Kruger's Alp

by Christopher Hope

  ‘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.’

  Of course Kuiker did not care. Augustus Carel Kuiker, Minister for Parallel Equilibriums, Ethnic Autonomy and Cultural Communication, cared only for success. Kuiker with the thick, ridged, almost stepped hairstyle, a rugged jaw and heavy, surprisingly sensuous lips. He looked like a rather thuggish Charles Laughton. Blanchaille recalled Kuiker’s speeches, how he tirelessly stomped the country reeling off figures. The total population was already over twenty-seven million, it could rise to thirty-eight million or more by the year 2000. The number of whites was dropping. Zero population growth might be all very well for the rest of the world but for the Europeans of the southern sub-continent it was suicide. The percentage, now about sixteen, would fall to eleven after the turn of the millennium. The Government, he announced, might have to introduce a programme. It would not shrink from introducing a programme. This programme might well involve penalising certain groups if they had too many children as well as offering sterilisation and abortion on demand. He felt sure that many black people would welcome abortion on demand, and even, he hinted with that famous frown wrinkling across his forehead, also by command. He was not afraid to speak plainly, if non-whites were not able to limit their own fertility, then the Government might have to step in to find a way to help them do it. This was not a threat but a promise. The Regime might also have to remind white women where their duty lay. Requests were not enough (this was a clear jibe at Bubé). Despite countless fertility crusades, tax incentives for larger families among whites, the ratio of black people to white people in the country was still five or six to one, and rising. The Government looked with new hope to the extraordinary advances in embryology and fertility drugs, much of which was due to the pioneering work of the brilliant young doctor, Wim Wonderluk. There were those who were clearly breeding for victory, who planned to bury the Boer. Well the Government would not stand by idly and see this happen. If offers of television sets and free operations did not work, then other measures must be taken. Soon rumours reached the capital that vasectomy platoons were stalking the countryside, that officials in Landrovers were rounding up herds of young black matrons and giving them the single shot, three-monthly contraceptive jabs. There were stories of secret radiation trucks known as scan vans, far superior to the old Nagasaki ambulances Bubé had sponsored, raiding the townships and tribal villages and the officials in these vans were armed with demographic studies and at the first sign of a birth bulge would visit those potential centres of population growth after dark and give them a burst of radiation, enough, the theory was, to impair fertility. A kind of human crop-spraying technique. People said it couldn’t be true until they remembered that anything you could think about could very easily be true. Kuiker was as forthright in his address to white women, ‘our breeders of the future’ he called them and he talked of introductory programmes of fertility drugs for all who wanted or needed them. Teams of researchers were working with selected females of child-bearing age on Government sponsored programmes to increase the white birth-rate without excluding the possibility, difficult though it might be, of obligatory implantation of fertilised ova in the selfish white wombs of women who had put golf and pleasure before their duty to the country. Pregnancy was good for the nation. He compared it with the military training which all young men had to undergo and pointed out that nine months’ service was not too much to ask of a woman. Gus Kuiker was clearly going places. He caught the public eye. He didn’t look to the past, he looked to the future
which could be won if allied to technology. ‘Breed or bleed’ had been his rallying cry and he asked the eminent embryologist, Professor Wim Wonderluk, to prepare a working document encompassing his plans for the new future. Yes, Blanchaille knew all about Kuiker. Knew more than enough to be going on with.

  ‘Why have you got me here? I was heading out under my own steam. It would have been easier, cleaner.’ Blanchaille stood up knowing the policeman was not ready to release him.

  ‘Two reasons. Mine and Lynch’s. I wanted to make you take another look at things you thought you knew all about. I don’t want to be left alone with my mysteries. You’re going out. Fine. So maybe you’ll be able to use some of what I show you to get some answers out there in the outside world. That’s my reason. Lynch’s was more practical. He knew you’d never get out without my help.’

  ‘Why not? How many have gone already?’

  Van Vuuren’s look was cold. ‘Not all those who disappeared have left the country. Getting out is not what it was. It has become a police matter. Things got difficult when Bubé and Kuiker issued instructions that disappearances were becoming too frequent and a close watch was to be kept on ports and airports.’

  ‘Then disappeared themselves.’

  ‘Yes, but the orders are still in force,’ Van Vuuren said.

  Blanchaille sat down again. ‘O.K. What else do you want to tell me?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Turn around,’ Van Vuuren ordered, ‘and watch the screen.’

  On a television monitor behind him there appeared a group of men sitting at a long table, six to a side, all wearing earphones.

  ‘A delegation from the Ring are meeting a delegation from an Italian secret society known as the Manus Virginis, the Hand of the Virgin. The Hand is some sort of expression of the Church Fiscal. This lot arrived in the country claiming to be a male voice choir and they all have names like Monteverdi and Gabrielli and Frescobaldi. The Hand appears very interested in investment. Each chapter or cell of the Hand is called a Finger and takes a different part of the world for its investment which is done through their own bank called the Banco Angelicus. On the other side of the table is the finance committee of the Ring. They read from left to right: Brother Hyslop – Chairman; Brother van Straaten – he’s their political commissar; Brother Wilhelm – Treasurer; Brother Maisels – transport arrangements. Don’t laugh. Getting here in style and doing it in secret is very important to them. Brother Snyman – catering and hospitality. Since the Brothers regard themselves as hosts they put themselves out for these meetings, they bring along wine, a good pâté, a selection of cheeses. Headphones are for simultaneous translation.’

  ‘But why are you monitoring the Ring? All the major figures in the Regime are members of the Ring, so why get you to spy on it?’

  ‘Because though all members of the Government are in the Ring, not all members of the Ring are in the Government.’

  Blanchaille looked at the heavy men on both sides of the table with their earphones clamped around their heads like Alice-bands which had slipped, and thought how alike they looked with their big gold signet rings, hairy knuckles, gold tie-pins, three-piece suits, their burly assurance. Here were devoted Calvinist Afrikaners who spat on Catholics as a form of morning prayers, sitting down with a bunch of not only Catholics, but Roman wops! To talk about – what?

  ‘Money,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘Highly technical chat about investments, exchange controls, off-shore banks, letters of credit, brokers, money moving backwards and forwards. But how are such meetings arranged and, more importantly, why?’

  ‘Ferreira would have understood,’ said Blanchaille. ‘But I don’t. What is the connection?’

  ‘I think,’ said Van Vuuren, ‘that the connection isn’t as odd as it seems. The philosophical ideas behind the Ring are not too dissimilar to those practised by Pope Pius X. He fired off salvos at the way we live. He attacked the ideas about humans improving themselves. He pissed on perfectability. He lambasted modern science and slack-kneed liberal ideas. So does the Ring. They have more in common than we think. Perhaps we do too.’

  Blanchaille stared at the men on the screen. ‘I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.’

  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 mul
ti-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.’