Free Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda Page B

that,” answered Rufus Koperslager back when he asked that question incessantly, though usually guardedly, to anyone he thought might offer him an educated answer. “Hitler saw prisons as a university for criminals. Didn’t you know that? An indoor gutter, where the rookies learn the trade from the pros.” He is reminded of his first private conversation with that eccentric Rufus, a meeting he would rather forget. “Do you know Hitler’s Table Talk?” No, he hadn’t got round to Hitler’s Table Talk yet. God, yes, Koperslager—a law enforcement chief with a knighthood and the petulant candor of a policeman—wasmade dean at Tubantia in late ’95. The appointment went against the grain, a cop on campus, a man perhaps a bit too straight-from-the-shoulder, impatient, used to giving orders and to a braidedsteel chain of command. But a realist. Sigerius pricked up his ears when Koperslager told them during the selection procedure he had been director of not one, but two prisons in the early ’80s, an achievement that intrigued him enough to take advantage of the sandwich reception to confide in his new colleague about his criminal son. He was like that back then. Heart on his sleeve. Wilbert had been in for just over a year and in that time Sigerius had developed a not-so-subtle obsession with everything that took place behind bars: he devoured every newspaper clipping, every book, every television documentary, anything that could tell him about correctional regimes and jailhouse norms. “I understand you have a prison background? My son, he’s doing time.”
    “Where?” Koperslager also had a considerable affinity with the subject; a dark shroud fell over his policeman’s face, he touched his clean-shaven chin ever so slightly, Sigerius saw him descend into an underworld that excited him more than he would care to admit. Without twitching a muscle, Sigerius named the three penitentiary facilities where they had been stowing Wilbert thus far. “Transfers?” asked Koperslager.
    “I believe so.”
    “Do you want me to be frank with you?”
    “Please,” he said, giving the go-ahead for Koperslager’s both convincing and dispiriting sketch of Wilbert’s “career,” which, in his humble opinion, Sigerius’s son was building up “on the inside.” “They only transfer the ringleaders,” he said. “Transfers are expensive and cumbersome, I was never keen on it, but sometimes you have no choice.” Wilbert was probably a kid with clout, was his analysis, a key player within his block, a power-broker, one ofthe “sharks.” We always plucked ’m out, Koperslager said, they’re the ones who undermine authority, intimidate and bribe the wardens, they’re forever making deals, both inside and out. “So they’re shunting your boy around. Sheesh. Maybe he’s got talent. Judging from his father: not at all stupid, physical and tough—yeah, he’ll be learning the tricks of the trade.”
    Koperslager’s favorite criminologist had an interesting take on prisons. “Hitler repeatedly advocated corporal punishment over detention. You’re better off beating the crap out of a twenty-year-old, or cutting off his hand—he says that in 1942, and it’s probably true. Jail only hones their skills. Prisons, Siem, are criminal academies, aggression workshops, testosterone laboratories. Masculinity flows like water, it’s machismo at its meanest, everyone hates everyone else. Divide and conquer, 24/7. Gangs, protection. There’s no feminine perspective, there’s no such thing as consideration—only power. Blackmail, beatings, sexual abuse, it’s all part of the game. You go in as a weenie and you leave as a gangster. Chop off a guy’s foot, I say.”
    It was just the nightmare scenario he had been tormenting himself with, and Koperslager was clearly not the man to allay his fears. Without telling a soul, as though he was going to a whore on a houseboat, Sigerius drove by the local prison every time he needed to