The Top Prisoner of C-Max Read online

  As for Abigail, he had made no attempt to contact her, not even to ask Rosa to invite her to dinner. He had worked with her twice in seven years, each time for little more than a week and they had neither spoken to nor seen each other in the intervals. Rosa too professed a special fondness for Abigail, but never suggested contact of any kind. Was it true, he asked himself, that they completed each other’s thoughts?

  Yudel had no answers to any of these questions. Nor did he have an answer to the minister’s questions. He would rather have been allowed to forget the Thandi Kunene matter. It haunted him still. He had hoped that telling the story during his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings would exorcise the memory. His confession, if it could be called that, had the effect of making it possible for him to continue working in the department. But it had no effect on his state of mind, none whatsoever.

  The questioning at the hearing had been something he hoped never to have to relive. The questions had been gentle, but searching. Why were they torturing her? he had been asked. I didn’t know at first, he had told the hearing, but then I realised that they were looking for the white man who had visited her on the Sunday night. And who was this white man? I was the man. I told them so and that they could release the pressure they were applying to her body. And did they? No. What did you do then? I told them again that they could release the pressure, that I was the man. Did they this time? No. And what happened then? She died. Were you present when she died? No. But you knew she did? Yes. What did you do about it? I put in an official report about the matter. And what was the result of that? Nothing. I heard nothing. And then, what did you do? I asked for an interview with the national commissioner. Was it granted? No. Did you do anything else – approach the press, for instance? No. You only approached the apartheid authorities? You could put it that way, yes. Thank you, Mr Gordon. But I would like to explain. He was given the opportunity to explain, but was only able to repeat that he had tried to intervene. But no, he had not taken it further. Was there a reason? Were you afraid of losing your job? Your pension? I don’t know. Perhaps.

  The hearing had been terrible, but nothing like the incident itself. Even after all the years since then, he remembered every detail of it. He closed his eyes to shut out the memory, but it had the opposite effect. Behind his closed eyelids he saw her again, as he had so long ago. He remembered her nakedness and what they were doing to her, the force of the rubber tube as they tightened it and the look in her eyes when she knew she was going to die. He remembered also his own attempt at intercession, how weak it had been and how ineffective. Perhaps if he had spoken earlier, she may have been saved. Perhaps he could have been more forceful, dealt more decisively with his own fears.

  Yudel opened his eyes and they were drawn by activity on the screen of his computer. An email had just come in. He opened it and saw that it had been sent at three thirty that afternoon. No doubt it had lain captive in some digital prison since then. The message said:

  Dear Mr Gordon, please note that an American lady will be in contact with you tomorrow. She is a postgraduate student and published author who is interested in our prison system. Her book on prisoner revolts in the USA has sold over a million copies. The minister asks that you extend her every courtesy while she is with us.

  M. Moseki

  Assistant to the Minister of Correctional Services

  PS She asked to be put in contact with you personally. She has studied your rehabilitation programme and would like to discuss it with you. The minister also asked if you are happy with your new office. MM

  Yudel read the message twice before answering. His response was brief. It read:

  The office is fine. Does the lady have a name?

  Yudel Gordon

  FOUR

  C-Max

  THE FIRST LIGHT of dawn crept slowly over C-Max, as the city of Pretoria’s maximum-security prison was now called. Shafts of sunlight from the east spilled into courtyards and barred windows, creeping down high walls and across rooftops.

  Yudel passed the narrow buffer strip between the inner and outer walls where the rabbits and guineafowl that lived on perfectly trimmed strips of lawn had woken and begun their endless and, in this case, unnecessary foraging. Like the men inside the walls, they too were prisoners. The wings of the guineafowl had been clipped to ensure that flight was out of the question. The walls were anchored far too deeply into the earth for the rabbits to burrow under them.

