The October Killings Page 5

  “Ah, bullshit.” Robert’s disgust for the old regime and all those involved in it was showing. He shook his head. “These guys, they’ll believe anything bad…”

  “Some of the soldiers who were in Maseru seem to have been murdered.” Abigail had already decided not to tell Robert about the matter of October 22. She loved him, but he was newspaperman and you did not tempt newspapermen with some things, even if you loved them.

  “You believe this?”

  “Some of them have been murdered. That much is true.”

  Robert needed more than that. “Do you believe a government agency is responsible?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’ll drink to that.” He held his glass toward her and they clinked them. “Let’s take your friend to lunch and reassure him.”

  “I don’t believe a government agency is involved.” She was watching his face as she spoke. “I believe Michael Bishop could be.” Abigail closed her eyes and rocked back as if she had been struck. Until that moment she had not even admitted that belief to herself. It had been lurking somewhere deep within her in the place that conscious thoughts avoid. If she truly believed that Bishop could be involved, it was only now that she knew that she did.

  “Michael Bishop.” Robert was searching his memory for an identity to match the name. “He’s the one they called the Ghost. Are you sure he’s real? I always wondered if he wasn’t a myth.”

  “He’s real all right. Yesterday they held a meeting at work to honor him.” That was not all. There was much else, but that would be enough for Robert. Or enough for her. At least, enough for now.

  “Really?” Already his curiosity was becoming a problem.

  “Listen, Robert, this is not a story. This man may be in danger. I need to help him. I owe it to him.”

  “Tell me why you suspect this Michael Bishop.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “I can’t.”

  Robert had both of her hands in his. “Listen, pal. I’m on your side, remember?”

  “I can’t. I can’t now.”

  “Will you be able to later?”

  “No. Maybe. Perhaps…”

  Robert smiled faintly. “A good maybe is almost as useful as a sturdy perhaps.”

  “I had dealings with him in the old days, during the struggle. I don’t believe anyone else could have done it. Most of all, I don’t believe anyone else would have wanted to do it.”

  “And you won’t tell me more?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “You’re a bit tough on your allies, pal. But all right, you tell me what to do for this Lourens. If he saved your life, I’ll do whatever I can to lend a hand.”

  But for the moment there was nothing Robert could do. She had no option but to leave him with the idea that what she had told him was based on nothing more than the meandering thoughts of an old apartheid-era soldier and her own hunches.

  Then there was the bedroom and this time there was no chance of Robert falling asleep in time to save her. But there was his puzzlement, almost hurt, and soon his asking, demanding even, to know, “What is it? Has it got something to do with the money?”

  And a long moment in which she wondered what he was talking about, before she realized. “No, it’s not the billion.”

  “Half billion,” he told her.

  “No, of course it’s not that. It’s just that it’s upset me and…”

  Then he was striding around the room, wearing only his sleeping trunks. “I’m a Zulu man. I need sex the way other men need food.”

  It was not possible though, especially not now, not since she had admitted her fears to herself. Eventually he did sleep and she went back to the French windows. By the lights in the neighboring garden she could again see the bull terrier ferreting among the shrubs. A female figure walked by in the street, carrying a shopping bag. Probably a domestic worker going home to one of the townships, she thought. Immediately the bull terrier surged toward the garden gate, snapping and biting at the steel bars to get to the woman outside.

  Jesus, she thought, do we have to put up with these reminders of apartheid days? In those days many a domestic servant had been savaged by a dog belonging to the employer or the employer’s neighbor. Very few had ever been compensated in any way.

  As the domestic worker moved away, the dog’s growling slowly died down, then stopped altogether. She sank slowly into the chair she had used the previous night. From the position where she was sitting she looked out into a night in which the black of the sky glowed vaguely gold with the reflected lights of the city.

  She tried not to think. She also tried not to remember. Maseru had returned to her more strongly than at any time in the intervening years. It was too late to do anything about it, but perhaps she could keep the door closed on Ficksburg. She could leave it as a dark cave in the vault of her memory. But it was a cave that was haunted by the insubstantial figure of Michael Bishop … the Ghost, as Robert had called him.

  8

  Monday, October 17

  Yudel Gordon, former senior psychologist in the Department of Correctional Services, drove through the Pretoria Central Prison complex. Over the last thirty years he had traveled the road many times.

  He passed the main section where most of the prisoners were kept, the administration block where the year before a bored bureaucrat had mislaid the files of four prisoners and as a result had kept them inside for an extra two months, the houses of the warders where uncomplicated men and their families lived in a world that was becoming increasingly complex, the sports field where the prison officers’ soccer team competed with more enthusiasm than finesse, and the recreation club where off-duty warders spent time when the need to escape female disapproval was upon them—all of it as immaculately maintained as the prison itself.

  Yudel considered how faulty the impression of order was. Prisons throughout the country were filled beyond capacity. Having five prisoners crowded into a cell intended for three was normal. It was a situation inherited from the apartheid government eleven years before, and had not improved since then.

