In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

YOU WERE THE GUN

Kgosi Mampuru II Management Area

Pretoria, South Africa

The woman with short auburn hair and deeply lined skin tore the cellophane off another pack of Camel cigarettes, unwrapped the foil, and dumped the contents onto a pile she had created on the wooden bench beside her. Between her feet was a large woven polypropylene bag filled with bulk packages, including toilet paper and Dial soap.

“They get nothing here,” she explained, not looking up.

“It’s unbelievable,” Klay agreed.

He was sitting opposite her in the waiting room at the notorious Kgosi Mampuru II prison, formerly Pretoria Central Prison, renamed for the nineteenth-century king (kgosi) who fought colonial domination and was hanged on the prison site—twice. The benches had welded rebar for legs, screws in the wood soldered tight, everything smoothed to a gloss by generations of visitors.

The woman got out a box of plastic baggies and began filling them with loose cigarettes. She worked steadily, taking each baggie to its limit, two rows wide, stretching the plastic to near breaking before sealing it. She set each filled bag aside and started on another.

“You’re getting faster,” Klay said.

She looked up. “What’re you, some kind of packing engineer, timing me?”

“I’m looking to enter you in the cigarette Olympics, if you’re interested,” Klay replied.

“Yeah, right.”

She kept at it. The hard part, he saw, was sealing a full baggie without crushing its contents.

“You want some help?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

They worked together. Camels. Peter Stuyvesants. Marlboros. More visitors arrived, taking seats on benches around them. The newcomers each with their own items they’d brought, their own rituals. The smell of home cooking filled the room. A man tapped his foot. A woman began to knit.

“They get nothing,” the woman said again. “The noise is awful. There’s no sleeping at night. He can only sleep in the daytime when the doors are open. But they’re always looking in at you, you don’t know what they want, so you can’t sleep then, either.”

Klay thought of his father. Jack Klay was currently at USP Coleman in Sumterville, Florida. He wondered how he slept at night.

After an hour they called everyone up to a window and handed each of them a large blue card sheathed in plastic bearing a prisoner’s name, date of birth, and two fingerprints. At the bottom of each card was a list of charges and court dates.

“When I was a girl, they gave me a card to check out library books,” the woman said. “Now it’s my husband.” She lit a cigarette. “Maybe mine knows him,” she added, and stole a glance at Klay’s card. She drew a quick breath. Without looking at Klay again, she gathered her things and hurried away. Klay looked down at his blue card. Ras Botha’s charges filled the card front and back and were scrawled vertically along the card’s edges in print too small to read.

Klay followed the other visitors and got in a long line for a metal detector and body search. The cigarette woman was three people ahead of him. When their line turned a corner Klay looked up, intending to catch her eye again, but she stared out a small window instead.

A hand touched Klay’s shoulder. “You don’t have to wait in line, Mr. Klay,” a guard said. “He’s expecting you.”

The cigarette woman shot him a last, appraising look as he walked past her, around the metal detector, and into the prison. The guard, whose name was Jacob, was about Klay’s size, dressed in a brown uniform, olive web belt, and black laced boots, but he was in poor condition and breathed heavily on the long walk, which took them up and down poorly lit stairwells and through long hallways whose walls were painted lemon yellow.

They passed men in orange prison uniforms stamped with “corrections” in circles, like leopard spots, working brooms and mop buckets. Several, he noticed, had the number twenty-six tattooed on their right hands. The prisoners paused as Klay approached, checked out his shoes, his watch, and his size. Some gave him chin juts and eye fucks. Others looked right through him.

“Anyone famous in here?” Klay asked as they walked.

“Some.”

Jacob named a few prisoners. Klay looked them up later. An Apartheid-era assassin. A billionaire mob boss from the Czech Republic. A pair of murdering twin brothers.

“All his friends,” Jacob said.

Jacob led Klay into an office marked “Warden.” The warden was not in, a receptionist declared. Jacob looked at Klay. “Botha flu,” he said, and opened the warden’s door.

Inside, Ras Botha was seated at a small conference table. Jacob indicated for Klay to sit at one end, across from Botha. Then he pulled a chair out for himself, took it across the room, and sat down behind Klay, against the wall.

“So, you do have some balls of your own,” Botha said. “I’m glad to see it.”

Botha wore blue jeans and a black golf shirt, a dive watch, and a gold wedding ring. On the table in front of him were two oranges loosely wrapped in a paper towel. He’s lost weight, was Klay’s first thought. Lines in Botha’s forehead had grown deeper than Klay remembered, and there was a cut over his left eye.

“I’m here to get your side of things,” Klay said.

“That right?” Botha licked his lower lip in a way that drew his cheeks in so far Klay wondered if he was missing his bottom teeth. Maybe he was. Klay hadn’t noticed before.

“I’m a big man in here. Privileges,” Botha said and nodded toward his feet. He wore hiking boots. “No prison shoes.” He gestured to his clothes. “No fucking jumpsuit.” He looked over Klay’s shoulder at Jacob in case Jacob was thinking of making him wear a fucking jumpsuit. Klay turned, too. Jacob didn’t appear to be thinking about Botha’s clothing. He was studying a magazine.

Botha rolled an orange across the table. “For you,” he said.

Klay watched the orange roll toward him. It stopped beside his notebook.

Botha waited, but Klay did not touch