Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

7

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Through the locker.

It was a narrow squeeze through the locker doorway, but inside there was more room. Two side partitions and the back were gone, leaving a space the width of three lockers and about four feet deep-a rectangular opening through the fake inner wall to the rough concrete block surface of the actual exterior wall.

There was light, a dim bulb screwed into a simple porcelain fixture over our heads. Phil had gone ahead, and the other three were coming along behind me. Steps led steeply down to the left, concrete block steps flanked by tight concrete block walls, leaving a space no more than two feet wide. We descended eight steps to an area with the dimensions of a telephone booth. Phil knelt and crawled away into a large circular opening at floor level, so once again I followed.

Concrete pipe, drainpipe, about three feet across. More dim bulbs were spaced along the top at long intervals, and the curving bottom of the pipe was covered with carpeting. It was easy and smooth, traveling on all fours on soft broadloom; when they’d used the word “tunnel,” I hadn't thought it would be like this.

Every so often, the color and texture of the carpet would change, and I finally realized these were remnants, strips left over after wall-to-wall carpeting had been installed. The subcontractor, Vasacapa’s cousin-in-law, had apparently made his customers bear the cost of this construction; the concrete pipe, too, had surely been finagled from some other site.

After what seemed a very long time, I at last emerged into a long narrow corridor, again with carpeting on the floor. I stood up and moved to one side to let Joe Maslocki through, while at the same time I looked around at this new place.

The left wall was rough concrete, and so was the short wall behind me with the drainpipe hole in it. The right- hand wall was a framework of two-by-fours, with what looked like paneling attached to it on the other side. The corridor extended about fifteen feet to a flight of stairs going up.

“We never go out more than two at a time,” Phil told me, while the others crawled out of the tunnel. “We'll go first.”

“Fine,” I said. I was feeling claustrophobic; first the tunnel and now this narrow corridor, filling up with tough and dangerous men.

Had they accepted me? Why should they; I wasn’t one of their breed, any more than I was of honest men’s breed. I was some sort of misfit, stuck forever in the middle. Or maybe not forever, not if I was in the process of delivering myself to some isolated place to be unloaded.

Once again paranoia touched me, and I peered at the faces crowded around mine. But it didn’t do any good to stare; I could look at a man and he would seem amiable and friendly, and the next time I looked the exact same expression would seem tough and menacing. How can you ever know what’s going on in people’s heads?

“Come on,” Phil said.

No choice. I followed him along the corridor and up the stairs. An ordinary wooden door on the left led out to the most beautiful mundanity: a gravel driveway, with weeds growing between the ruts. It was about two in the afternoon, a crisp, cloudy, late November day in upper New York. State. The air was cold and clear, the pale gray cloud cover was low but not oppressive, with no suggestion of rain.

Phil and I walked down the driveway to the sidewalk. Ahead of us, across the street, reared the anonymous high gray wall of the penitentiary. It looked like a sculptured impression of the clouded sky. I live behind that wall, I thought, and for once the idea of my forced retirement didn’t please me.

At the sidewalk, Phil turned right and I went with him. The houses on this side, facing that heavy wall, were small single-family units, with tiny front yards and barely room for a driveway between houses. A working class block, shabby but respectable blue-collar.

At the corner Phil and I turned again, away from the prison. Looking back, I saw Joe Maslocki and Billy Glinn coming out the driveway and going down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I said to Phil, “Where we headed?”

“We’ll just take a walk,” Phil said.

We walked three blocks through the same kind of residential neighborhood before we reached a business street. For all that time, Phil seemed content to just stroll along and breathe the free air, and I did the same. When we got to the business street, we stopped in a luncheonette, Phil got us two coffees in a booth, and then he said, “Well, Harry, whadaya think?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

“You want in?”

Later I would have more than one occasion to give that question deep thought, but at the moment it was asked I considered none of the implications; such as, for instance, the criminal nature both of the act and of my new companions. I was outside the wall, it was as simple as that. “I want in,” I said.

