‘What? All this time, Trevor, an agent for the Front?’
‘All this time. A special sort of policeman, just as Lynch predicted. I kept the faith, like I told you. In my own way. Then, a couple of days ago, soon after I had seen you in Balthazar Buildings I got a message from London. My job was over. I could come home. I took the plane. When I arrived at the airport there was another message waiting for me. I was to go to the Embassy. It seemed strange. The Embassy is one of those places I would have expected to avoid. But then I’m a soldier. I take orders. The Front says go and I go. Even so, I was surprised no one met me at Heathrow. I didn’t expect a band and streamers, but I thought someone might have shown up. So I came here, expecting someone familiar. But not a sign of anyone, until you came along. Don’t take this amiss, Blanchie, but you were hardly what I expected.’
‘Why do you say you’re bad news?’
‘Well, I should have been met, you see. Something’s very wrong.’
‘I was met.’
And Blanchaille told him about Magdalena, about their meeting at the airport, about her flat, omitting the details of her extraordinary attack on him, about the watchers outside the fishmonger’s.
‘Apple Two,’ said Van Vuuren and laughed. ‘Who do you think Apple One is?’
Van Vuuren was pale in the early morning light. Blanchaille was put in mind neither of the policeman he had been nor the priest he now resembled. Blanchaille could smell the fear on him. He was sweating though it was still cool in the dawn, breathing heavily, lifting his face, the nostrils flaring and sniffing deeply as if by the couple of inches this gave him he might find pure air easier to breathe. Blanchaille was reminded of a buffalo he’d once seen looking for water, plunging into a swamp and drinking and drinking until he moved in too far and could not pull himself out. Half-submerged, with his curved horns pointed above the water line, the beast struggled to free himself only to sink all the more securely into the mud until only the line of his back and the flashing horns were visible and the long wet muzzle with just the nostrils clear, sucking at the air, taking in a little water each time with a rivelled hiss. A little more water each time and the brown eyes blinked and bulged helplessly as the animal slipped deeper. It fought for each breath, a gurgling hiss of air and water passing into the nostrils. Then the buffalo gave a convulsive jerk, let its body sink and angled its head up in the air fighting the nostrils clear; he heard the clogged snuffle, more laboured, more lengthy, the watery intake and then, suddenly, nothing — just an ear and the horns and the silence. Why did Van Vuuren make him think of that?
‘Who sent for you?’
‘Kaiser himself.’
Blanchaille didn’t pursue the subject.
‘I can still remember my last Corpus Christi procession,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘I see us all gathered outside the railway station getting ready for the march to the Cathedral. The Children of Mary in blue cloaks and white veils; a platoon from the Society of St Vincent de Paul, male pillars of the Church in their grey flannel suits and their neat side partings; nuns running excitedly to and fro with their veils fluttering in their faces, all freshly scrubbed and shining with anticipation of the treat to come; young men and women of the various religious sodalities, very pink and pious and most disturbingly calm about it all. Contingents, squads, whole battalions of priests forming up beneath the banners. A small group of White Fathers appeared in that strange outfit they wore that gave them a slightly sporting look, like female bowlers; and of course Franciscans with their bunching brown robes, tightly roped around the waist; and throngs of tiny boys and girls who’d made their first Communion that morning, girls in bridal flounces with flowers in their hair and little boys in bow ties all carrying baskets of flowers with which to strew the streets. We were all formed up in a procession and at the head was the Bishop, the unspeakable Blashford, decked out in gold vestments and flanked by assistant priests and served by an army of altar boys, incense bearers, boat boys, bell ringers and acolytes, all attending His Grace who was bearing aloft the gold and silver monstrance with its small circular glass window behind which you glimpsed the sacred host, the white and sacred heart of the golden sun, the rays of which were suggested in the jagged, spiky ruby-tipped petals of the monstrance, a sight to dazzle and astound the faithful. Behind the ranks of altar boys, the great crowd of assistant priests in white surplices. I remember how the onlookers began to form, how they used to crowd the streets which were usually very empty on Sunday and watched with blank incomprehension as the