The Top Prisoner of C-Max
ALSO BY WESSEL EBERSOHN:
A Lonely Place to Die
, 1979
The Centurion
, 1980
Store up the Anger
, 1980
Divide the Night
, 1981
The Otter and Mr Ogilvie
, 1987
Klara’s Visitors
, 1988
Closed Circle
, 1990
In Touching Distance
, 2004
The October Killings
, 2009
Those Who Love Night
, 2010
The Classifier
, 2011
A novel
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters and incidents, as described in these pages, are products of the writer’s imagination.
Published in 2012 by Umuzi
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1966/003153/07
First Floor, Wembley Square, Solan Road,
Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
© 2012 Wessel Ebersohn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2012
987654321
ISBN
978-1-4152-0179-4 (Print)
ISBN
978-1-4152-0490-0 (ePub)
ISBN
978-1-4152-0491-7 (
PDF
)
Cover design by Georgia Demertzis
Cover photograph © Daniel R Burch/iStockphoto
Author photograph by Michelle du Pisani
Text design by 128 Design
Set in Minion
For Lanie, who is always there.
‘
I believe that there are monsters born in the world to human parents.
’
JOHN STEINBECK
ONE
Maximum-security correctional facility, Pretoria
FROM WHERE
he was standing at the railing, Yudel Gordon had a clear view of the exercise yard and the work team that was digging a drainage trench on the far side. They were some sixty or seventy metres from him. The team was made up of three prisoners with picks to loosen the hard ground, one with a spade to shovel away the dirt and one more, a supervisor. He followed a few paces behind the others.
The nearest guard was almost as far from the five men as Yudel himself. From his box on the southern inner wall, the guard should have had a clear view of the men in the team, but he had his back to them. Something on the narrow lawn between the inner and outer walls seemed to have drawn his attention.
Only one other guard should have been able see the work team from his position on the north-west corner. Yudel looked for him, but the box seemed to be empty. Across the intervening distance, he saw what he thought was a rifle barrel, pointing skyward, a short section of it visible above the protective barrier in the guard box. It was against regulations for him to have deserted the guard box without a replacement, and unforgivable to have left his rifle there. But it was some distance away and Yudel could not be sure. There were no guards in the yard itself.
The three men with the picks were working to the steady rhythm of their own chanting, their voices deep and melodious. The picks were rising and falling to a beat as precise as that of the instruments in a symphony orchestra. The language of the chant was Zulu, and Yudel understood no word of it. Puffs of dust rose from the hard, sun-baked dirt every time the picks landed.
As the men moved between the markers that outlined the position of the trench that was to be dug, the fourth man followed, shuffling the dirt into a pile that ran parallel to the trench. They would have to work the length of the trench at least six times before they were deep enough. Not that any of this was of interest to Yudel. He was far more interested in the make-up of the team and the choice of the supervisor. As Yudel watched, the supervisor trampled the stub of a cigarette to extinguish it.
Further down the yard, well beyond the work team, another group of prisoners was gathered, thirty or forty of them. They were in the yard to exercise. A few of them were kicking an old, misshapen soccer ball back and forth without much enthusiasm. The others were watching the work team. At their centre stood a short, heavily built man. Yudel knew that his name was Enslin Kruger and that he was here because of the role he had played in organised crime. Just what his position had been in the hijacking and prostitution rings that formed the basis of the charges against him had never become clear in the trial. He offered no explanations, only a flat denial in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The sentence had been a surprisingly light two years, the judge explaining his decision by the fact that Kruger’s was a first offence and that it was not proven that he had been involved in any of the gang’s killings.
The prison authorities did not see it that way. As a result of a single interview with Yudel, he had been brought straight to maximum security. Yudel’s report said that, although there was no trial evidence to support his view, he believed that Kruger was manipulative, amoral and dangerous. The department decided that, as long as he was in their custody, they were going to take great care to keep him there. There would be no minimum-security accommodation for him.
Yudel had been part of the prison staff for less than a year and his entire experience of prisons was only five years more. Despite his relative inexperience, he found too many things wrong with the scene below him. He was not in favour of high-security prisoners being allowed to work with implements as potentially dangerous as picks and he was not in favour of one of their number being allowed to supervise them. In his view, the reasons they were in maximum security were real and needed to be respected.
