The Top Prisoner of C-Max (26 page)

At that moment, an engine started inside the complex. After revving a few times, one of the residents, in a bright-red sedan, apparently intending to get an early start, approached from the other direction. The gate was only wide enough to take one car at a time.

The guard pointed at Abigail and waved for her to reverse. Like hell, my friend, she thought.

Inside the property, the tenant who wanted to go to work, stuck his head out of the window of his car, and said something to the guard. The guard answered and the other driver also waved to Abigail to reverse.

Sorry, boys, she thought, waving him back.

The other driver shook his head angrily and threw his car into reverse. Abigail smiled at the guard. He raised the boom, but as Abigail drove through, he shouted, ‘You come back.’

Like hell, buddy, she thought, accelerating briskly away. The guard would have instructions not to leave his post. By the lights at the gate she saw him standing in the middle of the drive, a man who had just failed in his task of keeping unwanted guests away from Mr Lekota.

There was no light in Nathi Lekota’s house and he took five minutes to answer Abigail’s knocking. Standing in the doorway of his house in pyjamas and dressing gown, Lekota blinked at her as if he was having difficulty focusing. He was carrying too much weight and Abigail knew that he would be on the far side of seventy by now.

Lekota was both a fulfilled and a resentful man. When the gold rush among activists for positions in business had started after the first democratic elections, he had tried to join in and find a well-paying position that included shareholding, but failed because he was neither a party member nor part of a syndicate of former activists or unionists. The corporations were only interested in groups that had influence in the right places. Apart from a few exceptions, individuals came nowhere in the race for sudden wealth. Instead of becoming a director of a mining company, he was the provincial head of a non-governmental body that trained farm labourers with the aim of turning them into farmers. Both his salary and his promised pension were ordinary. He lived alone and loved his work, but resented his comrades from the struggle who were now making the serious money. He was not pleased to see this woman, attractive though she was, whom he did not recognise. ‘What do you want?’

‘Uncle Nathi, it’s Abigail.’

‘Abigail,’ he repeated. He was still not glad to see her, but she was the daughter of a comrade who had died in the struggle. ‘But Jesus, I told you I don’t know what happened to Michael Childe.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Why not?’ He turned and walked deeper into the house without looking back. ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Abigail did not know and was not interested. She stepped into the house, closed the door behind her and followed. By the time she reached the lounge, he was pouring himself a drink from a bottle of cheap whisky. ‘You want one?’

‘No, thanks.’

He grimaced at the taste of the whisky. ‘This stuff is all ancient history. Why don’t you leave it alone?’

‘I can’t.’ She sat down in an armchair, but he remained standing, leaning against a small bar in a corner of the room, looking studiedly bored.

‘You can’t? Your father was also obsessive. He also couldn’t leave things alone.’

‘This is not about being obsessive.’

‘What’s it then?’

‘It’s about protecting Michael Childe’s daughter.’

‘Come again.’ Despite his determination to look bored, Lekota had stepped away from the bar and was staring angrily at her. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, kid?’

Abigail bridled under what she saw as an insult. ‘Damn it, Nathi, I’m not your kid or anyone else’s. Did you know that Childe’s daughter’s in the country.’

‘Oh? She survived then?’

‘Yes and she’s been here for the last two weeks.’

In a moment the anger drained from Lekota, like a balloon being deflated. He sat down heavily opposite Abigail. ‘Does this have to do with Oliver Hall’s parole?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus Christ, how could they have been such fucking fools? He was where he belongs.’

‘He broke the conditions of his parole twenty-four hours after he was released.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Now he’s on his way to Beloved Childe.’

‘Michael called his kid Beloved?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why’s he going there? Do you know?’

‘No.’

Lekota downed what remained of the whisky. It was an impulsive movement, little more than a reaction to the presence of whisky in the glass. He rose, poured himself another and sat down. ‘I wish you hadn’t come,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I need to understand the connection.’

Lekota shook his head. To Abigail the gesture said that, if he did understand, he would rather not. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She’s on a study tour. She’s an expert on American prison systems and has come to study ours.’

