The Top Prisoner of C-Max

by Wessel Ebersohn

  Dlomo turned his attention away from the scene. He had never been part of such gatherings and he did not want to observe them now.

  Line after line of cottages slipped past. Jenny’s was near the far end and only the third or fourth from the side on which he would be passing. If there was enough light he would be able to see it. If she was working the day shift she would have got home an hour or more ago. It was possible she might be standing outside to catch the last bit of twilight. Perhaps he might get a glimpse of her. The cottage was not far from the tracks.

  The first policeman was standing on the edge of the wild grass that bordered the township. He was clearly visible in the headlights of a parked vehicle.

  What’s that damned boer doing there? Is he waiting for me? Do they think I’m coming here? It’s that Gordon at C-Max. He knows about Jenny. The little bastard told me he does. But if this is a trap, why’s he standing outside?

  A second policeman came into view, between the first and the next cottages. Then the angle had changed and he could see between the rows of cottages. The back door of Jenny’s cottage was open, spilling light into the yard. A third policeman was leaning against the doorjamb.

  The angle changed again, and for a moment Jenny’s place was hidden by the closer cottages. Then he could see the front of the cottage. His view lasted perhaps a second, but in that time he saw the open front door and two more policemen carrying a stretcher through it. The figure on the stretcher was that of an adult. Both face and body were covered.

  THIRTY

  THE FIRST SHOT had Yudel hurrying for the door. Before he reached it, there were two more, the three following each other with less than a second separating them. He stopped in the doorway. Yudel had been warned on many occasions not to interfere when law enforcement officers had to deal with incidents that involved the use of force. Freek had explained the matter to him: ‘First of all, it’s not your role. Secondly, you’re no good at it.’

  ‘Surely I can help,’ Yudel had said.

  ‘The best way for you to do that is to stay out of the way.’

  Yudel stood in the door of his office, remembering this advice. He was still in that position when the fourth shot was fired. This time he could hear that it was coming from the exercise hall. He ran in that direction, taking the stairs to the vantage point above the hall, twice shouting ‘Hek’ for the guard there to open the gate for him. He looked as alarmed as Yudel was.

  From the rail that looked down onto the hall, Yudel saw a group of inmates, perhaps twenty of them, at the gate below. A warder was lying face down in the hall, unmoving. There were just the stairs and one more gate separating them from Yudel. At the head of the group, one of Enslin Kruger’s henchmen carried a hand gun. Three warders, armed only with truncheons, had retreated onto the stairs. As Yudel started backing away in the direction of the library, the prisoner with the gun fired again.

  Down below he heard Director Nkabinde’s voice. He was shouting, but Yudel could not make out the words.

  Yudel ran for the gate in front of the library. ‘Hek, hek,’ he yelled at the guard, then, ‘Keep it open. Some men are coming up. Close the gate and take cover, after they come through. One of the prisoners is armed.’ He was surprised by the shrillness of his voice.

  More shots were being fired, the sounds coming from closer this time. That could only be the prisoner who had the gun. How many shots before he would have to reload? Did he have more bullets? None of the warders in the hall had firearms.

  The three warders reached the top of the stairs. One of them was bleeding from his left thigh and limping. By the time they got to the gate, the prisoners were at the top of the stairs. The prisoner with the gun fired again, the bullet pinging against one of the bars. The guard at the gate waited until the three warders had come through before slamming closed the heavily barred steel framework and locking it. It was the act of a brave man. He was in a clear line of fire. A moment later, the three warders from the yard, the one from the gate and Yudel were crammed tightly together, taking shelter in a doorway that led off the passage to the library. The door had been locked from the inside and there was barely enough space to give them shelter.

  Yudel had his back to the door and was being pressed against it by two burly warders. ‘You all right, Mr Gordon?’ one asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Yudel gasped. To his own ears he sounded out of breath. ‘Are you out of the line of fire.’

  ‘Yes, but not so much.’

  Yudel could hear cursing from the passage, probably because of the locked gate. From the direction of the hall another shot was fired, then a second and third, followed by the sound of running.

  The command ‘Hek’ came from the gate. Yudel recognised the voice as belonging to a young senior officer who had often shown an interest in Yudel’s work. ‘It’s all right, Members, the problem is neutralised,’ he said to the men with Yudel. ‘Mr Gordon, you stay there. This is not for you.’ Another one, Yudel thought. To the warders, the officer said, ‘You know what to do.’

  Fifteen minutes after the first shots had been fired, Yudel was allowed as far as the railing. Looking down into the hall, prisoners were scattered face downward across the linoleum floor. They looked like decorations that had been sprinkled on the icing of a cake.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the young officer who had taken charge was shouting. ‘Any man who moves will die.’ He and a few men he had brought with him were the only warders in the hall. At the railing the number of warders had grown. Some of them carried firearms now.

