Masters of Noir: Volume 4

1.

They came through the prison gate, sixteen of them, handcuffed two by two, with four city policemen to deliver them to the prison. They saw their first convict in the shower room, a trusty who took their civilian clothes and thumbed them to the showers. Afterwards, they went along one at a time, and Macalay found himself in a barber chair. Clippers ran over his hair, and he was out again.

He looked down at his chest. His number was 116911. No. His name was that; he was 116911. And would be for quite a while.

He’d been here before, on business, to question prisoners. But it was different now. He was not a visitor with a badge in his pocket and a gun checked at the main gate, with a name and a job, a salary and a whistle to blow if the guards were slow letting him out. He was 116911, in a blue denim suit that was too tight across the shoulders and too long in the legs. But he was still big and he still looked like a cop was supposed to look. A cop for a mural or a Police Athletic League poster. He had the requirements, size and an ugly sort of handsomeness.

From his new viewpoint, he saw, somewhat to his surprise, that the guards did very little more than stand around. The actual bossing was done by trusties. Trusties had issued them their clothes; trusties formed them into lines. Now a trusty marched them to an isolation barracks. “You’ll be here three weeks,” he said. “Till the doc’s sure you ain’t gonna break out with something an’ infect us tenderer guys. I’m your barracks leader; the guys call me Nosy.”

One of the new fish said: “This is like the Marine Corps all over again.”

“If you was in the Marines, I don’t know how we won any wars,” Nosy said calmly. “Okay. There’s a bed for each of you. A shelf at the top, box at the bottom. There’s a john through that door. You can’t go no place but in here, but if you want lib’ary books, write ’em out, any they’ll bring ’em to ya. Any questions you got ask me now.”

Macalay said: “Can we have pencil and paper?”

Nosy didn’t answer.

One of the other cons said: “How about radios?”

“There’s headsets under your shelves, hooked into the prison system... No more questions? I’ll write a duty after each guy’s name, put it on the bulletin board here. That door leads to my room.”

“How about you picking up an infection from us?” the former Marine asked.

Nosy said: “Let’s see, you’re Rodel, aren’t you? Why, Rodel, the warden figgers anything I haven’t had’d be plain interesting. Keep the doc on his toes.”

Nosy stood up and tacked the sheet on the bulletin board and went into his room.

Macalay said: “Seems like a nice kind of guy.”

Nobody said anything. One by one the men got up and looked at their assignments. Rodel got to take care of the washbasins; he told a con named Beales: “You gotta call me mister. You’re the wiper of the johns; you gotta look up to me.”

After awhile Macalay went and looked, too. He turned from the list. “Hey, my name isn’t here.”

Nobody answered him. He went and knocked on Nosy’s door. Nosy yelled a “come in,” and when the door was opened could be seen stretched out on a cot with two mattresses, holding a magazine.

Macalay said: “You forgot to give me any work.”

Nosy stared at him silently and then went back to reading. After awhile, Macalay shut the door and went back to his cot. Somebody laughed, but when he looked around, there wasn’t a smile in the barracks room.

So now he knew how it was going to be; how it was for a policeman who went to prison. You became a ghost, something that nobody could see or hear.

It wasn’t good. But when he’d made the deal, he knew it wasn’t going to be any bed of roses.

It had started in the rain. There were two of them, as per regulations, two patrolmen in a car, making the rounds. That Macalay wasn’t physically fit, his right arm dislocated, was not according to regulations. They were listening to the traffic squad get all the calls while they — Gresham was driving, Macalay on the radio — tooled their weary way through the deserted commercial streets, the rain doing nothing for their spirits, the lack of calls letting them slowly down into a bog of indifference.

It was Macalay who saw the light, just a flicker of it, in the window of a second story salesroom. His hand on Gresham’s arm stopped the car, and they both watched, and then they were sure of it. There was a flashlight up there.

So they had gone up, Gresham first, and found the bars in the jewelry place cut away, the electric warning system carefully extracted, as Macalay had dissected angleworm nerves in high school biology. They saw the three men at the safe with the burning-torch, but they never saw the other two.

After that it was all noise and guns; Gresham dead and one of the safecrackers dying; Macalay in a corner with his right shoulder, the bum shoulder, shot and all the rest of him bruised as a .45 bruises a man; the other four getting away, and later the sergeant’s car and the lieutenant’s car, the headquarters car and the loft-squad truck all screaming down below.

And the ambulance and the trip to the hospital and the brass standing around his bed arguing and questioning.

And finally the hospital orderly — how honest can a skid-row white-coat get? — coming in and turning over the little paper to the inspector. The little paper with two diamonds folded in it that they had found in Macalay’s shoe, just where he had put them before blacking out trying to help Gresham, who was already beyond help.

After that, it got slower. He talked with Inspector Strane and they’d come to an understanding. He’d had a choice to make — which of two eight balls he’d get behind. And then there was the trial, and the district attorney who had asked the chair for Macalay: “If a man is committing a felony, such as grand larceny, and anyone gets killed as a result of said felony, he is guilty of murder under the law.”

But the jury had only given him ten to twenty. Ten years to twenty years in the pen. A reporter in the courtroom had said: “It doesn’t matter. Send a cop to prison, and the cons’ll knock him off anyway.” And this reporter, of course, didn’t know about the deal between Macalay and Strane which made a special target out of Macalay for the cons...

So here he was. In Isolation Barracks No. 7, bed No. 11. With a con on either side of him, and cons across the room; but nobody to speak to. He talked to them but he never got an answer, and even when the prison doctor came around once a day, he grunted at Macalay, though he made jokes with the other fresh fish.

All things pass. The three weeks went by without a contagious disease showing up and Macalay — 116911 — was put in a regular cell-block, No. 9, on the second tier, and given a regular job, running a stitching machine in the shoe shop.

The clerks who assigned the jobs were almost all trusties, and they would have given him hard labor, but his shoulder hadn’t completely recovered from the bullet wound and the old injury that kept throwing the collar bone out of place. It had been weak and strained the night he’d seen the light in the jewelry-loft; that was why poor Gresham had gone up the stairs first.

If it hadn’t been for the shoulder, it would have been Macalay dead and Gresham wounded, and sometimes 116911 thought it might have been better that way.

The needles used on a power leather sewing machine are strong, sharp. Set in the end of a piece of broom handle, one of them makes a lovely shiv. Coming to his machine one morning, Macalay found his needle missing. He went to the foreman, his lie prepared.

“I forgot to tell you last night. My needle broke just as I finished work.”

The foreman looked him over. “Okay. Bring me the broken parts and I’ll sign a new one out to you.”

“I threw the broken pieces in the scrap bin. Last night.”

The foreman was a civilian. He raised his hand, and a guard came over. “Take him to the P.K. Keep an eye on him; he stole a needle.”

As the guard marched Macalay out of the shoe shop, all the cons were, for once, bent hard over their work. But he thought he caught a couple of smiles.

The Principal Keeper was no gentleman; he left all that to the warden. When the guard lined Macalay up in front of him and said: “116911. Stole a needle from the shoe shop,” the P.K. hardly looked up. He just said: “Search him,” picked up a phone and said: “Search 32a, cell block 9,” and went on with his paper work.

Before the block guards could call back, Macalay was stripped and searched standing at attention, naked in front of the P.K.’s desk. When the call came back that there was no contraband in the cell, the P.K. sighed and got up from behind his desk. He walked slowly around to face Macalay.

“Where’s the needle?”

Macalay said: “It broke. I threw it in the trash bin last night.” The P.K. brought the heel of his shoe down on Macalay’s naked toes. “Where is it?” He twisted the heel a little. It was not made of rubber.

Macalay said: “I don’t know.”

The P.K. hit him in the belly. “Stand at attention,” he said, when Macalay bent over involuntarily. “And call me sir. Where is it?”

Macalay found a little wind left in him and said: “I don’t know, sir.”

The P.K. bawled “Parade rest.” Spray from his mouth landed on Macalay’s face.

Macalay advanced one foot, and started to clasp his hands in front of him. As soon as he separated his legs, the P.K. brought his knee up between them, hard. Macalay passed out.

