Kipsel had found the newspaper rolled around a long stick in the cordial manner of continental cafés, and unfolded it idly as they sat among the remains of their excellent lunch, fillets of fera, a succulent fish found in Lake Geneva. The photograph was on the front page. Kipsel passed Blanchaille the newspaper and asked for a translation of the headline.

Blanchaille, barely able to contain his horrified astonishment, pointed out to his friend that although he descended from a Mauritian sailor and his mother had had high ambitions for him in the France she had never seen, although he carried a French passport, his knowledge of the language was elementary. None the less, after much muttering in a voice from which the tones of horror could not be eradicated, he stared at the headline: LA GRANDE ESPIONNE SUD-AFRICAINE RENTRE.

‘Big, grand or great South African spy returns,’ Blanchaille offered reluctantly.

‘Returns?’ said Kipsel wonderingly. ‘That means she’s been with them all along. It is Magdalena — isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry, Ronnie.’

Inside the paper there were more pictures. They showed Magdalena’s secret life in colour photographs. Here was a picture of her spymaster, Brigadier Jim Langman, taken in Magdalena’s garden, Blanchaille announced after some deciphering. It showed the Brigadier in what appeared to be a uniform of his own making, a rather strange tan tunic with great big buttoned breast pockets and a collar of exceptional size. Brigadier Langman sat on the swing in the garden. The swing was painted lemon yellow. Langman wore black shoes and white socks which clashed noticeably with the tan uniform. He gazed soulfully out of the photograph, a round, fleshy face with soft, rather pouchy dark eyes with a glint to them that reminded Blanchaille of an ageing watchdog. Brigadier Langman’s nose was large, veined, his moustache curved out and downwards from each nostril to bracket the corners of his mouth. What was the Brigadier doing, perched on the swing in this odd uniform? No matter. It made a startling photograph in what was an amazing series. Here was Magdalena taking the sun by her poolside. Here she was at pistol practice wearing ear-protectors, the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth in an effort of concentration, her tailored jumpsuit covered in zips, her hair caught behind her head in a bow. Here was Magdalena in Red Square, white fur collar around her ears, the same photograph which hung on the wall in her flat. Here was Magdalena in a recently bombed refugee camp somewhere north of the border wearing military uniform, identification disc pinned to her chest, inspecting the damage following a South African air raid. Here was Magdalena with a group of black students in Mombasa, a row of grins and clenched fist salutes. Here was Magdalena arm-in-arm with Kaiser at an Azanian Liberation rally in Hyde Park and here she was again at a barbecue in a suburban garden in the company of a number of men whose very long shorts, bullet heads, stony eyes, the curious way the hair was shaved well above the ears and vigorously oiled, revealed them to be policemen. Here was a photograph of Magdalena’s favourite weapon, a Beretta Parabellum which it seemed she now carried everywhere in a hand-tooled leather case. The reasons were clear, even with their limited French. The Front for the Liberation of Azania, enraged at its humiliating penetration, had sworn revenge. Its eradication squad, the mysterious Strike Kommando No. 3, had vowed to kill her. Here was a photograph of Magdalena attending the christening of the youngest child of Kaiser’s cousin, in St Martin-in-the-Fields, where she had become the child’s godmother. Was there no end to her capacity for deception? It seemed not.

