‘Naturally the Church claims to know nothing of the activities of the Manus, much as our Regime claims to be unconnected with the Ring. But how else would Church and Regime talk except through such organisations?’ Fatima enquired, with eyes modestly lowered.
‘There are other conversations which go on in Balthazar Buildings,’ said Happy. ‘It’s probably just as well you didn’t witness in any of them. There are, for instance, the talks between the Regime and Agnelli, the Papal Nuncio.’
Blanchaille nodded dully. Of course… why not? First they spoke through proxies. Those were the talks he’d witnessed between the Italians and the rough guys from the Ring. No doubt talks followed between the principals involved. He realised the girls had not offered him a drink. Now he knew why. They were plying him with information more potent than any booze. He felt as high as a kite.
‘Of course, you see the Church has a great deal to teach the Regime about change. The Regime is now in the position not unlike that of the Church some years ago. Both are preaching to a shrinking audience, changes are to be made if that audience is to be kept. Some of the old slogans must be abandoned, slogans like “death before adaption”, “separation is liberation”, “tribalism is the future!”. These had to be revalued, reassessed, reappraised and reviewed. Just as the Church’s ringing affirmation of its mission to the townships and its irresistible embrace of its black brethren was not unrelated to a good hard look at the market. The Regime realised that if it was going to survive it was going to have to start allowing black people into white parks and removing discriminatory signs and stress the positive side of ethnic identity and equal freedoms. Those in power liked to present this as conscious choice, as liberalisation, but in fact it’s a form of desperate accountancy.’
Blanchaille nodded. ‘I do remember now how it was some years ago when you could go to a Catholic church and study in a Catholic school, recover in a Catholic hospital and never hear a single query raised about whether Jesus lived in the big house or in the servants’ quarters, and to blurt out the question was to be threatened with divine punishment and beaten with a strap loaded with halfpennies and cast into the outer darkness. Then suddenly one day you found a whole lot of people were shouting at you for not applauding the Church’s eternal commitment to the liberation of Africa, and you were so deafened that it took a while to realise that you were being shouted at by the very people who beat you in the first place.’
‘That’s right,’ Happy said. ‘It’s the figures again, you see. In the middle of this century the number of Catholics in the white West, in Europe and North America was over half the world total, but before much longer European Catholics will be a minority — the majority will be found in places like Asia and Africa. Not surprisingly, certain conclusions have been drawn…’
And so that night passed with talking and stories, rather too much drink and too little sleep, and the next day as well. Conversation and information was exchanged between the fleeing ex-priest and the kind hostesses of the secret travellers’ rest known to lost souls as the Airport Palace Hotel, and their mentor, the man they referred to affectionately as their ‘Commanding Officer’, the elderly barman, Colonel Visser, who had founded with such great hopes the Brigades of Light.
Fatima spoke to him of recent travellers who had stopped at the Palace Hotel en route for some long-desired home in the faraway mountains, and mentioned startling names such as Ezra Savage the novelist, Claude Peterkin the radio producer, and Gus Kuiker and the Secretary of the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel. Blanchaille had great difficulty in believing it, not knowing where truth ended and wishful thinking began.
He asked them how they had come to the Airport Palace Hotel and each described an encounter with the mysterious stranger who revealed to them that they were virgins pretending to be whores; this stranger had various names, Jack, or Fergus, or simply ‘our friend’. Well before he heard that he spoke with an Irish accent Blanchaille knew who their saviour had been. Even before they had shown him in their little ‘museum of mementoes’ (in reality the ladies’ cloakroom) an old black beret which he instantly recognized as the one Lynch had worn to the airbase. The implications only struck him later.
He was also given directions to his final destination. Geneva was the starting point and then old Kruger’s house by the lakeside in Clarens, near Montreux. But this, it was stressed, was only the beginning. From the official Kruger house he must climb to ‘the place itself.’ Happy showed him grainy black and white photographs of what she called ‘the place itself’ and bad though the shots were, he recognised the wild turrets of mad King Ludwig’s castle Hohenschwanstein, but said nothing, being loath to injure such simple, shining faith in the former Government negotiator. Having examined, in one of Lynch’s living history classes, both Paul Kruger’s official former residences and found them no more than a large bungalow and a simple farm respectively, it was impossible to credit that the old President’s tastes would have run to anything so fanciful. ‘Paul Kruger belonged to the Dopper sect of especially puritanical Calvinists, we can expect his last refuge to reflect his didactic, moralising spirit,’ Father Lynch had explained. ‘It is comical to reflect how his enemies might have played on this in the Boer War; consider — the British might have brought the war to an early end if they could have convinced the old man that the sight of white men shooting each other gave unalloyed pleasure to the natives…’
Fatima’s directions were as unpersuasive: ‘Above the lake and to the left,’ she said. ‘Start at Clarens. Where Kruger finished.’
So they made him ready for the journey. Babybel insisted on pressing his white shirt, because, she said, if a man was leaving for parts unknown with literally nothing but the clothes he stood up in, he would want to put his best foot forward. Visser agreed, saying that Blanchaille faced an ordeal ahead, a battle, a formidable enemy. When one entered the Garden of Eden, he explained somewhat mysteriously, one faced not merely the snake, but the apple, and there were circumstances in which apples were more subtle than serpents.
It was Freia who injected a note of realism into these conversations by revealing that Eden was hardly Blanchaille’s destination. He was going to England. Indispensable Freia! Owing perhaps to her training as a township tour guide she had checked his ticket and revealed that he was flying to London with a thirty-six-hour stopover before his flight to Geneva. Why not a direct flight? Blanchaille protested, but there was nothing to be done. Besides, said Visser, the police themselves had booked his ticket and must have known what they were doing. Only the police knew what they were doing. They comprised the holy circle. Since the police in this instance were personified by Van Vuuren, whose status as a policeman was increasingly mysterious, Blanchaille hoped he still fell within the holy circle referred to by Visser. Blanchaille hoped he knew what he was doing.
As if to console him, Babybel gave him a necklace of golden Krugerrands, pierced and threaded on a string which she told him to wear at all times and promised him that it was a key, the use of which he would know when the time came.
And then, in the evening, I saw how they personally escorted him from the hotel to the airport, stepping over the bodies of the Presidential Guard which lay scattered on the streets and pavements like soldiers from a child’s toy box. Whether dead or drunk, simply asleep or resting, he could not tell. Then I saw with what tears the girls fell upon his neck and kissed him goodbye. On the plane he was given a window seat beside an Indian gentleman. At ten o’clock the plane took off. Peering towards the bright lights of the airport as they began to taxi, the sight of Visser and his four girls waving from the roof of the building was the last he saw of Africa.