The Top Prisoner of C-Max (13 page)

Elia Dlomo fled across the Drakensberg foothills, running by day and sleeping in sheltered places by night. In the weeks that followed, he eluded capture and was never arrested or tried for killing Ruth. By the time he was next taken into custody two years later, it was for the armed robbery of a Johannesburg supermarket. At his trial, official incompetence saw him sentenced as a first offender.

In four years, he was free again. This time he built up a team of former convicts, as desperate as himself. He soon realised that the usual pair of security guards on a cash-in-transit armoured car were no match for a team of ten men, armed with
AK
-47 repeating rifles and grenade launchers. At the end of the liberation struggle, both items were freely available on the black market.

The gang struck ten armoured cars in the next twelve months, making off with more money in each raid than the combined take of all the supermarkets Dlomo had ever robbed. Arrests and convictions for armed robbery followed. The last conviction included the murder of two security guards. All five who had been arrested were found guilty of the murders under the doctrine of common purpose. This time the prosecution was aware of his earlier crimes and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Of his life after the Khumalos, Dlomo remembered only one aspect with any warmth. He and his gang had robbed an armoured, cash-in-transit car of the weekly wages of the workers at a Kimberley factory. Their tip-off had placed the armoured car in exactly the right place on a stretch of quiet road on the edge of the city. The
RPG
rocket launcher had brought the truck to a halt, the projectile killing the driver. The remaining guard, stunned and disoriented, had stepped away from the vehicle as he tried to return fire. His first three shots flew wild, but the third struck Dlomo’s driver in the heart. Before he could take aim at a second target, Dlomo killed him with a single shot from his
AK
.

That would have been the extent of the damage except that, while leaving the scene, a bystander had decided to risk his life in the cause of law and order. His shot had passed through Dlomo’s loin area just above the pelvis and out the back without striking anything indispensable. He stopped on the outskirts of town and did his best to plug the wound, then started back on the five-hundred-kilometre drive to Johannesburg.

It was after dark when he reached the dusty roadside town of Warrenton, only a quarter of the way to Johannesburg. His rough bandaging had only been a partial success. Much of his shirt and pants were soaked with blood. There was also blood damming up on the seat of the car. By the time he reached the town, the pain and the loss of blood were affecting his ability to keep the car on the road.

Through the haze of pain he saw the town on the left of the road and the township on the right. The town would be a hostile place, so he took the feeder road into the township. It was bigger than he expected, scattering ahead of him in a maze of side streets and sub-economic cottages. Some of the cottages showed signs of improvement – a coat of paint, a garden wall or a couple of fruit trees giving them some individuality. There would be families inside them, but who knew what sort of reception there would be? People who owned something were too afraid of losing it to be involved with a man bleeding from a gunshot wound.

For the residents of Warrenton township, the day was not yet over. Dlomo slowed to little more than jogging speed. To hit a child, an adult or even a dog would not help his cause.

Without warning, it seemed, he was up against the end of the street. He turned the car into a dirt side street, little more than a track and stopped against the fence of the last cottage in the row. This one was unpainted; weeds were growing in the yard. It was not too different from the one where, as a child, he had slept in his lean-to.

He knew that he should have closed the car door behind him, but the cottage and the township itself were spinning round him. He reached the door and tried to knock, but his hand seemed to slide down the smooth surface.

The next day, he found himself in bed, covered only by a rough, woollen blanket. Protruding strands of coir from the mattress scratched him if he moved. But his wound had been bound and cleaned. The flow of blood had stopped. A glass of milk and a sandwich, spread with margarine and sugar, were on the floor next to the bed. From the window he saw that the car door had been closed and it looked like the blood on the backrest had been cleaned.

That evening Jenny Pregnalato, the thirty-five-year-old offspring of an Italian sailor and a township prostitute, came home from her work cleaning and washing dishes in one of the town’s takeaways. She had been married once long before, but had been living alone for ten years on the night when she heard a scratching sound on her front door. The bloodied and unconscious man she found there was someone she had never seen before.

