And he was. “Shithead! Did you fuck up your meet with the kid?” This time the voice was dangerous and Harvey was quick in defense.
“No, it’s cool, Moots, that’s not till Thursday. I was just telling you why that was the best I could do.”
“You told me. Now shut up.” Harvey didn’t wait to see where Muzzi would conceal the weapon. He didn’t want to know. Fortunately he and Muzzi didn’t eat on the same shift, so Harvey left without looking back.
The thing was, Muzzi didn’t need the shiv. It would be useless in the first stages. When it stopped being useless it would be unnecessary. But you didn’t argue with Muzzi. Not when he told you to steal him a glass blade. Not when he added more people to the plan and made two of them break the glass to get it. Not ever. It wasn’t just that Muzzi’s connections made the whole project possible, it was the man himself. “Man” was the wrong word. Muzzi was a rabid animal.
Tuesday lunch was always the same: sloppy-joe sandwiches, salad from the surface farm or the hothouse, milk. What they called “milk,” anyway; it had never seen a cow, being made of vegetable fats and whitener. What made it worse than usual was the methane stink from where the digging of the new sewer pits had seeped through the soil into the cellblocks themselves. Harvey didn’t join in the catcalls or complaints, didn’t let sticky soup from the sloppy-joes spill on the floor or accidentally drop a meatball into the Jell-O. He didn’t do any of the things the other inmates did to indicate their displeasure, because the last thing Harvey wanted was to get even a slap-on-the-wrist twenty-four-hour loss of privileges just now. All the same, he suffered with every bite. Inmate Harvey was used to better things.
Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T. had a record that went back thirty years, to when he was a bright and skinny kid. He hadn’t intended to get into violence. He started out as a Phone-Phreak, rival of the semilegendary Captain Crunch. When Ma Bell got mad enough to put the Captain in jail, young Johnny Harvey got the message. Making free phone calls to the Pope on his blue box just wasn’t worth it, so he looked for less painful ways to have fun. He found them in proprietary computer programs. Johnny Harvey could wreck anybody’s security. No matter how many traps Apple built into its software, Johnny Harvey could bypass them in a week, and make copies and be passing them out, like popcorn, to all his friends before the company knew they’d been screwed. Apple even got desperate enough to offer him a job—don’t crack our security programs, design them—but that got boring. So did program-swiping. For a while Harvey worked for the city, mostly on the programs for electronic voting and the Universal Town Meeting, but that was kind of boring, too, in the long run, and then somebody came along with more larceny in his heart than Harvey had ever owned, and saw what treasures the young man could unlock.
He unlocked six big ones. Two were major payoffs from insurance companies on life policies that had never existed, on assureds who had never been born. Three were sales of stock Harvey had never owned, except in the tampered datastore of a brokerage house’s computers. One was a cash transfer from branch to branch of a bank that thought its codes could never be compromised.
When the bank found out how wrong it was, it set a trap. The next time Harvey tried to collect a quarter of a million dollars that didn’t belong to him, the teller scratched her nose in just the right way and two plainclothes bank security officers took Johnny Harvey away.
Since it was a white-collar crime and nobody loves a bank anyway, the prosecutor didn’t dare go for a jury trial. He let Harvey go for a plea-bargained reduced charge. No one was really mad. They just put him away for eighteen months. But they put him in Attica, world’s finest finishing school for street crime and buggery. After that Harvey couldn’t get a job, and the codes had got a lot tougher, and, by and large, the easiest way he could find to support the habit he had picked up in stir was with a gun.
And when that went wrong, and they put him away again, and he got out once more, the situation hadn’t improved. He tried the same project. This time things went very wrong, and when he finished trying to shoot his way out of a stakeout there were three people dead. One of the victims was a cop. One was a pregnant shopper. The third was her three-year-old kid. Well, the forgiving State of New York could make a deal on a homicide or two, but this time they were calling him “Mad Dog” on the six o’clock news, and he was convicted in public opinion before the first juror was called. He was looking at three consecutive twenty-five-to-life sentences. If he was the most model of prisoners, he could hope to get out two months past his one hundred and ninth birthday.