He came to in the Hole, in solitary. He was still naked, but there was a suit of coveralls and a pair of felt slippers in his cell. He put them on, and had to walk bent over, because the coveralls were too short. The slippers were too big.

Nobody tapped on his water pipes, nobody put a message in his oatmeal for two weeks. That was what he ate — a big bowl of oatmeal once a day, put in a Judas-gate in the door every morning, together with a half-gallon jug of water. The Judas-gate only opened one way at a time, so he didn’t know if his food was brought by a trusty or a guard.

That went on for two weeks. Towards the end of that time, Macalay began to have an illusion; he imagined Gresham’s dead body was in the cell with him. When he moved from one side of the Hole to the other, the body slowly moved after him. It took a lot of effort not to think about contacting Inspector Strane and begging him to call the whole thing off.

When he got back to cell block No. 9, he had a new bunky. It didn’t matter to Macalay; none of the cons talked to him anyway. He sat down on his bunk, and the thin mattress and chain-link spring felt wonderful after the floor of the Hole. He pulled his feet up, stretched, and slowly, tentatively closed his eyes; the light hurt them.

The body of Gresham came back and lay on the floor of the cell. But in a few minutes it faded, and Macalay let out a long sigh.

The man on the other bunk put down his magazine. “What did you see?” he asked.

“A body,” Macalay said. “He was my sidekick.”

“I saw my mother,” the other man said. “The time I was in the Hole. Everybody sees something, if he stays in the Hole more than three days.”

Macalay said: “Does anybody—” and then stopped. He suddenly realized he was being talked to. He finished the sentence. “Does anybody ever get less than three days in the Hole?”

“Not under this P.K.,” the cellmate said. “If he don’t end up with a shiv in his ribs, the class of prisoners has fallen off in this can... My name’s Mason. Jock Mason.”

“Macalay.”

“Yeah, I know. You were a cop, Mac. We’re willing to forget it. My gang. Jock’s Jockeys. If you’d said somebody lifted your needle, all the guys in the shoe shop woulda gotten hacked. We like a guy who keeps his teeth covered.”

Macalay slowly grinned. It never occurred to him to say he might not like to be one of Jock’s Jockeys. He said: “Hey. What are we doin’ in our cells?”

Jock laughed. “It’s Sunday morning. Church parade’s just gone, an’ lunch’ll be coming up in an hour... A guy loses track of time in the Hole, an’ don’t I know it. There’s a ball game this afternoon, the Stripes against the Stars. Who do you like?” Jock slowly rolled himself a cigarette and tossed the makings over to Macalay.

Macalay built a cigarette carefully. He hadn’t smoked in four years, but he thought he knew how to roll one from when he was a kid. It looked a little like a tamale, but it held together while he lighted it. He said: “I’ll take either side you don’t want, for a pack of tailormades — when I earn them.” The cons got a quarter a day when they worked.

Jock said: “You got the Stars. It’s a sucker bet.”

“Yeah? They’ll lick the numbers off the Stripes.”

Both men laughed.

2.

Life changed after that. A prison is a peculiar place; almost everything happens in one that happens in the outside, free world; but it happens fast, in odd corners, just before a guard walks by, just after one has passed.

So Macalay, as one of Jock’s Jockeys, found he could get drunk if he really wanted to; could get as many uncensored letters out as he wanted to; could even have a love affair — if he cared for it, and with a boy who should have been in a women’s prison — or an asylum — anyway.

He passed up the latter two amusements, but once in a while he took on a skinful. Ten to twenty’s a hard sentence to pass, and he’d done less than six months of it.

So he was in on the drunk in Boiler No. 4, which made prison history.

No. 4 was a power boiler, not a heating one, and it was out of commission while a bunch of cons scaled it. Fitz Llewellen, a lifer, was in on the scaling gang, and he designed a still out of some of the boiler tubes they were cleaning. Since no guard in his right mind would possibly go inside a boiler, the still ran all the time they were chipping No. 4; but Fitz and Jock wouldn’t let anybody touch, the white mule till the day before the boiler was cleaned.

There were six of them in there: Fitz, Jock, Macalay, the Nosy who had been a trusty when Mac was a fresh fish, and two safecrackers named Hanning and Russ, friends Macalay had cultivated with a great show of casualness, and persuaded Jock to take into their gang.

They passed the popskull around gently at first, with a lot of “will-you-please” and “your turn.” It was pretty good jungle juice; made out of oranges and prunes lifted from the mess hall. Jock’s habitual easy gloom lifted, and he began singing, the tenor notes bouncing back off the boiler plate. “Singin’ in the rain, oh singin’ in the rain...”

“Shut up,” Russ said. “A screw’ll hear you.”

Jock said: “A guy can’t shut up forever. I feel good.” He went on singing.

Russ said: “You may want a month in the Hole. I don’t. Shutup.”

“Hole ain’t so bad,” Jock said. “Ask Mac. He was there last.”

Macalay said: “Not so bad. But I don’t want any more of it.”

“You used to be a cop, didn’t you?” Russ asked.

Macalay nodded. It was the first time it had been mentioned.

“I don’t like cops,” Russ said. He drained a big swallow of popskull, and breathed out. “I don’t like cops’ brothers. I don’t like ex-cops, an’ any woman who’d give birth to a cop would sleep with monkeys.” And he took another drink.

“Okay,” Macalay said, telling himself to take it slow and easy, to feel his way along. “Now I’m a con, just like anybody else.” It was hot in the boiler, and the liquor didn’t help any. That stuff must have been a hundred and thirty proof at least, and they were drinking it straight.

“I don’t like drinking with cops,” Russ said monotonously. “I don’t like drinking with cops’ cellmates. I don’t have to listen to cops’ cellmates sing.”

“You’re just beggin’ for a throat full of teeth,” Jock said, still humming.

“Oh, tough guy,” Russ said. His hand flicked, and there was a little round of wood in it; a piece of broomstick, but carved carefully to give it looks. It opened, and one piece had a leather-needle sticking out of it. The other had been the sheath.

“Put it away Russ,” Hanning said. He was a very quiet guy, who had only drifted into buddying with Russ because they’d been in the same trade in the free world, loft-men.

“You turnin’ cop-lover, too?” Russ asked. His speech was getting a little blurred. He turned the bradawl shiv, and it shone in the dim light.

Jock suddenly shot out his foot, trying to kick the shiv out of Russ’ hand. Russ slid away, and stood up, his back against the polished boiler plate. “Now we know,” he said. “Now we know.” He started going for Jock.

Macalay got his feet under him. Why couldn’t it be some con other than Russ? Lousy luck. There was no other way to make the play now. Maybe, with Jock, he could get the shiv away and later, when sober, Russ would appreciate it.

The floor of the boiler was slick from the chipping they had given it. It was going to be a nasty fight; but Macalay needed Russ alive. He must try to keep him alive.

Fitz was gone; Nosy was halfway up the ladder. Before he could disappear through the manhole, Hanning was after him. The light was blocked a second time, and then Jock and Macalay were alone with the safecracker.

Jock said: “Got a shiv, Mac?”

Macalay said: “No. But there’s only one of him. I’ll keep him looking at me, and you get up behind him and mug him.”

Jock said: “Fair enough.”

Russ was bent over, shuffling around the boiler floor, the shiv held out, threateningly and guarding his belly at the same time. He moved into the center of the boiler, and that was a mistake. Jock started to get behind him, he half-turned, and Macalay was on him.

Macalay had had judo training as a rookie cop. He lunged at the knife with his right hand, and as it came up, shifted and came in fast with his left. The knife edge of his palm caught Russ on the side of the neck, and the safecracker went half off his feet.

Then everything turned into slow motion. Russ caromed off the side of the boiler, slid and staggered, and fell. He landed square on the leather needle in his hand. He made a little, quiet noise — almost like a tired man snuggling into bed — and was still.

Jock and Macalay stared at each other across his body. After a moment Jock bent down and felt his pulse. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. He’s had it.”

Macalay said: “I guess we have, too.” He shook his head. “No way of getting out of this. No way.” And by the emphasis, he included his chance of beating the rap per Strane’s agreement.

Jock said: “We can try. It’s hot out there. Maybe the screw’s gone off to hunt himself some shade... If we can get to the kitchen, and be bumming chow, the boys there’ll give us an alibi.”

