Foxcatcher

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by William H Hallahan


  He needed to celebrate his well-being with a boutonniere. And to that end he searched out a florist with Major Mudd in tow.

  At the florist’s he sniffed his boutonniere and happily permitted the young saleslady to put it on his lapel. The major declined to wear one.

  “Oh, come,” Mr. Rus said. “You really ought to learn to wear boutonnieres, Major. They give things just the right tone.”

  Slits of hot Cairo sunlight slipped through the shutters on the hotel window. But on the bed it was cool from the air conditioning.

  Eric Rock chuckled when the girl bared her sharp young teeth in a menacing smirk. “Ow!” Those preadolescent little razors had nipped his navel.

  Rock told himself over and over that his infatuation with this girl/woman was dangerous. This was still a risky town for him ever since the binary explosives deal he’d worked with Libya. Those people in Egyptian Defense were still very shirty about it. Furthermore, every time he flew into Cairo to see the girl, the uncle’s price got higher: The man could read the hunger in Rock’s eyes and adjusted the fee to fit the fever.

  Rock drew a finger along that petulant child’s lip, then along the beautiful configuration of her ear.

  There came a low, urgent knuckling on the door.

  “Sir! Sir!” the uncle whispered through the door. He said something in Arabic that made the child leap from the bed. She snatched up her clothing in a loose ball, hugged it to her bare body, and ran to the door.

  “Her father’s coming!” the uncle said. And he hauled her down the hallway to an exit door as the girl tried to pull on some of her clothes. From seductive vamp to threatened child in a few steps, she looked smaller and younger than her ten years.

  A moment later Rock, too, abandoned the room. Still half undressed, he ran toward the elevator, holding his passport and airline tickets in his teeth, carrying an attaché case in his left hand, and trying to pull on his shirt with the right.

  Down in the street he entered a cab and opened his attaché case to read the airline schedule. He was sure there was a flight within the hour. He would take it no matter where it was going.

  His infatuation with that child would be his undoing. He felt he was one step ahead of arrest. The last thing he wanted was to be chased by an irate Egyptian father. In the hotel room he had abandoned over two thousand dollars in clothing.

  When he looked out at the street, he saw the uncle hurrying the girl in and out of the throngs on the sidewalk. Rock watched her through the rear window until she became a speck in the crowd.

  Would he never see her again?

  The girl’s father and his four sons borrowed an automobile. In the late afternoon they took Fawzi, the uncle, bound and gagged in the car trunk, out into the desert, about an hour’s drive away.

  They followed the old caravan trail toward the west that the camels had followed in their immemorial treks before the dawn of Western civilization. There in the vastness of the desert, where they wouldn’t be disturbed, they took the uncle out of the trunk. The desert sunset was gorgeous, and all over the Arab world the muezzins were calling from their lofty minarets to the faithful to affirm their belief in the All-Powerful.

  The uncle came out of the trunk on his knees, madly praying, babbling incoherently, his hands clasped, imploring his brother, then his nephews, crying out to his God. The father and his four sons stood in a circle and, indifferent to his shrill singsong litany, watched the man dancing on his knees. The father handed each son an old scimitar, then watched them draw the curving blades from the scabbards. Long afternoon shadows on the earth pantomimed their movements.

  The uncle scurried about on his knees, clutching at their garments, hugging their legs, reminding the boys of past kindnesses, reciting the names of his children, calling on his brother to remember their mother and her grief. He begged and wept and called on his God’s mercy.

  His brother replied by pushing Fawzi over with his foot. Fawzi quickly rolled over and back on his knees, stumping after his brother, talking urgently now. From behind, one of the sons pushed him over again. Before he could rise, his brother made a slash on his buttock. Red blood soaked quickly through the slit in his trousers.

  Fawzi wagged a forbidding finger at his brother, shouting “Enough.” The eldest son with one stroke cut off the finger. Fawzi’s voice rose to shrieks now as he clutched the stump of his forefinger, blood dribbling from both hands and spotting the desert. Another son flicked away a piece of Fawzi’s left ear. A long strip of skin and muscle was surgically sliced off his bare right forearm.

