Johnny grinned. ‘I never knew him but I hate the old shit as much as you do. They should feed him to the pigs the way you did to his brats.’
‘Unfortunately, my father built himself a big marble temple on top of a hill where he will lie for ever like Napoleon, stuffed and embalmed.’
‘That’s great, white boy. As soon as they turn you loose you should go up there and piss on him.’
Carl whooped with mirth. ‘Great idea! While I am about it I might go all the way and curl out a turd on his head.’
‘Did you know that this would happen when you sent him the video? Did you know that it would kill the old bastard?’ Johnny Congo asked.
‘Of course I did!’ Carl gloated. ‘Didn’t you know, man? I have some weird powers. My father kept the ashes of all the filthy Jews he burned in the gas ovens in Bergen-Belsen, and on the day I was born he rubbed a pinch of those ashes on my head.’
Johnny stopped grinning and looked uneasy. ‘Don’t talk that sort of crap to me, man. It gives me the shits.’
‘I am telling you, Johnny. Voodoo stuff, man! The evil eye! I got the evil eye.’ Carl opened his eyes wide and stared at Johnny Congo. ‘I can change you into a toad. Do you want to change into a toad, Johnny? Just look into my eyes.’ Carl’s face contorted into a horrible rictus and he rolled his eyes.
‘Cut that out, man, I’m warning you. Stop fooling around with that sort of stuff.’ Johnny jumped off his bunk and went to the barred window. He deliberately turned his back on Johnny and stared out at the tiny wedge of sky that passed for a view in Holloway. ‘I’m warning you! Don’t make me mad.’
‘Your mother made you mad, Johnny. She made you mad when she dropped you on your head when you were a baby.’ Johnny spun around from the window and glared at him.
‘You leave my mother out of this, white boy.’ Carl knew that this time it was not an endearment. Carl also knew just how far he could press his luck with him, and he knew that he had reached the absolute limit.
‘Come on, Johnny.’ Carl held up both hands in surrender. ‘I’m your friend, remember? You told me I give you the best blow jobs you ever had. I don’t have any voodoo powers. I love you, man. I was just kidding around, man.’
‘Well, don’t kid around about my mother.’ Johnny had lost the main theme of the discussion. ‘She was a saint, man. I’m telling you.’ He was only marginally mollified.
‘And I believe you, Johnny. You showed me her picture, remember? She looked pretty damn saintly to me.’ He changed the subject quickly. ‘Just think of this. You and me, we set out to get those three bitch relatives of mine and we got more than that. We got the main man as well. I brought down my own daddy. How cool is that?’
‘That’s cool. That’s cool as a pound of shit in a deep freeze.’ Johnny turned back from the window. He was smiling again.
‘We got more than half of them with one punch. There are only two left now; my old man’s bride and her bastard brat. Only two more to go down and the money is all mine.’
‘How much is it, Carl baby?’ Johnny had forgotten and forgiven the affront to his sainted mother’s memory. ‘Tell me how much money you going to get, man.’
‘One day soon I am going to get me fifty billion green frogskins out of that old trust, Johnny baby.’
Johnny rolled his eyes theatrically. ‘Man, that’s so much money I still can’t get my head around it. Tell me how much it is in a way that I can understand it. Tell me the stuff about the motor cars.’
Carl thought for a moment. ‘Well, let me put it this way, Johnny. I will have enough money to buy every single motor car in the whole of the US of A.’
Johnny rolled his eyes as though he was hearing it for the first time. ‘Awesome, man, Carl baby. That’s just plain awesome!’ Johnny Congo waggled his head and giggled like a teenage girl. It always took Carl by surprise when he did that.
‘And I tell you something else. If one of my good friends is standing beside me when that all goes down he is going to get himself one – or ten – truckloads of those green goodies.’
‘I’ll be right there beside you, Carl baby, all the way.’ Then Johnny’s face puckered up into a bulldog frown. ‘That is unless the man don’t give me the hot needle first.’
