Those officers in the Department of Corrections whose literary tastes tend towards the moister, more urgent arts would have been hard-pressed last weekend to stifle a small shriek of desire when they discovered that Anaïs Nin had escaped from C-Max prison in Pretoria, the bigamist and writer of elegant filth having smeared herself with Vaseline and slithered to freedom through a narrow slit.
The pillow-biting, however, would have been short-lived, an emergency briefing almost certainly revealing the typo; that the lubricated criminal who plopped out of that broken window like a gorged leech was one Annanias Mathe, an apparently happy-go-lucky character for whom all life’s questions can be answered in one of two ways: semi- or fully automatic.
The identity of the fugitive confirmed, fresh questions no doubt presented themselves. Just how had he got his idle and wandering little hands on what must have been close to a gallon of Vaseline? How had he gambolled away into the distance unseen? And where did the slimy creature now find itself, glistening freshly hatched out of the albumen of incarceration?
For those versed in the science of fugitive-hunting, the next step was obvious: find a dishevelled but fiery marshal and order a hard-target search of the area. At some point Mathe would stumble. Instead, it seems, the department found a dishevelled ministerial spokesperson and ordered a latte. In the silence one could almost hear the last echoes of Mathe’s nimble trotters, cantering over the hills and far away.
The problem was that Mathe made it to the roof. If only he had opted for the laundry chute or had clung to the axle of an ambulance or had done something clever with a tiny rock-hammer and poster of Rita Hayworth. But the diabolical fiend went for the roof.
The lay sleuth might assume that this is an expanse of sun-bleached concrete, pockmarked with the ricochets of high-velocity slugs squeezed off at hadedas by bored warders. He might also assume that once on the roof, the fugitive would find himself dancing in the cross-hairs, his high-kicking knees not quite potent enough to catapult him over the barbed wire fence many metres away. One would think that the fugitive, once on the roof, is well and truly stuffed.
But, of course, one would be wrong. After all, if you can baste yourself in petroleum jelly in a maximum security prison, what’s to stop you from constructing an Oros-fuelled jetpack out of empty peach tins?
Naturally these are valid questions, but in this case they distract one from the evidence. Mathe was never on the roof. And he was never on the roof because he was in a striking Post Office cardboard box.
Word travels fast in prison. Guys know guys who know guys. Organisations are mentioned. The Americans. The 28s. The Post Office. A mind given time to think can surprise its owner with its creativity. Perhaps it happened while he was licking another envelope containing another letter to the parole board. Perhaps it came to him as he was ripping open his brown paper parcel from Acme Petroleum Products. Wherever it happened, it was genius.
The Post Office bosses were going down, one by one. There was a new gang in town. Maybe the Scorpions, maybe Postnet: nobody on the inside was sure. But they all knew that while the bosses were being taken out, nobody would be checking parcels. It wasn’t as if the Post Office looked after them at the best of times, anyway. Mathe’s hand would have shaken with excitement as he addressed himself to somewhere in Sunnyside: S-A-A-N-I-C-I-D-E. There would have been glitches — a Post Office wise guy feeling an intriguing lump in a box and prying it open to search for shiny productivity incentives: thumbs in his eye sockets would have dissuaded him from further exploration. And there would be sprains from being folded in half. And, of course, he would have arrived at the wrong address, somewhere in Sunnyshof.
But he was free. Slick as a suppository and choking on bubble-wrap, yes. But free.