‘She’s a clever kid then?’

‘Very.’ But that was not what Abigail had come to talk about. ‘Uncle Nathi, tell me what happened in Quatro.’

‘I don’t know exactly.’ And this time she knew he was telling the truth. ‘I’ll tell you what I do know.’ He was staring angrily at Abigail again. She was taking him back to a time and place he would rather have forgotten and that he hated visiting after all these years. ‘After Michael died his wife disappeared with the baby. I saw this kid for the last time when she was maybe six months old. I assumed the woman had got out of Angola and gone back to the States, but I didn’t know.’

‘Tell me how Michael Childe died.’

‘You’ve got to know that things went seriously wrong in Quatro in those days.’

‘How wrong?’

‘Very wrong. Your dad tried to bring sanity to the camp. I tried too. But eventually we both tried to organise transfers away from there before we also became victims of the Stalinists among us.’

To Abigail it seemed that Lekota was still avoiding her. ‘How wrong did things go?’

‘Comrades were executed without proper trials. Our intelligence unit, Mbokodo, was practically running the camp. If they said someone was guilty then it was taken as fact. Members of Umkhonto who were loyal comrades were executed for imaginary crimes. A man might die because he took a girl off the wrong officer or complained if an officer forced his girlfriend.’

‘And Childe?’

‘He and I tried to get transferred out of there. I made it, but he didn’t. He was one of those who was executed. He came all the way from the States to fight in our revolution and that’s where he died. His crime was that he was guilty of speaking out about some of the executions and naming those responsible. I never heard what name they gave his crime. I was away at our head office in Luanda when it happened. I arrived the day afterwards. I’m one of those who complained.’

‘And Hall, how did he come into it?’

Lekota swallowed down the second whisky, then rocked forward in his chair, his head held low and his face covered by his hands. ‘Most of us were ashamed of how the revolution had been perverted in that place. And, most of all, we were ashamed of the role Oliver Hall played in it. Jesus, we were so ashamed, but we were also afraid. The worst part was the murder of Childe. Our intelligence section was at the core of the paranoia that permeated the place. They put Childe in our cells when he criticised the way they were running the camp. They said he was a counter-revolutionary.

‘I saw Michael’s body afterwards. Three others had been executed that day. The others had been shot in the back of the head. Michael had his throat slit. That was Oliver Hall’s speciality. He was supposed to use a gun, but he did it for pleasure, so he used a knife instead. We could all see that he preferred using the knife.

‘He only lasted six months at Quatro. By that time, the camp was changing, reforms were being implemented and a lot of us wanted revenge. He knew he was running out of time. One night he disappeared with one of our Jeeps. We never saw him again.’ The words had been rushing out of him. Now he stopped suddenly, too suddenly for Abigail and before he had finished.

‘Uncle Nathi, can this all be true?’

‘I was there, Abigail. He was the one who did the killing while he was with us. And our intelligence section was right behind him. They told us we should remember that this was not a tea party. We were fighting a war. But Oliver Hall was never a freedom fighter. He was just a murderer.’

Beaufort West

THE KID
was walking along the pavement, rubbing his hands together to warm them, his shoulders slouched. He was probably no more than eighteen, but he was broad-shouldered and Hall reckoned that his clothes would fit well. Wherever he had been spending the night, it had been a long one.

What interested Hall most was his yellow jacket and tan pants. Both were made of a material that seemed almost luminous. It was the kind of thing worn by township boys trying to look good, even in a sleepy little dorp like Beaufort West.

Hall moved closer, holding up a hand to stop him. He knew that he should not be so close that it might be troubling and not face to face or he might seem confrontational. ‘Nice clothes you have,’ he told the kid.

‘Thanks. I saved up for them.’ His head was tilted slightly to one side, the eyes narrowed. What did this guy want from him?

‘How much did your suit set you back?’

‘Three hundred and fifty.’

‘Does the shop have more?’

‘For sure. Moosa’s, in Church Street.’