Now I saw Kipsel struggle to an elbow and with glazed eyes begin to speak: ‘Look, let’s get this straight — I never set out to be what I am. Hell, no! I mean a guy starts off at home as a rugby player, most guys do, but if he’s got more than a smidgen of brain someone comes along who tells him there’s more to life than playing ball, there’s politics which is just as dangerous, intellectually satisfying and pulls girls who start thinking about these things from an early age being more mature than boys. So before I knew it I was investigating the living conditions of our cook and pressing my old folks to increase her wages — and this while still at school, such is the pace of political development. At university, well, you find yourself leading a protest march on the police station, or picketing the profs for free medicals for black lab assistants, you go on marches, join demonstrations, engage in sit-ins and get arrested when failing to disperse after being ordered to do so by a police officer, but after a while it palls, or at least disenchantment sets in, you don’t feel that you’re really doing anything, you’re simply not scoring, so you get active, you start a trade union for gardeners and you dream of becoming a para-medic in the starving homelands. Jesus! you even send for the home-tuition course and you run a literacy night-class for black taxi-drivers and still you don’t feel you’re connecting. I mean there’s no one cheering in the stands and so you become desperate for action, and of course you’re reading like mad, Marx and Dostoevsky and Gide and Fanon, and you suddenly realise that what is needed is the lonely gesture of self-affirmation, that freedom is to be seized in a single act, authentic existence must be deliberately chosen, so what do you do? You get a few guys together and form a secret revolutionary cell, that’s me and J.J. Bliksem and Len Silberstein and Magdalena, but not Mickey the Poet, he was never in the cell, he was just roped in to drive because Silberstein’s stupid bloody Volvo wouldn’t start on the last morning of our campaign. Off we went, clutching our dynamite snitched from the explosives store of the gold mine where Silberstein’s uncle was compound manager, and found some power pylons in the veld outside town. They had to be outside town because we didn’t want to hurt anyone. We drew the line at casualties, hell we drew the line at everything you can think of! We wanted to make an impact but we didn’t want blood, or maiming. I mean we were naïve middle-class people, we gave up our seats to old ladies on buses, so we weren’t about to scatter arms and legs across the place. Silberstein laid the charges because he’d leant how to do it having been a sapper during his military service. I helped him. Back at the car Magdalena engaged Mickey the Poet in conversation and took him for a walk. Mickey said in court that she seduced him and I believe him. It was her usual response when conversation flagged, and that when the blast went off she told him these were the reverberations of his inner being. Mickey would believe anything. But I noticed that next night when we had to go off and blast the electrical pylons in the black township Mickey was unavailable to drive us and Silberstein had to borrow his father’s car. We went to bomb the other pylons after a pretty heated argument. I said two was enough but Silberstein and Magdalena said it would expose us to a charge of racial division if we hit white stuff only. As the Regime decreed separate lavatories it was only right that we hit separate black pylons; anything else would look like crude anti-white prejudice. The next morning the police picked me up. They knew everything; they knew Silberstein’s uncle, they knew how many sticks of dynamite, dammit they even knew poor Mickey’s poem. They played me tapes of the fool Silberstein’s telephone conversations. After we got back from the township bombing he spent hours phoning people around the country hinting at what we’d done, telling them to read the papers in the morning, like it was a picnic we’d been on, or a party. I didn’t think to ask myself how they knew. I just knew they knew and I tried to save Magdalena. They locked me in a room upstairs at the police station with the curtains drawn with a Special Branch killer called Vuis. He hit me until I fell down. Then he kicked me. In those days they didn’t bother to be subtle, no electrodes on the balls, no strangling with the wet towel. Fists and feet, drowning, doorways, steep stairs, high windows. They didn’t care if the marks showed. Dammit, they wanted marks to show! That was one of the perks of being a security policeman, you got to hit people often. Tried to tell them that Mickey had nothing to do with the explosions, but they laughed. Told them not a syllable about Magdalena and they beat me some more. For interrupting! You see, they knew the lot! They didn’t want my confession, true or not. They wanted to be left alone to go on with the beating. Arnoldus Vuis was also captain of the police hockey team; on his days off, he told me between punches, he played left back. It’s funny what you remember when you’re bleeding heavily and seeing double. We used electric detonators on the pylons. Silberstein read all about them, that’s the useful thing about lawyers, they read. Captain Vuis knew about Silberstein’s reading. He knew about things even I didn’t know about, like the fact that it had been Looksmart Dladla who did the recce and supplied the map of the power pylons in the township. They slipped there, of course, because Looksmart happened to have been hauled in before the attacks on the electric pylons and when the dynamite went off he was being savagely beaten and had his head banged against the wall, so he could not have been present. His alibi was unshakeable. They had to release him temporarily and were about to pick him up when someone tipped him off and he skipped to Philadelphia. Anyway, I shopped myself and Silberstein, reckoning we were for the high jump anyway, but I said nothing about Magdalena and I defended Mickey as best I could.’