“There aren’t any,” said Preston. “The story of his boyhood is absolutely accurate to the last detail. I believe he could even today describe that boyhood for five hours without repeating himself once and without being wrong in a single detail.”
“Then it’s true. Everything that is checkable is true,” said the general.
“Everything that is checkable, yes. It is all true up to the point when those two young soldiers dropped from the tailboard of a German truck in Silesia and started running. After that, it’s all lies. Let me explain by starting at the other end, with the story of Frikki Brandt, the man who jumped with Jan Marais.
“In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1935 a German railway worker named Josef Brandt went to the South African legation in Berlin and pleaded for an emigration visa on compassionate grounds—he was in danger of persecution because he was a Jew. His appeal was heard and he was granted a visa to enter South Africa with his young family. Your own archives confirm the application and the issuance of the visa.”
“That’s right.” General Pienaar nodded. “There were many Jewish immigrants to South Africa during the Hitler period. South Africa has a good record on that issue—better than some.”
“In September 1935,” continued Preston, “Josef Brandt, with his wife, Ilse, and his ten-year-old son, Friedrich, boarded ship at Bremerhaven, and six weeks later they disembarked at East London. There was then a large German community and a small Jewish one there. Brandt elected to stay in East London, and sought a job on the railways. A kindly immigration official informed the local rabbi of the arrival of the new family.
“The rabbi, an energetic young man named Solomon Shapiro, visited the newcomers and tried to help by encouraging them to join the Jewish community life. They refused, and he assumed they wished to try to assimilate into the Gentile community. He was disappointed but not suspicious.
“Then, in 1938, the boy, whose name was now Afrikanerized into Frederik, or Frikki, turned thirteen. It was time for his bar mitzvah, the coming-of-age for a Jewish boy. However much the Brandts might wish to assimilate, that is an important ceremony for a man with an only son. Although none of them had ever been to shul, Rabbi Shapiro visited the family to ask if they would like him to officiate. They gave him a flea in his ear, and his suspicions hardened into certainty.”
“What certainty?” asked the general, perplexed.
“The certainty that they were not Jewish,” said Preston. “He told me so last night. At a bar mitzvah, the boy is blessed by the rabbi. First the rabbi must be convinced of the boy’s Jewishness. In the Jewish faith, that is inherited through the mother, not the father. The mother must produce a document, called a ketubah, confirming that she is Jewish. Ilse Brandt had no ketubah. There could be no bar mitzvah.”
“So they entered South Africa under false pretenses,” said General Pienaar. “It was a hell of a long time ago.”
“More than that,” said Preston. “I can’t prove it, but I think I’m right. Josef Brandt was correct when he told your legation all those years ago that he was under thre
at from the Gestapo. But not as a Jew. As a militant, activist German Communist. He knew if he told your legation that, he’d never get a visa.”
“Go on,” said the general grimly.
“By the time he was eighteen, Frikki was completely imbued with his father’s secret ideals; he was a dedicated Communist prepared to work for the Comintern.
“In 1943 two young men joined the South African Army and went to war: Jan Marais, from Duiwelskloof, to fight for South Africa and the British Commonwealth, and Frikki Brandt to fight for his ideological motherland, the Soviet Union.
“They never met in basic training, or on the troop convoy, or in Italy, or at Moosberg. But they met at Stalag 344. I don’t know whether Brandt had worked out his escape plans by then, but he picked for his companion a young man tall and blond like himself. It was Brandt who initiated that run into the forest when the truck broke down.”
“But what about the pneumonia?” asked Viljoen.
“There was no pneumonia,” said Preston, “nor did they fall into the hands of Catholic Polish partisans. More likely they fell in with Communist partisans, to whom Brandt could talk in fluent German. They would have led Brandt to the Red Army, and thence to the NKVD, with the trusting Marais tailing along.
“It was between March and August 1945 when the switch took place. All that talk about freezing cells was rubbish. Marais would have been squeezed for every last detail of his childhood and education, and Brandt would have memorized it until, despite his poor written English, he could write that curriculum vitae with his eyes closed.
“The NKVD probably gave Brandt a crash course in English as well, changed his appearance a bit, put Marais’s dog tags around his neck, and then they were ready. With his usefulness ended, Jan Marais was probably liquidated.
“The Soviets roughed Brandt up a bit, gave him a few chemicals to make him realistically ill, and handed him to the British at Potsdam. He spent time in a hospital at Bielefeld, and more outside Glasgow. By the winter of 1945 all South African soldiers would have gone home; he was unlikely to run across anyone from the Wits/De La Rey Regiment in Britain. In December he sailed for Cape Town, arriving in January 1946.
“There was one problem. Someone at Defense HQ had sent old farmer Marais a cable to say his son was home at last, having been posted ‘missing, presumed dead.’ To Brandt’s horror a cable arrived—I admit I am guessing here, but it makes sense—urging him to return home. Of course, he could not show himself in Duiwelskloof. He made himself ill again and went into Wynberg Military Hospital.
“The old father would not be put off. He cabled again, to say he was coming all the way to Cape Town. In desperation Brandt appealed to his friends in the Comintern, and the matter was arranged. They ran the old man down on a lonely road in the Mootseki Valley, making it look like a hit-and-run accident while Marais was changing a flat tire. After that it was plain sailing for Brandt. The young man could not get home for the funeral—everyone at Duiwelskloof understood that—and lawyer Benson had no suspicion when he was asked to sell the estate and mail the proceeds to Cape Town.”
The silence in the office was disturbed only by the buzzing of a fly on the windowpane. The general nodded. “It makes sense,” he conceded. “But there’s no proof. We cannot prove the Brandts were not Jewish, let alone that they were Communists. Can you give me anything that puts it beyond doubt?”
Preston reached into his pocket and produced the photograph, which he laid on General Pienaar’s desk. “That is a picture—the last picture—of the real Jan Marais. As you see, he was a useful cricketer in his boyhood. He was a bowler. If you look, you will see that his fingers are gripping the ball in the manner of a spin bowler. You will also notice that he is left-handed. I have spent more than a week studying the Jan Marais in London—at close range, through binoculars. When driving, smoking, eating, drinking, he is right-handed. General, you can do many things to a man to change him; you can change his hair, his speech, his face, his mannerisms. But you cannot turn a left-handed spin bowler into a right-handed man.”
General Pienaar, who had played cricket for half his life, stared down at the photograph. “So what have we got up there in London, Mr. Preston?”
“General, you have got a dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Communist agent who has worked inside the South African foreign service more than forty years for the Soviet Union.”
General Pienaar lifted his eyes from the desk and gazed out across the valley to the Voortrekker Monument. “I’ll break him,” he whispered, “I’ll break him into tiny pieces and stamp them into the bushveld.”
Preston coughed. “Bearing in mind that we British also have a problem because of this man, could I ask you to restrain your hand until you have talked personally to Sir Nigel Irvine?”