Bubé’s thesis had been required reading on Father Lynch’s picnics. It was Lynch who pointed out how profoundly influenced Bubé had been throughout his career, as a young MP, as a distinguished Economics Minister and as President — by the birth-rate. Bubé in his formal suits, with his paunch, his watch chain, his benign manner made speech after speech pointing to the burgeoning black population and he would appeal to his followers to remember the old Boer wife in the days of the Great Trek, during the wars of freedom and the oppression of the Boers by the British Empire. The old Boer wife, he said, had been a breeding machine, her womb was a weapon more potent than the Mauser, a holy factory in which there was renewed each month a new army, the white man’s hope of a secure future in South Africa where he could thrive and prosper and protect his traditional way of life, his culture and his Christian God. But now the white birth-rate was spiralling down to zero growth while the black man was rearming in the belly of his wives. Tirelessly the President expounded his theme: ‘White women, remember your duty!’ HAVE A BABY FOR BUBÉ! the headlines ran. His supporters took up the slogan and ran through the streets chanting it, breaking into chemist shops, puncturing contraceptive sheaths and flushing birth control pills down the toilet and assaulting non-white persons for allegedly failing to respect pregnant white women. It was Bubé who funded the sterilisation campaign in the countryside, the secret radiation trucks, the so-called ‘Nagasaki ambulances’ which so terrified the rural population.

Lynch often expatiated upon the role of President Bubé, as he rested beneath the Tree of Heaven, ‘It was our Adolph who reminded us that an earlier and better name for the Boer War was the Gold War. It was a war between Gold Bugs, who understood the importance of the metal, and the Boers who had still to learn this. The British Army came in on the side of the Gold Bugs — people like Werner and Beit, Himmelfarber etc. Let’s not believe the story put out by men in an advanced state of dementia such as Cecil Rhodes, or Alfred Milner that they were defending the Anglo-Saxon race of which the English, God forgive poor Rhodes, were regarded as the most perfect flower, “the best, the most human, the most honourable race the world possesses…” This I quote to you from his Confession of Faith. Have you ever heard such rubbish? Reasons, you see — reasons. We must have reasons before the killing can begin. The Boers on their side under Kruger were fighting, they said, for the right to be free, for Calvinist Afrikanerdom, for the little man against the big, for independence, for truth. All lies, all lies. Gold it was and gold it has always been, the dream, the rumour, the hope and despair of the conquerors and of the conquerors before them, Arabs and Portuguese both. Stories of magical gilded cities, of Solomon’s mines, of Monomatapa and Vigiti Magna lured them here. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and finally even the Boers, they all wanted it. Rhodes and all his fellow Bugs had the gold but Kruger owned the sacred soil from which it was mined. They thought that the Boers didn’t want the gold. How absurd! It was the miners they hated. They saw them as the sub-life that crawled beneath the stone, so they averted their eyes, usually upward to God their Father and kept to the veld, content with their horses, their guns, a herd or two, the horizon endlessly receding, a host of servants and a wife in the back room breeding like a machine, claiming always simply that they wished to be left alone. The Boers were the Greta Garbos of history. The Boers didn’t want the gold only so long as no one else had it. But they soon found the stuff had its uses. Before the war they were already building up their funds by illicitly buying gold stocks and amalgam from shady sellers. There were organised Government theft departments, that’s what it amounted to. Contemporary observers were lost in admiration for the bribery, greed, corruption, the whole quality of the unblushing venality with which those involved enriched themselves in the Boer Republics. The lot of them. All those wily Hollanders surrounding Kruger, were rotten from the toes up. The Transvaal Government was supported by secret funds administered from secret accounts and with this stash fund the Krugerites bought votes, nobbled opponents, paid off old scores and enriched family and friends. When the war broke out they no longer had to buy their gold under the table, because they’d taken over the gold mines. They could take it straight out of the ground and put it into their vaults. So when they went to war with the British they said they were fighting for God and freedom and independence. But by then they knew that whoever got the gold had God and freedom thrown in buckshee. Even so, as Bubé points out in his thesis, men like Kruger and Rhodes were of the old century. Nineteenth-century men. And the quality of their hypocrisy and the nature of their corruption was a Victorian thing. The gold was a means, the way you paid for your dreams, financed them. The difference with us, the New Men, Bubé says, is that gold came first, the dreams later. You can see this change taking place at the end of the Boer War when even the most Christian fighting generals became bank robbers literally overnight. As the British marched into the capital, General Smuts was holding up the Standard Bank and the Mint and making off with a cool half-million in gold. Kruger saw it coming. His Memoirs make it clear that the discovery of gold was a catastrophe. It would ‘soak the country in blood’.

