Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

  Michael Travis felt his hand being released, and then Cordell gripped his shoulder, wished him a final “Good luck, son,” and then he was escorted out of Cordell’s office and down the hallway.

  The custodian who walked with him stopped at a locked door. “My name is Officer Hibbert,” he said. “Through here we have something called the cubes. They are little rooms, cells if you like, and they ain’t got nothin’ in them but four white walls, a bed, a chair, a locker for your clothes, and a towel. You gonna be in here for two weeks. This is just the way it is. You get your food through a mailbox in the door, and you come out for an hour’s walk around the yard between ten and eleven in the morning. If you have some difficulty or problem while in your cube, then you knock on the door three times. You then wait fifteen minutes. If there is no response, then you can knock on the door again. You wait until you are attended to. Any violation of that routine or any violation of any other regulation means a full day in Chokey. A full day is twenty-four hours. You will receive a copy of the facility regulations tomorrow, and you’d be advised to read it.”

  Hibbert paused and looked at Michael closely. “You do read, right?”

  “Yes, sir, I can read.”

  “Good, ’cause I am dog-tired of having to read that whole thing out loud and explainin’ all them words. Anyways, that’s the deal, kid. This is for your own good. This is so’s you get used to the idea of your own company. This is so’s you learn how to mind your own business and no one else’s. Now, I am gonna take you on through there and put you in your cube. You’d be advised to not start thinking about minutes or hours or days. Just makes it worse. Just get your head down and sleep as much as you can, and these two weeks will go like nothin’.”

  Hibbert took his key chain from his belt, found a key, opened the door, and walked Michael through. The corridor was painted white and stretched for a good eighty or ninety feet. On each side, spaced perhaps eight feet apart, were doors facing each other. The doors had a single lever handle, and low to the ground was a bolted shutter perhaps a foot wide and three inches deep.

  Hibbert walked half the length of the corridor, Michael right behind him, and then he stopped to open the door.

  “I will not be on duty tomorrow morning, and so another officer will come to supervise your exercise time. Dinner is at six.” Hibbert looked at his watch. “Three and a half hours from now.”

  Hibbert opened the door and ushered Michael in, and before Michael even had a moment to turn and look at the man, the door had closed tight behind him and he was locked inside.

  “Like I said, son,” Hibbert said through the locked door, “you try and sleep as much as you can. Don’t do no good to be thinkin’.”

  He heard Hibbert’s footsteps retreating all the way to the hallway door, heard it open, slam shut, heard the key turn with a sharp finality, and then there was silence.

  Hibbert’s advice might have been wise, but Michael was a thinker. He had always been a thinker. His mother figured he thought too much. Some people just are that way, she’d say. Some people want an answer for everything. They want to know why and how and when and where. That’s a double-edged sword, mind. Sometimes you wind up with a whole basket of answers you’d have done better without.

  Michael did not believe that there was such a thing. Any answer, even a bad one, was better than no answer at all.

  But, as was often the case, there were questions that would forever be nothing but questions, because no one had the answer.

  Michael thought about his mother. He knew she was in the State Reformatory for Women just west of York. He did not know what kind of room she was in, whether she was alone or with other women. He did not know if she was well or sick or if someone had already beaten her half to death. Such things happened in prison. He knew this.

  That first night, the few hours of fitful rest he managed were disturbed by dreams. As was always the case, those images that assaulted his sleeping mind were gone as soon as he woke, and trying to recall them was like snatching smoke rings from a breeze. The only thing that recurred, the only thing he ever remembered, was a single shadow against the dry, cracked earth of an arid field. And the sound of a bird. A crow, perhaps a grackle, its cawing more like the laughter of some old woman than any real creature. But even that image, the strange feeling that accompanied it, was gone within minutes.

  That first morning in the cubes, as with all subsequent mornings, breakfast came through the mail slot. A pressed-metal tray, four sockets, within them a piece of corn bread, a spoonful of blackstrap molasses, a handful of beans, and a thumb-sized strip of dried pork that was tough and salty. There was a cup of water as well, and it possessed a brackish and metallic taste. Michael did not think as he ate. He simply ate. Ten minutes passed and there was a knock on the door.

  “Yes?” Michael said.

  “Tray and cup, fucknuts,” a voice from the other side said, and Michael saw the mail slot open at the base of the door.

  He passed the utensils back through the aperture and heard it slam shut.

  “Got a schedule,” the voice said. “Be ready next time.”

  Footsteps moved on, the sound of the adjacent door being knocked, the tray and cup being returned, and on it went until the footsteps were silent and the opening and the closing of the aperture in each door was nothing but a whisper of sound that he had to strain to hear.

  Michael returned to the thin mattress and lay down.

  He knew that someone would come and collect him for exercise time at ten o’clock. He did not know what time it was and thus had no clue as to how long he would have to wait. He closed his eyes and fought his way back into an agitated and restless sleep.

  At first he could not see anything but that single blue eye, the way his father looked back at him from the surface of the table. He had not seen it then, but was there a flash of fear in that eye? Was his father actually afraid in his moment of death? Was he able to see what was waiting for him on the other side, his reward for a life of lies, infidelity, and violence?