Dlomo stayed with Jenny in her little cottage for three months. The neighbours all knew about the man who had come unexpectedly into Jenny’s life, but no word of it ever reached the authorities. For the first time in her life, Jenny had extra money. Dlomo gave her more than she dared use. She was fully aware that too much spending would draw attention to him and to herself. She never asked him about the wound, but usually someone was looking for a man who carried a bullet wound. So she bought her extra groceries carefully, from three different stores and went to work every day, as she always did. In the evenings she and Dlomo sat together, enjoying the food she cooked and making love.

She was happy, but Dlomo knew that sooner or later they were bound to run out of luck. Some kid was going to say something in the wrong company. The township was too small and the people too interested in him.

At the end of the three months, he left while she was at work one day. Since then, whenever he was out of prison, he sent Jenny money and visited her when he could. If Elia Dlomo ever loved another human being with anything approaching a mature love, Jenny Pregnalato was the one.

Dlomo was already in prison serving a life sentence when he heard of the boy who had been born to her. He had never seen the child.

Sleeping only intermittently in his cell, Dlomo knew what he had to do if he were to survive the years ahead and ever see Jenny again, and the boy for the first time. If Oliver Hall was allowed to do what he was planning, and if they brought him back to this place, he would be the man and there would be no doubt about that. And Dlomo himself would suffer the worst of his vengeance. Dlomo knew exactly what he had to do, but doing it was close to impossible.

TIME
in the exercise hall was prescribed. Every prisoner had to get his time and he had to get it every day. The prisoners had the use of a gym and a small pool table. But because of the number of prisoners and because of the need to keep warring factions apart, time spent in the hall was staggered and most never got a chance at the pool table. The exercise complement changed every two hours.

When Dlomo entered the hall, Kruger had already been there for an hour. He was leaning against the west wall, surrounded by a gang of Twenty-Eights, as always. Dlomo’s own body guard, made up entirely of Twenty-Sixes, was almost as big. ‘Stay here, but watch and come if I need you,’ he told them.

Approaching Kruger and his men, Dlomo walked slowly. It was important that they should have plenty of time to see that he was alone. He held his hands at his sides, but spread his fingers to show that he was holding nothing. From the time Dlomo started towards them, Kruger and his men were watching him closely. This was clearly a surprise. You did not try to kill one of them on one day, then approach peacefully with open hands on the next.

Dlomo stopped close enough for Kruger to be able to hear him, but far enough that if he had to retreat his men would be able to reach him in time. Kruger limped slowly through the encircling protection of his men till there was open space between them. He was the first to speak. ‘And this? Now you want to talk.’

‘With you. You talk, I talk.’

‘And where’s the kana-kana now, inside your pants, up your poke?’ A few of Kruger’s men laughed. Not all though. Dlomo, as an enemy, was no joking matter. Angering him made no sense.

‘There no kana-kana now.’

Kruger looked straight into the eyes of his enemy. He was an altogether dishonest human being, adept at hiding the truth. And he thought he knew the other man. Dlomo was as bad a liar as Kruger was accomplished. Kruger thought of him as a fool. He was a wild man, who only had his anger and physical strength in his favour. It surprised Kruger that, after all these years, Dlomo was still alive. Looking at him across the intervening space, Kruger knew that this time he posed no danger. ‘It’s all right,’ he grunted to his closest guards. ‘It’s all right. He just wants to talk.’

‘Boss?’ The question had come from Oliver Hall. It carried the implication of considerable doubt.

‘Wait here. I want to know what this man got to say.’

Kruger approached Dlomo slowly and watchfully. He was breathing heavily and dragging one leg slightly. He was no physical match for Dlomo, or any other inmate. He stopped close enough to be able to reach out and touch Dlomo. ‘And now?’

‘I want peace.’ Dlomo’s eyes were hard with hostility.

‘Peace? You try to kill one of my men yesterday, now you want peace?’

‘Hall is a mad bastard.’

‘Hall is my man. You touch Hall, you touch me.’

‘Just Hall, not you, Mr Enslin.’ Despite his hostility, Dlomo felt he was in the presence of a man who was senior to him. It was a seniority that extended beyond Kruger’s age to his position in the criminal community.