The buoyant mood between them changed swiftly. Earlier that week Johnny Congo’s lawyer had informed him that his appeal against the death sentence had finally reached the Supreme Court, and that in all probability the judgement would be handed down within the next eighteen months. Up to this stage the appeal seemed to have become totally bogged down in the legal system. As the years passed Johnny Congo had settled into a state of complacency. He had come to believe that his comfortable existence within the walls of the Holloway Correctional Unit would continue for the tenure of his natural life.
But now abruptly the spectral figure of the executioner with his dreaded needle had reappeared on Johnny’s horizon and was closing in on him, slowly but inexorably.
He had long ago been found guilty in the High Court of Texas of multiple murders with aggravating circumstances. To date the exact number of his capital convictions was twelve. The state prosecutor had decided that this was sufficient to his purpose. However, in the event that this was not the case and that Johnny somehow managed to wriggle off his hook, he had dockets for a further twenty-eight cases of murder that he could bring against Johnny at any time in the future.
Texas law recognized nine capital felonies. As he had boasted to Carl Bannock on more than one occasion, Johnny had qualified for five out of the nine. They had convicted him of straight murder; for sexually aggravated murder because sometimes Johnny liked to spice up the job; and of murder for remuneration which had been Johnny’s main profession after he had completed his two tours of duty with the US Marine Corps. They had also got him for multiple killings, which were inevitable in his line of business, and murder in the course of a prison escape. In his case the jail break had not been a success.
As Johnny very reasonably complained to Carl, ‘How they expect anyone to break out of here without blowin’ somebody away? It’s just downright illogical, man.’
All these birds of his were coming home to roost, and Johnny’s birds were all vultures. He was a worried man.
‘Calm down, Blackbird. Don’t worry,’ Carl counselled him.
‘Soon as anybody tells me “Don’t worry”, that’s when I really start worrying myself to death, man.’
‘We have gotten Marco and half the guards eating out of our hands. When the time comes to spring you they will lay down the red carpet for you to waltz out through the gates without getting your shoes dirty.’
‘When is that going to happen, man?’ Johnny insisted.
‘They are not going to hit you with the needle for another two years, like your lawyer says. So we have got that long at least,’ Carl explained. ‘In ten months’ time my own jail time ends, and I am out of here. We already have everything set up. As soon as I am released I will get everything else set up on the outside. We will make it all infallible.’
‘So then we will go into business with each other on the outside, just like we done in here.’
‘You can bet your sweet ass.’
‘I don’t know, Carl.’ Johnny looked dubious. ‘I have been thinking about this. When I get out I’ll be a marked man. With twelve murder raps on my score card the man will put a million dollars on my head, and they will have wanted posters stuck up on every wall in Texas and across the whole US of A. With a face like mine people are going to recognize me pretty damn easily. I’ll have every bounty hunter in the northern hemisphere after me.’ Gloomily Johnny reeled off the list of his woes. ‘Where am I going to hide?’ They were both silenced by the question.
‘Where’re you from, Johnny?’ Carl demanded suddenly, and Johnny stared at him blankly.
‘That’s a stupid question. I told you I’m from Nacogdoches, the toughest town in the entire Lone Star State, didn’t I?’
‘I mean where
were you born? You don’t speak like you were born in Texas.’
‘I was born in Africa, man.’
‘Whereabouts in Africa?’
‘What you think my name is, white boy?’ Johnny cheered up and grinned.
‘Johnny.’
‘Johnny who?’
‘Johnny Congo.’
‘Right on, man! Johnny Congo. That’s me. My grandpappy owned half the entire country. He were the paranormal chief of the whole damn place.’
‘Do you mean the paramount chief?’
‘Whatever, man. He was the king. He had five hundred wives, man. That’s as much a king as anybody can get!’
‘Do you speak the language?’ Carl asked.
‘My mammy taught me well. There are two languages. Inhutu is the language of where I come from. And Swahili is the lingo of all of East Africa. I speak them both.’
