My dream showed me Nokkles, awash in good champagne, immediately claimed as he left the Customs area by three men who introduced themselves as Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr. Two members of this burly trio claimed to have been recently attached to the office of the President, had travelled with him as far as London in search of medical treatment and there he had given them the slip. And I saw how these big men shivered and trembled at their loss.
Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr surrounded Trudy’s detective demanding to know what news he had brought. Dieweld was big and blond with a great cows-lick combed back from his forehead like a frozen wave, Moolah thin and springy with a mouth full of gold teeth and Spahr, bespectacled, with a round expressionless face and astonishingly bright blue eyes, gave no clue to his expertise with the parcel bomb. Nokkles knew Spahr as one of the men on Kuiker’s security staff. The others he thought he knew vaguely from photographs of the President in foreign parts. Dieweld, he vaguely remembered, had disgraced himself by fainting when a demented maize farmer had attempted to shoot the President at the official opening of the Monument to Heroes of the Mauritian Invasion.
Nokkles’ first question was about Bubé. The President was in Geneva, he had it on the best authority. Trace the President and surely the others could not be far away?
The security men looked glum. They too had heard of the President’s visit to London. They had heard he was on his way to Geneva. They had met every plane. But the old fox must have disguised himself because he eluded them.
‘Remember,’ said Moolah, ‘the President visited most of the European capitals during his celebrated tour and was never once recognised. What chance did we stand?’
As for Blanchaille and Kipsel, they stood on the moving pavement carrying them towards passport control and Customs, gazing with fascination at the advertisements for watches sculpted from coins, or carved from ingots, the offer of hotels so efficient they operated without manpower and the multitude of advertisements in cunningly illuminated panels alongside the moving pavement showing deep blue lakes and icing sugar alps. Most of all they stared at the multitudinous shapes and forms of gold to be purchased, ingots, coins, pendants, lozenges; some cute and almost edible came in little cubes, fat and yellow like processed cheese. How extraordinary that so much treasure should be produced from the deep, black, stony heart of their country.
This reverie was broken by a chauffeur in smart green livery who carried a sign reading ‘Reverend Blanchaille’ and announced that he had instructions to transport them to ‘the big house on the hill’, where a friend awaited them.
Who were they to argue? Alone and unloved in a strange land? However close to the end of their journey they might be (for after all ‘the big house of the hill’ was a tantalising description) offers of friendship from whatever quarter were difficult to resist.
It is a sign of the desperate state to which the once-powerful security men had been reduced that they, seeing Blanchaille and Kipsel escorted to a great limousine, should have decided to follow them, despite Nokkles’ warning that these men were deluded pilgrims come to Switzerland to seek Kruger’s dream kingdom and that they were in real life a disgraced traitor and a renegade priest. As Chris Dieweld put it: ‘We’re lost without someone to follow.’
The chauffeur pointed to the grey Mercedes keeping discreetly behind them. ‘We’ll lose them,’ he promised.
The road ran for miles along the lakeside. The lower slopes of the mountain were thickly crammed with vines, every inch of land terraced to its very edges, the dense greenness tumbling down to the roadside, vine leaves stirring in the passing breeze their car made. Then on the other side of the road the vines continuing their downward plunge to the very water’s edge. Up ahead were larger mountains folding one into another and covered in a thick dark fur of vegetation. It amazed him, the roughness of this vegetation, its harsh contours. No doubt it was different in the winter when the snows softened and smoothed away the detail, but now, under the sun hot and high, under a light-blue sky, there was a rough, wiry, raw determination about the way these shrubs and trees clung to the mountain side, a lack of softness, an absence of prettiness that reminded him very strongly of Africa. After running some way along the lakeside they began climbing steeply. The driver pointed to the town of Montreux below and to a small tongue of land jutting out into the lake, that was the prison castle, Château Chillon, very famous. They climbed through the thick fuzz of bush and forest, the harsh unlovely vegetation. Here and there boulders broke through the dark green and nearer the summits were ridges of grey stone, mountain skulls, patched and balding. And even higher still was the snow, even in this June heat, last year’s snow, icy grey.