  Fawzi howled with terror. He groveled with pain, crawling on his knees and elbows. His brother chopped off his right hand. Blood spurted from major veins and arteries. Slashes and sliced-away flesh appeared now on all his limbs and his back. His clothes were long red ribbons that fluttered when he moved. Everywhere he was leaking blood, rapidly bleeding to death, a writhing red-wet ball, demented with pain. One slash nearly severed his left arm at the elbow. A third nephew chopped at his foot.

  Fawzi tried to curl around all his many pains, his cries growing weaker, slowly writhing in his own large stain of blood.

  And then his brother, admonished by his Maker to mercifulness, signaled his sons to step back. He bent over and spoke a few words of farewell to his brother, raised his scimitar, and struck off his head. They all watched it roll a few feet toward the setting sun.

  Using the end of his scimitar now, the father wrote one word in the desert hardpan with its tip: the name of his daughter’s deflowerer. Rock. Then he plunged the tip of the scimitar into the word. Rock.

  Slane got ready for the sales clincher as the four customers stood around him in the office. He took six telephone books, stood them up, and wedged them into the corner of the room near the door.

  The eyes of the four customers watched with fascination as he opened his attaché case. He lifted out a rifle with a collapsible steel-rod stock.

  “Length,” he said, “under twelve inches.” He pulled on the stock until it reached its full extension. It clicked into locked position. Next he reached down to the open attaché case and lifted out a fat tube that was slightly bulbous at one end, like a long, drawn-out raindrop. It was a malevolent gray color. “Suppressor,” Slane said.

  He coupled the suppressor to the rifle and held them up. “This weapon is based on the Ingram machine pistol.”

  “M10 or M11?” asked one of the men.

  “The M10/11, with some new wrinkles,” Slane said. “Total weight slightly over six pounds. Fires a dozen shots a second. Seven hundred twenty rounds a minute. Range three hundred yards—ammunition either forty-five caliber or nine millimeter.”

  Slane looked through the glass partitions of the office and studied the office staff at work. People were walking to and fro, talking on the telephone, and sorting papers at their desks.

  “Watch,” he said. They watched with mouths agape as he raised the weapon and aimed it at the telephone books. He pulled the trigger. Pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft—the bullets shredded the phone books with barely the sound of a computer printer.

  All eyes looked out through the glass partitions to the people in the office. Not a head was turned to them.

  “Now that’s what you call silent.” Slane watched their bobbing heads. He lifted another fitting. “Telescopic sight. For use day or night. This weapon is whatever you tell it to be—a pistol, a machine gun, or a sniper’s rifle.”

  The four men smirked at it, then at each other.

  “It’s the ultimate jungle weapon,” Slane said. “A handful of men can tie up entire armies with this little item. It can kill more men in a shorter time than any other gun in the history of firearms. And I can make immediate delivery of quantities up to twenty-five thousand. You could be shooting your way into Government House on Traone Square a few weeks from now.”

  One of the businessmen chuckled with delight, spreading the heavy odor of garlic in the room.

  3

  In the cel
l to Brewer’s left was a kid named Jason Poole, from Maine. He was serving seven years for breaking and entering—a harsh sentence for a first offender. In the cell to Brewer’s right was Clivedell Rine, a professional thief from Harlem. A three-time loser at forty, he was in for eleven years on six counts of burglary and grand larceny.

  “Robbed the wrong apartment at the wrong time and stole the wrong things. Wroooo-ong.”

  The man to Rine’s right was a hardball named Pelew. He was in for twenty years on assorted charges including armed robbery, kidnapping, and atrocious assault. A friendless man, he was known as a dangerous head case with a violent temper and an antisocial personality. In the past three months he’d raped two other inmates, hospitalizing both of them in the process, and was awaiting trial on both counts. He was an odds-on favorite to be committed to Creedmore or some other state institution for the criminally insane.

  He had thrown the leather belt the night Brewer had arrived.

