The Tower

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The ruckus quieted as the prisoners tired of their new toy. They resigned themselves to bed, their heads settling to rest on the stained yellow pillows. After the shouts stopped echoing, after not an inmate stirred in the jet, black night, Allander drew the thin blanket to his face and shook uncontrollably.

  On rare occasions, high tide was moderate enough that the top three levels stayed above the ocean’s brink. The water would remain just under the vents of Level Ten, so the guards would open them to aid the air circulation. In the deathly heat of the summer, the prisoners would lie bare-chested on their cots, fanning themselves with their blankets and dousing their bodies with water from the toilets. But as dusk fell like a funeral veil across the sky, the cool San Francisco air crept through the vents and into the bones of the prisoners. The guards would laugh as the inmates shuddered and clamored in their metal rooms.

  On these nights, Allander would retreat to the safety of his bed and stare through the thin gaps in the vents. As moonlight spread across the water, it engendered figures and shapes, creatures and monsters that crept in the swirls and eddies. He stifled his cries as he saw clowns dancing above the whitecaps, their long, white arms reaching toward him through the waves, their laughing red mouths rippling in the water’s surface, mouthing threats and delights eternal.

  Only once did he lose control, and he hurled himself against the metal bars, screaming in despair. “JUST COME IN! Come in now and take me. TAKE ME!”

  He collapsed, cowering in the corner under the vent. His eyes bulged wide in dreadful anticipation as he slowly became aware of the laughter filling the air around him.

  3

  IN Unit 2A of the Dungeon was Tommy “Cuckoo T” Giacondia, perhaps the most famous living Mafia hitman. Tommy at one time had weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds, but since his imprisonment five years before, he had lost over a hundred. Now he looked thin and weak, his cheeks and eyes filled with shadow. His weight loss had no effect on his vocal capacity, however; he constantly bellowed complaints up the Hole, most of which dealt with the food. Evidently, Tommy was used to a more varied diet than a loaf for every meal.

  “This shit,” he would say. “I wouldn’t feed this to my worst enemy. I wouldn’t make his dog eat this shithouse brick if it pissed on my mother’s grave.”

  This was perhaps because he dealt with his worst enemies (or those of the Berlucciano family) in far more colorful ways. His signature disposal method was an original one. He would tie up his victim in a closet of an abandoned warehouse, and then cut off the tips of his fingertips about midway down the nail. He would leave them to bleed to death or to die slowly of dehydration. They were usually found weeks after he left them, their fingers scraped down to the top knuckles from trying to escape.

  Tommy ran into trouble on the Merloni hit. He had finished only the first two fingers of the right hand when the cops arrived at the scene. Tommy came out shooting and took two bullets to the gut, but was rushed to the hospital and lived to stand trial.

  The victim testified with a large bandage wrapped around his hand. When photographs of Tommy’s last hits were circulated to the jury, an accountant in the front row fainted. Needless to say, Tommy wound up with life, no parole. Perhaps even worse, he never found out who’d tipped off the police. This question consumed him, swimming through his mind on long afternoons until the bittersweet thought of revenge tightened his hands into fists.

  But Tommy was a different man now. His time in the Tower had worn him down, like water over a rock. His edges dulled, he smoothed against opposition.

  Although he was a horrible artist, he loved Sketch Duty passionately. One day, he refused to return his crayons when his hour was up. And when the time came for him to relinquish his picture, he would not. Using his semen, he pasted his childish drawing of a single potted flower on his wall bars and admired it as if it were a Renoir. The guards could not have prisoners disobeying the rules, and although they wouldn’t open the unit door to retrieve the picture, they could render it worthless from outside.

  Tommy regarded them nervously as they rode down on the elevator trailing a thick hose usually used for washing down the inmates. “Whaddaya want? Whaddaya want with my flower?” They didn’t answer him; they just turned on the water full blast, dousing the unit and drenching the picture.

  He shrieked and tried to block the stream with his body, but it was too late. The colors faded into the darkening paper and the ruined picture fell in a wad through the floor bars. He started crying like a child, big, round tears running down his cheeks. “My flower,” he said over and over. “My beautiful flower.”

