Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘I suppose I can be grateful for small mercies,’ he said to himself as the Kommandant mumbled his final prayer which in the circumstances the Bishop thought was rather curiously worded.

  ‘For what we are about to receive may the good Lord make us truly thankful, amen,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Well?’ said the Bishop after a short pause.

  ‘You’ll be glad to hear that your sister is doing very well at Fort Rapier,’ the Kommandant whispered.

  ‘It’s nice to know.’

  ‘Yes, she is in the best of health,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Hm,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘She has put on some weight,’ said the Kommandant. ‘But that is only to be expected with hospital food.’ He paused, and the Bishop began to wonder when he was coming to the point.

  ‘Overweight is something to be avoided,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Obesity is the cause of more premature deaths than cancer.’

  ‘I daresay,’ said the Bishop, who had lost two stone since he had been in prison.

  ‘Particularly in middle age,’ whispered the Kommandant.

  The Bishop turned his head and looked at him. He was beginning to suspect that the Kommandant was indulging in a rather tasteless joke.

  ‘You haven’t come here to lecture me on the dangers of being overweight, I hope,’ he said. ‘I thought your note said that you wanted to discuss something of interest to us both, and frankly obesity isn’t one of my problems.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it is,’ said the Kommandant sadly.

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘I have trouble with it myself.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘It can lead to all sorts of complications. It’s one of the main causes of heart disease,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Anyone would think from the way you go on that I was in danger of having a coronary when in fact I don’t think I am going to be allowed that particular luxury.’

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking of you,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘I didn’t suppose you were.’

  ‘It’s more my own obesity I’m thinking of,’ continued van Heerden.

  ‘Well, if that’s the only thing you’ve come here to talk to me about, I think I’ll go back to my cell. I have something better to think about in the hours left to me than the state of your health.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ said the Kommandant mournfully.

  ‘I can’t think what else you supposed I would do. You surely didn’t come here for sympathy. Have a heart.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Thank you for what?’

  ‘For a heart.’

  ‘For a what?’

  ‘A heart.’

  The Bishop looked at him incredulously. ‘A heart?’ he said finally. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Kommandant van Heerden hesitated before continuing. ‘I need a new heart,’ he said finally.

  ‘It hasn’t escaped my notice,’ said the Bishop, ‘that a change of heart would do you a power of good, but to be frank I think you’re too far gone for any prayers of mine to help you. In any case I am afraid that I have lost faith in the power of prayer.’

  ‘I’ve tried prayer already,’ said the Kommandant, ‘but it hasn’t done any good. I still get palpitations.’

  ‘Perhaps if you truly repented,’ the Bishop said.

  ‘It’s no good. I’m a doomed man,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Metaphorically I suppose we all are,’ said the Bishop. ‘It happens to be part of the condition of man, but if you don’t mind my saying so I’m a damned sight more doomed than you are, and it’s thanks to you that I’m going to be hanged next Friday.’

  There was a long silence in the chapel while the two men considered their futures. It was broken by the Kommandant.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d do something for me,’ he said at last. ‘A last bequest.’

  ‘A last bequest?’

  ‘A small thing really and nothing you’ll have much use for.’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve coming here and asking to be included in my will,’ the Bishop said irritably.

  ‘It’s not in your will,’ the Kommandant said desperately.

  ‘No? Well where the hell is it?’

  ‘In your chest.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Your heart.’

  ‘You keep going on about my heart,’ said the Bishop. ‘I wish you would stop it. It’s bad enough knowing you’re going to die without having someone harp on about your heart. Anyone would think you wanted the thing.’

  ‘I do,’ said the Kommandant simply.

  ‘What?’ screamed the Bishop, struggling to his feet with a clanking of chains. ‘You want what?’

  ‘Only your heart,’ said the Kommandant. ‘I need it for a transplant.’

  ‘I’m going insane,’ shouted the Bishop. ‘I must be. It isn’t possible. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve gone to all this trouble just so you could have my heart for a transplant operation?’

  ‘It was no trouble,’ said the Kommandant. ‘I hadn’t got anything to do this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m not talking about this afternoon,’ the Bishop screamed. ‘I’m talking about the murders and the trial and having me condemned to death for crimes you knew I couldn’t have committed. You did all that just so that you could hoick my heart out of my body to stick it in your own? It’s incredible. You’re a ghoul. You’re …’ The Bishop couldn’t find words to express his horror.

  Kommandant van Heerden was horrified too. He had never been accused of anything so disgraceful in his life.

  ‘Good God,’ he shouted back. ‘What do you take me for?’

  He could see it was the wrong thing to ask. It was perfectly obvious what the Bishop took him for. For one terrible moment it looked as if the manacled and chained prisoner was going to hurl himself on him. Then quite suddenly the Bishop’s fury evaporated and the Kommandant saw that he was staring up at one of the stained-glass windows. Following the Bishop’s gaze he found himself looking at the particularly grisly portrayal of a martyr in the process of being hanged, drawn and quartered. To Kommandant van Heerden the change in the prisoner’s demeanour could only be explained by miraculous intervention. In some strange way the stained-glass window had communicated a sense of peace and tranquillity to his soul.