That wasn’t good enough.
So Johnny Harvey summoned up his resources. He still had his winning ways with a computer, and Nathanael Greene was a computer-controlled prison. The central file always knew where every inmate was and whether he had a right to be there, because at every door, every stair, every cell there was a checkpoint. Each inmate’s anklet ID checked him in and out for all the hours of his sentence, everywhere.
That wasn’t good enough, either, but then two more events filled out the pattern. The first was when his first cellmate, No Meat, stuck his hand in the microwave oven. It was Harvey’s fault, in a way. He had told No Meat how to bypass the oven’s safety interlocks. But he hadn’t really thought No Meat would carry his protest against prison diet that far until he didn’t show up at evening lockup, and the screw told him No Meat was now well on his way to a different kind of institution, and the next day Harvey got a new companion. His name was Muzzi, and he looked a lot like bad news. He was short and scowling. He came into the cell as though he were returning to a summer home and unsatisfied with the way the caretakers had kept it up, and Harvey was cast in the role of the caretaker. His first words to Harvey were: “You’re too fucking old. I don’t screw anybody over twenty-two.” What struck Harvey most strongly, even more than the violence and the paranoid brutality in the man, was his smell: a sort of catbox rancor, overlaid with expensive men’s cologne. What struck Harvey later on, when Muzzi finished explaining to him who he was and how Harvey was going to behave, was that here was a man who was well connected. Not just connected, but holding. Muzzi was serving his sentence without the clemency he could have had in a minute for a little testimony. Muzzi chose instead to serve his time. So he was owed; and by somebody big.
The other event was that excavation started, no more than ten yards from the retaining walls of the prison, for the Bed-Stuy methane generating pit.
On Thursday morning Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T. returned to his cell after breakfast, along with all the other inmates in his cellblock, for morning showdown. Bedding stripped. Mattress on the floor. Personal-effects locker open. Inmates standing by the door. As always, the guards strolled past in teams of three. Usually there was just a quick glance into each cell. Sometimes a random dash and a shakedown: body search, sometimes going over the mattress with handheld metal detectors, sometimes even taking it away to the lab and replacing it with a new one, or rather an even older, worse-stained, fouler-smelling one off the pallet the trusty pulled behind them. Harvey and Muzzi stood impassively as they went by. This time the reviews didn’t bother them; but from the end of the cellblock Harvey could hear cursing and whining. Somebody, possibly the black kid who had just come in, had been caught with contraband.
Then, for some minutes, nothing, until the speaker grilles rattled and said, “All inmates, proceed to your duty stations.”
Muzzi’s work in the bakery was one way, Harvey’s library the other. They didn’t say good-bye to each other. They didn’t speak at all.
Harvey was not surprised when, toward the end of his morning shift, the speaker in the library defied the Quiet! signs and blared, “Six Four Seven Harvey! Report to Visitors’ Center!”
The well-connected Muzzi had used his connections well. He had procured them a reception party to be waiting once they were outside the prison. He had procured a couple of assistants to manufacture the plastic explosive and help with the digging—and, of
course, to get him his personal shiv as well. He had also procured for Harvey a “son” to serve as a courier, and not a bad son at that. The kid even reminded Harvey a little bit of himself at that age—not counting color, anyway. Not counting their family backgrounds, either, which were Short Hills versus Bed-Stuy, and certainly not counting parentage—in Harvey’s case a pair of college teachers, in Marcus’s a retired hooker and her pimp. It was hard to see any resemblance at all, to be truthful, except that the young Johnny Harvey and the young Marcus de Harcourt shared the lively, bursting curiosity about the world and everything that made it go. So when Marcus came in he was right in character to be bubbling, “I seen the model of Bed-Stuy, Dad! Boy! There’s some neat stuff there—they got windmills that’re gonna pump hot and cold water, they got a place to turn sewage into gas, they got solar panels and an ice pond—”
“Which did you like best?” Harvey asked, and promptly the answer came back:
“The windmills!”
