Blanchaille did not enjoy hearing his course of action so described but did not feel it was time to say so. Instead he babbled inanely to his hostesses of their extraordinary lives.
Freia shrugged. ‘Characteristic.’
Blanchaille persisted. ‘No, no. Wild — and awful.’
‘That’s their characteristic,’ said Happy.
‘If you wish to hear an extraordinary story we’ll call Babybel,’ said Fatima.
Babybel was by far the most beautiful of the four girls. Hair rich and auburn, the tiny lobes of her ears so delicate they were almost translucent; she wore a pale blue towelling robe which set off quite beautifully the soft, smooth milkiness of her skin. She’d been swimming, or at least relaxing by the pool, she said, until the sun became too much for her. With her fair skin she couldn’t take too much sun and, besides, the noise of the President’s demented guard firing away had driven her inside. She ordered champagne. ‘She always drinks champagne,’ said Freia.
‘Nothing but the best for Babybel,’ said Fatima.
‘Tell Blanchaille your story,’ said Happy.
‘Despite appearances to the contrary, I am coloured. You may not believe this but you would see it immediately if you were to meet my brother, Calvin. When we were small we were at school together until one day they came and looked at Calvin. Inspected his brown skin and curly hair and said — Calvin must go! Go to the school up the road, a school for coloured children, for Capey children. I cried, I clung to him. Calvin did nothing. He went. But he whispered to me before he went, “My time will come.” As I grew older and people noticed my looks Calvin evolved his plan, built it out of his very pure and uncompromising hatred for what had been done to him. “You will be my white poodle, Babybel,” he said to me, “I will manicure, powder, preen you and I shall take you for walks through the suburbs where rich men will stop to stroke you and then, on an order from me, you will sink your teeth into their hands.” It began when I left school and under Calvin’s direction I made myself available to certain men, powerful in the Government. “You are jailbait, pure jailbait, my little Babybel,” Calvin said to me. As I lay with these big meneers in bed, Calvin would reveal the truth. At first, in his boyish enthusiasm, he might hide in the cupboard and jump out shouting — “I am the fruit of your union. I am the child you are making!” But as time went on he grew more subtle, he worked with letters, photographs, video tapes and he drove these powerful men, my lovers, to distraction, to suicide, to ruin. I was quite happy with my role as the flesh with which he baited his hook for I believed in the incorruptible anger, let me say the immaculate hatred, buried in Calvin’s heart, I considered it as something commendable, noble even. Alas, Calvin became too subtle. “Equipment costs,” he told me. He went to the banks. Worse, he went to the Bureau. He was funded by those who ruined his life. What begins as pure revenge ends as investment, in our country. Calvin began to rule. He had become one of the big meneers.’
The ladies around the bar were in complete agreement and called on Visser for fresh drinks and even Fatima gave a bleak little smile as if only Babybel’s story approached her own in revealing the cruel and rich lunacy of everyday life among ordinary people in the days of the Total Onslaught.
‘And so I came to the Palace, to this home for homeless girls.’ Here she fluttered her delightful eyelashes at Blanchaille who understood what a potent lure she must have been to the big Government men she seduced.
‘But explain one thing to me,’ Blanchaille begged. ‘Who brought you here?’
‘We’ll explain that, and a whole lot more to you in your all too brief stay with us,’ Fatima said. ‘But that question is to be explored with delicacy, so let’s say that to a certain friend we were virgins pretending to be whores. It is he we have to thank for revealing this to Freia, Happy, Babybel and me. He sent us here, where we would be useful to those on their way out.’
‘But that’s enough of us,’ said Babybel. ‘tell us your story now.’
And Blanchaille told them how he had left his parish of Merrievale and passed through the township which was called peaceful. He told them of his call on Blashford and Gabriel and of his time with Van Vuuren in Balthazar Buildings, and of the meetings between the strange Italians and the members of the Ring. He told them of his visit to the holding cells and of seeing the man Strydom; of his sorrow and bewilderment at meeting his friend Zandrotti, now paralysed by some terrible knowledge obtained from Ferreira in London. Ferreira! who knew nothing but figures; of poor Vilakaze, condemned to make the same old speech to an audience who had long ago deserted him.
And they marvelled at his tale — except for Happy, that is, who laughed a trifle harshly.