  Michael could then see himself standing on the veranda of the house. Somewhere beyond the horizon he could see heat lightning. He could see the curvature of the earth. A sudden flare of distant color erupted in silence, and he knew it was a tree bursting into flames.

  He was aware of a metronomic sound, something almost subliminal, and though he at first believed it to be his pulse or his heart, he soon realized that it was the echo of his father’s blood—drip-drip-drip—as it fell to the floor beneath the dinner table. He wondered whether that sound was now part of him, as if there were a chamber within his mind where such sounds would be forever stored.

  And then Michael woke, and he lay there for some small eternity, listening to the sounds of the corridor, the distant footsteps, the closing and opening of doors. The world went on without him, and he was no longer part of it. At least for now.

  Unbeknownst to Michael, he would reside at State Welfare for merely ten months, but those ten months would mark his passage from boy to man. His sensibilities and preconceptions about himself and life would be challenged by many people and in many ways, but by none more so than Anthony Scarapetto, he of the Tray and cup, fucknuts. Got a schedule. Be ready next time.

  Scarapetto was all of seventeen years old, the seventh of nine children. The Scarapettos were among the original birds of passage who had immigrated to America at the beginning of the 1900s. How and why they had settled in New York with their plan to open a small restaurant, perhaps a delicatessen within arm’s reach of Mulberry Street, and how such a dream had collided with reality in such a way as to leave almost none of that dream intact, was a different story and did not need recounting, but Anthony Scarapetto warranted a mention considering his influence and effect on Michael Travis, both at State Welfare in 1942 and then again in February of 1953.

  Anthony Scarapetto killed a man before he was fourt
een. No one knew this, and Anthony would never speak of it. Though he felt no shame in having committed the murder, a murder that he felt was both provoked and justified, he was somewhat ashamed regarding the circumstances that forced his hand. The man (his name was Forrest Young), was a rent collector in Little Italy, back before the Black Hand and other such outfits took everything over, and he walked the streets and collected dollars, taking a particular interest in the youngsters. Boys or girls, it didn’t matter to Young. He possessed a seemingly insatiable appetite for the attentions of children, and Anthony Scarapetto, all of nine years old, inspired in Young a fervent obsession that was beyond anything Young had experienced before.

  The details of Young’s entrapment of the boy in the confines of his car one Thursday afternoon in the summer of 1934 are vague and uncertain. Police reports later stated that Young’s car was found parked in an alleyway at the north end of Mulberry, and within it lay the deceased. He was discovered on the backseat, his stiffening corpse drenched in blood, not only from the wide incision in his throat, but also from the terrible and vicious assault that had been perpetrated on his genitals.

  “Like a tiger had mauled him,” the first-at-the-scene officer had reported. “Like a wild animal had gotten in there and just torn everything apart.”

  There was no tiger. There was merely a nine-year-old Anthony Scarapetto with a switchblade and a vengeful temper. He had agreed to Young’s invitation to sit in the backseat of the car because he figured he might be able to rob the man. When the doors had been locked and Young had started his billing and cooing, Anthony had been well aware of the man’s indecent intent. Nine years old he might have been, but he was no spring chicken. Nine years of life in Little Italy was worth twenty or more anyplace else. Anthony carried a switchblade, had done so since he was five, and though he’d only ever used it as a threat to escape beatings and suchlike, now was a time when the blade might see some blood.

  When Forrest Young tried to stroke Anthony’s hair, Anthony told him that he wanted a dollar. Young produced the dollar from a wallet so thick it could have been a telephone book. Anthony took the dollar, tucked it into his pocket, and let the man stroke his hair. When Young tried to kiss him, he said he wanted another dollar. Young handed over the second dollar, smiling to himself, perhaps thinking that this was turning out to be a great deal easier than he’d imagined. They knew—these kids, with their flirtatious ways, their sly and coy glances—exactly what they were doing and why. But still so many of them gave the pretense of resisting. But this one? This Anthony Scarapetto was not hiding anything. He was going to do everything Forrest Young wanted him to do, but he was going to get paid for it. In a way, that made it less of a challenge, but the boy was so beautiful it didn’t matter.

  When Forrest Young put his hand on Anthony’s thigh, Anthony asked for a third dollar. This was now slightly insulting. Two dollars was a lot of money.

  “You better give me another dollar, mister,” Anthony told him. “You plan on doin’ that thing to me, then there better be another dollar.”

  “And what is it that you think I’m going to do, Anthony?” Young asked. He wanted to hear the boy say it. He wanted to hear those dirty little words from the boy’s own lips.

  “You want to stick your thing in my mouth, right? Or maybe you wanna stick it someplace else?”

  Young’s heart started beating so hard he could barely breathe.

  “Well,” Anthony went on, “if you wanna do that stuff, then you better give me another dollar.”

  Young fumbled with his wallet. He gave the boy a third dollar. He set his wallet on the dashboard and started unhooking his belt.

  “Come on, mister,” Anthony said. “Get it out and show me.”

  Young couldn’t manage the buttons; his hands were shaking so much.

