Vicious Circle (38 page)

‘Ready or not, here I come!’ Congo said as he got into position behind Carl.

‘No…’ Carl blubbered, and then he screamed. It was a sound of utmost anguish. Each of the waiting men handed their entrance fee to Lucas, like the spectators at a ball game, and then they crowded into the cell behind the pair on the bunk. Their voices were thick with lust and excitement. One of them sang out, ‘Go, Congo! Go, go, go!’

The others laughed and took up the refrain.

‘Go, Congo, go!’

Suddenly Congo arched his back, threw back his head and gave a cry like a bull moose in rut. The man behind him helped him off, and then immediately took his place. Carl screamed again.

‘My Lordy, but he do sing sweet,’ said the third man in the line.

By the time the fifth man came over him Carl was no longer screaming. When the last man was finished, he shook his head sorrowfully as he pulled away.

‘Seems to me like he gone and died on us, man.’

Congo had been resting on the bunk beside Carl. Now he stood up and said, ‘Naw, he still breathing. If he breathing, he still ripe for love.’ He stepped up behind Carl once more.

The trusty orderly from the sick bay had been invited to the party in both his personal and professional capacity. At last he came forward in his professional role and felt for Carl’s pulse under his chin at the carotid artery.

‘This old boy had enough for tonight. Help me get him downstairs and he will be ready for some more fun come two, three weeks.’

*

By dawn Carl was in a critical condition from shock and blood loss. The doctor from headquarters was called in. He ordered Carl to be moved to the main medical facility at Huntsville State Penitentiary.

In the operating theatre Carl’s lower abdominal cavity was aspirated by suction pump and almost two litres of blood and human semen were removed from inside him. Then the physician sutured the torn and leaking blood vessels and surgically repaired the injuries to his lower colon and finally administered three whole litres of blood by transfusion.

During the time he was in the Huntsville sanatorium Carl was allowed to make telephone calls and receive visitors. He phoned the Carson National Bank in Houston and asked his account manager to visit him. Carl was an important client, so the account manager responded promptly.

Carl had worked for his adoptive father and the Bannock Oil company for two years and two months before his arrest. At the beginning his salary had been set by Henry at a handsome one hundred and ten thousand dollars a month. Henry was a firm believer in both the carrot and the stick. He also believed that his only son deserved to be treated like royalty.

To Henry’s amazement and deep gratification Carl almost immediately displayed extraordinary business acumen far beyond that which Henry had expected from one of his age and experience. By the end of the first year Henry realized with immense pride that Carl was a financial genius whose natural endowments matched and in some cases exceeded his own. Carl soon demonstrated an uncanny ability to smell profits from as far down wind as a hungry hyena can smell a rotting carcass. Carl’s salary climbed steeply as his talents unfolded and blossomed. By the end of his second year he had earned his place on the board of Bannock Oil, and his salary and his director’s fees totalled in excess of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month. The Henry Bannock Family Trust in terms of its trust deed had been obligated to pay him out an additional sum three times greater than the amount of his personal earnings. The consequences of his father’s largesse were that even after meticulously paying his taxes Carl had amassed a credit balance of well over five million dollars, so the account manager responded promptly.

On the sixth day Carl was sufficiently recovered from his rectal injuries to be transferred from Huntsville back to the sick bay in the Holloway unit. He took with him the new cheque book which his account manager had provided. From the sick bay Carl was able to get a message to Lucas Heller via the medical orderly. The message was that Lucas should visit him if he wished to learn something to his benefit.

Lucas condescended to come downstairs to see Carl, mainly for the opportunity to mock him as he lay in bed.

To get the conversation rolling, and as a token of his good faith, Carl handed Lucas a cash cheque for $5,000 drawn on the Carson National Bank. Lucas read the figures with awe. He had seldom had that much money in his hands at one time, but experience had taught him not to place his trust in fairy godmothers. He refused to believe this stroke of fortune until he had an opportunity to hurry into town and present the cheque at the local branch of the bank.

