Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘I’m having the Dobermann stuffed,’ he announced to Kommandant van Heerden one day.

  ‘Then I expect you wouldn’t mind earning some pocket money,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘How?’ asked Els suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing arduous,’ said the Kommandant. ‘It certainly doesn’t require any effort on your part. In fact when I come to think of it I wonder you haven’t tried your hand at it already. I can’t think of a better man for the job.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Els who didn’t like the Kommandant’s beguiling tone.

  ‘I’d say you’ve probably got a natural talent for it.’

  Els tried to think what dirty jobs needed doing round the police station. ‘What is it?’ he asked shortly.

  ‘It’s the sort of job you’d really like,’ said the Kommandant, ‘and for once you would be doing it legally.’

  Els tried to think of something he would really like which wasn’t legal. Having it off with black women seemed the most obvious thing.

  ‘Of course you’d get the usual fee,’ continued the Kommandant.

  ‘The usual fee?’

  ‘Twenty-five rand, I think it is,’ said the Kommandant, ‘though it may have gone up.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Els who was beginning to think his ears were deceiving him.

  ‘Not bad for a bit of fun,’ said the Kommandant, who knew that Konstabel Els had shot at least fifteen people in the course of duty and twenty-one for pure pleasure. ‘Of course the method would take some getting used to.’

  Konstabel Els searched his memory to find some method he hadn’t used. As far as he knew he’d used every position in the book and a few more besides.

  ‘What method had you in mind?’ he inquired.

  The Kommandant was getting fed up with Els’ diffidence. ‘With a rope round the neck and a ten-foot drop,’ he snapped. ‘That ought to do for a start.’

  Els was appalled. If that was how it was going to start, he hated to think what the finish would be like.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be a bit dangerous?’ he said.

  ‘Of course not. Safe as houses.’

  It was not as safe as any house Konstabel Els could think of.

  ‘Of course if you’re scared,’ began the Kommandant.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ said Els. ‘If you really want me to do it, I will, but I’m not taking any responsibility for what will happen to the poor bitch. I mean you can’t drop a woman ten feet with a rope tied round her neck without doing her some injury, not even a Kaffir woman. And as for stuffing—’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, Els?’ the Kommandant asked. ‘Who said anything about women? I’m talking about hanging Jonathan Hazelstone. I’m offering you the job of hangman and you keep going on like a maniac about women. Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Yes sir, I am now,’ said Els.

  ‘Well, then, will you do it or not?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ll hang him all right. I don’t mind doing that,’ and Els went off to practise on the gallows at Piemburg Prison.

  ‘I’m Executioner Els,’ he announced grandly to the warder at the gate. ‘I’m the official hangman.’

  *

  Left alone in his office Kommandant van Heerden listened to his heart. Ever since the night he had found himself alone in the garden of Jacaranda House, he had known that there was something seriously wrong with it.

  ‘It’s all that running about and jumping out of windows,’ he said to himself. ‘Bound to be bad for a man of my age.’ He had visited his doctor several times only to be told that he needed to take more exercise.

  ‘You must be mad,’ the Kommandant told him. ‘I’ve been running about all over the place.’

  ‘You’re overweight. That’s the only thing wrong with you,’ said the doctor.

  ‘I’ve collapsed twice,’ the Kommandant insisted. ‘Once at Jacaranda House and the second time in court.’

  ‘Probably bad conscience,’ said the doctor cheerfully, and the Kommandant had gone away in a foul temper to take it out on Luitenant Verkramp.

  Kommandant van Heerden’s third seizure came during the ceremony in the drill hall at which the Commissioner of Police presented the reward to Konstabel Els. The Kommandant had regretted giving Els the reward as soon as he heard that it would be presented by the Commissioner before an audience of five hundred and seventy-nine policemen and their families. The prospect of Els standing up and making a speech of thanks was not one that Kommandant van Heerden could look forward to with any enthusiasm.

  ‘Listen, Els,’ he said before climbing on to the platform where the Commissioner was waiting. ‘You don’t have to say anything more than “Thank you very much.” I don’t want to listen to a long speech.’