The rain had stopped. Sheets of muddy water rushed past the two priests in the bus shelter. They could hear it thundering deep down in the storm-water drains.

‘With Bubé’s flight history comes full circle. It’s the Kruger departure all over again. Heaven be praised!’ Lynch’s jug ears waggled in delight. Blanchaille noticed that the old man appeared to have lost more of his teeth. He grinned like an ancient baby. ‘You’re still planning to travel?’

Blanchaille nodded, ‘Yes Father.’

‘Oh you call me Father all right, but I’m not, you know. Of course you know! I’m more like an uncle to you boys. I like you, that makes me really different, close. Yes, I like you and mind you I’m probably the only one who does — and I nourish hopes for you all yet, though I look dark into your futures. But Father you call me! And what do you call your old President, the President Kruger? Why man, you call him Uncle, Uncle Paul! But that’s all wrong. Sure it is. He’s not your uncle, I am. He’s your father, father of the nation, father of misfortune. Follow Kruger, find the truth. That’s the line, Blanchie. Stick to it like glue as you’re pitched into an uncertain future. Be sure and look out for your old Uncle Lynch because he’ll be looking out for you. Take this. Trust me.’ Lynch gave him a brown envelope on which an address was scrawled. ‘You’ll need cash.’ The envelope smelt faintly of pistachio.

‘You’ve taken Ferreira’s money!’ Blanchaille was outraged.

‘I’ve simply returned the funds Ferreira bequeathed to you and which you unwisely left behind when you fled. I give it to you, after making suitable deductions. You can take a bus from here. At this address a friend is waiting. It’s nine stages, and then you hop.’

Blanchaille counted the nine stages because he hoped against hope he might end up at an address different to that given on the envelope. It did no good. Nine stages brought him to the centre of the town, to the tall skyscraper known as Balthazar Buildings which housed the Security Police, the Special Branch and the organisation, so secret no one could be certain of its existence, known as the Bureau, under its phantom chief, Colonel Terblanche.

CHAPTER 7

Balthazar Buildings on Jan Smuts Square in the centre of the city — notorious headquarters of the Security Police, scene of violent incidents beyond number. Together with the usual offices it comprised several hundred cells, interrogation rooms, as well as offices of the Bureau for Public Safety, or, more briefly, the Bureau. So mysterious that a Government committee found itself unable to confirm its existence, despite the fact that a number of the committee members were rumoured to be officers of the Bureau, or Bureaucrats, as the knowing called them. Balthazar Buildings also housed Die Kring, or the Ring, a secret society formed, according to legend, at the turn of the century, at the time of Kruger’s flight into Swiss exile and dedicated to the preservation of the Calvinist ideal, and the continuance, protection and furtherance of the Boer nation. On the further fringes of the political spectrum, Blanchaille remembered, there had been speculation that the Bureau and the Ring were one and the same. Perhaps. There were many such secret societies, all-male, dominated by devoted followers of the Regime, dedicated to racial purity and in love with uniforms — the Phantom Kommando; the Afrika Straf Kaffir Brigade; the Night Riders; the Sons of Freedom; the Ox-Wagon Patriots — but the Ring, it was said, controlled and dominated them all.