“There’s maybe more to it than you know right now,” he said. “I got to tell you that.”

The tiniest of warning lights went on at the end of some cul-de-sac of my head, but I was looking the other way. “I don’t care,” I said. “Besides, what’s the alternative?”

“You get yourself transferred out of the gym,” he said. “Easy as that.”

I managed a not-entirely-honest grin. “You mean you wouldn’t unload me?”

He knew what I meant, and grinned back. “Nah,” he said. “We talked it over, and you’re okay. You’d keep your mouth shut.”

My grin still shaky, I said, “I thought maybe you were bringing me out right now to unload me.”

“What, on the street?” Fie shook his head, and his own smile turned hard. “No disappearances around that gym,” he said. “No searches, no mysteries. If we figured we had to bump you, we’d do it right in the prison, a long way from the gym.”

My throat was dry. “How?” I said, and swallowed.

He shrugged. “You could fall off one of those upper tiers in the cell-block,” he said. “You could get mixed up in somebody else’s knife-fight out on the yard. We could get you transferred to a place with big machines.”

That last one made me close my eyes. “All right,” I said. “I get the idea.”

When I opened my eyes again, he was giving me a quizzical grin. “You’re a funny bird, Harry,” he said. “Anyway, now’s when you say whether or not you want to come in.”

“I want to come in.”

“Even though there’s stuff I can’t tell you in front.”

That was the second time he’d mentioned that. But what stuff could there be? Maybe I had to promise that if anybody else discovered the tunnel I would join in with the murdering. It was a promise I would definitely make and definitely not keep. What else could there be? I said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been outside now, and I want to do it again. I’m with you.”

His grin this time seemed to show relief; maybe his assurances about not unloading me if I’d chosen the other way hadn’t been one hundred per cent accurate. Maybe if I’d decided to transfer away from the gym I would have found myself working amid big machines.

The grin, though, whatever it meant, didn’t last long; it was followed by a serious look, meaning that now we were going to get down to business. He said, “You got somebody holds your stash on the outside?”

All my money was held for me by my mother, which didn’t seem the best thing to tell him, so I just said, “Sure.”

He reached into a pocket and slid a dime across the table toward me. “There’s a phone booth over there,” he said. “Call your contact, collect. Tell him to send a check for twenty-three hundred bucks to Alice Dombey at two- twenty-nine Fair Harbor Street, Stonevelt, New York.”

I repeated the name and address, and went to the phone booth.

My mother was home, and utterly bewildered. In her heavy German accent she said, “Horreld, you’re out from prison?”

“Not exactly, Mama. What I’m doing is kind of a secret.”

“You escaped from prison?”

“No, Mama. I’m still in prison. For another two or three years, Mama. Listen, Mama, can you keep a secret?”

“You doing another joke, Horreld?”

“Absolutely not, Mama. This is very serious. It is absolutely not a joke, and if you don’t keep this secret I could wind up getting killed. I mean it, Mama, this time I’m dead on the level.” I was immediately sorry I’d used that last phrase.

Rut apparently my sincerity had made an effect on my mother, because in a more normal tone she said, “You know I wouldn’t tell a secret on you, Horreld.”

“That’s good, Mama, that’s fine. Now listen-”

I told her what to do, to take the money out of our joint savings account and make up a money order and where to send it. She copied everything down, saying, “Ya, ya,” the whole time, and when I was finished with my instructions she said, “Horreld, tell me the truth. Are you lying?”