‘Why did your father decide to leave Africa, Johnny?’
‘When my grandpappy died my father was his son number twenty-six. He got himself the hell out of there before his big brother, who was son number one, could put him in a pot and cook him for dinner. Where I come from we don’t piss around. We are real mean bastards, I tell you, man. The Congo is a big country. It has been split up into three or four separate countries.’
‘Which one do you come from, Johnny? Where were you born, man?’
‘My country is called Kazundu.’
‘How do you spell that?’
‘Shit, I don’t know. I was only born there, white boy. I didn’t discover the place.’
Suddenly there was a rattle of keys on the steel bars of the cell, and Carl stood up.
‘It’s time for me to go,’ he said with resignation. With the influence that the two of them wielded in the institution, they had been able to meet every night from midnight to three a.m. Every visit cost them a few thousand dollars in bribes. Neither of them grudged the money. Over the long period of their association Johnny had become a multimillionaire, carried to those heights on the back of Carl’s financial smarts.
Apart from Carl, Johnny had been deprived of many other forms of convivial, intimate and sympathetic human contact. The cells on death row were arranged so that the inmates were unable to see each other. Their only contact was verbal, shouting to each other down the echoing gallery.
Johnny Congo had been a certifiably crazy psychopath even before he was jailed. Without the benefit of Carl’s company over the past nine years he would most likely have become a suicide or a raving lunatic.
On the other hand, Carl’s prison routine as a trusty was relatively easy. He was allowed four hours a day in the exercise yard where his contact with other sub-humans was, if anything, overly unrestricted.
He was allowed visitors twice a week, though nobody from the outside came to visit him, unless it was his bank manager. Once Carl had numbered his friends in their hundreds, but now he had none, other than Johnny Congo. The notoriety of his crimes had placed the mark of the Beast on his forehead for all the world to see. He had been shunned and abandoned by everybody outside of Holloway.
However, Carl had a deep-seated need of human contact, of sycophants to flock around him and tell him what a marvellous person he really was. He knew that when he left prison he would have to buy his friends, or seek them in the ranks of the outcasts from society wherein he now found himself numbered.
Suddenly the idea of Africa was very attractive. His father had taken him on a hunting safari to that land when he was sixteen. He had killed over fifty wild animals, and had sex with a number of Maasai and Samburu girls. He had enjoyed it all immensely.
*
The two guards who picked Carl up from Johnny Congo’s cell led him back through the security gates and scanners to his own cell on the ground floor. Carl palmed a roll of hundred dollar bills to the senior officer who winked at him and then locked him down for the rest of the night.
Even at this late hour Carl could not sleep. Restlessly he roamed around his cell. He was excited and his imagination was sparking. He did not know why he had fired the question at Johnny Congo regarding his place of birth. The idea had sprung into his mind as though it had always been there, lying concealed until the right moment. He accepted it unquestioningly as further proof of his own natural genius.
He and Johnny needed a refuge, a fortress in which they would be safe from the enemies that surrounded them. For both of them America was now an exceedingly hostile place. They needed to find another more congenial country as a haven from which they could operate.
Carl stopped in front of his desk, which was concealed behind a curtain in the back corner of his cell. He sat down and switched on his computer. As soon as the screen came alive he typed in the name ‘Kazundu’ and he hit the Google search key.
Within seconds the page filled with rows of data and the legend at the head of the page read, ‘About 32,000,000 results’. Carl’s eyes raced down the screen as the facts sprang out at him. The descriptions of the country were overwhelmingly inauspicious.
Kazundu was the smallest sovereign country on the African continent. In extent it covered about 3,500 square miles; roughly half the size of Wales or the American state of New Jersey. Its total population was estimated at a quarter of a million. There had never been an official census.
It was also the poorest country on the African continent with a gross domestic product per capita of $100 per annum. Carl whistled softly. ‘Each of those poor suckers is pulling down less than $10 per month! What would ten million dollars buy out there?’ he asked himself in an awed whisper. ‘The answer, my dear friends, is it would probably buy the whole damned country.’
