Riotous Assembly

Chapter 14

When Luitenant Verkramp arrived from hospital to begin his interrogation of the prisoner, he found the Kommandant waiting for him. He hobbled into the Governor's office to report for duty.

'I'm a sick man,' he said grumpily. 'The doctors didn't want me to leave the hospital.'

'Quite so, Luitenant,' said the Kommandant cheerfully. 'Quite so, but now that you're here, let's not waste time. I need your help.'

'What is it this time?' Verkramp asked. Kommandant van Heerden was always needing his help, but this was the first time he had known him acknowledge the fact.

'I have here the Hazelstone family file,' the Kommandant said. 'It includes the security report you submitted to the Bureau of State Security. I've read it through, and I must say, Luitenant, you showed more perspicacity than I gave you credit for.'

Luitenant Verkramp smiled. The Kommandant had never been so complimentary before.

'You say here,' continued the Kommandant, tapping the report, 'that the Hazelstones are noted for their left-wing and Communistic leanings. I would like to know what made you say that.'

'Everybody knows they are Marxists,' said Verkramp.

'I don't,' said the Kommandant, 'and I would like to hear why you do.'

'Well, for one thing Miss Hazelstone's nephew is at the university.'

'Doesn't make him a Commie.'

'He believes in evolution.'

'Hm,' said the Kommandant doubtfully. He knew it was a subversive doctrine, but with Els around it seemed irrefutable to him.

'What else?' he asked.

'I checked the library. It's full of Communist literature. They've got _The Red Badge of Courage, Black Beauty,_ the collected works of Dostoyevsky, even Bertrand Russell's banned book, _Why I am not a Christian._ I tell you, they are all dangerous books.'

Kommandant van Heerden was impressed. Evidently Verkramp had gone more thoroughly into the matter than he had imagined. 'That seems conclusive enough,' he said. 'What about the brother, Jonathan Hazelstone. You say here he's got a criminal record.'

'That's right. He lives in Rhodesia and he's done time.'

'He says he's a bishop.'

'He can say what he bloody well pleases,' said Verkramp. 'It doesn't alter the facts. I checked them with the Rhodesian Police. You'll find the telegram they sent back in the file.'

Kommandant van Heerden pulled out the telegram. 'I can't make head or tail of it,' he said. 'It's in code or something. You read it,' and he handed the telegram to Verkramp.

The Luitenant peered at the hieroglyphs. 'It's pretty obvious,' he said at last. ''Jonathan Hazelstone 2 yrs parson Bulawayo 3 yrs Barotse incumbent at present convocation 3 wks Umtali.' Any fool can understand that,' he said.

'Well, this one can't,' snapped the Kommandant. 'You tell me what it means.'

Verkramp sighed. This was what came from having an illiterate Kommandant.

'It's quite simple. He's done two years in Bulawayo Prison for burning a building down. Three years for murdering a Barotse native who was having a nap and three weeks in Umtali for convoking.'

Kommandant van Heerden thought for a moment. 'What's convoking?' he asked.

'You've heard of con men, haven't you? It's fraud and swindling. It's convoking people into buying phoney shares and things.'

'Oh, is that what it is? You would think they'd have given him more than three weeks for a thing like that. After all he got three years for killing the coon boy which was a bit steep,' the Kommandant said, relieved to know that he had got the right man. There was no doubt now in his mind that he could make the case stick. A man who had killed a Barotse while the poor bastard was asleep was hardly likely to hesitate when it came to killing a Zulu cook.

'Well, all we need now is a nice tidy confession,' he said. 'I'll expect you to have it on my desk in the morning.'

Luitenant Verkramp shrugged. 'If you require it so quick you had better ask Els. My methods require that the prisoner be kept awake for at least three days and with a hardened professional like this fellow it will probably take more.'

'I can't ask Els. We can't have a Hazelstone hobbling into court with no toenails and his balls the size of pumpkins. Think what the defence attorney would make of that one. Use your head. No, the interrogation has got to be handled discreetly and I'm putting you in charge of it,' the Kommandant said, resorting to flattery. 'Do what you like with him, but see he's all in one piece when you've finished.'

