Sitting in a high window of the Embassy was Dirk Heiden, the so-called South African super-spy, a sobriquet well earned. This formidable man worked himself into the top job of the Students Advisory Bureau, a Swiss-based organisation promoting the aims of radical students abroad, particularly exiled students from the South African townships, a post which he held for some eighteen months in which time he took part in freedom marches in Lagos against the racism of the Regime and was photographed taking a sleigh ride in the Moscow snow. From his office in Geneva he monitored the activities of resistance groups, anti-war objectors and other dissidents abroad, tailing them, taping them, photocopying documents and insinuating himself into the clandestine councils of various radicals abroad who seemed as free with their secrets as they were with their brandy. As a result of his reports many at home were beaten, imprisoned, stripped, manacled and tortured. Heiden had returned home to the kind of triumphant reception normally accorded only to rugby teams or visiting pop-singers who had defied the international ban against appearances likely to benefit the Regime. But his hour of glory over, he fell prey to the boredom which so often affects those who have lived too long abroad. He grew fat and listless, developed a drink problem, was arrested for firing his pistol at passers-by, pined for his tie-maker and his old sophisticated life, and so his superiors returned him to an overseas post, a chair in the window of an upstairs room in the Embassy where he peered through the glass searching the Square for familiar faces.
Heiden sat in a chair by the window, so still he might have been dead. His weight had continued to increase, his facial skin was stretched tight and shining over the bones, it had the texture of rubber on a beach ball blown up to bursting point. He stared out of the window because it was his job to look at people who visit the Square below, look for faces he might recognise, for it is a well-known fact that South Africans abroad will come and stand silently outside their Embassy, prompted perhaps by the same impulses that bring early morning observers to wait outside the walls of a prison where a hanging is to take place, or crowds to stand outside the palace walls when the monarch is dying.
In another window on the same floor sat the Reverend Pabst, ‘the holy hit man’ they called him once, but a shambling wreck now, surrounded by empty cane spirit bottles and scraps of food. His career had been simple and brutal. God had instructed the Regime that His enemies should be identified and exterminated. Pabst went to work. A fine shot and a quick and efficient killer using his bare hands and no more than a length of fishing line, he had a considerable tally of victims to his credit. Sadly, unknown to himself, he had also killed, besides enemies of the Regime, certain members of the Regime, quite possibly tricked into doing so by other members of the Regime. He could no longer be allowed to roam loose. He sat in a chair with a small sub-machine gun in his lap. He would cradle it beneath his chin and sometimes even suck the snout-like barrel, pressing gently on the palm-release trigger. The gun was not loaded of course, and the door behind him was locked and bolted. Sometimes he would hurl himself at the window, mowing down imaginary hordes with his wicked little gun only to fall back in his chair with a streaming nose or broken tooth. The windows were thickly armour-plated. The old man would dribble and grin, dreaming of past assassinations.
Blanchaille passed by these dangers quite unknowing. It is not surprising. He was not known and would not have known the watchers in the windows. And besides, I saw in my dream that he had eyes for only one thing, a man on the other side of the busy street. He knew him instantly, despite the grey clerical suit, the dog-collar. His old clothes!
Blanchaille called his name, hopping from foot to foot on the edge of the Square while a steady stream of traffic surged between them. At first the man appeared not to hear. Blanchaille called again, and then, because the man appeared to be about to escape, without thinking he charged into the traffic. A large tourist bus narrowly missed him. He stumbled and almost fell beneath the wheels of a taxi, the driver squealing to a halt and cursing him. But he reached the other side and seized the coat of the man now hurrying down the Strand, seized him almost at the same instant as the watchers in the windows above saw him and positively identified his quarry (with what consequences I dread to think!) as Trevor Van Vuuren.
CHAPTER 13
Now that the absconding priest, Theodore Blanchaille, met and talked with the policeman, Trevor Van Vuuren, is not in doubt. Where opinions differ concerns the motives which brought Van Vuuren to London and the fate he suffered there. The official version put out by the Regime is well-known and straightforward. Van Vuuren visited London in pursuit of the renegade cleric, Blanchaille, because he believed the man had information which might throw light on the murder of Anthony Ferreira. His quarry, realising that the law was closing in, lured the policeman into a trap.
That is why there are still those who talk of Van Vuuren ‘The Martyr’.
I saw things differently in my dream. I saw Blanchaille and Van Vuuren, arm in arm, making their way down the Strand. An odd picture they were, closer than ever to Lynch’s predictions, for Blanchaille resembled a ruined Southern gambler in crumpled white suit and heavy stubble with his strange seal-like shuffle, the feet thrown out in a wide flipper shove, and Van Vuuren was the muscular priest beside him. They proceeded slowly down the street, the weightlifter and the punchbag. And so the short night passed.
They passed a bank which looked like a church and opposite it a station which looked to him like a palace and beside it a cinema showing a pornographic movie. Blanchaille had never seen a pornographic movie, he’d never seen a cinema advertise pornographic films. This one was called Convent Girls, and showed three naked blondes in nun’s wimples running across a green field. ‘Hellfire passions behind the convent walls!’ How he envied the potential of European Catholicism! No wonder Lynch had felt cheated in Africa. Blanchaille remembered the convent girls of his youth, shy creatures in sky-blue dresses, white panamas and short white ankle socks, shepherded by swathed and nimble-booted nuns patched in black and white, nipping at their heels like sheep-dogs. Van Vuuren was dressed in his friend’s old cast-off clerical suit, rather dirty charcoal with ash-grey V-necked vest and dog-collar far too large for him so that it hung below his adam’s apple like one of those loops one tosses over a coconut in a fairground. He had not shaved and the black stubble gleamed on his chin in the early light, that pale English dawn light which comes on rather like a wan bureaucrat to give notice that the day ahead will once again be one of low horizons and modest expectations.
I heard their conversation which I record as accurately as possible.
‘Thanks for waiting.’
‘After seeing you plunge into the traffic in that suicidal manner I had to wait. If only to see if you made it.’
‘I had to make a run for it because I saw the look on your face when you spotted me. I thought you were going to bolt.’
‘I was. You don’t want to be involved with me. I’m bad news, Blanchie.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Because my people sent for me.’
‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. I said to myself, that’s Trevor, but it can’t be. He’s at home.’
‘This is home for me, Blanchie.’
‘Who are your people?’
‘The Azanian Liberation Front.’
‘The ALF — your people? Since when?’
‘From as far back as I can remember. I went with the Communion wafer still sticking to my palate, straight from my last Corpus Christi procession, and told them I wanted to enlist. I had a meeting with old Vilakaze, he was still boss in those days. I must have been the first, perhaps the only, white schoolboy member of the Azanian Liberation Front. When I was ready to leave school the Front said to me, go back and work for the Government. Join the police. Fall asleep in the arms of the Regime. We will wake you when you’re needed.’