  Yudel paused at the gate in the inner wall. ‘Hek,’ he called, to signal his need to pass through. Eighteen years after the end of the apartheid regime, all official terminology had been anglicised in the cause of greater clarity for a staff drawn from more than ten language groups. But basic commands were still issued in terms that many staff members considered the language of the oppressor. When a warder asked if there were complaints or requests, ‘Klagtes en versoeke?’ was still the question put to them.

  As on every other day, the prison had woken early. From the kitchen, the sounds of activity echoed along the hard surfaces of floors and walls. Already the prisoners who worked in the kitchen, white-collar prisoners who were thought of as being more trustworthy with knives than their fellows, were preparing the morning porridge.

  Yudel made his way to the office he had for years used as his personal headquarters. Although it was no longer his, it was not yet in use for any other purpose. He knew the three hundred men in this place. He had studied the crimes and backgrounds of a great many of them and was still as fascinated by the factors that turned men into violent criminals as he had been thirty years before. And there were no minor offenders in C-Max. Those were down the hill in Central or Local.

  Some C-Max inmates posed a greater threat to the country’s economic system than to anyone’s physical health. They were the truly effective fraudsters who had sold shares in gold mines that did not exist, had concocted wonderfully complex schemes to extort rebates from the national revenue service for non-existent businesses, had found innovative ways of stealing the pensions of elderly working-class people, had defeated the online security systems of banks, had misspent the assets of shareholders in companies they ran, and succeeded, at least temporarily, in enjoying the fruits of money that was not theirs. While they did interest Yudel, and efforts at rehabilitation were more than usually effective among them, greed and the inclination to ignore society’s rules were easier to understand than the need to kill. So it was the killers and their motives on which he had always spent most time. There was no shortage of them in C-Max. Standing in the doorway of the office and listening to the sounds of the waking prison, Yudel knew that this was where he belonged. The idea may not have been comfortable, but he confessed inwardly that he belonged among the prisoners, or inmates, as the minister insisted he call them.

  C-Max had been built as a maximum-security prison when it was clear that Pretoria Central needed to be expanded and that greater security would be useful in controlling the more dangerous elements in the prison population. It was not the country’s highest-security prison. That prison had been located in the country town of Kokstad. In that facility, prisoners were held one to a cell. They were fed through a slot in the cell door; all eating and bathing took place inside their cells. Cell lights burnt permanently. Critics said the half an hour of exercise a day was designed only to keep the prison population from insanity. In a public debate, Yudel had defended Kokstad’s existence, telling the audience that the critics had the advantage of not having to deal with those inmates.

  A number of the inmates of Kokstad were there because of reports Yudel had written, suggesting they belonged there and should be transferred from facilities where they were a threat to warders and other prisoners. There were also prisoners who had been kept out of Kokstad because of reports he had made. Some recommendations of both sorts had been refused. The department did pay attention to its psychologists, but did not want them to get the idea that they were running the service.

  Y
udel turned his attention to his in tray. The first matter concerned a male member, Alfred Dongwana by name, who had been found having sexual intercourse with a female inmate. As the minister had made clear, ‘member’ was the term he was now supposed to use instead of warder. Yudel did not mind using inmate instead of prisoner, but member sounded to him more like the part of the warder’s anatomy he had employed to accomplish his supposedly abnormal activities.

  The prison director’s memorandum said that he wanted a report from Yudel. This sort of thing had to be stamped out, he said. Did the member suffer from any psychological deviation?

  Yudel interviewed the warder, or member, and discovered that he had been paying for sex with the inmate, an attractive twenty-seven-year-old bookkeeper who had been found guilty of diverting her employer’s funds to her own bank account. ‘She’s good-looking,’ Yudel said.

  ‘Hell.’ The warder ran a hand across his forehead. ‘Too much.’

  ‘Nice figure too,’ Yudel said.

  ‘Fantastic. How can you resist her? I can’t.’

  ‘So, Alfred, how much has she been charging you?’