With this _carte blanche,_ the Kommandant ended the interview and ordered his supper.

In the Maximum Security Block, there was no supper for Jonathan Hazelstone, and if there had been it is doubtful if he would have had much appetite for it. He had just learnt from the old warder how it was he enjoyed the unusual privilege of being able to be hanged in Top.

'It's to do with something your grandfather said in his speech when he opened the prison,' the warder told him. 'He said he wanted the gallows to be kept in working order in case his family wanted to use them.'

'I'm sure he meant well,' the Bishop said sadly, wondering at the appalling legacy his grandfather had bequeathed the family.

'Your father, the late Judge, he was a great one for the gallows. Why some of the men who've had their last meal in that cell, where you're standing now, have told me that they were certain they were going to get off free as the air, and damn me if your old dad didn't go and put the black cap on and condemn them.'

'I have always regretted my father's reputation,' said the Bishop.

'I wouldn't worry about it now,' said the warder. 'It's the gallows would put me in a sweat if I were in your shoes.'

'I have every faith in the fairness of the court,' said the Bishop.

'They haven't been used for twenty years,' continued the warder. 'They're not safe.'

'No?' queried the Bishop. 'Is that unusual?'

'They've got the death watch beetle. You'd be lucky to get up the steps alive, if you ask me,' said the warder and shuffled off down the passage to let Luitenant Verkramp and Konstabel Els into Bottom. The interrogation was about to begin.

In spite of the fact that he was still feeling the effects of his injuries, Luitenant Verkramp was determined to apply the standard South African technique to the prisoner.

'I'll butter him up,' he told Konstabel Els, 'and make him feel I'm sympathetic and you can be the hard man and threaten him.'

'Can I use the electric-shock machine?' Els asked eagerly.

'He's too important,' said Verkramp, 'and you're not to beat him up too much either.'

'What are we going to do then?' said Els, who couldn't imagine getting a confession out of an innocent man without some violence.

'Keep him awake until he's ready to drop. I've never known it to fail.'

Luitenant Verkramp seated himself behind the desk and ordering the prisoner to be brought in, assumed what he supposed to be an air of sympathetic understanding. To the Bishop, when he entered the room, the expression on the Luitenant's face suggested only a pained and vicious hostility. In the hours that followed, this first impression proved if anything to have been over-optimistic. Luitenant Verkramp's attempts at sympathetic understanding inspired in the Bishop the conviction that he was locked alone in a room with a sadistic homosexual suffering from an overdose of several powerful hallucinatory drugs. Certainly nothing else could explain the overtures the Luitenant was making nor the distorted version of his own life which Verkramp insisted he corroborate. Everything the Bishop imagined he had done took on an entirely contrary character as seen through the eyes of Verkramp.

He had not for instance been an undergraduate in Cambridge studying theology. He had, he learnt, been indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist theory by a man whom he had previously imagined to be a leading Anglo-Catholic professor, but who had apparently been a Moscow-trained theoretician. As the hours dragged by the Bishop's faint hold on reality grew fainter. The illusions he had nourished for a lifetime slipped away and were replaced by the new certitudes his deranged interrogator insisted he subscribe to.

By the time they had arrived at the events of the previous day, the Bishop, who had eaten nothing for thirty-six hours, and who had been standing with his hands above his head for six, was prepared to admit to murdering the entire South African Police force, if doing so would allow him to sit down for five minutes.

'I shot them with a multi-barrelled rocket launcher supplied by the Chinese consul in Dar-es-Salaam,' he repeated slowly while Verkramp copied the admission down.

'Good,' said the Luitenant finally, 'that seems pretty conclusive.'

'I'm glad to hear it. Now if you don't mind I would like time to think about my future,' the Bishop said.

'I think you can safely leave that to us,' said the Luitenant. 'There's just one more matter I want to get straightened out. Why did you shoot your sister's cook?'