  And this in its own way was true, for Jonathan Hazelstone had suddenly realized that the second verse of ‘The Forerunners’ needed revising. It wasn’t his brain they wanted. It was his heart.

  Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,

  Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there.

  Turning back to the Kommandant, the Bishop was a picture of truly Christian generosity.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘If you want my heart, of course you can have it,’ and without another word he turned from the altar rail and clanked down the aisle towards the door. And as he went he composed the lines afresh.

  Bad men ye be, to pilfer my best room

  Ev’n all my heart …

  The Bishop smiled happily to himself. It was extraordinarily appropriate, he thought, and he was still smiling beatifically when Kommandant van Heerden caught up with him and overcome with emotion grabbed his manacled hand and shook it as vigorously as the handcuffs would allow.

  ‘You’re a real gentleman,’ he gasped, ‘a real English gentleman.’

  ‘Noblesse oblige,’ murmured the Bishop, whose heart had been chronically weak since he had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child.

  18

  The Bishop was still in a cheerful frame of mind when Hangman Els visited him to weigh him for the drop.

  ‘You can smile,’ Els said as he dragged him out of the cell and shoved him on to the weighing machine. ‘It’s all right for you. You don’t have to do anyt
hing. I’m the one who has to do all the work.’

  ‘Each of us has his little part to play,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘Play?’ said Els. ‘I don’t call what I’m doing playing. I’m having to work my guts out.’

  ‘Just so long as you don’t achieve the same result in my case,’ said the Bishop uneasily. ‘By the way, how are you getting on with those sacks?’

  ‘I’ve practised with them till I’m fit to drop,’ Els said, ‘and I still don’t seem to get it right. It’s got to do with the weight how far you have to fall.’ He tried to read the scales. ‘I can’t make these things out at all,’ he said finally. ‘What do you make your weight out to be?’

  The Bishop came to his assistance.

  ‘Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds,’ he said.

  Els consulted a little black book entitled The Hangman’s Handbook, which he had borrowed from the old warder.

  ‘You’re too heavy,’ he said at last. ‘It only goes up to three hundred pounds. Are you sure that’s what the weighing machine said?’

  The Bishop checked. ‘Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds exactly.’

  ‘Well I don’t know what I’m going to do. It doesn’t look as if you need any drop at all.’

  ‘That’s a nice thought,’ Jonathan said, adding hopefully, ‘Perhaps fat men don’t commit murders.’

  ‘Well, if they do, nobody seems to hang them,’ said Els. ‘Perhaps they shoot them.’ On the whole he much preferred shooting. It was quicker and involved a lot less effort on his part.

  ‘No, no,’ said the Bishop hurriedly. ‘They definitely have to be hanged.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What does it say is the drop for a man weighing two hundred pounds?’ he asked.

  Els consulted his little compendium. ‘Six feet,’ he said at last.

  ‘Then three feet should be just about right,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘Why?’ Els didn’t like the sound of a shortened drop at all. It smacked too much of an attempt to avoid death.

  ‘Double the weight and halve the drop,’ the Bishop explained.

  Els wasn’t fool enough to fall into that trap. ‘Double the weight and double the drop, you mean.’

  The Bishop tried to explain. ‘The heavier someone is the shorter the fall needed to break his neck. The light man needs a much longer drop to achieve the necessary momentum.’

  Els tried to work it out. He found it very difficult.

  ‘Why is a momentum necessary?’ he asked. ‘Nobody told me to get one.’

  ‘Momentum is the product of a moving body’s mass by its velocity.’

  ‘I thought death was,’ said Els.

  ‘Yes, but you won’t get death without momentum. It’s not possible.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it?’ said Els. ‘Well, I’ll have a bloody good shot at it, don’t you worry.’

  Alarmed by the constant reference to shots, the Bishop tried again.

  ‘When a man is hanged, how does he die?’ he asked.

  Els thought about it. ‘By hanging,’ he said finally.

  ‘And hanging means doing what to him?’

  ‘Dropping him down a hole with a rope round his neck.’

  ‘And what happens then?’

  ‘He dies.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Bishop patiently, ‘but what does the rope do?’

  ‘Holds him up.’

  ‘No, no. It breaks his neck.’

  Els knew better than that. ‘Oh no, it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve been practising with sacks and it doesn’t break their necks. Their bottoms drop out. It makes no end of a mess.’

  The Bishop shuddered. ‘I’m sure it must,’ he said. ‘Now we don’t want that to happen to me, do we? That’s why we’ve got to get the length of the drop right.’

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t happen to you,’ Els assured him. ‘The old warder says it’s the other way round with you. He says your head would …’

  The Bishop didn’t want to know what the old warder had said. He had had enough of his morbid interest in anatomy already.

