Now I saw in my dream that a pretty Indian arrived and took her place at the bar. She wore an apricot silk sari. Petite and teetotal, she drank only orange juice and announced herself to be a Moslem and a Marxist. Her name was Fatima. She spoke so softly Blanchaille had to strain to hear the words. Soon he wished he hadn’t.
‘I hope to replace the present Regime with a people’s democracy,’ Fatima said mildly. ‘And as a result of my beliefs I was placed in preventive detention. My interrogators, who were all men, at first found themselves unwilling to inflict pain. That is to say, they didn’t like to beat me since it flew in the face of beliefs deeply instilled into them that large men do not go around hitting women, and perhaps because of the fact that I am particularly small boned, they were actually unable to raise their fists to me. However, after a certain time they stripped me, secured my hands and legs, and attempted to torture me by introducing various objects – pen tops, broom handles and finally fingers – into my vagina and anus. The reasons why they did this were complicated. I presume that since they weren’t attempting to extract any information from me, they must be trying to humiliate me, I being a slender girl and they being large and muscular white men and I suspect that they had read that Asian girls were naturally reticent and modest. But I wasn’t prepared to allow myself to be humiliated and this put them in a difficult position. I also pointed out to the men assaulting me that without exception they had large erections which were quite discernible beneath their blue serge trousers. Perhaps for this reason I was returned to my cell and later discharged. It seemed to me that sexual excitement had begun to replace serious political discussion. This was some time ago. By now these interrogators have probably done away with prisoners and replaced them with perverse solitary sexual acts. Not only did the revolution I envisaged seem impossible, but it had become impossible to even pose the question or the threat. I came here where at least I can help people to leave this world behind them.’
Blanchaille did not enjoy hearing his course of action so described but did not feel it was time to say so. Instead he babbled inanely to his hostesses of their extraordinary lives.
Freia shrugged. ‘Characteristic.’
Blanchaille persisted. ‘No, no. Wild – and awful.’
‘That’s their characteristic,’ said Happy.
‘If you wish to hear an extraordinary story we’ll call Babybel,’ said Fatima.
Babybel was by far the most beautiful of the four girls. Hair rich and auburn, the tiny lobes of her ears so delicate they were almost translucent; she wore a pale blue towelling robe which set off quite beautifully the soft, smooth milkiness of her skin. She’d been swimming, or at least relaxing by the pool, she said, until the sun became too much for her. With her fair skin she couldn’t take too much sun and, besides, the noise of the President’s demented guard firing away had driven her inside. She ordered champagne. ‘She always drinks champagne,’ said Freia.
‘Nothing but the best for Babybel,’ said Fatima.
‘Tell Blanchaille your story,’ said Happy.
‘Despite appearances to the contrary, I am coloured. You may not believe this but you would see it immediately if you were to meet my brother, Calvin. When we were small we were at school together until one day they came and looked at Calvin. Inspected his brown skin and curly hair and said – Calvin must go! Go to the school up the road, a school for coloured children, for Capey children. I cried, I clung to him. Calvin did nothing. He went. But he whispered to me before he went, “My time will come.” As I grew older and people noticed my looks Calvin evolved his plan, built it out of his very pure and uncompromising hatred for what had been done to him. “You will be my white poodle, Babybel,” he said to me, “I will manicure, powder, preen you and I shall take you for walks through the suburbs where rich men will stop to stroke you and then, on an order from me, you will sink your teeth into their hands.” It began when I left school and under Calvin’s direction I made myself available to certain men, powerful in the Government. “You are jailbait, pure jailbait, my little Babybel,” Calvin said to me. As I lay with these big meneers in bed, Calvin would reveal the truth. At first, in his boyish enthusiasm, he might hide in the cupboard and jump out shouting – “I am the fruit of your union. I am the child you are making!” But as time went on he grew more subtle, he worked with letters, photographs, video tapes and he drove these powerful men, my lovers, to distraction, to suicide, to ruin. I was quite happy with my role as the flesh with which he baited his hook for I believed in the incorruptible anger, let me say the immaculate hatred, buried in Calvin’s heart, I considered it as something commendable, noble even. Alas, Calvin became too subtle. “Equipment costs,” he told me. He went to the banks. Worse, he went to the Bureau. He was funded by those who ruined his life. What begins as pure revenge ends as investment, in our country. Calvin began to rule. He had become one of the big meneers.’
The ladies around the bar were in complete agreement and called on Visser for fresh drinks and even Fatima gave a bleak little smile as if only Babybel’s story approached her own in revealing the cruel and rich lunacy of everyday life among ordinary people in the days of the Total Onslaught.
‘And so I came to the Palace, to this home for homeless girls.’ Here she fluttered her delightful eyelashes at Blanchaille who understood what a potent lure she must have been to the big Government men she seduced.
‘But explain one thing to me,’ Blanchaille begged. ‘Who brought you here?’