'I discovered he was a CIA agent,' said the Bishop, who by this time knew the lines along which Verkramp's mind was working. He had long since discovered that there was no point in arguing with the man, and since Verkramp's imagination had evidently been nurtured on spy-thrillers, this seemed the sort of explanation he would swallow.

'Oh, was he?' said Verkramp, and made a mental note to investigate the cooks of Piemburg to discover how many more were in the pay of the Americans.

By the time Verkramp had finished with him, the Bishop had decided that his only hope of escaping execution on the scaffold reserved for him by his grandfather lay in concocting a confession so absurd that it would either be thrown out of court by the judge, or allow him to plead insanity. 'I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,' he said to himself when Els came to take over the interrogation and wondered what new crimes he could add to the list he had already agreed to. Konstabel Els was glad to suggest some.

'I hear you want us to go around marrying kaffirs,' Els began. He knew he was supposed to be questioning a Communist and the only thing he knew about Communists was that they wanted white people to marry blacks.

'I can't remember having advocated it in public,' the Bishop said cautiously.

'I don't suppose you would in public,' said Els, whose own advocacy of sexual intercourse with blacks had always been undertaken in strictest privacy. 'You'd get arrested for it.'

The Bishop was puzzled. 'For what?' he asked.

'For advocating a black woman in public. What about in private?'

'It's true I have given the matter some thought.'

'Come on, admit it. You haven't just thought about it. You have done it too.'

The Bishop couldn't see much harm in admitting it. 'Well, once or twice I have raised the matter. I've brought it up at meetings of the parish council.'

'At meetings, eh?' said Els. 'Sort of group gropes?'

'I suppose you could put it that way,' said the Bishop who had never heard the expression before.

Els leered at him. 'I suppose you put it other ways too?'

'I put it to them straight, man to man,' said the Bishop, wondering what all this had to do with murdering policemen.

Konstabel Els had difficulty imagining how you could put it man to man and call it straight at the same time.

'I didn't beat about the bush.'

'I don't suppose you'd have to with men,' Els agreed.

'Oh, there were women present too,' said the Bishop. 'It's the sort of question where a woman's viewpoint often helps.'

'You can say that again.'

'Funnily enough, I found the women more receptive to the idea than the men.'

'I should think you would.'

'Of course, it's not something most people will accept at one go. I put it to them gradually, but on the whole they could see there was something to be said for it.'

'Hell,' said Els, 'you must have had some parties.'

'I hope I'm not boring you,' the Bishop said hopefully.

'I'm never bored by sex,' said Els.

'Do you mind if I take a seat?' the Bishop said on the spur of the moment, taking advantage of Els' evident interest.

'Help yourself.' Els couldn't get enough of the Bishop's tales of group gropes and similar perversions.

'Now then,' said the Bishop, when he was seated, 'where was I?'

'You were saying how the women liked it in the tail,' said Els.

'Was I really?' said the Bishop. 'How extraordinary. I had no idea.'

As the night wore on, Konstabel Els sat rapt in admiration for the prisoner. Here at last, was a man after his own heart, a man for whom there was no shame, no remorse, no regret, only a dedication to lust unequalled in Els' experience.

The difficulty for the Bishop was that his imagination was hardly adequate for the task Els set it. Faced with such rapacious curiosity, he stuck to his calling and Els listened fascinated to descriptions of midnight orgies involving chasubles and albs. Among the other invaluable pieces of information that the Konstabel picked up there were three facts which were particularly damning. The Bishop, he learned, wore a frock, possessed a rubric and owned a biretta.

'What the hell is a rubric?' Kommandant van Heerden asked him in the morning when he read the Bishop's signed confession.

'Short for rubber prick,' said Els. 'He uses it for genuflexion.' 'Does he really?' said the Kommandant and read the astonishing document through for the second time. If half of what the Bishop had confessed to was true, thought van Heerden, the sod should have been hanged years ago.