  ‘Look, if you’re really so keen to get a permanent job as a hangman, you’ll have to make a success of this execution. Nobody is going to employ you if you don’t make a go of your first hanging.’

  Els looked pathetically at the Bishop. ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘but what can I do if your weight isn’t in the handbook?’

  ‘You could make me lighter,’ the Bishop suggested looking at his manacles and chains.

  ‘Done,’ said Els delighted. ‘I’ll have you put on a nil diet at once.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said the Bishop who couldn’t imagine anything niller than the diet he was already on. ‘What I had in mind was taking all these chains off and weighing me without them. I think you might find me a lot lighter.’

  ‘I doubt if I’d find you at all,’ said Els.

  ‘Well, if you won’t take these chains off I don’t see how I can help you,’ said the Bishop wearily.

  ‘If I were to take them off, I’m damned sure you would not help me either,’ said Els.

  ‘In that case I don’t know what to suggest. You’re not going to find my proper weight with the chains on and if you won’t take them off …’ He paused as he remembered another scene in the chapel window. ‘You don’t surely intend to hang me in chains?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Els, ‘there’s a special set of leather straps and a cloth bag for your head.’

  ‘Dear God what a way to go,’ murmured the Bishop.

  ‘I’ve put boot polish on the straps and shone them up. They look quite smart,’ Els went on. The Bishop wasn’t listening to him. He had suddenly thought of a way round the problem of weight.

  ‘I know what we can do,’ he said. ‘You go and get another set of chains and manacles and bring them here, and we’ll weigh them by themselves.’

  ‘I don’t see how that’s going to help,’ said Els. ‘I’ve just told you we won’t be using chains on the day. You don’t think I’ve been polishing those straps for nothing, do you?’

  The Bishop was beginning to think that he would never be able to get Els to understand anything.

  ‘Once we know how much the chains weigh by themselves we can subtract their weight from three hundred and ninety-eight pounds and then we’ll know how much I weigh by myself.’

  Els considered the proposal for a moment, but in the end he shook his head.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ he said.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I could never do subtraction at school,’ Els confessed finally.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the Bishop. ‘I was very good at it and I’ll do the sum myself.’

  ‘How do I know you won’t cheat?’

  ‘My dear Hangman Els,’ said the Bishop. ‘I can think of two good reasons why I am as anxious as you are that this hanging should go with a swing. Possibly three. One is that if you make the drop too short, I shall strangle to death and I really don’t want to. Two is that if you make it too long you’ll probably decapitate me.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Els. ‘Your head will come off.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the Bishop hurriedly. ‘Nothing like calling a spade a bloody shovel, is there?’

  ‘What’s three?’ asked Els, who didn’t care what a bloody shovel was called.

  ‘Oh yes, three. I had almost forgotten three. Well three is that you are obviously a born executioner and while you’ve got a lot to learn about hanging, I like to see a man make use of the gifts he’s been given. Yes, I know about the cloth bag,’ the Bishop continued, as Els tried to interrupt with the news that he wouldn’t see anything on the scaffold, ‘but I am speaking metaphorically, and speaking metaphorically I hope you’d go on to greater things, one might almost say to the top of your profession.’

  ‘You really think I’ll make a good hangman?’ Els asked eagerly.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ said the Bishop. ‘I can feel it in my bones that you will make a name for yourself among executioners the
world over,’ and having given the hangman the reassurance Els so desperately needed the Bishop went back to his cell while Els went off to fetch another set of chains and manacles. In the end they discovered that Jonathan Hazelstone weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and needed a seven-foot drop.

  If the Bishop was having difficulty persuading Els to kill him properly, Kommandant van Heerden was finding it almost as difficult to persuade the surgeons at Piemburg Hospital to undertake the operation he needed to save his life. They seemed to insist on raising quite irrelevant objections, and the Kommandant found particularly irritating their insistence that there was nothing wrong with his heart. When he had disposed of that difficulty by threatening to charge them with attempted murder if they didn’t agree with his diagnosis, they spent another hour discussing the ethical problems involved in transferring the heart of a murderer into the body of a man, who, as they pointed out, was so manifestly non-homicidal. The Kommandant soon set their minds at rest on that score, and it was only when they raised the technical problems of tissue typing and rejection and tried to explain how unlikely it was that the condemned man’s tissues would match those of a purebred Afrikaner, like Kommandant van Heerden, that he lost his temper.

  ‘Are you telling me that I’m not a human being?’ the Kommandant yelled at Dr Erasmus who led the transplant team. ‘Are you telling me I’m a bloody baboon?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything of the sort,’ Dr Erasmus protested. ‘You don’t seem to understand. Each human being has a different type of tissue and yours may not be the same type as that of the donor.’

  ‘You’re telling me I’ve got coloured blood in me,’ the Kommandant yelled. ‘You’re saying I can’t have an Englishman’s heart because I’m part-Kaffir. Is that what you’re saying?’