  Three prisoners seemed to have been hit during the shooting. The one who had the gun was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs. He was bleeding from the stomach and now had a neat hole at the top of his forehead. If the shot had been just a few millimetres higher it may only have grazed his skull. As it was, it seemed likely that not much of the cerebral cortex remained. Despite injuries that would ultimately make the continuation of life impossible, he was still breathing.

  The three other prisoners who had been hit were within a few steps of the gunman. Given the ungainly position of their limbs and the complete absence of movement, they were almost certainly dead.

  Yudel passed all three without stopping. Just beyond them, near the centre of the yard, two warders were down. As Yudel approached, one of them pushed himself into a sitting position. He was bleeding from a wound in his upper right arm. The other was lying face downward and altogether motionless. Even from a distance Yudel knew, by his uniform, who it was. He rolled the director’s body over. The bullet had struck him in the region of the solar plexus. This was no wild shot that happened to find its target. Yudel guessed that it was probably the first shot, the one that started it all. It came before the charge up the stairs and was probably the only carefully aimed shot from that gun.

  ‘Mr Gordon, I’m locking down the prison.’ The young officer was just behind him. ‘Until head office sends someone else to take charge, I’m locking C-Max down.’

  ‘Do it,’ Yudel said. ‘Do it immediately.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  SEATED at the desk in his office, Yudel heard the prisoners filing back to their cells. They had come from the yard, the laundry, the kitchen, passages they had been cleaning and other places of work.

  It was only after he was back at his desk that he appreciated the effect the last half hour had had on him. Yudel had been in dangerous situations a number of times during his career, but none had left him like this. He realised that his hands were shaking and he paced the office until he could bring them under control. Sam Nkabinde’s death, the deliberateness of it, was the worst part. He and the director had had plenty of disagreements in the years they worked together, but Sam had been a good man. Unlike some of his staff members, he had been an honest man and had always tried to do his job well.

  Even worse was that there could be no doubt where Hall was going. That stupid girl, what was she thinking? She had enough experience of prisons and the men in them to know better
. Down the years of his life in the nation’s prisons, Yudel had met a number of women who were drawn, sometimes irresistibly, to prison inmates. But Beloved? It was hard to believe. He keyed in the number of her cellphone. Her voice came up with the message he had heard before.

  Yudel hung up, then thought better of it and called the number again, this time leaving a new message. ‘Hall is on his way to you. If he knows where you’re working, you should stay away from there.’

  He hung up again, then realised that his message might not be easily understood and called a third time. ‘It’s Yudel here. I called a moment ago. Hall killed three people in Warrenton just hours ago.’

  After hanging up, he called the Freedom Foundation. A young male voice on the other end of the line answered. He told Yudel that Ms Childe came in every evening. She did counselling and life-skills classes in the evenings for former inmates. In fact she was due any moment. That was the arrangement. And no, Yudel could not speak to the executive director, who was in a meeting with the European donors.

  ‘I want you to give her a message,’ Yudel told the boy.

  ‘Certainly. Of course.’ He would do anything to have an excuse to be close to her again on the off-chance that his education may be continued.

  ‘Tell her to stay away from your offices until I tell her she’s safe. Tell her it has to do with Oliver Hall.’

  ‘Who’s Oliver Hall?’

  Yudel recognised the immaturity in the voice on the other end of the connection. ‘He’s a bad man, a very bad man.’

  ‘I could protect her,’ the boy suggested.

  ‘No,’ Yudel said. ‘Do not try to protect anyone from Oliver Hall. Try to stay out of his way. And most of all, see that Beloved stays out of his way.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy said. ‘You can depend on me.’

  Jesus Christ, Yudel thought. ‘And tell her to call me.’

  To Yudel every night in C-Max was filled with the ghosts of all the men who had died there, both prison officers and inmates. The prison was enveloped in a heavy but invisible cloud of anger and misery that never entirely left the place, but was always stronger at night and still stronger after a death.

  Most deaths, even in a place like C-Max, were the result of natural causes. None of the inmates were in for just a few years. Violent men grew old there. The violence died first, then the man in whom the violence resided.

  Yudel disliked being in the prison after dark, especially on nights like this one, when a man, especially an officer of the prison, had died violently. He felt something assailing him that could only be an echo left by the agony of Sam Nkabinde and others like him.

  Every man who died, Yudel believed, left a trace of himself and his pain in the cloud that hung over the place, seemingly forever. He wondered if the prison were torn down and the building materials removed, whether the ghosts of all that had gone before would remain as a permanent part of the hillside.

  It was not Yudel’s way to leave when he may be needed. Rosa had called to ask him to come home and he had said he would as soon as he thought things were quiet. The prison’s new acting director had agreed that he should go. Security was, after all, not his concern. He replied that he would stay until he felt some sort of normality return.

  Perhaps it was the night that did it or the minister wakening the memory a few days before, but without warning it was there. The ghosts of the men who had died within those walls were suddenly eclipsed by that of the woman who had died in the offices of the security police decades before.