  That was the last time Tommy got Sketch Duty. In the Tower, one chance was all you had.

  Although he kept up his contentious front, Tommy Giacondia was gone on the inside, rendered totally harmless. That was a bad thing to be in the Tower, surrounded by men who smelled weakness more strongly than anything else. So, as a means of protection, Tommy kept loud.

  Across from him was Safran Habbád, a bomb specialist who worked contracts for Third-World countries. During a South American coup in the early eighties, he had taken out an entire government cabinet.

  He was captured in the United States a few years later, fulfilling a contract on a Massachusetts senator who was a strong advocate of gun control. Safran was cornered in the house after he’d set the bomb, and he’d refused to surrender. It exploded in the kitchen, and although he was on the second floor, he still lost half the flesh on his face to the blast, as well as a considerable amount on his back, arms, and legs. He’d attempted to burn down his hospital room to avoid his trial, hoping perhaps to rise from his ashes and spread his wings, but his escapade had failed and he was sentenced, ironically, to life.

  The first day Safran moved to Level Two, Tommy greeted him in his usual manner.

  “You stupid falafel-eating Seven-Eleven prick. You shut the fuck up if you gonna live here by me. Bombing houses of families, you’re a sicko. A spaccone.”

  Safran swore back at him in several languages before commenting on Italy’s paltry effort in the Second World War, implying that it was due to the deficient genital dimensions of the soldiers. The two men were quickly embroiled in the first of many violent arguments in which neither understood much of what the other said.

  Alone on Level Three was Mills Benedick. The guards decided to leave Unit 3A vacant rather than subject even a Tower prisoner to Mills on a daily basis. He stood hunched over, his rounded shoulders heaving as he loudly drew breath.

  An unusual amount of body hair covered him, curling thickly around his shoulders and arms. There was no line where his head hair ended in the back and his body hair began. Mills ate by shoving his loaf against his mouth, grunting and sucking the food in.

  Mills had escaped a high-security mental institution two years after he was committed. He’d become a serial rapist in his brief stint in the outside world, committing five rapes in the seven days he was free.

  He would break into single women’s homes during the day and hide until they came home from work and went to sleep. Sneaking to their beds, he would pounce on them, quickly pressing duct tape over their mouths and eyes. Once he had their heads adequately fixed to the beds, he would undress the women slowly and stare at their naked bodies. Then, from his heavy perch upon their chests, he’d begin to masturbate. Finally he’d unleash himself on their bodies, hurling himself into them and thrashing until he was relieved.

  Six of the women had severe bite wounds on their breasts and faces; one victim had even died mid-act (the forensic pathologist concluded), when Mills had ripped out her larynx with his teeth.

  The day he was captured, Mills had fled a rape scene after he’d heard sirens approaching. He’d run several miles over rough terrain with tree branches cutting his arms and cheeks. Sweat ran into his cuts and his eyes, and he’d begun to bellow with pain. A frightened farmer, believing there was a wild animal on the loose, had called the police.

  The police trac
ked Mills to a church in the hills, and they positioned themselves outside, peering through binoculars to fix his location.

  Inside, the sun bled harshly through the stained-glass windows, casting distorted images across the pews. Mills sat on the stairs leading to the altar, holding his head in his hands, dust floating about him in the multicolored air. When he raised his head, the light ran madly across his unshaven face.

  The police burst in from their silent vigil, shattering windows and breaking down doors. Mills stood on the stairs and screamed, a terrified, primal roar, his face distorted as spittle flowed over the brink of his bottom lip, spilling onto his bristled chin. Before verbal contact could be established, a scared rookie sank two tranquilizer darts into Mills’s upper chest. Mills woke up on Level Three.

  Another personality in the Tower was Cyprus Fraker, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard from Alabama. His Klan chapter had grown to be influential at a local political level and, eventually, he was indicted on charges of embezzlement.