  In some years, the department’s budget ran out before the year did. Room was sometimes made for new prisoners convicted of relatively minor offenses by releasing others whose crimes were far worse. This too was a method inherited from the old regime. In recent months two convicted murderers, serving twenty-five-year sentences, had been released before the end of their fifth year and within months had been rearrested for further killings. A third prematurely released murderer had been arrested for multiple rapes.

  There had been a time immediately after the first democratic elections when the new authorities had seemed to think that the guilt of anyone convicted of anything during the apartheid years had to be in doubt. Tens of thousands of prisoners were released early in those days, temporarily easing the overcrowding in the prisons. Most were back inside within six months, and the situation returned to normal.

  These releases were in addition to the politicals, who had all been freed regardless of their crimes, the official position being that none of them would have committed their crimes in a normal society. While apartheid had certainly produced an abnormal society, Yudel was not sure what a normal one looked like. And he would not have released all the politicals who had been freed. They had been imprisoned by the old regime for setting off bombs in public places, shooting at and occasionally killing policemen and civilians, planting bombs on country roads and of being enthusiastic members of the necklace mobs which burned to death informers, witches, spies, boycott breakers, scabs and other traitors to the revolution.

  Many years had accustomed Yudel to dealing with criminals, but he doubted that he would ever grow accustomed to the sanctimony and self-satisfaction of the politically motivated killer. You don’t understand, he had been told many times. You have to see it in context. We did it for freedom. It’s easy for you. You’ve always been privileged.

  Among
the politicals who had fallen under his care and been released was Simon Mkhari, who had burned to death a woman of sixty. Her crime, in Mkhari’s eyes, had been that, during a boycott of white shops, she had bought a small packet of groceries from a shop owned by a white man. Yudel had felt that Mkhari was an opportunist who had found, in the country’s political situation, a morally acceptable reason to kill. Yudel remembered eyes that held a wild unruliness and an inner tension that distorted the area on either side of his mouth, an uncontrollable restlessness that went beyond the reach of discipline. Yudel had seen those eyes as the product of a life that had taught him that there were no friends to be found anywhere and only temporary allies. Men had to be subdued by force and women taken in the same way. He had opposed Mkhari’s release, believing that he was more than likely to kill again. As he had expected, he had been overruled without discussion. Recently, Mkhari’s name and photograph had appeared on police “wanted” posters. He had not possessed the skill or education to make use of the opportunities offered by the new South Africa, and the wild unruliness was still a part of him.

  There had been other releases with which Yudel had agreed. The Grysbank Six, as the media had called them, had been part of a mob that had beaten, kicked and finally burned to death a female schoolteacher by the name of Maggie Twala, who was rumored to have been the lover of a policeman. Those had been extraordinary times … none of them had ever before been found guilty of any crime, but had been swept along by mob passions in the heat of a political upheaval such as the country had never seen before. They were not likely to kill again.

  Yudel was aware that many people, perhaps most people, would sneer at his opinion of political killers. After all, he had stayed in the employ of the prisons department throughout the apartheid years. It was true that his actions and his sympathies in those years had removed any possibility of promotion, but still he had never resigned. He had been aware of the beatings and the torture dealt out by the security police, sometimes in the prisons, and he had objected officially. He had once tried unsuccessfully to have a senior security policeman arrested for rape and murder. But when nothing came of his protests, he had stayed in the department’s employ, telling himself that he was doing good. Not everyone had agreed.

  This was the first time Yudel was to meet with the commissioner since he had been retrenched three years before. Their last meeting had not been easy for either of them. In previous meetings the commissioner had always tried to show special friendliness to Yudel. “I’ll be sorry to lose you as a staff member,” he had said. “This retrenchment is no reflection on your ability. You know the reason as well as I do. The transformation of the department demands it. I have received employment equity targets from the minister and I don’t have any choice. When I took over, ninety-six percent of my professional officers were white. I brought it down to twenty-seven percent before I even considered retrenching you.”

  “Thanks for telling me yourself,” Yudel had said.

  “You have my respect,” the commissioner had said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I liked your approach to rehabilitation.”

  “I’ve worked on it for a long time.”

  “I know. I can see that. Maybe private practice will work out for you.”

  “Maybe.”

  Yudel had not told the commissioner that he considered this just as racist as the actions taken by the old government that excluded black South Africans from the mainstream of the country’s life. In his farewell speech to the staff, he had said that you cannot sail a ship without its crew. The commissioner had not answered him.

