The October Killings (7 page)

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 prison'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.

Yudel reached yet another gate. Commissioner Joshua Setlaba and two other officers that Yudel recognized, without knowing their names, were waiting for him in the block's shift office. They rose as Yudel entered.

9

“So, Yudel.” The commissioner held out a large hand, enveloping Yudel's smaller one and holding on tightly. It was an altogether friendly gesture. “How are you?” This too was not just a formality. He waited with real interest for Yudel's reply.

“I'm well, Mr. Commissioner,” Yudel said. “I hope you are too.”

“I'm very well.” The other officers both offered the firm handshakes that are part of the makeup of uniformed officers everywhere.

Yudel shook their hands, nodded at them, then waited. He was the one who had been invited.

“How are things going with you?” the commissioner asked.

“All right.” Yudel wondered where this was going.

“I suppose you're wondering why I wanted to meet you here.”

“No,” Yudel said truthfully. “I'm wondering why you want to see me at all.”

“Ah,” the commissioner nodded. “I wanted to meet you here because I want to talk about this place.”

“All right.”

“Are you making a living?”

“I'm getting by.”

“Some private practice? Old white ladies who feel unsafe in the new South Africa?”

“Sure. And some white businessmen who have given chunks of their businesses to black partners and are now regretting it.” The last part was not entirely true. There were many such cases, some of them known to Yudel personally, but he had no patients in that category. They went to see their attorneys, not their psychologists, the objective being to draw up contracts that would give away as little as possible to their new empowerment partners.

The commissioner grimaced slightly. Yudel had a way of raising awkward subjects. “How did you spend your retrenchment package?”

“Ah, Mr. Commissioner,” Yudel waved an admonishing finger at him. “You're going into the financial advisory business.”

“No, Yudel, certainly not. I only…” Then he read the look in Yudel's eyes and returned the admonishing finger with a throaty chuckle. “Ah, Yudel, you got me there.”

“I paid off my house bond and bought a car.”

The commissioner nodded. “Tell me, are you getting any criminology work?”

“Not much.”

“Want to get back into it?”

“Mr. Commissioner, what is this about?”

The commissioner turned to the two officers who had come with him. “You two wait for me outside.” To Yudel he said, “Can you call me Joshua? You're not on my staff anymore. Otherwise I'll have to call you Mr. Gordon. It seems a bit silly.”

“All right,” Yudel said. “I'll call you Joshua.”

The two officers had left. “Good,” their boss said. “Now, do you want to get back into prison work?”

“Are you offering me my job back?”

The commissioner opened his mouth wide, as if taking a deep breath, before answering.

“If so, will I have an equal chance of promotion in future?”

The commissioner waved a hand impatiently. “You know the answer to these questions Yudel. No, I want to offer you something different.” He waved a hand at the cells that occupied both sides of the passage beyond. “You've been here before…”

“Once or twice,” Yudel said.

The commissioner threw back his head and his laughter came roaring out. Before it had eased altogether, he began again. “That's what I like about you, Yudel. Understatement. That's right, isn't it? Understatement. Once or twice? One or two thousand times, I think.” The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had started. He pointed a finger at Yudel in what almost seemed to be an accusation. “Do you know how many prisoners I have?”

“In all our prisons? One hundred and fifteen thousand, six hundred and forty-five, last time I saw the figures.”

“What a memory. But that figure's not right anymore. It's now one hundred and sixteen thousand, two hundred and twenty.”

“I'm out of date,” Yudel said.

“And how many psychologists?”

“Twenty-eight before you retrenched me. Twenty-seven, I suppose. But that figure's probably out of date too.”

The commissioner shook his head briefly, ridding it perhaps of Yudel's repeated references to his retrenchment. “The remaining two white psychology officers, two colored officers and the last Indian have resigned. And I've hired two new youngsters and an academic from UPE. You'll get on well with him, a highly educated man. He'll be invaluable to you. So I've got twenty-four now.” He paused for dramatic effect that was not needed on Yudel. “Twenty-four psychologists and one hundred and sixteen thousand…”

“… two hundred and twenty prisoners,” Yudel completed the number for him. “So what do you want from me…” He paused for a moment before experimentally using the commissioner's first name. “… Joshua?” he finished.

“I want you to train selected, ordinary warders to use your system. I want you to coordinate the program nationally and Lesela to be in charge in this province.”

“Lesela?”

“The academic. We can call the warders you choose parapsychologists, like paramedics.”

“I understand, but we'll need a different name. Parapsychology is something else. We could call them psychology interns.”

The impatient hand was waving again, but the beginnings of a smile were in the commissioner's eyes. “Any name, I don't care. But I think you are not against the idea.”

“It can be done,” Yudel said. “We'd need to select the men carefully, both interns and prisoners. It doesn't work with all prisoners.”

“I know. You'll have to do it all.”

“There's one other thing,” Yudel said. Despite always having done some private work in his own time during his years in the department, he had always been embarrassed about discussing money. Three years without his monthly paycheck had cured him of that. “I need to make a living,” he said.