  Anthony reached over and rested his left hand on Young’s thigh. He moved his hand slowly toward Young’s crotch. Young leaned back, his eyes closed. He moaned softly, little more than an exhalation, and with his right hand, Anthony Scarapetto drove the switchblade into the center of Young’s throat.

  Young couldn’t speak. He couldn’t utter a sound. His eyes screamed, however. They screamed with an agony so unbearable that there would have been no words to describe it anyway.

  Young was dead within a minute, but that did not prevent Anthony from withdrawing the blade and actually cutting the man’s throat from ear to ear. Then he went to work on the man’s crotch and upper thighs, stabbing and slashing until Forrest Young did in fact appear to have been savaged by some wild and ravenous beast.

  Anthony Scarapetto took the contents of the wallet, all of eighty-six dollars, and stuffed it inside his shirt. He exited the vehicle, ran to the end of the alley, snatched a pair of pants from one washing line, a guinea tee from another, and when he was safely from view of the street, he stripped and changed. The pants were three or four sizes too big, but he buttoned and then rolled the waist, also turned up the legs, and thus looked no different from a hundred other kids who were dressed in their father’s worn-out pants for want of anything better. The knife itself was kicked into the first storm drain he encountered, the shirt into the second, the pants into the third. By the time he reached home, there was little evidence of his recent experience but for the blood beneath his fingernails and in the welts of his shoes.

  Anthony Scarapetto, thus having drawn first blood, began a swift downhill run into all things criminal and violent. Safe to say that by the time he was arrested for grievous assault and mayhem in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late winter of 1939, the Scarapetto boy that had stabbed Forrest Young had become a hardened, inveterate thief and liar.

  To Michael, the seventeen-year-old Scarapetto seemed more intense and threatening than any of the custodians, perhaps representing two sides of the same deal, nothing so simplistic as good guy and bad guy, but something close enough. Michael Travis understood that he had found himself an inmate of State Welfare due to fate, bad luck, even human error, whereas Scarapetto knew he was there became of the calumny and weakness and vindictive persecution of others. Michael knew he was in trouble because of himself, in essence, and thus knew it was up to him to get out of it. Scarapetto knew he was in trouble because of everyone else.

  On the day that Michael was released into general populace, Scarapetto watched him as he arrived for breakfast. He waited until Michael had taken a tray, joined the queue, been served his single piece of corn bread, his ladle of watery oatmeal, his spoonful of reconstituted egg. Michael—as all the greenhorns did—stood for a second away from the end of the queue and surveyed the mess hall before him. The noise was strange to his ears. There had to be a thousand people there, and each of them was talking in hushed voices. It gave the impression of far-off thunder, some distant sound beyond the horizon, a sound created by something that remained unseen.

  Eventually, Michael chose a table to the left near the corner. The table was occupied by one person and one person only—a teenager, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, who looked sufficiently unthreatening. Michael sat down. It was no more than thirty seconds before the teenager got up and walked away. He did so suddenly and swiftly, almost as if he had been directed by some unknown command.

  Michael frowned, looked over his shoulder, and was confronted by Anthony Scarapetto.

  “Oh,” Michael said.

  Scarapetto grinned and then walked around the table and sat facing Michael.

  There was an immediate change in the air. Tension perhaps, a coolness, a feeling of imminent danger, and it emanated from Scarapetto like a bad smell.

  “Hey, fucknuts,” Scarapetto said.

  Scarapetto was a little shorter than Michael, a little narrower in the shoulder, but there was not a great deal between them. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and here and there punctuation marks of scar tissue evidenced collisions with objects that were harder than his head. A further scar followed a
narrow line from behind his right ear and out across his cheek toward his nose. It was thin, no doubt a knife or razor wound, and when Scarapetto smiled, the scar made a fold in his face as neat as a sheet of paper.

  “You’re new here, right?” Scarapetto asked.

  “I am, yes,” Michael said.

  Scarapetto put his right index finger in his mouth and then proceeded to jab that finger into Michael’s breakfast—the egg, the oatmeal, the corn bread.

  “And this is your first meal in general, right?”

  Michael knew precisely what he was dealing with then. “Looks like it’s your meal now,” he said.

  Scarapetto smiled. “You ain’t gonna complain, little man?”

  “Not a word,” Michael replied. He could see the edges of his own internal shadows, not as if they were moving toward him, but as if he were moving toward them.

  “Is that ’cause I scare you?”

  “Absolutely,” Michael said. “You scare me more than anyone has ever scared me before.” His voice was calm, but inside he was truly disturbed. Little more than two weeks earlier, he’d been helping his mother wash dishes. Now he was here, seated across from someone who seemed intent on violently assaulting him while the world looked away.

  And then it came, that sense of his father, the certainty of how his father would have dealt with such a situation. But he was not his father. He did not dare rise to the bait.

  Scarapetto started to smile, and then he frowned, and then he lunged forward and grabbed Michael’s wrists. He pulled Michael forward suddenly, and the edge of the table slammed into Michael’s rib cage. Michael exhaled painfully, but he did not look away from Scarapetto.

  “You messin’ with me, kid?” Scarapetto asked. “You jibin’ me, fuckin’ with me, playin’ smart-mouth with me?”