This was the formula of truth between us, and had been since I was a little boy. Whenever she said, “Horreld, tell me the truth. Are you lying?” I then told her the absolute truth. She had never used the power lightly, and I had always taken it seriously. When two people are as close as mother and son, they have to find some method by which they can live together within one another’s foibles, and this was the way we had chosen to permit us to live together inside the network of secrecy, fraud and doubledealing which is the natural dwelling place of the confirmed practical joker. So now I said, “I’m telling you the truth, Mama. I need the money for a secret reason that I can’t tell you about. I’m still in prison, and if you tell anybody, even Papa, about my calling you or about you sending the money, I’ll be in a lot of trouble with the law and also in a lot of trouble with some very tough people in the prison. I could get killed, Mama, and that’s the truth.”

“Okay, Horreld,” she said. “I’ll send the money.”

“Thanks, Mama,” I said, and went on to ask after Papa’s health and how were things at the used car lot which had been my last place of employment before my trial. She said, “A man came in and said there was sand in his gas tank, and Mr. Frizzell wants to know was that you.”

“I’m afraid it was, Mama,” I said, and on that note we ended the conversation.

Phil was waiting patiently in the booth. I gave him his dime back and said, “The money’s on its way.”

“Good.” He gestured at my coffee. “You done?”

“Sure.”

We left the luncheonette, strolled two blocks past clothing stores and appliance stores and five-and-tens, and then Phil pointed across the street and said, “I got to go to the bank.”

“The bank?”

“I got an account there.”

He said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a convict to have an account in a local bank. But of course it was, wasn’t it? For this particular convict it was, anyway.

And for me, too. I felt as though my brain had been injected with Novocaine, which was slowly wearing off. Feeling, sensation, understanding were gradually coming to me. I was outside the wall.

And I was crossing the street, I saw, toward not one bank but two. On the right was a hulking gray stone Greek temple, with pillars and complicated cornices and all. Gold lettering on the windows said Western National Bank. On the left was a perfect study in contrasts, a four- story building that couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The upper floors showed mostly wide office windows interspersed with red or green plastic panels, and the first floor contained a Woolworth’s on one side and a bank on the other, both with large windows fronting on the street. The bank, called Fiduciary Federal Trust on its windows, was cheek by jowl with Western National and couldn’t have been more different. Western National was as grim and tight as the prison I’d just come from, while Fiduciary Federal was wide open; through its big windows l could clearly see the open, airy, brightly- lighted interior, with lines of customers and a sense of casual bustle.

Phil and I crossed the street and promptly bumped into one another as I angled toward Fiduciary Federal to find him angling toward Western National. “Oops,” I said.

He pointed to the Greek temple. “That one,” he said.

“Oh. I just took it for granted, uh ...” I gestured toward the cheerful openness of Fiduciary Federal. It hadn’t occurred to me Phil might choose the bank that looked like a prison.

“A couple of the other guys use that one,” Phil said, as though that were some sort of explanation.

We went on into the bank. The inside was austere, echoing and high-ceilinged; more a Buddhist temple than a Greek, somehow. Phil took a check from his wallet, filled it out, and cashed it with a smiling girl teller who apparently knew him. They exchanged hellos and comments on the weather. Then he gestured to me, saying, “Here’s a friend of mine, Harry Kent.”

I almost corrected him. Then, in a blinding flash, what he had done blossomed in front of me. He had given me an alias! For the first time in my life, with utter justification, I could be somebody other than Harry Kunt. With an umlaut.

She gave me a smile, saying, “How are you?”

I gave her a huge smile right back. “I’m just fine,” I said. Oh, let my prison term never end, I was thinking. What did I care what they called me inside those walls; in this wonderful world outside I was Harry Kent. What a beautiful name, what a noble name! It sounded like something out of Shakespeare. Harry of Kent awaits without, milord. Without what, varlet? Without his fucking umlaut, milord.

When we left the bank, Phil said, “Had enough for one day, Harry?”

“No,” I said.

He grinned at me. “Yeah, I know how you feel. You’d be surprised, after a while you get used to it. You get a turn to go out, you don’t even do it.”

“Never,” I said.

“I used to say that. You’ll see.”

You never needed an alias as much as me, I thought, but I didn’t argue the point.