  Konstabel Els nodded. He wasn’t given to making speeches, long or short. The two men entered the hall.

  In the event, the evening was worse than even the Kommandant had anticipated. The Commissioner had just heard of the new honour conferred on Konstabel Els and he had decided to end his speech by announcing the news to the assembled men.

  ‘And so I call on Konstabel Els to come up and receive his reward,’ he said finally, ‘or should I say, Executioner Els.’

  A wild burst of laughter and applause greeted the remark. ‘That’s right, call him Executioner Els,’ someone shouted, and another voice yelled, ‘Kaffir-Killer Els.’

  The Commissioner held up his hand for silence as Els scrambled on to the platform.

  ‘We all know what a vital contribution Konstabel Els has made to the solution of the racial problem in South Africa,’ he continued amid laughter. ‘I think I can honestly say that there can be few men in the South African Police force who have disposed of more obstacles to the establishment of a racially pure and truly white South Africa than Konstabel Els. But I am not referring now to Konstabel Els’ excellence of aim nor to the sacrifices he has seen fit to make in pursuit of our common dream, a South Africa with no blacks in it. I speak now of his new duty. Konstabel Els has been chosen to carry out the duty of hanging the man whom we have to thank for our depleted ranks here tonight.’ He paused and turned to Konstabel Els. ‘I have great pleasure in presenting you with this cheque in reward for the capture of a dangerous criminal,’ he said shaking Els by the hand. ‘Hangman Els, you have done your fellow policemen proud.’

  A great round of applause greeted the news of Els’ appointment. Els took the cheque and turned to go back to his seat.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said the Kommandant out loud, but the next moment there were shouts of ‘Speech. Speech. You’ve got to make a speech,’ and ‘Tell us how you’re going to kill the bastard,’ and Els standing awkwardly on the edge of the platform was finally persuaded to say something.

  ‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, when the shouting had died down, ‘I expect you all want to know how I’m going to spend the money.’ He paused and the Kommandant shut his eyes. ‘Well, first of all I’m going to stuff a Dobermann.’

  The audience roared its approval, and the Kommandant opened his eyes for a moment to see how the Commissioner of Police was taking it. The Commissioner was not laughing.

  ‘It’s a dog, sir,’ whispered the Kommandant hurriedly.

  ‘I know it’s a dog. I know what a Dobermann is,’ said the Commissioner icily, and before the Kommandant could explain the true nature of Els’ intentions the Konstabel had started again.

  ‘It’s a big black one,’ said Els, ‘and it’s been dead a few weeks now, so it’s not going to be an easy job.’

  The audience was delighted. Shouts and the stamping of boots greeted Els’ news.

  ‘Do your men make a habit of stuffing dogs?’ asked the Commissioner.

  ‘He’s not using the word in its usual sense, sir,’ said the Kommandant desperately.

  ‘I’m fully aware of that,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I know exactly what he means.’

  ‘I don’t think you do, sir,’ the Kommandant began, but Els had started to speak again and
he had to keep quiet.

  ‘It’s sort of stiff,’ said Els, ‘and that’s what makes it difficult to get at its insides.’

  ‘You’ve got to stop him,’ the Commissioner shouted at Kommandant van Heerden, as the hall erupted with hysterical laughter.

  ‘You don’t understand, sir,’ the Kommandant shouted back. ‘He killed the dog and—’

  ‘I’m not at all surprised. It’s a pity he didn’t kill himself in the process.’

  Around them in the hall pandemonium raged. Konstabel Els couldn’t see anything in what he had said to laugh at.

  ‘You can laugh,’ he shouted above the din, ‘you can bloody laugh, but I bet you haven’t got a dog with a family tree. My dog had a special tree …’ The rest of his sentence was drowned in the laughter.

  ‘I’m not sitting here listening to any more of this filth,’ shouted the Commissioner.

  ‘If you’d just wait for a moment, sir,’ the Kommandant screamed. ‘I can explain what he means. He’s going to take the dog to a taxidermist.’

  But the Commissioner had already risen from his seat and had left the platform.

  ‘Damned disgusting,’ he said to his adjutant as he entered his car. ‘The fellow’s a sexual maniac.’