  Without prompting, many of the inmates asserted to Brewer that their jail terms were passing quickly—a piece of cake you can do standing on your head. Nothing to it. Everyone wore a brave face. If an inmate lost heart and spoke out in despair it was considered a breach of faith. Despair is a contagious disease in a prison.

  At night Brewer often heard men sobbing.

  Jason Poole talked usually of his father and his brothers, of hunting and of country life in Maine. Most of his hunting stories centered around a blue-tick hunting dog called Chili.

  “She can hunt a bird right up his kazoo.”

  Clivedell Rine spoke of the good times he’d had when the scores were good and the fences were generous, of feeling mellow from wine and joints, of women and night life in Harlem. He’d had gonorrhea at least twelve times—maybe more—and Old Joe twice.

  “Clap’s just a bad cold in your private.”

  He was illiterate and was learning to read so he could study the Koran. While in prison he’d become a Muslim.

  In his cell Brewer was confronted with himself. For the first time in his life there was no place to hide: Brewer faced Brewer. Lying on his back in the dark with his eyes open, he engaged in remorseless and unremitting self-examination. He was shocked when he discovered a person he neither liked nor admired. He’d uncovered a naïve fool who had trusted people, who had expected the system he had defended to defend him. And with astonishing speed he reached a fatal conclusion.

  Now it became clear to him that he had always been in prison. Not the walls and locked doors and grated steel decks and bars and cells, but the real prison inside himself.

  For he was a prisoner of time, locked inescapably into this historical age, carried along with it like a stone in a glacier—moving, but at time’s tempo, not his own.

  Most of all he felt he was a prisoner of his own personality—of that given set of traits that came with birth, stayed until death, and predisposed him to see the world in a certain way, to make certain moves, certain choices. The iron maiden of his personality gave him at birth predetermined preferences and inclinations, whether he wanted them or not. It allowed him to make only these moves and these choices and no others. He had no free will. No man did.

  Sitting on the edge of his cot in the middle of the night, he told himself each man is born an optimist or a pessimist, a ditch digger or a violinist, a fool or a knave, a terse introvert or a loquacious extrovert. You can play only the hand you were dealt. No other.

  In short, he saw himself as the prisoner of predestination.

  On a piece of pad paper, he wrote, “Brewer is a Calvinist.” He stuck it on the wall and tried to laugh at it. He couldn’t.

  The Greeks had said it: Character is fate. Personality is destiny.

  To change his fate, he would have to change his personality. Refuse to be the trusting fool any longer.

  The fatal conclusion this led him to was even more astonishing. It was a consequence of numbers.

  First were the numbers of time.

  Some 1,500 prisoners in unison, with all the fervor of desperate hearts, willed time to race by. Flee, days. Fly, months. Roar on, years. With the speed of light, hurry by, Time. Get me out of here.

  The least unit of time was carefully measured and judged: bad time or good time. Bad time was prison time, those bleak days and worse nights. Good time was time spent on a phone call or a family visit, on a letter or a package. Good time was anticipated, savored, and hoarded.

  Each inmate was allowed 2 phone calls a month. Each phone call lasted no more than 6 minutes—minutes that were carefully planned so that each second of each minute would be filled to overflowing with love and encouragement and home news, like glowing coals placed around the heart to warm it for days afterward.

  Each inmate was allowed one visitor a month. Visiting time, one hour: 12 hours a year. This, too, required careful planning and thought. Some prisoners even contrived to have regular sexual contact with their visitors.

  These good-time segments meant nothing to Brewer. He received no phone calls, no visitors, no mail.

  Then there were the numbers of space.

  Brewer’s cell was exactly 6 feet wide. It was 8 feet 4 inches deep and 7 feet 9 inches high.

  In it were 5 pieces of furniture: a steel cot with a foam mattress, a steel footlocker, a cold-water sink, a backless stool, and a lidless toilet. There was very little room to pace in.

  His sliding cell door unlocked every morning at 7:00. It locked every night at 5:00. The opening was exactly 24 inches wide.

