Kruger's Alp Read Free

eavesdroppers bugging the call handled their appliances in the customarily inept way. So many telephones, so many listeners needed. It was rumoured they took on students wishing to earn cash in their vacations. An unpleasant hum increasing in pitch and volume covered their piping exchanges. Ferreira’s voice shrilled tinnily through the growing fog of interference. He was probably yelling his head off. ‘I’ve had a revelation, Blanchie! I’ve found it – I’ve found the City of God!’
    â€˜Of what?’ Blanchaille shrieked.
    It was hopeless, the humming noise made the ear quiver. He knew then that the line had not merely been tapped, their conversation had been jammed.
    The money came. There were hundreds, thousands perhaps. He hadn’t counted it, wrapped in plastic film, crisp notes held tight with rubber bands. He hid it in a great tub of ice-cream in the freezer, scooping out the middle and sealing it with a plug of the peppermint chip and pistachio. It was the only food left in the house since Joyce had left, not counting the beans.

    Now Ferreira was dead. The item itself in the paper was small, it might have been lost amongst the lists of divorces and the spreading columns of troop casualties on the Borders. The news of the Ferreira killing might not have been much but the stories surrounding it made clear the interest that it aroused. The young Secretary of the new Department of Communications, or Depcom, dynamic Miss Trudy Yssel, put out a statement deploring speculation about price falls on the Exchange and pointing out that the press must take a more responsible attitude and that this wasn’t, after all, the Bubbles Schroeder murder case. This last a reference to one of the most celebrated murders in the country in which a pretty young whore named Bubbles Schroeder, who had slept with a number of people of note, was found lying in a grove of trees one morning witha lump of limestone thrust into her mouth. And Yssel’s boss, Minister for Parallel Equilibriums and Ethnic Autonomy, the formidable Augustus ‘Gus’ Kuiker who held, besides, the important portfolio of Cultural Communications, the Government’s propaganda arm, took the opportunity to warn the press once again that the Government’s patience was not limitless, that freedom was a privilege to be earned, not a licence for personal or political rumour-mongering. A further story reported the deaths of three brokers, Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum, and quoted the Chairman of the Exchange, Dov Solomon, as saying that an investigation had shown that these unfortunate accidents had no connection with one another, or with any other event. Blanchaille paid no attention to these attendant stories. It is probable that he detected no connection – but I saw in my dream that he would remember them later, when his investigative talents flowered as of course Father Lynch had prophesied they would.

    Ah, the prophecies of Father Lynch! What is one to make of them?
    Father Lynch had prophesied that Tony Ferreira was a natural visionary. Consequently he received the news of his interest in accountancy with what seemed like astonishing composure. He had taken to figures, he told Blanchaille once, because it kept his mind off his bruises. Now that was fair enough. Ferreira had been beaten since he was a baby. Indeed one of Blanchaille’s earliest memories was seeing Ferreira arrive to serve early morning Mass with two eyes so swollen, so bruised, he could hardly see where he walked and had to take Blanchaille’s arm as they made their way from the sacristy into the church, along the altar rail, through the gate and up the five grey marble steps leading to the altar. He could remember counting, ‘here’s one, now two coming up, here is three . . .’ then they crossed the flat grey granite expanse and knelt together on the top altar step where Ferreira remained for the rest of the Mass too