  Behind him in the hall Els had left the stage and was telling a plain-clothes cop in the front row how he would stuff him if he went on laughing. On the platform Kommandant van Heerden had had his third heart attack.

  In Piemburg Prison Jonathan did not share his sister’s belief in the dignity of God. After a lifetime spent in the service of the Lord and a month in Bottom he felt unable any longer to believe that whatever had chosen to reveal itself to him in the depths of the swimming-pool had been even vaguely beneficent. As to its having been sane, his view of the world and its ways led him to suppose that its Maker must have been out of His mind.

  ‘I should think He must have needed a rest on the seventh day,’ he told the old warder who insisted on bringing him consolation, ‘and as for its being good, I think the facts speak for themselves. Whatever was responsible for the Creation cannot possibly have had anything good in mind. Quite the opposite if you ask me.’

  The old warder was shocked. ‘You’re the first man to occupy that cell,’ he said, ‘that didn’t come round to being converted before he was hanged.’

  ‘It may have something to do with the fact that I am innocent,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘Oh is that what it is,’ said the old warder with a yawn. ‘They all say that,’ and he shuffled off to give his advice to Konstabel Els who was practising in Top. Alone in his cell the Bishop lay on the floor and listened to the noises that reached him from the gallows. By the sound of things he was less likely to die from a broken neck than from some appalling form of hernia.

  Executioner Els wasn’t finding his new job at all easy. For one thing he was fed up with all the work it entailed. He had had to empty the Gallows Shed of all the junk that had accumulated there for the past twenty years. With the help of half a dozen black convicts, he had moved several tons of old furniture, garden rollers, disused cat-o’-nine-tails and corroded lavatory buckets before he could begin to get the scaffold ready for its task, and when the shed was empty he was not sure what to do.

  ‘Pull the lever,’ the old warder told him when Els asked him how the thing worked, and the new hangman had returned to the shed and had pulled the lever. After falling twenty feet to the floor of the shed as the trap opened beneath him, Els began to think he was getting the hang of the contraption. He tried it out with several unsuspecting black convicts standing there, and they seemed to disappear quite satisfactorily. He was disappointed that he wasn’t allowed to try it out properly.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ the old warder told him, ‘it’s not legal. The best thing I can suggest is a sack filled with sand.’

  ‘Fussy old sod,’ thought Els and sent the convicts off to fill some sacks with sand. They were quite satisfactory as stand-ins and didn’t complain when the noose was fitted round their necks which was more than could be said for the black convicts. The trouble was that the bottom dropped out every time one was hanged. Els went back into Bottom to consult the old warder.

  ‘He’s not here any longer,’ the Bishop told him.

  ‘Where’s he gone to?’ Els asked.

  ‘He’s applied for sick leave,’ the Bishop said. ‘He’s got stomach trouble.’

  ‘It’s the same with those sacks,’ said Els and left the Bishop wondering which was worse, hanging or disembowelling.

  ‘I don’t suppose it makes a great deal of difference,’ he thought finally. ‘In any case there is nothing I can do about it.’

  Kommandant van Heerden did not share the Bishop’s fatalism. His third heart attack had convinced him that he too was under sentence of death, but he had decided that there was something he could do about it. He had been assisted in reaching this conclusion by Konstabel Oosthuizen whose experience of major surgery made him an unrivalled source of medical information.

  ‘The most important thing is to have a healthy donor,’ the Konstabel told him. ‘After that it’s a piece of cake, compared to my operation.’ Kommandant van Heerden had hurried off to avoid having to listen to a description of the operation in which the greater portion of Konstabel Oosthuizen’s digestive tract figured so memorably.

  Sitting in his office he listened to Luitenant Verkramp discussing very loudly the case of his uncle who had died of heart trouble. The Kommandant had noticed recently that an extraordinarily large proportion of the Verkramp family had succumbed to what was evidently an hereditary defect and the manner of their passing had been uniformly so atrocious that he could only hope that Verkramp would go the same way. The Luitenant’s solicitude was getting on his nerves, and he was equally tired of inquiries about how he felt.

  ‘I feel all right, damn it,’ he told Verkramp a hundred times.