  Cyprus was less immediately dangerous than the other inmates, but he wound up in the Tower because at Maingate he’d led the Aryan Fist organization, which had been responsible for several prison assassinations. The officials thought it better to separate him from his followers and his outside contacts, so they had placed him in the Tower. Racial violence at the prison had abated as a consequence.

  Cyprus lived in Unit 9B, where, in his underwear, he would sit for hours, tilted back on his bed, singing country songs. He managed to catch a number of water rats that made their way into the Tower, and he snapped their necks and hung them by their tails from the ceiling bars. Whenever the Hatch was opened, they would twirl in the air like wind chimes.

  When Cyprus had first moved to his unit, Spade, the powerful black prisoner in Unit 10B, urinated through the floor bars into his open mouth every time he fell asleep.

  “You stupid fuckin’ nigger. I ought to lynch your sorry ass. You’re a fuckin’ gorilla.”

  “Yes,” Spade smiled back, “but who’s the one with a mouthful of piss, ’Bama boy?”

  Eventually, at the command of the guards, Spade had toned down his urinary assaults in exchange for more Sketch Duty.

  4

  CLAUDE Rivers lived right above Allander, in Unit 11A. After a killing spree in 1992, Claude had come home, decapitated his mother, and lived quietly in the apartment with her head impaled on a coat tree. He’d kept her corpse in the bedroom, using it to fulfill his sexual needs. He was captured after neighbors complained about the smell emanating from his apartment.

  In the Tower, Claude spent his time sleeping. Balding, his gut protruding from beneath his shirt, his skin greasy and red, he looked more like a seedy hotel manager than an accomplished killer. Allander had heard stories about him back at Maingate, and was amazed that someone with such an egregious appearance could have committed that most challenging of crimes.

  Spade lived in Unit 10B, across the hole from Allander. Like the pairs of prisoners on each level, they were both locked together and apart in their tight circle. Spade stood a solid six foot four, two-forty, and he was as bald as an eight ball. He was still known by his street tag, which he carried with him like a weapon. None of the prisoners knew his real name.

  Through a rigorous routine of exercises during his eight years at Maingate and the Tower, Spade had maintained his muscle from his gangster days. In the late-night hours, Allander watched through the thick air as Spade contorted his frame, twisting backward and upside down.

  Spade alone could reach through the bars that composed the ceilings of the cells. He did pull-ups on them until one day Jonsten Evers gleefully overturned his bed on top of Spade’s hands, which peeked through his floor. Spade was stuck dangling five inches above the ground, swaying painfully back and forth. Jonsten had giggled hysterically during the thirty minutes the guards took to respond to Spade’s roars. It was very hard to hear what went on in the Tower from certain areas of the roof (one of the flaws of its design), and this, in addition to the guards’ general contempt for the prisoners, accounted for the slow response time when mishaps did occur.

  After the tops of his fingers scabbed over, Spade stood on his bed for hours, his hand extended through Jonsten’s floor bars. Jonsten, still under the sway of his heady delirium, played with Spade’s hand at first. He taunted it with strokes, jerking back his hand as Spade’s snapped shut like a Venus’s-flytrap. He would spit on the hand, pinch the back of it—even try to step on it and pin it wriggling to the floor. Spade’s hand responded so quickly, however, that it avoided much of the punishment from above.

  “On the street, you’d be my little bitch,” Spade growled at Jonsten through the bars. “I’d own you. These metal bars protect you from the beast. Just a couple feet between us. If I could touch you, I’d rip you apart with my hands and teeth. Rip you apart. Come on, just reach down. Reach on down and touch my hand.”

  Jonsten tittered nervously, his high-pitched laugh echoing through the elevator shaft.

  “But we’re not. We’re not on the street. You can’t touch me. I’m up here and you’re down. You’re down on Level Ten.” He giggled as he writhed about the floor, singing ecstatically. His halting song came in tortuously rhymed couplets: “On the street a wild killer he made. But in the Tower, Spade finds himself caged.”

  As Spade persisted in his efforts, Jonsten’s hyper-delirious mood was replaced with concern, then fear, then despair. He began to obsess about the hand’s minuscule intrusion into his world. He stopped playing with it, then touching it at all, and soon he withdrew to his bed and refused to leave.