Macalay said: “We have a chance. Those damn guards don’t work too hard.”

Jock went up the ladder first. Macalay was so close behind him that he almost got his fingers stepped on. They clambered through the manhole, and out onto the boiler top, and dropped down on the brick floor of the boiler room.

Nobody was around. The heating furnaces were off for the summer; the con in charge of the power boilers was around on the other side, where the gauges were. It was almost as hot on the boiler room floor as it had been inside the boiler, or at least it seemed that way.

They made it to the door, and out, and walked along the side of the powerhouse towards the kitchen, the next building. The yard was deserted in the heat. Jock said: “The P.K. done us a favor, when he thought he was piling it on us, making us chip that boiler. We’re gonna get away with it.”

Macalay said: “We haven’t yet.”

Jock said: “No. We ain’t. I got an ace in the hole. I’ve been saving it. If we can make the kitchen I think I’ll play it.”

“This is the big hand,” Macalay said. “Play your ace. This is murder.” The goose that could lay the hundred-grand egg for him had been murdered.

“Self defense,” Jock said quickly. “Ain’t no fingerprints on that shiv except his.”

Macalay laughed. “By the time the P.K. gets through, there’ll be fingerprints. Yours, mine. That P.K. lives to see us all fixed, but good.”

A hundred feet from the kitchen, ninety feet. Their shoes seemed to have lead soles, like they’d dressed for diving. The sweat poured steadily down Macalay’s back. Abruptly, he wanted to stand in the scorched yard and scream: “I’m not a criminal. I’m not a con! I don’t belong with these men, this isn’t me!”

You’re shook, he told himself. Take it easy. Remember, this is the eight-ball you picked.

Fifty feet, forty feet. The whole traverse wasn’t taking more than two minutes. But hours went by inside Macalay’s brain, years of aging were being piled on his body. He told himself, trying to make a joke of it, that his arteries would be hardened before he got to the kitchen.

He found the joke didn’t amuse him.

Now the loathesome smell of greasy stew bubbling was strong in their noses. There should have been a guard outside the kitchen door; there wasn’t. The P.K. was so bad that the guards doped off half the time, smoking and lounging in a shady area behind the infirmary. The P.K. himself stayed out of the yard as much as possible.

The Warden was writing a book on the reform of criminals. The Deputy Warden toured around the United States making speeches about the Warden’s pet theories.

It was a hell of penitentiary, but it had a kitchen and they were almost there.

And then they were inside. Macalay followed Jock around the edge of the big room, past cons peeling vegetables, washing pots, past baker-cons and cook-cons and salad-maker-cons. There were supposed to be civilian chefs, but the jobs were never filled, and the budget came out nicely at the end of the year, if the food didn’t.

Somewhere Jock snatched two white caps, and they put them on. They bellied in to a sink where a punk named Snifter was scrubbing grills with a red brick. Each of them snatched up a brick and went to work. Macalay noticed that Jock was very careless with the dirty water that came off the grease-caked grill; he splashed it on his clothes, it ran down on his shoes. After a moment Macalay got the idea too; and in a couple of minutes he looked as though he’d been working in the kitchen all morning.

His stomach began to unknot, his arteries to soften.

A trusty-messenger went by; carrying invoices from the kitchen to the front office. Jock stepped back and blocked his way. Jock’s lips hardly moved, and his voice was faint even as close as Macalay was.

“Bud, take a message for me. To a screw named Sinclair. You know him, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” the trusty said. “Big potbellied guy with a brown moustache.”

“The one,” Jock said. “Tell ’im I wanna see him. Here. Now.”

“S’posin’ he don’t want to see you?”

“Tell him I just got a letter from a friend of his in ElkoNevada.”

“Okay,” said the trusty. “You owe me a favor.” You got nothing for nothing in the can.

Jock nodded, and stepped in to the sink again, started scrubbing. A con pushed a load of grills up and dumped them in the sink, and more greasy water splashed over them. Macalay said: “Watch what you’re doin’, stir-bum.”

“Who’s a stir-bum, you stir-bum?”

The grease from the grills was a solid coating on Macalay’s arms now, and its taste, and the taste of the blue air of the kitchen, was all down his throat. He said: “Isn’t this enough grills?”

Jock said: “I’m waiting for Sinclair.”

All this time the punk named Snifter scrubbed grills between them, not saying anything, apparently not hearing anything. Macalay realized that the punk was scared to death at being between Jock and one of his Jockeys, a tough yard gang. Macalay wondered what Snifter would do if he knew why Macalay and Jock were scrubbing grills, and remembering why they were there, made the filthy work a lot easier to take.

And here came Sinclair, a paunchy guy, with a moustache that probably would have been gray if he hadn’t chewed tobacco. There were grease spots on his gray shirt and blue pants, and tarnish on his badge. “You Jock?” he said.

Jock nodded. “One time of Elko Nevada,” he said. “With lots of friends there.”

Sinclair chewed the moustache, and looked at Macalay and Snifter. “Blow.”

Jock said: “Snifter can blow. Macalay’s a friend of mine. From ElkoNevada.”

Snifter sidled away, happily.

“What’s all this about Elko, Nevada?” Sinclair said. Unlike Jock he did not say it as though it was all one word.

“Mac and I have been here all morning. When we reported to the job we were supposed to do, it was all done, and you went through the yard and told us to report to the kitchen.”

Sinclair spat brown juice on the kitchen floor. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jock said. “And you never held up Horse Caner’s gambling joint in ElkoNevada and you never shot his brother and one of the faro-dealers. Never.”

Macalay watched Sinclair. The pig eyes of the guard never showed anything, not fear, not anger. “When did all this happen?”

“Five minutes after the first shift started this morning,” Jock said.

Sinclair said: “Okay. What job was it that was finished?”

“Chipping boilers.”

Sinclair started away. From five feet he turned back. “And stay away from Nevada.”

“Never even heard of the place,” Jock said.

“It’s a no-good state,” Sinclair said, and kept on going.

Macalay let out his breath as far as it would go. Then he hated to breathe in again because of the blue grease-smoke in the kitchen. “That was quite an ace.”

Jock nodded, sadly. He had given up on the grills, was trying to get the grease off his hands. “Yeah,” he said. “A pal got the word to me when he heard I was coming here. I hated to play that hole ace. I really hated to.”

3.

This time there were five naked men lined up in front of the P.K.’s desk. The P.K. looked very happy; he had the look of a man who’d hit oil digging a sewer. There was old Fitz, there was Hanning, Nosy, Jock and Macalay.

The P.K. said: “Okay. I’m paid by the year; I don’t mind waiting. You were the guys on the chipping gang with Russ. This morning we go to put the boiler back in service, and he’s in there stinking dead. And we’ve had the state cops looking for him for three days. So what happened?” He glared at them.

Nobody said anything. The P.K. leaned back in his desk. A triangular stand of wood on it said his name was J. Odell, and he was Principal Keeper. Macalay wondered vaguely what the J stood for, but he didn’t ask.

“I don’t take it kindly that for three days the papers have been full of I let a con escape,” the P.K. said. “I don’t take it kindly on account of the people don’t remember it wasn’t so. They think they remember I got a leaky jug. It ain’t good.”

None of the cons said anything. It was still hot weather, and their bodies glistened. Macalay wondered if the P.K. was a little queer, the way he liked to question naked cons. It could very well be. A homo and a sadist would be two nice things to say about the P.K.

You’re thinking like a con, Macalay told himself. The P.K.’s just a sour guy who does all the work the Warden and the Deputy Warden should do. You find guys like that in police stations all over the country. Supposing they take it out in socking a prisoner now and then, it’s understandable.

And a voice inside answered: “It depends on which side you stand. What a cop or a guard can understand doesn’t make sense to a con or a suspect.”

The P.K. said: “You guys were on the crew with Russ. One of you killed him.”

Hanning said: “How did he die?”

A guard standing behind the five prisoners reached out with his swagger stick and whacked Hanning across the back. “Shut up.”

“One of you knows how he croaked,” the P.K. said. “It don’t matter to the rest of you. I can throw the five of you into the Hole. But it’s nice an’ cool in the Hole now. So—” He turned to the guards. “I want five pairs of cuffs.” He thought. “An’ a piece of chain.”