And here was a grand house, a castle within its own walls, but no rearing bulk of dull stones, more of a Schloss, a château, whitewashed, trim and solid. Then they were driving through the great wrought-iron gates with their chevrons and swans intricately worked, along a gravel drive up to great oaken doors.
Their host in his big solid house at the end of a long drive, behind high walls and wrought-iron gates, awaited them on the steps. With his hand outstretched, wearing the dark business suit, the well-shaped smile so familiar from a thousand press photographs and television, with his head cocked to one side, sparse grey hair neatly combed, the round intelligent face with bright eyes that gave him the look of an intelligent gun dog, the characteristic quick shrewd glance from behind thick lashes, the quiet, formidable air of authority. It was very difficult for them to suppress their astonishment.
‘What? Himmelfarber, you!’ Blanchaille said.
Kipsel said, ‘It really is another bloody exodus. It’s a diaspora. If Himmelfarber the mine-owner has left, then it’s all finished. Everyone will leave. You won’t be able to move anywhere overseas for fleeing South Africans.’
‘But I haven’t left,’ said the mine-owner. ‘This is merely my summer place. I spend the African winter here.’
Blanchaille turned on his heel. ‘Have a happy holiday,’ he said.
‘I have a proposition,’ said Himmelfarber.
‘We’re not open to any proposals,’ Blanchaille said very firmly.
‘We may as well hear what he has to say,’ said Kipsel, ‘now that we’re here.’
‘Let’s talk inside,’ Himmelfarber led them through the house into an enormous lounge furnished in white leather with thick pink carpets on the floor, a large generous room looking through french windows onto the lawn and large circular lily pond. Himmelfarber stood at the bar at the far end and poured them drinks. A little fruit punch, he said, of his own making, light and refreshing.
On the walls of this room were blow-ups of black and white photographs of miners working below ground, drilling the rock face, or loading the ore, coming off shift. Happy pictures of a classroom full of new recruits learning Fanagalo. Other photographs, far more disturbing, showed men terribly mutilated, crushed and bleeding; they also saw corpses lying on sheets in what must have been a morgue, rows of them, they stared at the ceiling wide-eyed and with quite terrible, unfrightened detachment. Why should Himmelfarber keep these reminders about him?
Blanchaille considered the entrepreneur. Curtis Christian Himmelfarber was the brilliant son of a brilliant family. The family had been established by the remarkable Julius Himmelfarber, a penniless Latvian emigrant to the South African goldfields who had founded a great mining empire. Old Julius had been an intimate of Cecil Rhodes and Milner, a drinking companion of Barney Barnato, a sworn enemy of Kruger who had called him ‘Daardie Joodse smous’… that Jewish pedlar… Julius Himmelfarber had bought Blydag, his first mine and one of the premier producers of all time, for a little more than was now paid for one single ounce of its gold, and the foundation of a great financial empire had been laid.
Frank Harris, the noted Irish philanderer on a visit to South Africa shortly before the Boer War began, had been favourably impressed.
Harris had met Julius Himmelfarber and liked him well enough to leave a portrait of him: ‘… cultured, urbane, very pointed in conversation, a gentle Croesus, a philosopher miner, a flower of the Semitic type, markedly superior to your Anglo-Saxon sportsmen.’ But then Harris, of course, had held a long-standing prejudice against the Anglo-Saxon sportsman, for, as he told Cecil Rhodes in a bizarre meeting which took place on top of Table Mountain while Rhodes presumably gazed from this fairest Cape in all the world towards distant Cairo, it was perfectly understandable that God in his youth should have chosen the Jews for his special people, for they were after all an attractive, lovable race. But that later he should have changed his mind in favour of the English, as Rhodes contended, showed that he must be in his dotage.