The Fourth Protocol

The old man stared at him for a while before nodding. “Yes, I remember Joe Brandt.

He’s been dead these many years.”

“He had a son. Frederik—Frikki.”

“That’s right. Good heavens, young man, you’re taking me back quite a bit. Nice kid.

Used to come down to the yards sometimes after school. Joe used to let him ride the engines with him. Quite a treat for a lad in those days.”

“That would be the mid- to late 1930s?” asked Preston.

The old man nodded. “About then. Just after Joe and his family came here.”

“Around 1943 the boy Frikki went away to the war,” Preston suggested.

Papa Fourie stared at him for a while from rheumy eyes that were trying to look backward through more than fifty years of an uneventful life. “That’s right,” he said.

“The boy never came back. They told Joe he had died somewhere in Germany. It broke Joe’s heart. He doted on that boy, had great plans for him. He was never the same, not after that telegram arrived at the end of the war. He died in 1950—I always reckoned of a broken heart. His wife wasn’t long after him—couple of years, perhaps.”

“Awhile ago you said, ‘Just after Joe and his family came here,’ ” Viljoen reminded him. “Which part of South Africa did they come from?”

Papa Fourie looked puzzled. “They didn’t come from South Africa.”

“But they were an Afrikaner family,” Viljoen protested.

“Who told you that?”

“The Army,” said Viljoen.

The old man smiled. “I suppose young Frikki would have passed himself off as an Afrikaner in the Army. No, they came from Germany. Immigrants. About the middle of the 1930s. Joe never spoke good Afrikaans to the day he died. Of course, the boy did.

Learned it at school.”

When they were back in the parked car, Viljoen turned to Preston and asked, “Well?”

“Where are the immigration records kept?”

“In the basement of the Union Building in Pretoria, along with the rest of the state archives,” said Viljoen.

“Could the archivists up there run a check while we wait here?” asked Preston.

“Sure. Let’s go to the police station. We can phone better from there.”

The police station is also on Fleet Street; it is a three-story yellow-brick fortress with opaque windows, right next to the drill hall of the Kaffrarian Rifles. Preston and Viljoen put in their request and lunched in the canteen, while up in Pretoria an archivist lost his lunch hour while he went through the files. Happily they had all been computerized by 1987 and the file number came up quickly. The archivist withdrew the file, typed up a résumé, and put it on the telex.

In East London the telex was brought to Preston and Viljoen over coffee. Viljoen translated it, word for word.

“Good God,” he said when he had finished. “Who would ever have thought it?”

Preston seemed pensive. He rose and crossed the canteen to speak to their driver, who was at a separate table. “Is there a synagogue in East London?”

“Yes, sir. On Park Avenue. Two minutes from here.”

The white-painted, black-domed synagogue, surmounted by the star of David, was empty this Thursday afternoon save for a Colored caretaker in an old Army greatcoat and wool cap. He gave them the address of Rabbi Blum in the suburb of Salbourne. They knocked on his door just after three o’clock. He opened it himself, a stalwart bearded man with iron-gray hair who appeared to be in his mid-fifties. One glance was enough; he was too young. Preston introduced himself and asked, “Can you tell me, please, who was the rabbi here before yourself?”

“Certainly. Rabbi Sharpiro.”

“Have you any idea if he is still alive and where I might find him?”

“You’d better come in,” said Rabbi Blum. He led the way into his house, down a corridor, and opened a door at the end. The room was a bedsitter, in which a very old man sat before a gas fire sipping a cup of black tea. “Uncle Solomon, there’s someone here to see you,” he said.

Preston left the house an hour later and joined Viljoen, who had returned to the car.

“The airport,” Preston told the driver, and to Viljoen, “Could you arrange a meeting with General Pienaar for tomorrow morning?”

* * *

That Thursday afternoon, two more men were transferred from their posts in the Soviet armed forces to special assignment.

About a hundred miles west of Moscow, just off the road to Minsk and set in a large forest is a complex of radio dish aerials and supporting buildings. It is one of the USSR’s listening posts for radio signals coming in from Warsaw Pact military units and from abroad, but it can also intercept messages between other parties far outside the Soviet borders. One section of the complex is screened off and is solely for KGB use. One of the man detached for special duty was a warrant officer radio operator from this section.

“He’s the best man I’ve got,” complained the commanding colonel to his deputy when the men from the Central Committee had left. “Good? I’ll say he’s good. Given the right equipment, he can pick up a cockroach scratching its arse in California.”