‘We’ll explain that, and a whole lot more to you in your all too brief stay with us,’ Fatima said. ‘But that question is to be explored with delicacy, so let’s say that to a certain friend we were virgins pretending to be whores. It is he we have to thank for revealing this to Freia, Happy, Babybel and me. He sent us here, where we would be useful to those on their way out.’
‘But that’s enough of us,’ said Babybel. ‘tell us your story now.’
And Blanchaille told them how he had left his parish of Merrievale and passed through the township which was called peaceful. He told them of his call on Blashford and Gabriel and of his time with Van Vuuren in Balthazar Buildings, and of the meetings between the strange Italians and the members of the Ring. He told them of his visit to the holding cells and of seeing the man Strydom; of his sorrow and bewilderment at meeting his friend Zandrotti, now paralysed by some terrible knowledge obtained from Ferreira in London. Ferreira! who knew nothing but figures; of poor Vilakaze, condemned to make the same old speech to an audience who had long ago deserted him.
And they marvelled at his tale – except for Happy, that is, who laughed a trifle harshly.
And this talk went on far into the night and of those details I can recall there was in particular the explanation of the secret Italian organisation Blanchaille had seen at work in Balthazar Buildings.
The Manus Virginis had been founded in Portugal in 1924 by a reprobate Lisbon cleric, a dissolute, lustful man, who’d more or less abandoned all his priestly duties, stolen the gold and silver from his church, and taken to pursuing women. His name was Juan Porres and he lived as if he believed, he once flagrantly said, that ‘salvation lies in the laps of women’. Then one night as he lay sleeping beside his latest mistress, a short hairy creature of stupefying ugliness named Puta (or Petra) who was said later to be related distantly to the dictator Salazar, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and demanded that he mend his ways. She declared that from that moment on he would no longer be Porres the defiler of women, but the protector of their honour, and in particular the honour of the Virgin Mother. She advised him to invest his ill-gotten money in the Portuguese Marconi Company and devote the profits to the ‘honour of the mother’. The Virgin afforded him several visions, in one of which she appeared with her hand extended over the globe of the world with her fingers resting on what Juan called in his memoirs ‘troubled and vexed spots’. The next morning he put aside his ugly mistress and went into the street where he met a banker whom he converted to
his cause. From this small beginning Juan Porres formed his association of militant groups of priests and laymen divided into sections, which spread with amazing rapidity throughout the world. Their aim was personal sanctity combined with financial integrity. From the late twenties these ‘fingers’, as they came to be called, grew from a mere dozen to sixty or seventy and their influence could now be felt all around the world. The ‘honour of the mother’ was later to be interpreted as referring not merely to the sanctity of women, but to the general safety of Holy Mother Church. Membership to the Manus Virginis was open to anyone, men, women, priests and laymen, but membership was strictly secret and the organisation had considerable autonomy within the Church, its controlling bishop had his headquarters in Rome and reported directly to the Pope. The organisation had changed little over the years. Members still practised various forms of mortification of the flesh. They used the hair shirt, the whip and the bracelet, a steel chain placed around the leg or upper arm and tightened daily. The Manus Virginis continued to have interests in certain aspects of the welfare of women, in particular the preparation of anti-abortion literature, homes for unmarried mothers, and in marriage guidance counselling, but the emphasis over the past thirty years had really been in the field of finance. The Manus was to money what the Jesuits had been to education, the fiscal troops, the militant accountants, the sanctified economists. The Manus Virginis claimed to have reconciled the age-old contradiction between money and religion, God and Mammon. They invested quite simply for God and the greater honour of the Church. Strategic charity it was sometimes called, or tactical philanthropy. God repaid their investment with high returns and ‘the divine portfolio’, as the investment plan was known, had made the Hand grow extremely rich. The appeal of the Hand was that it allowed ordinary men and women everywhere to lead secret lives of heroic self-sacrifice and obedience, and to experience the effects of grace with which God rewarded his followers in a form which they could recognise, called ‘divine funding’, namely cash. The beautiful simplicity of the doctrine had made the attraction of the Hand extremely potent. The tactical charitable investment of the organisation was seen by its members as a form of holy warfare which was directed from its secret headquarters in Rome. Of course there were links with other secret societies, with various Masonic Lodges in Italy, with the Mafia and with other sympathetic organisations. It was an interesting fact to be noted, said Happy, that while secret societies turned inwards and away from the general public their mutual interest in power often enabled them to overcome the animosity they might feel for other clandestine groups. The Hand of the Virgin had its own bank, the Banco Angelicus, from which its investment policy was co-ordinated throughout the world. The Bank provided a useful receptacle for funds which did not seek public attention. It was said to play banker to various secret organisations including the South African Ring, and even, it was said, to the Vatican itself. It was a policy of the Hand of the Virgin that tactical investments should be made in regimes broadly sympathetic to the beliefs of western Christian civilisation. Funds were often used to stabilise regimes, and even large companies which, in the opinion of the Manus Virginis, deserved divine support. Where the funds for investment came from was no longer important once the money had passed into the bank, for in the Banco Angelicus there was no such thing as tainted money. All was for the greater glory of God. The Banco Angelicus manipulated its extensive investments through a series of offshore companies in Panama and Bermuda, and had especially close links with many South American dictatorships and was increasingly involved in Third World countries where growing Catholic communities were established.