Also, if a prisoner had to supervise others, it should not be the man who was doing it. His name was Jackson Masuku and, according to warders and prisoners alike, he was the real authority among the prisoners. Some of them felt that he dispensed more power than the prison’s head warder. It was an open secret that considerable trade was conducted inside the prison and, according to Yudel’s sources, none of it without Masuku taking his share. Tobacco, dagga, food, pornography, new boys who could be shared among the top prisoners, and other luxuries: all were controlled by Masuku and his cronies. In Yudel’s view, allowing him to supervise a team of workers was playing into an already undesirable situation. Action should be taken to dismantle his power, not play a part in extending it.
Yudel had twice approached Colonel van Wyk, the head warder, a long-service officer nearing retirement, about Masuku’s role in the prison. ‘Mr Gordon, you haven’t been in the service long enough to understand the prison’s work properly,’ he had been told on both occasions. ‘When you’ve been here longer, you’ll understand better the way things work.’
Since then, one of the warders had told Yudel that nothing was ever going to change. Masuku was no fool, he always saw to it that the colonel and some of the senior warders received their cut. It seemed that none of them ever refused the subsidy to their very modest pay packets.
Among the group of prisoners of which Enslin Kruger was the centre, a movement, a ripple of attention, caught Yudel’s eye. He saw a number of faces turned towards Kruger as if waiting for a signal. While Yudel watched, a path was cleared to give Kruger an unhindered view of the work team.
The men with the picks paused for a moment and the prisoner with the shovel turned. He was offering Masuku a cigarette to replace the one he had just finished. Superficially, it was a gesture of homage of a junior to the top man. The three men with the picks were watching the transaction. Masuku took a step forward to reach for the cigarette. The man who was offering it seemed to be looking in the direction of Kruger and the gathering around him.
Masuku reached for the cigarette, but before he could take it, Yudel was going down the stairs towards the yard, two or three at every stride. On the landing halfway to the yard, he passed a warder, a farm boy whose understanding of his occupation extended only to the knowledge that the prisoners were bad and had to be kept inside. ‘Come with me,’ Yudel shouted. ‘Come quickly.’
‘Mr Gordon?’ He sounded puzzled, but Yudel could hear him following close behind.
The gate into the yard was closed, but the man responsible for it was on his feet at the sound of the stampede from the stairs. ‘Hek,’ Yudel shouted at him. At the order to open the gate, he turned the key and swung it open in almost one movement.
Yudel arrived in the yard, with the young warder close behind. The other warder remained at the gate, as orders stipulated. The work team was at least fifty metres away. ‘Stop,’ Yudel was shouting. ‘Stop immediately.’
Yudel did not see the man with the shovel move. Neither did he see Masuku fall, but now he was down on his hands and knees. Exactly what had happened, how he had lost his balance, whether or not he had been pushed or even where the man with the shovel had been standing, had not been clear to Yudel afterwards. All that he remembered with any sort of clarity was that, within a moment of Masuku landing on his hands and knees, three picks had been driven into his skull, and power among the prisoners had passed into the hands of Enslin Kruger.
Pretoria, twenty-five years later
YUDEL GORDON
arrived at Poynton Building in central Pretoria fifteen minutes late for his meeting with the minister of Correctional Services. Throughout his career in the department, he had been stationed on the property of Pretoria Central Prison, most of it in C-Max, as maximum security was now called. He had successfully avoided an office at headquarters by pleading that he could do his job better if he was close to the prisoners themselves.
Yudel’s lateness was the result of a struggle to find the entrance to the car park, then to find the bridge that led from the parking to the office building. He had been in Poynton Building only ten or twelve times in the last twenty-five years and his memory of its geography had gone the way of all matters that he saw as unimportant. He eventually found the entrance to the car park in a side street. An old attendant helped him find the bridge.
‘It’s Mr Gordon, I think,’ the attendant said.
Yudel was certain that he had never seen this man before. ‘Oh, yes, how are you? Still here after all this time?’
‘That’s right, sir. I didn’t think you remembered me.’
Yudel tapped his forehead with the tips of two fingers. ‘I never forget a friendly face,’ he lied.
‘Me also. But maybe you don’t remember bridges so good. It’s down there, one floor below, same place it was last time Mr Gordon was here.’ It was a joke and they both laughed.