‘I’ll give you four hundred for it – right now.’

The kid turned to Hall in genuine surprise. ‘You can get it for three hundred and fifty. They’ll be open nine o’clock.’

‘I give you four hundred, you can get the same suit and have fifty to spend on a girl.’

‘But if you wait—’

‘I need it now. You can take mine. Four hundred, cash.’ Hall took the cash from his pocket and held it so the kid could see it.

‘Make it four fifty,’ the kid said. He was looking at the money.

‘Right.’ Hall took another fifty from the side pocket of his pants. ‘Where can we swop?’

‘Behind the sports club.’ The boy tilted his head in the direction of the rail tracks. ‘There by the back of the station.’

‘Can they see us from the station?’

‘Not a chance.’

The place the kid led him to was sheltered on three sides by the back of the sports club and a garden wall. On the open side a little-used, unlit street promised its own share of anonymity. Beyond that was the back of a storage shed inside the station’s property. A few lights were burning in the station yard, but they were too far away to have any real effect.

‘Here,’ the kid said. ‘Nobody’s going to see us here.’

‘Get the clothes off,’ Hall said, unbuttoning his shirt at the same time.

The kid glanced in the direction of the freight yard, then put aside his jacket. The shirt soon followed, then his pants. Hall’s eyes followed every movement. He saw the pants slip to the ground. The kid was wearing jockey shorts. As in every other human being, his femoral artery ran along the groin. If it was severed the victim lived at most another two minutes. Hall had slipped off the holster with the knife in it in when he took off his shirt. To retrieve it and cut the kid’s artery would be the work of a second. The question was which would be the greater risk: trusting the kid to keep quiet about what had just happened or leaving his body here where it would probably be found as soon as it was light.

The kid followed the direction of Hall’s eyes and he misinterpreted the look. ‘You want sex? That’s going to cost more. Another fifty.’

No, Hall thought. What I want is to make sure that you shut up. ‘Yes, I want sex,’ he said, ‘but not from you.’

‘I know a girl.’

‘Forget it, kid.’

By the time they were dressed in each other’s clothes Hall had made up his mind about what to do with the boy. He reached out with his left hand in a movement that was too quick for it be avoided, took him by the front of the shirt and pulled him close. The knife was in his right and touching the skin of the kid’s throat. ‘Now you listen to me,’ he said. ‘You forget that you ever met me. If you talk about this to anyone I will know and I will come back and kill you. Do you understand me?’

The kid nodded. He was looking into Hall’s eyes and he had no doubt that this man who wanted his clothes so badly meant what he said. ‘Just one word about this,’ Hall said. ‘Just one.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the kid mumbled.

Hall released him and watched him stumble away across the sports club’s parking area. The kid would keep quiet. And Hall knew another body left here would make it too obvious that he had passed this way. He chuckled softly. The kid got away with it this time. Next time might be another story.

The man at the ticket office looked boredly at him. ‘You lucky,’ he said. ‘We on’y get two trains a day an’ one’s coming in half a hour.’

‘How much to Cape Town?’

‘Three hundred if you go premier class. Otherwise it’s one fifty.’

Hall thought about what he was wearing. He would stand out among the passengers in the lower class like a rent boy in a cathedral choir.

‘Well, what you want?’

‘Premier class.’

‘Three hundred then.’

Hall paid, took his ticket and went out onto the platform. Beyond the station he saw that the freight train had been moved to a side track, no doubt to let the passenger train through. Perhaps an hour had passed since he had jumped from it. It was light enough to see any cops who may be patrolling the station, but there was no sign of them. Because they had not found him on the train there was a fair chance that the search had now moved to the road and the trains would be safe.

With ten minutes to go before train time, three other passengers, all men, came out of the ticket office. They were wearing jackets against the cold of the desert night and had their hands in their pockets to keep them warm. By their clothing Hall reckoned that they were definitely not premier-class passengers. The three seemed to know each other, standing close together and talking. He moved away down the platform. The less contact he had with anyone, the better.