Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

37

AND BESIDES THAT, another of those damn ‘help’ messages showed up.

With the advent of Marian and the apartment, I had been choosing mostly to spend nights off the reservation, covering for other members of the group who were away during the day. So I was in the mess hall for lunch that day, and it was at lunch that it happened. Since the call went out immediately, and rather urgently, for me to get my ass over to the warden’s office, it’s just as well I was present in prison at the time.

Warden Gadmore, when Stoon escorted me into his office, was looking very annoyed, though it was impossible immediately to tell whether he was annoyed at me or at the large plastic shampoo bottle dribbling vegetable beef soup down its sides onto the surface of his desk. I knew it was vegetable beef soup because I’d just had some for lunch, ladled out to me from one of the big vats they used on the serving line in the mess hall.

It turned out the warden was annoyed at us both. Glaring at me, he said, “Do you know what day this is, Kiint?” Annoyed or not, by God, he pronounced my name right.

It was Monday, the seventh of March, and after a brief hesitation I told him so. He nodded, and through his annoyance he affected sadness; but I knew he was really just annoyed. The sadness was rhetorical. “It is just two months and two days,” he said, “since I gave you your privileges back.”

I had been worried when Stoon arrived to bring me to the warden’s office, but I had tried to thrust fear away; after all, I hadn’t done anything the warden could know about.

But someone else could have. I had deliberately avoided thought of the ‘help’ messages on the walk over, but now I knew the worst had happened. Feeling a cold inevitability, I said. “There’s been another message.”

“Very funny, Kiint,” he said, and gestured at the shampoo bottle. “It really does have its comical side, I must admit.”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said.

“I mean the bottle found floating in the vat of vegetable beef soup,” he said. He thrust a tattered piece of brown paper at me. “With this message in it!”

The same old message, scrawled this time with pencil on a wrinkled torn-off piece of a brown paper bag. I said, “The message was in the bottle?”

“By God, Kunt,” he said, “you are either a consummate liar or you have an imitator somewhere in this prison. I wish to God I could read your mind.”

“So do I, sir,” I said, thinking only of my innocence in connection with the message in the bottle. But almost immediately I thought of what else the warden would find in my head if he happened to look there, and I felt an incipient twitch in my cheek.

No no! If I started blinking and twitching and scratching he’d never believe me! To distract myself, not caring whether I was protesting too much or not, because the important thing was to regain self-control, I said, “Sir, if you could see inside my head you would find that I haven’t performed one single practical joke since last December, since before you took away my privileges.”

I said that in all sincerity, too, and I meant it, regardless of the things I’d done to the typewriter repairman’s truck, and regardless of the smoke bombs in the Western National Bank’s wastebaskets, and regardless of the bomb threat phone call to Federal Fiduciary Trust. Those had not been practical jokes. They had been practical, in the sense of useful, but they hadn’t been jokes. No, they had been deadly serious.

“I have only one question, Kiint,” the warden said. “If you aren’t doing these damn things, who is?”

“I have no idea, sir,” I said. “I wish I knew.” “Haven’t you thought about it?”

“Yes, sir, I have. But I don’t even have any suspects to mention. I just can’t think of anybody who might be doing this stuff.”

“Is there anybody here who knows about your practical jokes?”

“Good God, no! Not among the prisoners, sir.”

He gave a somewhat grim smile. “I think I have to believe a response that forceful,” he said. “But you realize, Kunt, that not every prisoner in this institution could have performed these little tricks.”

“Sir?”

“It requires a man with privileges,” he said. “A man like you, with access to various parts of the prison closed to many of the inmates.”

“Yes, sir, I see that.”

He shook his head. “It just keeps coming back to you,” he said. “I want to believe you, I want to believe that I’m capable of making an accurate estimate of a man, but goddammit Kiint it just keeps pointing at nobody else but you.” “I realize that, sir,” I said. “And I just don’t have anything to say, expect it isn’t me.”

He ticked it off on his fingers. “You have a record in this area,” he said. “You have the kind of access needed by whoever is doing these things. And neither one of us can think of anybody else likely to be doing them.”

It did sound damning, I had to admit it. “If I couldn’t read my own mind,” I said, “I’d be inclined to think I was guilty myself. I really can’t argue with that.”

“There’s another point,” he said. “Small, but significant. None of these events occurred before you arrived here. And none of them occurred during the two weeks that I took away your privileges.”

I thought I knew what was coming, and never has anyone awaited a sentencing with such mixed feelings. I was sure I was about to be relieved from attendance at the next bank robbery, which was beautiful with me since I had as yet no way to counter the thing, but of course simultaneous with that I would also be relieved from attendance at my sessions with Marian. That part wouldn’t be so much fun. I waited, and said nothing.

Nor did the warden. He’d seemed about to go on, but instead he sat there, frowning at me, studying me, thinking about me, and once again his fingers began to go bunk-bunk. Except that this time they more nearly went blup-blup, because he had inadvertently drummed his fingers into the little pool of vegetable beef soup at the base of the shampoo bottle.

He gave a little start, looked at his fingertips with a glare of disgust that reminded me strongly of Phil, and pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket to deal with the matter. While doing that, he turned his glower on me and said, “I don’t believe in coming at a man from his blind side, Kiint, so I’m going to give you fair warning. If this sort of thing happens again, and you don’t have a rock-solid alibi, and there is no absolutely convincing alternate explanation, I will take you off privileges of any kind. And I will keep you off privileges until it happens again. If it happens while you’re off privileges, in a way that could only be done by a man with access to privileged areas, I’ll accept that as proof of your innocence.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. So I was reprieved once more, both for Marian and the bank.

If only once I could greet an event in my life without ambivalence.

“In the meantime,” he said, “assuming you really are innocent, it might pay you to do some detective work on your own.”

Be an informer, he meant, and I was more than willing to do so. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll be trying to find him, I promise.”

“That’s good,” he said. He considered me, seemed to think of various other things he might say, and in the end merely shook his head slightly and said to Stoon, “Very well.”

Outside, as Stoon and I walked down the corridor together, he said, “If it was me, I’d lock you in over in the restricted cells and throw the key away.”

I was glad it wasn’t him.