Most of the commuters had already got to work when McQuade arrived in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia the next morning. There were the long, high, brown walls extending down the long lush tree-lined avenue, surrounding the home of Hendrik Pieter Strauss.
He stopped the Landrover outside the big wooden doors, picked up his file, opened it, pulled the photograph of Heinrich Muller out of the envelope, and studied it one more time. He thrust it back into the envelope and got out.
He walked to the big doors, and rang the bell.
A grille was opened by a black man in uniform. McQuade spoke in Afrikaans. ‘Good morning. Police. Is Mr Strauss home, please?’
The black man said, ‘Please wait one minute.’ He disappeared. McQuade heard the guard speaking on a telephone. He reappeared and opened the gate.
McQuade walked through, into a magnificent garden of sweeping lawns, flowerbeds, trees. The drive swept up to a big, double-storied house, with colonnades and a wide portico. A Mercedes sedan was parked under it. McQuade ran his eyes over the house, trying to remember details. Beyond the house were more gardens, a row of garages. No dogs were to be seen. They came to the portico. Wide marble steps led up to the imposing front door. The guard rang the bell.
The door was opened by an elderly black maid, who showed him into a drawing room. ‘The master is coming.’
The black guard had disappeared. Suddenly McQuade’s nervousness was gone: this was just a practice run. An elderly man came bustling into the room with a big smile, and McQuade knew he had drawn a blank. He was tall and aristocratic, which Heinrich Muller could never be. ‘Good morning!’ Mr Strauss exclaimed.
‘Good morning, sir,’ McQuade said respectfully in an Afrikaans accent, ‘sorry to trouble you, but I’m Sergeant van Niekerk of the Car-Theft Division.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Mr Strauss said earnestly.
‘Sir, you may have heard about this recent spate of car-thefts we’re having?’ McQuade said. ‘Anyway, our investigations have resulted in us getting hold of some documents drawn up by the thieves – a list of addresses where they intended to steal cars. Your address was on their list, so we want to warn you.’
‘I see,’ Mr Strauss said. ‘Thank you.’
McQuade opened the folder. ‘Now, I see you’ve got a Mercedes out there. What’s its number, year, model, please.’
Mr Strauss told him. ‘And I also have a BMW.’ He gave him those details.
McQuade noted them down. ‘Well, both those cars are just the sort they steal, sir. They file off the engine serial number, respray it, and ship them off to Australia and New Zealand.’
‘The swines,’ Mr Strauss said in wonder.
‘Have both your cars got immobilizer systems, sir? And alarms?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, now, do any of these faces mean anything to you, sir?’ McQuade pulled out the sheet of paper holding the mugshots of the men Sarah had photographed at random.
Five minutes later he walked back down the drive. He had drawn his first blank, but he was almost walking on air. He had done it! The impersonation had gone off perfectly! Mr Strauss had suspected nothing!
He got back into the Landrover, and roared off. He drove for two blocks, then pulled over to the verge.
He held his face for a moment, then fumbled his two lists out of the file and opened his street map.
He had to force himself to concentrate. The next Mr Strauss was number eleven on his list, but he lived only a few miles away.
The next three weeks were exhausting, and not because of the five-kilometre run that began and ended each day – that got easier and easier – but from the tension that built up before each knock he made on a door, which subsided into overwhelming relief as he walked back out, unsuccessful in identifying Heinrich Muller but intensely relieved at another successful impersonation of Sergeant van Niekerk. It also taught him something about human nature: everybody treats a policeman with great politeness because most people, although usually law-abiding, are disturbed at the sight of the uniform in their homes and almost gushy when they find out they are not in trouble. This gave him a great psychological advantage. Not once did he encounter the imperiousness for which Sarah had tried to prepare him, not once was he asked for further identification. In most cases he was immediately offered refreshment – one Mrs Strauss insisted he take away a fruit cake she had just baked, another Mrs Strauss asked him to lecture her housemaid on the serious view the law took of stealing sugar, while one Mr Strauss asked for legal advice on his impending divorce action. In each case McQuade was given earnest cooperation, and in four cases a Mr or Mrs Strauss solemnly identified one or more of the photographs as being of men they had seen behaving in a suspicious manner. In no case was Mr Strauss too busy to see him and only in three cases was he out. The return visits worried the hell out of McQuade lest Mr Strauss had in the meantime contacted his local police station in his desire to be cooperative: but this never happened. The houses these people lived in varied greatly; some were opulent, most were middle class in respectable suburbs, two were smallholdings and two were so unpretentious that McQuade was sure before he set eyes on Mr Strauss that he could be dismissed. Most houses had burglar bars, and some had impressively aggressive dogs; but those that had no burglar-alarm warning-signs were unlikely to be occupied by Heinrich Muller. All these people spoke in both English and Afrikaans but only in two cases could McQuade detect a German accent and he could cross both off his list because one was squint in one eye and the other was too tall. He paid particular attention to teeth, for although patently false teeth would not be unusual, the owners of patently natural teeth could be dismissed: this was the case twice.