He was positively chuckling when the things were brought. “You guys like the boiler room so well, you’re gonna see it. There was jungle juice in that boiler, there was a still. Having a good time, wasn’t you?”

He had them handcuffed one to the other. The man at each end had one open cuff; the guard slipped a chain link over one of them, and then led the line of five, still naked, out of the office, down the stairs, across the exercise yard to the boiler room. The P.K. strolled along with them, his uniform coat open. He was whistling softly under his breath.

There was a guard on duty outside the boiler room this time. The word had gone out; the P.K. is in the yard. It wasn’t a thing that happened very often; the screws were all on duty and at their posts. Some of them had even straightened their uniforms and tried to polish their badges.

The guard saluted, and the procession marched into the boiler room. There were cops, plain clothes and uniformed, from the State Police Force working around No. 4. The P.K. led his little show there and stopped.

He said: “You guys about through?”

A detective turned and grunted. “Nothing to find out here.”

“Then scram.”

The detective probably had a good deal of rank; he didn’t seem to be used to that kind of talk. He said: “Huh?”

“Regulations say if there’s a homicide in the prison, I gotta let you guys look it over. So you looked. Now I’m taking it over my way. I’ll call you tonight, let you know who croaked Russ.”

The detective turned a blue-eyed gaze on the five naked men. “What the hell?”

“They’re gonna talk. Probably only one or two of ’em did the killing. The others’ll be glad to squeal before I get through with them.”

“Stuff you get that way don’t stand up in court.”

“This is my pen. It’ll stand up here.”

The P.K. reached out, grabbed the loose end of the chain, pulled it. The con to whose cuff it went gave a little yelp as the cuff bit into his wrist. The P.K. said: “You guys make a circle around the boiler. No. 5 here. Face the boiler and stand a foot away from it.” He turned to the detective. “You think I’m cruel, cap? A cruel guy wouldn’t give ’em that foot. But me, I got all the time in the world.”

Macalay found it was hard to force himself to step that close to the boiler side. A faint cherry glow came out of it. But the bite on his wrist was more immediate and he stepped in. The P.K. fastened the chain so they were pinned there, in a circle whose radius was just a foot more than that of the boiler rim.

The detective-captain said angrily: “I don’t want to see this.”

“Then don’t look,” the P.K. said. “Get back in your dolly-cart an’ go tour the pretty scenery. You state cops give me a pain. Inside here, we know what these guys are. Rats, all of ’em. Punks. Mebbe they act nice an’ pretty for you, but once that gate closes on ’em, they show up for what they are.”

The captain was not visible to Macalay any more. He said: “All right, boys, the Warden doesn’t seem to need us anymore.”

There was the shuffle of men moving together. There was the snarl of the P.K.’s voice. “I’m not the Warden. I’m just the lousy Principal Keeper.”

But the heat had started now. Sweat streamed down his front, into his eyes, into his mouth when he gasped. He shut his eyes tight, and red flames flickered against the eyelids.

His wrists hurt, and he had to brace himself. The men on the other side of the circle were pulling back, trying to get away from the cherry-glow of the boiler wall, and that meant they were pulling him in. He braced his naked, aching feet, and pulled back, and across the boiler one of the men shrieked. He didn’t know which one.

Old Fitz was next to him. Macalay heard him mutter: “We gotta hold our own.”

The boiler room floor was greasy, the puddle of sweat didn’t help. But he braced himself, and leaned backwards.

Jock’s voice on the other side of the boiler yelped: “Give us a little slack here. Hanning’s touching the metal!” Macalay realized then that the scream he’d heard had never stopped. He let up on the pull a little, and the screaming stopped, broke off into a mumbled wail.

The sweat had stopped, he suddenly realized. Guess there’s just so much in a man, and his was gone.

Now his head began to go around, and his eyeballs began to swell. It was as though all the liquid left in his body had gone to his eyes. He was sure they would burst in a moment, and that seemed worse to him than dying. The picture of his eyes bursting, and their liquid spattering on the boiler wall and drying there became so real that he jerked back, and the scream came from the other side again.

He shook his head and came back to a sort of half-sanity, a limbo-land on the edge of reason. The P.K.’s gravelly voice came through to him: “All right, you lice. Anybody want to confess an’ save four other guys’ lives?”

He got no answer; perhaps he hadn’t expected any. The voice deepened to a snarl: “All right. If you think I mind seeing the whole bunch of you shrivel up an’ blow away, just keep your mouths shut. It don’t matter to me.”

The snarl went on. But Macalay had a new worry. Old Fitz on his left wrist had fainted. He fell forward, almost breaking Macalay’s arm, and Macalay and Nosy, on either side of him, flipped him back, automatically, and held him there. The cuff bit through the skin and Macalay began to bleed. The blood running down his hand felt cool and nice.

Maybe I’ll bleed to death and get out of this. Easy dough, Strane’s kind, you can’t take it along. Wouldn’t it be nice to die, just to die?

A new noise cut over the P.K.’s growl. It was Nosy. “Got a guy passed out, sir. He’s breaking my arm.”

“Fine,” the P.K. said, “fine. So talk, and get outta the daisy chain.”

“How can I talk?” Nosy asked. “My arm’s breaking.”

“Let it break,” the P.K. said. “Talk with your mouth.”

“Go to hell,” said Nosy.

Through the fog of his pain, he heard the P.K.’s feet tramping towards him. Grit on the boiler room floor ground under those big feet, and they did it on a note high enough to cut piercingly through Macalay’s head and add one more pain to a system that was nearly all pain now.

The P.K. had kicked Nosy up against the boiler.

Nosy screamed, and jerked back, and Hanning on the other side screamed, and then Hanning’s scream turned into words. “Macalay,” he yelled. “Macalay an’ Jock was the last two in the boiler with him. They did it, Jock and Macalay.”

“All right,” the Principal Keeper said. “Open the chain, boys. Take Hanning and Fitz and Nosy to the hospital. Lay the other two out on the floor here and throw a bucket of water on ’em.”

Macalay felt hands on him, but he couldn’t be sure what they were doing. But he did feel cooler, and there was some sensation left in his back, because he could feel the filth of the floor biting into his skin.

“G’wan,” the P.K. said. “Throw some water on ’em.”

Another voice said: “Sir, those burns’ll blister if you hit them with cold water.”

“So? Let ’em blister.”

“I thought the Principal Keeper wanted them for trial. Any jury’d let them off if they get blistered.”

“Who’s going to try them?” The Principal Keeper was laughing now. “There wasn’t any fingerprints on that shiv except Russ’; we’d never get a conviction. But if these crumbs had told me about Russ when it happened, the papers never would have printed that I’d let a guy escape. I want to teach these bums that they better keep clean with me. Throw some water on ’em and put ’em in the Hole. They gotta learn.”

Macalay, for all his pain, laughed inside when he heard he was going to the Hole again. It was cool in the Hole, and this was summer. He could take it; he’d taken it before...

And once he’d been sorry for himself, just because he was in a detention cell in the city. Sorry for himself because he was lonely. That was why he had been so glad when Inspector Strane showed up.

Inspector Strane, William Martin Strane, was something in the Department; a man four years beyond the retirement age, the city council had had to pass a special law exempting him from retirement. Theoretically, Inspector Strane couldn’t live forever; but the city, and the city’s police, had no idea of what they would do when and if he died.

He didn’t look like dying as he sat down on Macalay’s bunk and stared at him from ice-colored eyes. He didn’t seem to have much time to waste on words. “Macalay, you had no business being on duty that night.”

Macalay knew the Inspector, from hearsay and personal knowledge. You didn’t kid around with him. He said: “No, sir.”

Strane said: “I want to brief you on your physical condition. Seems you’re not aware of it. Your right arm’s gone out four times in the last two months. You dislocated it wrestling at the Y, and the civilian doctor you went to hasn’t been able to fix it.”

“No, sir. No, he hasn’t.”

“You got a physical exam coming up next month. You wouldn’t be able to pass it, even if you had the chance to take it.” The Inspector reached his leg out and squashed a cockroach under the sole of his high-laced kangaroo shoe.

Macalay said nothing.