  ‘A hundred and fifty,’ he said. ‘I can only afford her once a month. Shit, Mr Gordon, you aren’t going to tell my wife, are you? Last month I told her we didn’t have enough to buy her a new coat.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’ll be too sympathetic to the way you spent the money,’ Yudel said.

  ‘You can’t buy a coat for a hundred and fifty anyway.’

  ‘You can if you save the hundred and fifty every month for a few months.’

  ‘Shit, Mr Gordon.’

  At the end of the interview, the warder had asked if he was cured now.

  ‘You want to be cured of your sex drive?’ Yudel asked.

  Yudel’s report said that he thought the officer was essentially a good member – there was that word again – but that it may be advisable to place him in a section in which he only had supervision of male inmates. He added that, as far as he was concerned, desiring sexual interaction with attractive members of the opposite sex was not a psychological deviation. He went on to add that, according to his own observations, it was a common phenomenon in our species. Then he reread the report and deleted the last sentence.

  Yudel was in early because the parolees, Oliver Hall among them, were due to be released in two days. The minister had said that she had no choice but to release him. There was even less that Yudel could do about it.

  The question of how Hall intended to spend his time on the outside had exercised Yudel’s mind since the matter of his parole had first been raised. During the years he had been in C-Max, despite his powerful political sympathisers, Hall had never once applied for parole. Now, for the first time in ten years, knowing that a new amnesty for political prisoners was being considered, he had applied. He must have known that an earlier application would have had a reasonable chance of success, yet he had never tried. Yudel’s curiosity was further aroused by a request that had reached him. Hall had asked to see him.

  Yudel met him in the interview room straight after breakfast. He was already seated at the room’s only table when Yudel came in.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ the prisoner said. ‘I thought you’d given up on me by now.’ Hall always spoke softly and clearly, but overlaying the elegance of his speech, a soft snorting sound, the result of a genetic adenoid disorder, formed a sharp contrast. Yudel could ignore the snorting, but, knowing Hall’s history, he found the delicate enunciation of each word repulsive.

  Like most other inmates, Hall’s skin colour was the typical African brown of the continent’s temperate regions, but his lean face and high-bridged nose would not have been out of place on a north European. When he was first imprisoned, in a different prison in the far end of the country, more than twenty years before, he had been slight except for a tyre that he carried around his waist. Since then he had, like many inmates, used his time to work on strengthening his body. Now he was muscular and the tyre had long since disappeared. He told Yudel that it was a matter of self-preservation. In his case, Yudel had never believed defence to be the only reason.

  ‘I gave up on you long ago. You know that.’

  Hall smiled warmly. Yudel may have given up on him, but he never gave up on someone who had power over him. ‘Come on, Mr Gordon, my record in recent years has been immaculate.’

  ‘We both know you’ve been waiting for the day when you’ll be free. And we both know how patient you are. I don’t know what you plan to do outside, but you’re going to be back here inside a year.’ Yudel thought about this statement. ‘Six months,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘I plan to earn an honest living and continue my rehabilitation. The way I see it, my release is a reward for my service to the revolution. Is it strange to want to be an ordinary person for the rest of my life?’

  He was forty-eight and what remained of his life was unlikely ever to be ordinary. ‘No, that wouldn’t be strange,’ Yudel said. ‘I believe your friends have offered you a job?’

  ‘Yes. My friends are all people of high quality. They have remembered me.’

  ‘As the caretaker of an office building, I’m told.’

  ‘It’s honest work, Mr Gordon, and I intend to show the depth of my appreciation.’

  Yudel could see Hall’s chagrin – Yudel did not believe what Hall was saying. Honest work had never been an interest of his, the way parole had so far not interested him. ‘You’ll be a big man,’ Yudel said, ‘washing floors and cleaning windows.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being the supervisor of a building.’ A slight snorting sound interrupted the flow of words. ‘In any case, my role as a caretaker is entirely temporary. I will seek employment elsewhere as soon as I have departmental sanction, perhaps in the security industry. I have experience.’