The cashier honoured it without a quibble. The scales fell from the eyes of Lucas Heller and he became a believer. He rushed back to the Holloway unit and visited Carl again. On this occasion his manners were deeply deferential and obsequious.

Carl ordered him next to carry a message to Johnny Congo on death row. Carl had by now fully appraised all the underlying political structures of the Holloway unit. He had learned that Johnny Congo wielded enormous influence throughout the prison. Like some grotesque man-eating spider he sat at the centre of his web and manipulated the strands that reached as far as the warden’s office.

The warden had come to rely heavily on Congo to keep order among the prison inmates. If Johnny passed the word for ‘Peace and cooperation’ then the administration of the unit was able to maintain some semblance of order in the midst of a system which seemed specifically designed to produce chaos.

However, if Johnny Congo said ‘Riot!’ then fires broke out throughout the unit; guards were knifed in the workshops, or in the galleries or on the catwalks; the inmates seized control of the dining halls and the prison yard. They broke up the furniture and fittings. They murdered a few of their companions to work off old grudges or in obedience to Johnny Congo’s orders. They hurled missiles and chanted abuse at the guards, until the National Guard was called out in full riot gear, and the warden’s performance ratings plummeted.

Johnny Congo had won special privileges from the administration for his cooperation. He had his pick of the prettiest new prisoners as soon as they arrived in the unit, as Carl had experienced at first hand. His cell was never searched, so his stash of drugs and other luxuries was inviolate. He was even allowed to have a telephone in his cell so he was able to communicate with his contacts and criminal associates in the outside world. His death sentence was blocked somewhere in the system; rumour was that the state governor had seen to that. The smart money was betting that Johnny would die of old age without any help from the man with the lethal needle in the white-tiled execution chamber.

If any person incurred Johnny Congo’s displeasure it was only a matter of days before the issue was terminally settled with the blade of a knife in the prison yard, or in the small hours of the morning in the privacy of the offender’s own cell, which would have been conveniently left unlocked by the Level Supervisor.

It was bruited abroad that Johnny Congo’s influence reached out far beyond the prison walls. It was believed that he had maintained strong ties with criminal syndicates and gangs in all of Texas and the surrounding states. For a very reasonable price he could fix things in cities as far off as San Diego and Frisco.

It took Lucas Heller almost a week to set up the meeting between Carl and Johnny Congo, but finally the office of the supervisor of death row was put at their disposal, and the two of them came together at three o’clock on a Sunday morning when the rest of the unit had been locked down for the night. The Level Supervisor and four of his guards waited outside the door, but did not interfere.

Once Carl and Congo were alone they assessed each other warily, like two black-maned lions from rival prides meeting in disputed territory on the African veld. By this time Congo had learned that Carl was not just a pretty face. He knew that Carl was Henry Bannock’s son, and he knew the power and wealth of the Bannock Oil Corporation.

‘You wanna talk with me, white boy?’

‘I need your protection, Mr Congo.’ Carl wasted no time.

‘You can bet your sweet ass you do, else sure enough it ain’t gonna be sweet or pretty much longer. But why should I want to protect you?’

‘I can pay you.’

‘Yeah, man, that might make me wanna do it. But how much money we talking about here, boy?’

‘You tell me, sir.’

Congo picked his nose while he pondered the question. Finally he examined the crust of dried mucus he had retrieved from his left nostril and flicked it off his finger, before he stated his price. ‘Five thousand dollars each and every month, in ones and fives delivered here in Holloway. Ain’t much good to me on the outside.’ He had set the figure outrageously high, expecting Carl to bargain.

‘That figure is ridiculous, Mr Congo,’ Carl said, and Johnny Congo bridled. His fists clenched into mighty black hams. ‘For a man of your stature and exalted position I would expect to pay ten or even fifteen thousand dollars a month.’

Johnny Congo blinked and his fists unfolded. He began to smile in a fatherly manner. ‘I hear you, white boy, and I like what I hear. Fifteen thou’ sounds just about right to me.’

‘I am sure I will be able to arrange the delivery route from my bank to wherever you want it. Just tell me what I must do and I will do it. My hand on it, sir.’