“Hmph.” Even the Inspector’s grunt had an old-fashioned quality about it. “Some day you’ll have to learn a trade. Clerk in an office or something.”

Macalay shifted from one foot to the other. He didn’t dare sit down until the Inspector asked him to.

“Listen, Macalay,” the Inspector said. “Those jewels in your shoe weren’t worth a million, but they were still worth a hell of a lot. Even if they were glass, you’d still be on a spot. You know that.”

All Macalay said was: “Yes, sir.”

“The Jewelers Association has posted a hundred thousand dollars reward for that gang, arrest and conviction. It’s their sixth job.”

He stopped, and Macalay waited. The Inspector pulled a narrow cigar out of his pocket and lit it. He half-closed his ice-cube eyes against the smoke. For a man with a reputation for bluntness, he was being surprisingly circuitous.

“That’s a lot of money,” Macalay said, to break the silence, wondering when Strane would get to the point.

“Yeah. Jewelers pay a lot of insurance. A gang like this raises the premium — y’know? These bums have heisted several million bucks’ worth.”

“You’d think they’d retire,” Macalay said.

Inspector Strane stared at him, as though trying to figure out if this cop in a cell was trying to be funny. Finally, he concluded Macalay wasn’t. He said: “Bums never got enough money. Their friends blackmail ’em; their dames cost money; the fences rook them. I never knew one to die rich.”

Macalay had no observations to make on bums and their money problems.

Inspector Strane let the silence build; then he nodded, as though pleased with the young man. “Okay,” he said. “You got the picture. Signify anything to you?”

Macalay shook his head slightly.

“You’ve not got too much to choose from,” Inspector Strane said. “So. Why not take on this case? The Jewelers’ Association’s been talking to me. They want a man.”

“Me?” Macalay laughed a non-funny laugh. “I’m sure as hell not going to be around.

Inspector Strane crossed his legs and the bunk creaked. He took the thin cigar from his mouth. “Why’d you take those diamonds? No crap now, Macalay.”

“Like you said, Inspector: the doc told me I’d never pass another physical. They were right there for me to take. I’d just come to after being slugged and there they were. If I hadn’t passed out trying to get to Gresham, I’d have got away with those stones.”

Strane came as close to smiling as he ever got. “We want the bums who have been getting away with too damn much.”

Macalay said: “And don’t forget Gresham.”

“You’d like to square things for him, wouldn’t you?”

A silence hung between them. Strane wasn’t getting to his point. Macalay figured he’d help him.

“You said something about a hundred thousand reward. That dough interests me.”

“All right,” Strane said, and then laid it on the line. He had given it to him like an itemized account. His offer and the alternatives, numbering them one to three, for definiteness as well as clarity: In return for information, Macalay would be sprung, his sentence whatever it might be, nullified. That plus the reward. If he failed, tough — Strane had no bargaining tools; he served his time. In either case, he ran the risk of a shiv in his gut by a con. There was only one thing worse, to a con’s way of thinking, than a cop... and that was a double-crossing cop.

“Why go into the pen to crack this case?” Macalay wanted to know.

“We got no leads on the outside, that’s why.” Strane sounded annoyed. “Well?”

“A guy can live forever on a hundred grand. Live real well. His shoulder’ll never bother him.”

“You sound like I’m giving you a guarantee.” Inspector Strane shook his head dolefully. “Bums don’t talk, remember that.” It was his standard word for crooks. “Especially to cops.”

“They talk to other bums,” Macalay said.

“Hmph.” The Inspector’s grunt belittled Macalay’s confidence. “And there’s another thing to remember. We go on working on this case on the outside. We crack it before you, the deal’s over. You understand?”

“I still like the sound of that big lump of dough.”

Inspector Strane nodded. “I just hope you’re tough enough. Once you start on this, you know, there’s no out?” He spotted another cockroach; his foot went for it and got it. “Write when you’ve got something to tell me. My first two names, William Martin. On second thought, make it Miss Billie Martin. Tell her you miss her. The box number is 1151, here at the Central Post Office. The bum you’re to get close to is a loft-man by the name of Russell. He’s the brother of that safecracker who died right alongside of Gresham. That’s about it.”

4.

Macalay was four weeks in the Hole this time. But even in there, he could sense that his position in the prison had changed. The first time he’d gone to the Hole for not squealing, he hadn’t known whether a prisoner or a screw brought his food; this time when he was in for not squealing under the toughest circumstances, he was sure it was a con.

Because in his very first tray there was a salve of burn ointment. And on the second tray there was a candle and a dozen matches.

After that there was a little something on nearly every tray; a few slices of bacon, a buttered roll, an orange even. Sometimes there was nothing, and that undoubtedly meant that a guard was looking over the trays. But that didn’t happen very often, so probably the P.K. had gone back to sitting in his office, and the Warden was still working on his book and the Deputy Warden was still making speeches, and the screws were still doping off in the shade.

It was funny, now. Even in the Hole Macalay felt in touch with the whole prison, perhaps as a man giving a transfusion to a patient on the operating table feels in touch with the operation; it is passing through his veins and arteries. He never heard a word from Jock or anyone else, but he could feel himself in touch with Jock, in some other Hole.

Macalay was really part of the prison now, and the Hole wasn’t so bad. And best of all there was Hanning, Russ’ sidekick. Hanning who probably knew what Russ knew.

His burns healed, and the broken skin on his wrist healed, though his wrist bones ached for quite a while, and there were permanent scars there and on his knees and on one shoulder that must have gone against the boiler when he didn’t know it.

Instead of fighting the Hole this time, he looked on it as a rest from chipping boilers or scrubbing greasy pans in the kitchen. Maybe it would have been better in the infirmary, but it was all right.

And so he got a little better all the time. He began exercising, doing knee-bends and push-ups. He told himself he was doing this to keep his health; then, when that self-lie stopped fooling him, he said he was doing it because you didn’t dare go out in the yard weak.

And then he stripped away all self-pretense. He faced himself: Hanning squealed on Jock and me; Jock and me have to get him. And we will. So I got to be strong.

The next meal he kept his spoon out, hoping it wouldn’t get the trusty who’d been feeding him into trouble. He hid the spoon by putting it behind some loose mortar in the wall, and waited two full meals. When there was a cold chunk of stew meat — good lamb shank with marrow in it — on his tray, he knew the same trusty was still on duty, and had covered up about the spoon, some way.

So he took the spoon out of hiding and began sharpening it on the rough concrete floor.

You can kill a man with a spoon. The way you do it is, you sharpen the bowl down to an arrowhead; then you bend the handle like a finger ring, only you leave an inch and a half at the back to lie flat along your palm.

Slip that on, and one punch will do the job.

Now his time was pretty full. He had his exercise; he had his sharpening; he had his thoughts. He thought of the hundred thousand. He thought he would get the dope for Strane from Hanning and then kill Hanning.

After awhile he got out. His cellmate this time was a fresh fish, just out of the quarantine block, guy named Leon something or other. Just a punk. Looked like he didn’t even have to shave every day. A punk with light fuzz on his chin.

As soon as Macalay was shoved into his cell, this Leon volunteered his name and said: “I’m doing two to ten for grand larceny, automobile. How about you?”

“I’m a chicken thief,” Macalay said. “I took three hundred to five hundred for habitual chicken theft.”

Leon looked at him. “Aw,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m always doin’ something wrong. Isn’t it right to ask the guys what they’re in for?”

“No, fish. It ain’t right. You can accumulate a mouthful of floating teeth asking questions. It isn’t ethical.”

“I didn’t know,” Leon said, gloomily. “I never do anything right. Like the car I took. It was already hot, and on the police radio, was why the guy had left it there with the keys in it... I thought the law was it wasn’t stealing if the keys were in it, but that ain’t the law.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Macalay said. “I knew the P.K. had it in for me, but I didn’t know he’d go this far, putting you in my cell.”

“Who’s the P.K.?” The kid had thick black hair and pink cheeks, and his eyes shone. He’d last about two hours in the yard.

“The P.K. is a kind of chewing gum they give us,” Macalay said. He stripped off his shirt and went over to the washstand. He knew the kid’s eyes must be coming out on his cheekbones when he saw the still-fresh scars, but he didn’t hear any questions.

