Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and Van Vuuren, though unaware of it, talked and walked their way up the Strand, around Covent Garden and by degrees into Soho. And it was in Soho that they first noticed the black cab trailing along behind them and saw that it carried none other than their old mentor, Father Ignatius Lynch.
And Blanchaille remembered the famous black beret in the Airport Palace, and knew why it was there before him.
Stories abound concerning the conversation Blanchaille and Van Vuuren had with their old master at that strange meeting in Soho, once they had recovered from their astonishment. How they noted his tremendous excitement as well as his weariness. (This is hardly surprising when you consider the old man had achieved a lifetime’s dream in escaping from Africa, helped no doubt by the pistachio-flavoured banknotes he had borrowed from the money poor Ferreira had left Blanchaille.) Yet having made good his escape from Africa at last, why come looking for them? Lynch cut short such enquiries. In fact, as I saw in my dream, he did most of the talking, telling them for the last time that his time was short and he was not much longer for this world and as if to emphasise it, he kept the taxi waiting, meter ticking over. Indeed, he implied that they might not be much longer for this world either. He reminded them that they were babes abroad, that neither had ever been out of the country before except for their living history lessons he’d provided years before. He said they wouldn’t ever have known that they were now in Soho had he not told them, and grave dangers awaited them. All his talk was of death, while the meter ticked. And for once it seemed true, this expectation of his own end. He was smaller, thinner, more frail than they had ever seen him before. It was by a fragile, grinning, big-eared wraith that they were addressed in a Soho street.
He told them about the strange suicides of the brokers Lundquist, Kranz and Skellum, which he described as the most extraordinary acts of self-destruction since Mickey the Poet strangled himself with his own hands.
‘The broker Kranz died by hanging himself during a lunch given by the Woolgrowers’ Association of which, for obscure family reasons that need not detain us, he was a director. It had been a very good lunch apparently and they got down to coffee and liqueurs when Kranz himself was, in the words of one witness, “as merry as hell”. Setting off to the bathroom his last words were — again I have this from the family, “Keep the bottle coming around — I’m off for a splash”, and then walking, or rather weaving, happily from the room, a large brandy in hand, he disappeared. The glass of brandy, now drained, was found in a basin in the men’s lavatory and suspended from the window directly above the toilet, hanging by his own belt, was the unfortunate Kranz. It seems there were a number of puzzling bruises and contusions on the body for which no explanation could be found. Certainly it seems unlikely that Kranz could have injured himself like that, but the inquest finally decided that Kranz in his drunken state had probably clambered up on the seat of the lavatory and then onto the cistern itself, attaching the belt to a steel window frame. However, being drunk, he was clumsy and hadn’t tied the knots correctly and he fell, or so the story goes, perhaps he fell several times only to clamber up again, stubborn fellow that he was, and try again. Everyone agreed that he had shown quite remarkable determination.
‘Lundquist showed the same intensity of purpose as his colleague Kranz. For we must believe that this small man lifted his heavy executive chair, weighing half as much as he did, and using it as a kind of battering ram smashed a hole in the window large enough to pass through and so plunged to his death one hundred and fifty feet below. A wonderfully neat worker, too, this Lundquist. For although the body was badly broken, as you would expect after such a fall, it seems he had not been cut once by the wall of glass through which he had smashed in his feverish desire for extinction.
‘Of Skellum, the third suicide, it must be said that we have an act of self-destruction which deserves the palm. Here we had a man with a brilliant military record who was invalided out of the service suffering from shellshock. This was caused by a terrifying experience when the patrol he was leading was ambushed and lay under continual mortar fire for a full day and Skellum saw his companions killed beside him one by one. Not surprisingly this experience left him with an uncontrollable fear of sudden and violent explosions, a backfire, a slammed door, a firework, even a loud cough would reduce him to a state of gibbering terror. Yet this man so overcame his fear as to bounce into his office one morning bright and early, close the door, put a.38 pistol to his temple and blow his brains out, falling forward onto his desk, thereby unintentionally summoning his secretary who came in with her notebook thinking that her boss wanted to dictate some letters.
‘Now these dead brokers might have been remembered for nothing more than their suicides,’ Father Lynch concluded, ‘had it not been for the fact that each had seen Ferreira shortly before his death. Ferreira had revealed to them that their dealings in gold and industrial shares for ostensibly reputable clients, were really deals on behalf of dummy companies set up by the Ring. Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum had been dealing for the Ring. And it in turn had been dealing for the Hand of the Virgin, you will know that organisation of devout Catholic freemasons. Unfortunately the Ring felt entitled to a decent commission. And they forgot to mention it to the Hand.
‘The Bank of the Angels called in the accounts, checked them over — and had a convulsion. But the real culprits, the Ring, slipped out of reach of the Fingers by the simplest and time-honoured expedient in these matters, it blamed the brokers who had handled the deals. If there was money missing, the Italians were informed, then Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum were the guilty men. The Hand reached out. It reached for necks.
‘It was now that Ferreira called in the brokers. The only way the brokers could save themselves, Ferreira told them, was to cooperate with his enquiry. Give him details of the shares purchased, sums remitted, names of contacts. And naturally the brokers fell over themselves to comply with this request. They firmed up Ferreira’s case so tight you could have built battleships with the steel in it. And then Ferreira goes and gets murdered. Maybe the Azanian Kommando did it, maybe the Afrika Brigade — what did it matter to Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum? Did it matter what the writing on the wall really meant? To them its message was clear enough. It said “You next”. So they panicked. Who wouldn’t? They began off-loading shares, too many, too fast. Maybe they planned to skip? Or buy their way out of trouble — who knows? The market turned downwards. And there followed the sensational suicides. Truly, the only miracle left in our country these days is the wonderful and mysterious ways which men find to take their own lives. Of this, poor Mickey the Poet is the patron saint and initiating martyr. We can but pray that they find peace at last in another place, as we pray we all may do one day.’
‘And may we pray that the Regime, the Ring and the Hand one day roast in hell?’ demanded Van Vuuren, angrily.
‘Certainly we may pray for no such thing,’ came the prompt reply, ‘but we can always hope.’
And then Blanchaille asked him this question: ‘Father Lynch, you’ve cleared up one of the mysteries in this business. We know why share prices fell. But tell us — who killed Ferreira?’
‘Read the writing on the wall,’ replied the little priest. ‘You’re the policeman, remember, work it out.’
‘But we read the writing on the wall and it told us that either the Straf Kaffir Brigade got him — or the black radicals, the Azanian Strike Kommando No. 3. But a lot of other people could have had a motive. Like Bubé, or Minister Kuiker and Trudy Yssel, or the Israelis, or the Taiwanese, or the Ring, or the Hand or just about anybody who believed Ferreira knew enough to sink them and he intended to publish it…’