And that was the heart of the visit, the rest was just window-dressing.
Because Harvey had an artist’s urge for perfection he took pleasure in spinning out the talk to its full half hour. He asked Marcus all about his school, and about his Mom, and about his Cousin Will and his Aunt Flo and half a dozen other made-up relatives. The boy was quick at making up answers, because he too obviously enjoyed playing the game. When it was time to go Harvey reached around the desk and hugged him, and of course the guard reacted. “Oh, hell, Harvey,” she sighed—not unpleasantly, because she didn’t believe in shaming a man before his kid. “You know better than that. Now we got to frisk you both.”
“That’s all right,” said Harvey generously. It was. He wasn’t carrying anything that he wasn’t supposed to, of course, and neither was the boy. Anymore.
An excuse to clean up around the model on his afternoon shift, a pretext to return to the library after dinner—Harvey’s glib tongue was good enough for both, though not without some sweat. He was carrying, now; if he had happened to hit a routine stop-and-search with the contraband in his possession…But he didn’t. Before bedcheck that night Harvey’s part was done. The chip was in place in the library computer.
The chip Marcus had smuggled in wasn’t exactly a chip. It was a planar-doped barrier, a layer cake with gallium arsenide for the cake and fillings of silicon and beryllium. Once Harvey had retrieved it from the niche under the model windmills and slipped it into place in the library terminal, it took only a few simple commands—“Just checking,” he grinned at the night duty officer in the library—and the chip had redefined for the master computer a whole series of its instructions.
So, back in his cell, Harvey stretched out and grinned happily at the ceiling. Even Muzzi was smiling, or as close to smiling as he ever got. They were ready. Esposito had already stolen the vaseline and the other chemicals to make plastic. La Croy had the hammers, the shovels and the spike to make a hole in the wall for the plastic charge.
And the chip was in place.
It functioned perfectly, as Harvey had designed it to do, which meant that at that moment it did nothing at all. As each inmate passed a checkpoint, his ankle ID registered his presence and was checked against the master file of what inmates were permitted to be in what locations at which times. In the seven and a half hours after Harvey did his job, about a dozen inmates came up wrong on the computer. Their sector doors locked hard until a human guard ambled by to check it out. Three of the inmates were stoned. One was simply an incorrigible troublemaker who had no business being in a nice place like Nathanael Greene. The others all had good excuses. None of them was Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T. Neither he nor any of his three confederates had tripped any alert, and they never would again. The computer registered their various presences readily enough. When it consulted the file of any one of them it was redirected to a special instruction table which informed it that Inmates Harvey, Muzzi, Esposito and La Croy were permitted to be any place they chose to be at any time. When it sought any one of them in his cell and registered an absence, the same redirection told it that this particular indication of absence was to be treated as registering present. The computer did not question any of that. Neither did the guards. The function of the guards was not really to guard anything, only to enforce the commands of the computer—and now and then, to be sure, to see that none of the inmates dumbly or deliberately jammed the optical scanners by kicking their IDs in backward, thus locking everybody in everywhere. The guards didn’t ask questions, since they were as sure as any bank or brokerage firm that the computer would not fail.
And were about to learn the same lesson from Johnny Harvey.
So at five o’clock the next morning all four of them had strolled to a cell in the east wing of Nathanael Greene, part of the block that had been evacuated while the outside digging for the Bed-Stuy shit pit was going on. “Do it, fuckheads,” Muzzi ordered, licking his lips, as Esposito held the spike and La Croy got ready to strike the first blow. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He was fondling the paper-wrapped shiv, and Harvey had a dismal feeling. “We all really ought to stay right here, Moots,” he offered.
Muzzi said, without malice: “I got business with a guard.” And he was gone.
“Oh, shit,” sighed Harvey, and nodded to La Croy to swing the hammer.
