Kruger's Alp (12 page)

Lynch made them walk the distance between Waterval Onder and Waterval Boven which, although only some eight kilometres in distance, was virtually straight uphill and Lynch pointed out to them the one and only stretch of railway still to be seen there, built by the South African Railway Company in 1883. He took them to the tunnel cut through the rock beside the pretty Elands River Falls to help reduce the gradient and he pointed out the old stone bridge with its graceful arches along which the trains had trundled as they crossed the aptly named Get-Lost-Hill stream. How much had been lost crossing that stream! The presidential train had strained up the steep gradient of one in twenty, crossed the border and steamed into the port of Lourenço Marques where the Dutch cruiser, the
Gelderland,
lay riding at anchor in the blue swell of the Indian Ocean. And the gold went with him on 21 October 1900.

In bullion or minted coins, in gold dust or in bars? And in what guise? And how much? Father Lynch stood on the quayside in Lourenço Marques and stroked his fake beard, and wondered aloud. His boys in their slouch hats and their crossed bandoliers sweated beside him in the moth-eaten uniforms, the stage property of some defunct theatrical company which Lynch had raided for these old khaki cast-offs,
velskoens
and reproduction muzzle loaders. And did the millions really go at all? Or was it another story? They wanted to ask but dared not. Lynch stood there comfortably enough in top hat and fake beard but his boys were deeply embarrassed by the looks they were given by the black Portuguese who giggled behind their hands and pointed.

‘Jesus, what a bunch of tits we must look!' he remembered Ferreira fumed.

Blanchaille answered Van Vuuren, ‘How long? Not since we were living history.'

‘Living history! We were dying of embarrassment,' Van Vuuren said. ‘He claimed he was trying to make us understand the roles we
played.'

Blanchaille remembered how they had shuffled and glowered and banged their rifle butts on the ground. ‘I never felt a bit like a Boer.'

‘Lynch never cared about our feelings. He made us pretend because he knew that's what we did best. Lynch wanted us to understand that our lives were all play-acting. There was nothing real about them. He wanted us to see that all we lived for was to pretend to be what we weren't. Your role, Blanchie, has always reminded me of St Paul. You remember the trouble with St Paul, don't you? He spent all those years persecuting Christians for being Christian and then he got converted and spent the rest of his life persecuting them for not being Christian enough. And for that he was canonised by his grateful victims. God's policeman, old Paul was. And you're another. Why do you think Lynch always insisted that you'd gone to police college and refused to accept that you were in the Seminary? The dogmatic, policeman-like qualities in you, were what he saw. Look at your life! You went into the camps and you gave the Regime hell for treating people like garbage. You attacked the Church, your own church, at every turn for failing in its responsibility. Then you took to touring the country like a wandering madman demanding that the camps be bulldozed. Then you were given a church and you stood up in the pulpit and addressed your parishioners like the investigating officer. You stood up there to unmask the villain, like the tiny Flemish tax inspector or the seemingly genial ex-nun in the detective yarn unmasking the totally unsuspected killer. You expected them to stand up and confess. Instead, like Makapan, they lost their tempers and besieged your house. Well, what did you expect? You've lived the investigating life, you've taken the high moral ground, you've gone after the culprits, the criminals. Your vocation is to bring the guilty ones to book, you're the holy detective, the righteous sleuth. And where's it got you? Nowhere. It's done nothing for you – except to ruin you. You've taken the drugs this country offers – moral outrage, angry condemnation – and they've wrecked you. You're on your last legs and you're going down, you're going out.'

‘And you? I suppose you know better,' Blanchaille said angrily.

‘I joined the police because I believed I would find out what was really going on. You know what it's like. Under the Regime everything important is called a police matter, history is a police matter. All presidents as far back as Babbelas and Breker have also held the portfolio of Minister of Police. You know the argument –
the State is an instrument of God. Its security is a matter of divine concern. The police are the mediators between the Almighty and the citizen. I believed it. We all believed it.'

‘Of course.'

‘But Blanchie, what if it isn't true?'

‘You mean it isn't true?'

