The next day never came for Mickey the Poet. Some time during the following twenty-four hours Mickey had attached a strip of towel to his bedstead and the other around his neck and strangled himself. The incredulity with which this was greeted stopped the trial while evidence was heard of Mickey’s last hours. The shock of his death was only surpassed by the wonder of its achievement. The defence lawyers produced a statement in which Mickey complained of electric shocks, beatings, and frequent threats that he would be thrown from a high window in Balthazar Buildings. Mickey, it seemed, had demanded to see, as was his right, the Inspector of Detainees, but this had not happened. He had then, it was alleged, gone to bed, tied the towel around his neck and choked himself. Sergeant Betty Paine was called to the witness box to explain why the Inspector had not called. Sergeant Paine’s job was to take down statements from prisoners when they complained that they had been tortured and, as she added charmingly with a little flick of her blonde head, to hand this to the interrogator so that he might determine whether indeed there was a case for reporting the complaint to the Inspector of Detainees. However, when the Inspector arrived he was told by Sergeant Paine that the prisoner, Michael Yates, was ‘out’. The judge was puzzled by this and asked for the meaning of the word ‘out’. Did Sergeant Paine mean ‘out’ as in ‘out for the count,’ or ‘out for lunch’, or ‘out of order’? Or perhaps ‘out like a light’? Presumably she did not mean ‘out to tea’ or ‘out on the town’. There was laughter in court at this and the judge threatened to clear the galleries.

Sergeant Paine replied that political prisoners were the responsibility of the Security Police who were interrogating them. The police held the keys to the cell and entrance was by permission only, one could not simply go barging into a detainee’s cell unannounced or uninvited at any old hour of the night, and although it was true that the officer in charge had given permission for the Inspector of Detainees to call on Yates, as it happened she did not have the keys that night and there was nothing she could do. Rather than hurt the Inspector’s feelings she had told him that Yates was ‘out’. Sergeant Paine told the court that she dreaded such requests and did her best to please, she even kept a sign on her desk which read: ‘Please don’t ask to see the prisoners as a refusal may offend…’ Well, the judge enquired, if the Inspector of Detainees had not seen the prisoner, then presumably Paine had done so, since she had taken down his statement on her Brother electric typewriter. Did he strike her as someone who had been assaulted by interrogating officers? She gave a rather flustered glance desperately towards what were known as the choir stalls, the front benches of the court where the prosecution witnesses from the police sat. A security branch man was shaking his head vigorously at her. The defence counsel protested, claiming that the witness was being prompted from the wings. Sergeant Paine shrilly denied the charge and burst into tears and the judge cautioned the defence for hectoring the witness and permitted her to step down.

And that was the end of the inquiry into the strange death of Mickey the Poet.

The next day Kipsel turned state witness and gave his evidence in a hoarse whisper. He took all the blame on himself: he had persuaded Mickey the Poet to drive him, it was his uncle who ran the compound where the explosive store was situated, it was he who persuaded Looksmart to draw the map of the township and it was through her love for him that Magdalena had allowed herself to be persuaded to take part in the operation. And Zandrotti? Why, he hadn’t really been involved at all, he’d merely winked, smiled and sang a couple of verses of the National Anthem.

Kipsel was given a suspended sentence and discharged.

While he was giving evidence to a hushed courtroom, Magdalena turned her back on him and Zandrotti shouted angrily that he should keep his explanations to himself, better a bungling saboteur than a traitor. For this he was removed to the cells beneath the court room.

He received five years.

Magdalena was given three.

A few weeks later, after apparently bribing a wardress, and disguised as a nun, Magdalena escaped from jail and fled across the border. The disguise she affected led to a tremendous row between Church and State. President Bubé in a warmly received speech to his Party Congress warned that the Roman danger was growing, and called on the Pope’s men and women to put their house in order. He hinted at Church connivance in Magdalena’s escape and its tacit support of terrorist groups. Bishop Blashford, speaking for the Church, responded by ordering a central register of all working nuns, ‘genuine sisters’ as he called them and disclaimed any connection between the renegade Magdalena and the true Brides of Christ who, he said angrily, dedicated their lives to serving God and their fellow men and took no part in politics. At the same time he warned that violent opposition to the Regime would continue while they maintained their hideous racial policies. He took the occasion for attacking as well their authoritarian methods of birth control, the dumping of unwanted people in remote camps in the veld, and the crass folly and blatant inhumanity of the Regime’s political arrangements. He drew parallels with Nazi Germany and went so far as to compare President Bubé with Hitler, a time-honoured insult and much appreciated throughout the country where Blashford earned enthusiastic praise from the anti-Regime opposition but equally delighted President Bubé’s followers, so much so that in the traditional response he publicly thanked the good Bishop for the compliment, since after all Hitler had been a strong man, proud of his people and his country. Both men came out of the confrontation with their public prestige much enhanced and behind the scenes it was said they were both good friends and often went fishing together.

The anarchist’s eyes were red-flecked milky pools surrounding pupils dark and hard as stones. And I saw in my dream how hesitantly Blanchaille approached him, not knowing what his reception was likely to be at the hands of his old friend not seen for so long, so cruelly used, for after that terrible trial it had been Zandrotti alone who faced the assaults of his jailers, cruelties not refined but oafish, coarse, persistently callous, and above all, juvenile. The young warders had waged a campaign of humiliation against him, Blanchaille heard on his weekly visits to the prison; they would apple-pie his bed, piss on his cigarettes replacing them limp and wet in the pack, tear pages from the books he was reading and allocate him cells from which he could hear the singing of the condemned men on death row. Lovely singing it was too, Zandrotti told him, day and night, right up to the last moment, this male voice choir of killers waiting for the end. They would sing special requests, the warders joked with Zandrotti. It had been his idea of hell, Zandrotti told Blanchaille afterwards when he was free, to be locked in a small room with the intellectual equivalent of the police rugby team. Beside that horror the fires of conventional Roman hell cooled to an inviting glow.

Blanchaille drove him to the airport after his release, the anarchist clutching a few clothes, a little cash and an exit visa which ensured he would depart from the country forever within forty-eight hours. ‘They opened a little gate in the big prison gate and pushed me out clutching my money, in this badly fitting blue suit, carrying my passport and an exit permit and told me, God bless, old fellow. God bless! Can you believe that?’ All he wanted on the road to the airport was news. He had none in the years inside. He greeted the news that Magdalena was regarded as dangerous by the Regime with a whistle of appreciation. But he was amazed to learn that Kipsel was still alive, had not done the expected and hanged himself, or shot himself.