None the wiser.'

‘Maybe they're spies,' said Kuiker. ‘Maybe the Regime sent them to find us.'

‘Well, that doesn't matter now – does it? You've found them. They know who we are. Worse still, they know
where
we are. What's to be done?'

‘Get rid of them, I suppose,' said Kuiker.

The blood had dried on Blanchaille's face and on the ropes that strapped him in. He blamed himself for not anticipating something like this. Kipsel was hard put to find anything to say that would cheer him up. When Kuiker arrived the general mood of gloom darkened still further. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite them, he swung his pistol around the finger guard in a manner so casual Kipsel would not have expected it in a police trainee. He was very drunk. His midnight blue dressing gown was monogrammed with a great
G
gulping down a smaller
K.
The stubble on his chin was longer and tinged with grey. His feet were bare and the pyjama trousers which protruded beyond his dressing-gown creased and rather grubby around the unhealthy whiteness of his ankles.

‘Why are you here? Who sent you?' Kuiker demanded.

Blanchaille ignored him.

‘If we'd known you were holed up here we'd never have come,' said Kipsel. ‘Come to that – what are you doing here? The papers said you were in Philadelphia.'

‘We were betrayed in Philadelphia. That black shit Looksmart dropped us in it. He and that oily priest bastard brother of his got together and destroyed us in America. Years of work wiped out in a few minutes. Our plans broadcast all over the bloody country. Now, at home, they've turned on us. We heard today that there are warrants out for our arrest, it seems that the Regime, desperate to find somebody to blame has settled on us. It is we, it seems, who have been rifling the treasury, absconding with public funds, hiring executive jets and wining and dining our way around the world, all for our own selfish ends. They are saying that we went abroad once too often and were seduced by foreign ways and luxuries. But they,
they
stayed at home, they are the only ones who remained pure. They will preserve racial amity, only they can withstand the Total Onslaught, they have never been corrupted. They are no longer pretending that we are in Philadelphia, they have officially announced
that we are on the run and what's more the bastards have taken credit for making the announcement, for setting up an enquiry into the misuse of public funds, for the dismantling of the Department of Communications, they have resurrected the dead official, Ferreira, they have announced that this good and faithful official discovered the beginnings of this rotten business, as if small peculiarities in the movements of Government funds which we handled are worth twopence compared to the much larger, one could say total, distortion and perversion of reality the Regime has organised against us.'

‘Do you know who killed Ferreira?'

‘Who? You mean
what
! What killed Ferreira? I'll tell you what killed Ferreira. Curiosity killed Ferreira, and ignorance and the refusal to operate within the parameters of the practical. The mind of an accountant. The insistence on perfection, his own perfection. The stubborn desire to go by the book. His book.
His
books! The refusal to recognise that we were just proper people doing what we could to change things for the better, to win our country a place again in the world. To fight. And we had to fight because we were at war, see. And you can't behave like you're in a monastery garden when you're at war with the rest of the world. But ignorance and pig-headed fucking stubborness chiefly – that's what killed Ferreira. He wouldn't listen, he wouldn't learn, he wouldn't adapt. So he died.'

The Minister lurched forward waving his revolver and perhaps in his rage might have killed the prisoners had not Mevrou Fritz bustled in at that moment with a fresh pile of ironing and complained that the prisoners were beginning to smell.

‘They'll stink a lot more when they're dead,' said Kuiker.

Kipsel kept perfectly calm. ‘This place as such is of no importance to us, it's a shell, a ghost house. We only came here because it's the start of our mission. We're not fighting the war against you. We're looking for the other Kruger House, we're retiring.'

Kuiker made a sound, somewhere between a belch and a laugh. ‘There is no safe house, no garden of refuge, no asylum, no home for the likes of you – or me. And shall I tell you how I know? For one very good reason. If there were such a place you can be damn sure I would have found it by now.' He swayed and almost fell, ran a hand through his hair, pounded himself several times on the chest and hawking phlegm turned abruptly on his heel they heard him clumping upstairs.

That night when Kuiker got into bed he said, ‘There's no
persuading them. They're mad. I tried to explain this is the end of the road. This is where we turn and fight. But they seriously believe in some promised land. We'll have to finish with them.'

‘Let me try,' said Trudy Yssel.

Early next morning she fetched the prisoners from the cellar. Blanchaille and Kipsel were unshaven and smelt badly and after days without food they were weak on their feet. But Trudy smiled at them as if she were taking them on a picnic. Before the first visitors arrived at Uncle Paul's House she wanted to take them on a little tour, she said. She wore a spotted blue dress with pearl ear-rings and was unnaturally cheerful, relaxed and chatted to them as if she might have been any houseproud wife showing off her establishment and not the mistress of a hunted Government minister with a price on his head and she the disgraced and vilified civil servant accused of spiriting away thousands upon thousands of public money.

‘Don't you think, Father Blanchaille, that the tour is nowadays the chief way we now have of communicating information to busy people? We have a tour of the game reserve to learn about animals. We tour the townships to show our black people living in peace. We tour the operational areas of our border wars to discover how well we are doing. Talking of war, do you know I have toured forward areas where it felt as if the war had been turned off for the day, like a tap, or a radio broadcast, or a light. You expected when you got back to your tent at night to find a small note on your pillow saying –“The conflict has been suspended during your visit by the kind agreement of the forces concerned”, but of course you knew that wasn't so when you heard of American senators caught in the bombing raid, or a group of nuns from one of the aid organisations like “Catholics Against Cuba”, had been ripped to pieces by shrapnel. Follow me, gentlemen. Don't hang back.'

The place was kept spotless, a gleaming polished purity, it seemed to them that Mevrou Fritz must have caught the Swiss passion for cleanliness. It smelt of elbow grease, it smelt of floor wax. It was heavy, dark, depressing and virtually empty. Their footsteps echoed on the smooth boards. ‘Of course none of the furniture remained when the old man died. It was sold off. The house now comes under the Department of Works and they've replaced what they can with copies, or pieces of the period. But it's still pretty bad. A bit of a tomb really. When the old man died his body was taken back to South Africa, again on a Dutch warship,
and given a hero's burial. That was the end of his association with Switzerland. There was no money left here, the furniture was sold off, the house given up and any talk of the missing millions was simply a myth. And it remained, as General Smuts said, merely something “to spook the minds of great British statesmen”. The time has come to stop talking of these dreams. We must wake up. We've been woken up, the Minister and I. We're considering our position. When we're ready we will move.'