The picture faded into blackness. ‘You haven’t seen anything,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘Now come along and look at what we have in the holding cells.’
CHAPTER 8
The holding cells were below ground, arranged in tiers rather in the manner of an underground parking garage, Van Vuuren explained in what to Blanchaille was an inappropriate and chilling comparison. And why ‘holding’ cells? Van Vuuren was also quick to counter the notion that this was intended to distinguish them from ‘hanging’ cells, or ‘jumping’ cells. The policeman seemed, surprisingly, to regard this suspicion as being in bad taste.
Van Vuuren led him into a long concrete corridor: air-conditioning vents breathed coldly, a thin, flat hair-cord carpet on the floor, abrasive white walls, overhead fluorescent light-strips pallid and unforgiving. Down one side of the corridor were steel cell doors. At the far end of the corridor, in front of a cell, stood a group of uniformed officers. Senior men they must have been for Blanchaille caught the gleam of gold on caps and epaulettes. They seemed nervous, slapping their swagger-sticks against their thighs. One carried a clipboard and he was tapping his pencil nervously against his teeth.
‘We’ll wait here and watch,’ said Van Vuuren.
Then I saw in my dream, marching around the corner, two more policemen and between them their prisoner, a powerful man in grey flannels and white shirt, at least a half a head taller than his captors. As they approached the cell door the policeman with the clipboard stepped forward and held up his hand. ‘We are happy to inform you, Dr Strydom, that you are free to go. There is no further need to hold you. Your name has been removed from my list.’
The reaction of the prisoner to this information was sudden and violent. He gave the clipboard carrier an enormous blow to the head. The two men guarding him fell on him and tried to wrestle him to the ground, but he was too big, too strong. The uniformed policemen with the swagger-sticks joined in and a wild scrum of battling men seethed in the corridor. The prisoner laid about him with a will and reaching his objective, the cell door, opened it, rearing and lashing out with his feet, kicking backwards like a stallion at the policemen clawing at him. ‘Now write down my name in your book,’ he roared at the unfortunate clipboard carrier who was leaning shakily against the wall and then leapt into the cell, slamming the heavy door behind him.
Glumly the policemen gathered themselves together and wiped the blood from their faces. From behind the cell door Blanchaille could hear the prisoner’s voice raised in the National Anthem:
‘On your call we may not waver, so we pledge from near and far; So to live, or so to perish — yes we come, South Africa-a-a-r!’
‘That’s quite a patriot you’ve got there,’ Blanchaille said. He couldn’t help smiling, ‘Balthazar Buildings is a place from which generations of doomed prisoners have tried to escape. I think I’ve just seen a man fighting to get in. The world is suddenly stood on its head.’
‘That man is Wessels Strydom, once a leading light in the Ring which he left claiming it had been undermined by the Communists. Strydom said that the Regime was going soft on the old enemies, Reds, liberals, Jews, internationalists, terrorists. He expressed the feeling that control was slipping away from God’s people. With a group of like-thinking supporters he formed what they called the Nuwe Orde. This organisation aims to expose betrayals of the Boer nation, by direct action. The military wing of the Nuwe Orde is the Afrika Straf Kaffir Brigade. You’ve heard of their punishment squads who deal with people they see as threatening or sullying the old idea of purity? Their ideas of punishment are juvenile but no less painful for that, mind you. They’ll hang about a house where they know blacks and whites are holding a party and slash tyres; a little while ago they devised a plan of releasing thousands of syphilis-infected white mice in one of the multi-racial casinos; they’re not above kidnapping the children of social workers or trade unionists who they feel are betraying the Afrikaner nation; or breaking into cinemas and destroying films they disapprove of; or shooting up the houses of lawyers (Piatikus Lenski, the liberal defence lawyer was a favourite target); or preparing to mate with their wives in front of the Memorial to the Second Mauritian Invasion in response to the falling white birth-rate, a huge breed-in of hundreds of naked male members of the Nuwe Orde and their carefully positioned wives all preparing for insemination at a given signal. They want a homeland for the Boer nation and eventual independence. In this new homeland only white people will be admitted. The idea is to remove all dependence on black labour. They’ll do their own housework, sweep their streets, run their own factories, deliver their own letters, mow their lawns. They’ll be safe, separate, independent. They’ve bought a tract of land down on the South Coast. The sea is important to them as a symbol, it’s something that they have to have their backs to.’
‘Would they be capable of killing?’
Van Vuuren shrugged. ‘You’re thinking of the writing on Ferreira’s wall, aren’t you? So were we. That’s why we hauled this Strydom in. Frankly it was a terrible mistake. I’m not saying that the A.S.K. couldn’t have killed him but Ferreira was dealing in highly complex matters concerning the movement of funds through very complicated channels which none of us understood. Certainly not this Strydom. He could barely read his own bank account. And he doesn’t care about those things, he cares about race, about history, about being right. Arresting him has proved to be a terrible mistake. We can’t get rid of him. We don’t need him any more, we don’t want to hold him, there’s nothing he can tell us, but he won’t go! And it suits the Nuwe Orde to have him here. It makes it look like the Regime is really taking them seriously, locking him up like any black radical. You can see how determined Strydom is. He literally fights his way in back into his holding cell. The thing to remember about the Nuwe Orde is that it is actually a very old order.’
Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and the policeman Van Vuuren moved to another cell and peered through the thick glass spyhole in the door and Blanchaille recoiled at what he saw. For there, lying on the bunk, was Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, the anarchist. He recognised immediately the spiky black hair, the long, thin chin, the freckled, ghostly white face. ‘I don’t believe this. He’s in London.’
Van Vuuren shook his head. ‘We had known he was planning to return secretly to the country. We knew when he would arrive and, most importantly, what he would be wearing. The information was top-grade. So accurate Zandrotti never stood a chance. Blanchie, he came back disguised as a nun, of the Loretto Order, to be precise. Imagine it if you will. There’s this double-decker bus trundling through a green and leafy suburb, all the passengers peering out of the window and paying very little attention to what some of them afterwards thought of as perhaps rather ‘swarthy’ a sister who sat there on her seat keeping her eyes demurely downcast and most of her face hidden behind her large wimple. Imagine their surprise when three large men in hairy green sportscoats and thick rubber-soled brown shoes jump aboard the bus and begin attacking this nun. Apparently the conductor went to her assistance and was struck down with a blow to the temple. He lay sprawled in the aisle, bleeding, and all the coins from his ticket machine went rolling beneath the bus seats.’
Blanchaille imagined it. He saw it. He heard the jingling flutter as the coins spun and settled beneath the seats.
‘Anyway, these three guys wrestled with the nun who hoofs them repeatedly in the nuts until they pick her up and carry her down the aisle head first. The other passengers see that this nun isn’t what they thought because the headdress has been torn off and they look at the hair and the freckles and the beard and fall over themselves with amazement — this is a man! There was no end of trouble afterwards stopping them talking to the papers, and the conductor, he was well into negotiations to sell his story to something called Flick, a flashy picture magazine, when he was stopped at the last moment.’
Of course escaping from jail in clerical dress had a long history. There had been Magdalena who got out disguised as a nun. A less appropriate garb could not be imagined. From that day nuns leaving the country were abused by Customs officers still smarting over the one who got away. Then there had been Kramer and Lipshitz who bribed their way out of their cells dressed as Cistercian monks. But for a wanted man to return to the country in clerical dress, to certain arrest, that was beyond comprehension. The exit permit on which Zandrotti had left the country on his release from jail specified arrest should he return.