  Slowly and without real purpose, he walked the passages of the prison. Even after all these years, the narrow cells and the state of the men they held were troubling to him.

  Yudel had a gitf that he sometimes thought of as a curse. His intuitions were rarely shared with senior officers in the department. He had long since realised that no one was interested in emergencies that had only his hunches as a basis. He had never doubted his intuitions, but it had been a relief to him to read that Boris Pasternak had been a medical doctor and had held the view that the best diagnoses were a matter of intuition. Yudel felt that the same applied to crime.

  Entering a public place like a bus, a train or a movie theatre, he was sometimes suddenly overtaken by a feeling of deep depression. A brief examination of the faces around him usually revealed the source of the unhappiness. It was a gift that often helped him in his work, both to establish true suffering and to reveal when the suffering was only a pretence.

  On a night like this, when the turbulence following the brief revolt, the killing of the director and a number of inmates, flowed from almost every man, the power of his intuition was almost too much to bear.

  Yet it was over now. Surely it was over. But the matter of Oliver Hall and Beloved – that was not over, perhaps that was only beginning.

  It had been just twelve hours since Abigail had visited Robert in hospital. She had arrived home late and was near exhaustion after a tough day in court that she had spent in cross-examination. It had not gone well until late in the afternoon. All day the main accused had been telling her that he and his friends were not running a protection racket among small shop owners in Soweto. Then, with half an hour of the court day to go, he had suddenly been infuriated by her continually suggesting that he and his cronies were a disgrace to African men, that their behaviour went against all the continent’s best traditions. ‘Why must they keep all the money?’ he had screamed at her. ‘They are against tradition, not us. Why don’t they share?’

  Only when his screaming had stopped did he realise to what extent he had incriminated himself. Until that moment he had been standing in the witness box and looking straight at her. Now he sat down heavily and turned his face away.

  Despite her tiredness, the hospital where Robert lay was like a magnet drawing her towards it. And yet, what was the convention as far as ex-wives visiting former husbands in hospital was concerned? But then, convention never had meant much to her. She wondered if Thandi’s mother was still there.

  Her tireness and the awkwardness of it all won the argument. I’ll go tomorrow, she thought. But she did call Thandi’s number. She got through to a message Thandi had recently recorded. ‘To all my friends who have given me so much support since Robert was attacked, I want to tell you that he is improving and I beg you not to come to the hospital. I am the only visitor being allowed in. If there is any change in his condition, I will leave a message here.’

  Does that include me? she wondered. Thandi had seemed happy enough to have her there that morning.

  From the armchair where she was seated, she could see Robert’s file, the one that she had promised to read, the one for which perhaps he had been shot. It was still where he had left it on the small table near the coat rack in the hall. I should be reading it, she thought. A passport-size photograph was lying next to it. The photograph had probably slipped out of the file, perhaps when the cleaning woman was dusting.

  Abigail went over to the table, picked up the photograph and took it back to the armchair where she sat down again. The face in the picture was lean, almost aristocratic. The chin was lifted and the eyes stared boldly into the lens of the camera. The overall impression was one of arrogance. Abigail turned the picture over and read the name printed on the back. It was Oliver Hall. This was the parolee Yudel had told her that Beloved seemed interested in, too interested as far as Yudel was concerned.

  Despite her own interest in the file and the photograph, Abigail’s tiredness was like a blanket enveloping her. Whatever Hall had to do with the killings in Mpumalanga could wait for another day. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the photograph.

  Uninvited, Beloved and her activities arose in Abigail’s mind. What had been done to Robert was over. He was in hospital where they would no doubt patch him up. By that time, she would have studied the file and taken whatever action was possible. The Beloved thing could wait too. Or could it? And why did the damned kid keep her phone switched off?


  Worse than that was that Nathi Lekota had lied to her last night when she asked about Childe, the American who had served in the military wing of the resistance movement. But before he decided that lying was the best option, he had told her that Childe had died in Quatro.

  From all she had read and heard, nothing had gone well at Quatro. Far too many female comrades for it to be their imagination had complained of being raped by officers. A number of Mkhonto soldiers had been imprisoned and even executed under conditions that no one wanted to talk about today. Some Quatro victims had fled the camp and spent years afterwards trying to persuade anyone who would listen that the country’s liberation army was not going to bring the liberation it promised. A few still lived overseas, where they felt safe.

  Suddenly she was fully awake. Even the tiredness was gone. Her mind raced through the contacts she still had from those days when, as a child, she had met many of her father’s comrades in the struggle. Not many were left. Some had died during the struggle, some in the years since then. Others now occupied senior positions in government and business. Not all would remember her.

  Of just one thing she was certain. Nathi Lekota knew. He would be able to tell her. He would have to tell her.

  Abigail called his number, as she had done the night before. This time, she only reached the recording of his voice telling her to leave a message. She resisted the temptation to do that. Warning him that she was after him again might not be useful. She would call again before the night was over.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Outside Beaufort West – 550 kilometres from the Freedom Foundation