It was a very curious combination; Kuiker the granite man at home, but curiously, even distinctively, colourful abroad, with his taste for bright Hawaiian shirts aglow with orange sunsets and rampant palms, and the new Secretary to the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel, young, pretty, tough as hell, shrewd and decidedly modern. There was always something stubbornly old-fashioned about Gus Kuiker. He was large, lumpish even. Trudy was svelte and auburn. He looked like a prize fighter, with a big bone-plated forehead, cauliflower ears, a doughy nose, fleshy and rather sensuous lips. But they were a formidable team, it was widely agreed, and of their determination to change the face of internal and foreign propaganda there could be no doubt. As far as Gus Kuiker was concerned, Trudy Yssel could simply do no wrong. What’s more she was funded to the hilt. She seemed unstoppable.
As Blanchaille and Kipsel arrived at Heathrow Airport the newspapers they bought told a very strange story. DEPCOM MYSTERY DEEPENS. WHERE IS TRUDY?
Kipsel studied the paper. The Kuiker/Yssel affair was now making international news. The English papers printed an account of an interview given by a spokesman in Kuiker’s Department.
Reporter:
Can you give us any idea about the location of Trudy Yssel?
Spokesman:
It is not in the public interest to disclose any further information.
Reporter:
Would you comment on rumours that she has left the country?
Spokesman:
The rumour is without foundation.
A few days later, after Trudy Yssel had been sighted in Philadelphia, another news conference was given.
Reporter:
Will you confirm that Miss Yssel is now in Philadelphia?
Spokesman:
I cannot confirm or deny that report.
Reporter:
Do you admit that she is abroad?
Spokesman:
I have not said that she is abroad.
Reporter:
But she’s in Philadelphia. Therefore she must be abroad.
Spokesman:
You should learn a little more about your own country before leaping to conclusions. There are other Philadelphias nearer home.
Reporter:
Whichever Philadelphia she may be in, what is she doing there?
Spokesman:
I will not be cross-examined like this.
Well, of course, the invitation was impossible to resist and a search was immediately launched and indeed another Philadelphia was found, closer to hand, in the Cape province, a small town consisting of no more than the usual bank and church and a few hundred puzzled inhabitants who lined and cheered when the reporters from the nation’s press arrived in their Japanese estate cars and their big Mercedes to interview everyone from the mayor to the town’s oldest inhabitant, Granny Ryneveldt, aged 103, who declared that she hadn’t seen such excitement since Dominee Vasbythoven ran off with his gardener and joined the gay community in the Maluti mountains. However, there was no trace of Trudy. Everybody had heard of her, of course. But nobody had seen her.
It didn’t matter. The Regime made capital out of the reporters’ double discomfiture. Journalists, they said, should get to know their own country better and not always look overseas for glamorous stories. Various sanctions were hinted at if the newspapers did not take up this suggestion. Then ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church expressed their outrage that the affair of the renegade minister, Vasbythoven, had been dragged up once more. For their part, several liberal English clerics preached sermons against the hounding of the unfortunate minister, reminding their congregations that homosexual practice between consenting adults was widely regarded as acceptable in the outside world and they lauded Dominee Vasbythoven who had shown his bravery not only by taking as a lover one of his own sex but someone of another race which showed him to be not only sexually liberated but racially balanced and they pointed out that this was no small feat for a man whose great-great uncle had been Judge-President of the Orange Free State, when it had still been a Boer Republic. Here again the Regime waded in with warnings to the opposition press against attempts to slander the memory of the Boer Republics when, led by Uncle Paul Kruger, the Boer Nation with God’s help had fought for its freedom against the wicked imperialist colonialist oppression of the British. Anti-Government papers were warned for the last time to put their house in order.
The English papers overseas, beyond the reach of the Regime, agreed that Minister Kuiker and his protégée Trudy Yssel had disappeared. They also agreed that large sums of Government money appeared to have gone missing with them. They printed a photograph which showed the missing pair in a Paris street. She carried several shopping bags and smiled vivaciously. He covered his face with one hand, but was instantly recognisable. Behind them walked two men in dark suits. One of these men now sat drinking at the bar.
The only other drinkers were a small group of oriental businessmen who drank from globular tankards foaming pink cocktails garnished with sprigs of mint and cherries, leaning forward above the liquid and tasting it with tongues and fingertips, giving excited little barks of encouragement. A small girl carrying an enormous soft green cat with wild eyes and a forest of woolly whiskers wandered around the footrail with tear-stained face obviously searching for her parents. All around was the teeming flux of anonymous travellers departing for a hundred destinations.
The drinker who aroused this rhapsody of patriotic memories in Blanchaille was painfully thin, his sports jacket hung on him, a loud tweed of blues and greens with an ugly stiffening of the bristles which had the effect of making the colours of the cloth shimmer, a sickly rainbow effect. His complexion too was strange, a light grey translucency tinged with pink. He’d been drinking for some time, Blanchaille judged, and despite the flush that warmed the bony face, it was the air of desiccation that struck him, as if a kind of internal emaciation had taken place, an interior drought, a profound dryness which no amount of watering could end. He had crisp, slightly oiled sandy hair through which the scalp gleamed bleakly. Altogether he had the look of St John of Capistrano, formidable Inquisitor-General of Vienna, a portrait of whom had hung in Blanchaille’s class-room many years before.
His message to Kipsel was succinct: ‘Cop.’
Kipsel did not thank him. ‘I warn you Blanchie, when shown a South African security man competing urges threaten me.’
‘Which?’
‘Do I hit out, or throw up?’
At the bar the oriental businessmen had replenished their tankards and were lapping away happily at the pink stuff. The little girl had been given a bowl of crisps by the barman and sat eating steadily, gazing out into the seething concourse with tearful eyes. Blanchaille introduced his friend and himself to the solitary drinker.
‘Jesus!’ said the drinker, ‘Not Kipsel the traitor?’
‘No,’ Kipsel said firmly. ‘Not Kipsel the traitor.’
‘Ernest Nokkles,’ said the drinker, ‘passing on to Geneva.’
‘So are we.’
‘Let me get you a drink,’ said Blanchaille.
‘Brandy,’ said Nokkles. ‘A large one if you will. The bloody English tot is about as much as a nun pees with her knees crossed. And Coke with it. I always have it with Coke. The bastards here drink it neat, y’know.’
‘How are things at home?’ Kipsel asked.
‘Do you mean militarily or economically?’
‘I didn’t know there was a difference.’
‘They’re linked, but they’re different. Militarily we’re all right. Hell, there’s nobody who’s going to touch us. Frankly I think we’re in more danger from the drought. But if you consider the Total Onslaught, then there’s no doubt about its having an effect. Slow but cumulative. We might crack one day. But despite that, the Big Seven reckon we’re doing O.K., financially.’