‘Not entirely. That's the thing. Nothing is entirely true. Or entirely anything. I began to learn that as a rookie cop when they put me on surveillance in a department called “foreign friends”. Now that alone was an eye-opener. I thought we didn't have any foreign friends. Or need them. Or want them. We were the Albania of the South. Our foreign policy was to tell everyone to go and get stuffed. But that's wrong! We've got loads of foreign friends. That's why President Bubé went on his whirlwind foreign tour. He wasn't foisting himself on his hosts in the capitals of Europe. He was returning calls! We do have foreign friends. Lots. And I was detailed to watch over them. Once they came singly: businessmen, politicians – here to collect their bribes to arrange shipments of materials we needed like planes or football teams. But soon we had so many foreign friends they took block bookings and came on chartered flights calling themselves the Patagonian Hockey Team and were taken away in buses with darkened windows. I got assigned to one of these teams. The papers usually got the story after the new arrivals had been spirited away and ran headlines like: V
ICTORY FOR GOVERNMENT SPORTS POLICY: PATAGONIANS TO TOUR
! This led to world-wide protests and the Patagonians would flatly deny that any of their teams was playing in South Africa. By then the ‘team' had disappeared. I looked after a team who wore baseball caps the wrong way round, with the peaks down their necks. Or yarmulkas. And they'd get drunk with the township girls and cause us a lot of trouble. They worked in a camp in the mountains outside the capital. It turned out that the language they were speaking was Hebrew and they were scientists of some sort. I went to my superiors and said, “Look there's a colony of Jewish scientists working in the mountains.” “Nonsense,” my superiors said. “They're not Jews, they're Israelis. And this conversation did not take place.” I was sent to another camp about five miles away. This one was a very different kettle of fish. It was full of Chinese. Now wasn't that strange? I mean we don't even have Chinese laundries and here is a colony of Chinese working in a strange factory. I went to my supervisors. “Look here,” I said, “what are all these Chinese doing? I thought we didn't like Chinese. I thought the
Regime had taken a vow of No More Coolies! Ever since their bad experience with the indentured labourers on the gold mines early this century.” “There are no Chinese,” said my superiors, “only Taiwanese and this conversation did not take place.” Then I was taken off people and put on to things. I was posted to security on the atomic research station out there in the mountains. I missed the voluble scientists and the quiet, hardworking technicians but you go where you're sent. The atomic research station was getting large shipments of equipment. I happened to see the inventories. They took delivery of something called the Cyber 750-170 which is an interesting computer. Because its main strength is multi-channel analysis, it's used for sorting through the hundreds of cables collecting data from a test-blast site. Other shipments to the research centre included vibration equipment and ballistic re-entry vehicles. Oh, I almost forgot, there were supplies of some gas too, Helium 3 it was. I thought about this. You put together the scientists, the technicians and the equipment and you come up with something that explodes.'

Blanchaille began to understand. He knew the rumours, the unmentionable stories.

Van Vuuren's blue eyes widened. ‘Go on, Blanchie, take a guess.'

‘A bomb! The bastards are building a bomb. Now the question is – are we working on a large dirty weapons system, or small, relatively clean devices? Neutron bombs, say? Or field launching systems. Yes, tactical battlefield weapons. Or both? That would give flexibility. Large bombs against hostile forces on our borders, or on the capital of an enemy, or on the capitals of states supporting that enemy. Then the smaller, cleaner, weapons for specific jobs, say the 155 millimeter cannon, capable of lobbing nuclear shells. But what's the gas for? This Helium 3?'

‘It's used to make Tritium. That's a form of hydrogen used in thermo-nuclear weapons.'

‘What a lot you know about this sort of thing,' Blanchaille said.

‘I remember hearing about it first years ago from Kipsel, Silberstein and Zandrotti and the others in their bomb-making days. No, I did not interrogate them, that affair was before my appointment to Interrogation, or Twenty Questions, as they call it here. But I read the report of Kipsel's confessions. Even though all they were planning to demolish were a few pylons, Kipsel was never one to do anything by halves. He got Silberstein to swot up on everything from fireworks to weapons in the megaton range.'

Blanchaille nodded. ‘Lawyers read.'

Van Vuuren looked cagey. ‘They were young. They confused yearning with faith. They really believed the revolution had started. Zandrotti was convinced.' Again the odd look, almost embarrassment. ‘Poor old Zandrotti.'

‘We were all young and we all believed. What else could we do?'