At the end of three weeks McQuade still considered he had reason to congratulate himself: his system was working. He could get into people’s presence easily: he was daily more confident and although he had failed to identify Heinrich Muller he had eliminated sixteen of the suspects who lived in the environs of Johannesburg and Pretoria. The remaining two were both away.
And he was not so worried about 435 any more – that pressure was off him. It was the first news he looked for in the press every day: and it seemed clear that the Cubans were trying to play Clever Buggers, stall negotiations over the timetable of their troop withdrawal to give them time to wipe out UNITA. McQuade doubted they had any intention of leaving Angola at all, despite what Johan Lombard had said. SWAPO proclaimed that it was ‘laughable’ for South Africa to try to shift responsibility for Namibia’s future onto Angola and Cuba. And so on. There were going to be more talks in Geneva and Chester Crocker, the United States Deputy Secretary of State for Africa, seemed to be running round like a dog on a tennis court, desperately trying to keep South Africa’s peace-initiative alive, to persuade Russia to put pressure on Cuba to withdraw, trying to drum up support from other African leaders. It was all very confusing to your average reader like McQuade. Now Angola ‘flatly rejected’ South Africa’s ‘ridiculous offer’ of peace in exchange for Cuban withdrawal and it was rumoured that she was preparing an all-out offensive against UNITA by combined Cuban, Soviet and East German troops, that South Africa and America were hastily bolstering UNITA in anticipation of the onslaught. And now even Great Britain wondered whether South Africa’s linkage of Cuban withdrawal to peace was not ‘extraneous’. McQuade was astonished and angered. Of course Cuban withdrawal was not ‘extraneous’, madam – but if a no-nonsense politician like Maggie Thatcher sniffed at South Africa’s offer, no way were the Marxist blacks and the Cubans going to give in. And now the South African Conservative Party and the AWB were hurrying to Namibia to drum up resistance amongst the whites, promising the ‘spineless’ South African government ‘big trouble’ if they ‘sold out their kith and kin to 435 …’
McQuade tossed the newspaper aside. Oh, he wanted the bloody Cubans out and the AWB – but it was clear he had time on his side in which to sell his fishing company. And the backlash the AWB would create would slow down the government further …
It was Friday noon. He had had another good week. He now had to move onto those Strausses who lived in the Transvaal high veld, in the farming areas. There were five of them up there, spread over hundreds of miles. But it was not such a daunting task. Then he had to come back and look at the two remaining men in this area. Then? Then it was Namibia.
But today was Friday and surely no honest-to-God policeman would make enquiries like his on a weekend; he was going to spend two days in bed with his beautiful woman. And no way was she going to make him run eight kilometres tonight …
It was lunch-hour when he drove through the centre of Pretoria on his way home. On the corner, a black boy was selling newspapers. The board beside him cried: ‘RUDOLF HESS IN HOSPITAL! CONDITION CRITICAL!’ McQuade shouted to the boy and held out a coin.
He speed-read the front page paragraphs whilst the lights were against him.
Rudolf Hess, aged 93, second-in-command to Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, is critically ill. He has been removed from Spandau Prison, where he has spent the last forty-one years as the only inmate, to an intensive-care hospital in western Berlin.
In 1941 Rudolf Hess piloted a Luftwaffe aircraft alone from Germany to Scotland in a desperate bid to contact Winston Churchill and make peace between Germany and Great Britain. He had to parachute from his aircraft, was injured on descent, arrested and, his overtures rejected by Churchill, has been incarcerated ever since. At the subsequent Nuremberg Trials he was spared the gallows (the Russian judge strongly dissenting) because of his extraordinary mission. It is not clear to this day whether Hitler authorized this mission, or whether Hess, allegedly a little strange at this stage, acted on his own initiative.
The lights changed to green. McQuade drove across the intersection, through the centre of town, then swung onto the verge. He speed-read the rest of the news-item. There was a photograph of Rudolf Hess, a skinny, fatherly-looking type with thick eyebrows.
McQuade studied the photograph. It was hard to believe that this man was Adolf Hitler’s deputy – a man so strong in personality that a demoniac Adolf Hitler and the rest of his brutal hierarchy approved him as Deputy Führer? This was the man who was as guilty as Adolf Hitler in his staggering crime against mankind, a mass-killer of innocent people. That picture of Hess gave him a new kind of courage. This Rudolf Hess, once deputy ruler of the strutting, war-mongering, genocidal Nazi Party, was now just a funny-looking frail man with skinny white legs and sagging singlet over a concave chest – as was the great Heinrich Muller, former proud head of Adolf Hitler’s dreadful Gestapo.