Fresh water played across his face, he rubbed it in well, rubbing the Hole out, getting clean again. He started to shave, and then, not suddenly, but rolling hard at him, as a steam-roller goes at a pile of rubble, some sort of sanity returned.

I was going to kill Hanning, he thought. Kill Hanning, take a chance on the big rap, on throwing away everything that maybe can get me out of here.

He shaved slower, pausing every now and then. To live like a con, and yet not to become one. That, he told himself, was what he had to fight against — that was the big danger. To keep my eye on the outside, on the free world, on a hundred thousand bucks, to remember that stir is only a small part of the world. To think of it as prison, not stir, the men prisoners, not cons, the officers guards and not screws; to live penned up, but think free.

He turned, reached for his shirt, and said: “Leon, the P.K. is the Principal Keeper. He runs this place. He’s the man to fear.”

A smile broke across Leon’s face. His eyes got shiny. He said: “Thanks, mister.”

“The name’s Macalay. Just Mac.” Macalay returned the smile, wondering fleetingly if he could in some way use this young squirt to get to Hanning. “There goes the supper bell. We line up here, I’ll show you how, and do a snake dance to the mess hall... Keep your lip buttoned up, there are swagger-stick screws all along the way.”

It was still hot weather, but there was just the smell of fall coming in the air. It was good to be walking along to the mess hall, out in the sun and the cool air.

Good just to drift along with the other cons, but it was time for Macalay to think. He had accomplished only one thing so far: he had established himself as a real con. Hardly anybody would remember now that he’d once been a cop; two sessions of the Hole had taken care of that.

And now — suddenly, not like the steam-roller, but like a bulldozer hitting something hard, and pushing it, all at once into something new, he understood why there had been no outside trial, no investigation of Russ’ murder.

The P.K. That snake brain, sitting in his twin offices, one blood-proof, and one carpeted, planning. It would be easy for the P.K. to see to it that the state cops would find no evidence to take into court, and an officer won’t push a case that he’s going to lose.

Macalay knew that. Every cop knows that. It’s bad for your record.

And why? So the P.K. could keep his own record clear. So he could have a real reason to use the torture that was as necessary to him as grass to a cow, water to a fish.

Macalay, back from the Hole, back from the depths of his convict-thinking, summed it up. I’m in stir, but good, not a con holds my police background against me. I’ve got that, and it’s one thing I figured right from the start I had to get.

And I’ve got one other thing: I know how to handle the P.K., and the P.K. is the prison. The whole prison. But my neck is still in a noose. I got to act like I’m expected to act. The cons will expect me to get Hanning for squealing. I’ve got to make that play, and cross the next bridge when and if.

Macalay laughed inside, thinking of Strane smashing cockroaches, Strane, who should be retired, sitting on his old ass telling him he’d have to be tough. But Macalay’s face never moved a muscle. The screws didn’t like it if you laughed in the march-along.

He marched into the mess hall, eyes in front of him, hands at his sides as per regulations; but he had learned to see a lot without looking. He saw Hanning two files over, and Hanning saw him. Hanning’s look said, “Come on, you sonofabitch, I’m ready.” He saw Jock one file on the other side of him, and Jock didn’t look like he’d ever get his strength back. The P.K. had broken Jock; the P.K. could break anyone in time. Including Macalay.

Leon was on one side of him, and that was no good to him at all. But the man on the other side of him was an old stir-bum, Lefty something-or-other. As they bowed their heads and stood behind the benches, he gathered his breath; and as the chaplain started the grace, he told Lefty: “Hanning’s my meat and nobody else’s. Pass it.”

The Chaplain finished and they sat down and the bowls were placed on their tables: hot dogs, vinegary sauerkraut, boiled potatoes and watery spinach. Macalay speared hot dogs and potatoes and took his bread and Leon’s to make sandwiches; it takes twenty years to learn to eat prison sauerkraut. As the new head of Jock’s Jockies, he probably should have taken Leon’s sausages, too, but he couldn’t do it.

He knew the word was passing down the long tables. It was a thing that the rifle-screws on the balcony, and the swagger-stick screws walking up and down between the benches couldn’t stop; it happened at every meal that somebody passed the word. But never a lip moved, and not a wave of sound went anywhere but where it was aimed.

We’ve suspended the laws of physics, Macalay thought. We can make a tunnel out of air, and shoot sound through it! We ought to be studied by some of the eggheads at the colleges.

He reached out and scooped up Leon’s margarine, buttered a sandwich with it.

Leon looked at him sadly.

There was a commotion behind them, aways. The rifle-guards on the balcony stiffened at the rail, raking the place with their guns. Leon said: “What happened?”

A screw yelled: “Shut up, you! No talking in the mess hall,” and poked Leon in his back with his swagger-stick.

Macalay said: “Somebody passed out. The stinkin’ food they give you, you never know if it’s to be eaten or if it’s already been eaten. It’s a mystery somebody doesn’t pass out every meal.”

Nobody but Leon heard him say it.

The doors to the yard opened and two white-shirted trusties with a stretcher came in, trotting. The chug-chug of the infirmary’s old ambulance could be heard outside the door.

A gentle wind ran across the mess hall. Lefty let a breath of it go at Macalay. “Jock lost his lunch. He passed out.”

Macalay said: “A lunch like this ain’t much loss.” And he thought that with Jock laid up, Hanning became unquestionably his meat. It was up to him now.

The mess hall trusties served rice pudding.

5.

The P.K. assigned Macalay to the concrete block plant. It was rough work; pick up a shovel of cement, heave it in the hopper, follow it with a few shovels of sand, a few of gravel, one of stones and turn and do the same thing to the mixer on the other side.

It was work that left your arms trembling long after you were on your cot in the cell with the lights out and the radio earphones turned off. Macalay was the only man in the yard who had to tend two mixers at one time. His bad shoulder nearly killed him at night.

He heard Jock was in the clay-brick yard, unloading kilns. That wasn’t bad work, if the screws let the kilns cool before you had to unload them. He heard they didn’t with Jock. The P.K. was still riding both him and Jock.

Then he heard that Hanning had been given a job in the office, filing papers for the P.K.

That night he wrote a letter to Miss Billie Martin, Box 1151. He had to make an effort to remember the number.

Two days later he was hauled out of his cell right after lunch and told the P.K. wanted him.

Even though he knew what it was about, he felt the old thrill of fear go through his stomach and the small of his back. He didn’t even like to hear about the P.K. anymore; the P.K. was the cons’ favorite conversation piece.

But this time there weren’t screws in the office; it wasn’t even the same office. It was the one where the P.K. did his front work, a pleasant place with a trusty typing away at a desk, and the P.K. behind a bigger one, with a bookcase behind him, full of books on criminology and penology and institute management which he had never read.

Opposite him was Inspector Strane. He looked around as Macalay came to attention, his heels clicking.

The P.K. said: “All right, Macalay. At ease. The Inspector here has some questions to ask you.”

Inspector Strane said: “No use taking up your time, Mr. Odell.”

Odell, that was the P.K.’s name. He had another of those triangle things on this desk, like he had in the other room, the room that was plain and slick, so blood wouldn’t stain anything.

The P.K. said: “I like to cooperate.”

“And I appreciate it. But I would like to talk to Macalay alone now. If we could just have a little room to talk in, a cell, anything.”

“I ain’t likely to put a city police inspector in a cell. You g’wan an’ use my other office. You want somebody to take notes?”

“No.” Inspector Strane had not looked at Macalay. “You can’t get anything out of a convict if notes are being taken, Mr. Odell.”

“You can’t get anything out of Macalay anyway,” the P.K. said. “He’s one of the worst troublemakers in this can. I wisht you’da framed a more docile guy to send here.”

The Inspector was as stiff-backed as ever. “I don’t frame people, Mr. Odell.”

“That was a joke,” the P.K. said. “Just a joke. Okay, Strauss, take Inspector Strane over to my other office, take Macalay with him. You don’t have to stay with them, jus’ make sure Macalay don’t have a shiv on him. I don’t want any cops getting killed in my stir.”

The screw, Strauss, saluted. He snapped his fingers at Macalay to right-about-face; Macalay did. The Inspector followed them out. The P.K. said: “You guys on the cops don’t have any idea what we gotta put up with. You see the best side of them, when they still think they maybe are gonna beat the rap.”