And this talk went on far into the night and of those details I can recall there was in particular the explanation of the secret Italian organisation Blanchaille had seen at work in Balthazar Buildings.
The Manus Virginis had been founded in Portugal in 1924 by a reprobate Lisbon cleric, a dissolute, lustful man, who’d more or less abandoned all his priestly duties, stolen the gold and silver from his church, and taken to pursuing women. His name was Juan Porres and he lived as if he believed, he once flagrantly said, that ‘salvation lies in the laps of women’. Then one night as he lay sleeping beside his latest mistress, a short hairy creature of stupefying ugliness named Puta (or Petra) who was said later to be related distantly to the dictator Salazar, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and demanded that he mend his ways. She declared that from that moment on he would no longer be Porres the defiler of women, but the protector of their honour, and in particular the honour of the Virgin Mother. She advised him to invest his ill-gotten money in the Portuguese Marconi Company and devote the profits to the ‘honour of the mother’. The Virgin afforded him several visions, in one of which she appeared with her hand extended over the globe of the world with her fingers resting on what Juan called in his memoirs ‘troubled and vexed spots’. The next morning he put aside his ugly mistress and went into the street where he met a banker whom he converted to his cause. From this small beginning Juan Porres formed his association of militant groups of priests and laymen divided into sections, which spread with amazing rapidity throughout the world. Their aim was personal sanctity combined with financial integrity. From the late twenties these ‘fingers’, as they came to be called, grew from a mere dozen to sixty or seventy and their influence could now be felt all around the world. The ‘honour of the mother’ was later to be interpreted as referring not merely to the sanctity of women, but to the general safety of Holy Mother Church. Membership to the Manus Virginis was open to anyone, men, women, priests and laymen, but membership was strictly secret and the organisation had considerable autonomy within the Church, its controlling bishop had his headquarters in Rome and reported directly to the Pope. The organisation had changed little over the years. Members still practised various forms of mortification of the flesh. They used the hair shirt, the whip and the bracelet, a steel chain placed around the leg or upper arm and tightened daily. The Manus Virginis continued to have interests in certain aspects of the welfare of women, in particular the preparation of anti-abortion literature, homes for unmarried mothers, and in marriage guidance counselling, but the emphasis over the past thirty years had really been in the field of finance. The Manus was to money what the Jesuits had been to education, the fiscal troops, the militant accountants, the sanctified economists. The Manus Virginis claimed to have reconciled the age-old contradiction between money and religion, God and Mammon. They invested quite simply for God and the greater honour of the Church. Strategic charity it was sometimes called, or tactical philanthropy. God repaid their investment with high returns and ‘the divine portfolio’, as the investment plan was known, had made the Hand grow extremely rich. The appeal of the Hand was that it allowed ordinary men and women everywhere to lead secret lives of heroic self-sacrifice and obedience, and to experience the effects of grace with which God rewarded his followers in a form which they could recognise, called ‘divine funding’, namely cash. The beautiful simplicity of the doctrine had made the attraction of the Hand extremely potent. The tactical charitable investment of the organisation was seen by its members as a form of holy warfare which was directed from its secret headquarters in Rome. Of course there were links with other secret societies, with various Masonic Lodges in Italy, with the Mafia and with other sympathetic organisations. It was an interesting fact to be noted, said Happy, that while secret societies turned inwards and away from the general public their mutual interest in power often enabled them to overcome the animosity they might feel for other clandestine groups. The Hand of the Virgin had its own bank, the Banco Angelicus, from which its investment policy was co-ordinated throughout the world. The Bank provided a useful receptacle for funds which did not seek public attention. It was said to play banker to various secret organisations including the South African Ring, and even, it was said, to the Vatican itself. It was a policy of the Hand of the Virgin that tactical investments should be made in regimes broadly sympathetic to the beliefs of western Christian civilisation. Funds were often used to stabilise regimes, and even large companies which, in the opinion of the Manus Virginis, deserved divine support. Where the funds for investment came from was no longer important once the money had passed into the bank, for in the Banco Angelicus there was no such thing as tainted money. All was for the greater glory of God. The Banco Angelicus manipulated its extensive investments through a series of offshore companies in Panama and Bermuda, and had especially close links with many South American dictatorships and was increasingly involved in Third World countries where growing Catholic communities were established.