  The road wound round the last of the warders’ houses and ended in the parking area beneath the walls of C-Max, the country’s top high-security prison. The outer gate was a black, heavily studded vehicle entrance, set into a recess in the wall. A narrow pedestrian door in the gate opened for Yudel, where he was subjected to a quick electronic search for weapons. The search showed up something suspiciously large and metallic in his brief case. On examination the guards found the suspicious object to be a modest roll of banknotes. Each note contained a thin metal thread that set off the alarm. After they were satisfied that Yudel posed no threat to the prison’s security, he was allowed in to wait for the warder who would accompany him to the inner wall. Only one prisoner had ever escaped from C-Max, and he had achieved that distinction by bribing a warder with more money that he would have earned in five years. Both escapee and warder were now prisoners in this same institution.

  A narrow strip of lawn filled the space between the two walls. Guinea fowl and rabbits grazed on the grass, apparently at ease in these forbidding surroundings.

  At the second wall a warder unlocked a barred gate with a key so big that he could manipulate it only by holding it in both hands. Yudel was passed to a new warder who took him deeper into the prison. Ten paces farther, at the foot of a broad flight of stairs, the process was repeated.

  As gate after gate opened and wall after wall enclosed Yudel, all outer sounds faded and the sounds of the prison rose around him. The continual opening and closing of gates, steel sliding and jarring heavily against steel, shouted voices issuing the endless streams of orders by which prisons function, the clatter of buckets from a passage and steel plates from the kitchen and, as he passed the entrance to a cell block, the hum of the prisoners’ voices: all seemed to reinforce the walls and bars, drowning the evidence of a world outside.

  The cell block where the commissioner had chosen to meet Yudel was in the innermost keep. Here the only eating utensils allowed were plastic spoons with the shortest handles. Materials like wood and porcelain, let alone steel, lent themselves too well to making weapons. For the same reason no belts and buckles were worn in these cells. This was also the only place in the country where toothbrushes without handles were provided to prisoners.

  C-Max held a motley collection of murderers, rapists, the most ambitious white-collar criminals and those prisoners whose possible future testimony made them targets, but this particular block was home to those who would probably never be freed. Its population was made up of serial killers, the senior members of organized crime gangs, dangerous sex offenders and the last solitary political killer of the apartheid government who had refused to confess and so earn his freedom.

  Deep interest surrounded each new addition to the cell block, news passing fluidly along the cells between prisoners who could hear one another, but only see the man directly opposite, and then only when he was looking through the inspection hole in the solid steel door of his cell. They knew one another’s crimes, their victims, their sentences, appeals and petitions.

  In the old days this had been death row. In those days tragedy was present here in an even starker form. Reality had been reduced to its simplest elements. In those days and in this place tragedy had not been a market collapse, a run on the nation’s currency or a doubling of interest rates. Matters of this sort had stood exposed as trivia. Reality came at seven in the morning with the visit of the sheriff and his list of those who had a date with the gallows in seven days’ time.

  Today, the men in this block were virtually all permanent. There were few new arrivals and few releases. It was the most stable prison population in the country. Occasionally a new serial killer or senior member of an organized crime ring was added to the tally. Those who were in C-Max were not going anywhere soon.

  Like any other prison, C-Max had seen its share of break-out attempts. Just a year before Yudel’s visit, the head warder himself, a second warder and two prisoners had died during an unsuccessful break-out. The only successful one had taken a bribe of 80,000 rand to get the escapee past the prison walls.

  In apartheid days, no one in this section had been permanent. New men had been brought in. Old ones left, either downstairs to the main prison after their sentences had been commuted, or across the yard to the chapel to make their final preparations, or simply to await the moment.

  Apart from the pris
on’s sights and sounds—the gleaming tiled passages, the gray steel gates with bars polished to a bright glow at shoulder height by the handling of many years, the shuffling prisoners and striding warders—there were also smells. Disinfectant, floor polish, food and the pungency of cheap soap: the smells formed powerful associations in the minds of those who spent time in prisons.

  The smell that had always been the most powerful and most troubling to Yudel was gone now. In years past, when the cell block had been used as death row, a ripe body odor that Yudel had never experienced anywhere else had always been present. Many years before, a new head warder who had never before served on death row had tried to remove it. For a week prisoners from other sections had scrubbed the passages and cells with every soap and disinfectant available to the department, but the moment the scent of the cleaning agents began to fade, the other returned. A young white sociologist from the University of the Witwatersrand who had visited a prisoner there had written in an academic paper that this was the smell of fear. An old black woman whose son was awaiting execution had told Yudel that it was the smell of approaching death.

  Whatever it had been in those days, the prison authorities had never been able to eradicate it. It had simply been the smell of death row. Within days of the repeal of the death penalty it had disappeared.

  Few of the former inmates of death row were still in prison. By the time the death penalty was repealed there had been just over two hundred and fifty souls on death row. Only a few of them were not political prisoners and those were the only ones who had not been set free. Most of the freed politicals, members of necklace mobs, had returned to the obscure lives they had led before that moment of insanity had swept them away. Others had been rewarded for the roles they had played in the revolution. One, who had planted a bomb in a bar, killing a few late-night revellers, was now a manager in a department of one of the cities. Another had returned to his old position in a trade union. Some others filled fairly senior government posts.