When they were alone, Macalay stood at attention in front of the P.K.’s desk.

The Inspector, behind the desk, said: “All right, Mac, all right. Break it off.”

Macalay said: “Yes, sir.”

Strane’s eyes widened. Then he nodded, slowly, and began sliding the desk drawers open, slowly, smoothly, as though he’d once been trained as a second-story man. He found the mike in the middle drawer, left-hand side. He sat staring down at it for a moment, and then slowly grinned. He took his hat — his good felt hat — and jammed it down over the mike. Then he shut the drawer again. “There,” he said. “Sit down, Mac.”

Macalay sat down. Inspector Strane pulled two thin cigars out of his pocket, handed one of them to Macalay, took a flask off his hip and a box of breath-killers, and put those on Macalay’s side of the desk. “Okay,” he said, “let’s have it. You getting anywhere?”

“Sure. I’m making concrete bricks now. It’s better than chipping boilers or washing pots. It’s not as good as being in the shoeshop, where I was.”

Strane’s lips thinned. “Knock it off, Macalay. Quit clowning.”

Macalay reached out and took a drink from the flask. The taste of free-world liquor brought him all kinds of memories; and for a minute he was afraid he was going to cry. He bit his lip and said: “I’ve been in The Hole, in solitary, twice. It pretty near got me.”

“So now you want out. You know I can’t—”

“No. No. I don’t want to get out.”

The Inspector sat up a little straighter. He looked almost angry. “What did you want to see me about?”

“I want to be transferred to the laundry.”

“You got me down here for that? Why, I can’t—”

“There’s somebody I got to get next to.”

“Why?” The old voice cracked like a whip.

“This guy was Russ’ buddy. He’s on the office force and he got there by squealing on me. He goes through the laundry every day for a check.”

“You’ve gone stir-crazy! You think I’d help you kill a man, even a con? You think Principal Keeper Odell wouldn’t know he had to keep you apart?”

“He’s a sadist,” Macalay said. He finished his liquor and reached for the breath-killers. “He’d like to see this Hanning hurt. He’d like to see me hurt, too. He’d like to see every con hurt. This Hanning was Russ’ buddy. You know Russ is dead? I take it, you know that.”

Strane nodded, watched Macalay chew the breath-killers.

“I was getting somewhere before I got into The Hole,” Macalay said, “and to go on, I’ll have to work in the laundry. I tell you I’m onto something good.”

“You got guts,” Inspector Strane said. “I’ll be damned if I don’t want to see this work out for you.”

“Thanks,” Macalay said bitterly.

“Stop and think, will you? What am I going to tell Odell? I got no reason to ask him to transfer you.”

“You’re not much help.”

Strane swore. “And you keep your hands off that Hanning.”

“I’ll get to him,” Macalay said. “I have to.”

The P.K. laughed. “He’s a real dyed-in-the-wool lowdown con,” he said. “They never talk. Supposed to be a first offender, but I’ve sent out tracers. I’ll bet you he’s served time in a half a dozen other places.”

Macalay stood at attention.

“He’s not your favorite prisoner, eh?” Inspector Strane took out a cigar, handed it to the P.K.

“I got no favorite among the cons,” the P.K. said, heavily. “A nestful of snakes, the whole bunch. I’d like to pump poison through the cells.”

Strane said: “Well, if there weren’t any criminals, we’d both be out of jobs.”

The P.K. chuckled his heavy, belching chuckle. “A thought. Need this boy any more, Inspector?”

“No,” Inspector Strane said. “But think it over, Macalay.”

“Hold that boy outside, Strauss,” the P.K. said. “I want to talk to him...”

Strauss snapped his fingers at Macalay, who about-faced and marched out with the guard. Outside, Strauss sat down on a bench, staring at the convict-clerks; Macalay started to sit down next to him. Strauss snapped his fingers. “Attention!”

After awhile Inspector Strane came out, putting on his hat. He never glanced at Macalay, standing stiffly at attention.

One of the clerks, a little nance Macalay couldn’t remember seeing before, was giggling at him, for no apparent reason. By the time the P.K. sounded his buzzer, Macalay was considering violence.

Strauss snapped his fingers again — he was really a natural to turn out just like the P.K. — and Macalay marched back into the office, stood at attention in front of the desk.

After awhile the P.K. looked up. “All right, Strauss.” He waited till the screw had left. Then his sour gaze went up and down Macalay. “So you didn’t tell that city dick anything.”

“No, sir.”

“Pretty anxious for you to talk. Wanted me to bribe you.”

“Sir?”

“Give you a laundry job so you’d talk. Yah! Why should I? What did these cops ever do for me, except send more renegades in here to make me trouble? I wouldn’t do a city inspector a favor if he paid me!”

Macalay waited. So Strane had tried and it hadn’t worked. So—

“Yeah!” the P.K. snarled again. “I never liked you, Macalay. I don’t like cons, and you’re the worst kind. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“But I got you trained,” the P.K. said. He ran a finger over the desk, inspected it for dust. “You don’t talk to cops, and that’s because I trained you. You’re a real con, now. You know what that inspector gets a year?”

Macalay felt very tired. He said: “No, sir.”

“Twenty-three hundred bucks more than I do. And he gets to go home at night, not live in a lousy stir. And he gets to go to dinners with all the big shots in town, and get up an’ make speeches about how we’re putting down crime, an’ all.”

Apparently the P.K. hated cops as well as cons. Macalay wondered how he felt about civilians. Probably hated them, too, because they didn’t have to take state jobs. Probably hated himself for that matter.

“Yeah,” the P.K. said, “that inspector sure went off with a bee in his high hat. You, Macalay. I’ll transfer you, but where I want to transfer you. You think you got brains enough to hold down an office job?”

“I could try, sir,” Macalay said, and held his breath.

“Yeah. I’ll have you transferred. You start tomorrow. Can you type?”

“Yes, sir.” This was too damn good to be true.

“Good, boy, good. A big boy like you in with the fags. Be nice.”

Macalay nodded imperceptibly. The sadistic sonofabitch wanted to see him and Hanning tangle. He wanted to see two cons knife one another. His own perverted pleasure was all the sonofabitch ever thought about.

6.

The office job was okay. Only the P.K.’s office — the fancy one where he did not interrogate prisoners — was air conditioned, but there were fans in all the clerical rooms, and, as winter came on, heaters. There were washbasins where the convict-clerks could wash their hands if they soiled them on the carbon paper; there were pots of coffee sent up from the kitchen whenever they wanted them, because the office staff could do a lot for the other convicts, could transfer their cells or their work-assignments.

Several of the clerks were punks, pansies, girl-boys; these were the various phrases the prison world used to describe them. They flirted with the normal men on the convict-staff, and two or three couples of clerks were “married.” Of course it was a cinch for a clerk to see that he shared the same cell with his beloved. But in addition to all this, they were cons. Especially vicious ones. The limp wrists and the wiggling behinds didn’t make you forget that.

The arrival of Macalay, a new man in the office, had given the pansies a great big old thrill, as Macalay put it to himself. One of them had presented him with a personal coffee cup with his name painted on it in the fluid they used to correct mimeograph stencils; another had put flowers on his desk, and a third had given him a chair pad, hand-knitted.

But when he didn’t respond to their attentions, the girl-boys relaxed back into routine, and left him alone. Quizzically, he noticed that inside himself he rather missed the fuss they’d made over him, and, shuddering, he told himself he had to finish this up quick, make his play before he slid down the easy chute of convict thinking.

So he concentrated on Hanning.

It was a thing he could do well — hate Hanning. The convict part of him and the copper part of him could hate Hanning equally.

Hanning didn’t bat an eye when he found Macalay in the office. He didn’t allow himself to be stared down. What Hanning might be cooking up for him, he had no way of knowing. But he was wary, even as he knew Hanning to be wary of him.

He found out something right away: Hanning was “married” to one of the file clerks. Somehow or other this surprised Macalay; it changed his opinion of Hanning from sheer hatred to something pretty close to contempt. Still, he worked on how he could put this information that he’d uncovered about Hanning to use.