Carl went on scanning the information on his screen, and he learned that Kazundu was situated on the north-western shore of Lake Tanganyika, like a tiny bush-tick clinging to the belly of the great elephantine mass of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Lake Tanganyika is a vast inland sea. It is one of the longest and deepest lakes in the world, with a north to south length of over four hundred miles. On average it is thirty miles wide. Kazundu had a lake frontage of a mere twenty-two miles. Fishing and primitive agriculture were its only sources of income and sustenance.
Back in the dark days of the Arab slave traders it had been an important link in the chain of trading posts that led down to the shores of the Indian Ocean to the east. Slaves captured in the interior of the Congo were held there in barracoons before being shipped in Arab dhows across the lake to Ujiji, and thence down to the coast.
In AD 1680, at the height of the traffic in human beings, the Sultan of Oman constructed a castle on a high promontory of a rocky cliff overlooking the lake. The slave-trading harbour nestled in the small inlet below the cliff.
When the Arabs were driven out of the Great African Lake districts by the European colonists and the anti-slavery forces of France and Great Britain, the paramount chief of the local Inhutu tribe moved with his entire court and harem into the abandoned castle of Kazundu. His heirs had been ensconced there ever since.
The present ruler of Kazundu was the hereditary King Justin Kikuu Tembo XII. The Swahili name translated as Great Elephant. His portrait revealed him to be an impressively large man with a sombre expression, a scraggly grey beard and an enormous paunch that sagged over his kilt of leopard tails. On his head he wore a turban of leopard skin, and he sat on a throne of elephant tusks. He was surrounded by his multitudinous wives and his bodyguard of five uniformed Askari armed with automatic rifles.
According to the numerous derogatory comments on the internet, he ruled the tiny state with a high hand, unencumbered by such modern eccentricities as parliaments and elections. He was treated by the rulers of the surrounding countries with benign indifference. None of them had ever shown much interest in wresting the insalubrious little country out of King Justin’s hands. His father had been a close associate of General Idi Amin in Uganda, and he was an ardent admirer of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
Carl cl
icked on a collection of pictures and photographs of the kingdom. There were many views of the lake shore and the mountainous and densely forested land that rose beyond it. The settings were splendid and the panoramas across the lake were magnificent, wild and barbaric. White-headed fish eagles circled high above the creamy beaches, and lines of pink flamingos undulated low across the lustrous lake waters.
There were shots of the airport that had been built by South African Airways to attract the tourists who never came. The buildings were now abandoned and derelict, but the runway which ran parallel to the lake shore looked as though it was still serviceable.
The castle was built in the Indo-Islamic style. Elegant minarets rose above the formidable walls. The gateways were curlicue shaped, and the windows were covered with fretwork panels. Photographs of the interior depicted spacious and lofty public rooms. The walls were covered with glazed ceramic tiles in shades of blue ranging from azure to indigo and ultramarine. These were overlaid with verses from the Koran in black serpentine Arabic script.
These state rooms contrasted sharply with the dingy cellars and dungeons where the slaves had once been chained.
Carl Bannock had difficulty restraining himself and his ambitions until he could resume his interrupted discussion with Johnny Congo. As soon as the two of them were alone again he picked up their discussion at the point it had been interrupted.
‘You remember what we were talking about last time, Johnny my man?’
‘I sure do, Carl baby.’ Johnny grinned. ‘I was telling you how my daddy and all the family had to get the hell out of Kazundu before my mother-loving uncle ate us.’
‘What was your uncle’s name?’
‘Justin Kikuu Tembo.’
‘So your name isn’t really Congo, is it?’
‘My daddy changed it to Congo when we reached Texas, but before that it was also Kikuu Tembo. People here in the US can’t get their stupid tongues around my real name, man.’
‘How would you like to change back to King John Kikuu Tembo?’ Johnny blinked and then began to chortle.