‘Naturally the Church claims to know nothing of the activities of the Manus, much as our Regime claims to be unconnected with the Ring. But how else would Church and Regime talk except through such organisations?’ Fatima enquired, with eyes modestly lowered.
‘There are other conversations which go on in Balthazar Buildings,’ said Happy. ‘It’s probably just as well you didn’t witness in any of them. There are, for instance, the talks between the Regime and Agnelli, the Papal Nuncio.’
Blanchaille nodded dully. Of course . . . why not? First they spoke through proxies. Those were the talks he’d witnessed between the Italians and the rough guys from the Ring. No doubt talks followed between the principals involved. He realised the girls had not offered him a drink. Now he knew why. They were plying him with information more potent than any booze. He felt as high as a kite.
‘Of course, you see the Church has a great deal to teach the Regime about change. The Regime is now in the position not unlike that of the Church some years ago. Both are preaching to a shrinking audience, changes are to be made if that audience is to be kept. Some of the old slogans must be abandoned, slogans like “death before adaption”, “separation is liberation”, “tribalism is the future!”. These had to be revalued, reassessed, reappraised and reviewed. Just as the Church’s ringing affirmation of its mission to the townships and its irresistible embrace of its black brethren was not unrelated to a good hard look at the market. The Regime realised that if it was going to survive it was going to have to start allowing black people into white parks and removing discriminatory signs and stress the positive side of ethnic identity and equal freedoms. Those in power liked to present this as conscious choice, as liberalisation, but in fact it’s a form of desperate accountancy.’
Blanchaille nodded. ‘I do remember now how it was some years ago when you could go to a Catholic church and study in a Catholic school, recover in a Catholic hospital and never hear a single query raised about whether Jesus lived in the big house or in the servants’ quarters, and to blurt out the question was to be threatened with divine punishment and beaten with a strap loaded with halfpennies and cast into the outer darkness. Then suddenly one day you found a whole lot of people were shouting at you for not applauding the Church’s eternal commitment to the liberation of Africa, and you were so deafened that it took a while to realise that you were being shouted at by the very people who beat you in the first place.’
‘That’s right,’ Happy said. ‘It’s the figures again, you see. In the middle of this century the number of Catholics in the white West, in Europe and North America was over half the world total, but before much longer European Catholics will be a minority – the majority will be found in places like Asia and Africa. Not surprisingly, certain conclusions have been drawn . . .’
And so that night passed with talking and stories, rather too much drink and too little sleep, and the next day as well. Conversation and information was exchanged between the fleeing ex-priest and the kind hostesses of the secret travellers’ rest known to lost souls as the Airport Palace Hotel, and their mentor, the man they referred to affectionately as their ‘Commanding Officer’, the elderly barman, Colonel Visser, who had founded with such great hopes the Brigades of Light.
Fatima spoke to him of recent travellers who had stopped at the Palace Hotel en route for some long-desired home in the faraway mountains, and mentioned startling names such as Ezra Savage the novelist, Claude Peterkin the radio producer, and Gus Kuiker and the Secretary of the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel. Blanchaille had great difficulty in believing it, not knowing where truth ended and wishful thinking began.
He asked them how they had come to the Airport Palace Hotel and each described an encounter with the mysterious stranger who revealed to them that they were virgins pretending to be whores; this stranger had various names, Jack, or Fergus, or simply ‘our friend’. Well before he heard that he spoke with an Irish accent Blanchaille knew who their saviour had been. Even before they had shown him in their little ‘museum of mementoes’ (in reality the ladies’ cloakroom) an old black beret which he instantly recognized as the one Lynch had worn to the airbase. The implications only struck him later.
He was also given directions to his final destination. Geneva was the starting point and then old Kruger’s house by the lakeside in Clarens, near Montreux. But
this, it was stressed, was only the beginning. From the official Kruger house he must climb to ‘the place itself.’ Happy showed him grainy black and white photographs of what she called ‘the place itself’ and bad though the shots were, he recognised the wild turrets of mad King Ludwig’s castle Hohenschwanstein, but said nothing, being loath to injure such simple, shining faith in the former Government negotiator. Having examined, in one of Lynch’s living history classes, both Paul Kruger’s official former residences and found them no more than a large bungalow and a simple farm respectively, it was impossible to credit that the old President’s tastes would have run to anything so fanciful. ‘Paul Kruger belonged to the Dopper sect of especially puritanical Calvinists, we can expect his last refuge to reflect his didactic, moralising spirit,’ Father Lynch had explained. ‘It is comical to reflect how his enemies might have played on this in the Boer War; consider – the British might have brought the war to an early end if they could have convinced the old man that the sight of white men shooting each other gave unalloyed pleasure to the natives . . .’
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