Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  During Vasacapa’s last two months in prison, he had actually held down a part-time job in a local supermarket on the outside, as an assistant produce manager. Once he was a free man, he shifted to full-time employment in the same store, and of course he kept the house at the other end of the tunnel. His former fellow inmates continued to use the tunnel, and Vasacapa constructed a private entrance from his driveway into the basement for them, so they could travel at any time they pleased without disturbing him or his family.

  Three years ago Vasacapa had died, and his widow had decided to sell the house and go live with a married daughter in San Diego. Over the years, as each tunnel insider had finished his prison term, his place had been taken by another inmate, chosen by the insiders in a democratic vote; like a fraternity. When the widow informed the current insiders of her plans, they realized they couldn’t let the house be sold to a stranger, yet no one of them had the cash—or credit—to buy the place himself. So they pooled their resources and bought the house as a group. The wife of one of them—Bob Dombey, the shifty-eyed first man I’d seen coming from the locker room—had been brought up from Troy, New York to front the combine, had bought the house in her own name, and was now living in it.

  The agreement was that the group owned the house, and that a member whose term was up and who left the prison gave up his share but was paid back his investment That had originally been twenty-three hundred dollars per man; so that now whenever an insider left prison, the group gave him twenty-three hundred dollars, which it then got back from the man who took his place. If an insider died, which had happened twice so far (both times of natural causes), the new man still paid the twenty-three hundred dollars, which was sent without explanation to the deceased’s next of kin.

  My appearance had screwed up this well-oiled operation completely. The man I’d replaced, a professional arsonist out now on parole, had been paid his twenty-three hundred dollars, but the group couldn’t ask me for the money unless they were willing to let me in as an equal partner, and none of them was at all sure that was the case. I’d been more or less shoved down their throats by the warden, and most of them resented it.

  So they didn’t know what the hell they were going to do. Nor did I. And in the meantime my only course was to wait, keep my mouth shut, and hope for the best.

  If only I knew what was best. The idea of going through that tunnel of theirs once was very pleasant, very exciting; but the idea of becoming a part of this conspiracy was terrifying.

  The whole situation raised yet again my old problem: was I good, or was I bad? A hardened professional criminal would simply join in with these commuters, pay his money, and live content within the bent rules. A truly honest man, interested in perfecting society and rehabilitating himself, would have gone to the warden and told him the full story at the first opportunity. But I, stuck somewhere between the two extremes, dithered, did nothing, and waited for circumstances to sort things out without my help.

  Phil was away with Eddie Troyn for about ten minutes. When he came back, the basketball players were still making their infinity sign and I was still brooding about my prospects. Phil had Max Nolan with him, and he said, “Max can take over at the door here for a minute. Come on with me.”

  “Right,” I said. “Hello, Max.”

  He nodded, neither friendly nor hostile. A muscular, thick-waisted man of about thirty, Max Nolan looked more like an outside agitator living near a university campus than a professional crook. He had thick brown hair, a bit longer than prison regulations allowed, and a bushy, drooping moustache, and he was serving ten-to-twenty for various kinds of grand larceny. In fact, Max had started out as a campus radical, had seen jail the first couple of times as a result of anti-war demonstrations, had moved on from there to drug busts for possession, and then had graduated to burglary and the use of stolen credit cards.

  There’s a funny double progression going on in prison these days, as more and more radicals arrive, sentenced for drugs or politics. The rebels are radicalizing the criminals, which is why there’ve been so many prison riots and strikes recently, but at the same time the crooks are criminalizing the radicals. A college graduate who enters prison for smoking marijuana or bombing an army recruiting office comes out knowing how to jimmy apartment doors and crack safes. A few years from now the world in general may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

  Anyway, Max was one of this new breed, who had been at Stonevelt three years and managed to ingratiate himself early on with both establishments: the official one headed by the warden, and the unofficial one run by the trusties. “It’s just like college,” he told me once. “You brown-nose the teachers and buddy-buddy your roommate.”

  But he told me that when he knew me better. At this point he merely nodded when I said hello, and let it go at that. So I went away with Phil, who led me back to the locker room at the rear of the building, where I found three of the others waiting for us, sitting on the benches or lounging against the lockers.

  I stopped dead when I saw them. Eddie Troyn, Joe Maslocki and Billy Glinn. Joe Maslocki was a former welterweight boxer in for manslaughter, a tough guy with a battered face and chunky body; he was the second returnee I’d seen that first day, the one I’d felt impelled to call “sir.” Billy Glinn was simply a monster, a being designed for no purpose other than to destroy people with his bare hands. He wasn’t quite as tall nor quite as wide as Jerry Bogentrodder, but he gave an impression of much more strength and much more viciousness. He seemed denser than most human beings somehow, as though he’d actually been born on some larger, heavier planet. Saturn, maybe.

  I knew instantly that they’d decided what to do about the problem of me, and I stared hopefully into each face, trying to read what that decision had been. But there was nothing there; Billy Glinn looked like a monster killing machine as always, Joe Maslocki looked like a welterweight boxer between rounds, and Eddie Troyn looked as military and disapproving as ever.

  When Phil tapped my arm I jumped as though he’d used a live wire instead of his finger. I stared at him, and he pointed, saying, “Put those on, Harry.”

  I looked where he was pointing, and saw a pile of civilian clothing on the nearer bench. Suddenly smiling, suddenly feeling wonderful, I said, “I’m going through, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Phil said, and when I looked around at the faces I now could see they were all smiling. They’d accepted me.

  The civvies were rumpled tan slacks, a green plaid flannel shirt, a green V-neck sweater with gaping holes in both armpits, and a reversible cloth zippered jacket, blue on one side and brown on the other. “That’s the best we could do,” Phil said, while I was putting the stuff on.

  “It’s fine,” I told him. “Fine.” And it was; anything that wasn’t prison blue denim pants and prison blue cotton shirt was fine and more than fine.

  I was reversing the reversible jacket, thinking my ensemble called more for the brown side than the blue, when a sudden thought struck me. What if they’d made the other decision? What if in fact they hadn’t really decided to accept me, but had decided to unload me instead? What better way to unload somebody than to walk him off the prison grounds, walk him directly to the shallow grave and then shoot him, or cut his throat, or have Billy Glinn reduce him to component parts?

  I looked around again at their four faces, while I fumbled with the reversible jacket. It was true they were all smiling, but were those actually smiles of friendship? Was Phil Giffin’s smile comradely or smug? Was Eddie Troyn’s smile so strained only because it was unmilitary, or also because it was untrustworthy? Was that smear on Billy Glinn’s face a grin of friendship or a leer of anticipation?

  Phil said, “You ready, Harry?”

  Christ, no, I wasn’t ready. But what could I do? Plead with them, promise them eternal silence if they would only let me go? I would plant a shiv in my cell myself just before inspection. I would do whatever they wanted.

  I blinked, licked my lips, was about to s
peak when Joe Maslocki said, “Really gets to you, don’t it, Harry? Getting outside the wall.”

  Friendship; it couldn’t be anything else. They’d accepted me. “That’s the way I feel, all right,” I said, and slipped on the jacket.

  7

  Through the looking glass. Through the locker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Come on,” Phil said.

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

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

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

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

  “We’ll just take a walk,” Phil said.

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

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

  “You want in?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I want to come in.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You escaped from prison?”

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

  “You doing another joke, Horreld?”

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

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

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

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

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