  “Spade, I didn’t mean it. With the bed. The bed. The bed that tipped over. I’m sorry.”

  But Spade said nothing, and day after day, he stood on the bed with his hand extended patiently through the bars.

  Jonsten began screaming and moaning in anguish, but he was generally ignored. This was nothing new in the Tower. “The hand. Make it go away. Away, hand! Away, Spade’s hand. I’ll bite it. I’ll bite it off.”

  He never really slept anymore, existing instead in that bitter dream world that lies between sleep and waking. He squirmed in his bed, his disheveled hair flipping from side to side. “The hand! Don’t! It’s reaching for me. It’s coming for me.”

  A chorus of shouts answered him. “Shut the hell up, Jonsten. Or I’ll come for you. And I’m worse than some fucking hand.”

  Jonsten peered anxiously over the edge of his bed to see if the tell-tale hand had sunk away, but it had not. For days it did not depart; it stayed and watched him, a shark’s fin emerging from a metal sea.

  When Jonsten had to go to the bathroom, he leapt from the bed and made his way to the toilet, his back mashed against the wall bars so he could watch the hand. He balanced over the toilet, his bulging eyes still fixed on the hand as he defecated sloppily into the steel bowl. Aside from such ventures, he remained sitting Indian-style on his bed.

  All the while Spade waited calmly.

  Jonsten got weaker and weaker. He was afraid to cross his cell to pick up his loaves; they accumulated just inside the slot in his door, collecting swirls of flies. After a few days, he became afraid even to make the brief journey to the toilet.

  Eventually, his exhaustion caught up with him and he began to nod off. His head lolled forward and his weight started to shift him over the side of the narrow bed. He jerked awake in a panic, his wild eyes flashing, then orienting on the hand and setting themselves again with determination. He had glimpsed his final weakness, however, and now he knew, as Spade had all along, that it was just a matter of time.

  Finally, one night he fell asleep completely and he slumped forward, his arm dangling above the floor. His eyes opened in terror as he realized where his lapse had landed him, and then the hand seized him around the wrist.

  Spade leapt from his bed, maintaining his viselike grip on the wrist and bringing his two hundred and forty pounds to bear on it. Jonsten’s body slammed flat against the floor,
smashed by the force pulling his arm downward. His hand snapped back against his arm to accommodate the gap between the bars, and he squealed as his wrist broke in two.

  Spade’s size-fourteen feet were finally touching the floor. He gazed up at the limp piece of meat in his outstretched hand. His face and bald head were splattered with blood from the wound where Jonsten’s bone had punctured the skin, and he laughed deeply as he licked the spray from around his lips.

  Dropping his weight, Spade swung from Jonsten’s arm, which was taking on the appearance of a grotesque chandelier. There was another pop (accompanied by more screams) when Jonsten’s shoulder left the socket, and the flesh around his upper arm bunched up above the bars. It began to give way, and as it tore, bone, muscle, and ligament came into the dim light in front of Spade. He no longer had to stand on his toes.

  He heard a series of whimpers coming through the ceiling, and he smiled before climbing on the bed and reaching through the gap again. He grabbed a handful of Jonsten’s hair, and using his body weight again, ripped it out.

  Jonsten passed out, giving the other inmates a break from his delirious screaming. Mercifully, he didn’t have to be awake as Spade’s meaty hands closed around his neck, and with a single quick jerk, snapped his spinal cord.

  The only prisoners who actually witnessed the episode were those on the eighth and ninth levels and, of course, Allander. He lay on his bed, watching Spade’s exertions with a mixture of amusement and contempt. The inmates on the lower levels realized something was wrong only as the blood made its way down, dripping from the ends of Jonsten’s fingers through the floor bars. A few of them cackled and cheered, licking the blood gleefully from their fingers, remembering the flavor and the hot scent.

  Spade settled down on his bed. Lying back, he opened a book and began to read as Jonsten’s arm swung lazily overhead.