  ‘Ah,’ Verkramp said sadly, ‘that’s often the way it seems. Now my Uncle Piet said he was feeling fine the day he died but it came on all of a sudden.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was quick,’ the Kommandant said.

  ‘Oh no. Very slow and agonizing.’

  ‘I thought it would be,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘A dreadful business,’ said Verkramp. ‘He—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ the Kommandant shouted.

  ‘I just thought you’d like to know,’ said Verkramp and went out to tell Konstabel Oosthuizen that irritability was a sure sign of incurable heart disease.

  In the meantime the Kommandant had tried to occupy his mind by devising a suitably caustic reply to the Commissioner of Police, who had written ordering him to see that the men under his command got plenty of outdoor exercise and had even hinted that it might be a good thing to organize a brothel for the police barracks in Piemburg. The Kommandant could see that Konstabel Els’ confession was still preying on the mind of the Police Commissioner.

  ‘How do you spell taxidermist?’ he asked Konstabel Oosthuizen.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go to one of them,’ the Konstabel replied. ‘You need a proper surgeon.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of going to a taxidermist,’ the Kommandant shouted. ‘I just want to know how to spell the word.’

  ‘The first thing to do is to find a suitable donor,’ the Konstabel went on, and the Kommandant had given up the attempt to finish the letter. ‘Why don’t you have a word with Els? He should be able to fix you up with one.’

  ‘I’m not having a Kaffir,’ said the Kommandant firmly. ‘I’d rather die.’

  ‘That’s what my cousin said the very day he passed on,’ Verkramp began.

  ‘Shut up,’ snarled the Kommandant, and went into his office and shut the door. He sat down at his desk and began to think about Konstabel Els’ capacity for supplying a donor. Half an hour later he picked up the phone.

  It was with some surprise that Jonathan Hazelstone learnt that Kommandant van Heerden had put in a request to
see him.

  ‘Come to gloat, I suppose,’ he said when the Governor brought him the note from the Kommandant. He was even more astonished at the way the request had been worded. Kommandant van Heerden did not actually beg an audience with the Bishop, but his note spoke of ‘a meeting perhaps in the privacy of the prison chapel, to discuss a matter of mutual interest to us both’. Jonathan racked his brains to think of some matter of mutual interest, and apart from his coming execution which Kommandant van Heerden must have had considerable interest in if his pains to achieve it were anything to go by, he couldn’t think of any interests he might share with the Kommandant. At first he was inclined to refuse the request, but he was persuaded to go by the old warder, whose bowel trouble had stopped, now that Els had ceased rupturing the sacks.

  ‘You never know. He might have some good news for you,’ the warder said, and the Bishop had agreed to the meeting.

  They met in the prison chapel one afternoon just a week before the execution was due to take place. The Bishop clanked over, firmly chained and manacled, to find the Kommandant sitting in a pew waiting for him. At the Kommandant’s suggestion the two men made their way up the aisle and knelt side by side at the altar rail, out of hearing of the warders at the chapel door. Above them in the windows scenes of edifying horror done in late nineteenth-century stained glass filtered the sunlight that managed to penetrate the dense colours and the bars behind the glass, until the whole chapel was glowing with maroon gore.

  While Kommandant van Heerden offered a short prayer the Bishop, having declined the Kommandant’s invitation to say one, gazed up at the windows awe-struck. He had never realized before how many ways there were of putting people to death. The windows provided a comprehensive catalogue of executions and ranged from simple crucifixion to burning at the stake. St Catherine on the wheel entirely merited her fame as a firework, the Bishop decided, while St Sebastian would have made an ideal trademark for pincushions. One after another the martyrs met their terrible ends with a degree of realism that seemed to mark the artist out as a genius and an insane one at that. The Bishop particularly liked the electric chair in one window. With a truly Victorian obsession for naturalism combined with high drama, the figure in the chair was portrayed encased in an aura of electric-blue sparks. Looking up at it, the Bishop was glad that he had agreed to the meeting. To have seen these windows was to know that his own end on the gallows, no matter how badly bungled by the incompetent Els, would be positively enjoyable by comparison with the sufferings portrayed here.