  Yudel doubted that it was the sort of experience that many security companies would find useful. His objectives and theirs were too far apart. The prisoner was a far more powerful man in prison than outside. His conviction ten years before had been lengthened twice because of assaults on other prisoners, one resulting in the other man’s death. Yudel believed that both had been actions aimed at strengthening his position among the other inmates. For years it seemed that the position of power he occupied in the prison had always been more important to him than the possibility of being released.

  In the prison he was second only to Enslin Kruger, and no one expected Kruger to live more than another year or two. The condition of his heart had been deteriorating for at least the last five years. Yudel had no doubt that only fear prevented Hall from putting an end to Kruger’s reign in the same way Kruger had dealt with Masuku.

  Kruger had been head of the Twenty-Eight Gang for twenty-five years now, ever since he had presided over the killing of Jackson Masuku. Twenty-Eights, both inside and outside prison, lived according to his decree. Inside the prison, smaller, less-powerful gangs existed, the Twenty-Sixes, the Big Fives, the Desperadoes and the Fast Elevens. While the Twenty-Sixes were closest to being a real opposition to the Twenty-Eights, none of them ever had the nerve or the muscle to try to break the power of Kruger and his cohorts.

  You’ll be the caretaker of an old building, Yudel thought. What appetites are going to be satisfied there that can’t be satisfied here?

  An awkward movement by Hall brought to Yudel the realisation that he had been staring at the prisoner without saying anything. ‘Mr Hall, is there a reason you wanted to see me?’

  ‘I came to say farewell. Is that so wrong?’ Hall was smiling. ‘I’m rehabilitated, Mr Gordon. Your programme, the one you yourself designed, has saved me from myself.’

  Yudel knew that none of this was true, and Hall knew that he knew. Hall also knew that he had one element of power Yudel could not deny him. He was going free and Yudel could do nothing about it.

  ‘Yes, the programme is happy with you. We both know its limitations though. You’re going to miss the power you and your
mentor have exercised over other prisoners and you’re going to miss the profitable trading. I wonder if freedom is going to be worth it.’

  ‘Mr Gordon, if all this about trading is true, why didn’t you stop us?’

  And now Yudel had no answer. He had tried on more than one occasion and failed each time. Warders too were supplementing their very modest incomes through the prison’s illegal supply chain and had been for much longer than anyone could remember. ‘Leave it alone,’ previous directors of the prison had told Yudel. ‘It does no harm.’

  ‘It damages the power relationship between staff and inmates and ultimately puts staff at greater risk,’ Yudel had said.

  ‘Leave it alone. The prison works this way.’

  Hall could see that Yudel was unable to answer. The mockery in the prisoner’s face was unmistakable. This was the only reason for the visit. He wanted to enjoy his moment of triumph.

  Yudel rose. ‘Till we meet again,’ he said.

  ‘Under happier circumstances, I trust.’ Hall held out a hand which Yudel ignored.

  ‘Within these walls, I expect.’

  ‘Farewell. As always, it’s been a pleasure …’ He paused long enough to add emphasis. ‘… Mr Gordon,’ he added.

  On his return to Poynton Building, Yudel found the car park quite easily. He again struggled with locating the bridge between the parking garage and the office building. The same attendant was on duty though. ‘Still one floor down, the same as yesterday,’ he said. Yudel thanked him, crossed the bridge and made his way to the top floor. That was easier to find. All the lifts went there.

  Yudel walked slowly down the passage on the top floor, looking for the office of Brigadier Sibiya, who was in charge of parole matters. He passed the office of the chief of staff in the commissioner’s office, then the office of the chief of staff in the deputy minister’s office, then that of the minister, then the departmental chief of staff, the political advisor, recruited from the ruling party, each with a PA’s office adjoining. Eventually he reached the office of Brigadier Sibiya and his PA. Yudel reflected that he was the only one on the floor who did not have a PA. At least I’m on the top floor, he thought. Yesterday morning, I was on my way home, jobless.