  His cell was one of 50 cells on his row. There were 2 rows to a tier: 100 cells. There were 3 tiers—and 300 cells—in each cell block. There were 5 blocks in the prison, 1,500 cells. All 5 cell blocks were contained within one huge brick building which also housed the 2 prison mess halls.

  It was a Noah’s Ark of criminals. A living anthology of various crimes. Sweetmeadow housed 1,487 prisoners, more than 500 of them serving time for robbery, 246 for burglary, 222 for homicide, 200 for murder, 130 for drug possession, 65 for weapons possession, 56 for felonious assault, 33 for grand larceny, 53 for rape and other sex offenses including sodomizing minors, 15 for forgery. In all, nearly 1,500 failures in their chosen careers.

  Numbers haunted their lives.

  It was 357 paces from his cell to the left-side mess hall. He never entered the one on the right, which was identical. There were 64 tables, all bolted to the floor, and a backless bench on either side of each table, also bolted down. Each table fed 12 men. Each mess hall fed 768 prisoners.

  Counting the 2 chapels, the school building, and the workshop buildings—which also contained the laundry and the barbershop—there were 26 buildings inside the walls.

  The prison area covered 54 acres. And it was surrounded by a 4-sided wall of steel-reinforced concrete, 1.25 miles long, 30 feet high, 36 inches thick at the base. There were 11 watchtowers, each containing one armed guard, posted to make sure that the inmates stayed in. Prison was a deprivation of geography.

  For Brewer the most significant number focused on the prison farm, where 89 prisoners were allowed to work outside the walls: 89. Outside the walls.

  Jason Poole said, “No one’s escaped from here in thirteen years. Two men tried three years ago. They killed a guard. They were shot dead by the state troopers about a mile from here.”

  Brewer thought about his 9-year sentence. And he refused to serve it. He refused to be the victim of predestination any longer. He refused to be someone else’s fool one more day. From the library he checked out a book on gardening and farming.

  He would escape.

  After a while Brewer was old news to the prison population at large. He was just another face there to do his time. He listened to their talk. And they talked endlessly.

  The most insistent subject in prison is not sex or crime or revenge. It’s the art and craft of getting out. Serving the shortest possible sentence. Parole. The most important institution in a prisoner’s life is the parole board. With the squiggle of a pen,
the three men on the board can turn a prisoner loose, end his incarceration, put him back out on the street years before his sentence is completed. Or they can extend his stay to the full bitter length of his term.

  To a man languishing in prison, such a signatory power is godlike.

  Inducing the parole board to be generous requires great skill and preparation. To that end prisoners haunt the law library, become exceedingly knowledgeable in the ways of the law and in the forms that flesh out the law—the petitions and writs and the many other official documents that surround a man who has been sentenced to prison.

  Brewer paid little attention to all this. He would be his own parole board.

  He applied for a job on the prison farm and was put on a long waiting list. It would take years, they said. His inner ear told him that it would not take years; it would take a payoff. When the time came. He didn’t want to wait. So he sought an alternative method.

  His plan to escape was his balm and solace, his constant companion, his obsessive activity.

  This was now Brewer’s world of numbers: a count of prison doorways, their sizes and locations; the course and length and disposition of sewer lines, water lines, electrical cables, gas mains; the terrain outside the walls—the roads, their lengths and destinations. And, most interesting, several long-disused underground passageways and their dimensions.

  Somewhere in that welter of lengths, heights, distances, frequency of use, method of securing, number of keys—somewhere was the way out.

  Jason Poole was an excellent self-taught artist. With a complex style that was part primitive and part slick technique learned from prison library books, he painted scenes from memory of his rural life in Maine. To verify it he searched travel magazines and constantly asked for photographs from the relatives who would still write to him. There were very few: his mother, his twin brother, and an aunt.

  He, too, was obsessed with the parole board. Everyone said he was the ideal candidate for parole. He was a model prisoner, of good family, with no previous record, good school scores and education, and with the skills to support himself in various ways in Maine: woodsman and guide, lobsterman and commercial fisherman. If he worked it right he might be home by autumn, just in time for the hunting season. With Chili.

 

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