Congo took the proffered hand and as he shook it he rumbled, ‘There is more than your hand on it, boy. Your sweet life is on it.’

‘I understand that, Mr Congo. However, if you really want to make a great deal of money we should go into business together.’

‘What kind of business?’ Congo stopped just short of scoffing. ‘Lay it on me, white boy.’

Carl spoke for the next forty minutes and Congo leaned forward and listened almost without interruption. By the end of that time he was grinning and his eyes were shining.

‘How do I know you going to deliver, boy?’ he asked at last.

‘If I don’t, then you can withdraw your protection, Mr Congo.’

It was a momentous meeting out of which would emerge an unholy alliance; a crooked young genius combining his talents with those of a ruthless monster who wielded the powers of life and death. Both men were psychopaths; totally lacking compassion, scruples or remorse.

Over the following years the profits of their various enterprises, initially conceived by Carl and then fostered by Johnny Congo, were first laundered and sanitized. Johnny’s friends on the outside were eager to assist in this process. After the money was clean it was distributed to Carl personally in the form of dividends and director’s fees through a company in the British Virgin Islands that Carl had set up while he was still at Princeton.

The value of the end receipts was quadrupled by the Henry Bannock Family Trust. Finally, the grand total was shared by Carl and Johnny Congo and secreted in numbered bank accounts in Hong Kong, Moscow, Singapore and other cities around the globe where even the muscled arm of the US Internal Revenue Service could not reach.

To facilitate the operation of their enterprises both in and outside of the prison it soon became necessary for Carl and Johnny to take in Marco Merkowski, the warden of the Holloway Correctional Unit, as a sleeping partner. Once they had involved him in his first illegal scheme Marco found himself completely in the thrall of Carl Bannock and Johnny Congo.

*

Carl was moved from the sixth level of the unit to the first level, where jail trusties and other inmates with unblemished records of good behaviour were accommodated. The cell that Carl was allocated was three times the size of his old one on the sixth level. Carl was provided with a television set and his own private telephone.

The telephone was an essential element in the management of the business interests of the alliance. Fortuitously, Carl was working into a raging bull market. All his former contacts were still in place and his instincts for profit were unimpaired.

There was still a great deal of time in his unhurried prison days for Carl to turn his fecund mind to planning for the future. By this time he had passed over five years in detention. His prison record was spotless; Warden Merkowski had taken care of that. The original minimum sentence of fifteen years handed down by Judge Chamberlain had been reduced on appeal to a minimum of twelve years. Carl had nearly reached the halfway mark. He was still only thirty-one years old, a cunning street-smart multimillionaire, eager to take on the world on his own terms as soon as he stepped out of the gates of the Holloway Correctional Unit.

Through his own and Johnny Congo’s multitudinous outside contacts Carl was kept fully informed of his father’s movements, and the movements of all the other beneficiaries of the Henry Bannock Family Trust.

Most unfortunately for Carl’s ultimate financial aspirations, his father had met a professional women’s tennis champion thirty years his junior, considerably younger than Carl Bannock himself. Carl had seen photographs of this woman. Her name was Hazel Nelson and she was blonde, athletic and lovely. Only a few months after meeting, his father and Hazel were married in a splendid wedding ceremony at the Forest Drive residence in Houston. Less than a year later Hazel gave birth to a girl they named Cayla. Henry’s record of fathering only female offspring remained intact. From Carl’s point of view, this awkward new adventure of his father’s had added two more names to the role of beneficiaries of the Henry Bannock Family Trust.

The full list including Carl himself now amounted to a total of seven persons: Henry Bannock and Hazel Bannock and her infant daughter Cayla; Carl’s mother Marlene Imelda Bannock, who had retained his name after Henry had divorced her; and Carl’s two half-sisters, Sacha Jean and Bryoni Lee. Using the market value of the Bannock Oil Corporation stock as quoted on the NY Stock Exchange as a guide, Carl estimated the present total value of the assets of the Henry Bannock Family Trust to be in the region of $111 billion. Carl fiercely resented having to share even that vast sum with five or six other persons.