‘Naturally the Church claims to know nothing of the activities of the Manus, much as our Regime claims to be unconnected with the Ring. But how else would Church and Regime talk except through such organisations?’ Fatima enquired, with eyes modestly lowered.
‘There are other conversations which go on in Balthazar Buildings,’ said Happy. ‘It’s probably just as well you didn’t witness in any of them. There are, for instance, the talks between the Regime and Agnelli, the Papal Nuncio.’
Blanchaille nodded dully. Of course… why not? First they spoke through proxies. Those were the talks he’d witnessed between the Italians and the rough guys from the Ring. No doubt talks followed between the principals involved. He realised the girls had not offered him a drink. Now he knew why. They were plying him with information more potent than any booze. He felt as high as a kite.
‘Of course, you see the Church has a great deal to teach the Regime about change. The Regime is now in the position not unlike that of the Church some years ago. Both are preaching to a shrinking audience, changes are to be made if that audience is to be kept. Some of the old slogans must be abandoned, slogans like “death before adaption”, “separation is liberation”, “tribalism is the future!”. These had to be revalued, reassessed, reappraised and reviewed. Just as the Church’s ringing affirmation of its mission to the townships and its irresistible embrace of its black brethren was not unrelated to a good hard look at the market. The Regime realised that if it was going to survive it was going to have to start allowing black people into white parks and removing discriminatory signs and stress the positive side of ethnic identity and equal freedoms. Those in power liked to present this as conscious choice, as liberalisation, but in fact it’s a form of desperate accountancy.’
Blanchaille nodded. ‘I do remember now how it was some years ago when you could go to a Catholic church and study in a Catholic school, recover in a Catholic hospital and never hear a single query raised about whether Jesus lived in the big house or in the servants’ quarters, and to blurt out the question was to be threatened with divine punishment and beaten with a strap loaded with halfpennies and cast into the outer darkness. Then suddenly one day you found a whole lot of people were shouting at you for not applauding the Church’s eternal commitment to the liberation of Africa, and you were so deafened that it took a while to realise that you were being shouted at by the very people who beat you in the first place.’
‘That’s right,’ Happy said. ‘It’s the figures again, you see. In the middle of this century the number of Catholics in the white West, in Europe and North America was over half the world total, but before much longer European Catholics will be a minority — the majority will be found in places like Asia and Africa. Not surprisingly, certain conclusions have been drawn…’
And so that night passed with talking and stories, rather too much drink and too little sleep, and the next day as well. Conversation and information was exchanged between the fleeing ex-priest and the kind hostesses of the secret travellers’ rest known to lost souls as the Airport Palace Hotel, and their mentor, the man they referred to affectionately as their ‘Commanding Officer’, the elderly barman, Colonel Visser, who had founded with such great hopes the Brigades of Light.
Fatima spoke to him of recent travellers who had stopped at the Palace Hotel en route for some long-desired home in the faraway mountains, and mentioned startling names such as Ezra Savage the novelist, Claude Peterkin the radio producer, and Gus Kuiker and the Secretary of the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel. Blanchaille had great difficulty in believing it, not knowing where truth ended and wishful thinking began.
He asked them how they had come to the Airport Palace Hotel and each described an encounter with the mysterious stranger who revealed to them that they were virgins pretending to be whores; this stranger had various names, Jack, or Fergus, or simply ‘our friend’. Well before he heard that he spoke with an Irish accent Blanchaille knew who their saviour had been. Even before they had shown him in their little ‘museum of mementoes’ (in reality the ladies’ cloakroom) an old black beret which he instantly recognized as the one Lynch had worn to the airbase. The implications only struck him later.