Kruger shook his head slowly. ‘That’s not how it works. You try to kill Hall, you try to kill me. You want to kill me, Elia?’

‘No, Baba, I don’t want kill you.’

Addressing Kruger as a father was not a device to put him off guard. Dlomo was not capable of that. Kruger did not even try to keep his satisfaction at this apparent deference out of his voice. ‘What you want, Elia?’

‘Yesterday I want to kill Hall. When you die, Hall come back and he’s a big man. When he’s a big man, he do anything. He make war on the Twenty-Six. I don’t want wash first one side of my face, then other side – every day like that.’

Kruger had no doubt what the anything was that Dlomo thought Hall might do. ‘So? You made a mistake when you join the Twenty-Six. I tol’ you then, you remember. Long time ago, I tol’ you. You could be with me now.’

‘I work for you on the thing you want, Mr Enslin.’

Kruger cocked his head slightly to one side, his eyes half closed. It was an expression of complete scepticism. ‘Your boys are standing there. Mine are here behind me. What you wan’ to do for me?’

‘I help you with Gordon.’

The anger that rose in Kruger rested chiefly on the idea that he needed help with Yudel. ‘Gordon is nothing. I can handle Gordon. That little bastard has fucked with the wrong man for too long.’

‘I help you.’

Kruger’s anger calmed as quickly as it had arisen. The calculating, planning side of his personality was never in submission to the inner hatreds for long. ‘Talk,’ he said. ‘Le’s hear.’

‘The thing with Hall, the thing you want from him.’

And this was a surprise to Kruger. He had never guessed that Dlomo might know what he was saying to his inner circle or the nature of his most secret plans.

‘I do it also,’ Dlomo was saying. ‘Maybe Hall can’t. Maybe I can.’

‘How?’ Kruger wanted to know. ‘You here, inside. What can you do?’

‘Maybe I can do something.’

‘Even if you do what I wan’, you still a Twenty-Six.’ And yet Kruger was interested. This could be insurance. If Hall was not successful, perhaps Dlomo might be. ‘You gotta man you can send?’

‘Maybe.’

Fuck this bastard and his maybes, Kruger thought. He looked straight into Dlomo’s eyes without blinking. He thought that was the way an honest man would look at another. He had used it often and it worked well on people who did not know him. ‘The word is this Beloved bitch is working at a place called Freedom Foundation every night.’

That’s better, Dlomo thought. ‘And my Twenty-Sixes?’

‘Our two will be one thing. The Twenty-Eights and the Twenty-Sixes, they will work together.’

Another lie, Dlomo told himself. That had never happened in his experience. But with or without Kruger, if he did this thing, he knew he had a chance to be the top man. ‘Thank you, Mr Enslin. But I need you help me with something first.’

Kruger looked at him in the same direct way. ‘What you want, Elia?’

‘I need your phone – just tonight.’

Kruger nodded. He never doubted that Dlomo would know about his cellphone. Now everything was clear. ‘You got a man outside?’

‘I got man outside.’

‘He’ll do the job for you?’

‘He do the job, not for me, he do it for you.’

‘You can have the phone, jus’ for tonight.’

Robert Mokoapi had spent much of the morning on the telephone. Johnny wa Mzansi, his man who had been gathering information on the political killings in Mpumalanga, had been arrested late the previous night and was being held in the police cells in Mbombela, the province’s capital. He was responsible for most of the contents of the file that was now lying on Abigail’s desk.

During the morning, Robert had spoken to the company’s attorney and to the attorney’s associate in Mbombela, to two Mpumalanga politicians he knew personally, the provincial commissioner of police, the director general of the Department of Justice, and briefly to the reporter himself. All the government people advised him to be in court with his attorney the next morning when Johnny would appear on a charge under the Official Secrets Act. The attorney told Robert he had spoken to the prosecutor and would be in court the next morning, and agreed that it would be useful if Robert was present. But it was the call to Johnny himself that was disturbing. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t leave me in a cell here overnight,’ he had said before the police cut the call short.