For two weeks he didn’t speak to the squealer. Then the time for the annual report to the Governor came up, and the office staff were put on overtime. It meant they had to eat dinner, at least, in the office, while the rest of the population got supper in the mess halls. The P.K.’s whole career depended on those reports; if anything went wrong with them, the Warden might stop writing his book, the Deputy Warden might stay home for a while, and the P.K.’s life would be wrecked. So nothing was too good for the clerks who made out the report.

Macalay searched and searched, and finally found an opening. There was a nice little thing in the annual mess report he could use. But, instead of going right to the P.K. with it, he waited. That night he took his supper plate over to Hanning’s desk. “Hi, boy.”

Hanning looked up, startled, his face an angry white.

“I don’t want these mashed potatoes,” Macalay said. “I’ll swap them for your string beans.” Macalay made the swap quickly with his fork. Then he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Hanning. He said: “Brother, I was sure out to get you.” He forked overdone beef into his mouth. “When a guy first gets out of that Hole, he’s like an animal. Hell, man, if you hadn’t yelled, I was gonna do it myself. You probably saved my life, yellin’ when you did.”

Hanning was getting back to normal. “Well, yeah, that furnace. We’d’ve all croaked in a little while, and the P.K. — he woulda found some way of covering up.”

“That’s right,” Macalay said, and went on eating. “You holding that against me? You know — about Russ?”

Hanning shook his head, his eyes glistening with relief. “That bastard?” he said shrilly, in his eagerness to square things with Macalay.

Macalay dropped it then, but he kept on talking to Hanning once in awhile — just casually for a couple of days. At the end of that time he gave Hanning’s sweetie — they called him Piney — a knitted muffler Leon’s mother had sent him.

Then Macalay went to the P.K. He was very careful to stand at attention while he talked. “Sir, about the mess hall report.”

The P.K. growled, but it wasn’t the growl he’d used at previous interviews. This one took place in the polite office, too. “What about it?”

“I notice the Principal Keeper says that food costs went up three percent in the last year.”

“Yeah?”

“I went over to the library and looked it up. Overall food costs in the country went up eight percent. Instead of apologizing, the prison can claim an actual reduction in costs of five percent.”

The P.K. looked pleased. But he hated to be nice to anyone. “Yeah?” he said. “I can claim it, but can I make it stick?”

“I want to make a chart on it. A graph.”

“Hey, that’s all right. Yeah, you do that.”

“I’ll need some help. I’ll have to go talk to the steward, and the chief cook. Get the real dope. Make it look professional. I could do it myself, but it’d take me a week. Two guys could get it all done in half a day.”

“Okay. Take any of the clerks you want.”

So the next morning found Macalay and Hanning in the kitchen. Macalay had worked it smoothly; Hanning’s last suspicion was gone. He should have known all along that a squealer would also be yellow. Hanning behaved like any other greedy weakling let loose in the kitchen; went around nibbling stuff, bumming coffee, flirting with one of the fry-cooks till he got a steak broiled in butter.

The kitchen activity was rising to the noontime peak. Lunch had to be gotten out; three thousand cons had to eat. Nobody paid any attention to anybody else.

Macalay got a piece of rag out of his pocket; it was used to dust typewriters, but this one was fresh. He slipped a boning knife from a butcher block, wrapped the rag around the handle, moved it up and down a couple of times to remove prints, and palmed it under the clipboard he was taking notes on.

He said: “Hanning, you got to help me a couple of minutes.”

Hanning was talking to his friend, the fry-cook. “Aw, Mac...”

“You’ve goofed off all morning. I’ll have to bring one of the other clerks back with me after lunch if—”

“All right, all right.”

Macalay led the way to a meat box. If Hanning had any suspicions left, they must have disappeared when he saw how casually Macalay let him take the rear. They walked into the box, and Macalay gestured with his pencil hand; the other held the clipboard and the knife. “We gotta make a count of those carcasses,” he said. “You go along and call out to me, lamb, beef, pork, whatever they are. Only take us a minute.”

Hanning stepped forward towards the chilled meat. Macalay kicked the heavy vault door shut, and put the pencil in his pocket.

He said: “Turn, Hanning. Turn and take it.”

Hanning turned, his mouth open to say something. Then he saw the knife, and his mouth stayed open. But the color ran out of his face. He was standing by a big side of mutton, and his face, which had been the color of the red meat, ran down the scale until it just matched the suet.

“You think you were going to squeal and get away with it?” Macalay asked. “You got soft in the head, just because I talked easy to you.”

Hanning’s Adam’s apple was jerking up and down like there was a fish hook in and somebody was playing it with a reel.

“Go on and yell,” Macalay said. “These boxes are soundproof.”

“You — you—”

“Let me do the talking,” Macalay said. “You’re trying to say I can’t get away with it. You’re wrong. Nobody saw us come in here. And in this cold, your body’ll stiffen so fast, the docs’ll never be able to say what time you got it. And I got alibis for every minute of my time — from when I checked with the steward out there, and him with one eye on the clock that tells him when to serve lunch, till ten minutes ago, when your friend Piney’s gonna swear I was in the office with him.”

“Piney?” Hanning asked. Blood — maybe the blood that had drained out of his cheeks — was flooding the whites of his eyes, tracing red veins across them. “Piney’s gonna—”

“Piney don’t love you any more,” Macalay said. “Nobody loves a squealer. Anyway, Piney wants a guy who can look after him. Dead men don’t.”

He raised the knife, holding it in front of his chest, fist around the wooden handle, hand turned over. He walked towards Hanning.

And it was hard for him not to hurry, not to step forward fast and let the knife do the work. The dirty squealer! It wasn’t right that a snitch should live in the world of decent cons!

The knife would do it. It was sharp and thin, worn down to a sliver of the finest steel. It would go in the soft space between the breast bones and slide up, easy as taking a drink, up to the left and into the heart, and there’d be one squealer less to stink up the world.

Macalay fought it back, made himself go slow, slow for effect, slow for the big one, the play that he’d suffered for; in the fish tank, in cells, in The Hole, in the concrete block plant...

Slow, he told himself, slow to scare him, not fast to kill him. He’s a squealer and a yellow belly and he’ll break right down the middle. Take it slow, slow...

Then the mutton-fat face split, and Hanning was screaming: “Don’t kill me! Lemme go, I can give you some dope you can use. You were a cop.” He was playing his hole ace; every con had one, fondled and held onto, for just such a time. “It could do you good. Yeah — yeah, it could.”

Macalay hesitated. This had to be right, this had to be acting like no guy on the screen had ever done. His voice had to be hard and contemptuous. “What you got? You got something on the P.K.? You going to tell me he’s a swish?”

“It could maybe spring you,” Hanning screeched again. “I know the guys who—” he stopped.

Macalay’s heart began to pound, hard. But he had to keep that sneer on his face, in his voice. “Still squealing, huh?”

“Russ knew the ones pulled that loft job,” Hanning said. “His brother got it on that job. Ya — ya, just like that buddy-cop of yours. I’m levelling with ya. Russ told me when we first saw ya. Told me who—” He broke off.

“What good’ll that do me?” Macalay asked. He moved the knife forward; it touched Hanning’s shirt, just below and to the right of the number sewed on the pocket. “What good, squealer?”

“I can give you names and dates and where to pick ’em up,” Hanning said. “I got it all. You wanta get them, don’t you? They killed that cop pal of yours. You wanta get ’em don’t yuh?”

“Yeah,” Macalay said. “Yeah, I want to get them. Start talking. An’ it better be right, because if it ain’t, I’ll still be in here, and so will you.”

He shifted the knife to his left hand, under the clipboard, and started writing as Hanning babbled.

He could sneak a letter out with the noon mail that went from the office. Inspector Strane would get it tomorrow, and come get him.

He’d be out soon — a free man, a rich man... But, hell, it would be a pleasure to kill Hanning when the squealer got through squealing. It sure would. And maybe necessary now, to keep Hanning from squealing on him. In any case, he’d have to travel fast and far to get beyond the clutch of the grapevine.

Suddenly, Macalay threw the knife away, hard, into the far black depths of the icebox. It landed in the sawdust, barely made a noise. Looking at Hanning, crouched, panting, the refrigerator light glinting off his cold sweat, Macalay wondered if it was going to be as hard living what the hundred grand as it had been getting it.