Since no one else was in that wing, no one heard. Or no one but the geophone, which relayed the information to the central computer, where the same chip informed it that the digging noises were part of the excavation for the shit pit. The geophone heard the sound of the plastic going off in the drillhole five minutes later, too, and reported it, and got the same response; and they were through the wall. All that remained was furious digging for about a dozen yards. When they were well begun Muzzi came staggering back, holding his face, his jaw at an unusual angle. “Fuckin cockthucker thapped me,” he groaned. “Get the fuckin hole dug!” And dig they did, frantic shoveling, now and then noisy and nervewracking sledgehammering as they hit a rock, and all the time Muzzi ranting and complaining as he held his fractured jaw: the shiv had been too short, it had broken off, the fuckin guard fought back, Muzzi had had to strangle the fucker to teach him a fuckin lesson for giving him a fuckin hard time—Harvey began to panic; the grand plan was going all to pieces because this raving maniac was part of it—
And they made it through the dirt and broke out into open space, into the excavation. Out onto a narrow plank walk over four stories of open steelwork. To a ladder and up it, five stories up, all the way to the surface, seeing buildings, seeing city streets, seeing the lightening pre-dawn sky, and it was working, it was all working after all!
They even saw the black car that was waiting where it was supposed to wait, with its clothes and guns and money—
And then it all went wrong again—Jesus, Harvey moaned, how terribly wrong—as a construction-site security guard, who did not have a computer to tell him what to do, observed four men clambering out of the excavation, and tried to stop them.
It was too bad for him. But the shots gave the alarm, and the noise and the commotion were too much for the person in the black car, and it rolled away and around the corner and there they were, Esposito dead, Muzzi with a bullet in his ass, out of the prison, free—but also alone in a world that hated them.
5
Marcus was early at Mr. Feigerman’s office, not just early because the errand he had to run couldn’t wait, but too early for Mr. Feigerman to stand for it. He couldn’t help himself. All the way from the candy store his feet kept hurrying him, although his head told him to slow down. His feet knew what they were doing. They were scared.
So was the rest of Marcus Garvey de Harcourt. It was bad to be summoned out of school because his father had been hurt. It was worse that when he got to the candy store his father was in a stretcher, a paramedic hovering by, while two cops questioned him angrily and dangerously. The store had been robbed, Marcus gathered. The robbers were not just robbers,
they were escaped prisoners from Nathanael Greene; and they had held up the store, beaten up his father, stolen all the money and ridden off in a commandeered panel truck with Jersey plates. None of that really scared Marcus. It was only the normal perils of the jungle, surprising only because his father was known to be under the protection of someone big. It did not occur to Marcus that the story was a whole, huge lie until his father waved the cops away so he could whisper to his son. What he whispered was, “Around the corner. Mr. Gambiage. Do what he say.” It was serious—so serious that Dandy de Harcourt didn’t bother to threaten Marcus with the cat, because he knew the boy would understand that any punishment for failure would be a lot worse. That was when he began to be scared; and what finished the job was when Mr. Gambiage snatched him into the black car and told him what he had to do.
So he took the knapsack and the orders and went trotting off, and if the boy warrior did not wet his pants with fear it was only because he was too scared to pee. He had been told that a diversion had been organized. The diversion was beginning to take shape all around him, people in threes and fours hurrying toward the heart of the Bed-Stuy project, some carrying banners, some huddled on the sidewalk as they lettered new ones. It made slow going, but not slow enough; he got to the Williamsburgh Bank Building more than ninety minutes before he was expected, and that was too early. The best thing to do was to pee himself a break in the twenty-ninth-floor men’s room to collect his thoughts and calm himself down, but a security guard followed him in and stood behind him at the urinal. “What’s in the backpack, kid?” the guard asked, not very aggressively.
Marcus took his time answering. It was a good thing he’d finally managed to get tall enough for the man-sized urinals, because there weren’t any kid-sized ones here. He urinated at a comfortable pace, and when he was quite finished and his fly glitched shut he turned and said, “I’m Mr. de Rintelen Feigerman’s personal assistant, and these are things for Mr. Feigerman.” The guard was a small man. He was lighter skinned than Marcus, but for a minute there he looked a lot like Dandy getting ready to reach for the cat.
Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories Page 28