It had been claimed that the Ring was a fascist secret society. Bubé had denied this, as had every president before him — all of whom were members of the Ring. ‘The English have their Rotary Clubs, the Catholics have the Jesuits, the Bantu have their burial societies — and we have the Ring. It is not a society, it is more like a family gathering.’
It was with considerable trepidation that Blanchaille surveyed the stone steps leading up to the great steel doors of Balthazar Buildings and only by considerable effort of will did he tell himself that if this was the place to which Lynch had directed him then he must have his reasons. Across the road a boy was selling papers. PRESIDENT FOR TREATMENT OVERSEAS? the posters ran. So Lynch had got hold of the right story, at any rate. Blanchaille pushed the bell. Few who came to Balthazar Buildings ever emerged unless they were led away to waiting police vans, to court, to jail, to the gallows. Others left briefly in flights from high windows, or tripped down staircases, or were found hanging from their cell bars by their belts or pyjama cords. This fortress housed the Russian spy Popov. Two TV cameras swivelled above his head and examined him silently.
The young constable who let him in was of the type Blanchaille knew well from school rugby matches against just such long-limbed, rangey sorts, full-grown men at twelve with moustaches to prove it. They smelt of sweat and onions and stomped you unmercifully whenever you went down with the ball. He gave his name. There he was in Balthazar Buildings along with the likes of Popov. He hoped Lynch knew what he was doing.
The story of Popov was widely known and loved and taught in school. Once a cipher clerk named Steenkamp was sitting at his desk in Balthazar Buildings on Sunday afternoon, hot and bored. He had just decided, by his own admission, that his job as a security policeman was at an end. The codes were beyond him and the amount of application required was simply too much for a simple man. And a simple man he was, this Steenkamp, the fifth son of a large and impoverished Karoo family, regarded by his superiors as a good policeman but unimaginative and perhaps a trifle slow. There was no hint then of the blaze of glory with which his career was to be crowned and was to make his photograph a familiar sight in every house in the country. Blanchaille had seen the photograph, everyone had seen the photograph. The mild empty eyes, the bored and unlined forehead which gave him the look of a man a decade younger than his forty years, the strong curling hair and the protuberant ears, the penalty of playing lock-forward for many years for the police team without wearing a scrum cap. It was this Steenkamp who one hot afternoon happened to look out of his window and see down below in the street a man taking photographs of him. He might have been picking his nose or yawning and there was this stranger in the street below taking pictures! He was down the stairs two at a time and he collared the impudent photographer who turned out to be Nikita Popov, a genuine, real, live Russian spy, and a full colonel in the KGB. It was a considerable coup and the President, wearing his other hat as Police Minister, went on television and thanked the Security Services for their watchfulness and said, ‘Let this be a lesson to any other hostile countries who may have thought of infiltrating agents. The Security Forces are ready and waiting for them and will do their utmost to defend the country’s integrity against the orchestrators of the Total Onslaught.’ A police spokesman in turn thanked the Minister for thanking the police and the session ended in an orgy of mutual gratitude.
An anti-Regime paper caused a stir by suggesting the arrest was a fluke. The police issued a statement asserting that Steenkamp had known immediately that something deeply suspicious was going on since photographing police property was forbidden, along with army property, railway stations, harbours, electric pylons, atomic research centres and at least three hundred and sixty-three other items, from the servants of ministers to radio stations, which fell within the so-called ‘Sensitive Subject Catalogue’, regularly updated in the Government Gazette. As a general rule of thumb photographers should stick to photographing one another, unless one of them happened to be a banned person or a named Communist, in which case such photographs were also against the law. A few voices were raised inquiring how it was that a Russian colonel in the KGB should have entered the country in the first place and why he should spend his afternoons photographing police stations? But in a fiery parliamentary speech the Minister for Defence, the former army chief General Greaterman declared that the Russians were a devious and stealthy people and that such queries were clearly designed to denigrate the police and should cease immediately, or else. As for Steenkamp, he was sent to lecture at various police colleges and became a kind of saint for the new, young recruits who prayed that they too might one day strike such a blow for their country.
A photograph of Popov appeared which was to become ‘the photograph’: it showed a round, rather soft, boyish face with just a trace of a slant to the dark eyes, a sleepy, not unintelligent look, and, if you peered at it very closely, a gleam of utter astonishment in those eyes. Here was a living rebuke to those who accused the Regime of seeking Reds under the beds. Well, now the secret was out, they were in the streets taking photographs. The interest in Popov was enormous. It was presumed that he would be thoroughly interrogated, and then executed. A group of nurseryschool teachers canvassed the idea that the method of his execution should be one which would least disfigure his person. They argued that coming across Popov like this was rather like being given a giant panda, a rarity which should be preserved, perhaps put on display in a public place in a glass case where groups of school children could be taken to be shown the true reality of the Russian menace. ‘Cut out his derms, stuff him and mount him!’ sang the children in kindergarten as they drew pictures of the spy, Popov.
Blanchaille waited in the lobby, a bare place with a desk and a few chairs. On the walls were the TV monitors for the closed-circuit cameras. Could the screams of the detained be heard from here? He strained his ears. Silence. There were two portraits on the wall. One showed President Bubé in tribal dress. Chief for the afternoon of some forsaken tribe upon which the Regime had visited the dubious distinction of independence and the President had gone along in ceremonial tribal finery to cut the umbilical cord. He wore a bulky fur hat, perhaps torn from a meerkat, and its tail curled about his neck. Over his shoulders hung a pelt, monkey probably, and beneath that another spotted skin, leopard perhaps. Various herbs and amulets dangled from his shoulders and sleeves and he carried a short stabbing spear and a cowhide shield. Even beneath this exotic head-dress his round owlish face in its heavy spectacles peered out almost piteously. Beneath the animal skins he could be seen to be wearing a dark morning suit and tie. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. He would have made a speech to the gathered tribe standing upon a chair beneath a thorn tree.
‘Dear Friends, it is nice to be here with you. I am from the Government and the Government’s attitude is that we have to help people like you to have a better life in this beautiful country of ours. With that I will say goodbye and may you stay well.’
A similar speech was given by ministers visiting resettlement camps. But there it was followed by a hymn from the people — usually a lament.
On the opposite wall was the famous Kruger portrait. Blanchaille knew it well for Lynch always had a copy on his wall. Uncle Paul wore a top hat and his beard was thick and white with holes in it like a hedge that has been eaten away. Around his barrel chest was a broad green sash and on the right shoulder was a silver epaulette to take the sash — this epaulette was thickly fringed in tufty gold thread hanging in rich fronds. The old man’s beard, so untidy, yellowly white, had the look of a fake. It seemed theatrical, stuck on, as if a powerful hand reaching below the ear lobe might with a sudden tug strip it from the powerful jaw with a medicinal screech. Perhaps the same might be done with the cotton wool eyebrows. ‘Look to the past,’ Kruger had written to his people as he lay dying in exile, Lynch had taught, the African Moses warning his unruly people that if they forgot their God then they would perish and never find the Promised Land. ‘The old Israelites built a golden calf,’ Lynch said, ‘these new ones build a stock exchange, they build a share portfolio, they build an army, they build themselves. They look to the future.’