‘Sure, sure.' Van Vuuren regarded him steadily. ‘From what I've told you, then, you conclude that we're building a bomb, or rather the Taiwanese are building us a bomb designed by the Israelis who are selling it to us wholesale?'

‘Seems like it.'

‘You know of course that the Regime deny that we possess any nuclear weapons – and when mysterious explosions occurred in the southern hemisphere the Regime rejected American claims that we were testing nuclear weapons. They said it was atmospheric disturbance, or the American instruments were faulty. Then they said a meteorite landed in the Namib Desert. So what do we surmise from that?'

‘That they were lying.'

Van Vuuren's blue eyes widened still further. ‘Certainly not. We agree that there was no explosion. From there we go on to state categorically that we have no nuclear weapons.'

Now it was Blanchaille's turn to stare. ‘But you said –'

‘No. I didn't.'

‘But I heard you.'

‘You couldn't have done. This conversation never took place.' Van Vuuren took a photograph from a desk drawer and fanned himself with it absently. ‘What is the official policy towards the Russians, Blanchie?'

‘The Russians are our enemies. They are after our gold, our diamonds, our minerals, our strategic positions, our sea-lanes. We do not talk to the Russians, have never talked to them, will never talk to them.'

‘Excellent answer. Now have a look at this.' Van Vuuren handed him a small black and white photograph, rather grainy and blurred, as if taken from a distance. In the foreground two men were walking together, behind them a busy street with trams. ‘Paradeplatz in Zurich where the banks sell gold like hot rolls in a baker's window. Do you recognise the men?'

Blanchaille studied the grainy photograph. The two men were deep in conversation. The older man wore a black Homburg. The other looked younger, was bare-headed, fair-haired.

‘Never seen either before.'

‘The man on the left in the hat is a Russian. The official, accredited roving representative of the Bank of Foreign Trade in Moscow, on secondment to the Wozchod Handelsbank in Zurich. The other man is Bennie Craddock, an executive of Consolidated Holdings and the nephew of its Chairman, Curtis Christian Himmelfarber. Here is another photograph of Craddock, this time in Moscow. Notice anything?'

The photograph showed Craddock standing in a snowy Red Square surrounded by what appeared to be curious bystanders.

‘Yes,' said Blanchaille, ‘he seems to be crying.'

‘Odd, isn't it? Why go all the way to Moscow for a cry? It's as odd as the spy Popov's behaviour when he was arrested outside this very building. He was reported to be very, very angry. It puzzled me. That he was upset I can understand, even anguished, but
angry?
No, I can't make sense of that. And I can't clear up the mystery by asking anyone. What strikes me about this investigation is that there are more and more mysteries and fewer and fewer people to question. I've had the urge, increasingly hard to resist, to call off the whole damn investigation and start praying. It starts with Ferreira. Somebody has been telling stories about Ferreira. He dies. Shares fall on the Exchange. People disappear leaving behind only the stories we go on telling about them. Craddock has not been seen since the photograph was taken. And his uncle, Himmelfarber, is abroad. So many people are overseas. Have you noticed? Minister Gus Kuiker and his Secretary of Communications are out of the country. The President is said to be travelling overseas for medical treatment. Even you will soon be gone.'

‘You could ask Popov yourself, you've got him here. “Why the rage Nikita?” you could say.'

‘I heard why – from Himmelfarber. Popov's gone. He was spirited away by the Bureau and now he, like it, may or may not exist. You see how isolated I am, Blanchie? Even those who assigned me to investigate the murder of Tony Ferreira have gone. I had no shortage of instructions. First to put me on the case was the President himself. It's his prerogative when he wears his other hat as Minister of Police so I went to it with a will. President Bubé implied that Minister Kuiker might have had some involvement. As I knew that Gus Kuiker is a rising star in the Regime, tipped to succeed Bubé one day, or even replace him, I put this down to professional jealousy. After all Kuiker took over Bubé's baby platform. The President went around the country encouraging white women
voters to breed; but Kuiker took positive steps to reduce the opposition birth-rate and he used science. He made it his aim to reduce the non-white breeding potential by one half and he got the boffins involved. All Bubé did was to encourage white women to have more babies. Whereas Kuiker hit the enemy where he lived – in the womb. He got the reputation of a modern whizz-kid. Bubé never forgave him. But Kuiker didn't care.'