McQuade sat there, thinking. When Rudolf Hess died, was there going to be some kind of public appearance by the Nazis in South Africa, as there had been when Dr Heusler died in the 1970s, as Johan Lombard had mentioned? Or a demonstration, like there had been in 1976, for Hess’s release?
He drove off, looking for a public telephone. He called the German Club and asked if Johan Lombard was there.
‘Come and have a beer, dear boy!’ Johan cried. ‘The boys are sulking about what the beastly Allies did to poor old Rudolf who never hurt a hair of a Jewish head!’
McQuade could not go to the club in his police uniform.
‘Is there likely to be any public demonstration when he dies?’
‘My dear boy, when Reichsleiter Rudolf Hess takes the dark journey to Valhalla, memorial services are going to blossom across this liberal land of ours like toadstools. The biggest will doubtless be in the Rebecca Street Cemetery right here in sunny Pretoria, where there’s a big memorial to the German soldiers who died in both world wars. The Nasties will come out of the woodwork from far and wide for that, flags, Heil Hitlers, the works.’
McQuade’s heart leapt. ‘Will you be there?’
‘You bet, dear boy, hiding behind a tombstone – so will every newspaperman. The laugh is that this German memorial is right next door to the Jewish mausoleum, we’ll all probably be hiding in that to get our pictures.’
Pictures! Of course! ‘Could I go with you?’
‘Certainly, a cemetery is a public place.’
‘Where can I rent a video camera?’
‘I’ll lend you mine, dear boy! Fully automatic.’
McQuade hurried back to the Landrover, grabbed the newspaper again and opened it to the classified advertisements.
There were half a dozen firms that offered to video-film your wedding, graduation, bar-mitzvah, anything that moved. He hurried back to the telephone box.
‘I want to have a video made of a funeral that’s happening next week, but I don’t want the cameraman to be conspicuous. That would upset people and be offensive.’
‘Quite right, sir,’ the man said solemnly.
‘So I want the cameraman to be hidden somehow, in a nearby building or a car. Can you do that?’
‘No problem, sir.’
‘What are your charges?’
The man told him. McQuade telephoned two others, to compare prices. The man he liked the sound of best was a freelance, young and eager. McQuade said he would telephone again.
He felt lucky. If this worked he would have all the Nazis for miles around on film in one fell swoop! He thought; then banked up more coins and dialled Roger Wentland in Swakopmund. ‘I’m in a coin-box so I must be brief. You’ve heard about Rudolf Hess? He’s likely to die soon, and there’re going to be memorial services for him all over the place. Can you find out where and when they are going to be held in Swakopmund and Windhoek?’
Roger was taken aback. ‘I suppose so. Should be common knowledge.’
‘Roger, can you hire some professional cameramen from a video-hire agency?’ McQuade said. ‘And get them to film these services for me? Trying to get every male face? Nobody must realize what’s going on – so the cameraman must be outside the church, and film the people as they arrive and leave.’
‘What’s this for?’ Roger demanded.
‘Just believe me it’s important. There’s nothing illegal in filming a memorial service, is there? So do it, Roger. And put the cost on the company’s account.’
He returned to the Landrover, and thought excitedly: This could solve all the problems! He set off to find the Rebecca Street Cemetery.
Then he realized something. The Mossad boys would certainly know all about Rudolf Hess and what the Nasties in Pretoria were likely to do when he died. And if Jim McQuade had thought about being present, certainly those guys had thought about it. They wouldn’t merely be looking for a man who looked like Heinrich Muller, they’d be looking for a man who looked like James McQuade, too. He would have to have some kind of disguise, and since Mossad knew his Landrover, he would have to rent a car.
He found the Rebecca Street Cemetery, on the outskirts of town. He found the German war memorial. He drew a map. There were many places to hide, but the best feature was the gateway to the cemetery. The car park was outside and everybody had to enter and leave on foot. A cameraman in a vehicle at the gate would film every face with ease. But a cameraman sitting in a car would be too conspicuous. He needed a covered van.
It was late afternoon when he got onto the road to the cottage, with four important new jobs done. Firstly, he had found a place that rented suitable panel-vans; secondly, he had telephoned the young freelance cameraman, who was called Oosthuizen, and hired him: he had been employed by attorneys for divorce cases and swore confidentiality although McQuade had given him no reasons for his assign ment. Thirdly, he had found out where to rent a television set and video-cassette player; and, fourthly, he had acquired some elementary disguise: from an optician called Frames he had bought his first-ever pair of spectacles, near-enough window-pane. From a chemist he had bought black hair dye.
But it might be weeks, months before Rudolf Hess died, so there was no alternative but to keep going, looking for Mr Strauss.
But not till Monday. He was going to spend the weekend in bed, bed, bed, with his lovely woman.