The rain had stopped. Sheets of muddy water rushed past the two priests in the bus shelter. They could hear it thundering deep down in the storm-water drains.
‘With Bubé’s flight history comes full circle. It’s the Kruger departure all over again. Heaven be praised!’ Lynch’s jug ears waggled in delight. Blanchaille noticed that the old man appeared to have lost more of his teeth. He grinned like an ancient baby. ‘You’re still planning to travel?’
Blanchaille nodded, ‘Yes Father.’
‘Oh you call me Father all right, but I’m not, you know. Of course you know! I’m more like an uncle to you boys. I like you, that makes me really different, close. Yes, I like you and mind you I’m probably the only one who does — and I nourish hopes for you all yet, though I look dark into your futures. But Father you call me! And what do you call your old President, the President Kruger? Why man, you call him Uncle, Uncle Paul! But that’s all wrong. Sure it is. He’s not your uncle, I am. He’s your father, father of the nation, father of misfortune. Follow Kruger, find the truth. That’s the line, Blanchie. Stick to it like glue as you’re pitched into an uncertain future. Be sure and look out for your old Uncle Lynch because he’ll be looking out for you. Take this. Trust me.’ Lynch gave him a brown envelope on which an address was scrawled. ‘You’ll need cash.’ The envelope smelt faintly of pistachio.
‘You’ve taken Ferreira’s money!’ Blanchaille was outraged.
‘I’ve simply returned the funds Ferreira bequeathed to you and which you unwisely left behind when you fled. I give it to you, after making suitable deductions. You can take a bus from here. At this address a friend is waiting. It’s nine stages, and then you hop.’
Blanchaille counted the nine stages because he hoped against hope he might end up at an address different to that given on the envelope. It did no good. Nine stages brought him to the centre of the town, to the tall skyscraper known as Balthazar Buildings which housed the Security Police, the Special Branch and the organisation, so secret no one could be certain of its existence, known as the Bureau, under its phantom chief, Colonel Terblanche.
CHAPTER 7
Balthazar Buildings on Jan Smuts Square in the centre of the city — notorious headquarters of the Security Police, scene of violent incidents beyond number. Together with the usual offices it comprised several hundred cells, interrogation rooms, as well as offices of the Bureau for Public Safety, or, more briefly, the Bureau. So mysterious that a Government committee found itself unable to confirm its existence, despite the fact that a number of the committee members were rumoured to be officers of the Bureau, or Bureaucrats, as the knowing called them. Balthazar Buildings also housed Die Kring, or the Ring, a secret society formed, according to legend, at the turn of the century, at the time of Kruger’s flight into Swiss exile and dedicated to the preservation of the Calvinist ideal, and the continuance, protection and furtherance of the Boer nation. On the further fringes of the political spectrum, Blanchaille remembered, there had been speculation that the Bureau and the Ring were one and the same. Perhaps. There were many such secret societies, all-male, dominated by devoted followers of the Regime, dedicated to racial purity and in love with uniforms — the Phantom Kommando; the Afrika Straf Kaffir Brigade; the Night Riders; the Sons of Freedom; the Ox-Wagon Patriots — but the Ring, it was said, controlled and dominated them all.
It had been claimed that the Ring was a fascist secret society. Bubé had denied this, as had every president before him — all of whom were members of the Ring. ‘The English have their Rotary Clubs, the Catholics have the Jesuits, the Bantu have their burial societies — and we have the Ring. It is not a society, it is more like a family gathering.’
It was with considerable trepidation that Blanchaille surveyed the stone steps leading up to the great steel doors of Balthazar Buildings and only by considerable effort of will did he tell himself that if this was the place to which Lynch had directed him then he must have his reasons. Across the road a boy was selling papers. PRESIDENT FOR TREATMENT OVERSEAS? the posters ran. So Lynch had got hold of the right story, at any rate. Blanchaille pushed the bell. Few who came to Balthazar Buildings ever emerged unless they were led away to waiting police vans, to court, to jail, to the gallows. Others left briefly in flights from high windows, or tripped down staircases, or were found hanging from their cell bars by their belts or pyjama cords. This fortress housed the Russian spy Popov. Two TV cameras swivelled above his head and examined him silently.
The young constable who let him in was of the type Blanchaille knew well from school rugby matches against just such long-limbed, rangey sorts, full-grown men at twelve with moustaches to prove it. They smelt of sweat and onions and stomped you unmercifully whenever you went down with the ball. He gave his name. There he was in Balthazar Buildings along with the likes of Popov. He hoped Lynch knew what he was doing.
The story of Popov was widely known and loved and taught in school. Once a cipher clerk named Steenkamp was sitting at his desk in Balthazar Buildings on Sunday afternoon, hot and bored. He had just decided, by his own admission, that his job as a security policeman was at an end. The codes were beyond him and the amount of application required was simply too much for a simple man. And a simple man he was, this Steenkamp, the fifth son of a large and impoverished Karoo family, regarded by his superiors as a good policeman but unimaginative and perhaps a trifle slow. There was no hint then of the blaze of glory with which his career was to be crowned and was to make his photograph a familiar sight in every house in the country. Blanchaille had seen the photograph, everyone had seen the photograph. The mild empty eyes, the bored and unlined forehead which gave him the look of a man a decade younger than his forty years, the strong curling hair and the protuberant ears, the penalty of playing lock-forward for many years for the police team without wearing a scrum cap. It was this Steenkamp who one hot afternoon happened to look out of his window and see down below in the street a man taking photographs of him. He might have been picking his nose or yawning and there was this stranger in the street below taking pictures! He was down the stairs two at a time and he collared the impudent photographer who turned out to be Nikita Popov, a genuine, real, live Russian spy, and a full colonel in the KGB. It was a considerable coup and the President, wearing his other hat as Police Minister, went on television and thanked the Security Services for their watchfulness and said, ‘Let this be a lesson to any other hostile countries who may have thought of infiltrating agents. The Security Forces are ready and waiting for them and will do their utmost to defend the country’s integrity against the orchestrators of the Total Onslaught.’ A police spokesman in turn thanked the Minister for thanking the police and the session ended in an orgy of mutual gratitude.