Corpus Christi procession in all its gaudy Roman glory snaked forward, chanted, sang, knelt, shuffled up from its knees and staggered on again. Fluttering above the Bishop and the monstrance was the silken canopy supported on four poles by members of the Knights of De Gama wearing broad sashes and white gloves. The crowds gawped. The white people looked stern and unimpressed; behind them the blacks giggled and pointed and shook their heads at this fantastic spectacle of mad pilgrims in curious costumes following their gorgeous leader beneath his wind-rippled canopy. The white spectators put their hands in their pockets and struck attitudes of contempt. The Africans gave little outbreaks of spontaneous applause, as if they were watching a varsity rag procession and admiring the different floats. I remember they saved their best applause for the little band of black Christians who traditionally brought up the rear of the procession, usually wearing religious costumes of their own design, long white flowing albs, shimmering chains of holy medals clinking on coloured ribbons worn around the neck, roughly cut wooden staffs in their hands. These wild prophets received a special police escort. Occasionally there were fights as a group of white bystanders isolated and assaulted some chosen black spectator, raining blows and kicks upon the victim for reasons you never understood — I mean you could hardly stop and ask. And the police moved in and rescued the fallen man with the customary arrest. Every so often, you remember, we stopped and knelt. I can still smell the hot tar. The old hands spread a handkerchief. Sometimes horses had passed that way and you could smell the dung. There were oil stains right there in the middle of the road. There we knelt in the middle of the city, on a bright Sunday morning, the whole great procession reciting the rosary, a vast murmur rising and falling. Do you remember how the spectators often shrieked if the holy water sprinkled by the priests accidentally touched them? And they would wave away the fog of incense with their newspapers. You remember how they used to cough and give artificial little explosions of irritation to show how much they disapproved of it all? And you remember how embarrassed we were? I was anyway. I knelt there and prayed that the buildings would topple and cover me. We had to endure hours of it! pretending that nothing strange or bizarre was happening, that this was what you did every Sunday morning, you got dressed up in crazy clothes and went out and knelt in the middle of the road while the traffic policemen kept the cars away. You remember the traffic policemen? They stood at the intersections and wore those black jodhpurs, black tunic, grey shirt, the sunglasses, and the black peak cap. They said the uniform was modelled on that of the SS. I knelt there and prayed for the earth to open or the sky to fall, or for bolts of lightning to obliterate the entire procession in an instant, or for bombs to go off, or for a madman armed with a sten gun to burst upon the scene and mow down every living soul. I prayed for a message: “Lord, tell me what to do.” And the message came back: “Join the ALF, my son. It is the only act of faith left to you. You kneel here on the hot tarmac, foolish, exposed, embarrassed. You are that comical thing — a white man in Africa. Repent whilst there is still time, join the Front…” It was a religious conversion. The Front ordered me into the police force. I knew my friends would see it as an act of treachery, but I could live with that. Let my friends think of me as the traitor-policeman. Let them spit at me. I could take it. For the Cause. For the Front! Actually, at the time I think I was suffering from a kind of religious mania. Luckily it had no outward sign. I mean it didn’t issue in fainting fits or speaking in tongues or stigmata or levitation or uncontrolled miracles. All of that would have been rather inappropriate in a police officer, as you can imagine. And there was a short period when I experimented with flagellation, making a small branched whip with half a dozen tails securely attached to a short wooden stock and I beat myself with this whip but there were immediate difficulties. Probably few people know it, but it’s not possible to direct the whip so as to avoid marking oneself on the neck or wrist, and these are places where the weals might show and so arouse suspicion. And then I had myself a hairshirt made of horsehair and wool and wore it next to the skin for over a week. Not very practical either. It was hot, you see. I’d sweat. And the sweat would saturate the hair on the shirt and the shirt clung to me underneath my tunic and gave me a very odd shape. One or two of my colleagues asked if I was putting on weight. It was a very odd time for me.’