‘Would they be capable of killing?’
Van Vuuren shrugged. ‘You’re thinking of the writing on Ferreira’s wall, aren’t you? So were we. That’s why we hauled this Strydom in. Frankly it was a terrible mistake. I’m not saying that the A.S.K. couldn’t have killed him but Ferreira was dealing in highly complex matters concerning the movement of funds through very complicated channels which none of us understood. Certainly not this Strydom. He could barely read his own bank account. And he doesn’t care about those things, he cares about race, about history, about being right. Arresting him has proved to be a terrible mistake. We can’t get rid of him. We don’t need him any more, we don’t want to hold him, there’s nothing he can tell us, but he won’t go! And it suits the Nuwe Orde to have him here. It makes it look like the Regime is really taking them seriously, locking him up like any black radical. You can see how determined Strydom is. He literally fights his way in back into his holding cell. The thing to remember about the Nuwe Orde is that it is actually a very old order.’
Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and the policeman Van Vuuren moved to another cell and peered through the thick glass spyhole in the door and Blanchaille recoiled at what he saw. For there, lying on the bunk, was Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, the anarchist. He recognised immediately the spiky black hair, the long, thin chin, the freckled, ghostly white face. ‘I don’t believe this. He’s in London.’
Van Vuuren shook his head. ‘We had known he was planning to return secretly to the country. We knew when he would arrive and, most importantly, what he would be wearing. The information was top-grade. So accurate Zandrotti never stood a chance. Blanchie, he came back disguised as a nun, of the Loretto Order, to be precise. Imagine it if you will. There’s this double-decker bus trundling through a green and leafy suburb, all the passengers peering out of the window and paying very little attention to what some of them afterwards thought of as perhaps rather ‘swarthy’ a sister who sat there on her seat keeping her eyes demurely downcast and most of her face hidden behind her large wimple. Imagine their surprise when three large men in hairy green sportscoats and thick rubber-soled brown shoes jump aboard the bus and begin attacking this nun. Apparently the conductor went to her assistance and was struck down with a blow to the temple. He lay sprawled in the aisle, bleeding, and all the coins from his ticket machine went rolling beneath the bus seats.’
Blanchaille imagined it. He saw it. He heard the jingling flutter as the coins spun and settled beneath the seats.
‘Anyway, these three guys wrestled with the nun who hoofs them repeatedly in the nuts until they pick her up and carry her down the aisle head first. The other passengers see that this nun isn’t what they thought because the headdress has been torn off and they look at the hair and the freckles and the beard and fall over themselves with amazement — this is a man! There was no end of trouble afterwards stopping them talking to the papers, and the conductor, he was well into negotiations to sell his story to something called Flick, a flashy picture magazine, when he was stopped at the last moment.’
Of course escaping from jail in clerical dress had a long history. There had been Magdalena who got out disguised as a nun. A less appropriate garb could not be imagined. From that day nuns leaving the country were abused by Customs officers still smarting over the one who got away. Then there had been Kramer and Lipshitz who bribed their way out of their cells dressed as Cistercian monks. But for a wanted man to return to the country in clerical dress, to certain arrest, that was beyond comprehension. The exit permit on which Zandrotti had left the country on his release from jail specified arrest should he return.
‘Unless, of course, he wanted to be caught,’ suggested Blanchaille.
‘It makes no sense. But you know Roberto, and you know his way of thinking. Jesus, he must have wanted to be caught! There is no other explanation. He let it be known in London, in certain quarters, that he was going home — knowing the details would get back to us. They did. We even knew his seat number on the aircraft.’ Van Vuuren unlocked the door and drew Blanchaille into the cell.
Zandrotti had always gone his own way, opposed not merely to the Regime but to every authority he encountered. His schemes for that opposition were novel, intriguing, entirely characteristic, quirkish, outrageous, quite impractical and wonderfully diverting. Zandrotti’s plan for immediate revolution was a message, passed by word of mouth to all those opposed to the Regime, that on a particular day at a particular time each man, woman and child would fetch a stone, the biggest and heaviest that could be carried, and place it in the middle of the road and then go home and wait for the country to grind to a halt. Zandrotti’s grand coup at school had been the occasion when he broke into the cadet armoury and stole a supply of.303 rifles and full sets of uniforms, khaki shorts and shirts, boots and puttees and caps, with which he dressed and armed a platoon of black school cleaners and drilled them on the school playground for all the world to see. The sight of black men marching with rifles caused panic in the neighbourhood. Zandrotti was expelled from the Hostel and they remembered how he was driven away in Father Cradley’s grey DKW, sitting in the back fervently making the Sign of the Cross. The rector was a notoriously bad driver and they watched Zandrotti’s mock gibbers of terror, helpless with laughter.
His star appearance was in the dock at the Kipsel trial. The trial of the so-called Fanatical Five. It wasn’t Five for long. Looksmart Dladla had fled, mysteriously warned a few days previously by an unknown source. That left just four: Kipsel, Mickey the Poet, Magdalena and Zandrotti.
The number was further reduced when Mickey the Poet hanged himself in his cell. What a miracle of athletic agility that had been, what a wonder of tenacity! Michael Yates, little Mickey the Poet, short, blond, barrel-chested, the build of a youthful welter-weight with powerful forearms and lengthy reach (which perhaps helped in the miracle of his death). But Mickey wasn’t a boxer, he was a poet, not by practice but by acclamation. He was known for four quite hopeless lines: Bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois fool/ Little capitalistic tool/ What you ask, will end white rule?/ Ask the children in the school! With these few lines of thudding doggerel Mickey acquired the sobriquet ‘the Poet’, and met his end. For not very long after that came the township disturbances when the school-children rioted and Mickey’s words seemed amazingly prophetic, if not a straight case of incitement, and his little poem was printed in an anthology of revolutionary verse and was much quoted abroad. And then there was the photograph of Mickey with the ‘Liberation Committee’, as the leaders of what later became the Azanian Liberation Front were known. A famous photograph showing Mickey standing between Athol Ngogi and Horatio Vilakaze, and with Achmed Witbooi, Oscar Amandla and Ramsamy Gopak, all raising clenched fists and singing. Mickey said he had gone to the meeting by mistake, someone had told him it was a jazz concert, that he never knew. He never knew. Another brief epitaph for his gravestone. He never knew when he was approached by Kipsel for a lift what it was that Kipsel carried in the brown leather briefcase. Mickey’s ignorance was invincible and nothing that the State Prosecutor, Natie Kirschbaum, said could pierce it. With wonderful simplicity Mickey informed the judge that since he hadn’t the first idea of why he had been arrested but since the prosecution seemed to have a number of explanations, he planned to call the entire prosecution team as witnesses for the defence and to cross-examine them carefully on all aspects of his case. The surprised judge adjourned the hearing to consider the application and promised a decision the following day. It caused a sensation. POET TAKES ON PROSECUTION! the headlines read.