“She actually died in Chicago,” I told her.
Miss Ruby liked having inside information, more than a whole bushel of tomatoes, and she questioned me closely on Nicola’s death. After I told her what I knew—omitting how I’d come on Nicola to begin with—I asked how she came to take Nicola under her wing.
“Too many of these girls here don’t have any respect for any other human being on the planet. Nicola came from a country where old people are treated with respect—someplace near Japan, which is probably the reason why. She saw how my shoulders and neck bother me after talking on that phone for six hours, and she used to rub the knots out for me. Of course I tried to help her in a few little ways myself.”
While Miss Ruby talked, I wondered if perhaps Nicola had never made it to Coolis Hospital. Maybe Captain Ruzich had her taken to Chicago directly from the prison. No, that didn’t work—the floor head at the hospital’s prison wing clearly had known about Nicola. Unless she’d been primed to say Nicola had been on the ward when she wasn’t?
“I need to find someone who will tell me what went on in the shop the day Nicola left here. Or I need to get a job working over there.”
Miss Ruby grunted. “You can’t get girls to talk about what goes on in the clothes shop. Of course everyone around here is more or less scared, the guards can take away your commissary privileges or your phone calls or put you in seg. But the girls in the clothes shop, they don’t talk to anyone. And of course, for the most part they don’t speak English anyway.”
“So if I wanted to get into the clothes shop, I’d have to be a foreigner.”
“First, you have to lose at your trial. The jail girls, they get kitchen duty and other ugly stuff, but they don’t ever get the jobs that pay anything decent.”
“I really need to see the inside of that shop,” I said, looking across the room. CO Polsen was in the doorway, eyeing me in a way I didn’t like, but I willed him out of my mind. “How much would it cost, and who could arrange it for me?”
“What’s your real business here, Cream?” Miss Ruby asked softly.
I continued to look ahead, speaking as she did, out of the side of my mouth. “I want to see Robert Baladine destroyed. If I can learn what happened to Nicola, I may find a way to make him . . . well, sorry he ever crossed my path.”
“If revenge is what you want to eat for dinner, you’re going to get yourself a bad case of indigestion. It never pays, believe me, Cream. I tried that meal for a lot of years, before Jesus showed me a better way.”
She paused, as if waiting for me to say amen, sister, or ask for her conversion story, but even for her help I couldn’t pretend to a faith I don’t own.
Disappointed at my lack of interest, she finally said, “No one wants the jobs in the clothes shop; the stories on how they treat the girls over there are too unpleasant. So I never heard of anyone bribing her way in before—usually they’re crying to get out. And most of them sleep and eat together, too. So if you want to get in, well, Lieutenant Dockery, she’s in charge of the work details, and no one ever gave her a bribe in their life: she’s strict but fair. But Erik Wenzel—he’s in charge of the shop—he’s another kettle of fish. And he’s not a CO, he’s some manager they hired, like they do for my reservations work—someone who knows how the job is supposed to be done. Give me a day or two. I’ll see what I can find out.”
She tapped my arm with a manicured finger. “You don’t know how to behave here, Cream. Maybe you’re the toughest bitch on your block in Chicago, but that makes you a challenge to the CO’s: they want to break you. There are no secrets in Coolis. And the CO’s know them, too. There’s always some girl willing to tattle to them in exchange for some favor, a better work assignment, or real makeup—you notice how most of the girls here are black, but the makeup in the commissary is made for whites? Which, by the way, you can wear with your skin, but most of us can’t. So if you can come up with some carmine nail polish and lipstick for me, it would make me move faster on your strange request.
“Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you, Cream, Troy Polsen is a bad man, but don’t go beating him up. The satisfaction you’d get wouldn’t be worth it. You’d land in segregation, and you’d never get out of it, so you’d go to your trial in prison clothes, and you know how that will look. Watch yourself, Cream.”
Polsen yelled to Jorjette and me that we were due in the kitchen. “You’re not on vacation here; move those lazy buns.”
“Exquisite manners,” I murmured. “It’s either that or the cuisine that keeps me coming back. I appreciate the warning and the offer of help, Miss Ruby. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but . . .” I let my voice trail away suggestively.
“Why am I helping you? You don’t need to know everything about my life.” She smiled suddenly. “This I’ll tell you for nothing: I have a big bone of curiosity. My mama always said it would be the death of me, but I want to know what goes on in that shop myself. I have to spend another eight years in this building. I hate there being stuff about it I don’t know.”
Polsen came over and yanked me roughly to my feet. “Come on, Princess Di, they want you at Buckingham Palace.”
As he shoved me toward the corridor I couldn’t help wondering if my own bone of curiosity would be the death of me.
40 Sewing Circle
“Mannaccia!” I swore. “Puttana machina!”
My fingers had once more slipped on the stretchy fabric so that the armholes puckered up. While I used the little clippers to pull the threads out, I flexed my shoulders, trying to ease out the knots in my neck as well. None of the women around me stopped or looked up. They were tied to the whirring machines, working on jackets and leggings, their fingers moving so fast the movement of arms, fabric, and needle was a blur of motion.
“Hey, you, Victoria!” Erik Wenzel suddenly stood in front of me. “I thought you said you knew how to run this machine. Sabes usar esta máquina.“
When they spoke Spanish, the men always used the familiar form of you. I said in Italian how insufferable Wenzel’s manners were, then added in Spanish, “Sí, sí, se usarla.”
“Then act like you can fabricar.“ He snatched the shirt from my fingers, ripping it in two, and slapped my head. “You’ve destroyed this shirt so it can’t be used. La arruinaste! It comes out of your pay. No te pago por esta!“
It had taken almost my whole four hundred dollars cash to get here; so far all I’d learned was that in a prison shop the foreman can do whatever he damned well wants. Miss Ruby managed somehow to spread the money among CO Rohde in the jail wing, his counterpart in the prison wing, and one of Erik Wenzel’s subordinates who put together the work rosters for the clothes shop. She told the man that I was a fragile immigrant far from home and she thought kitchen work might kill me. Miss Ruby got a Revlon lipstick and compact, and they weren’t easy to come by either.
I hoped I never had to depend on sewing to pay my bills. I thought it would be a cinch to run one of those machines, and I thought it would be a holiday after the misery of working in the prison kitchen, but after four days all I had to show were a permanent knot in my shoulders and neck, bruised and bleeding fingers from getting in the way of the needle, and three dollars and twenty–four cents in earnings, which wouldn’t be paid into my trust account until the end of the week.
We got paid by the piece: nine cents for T–shirts, which were the easiest to assemble, fifteen cents for shorts, thirty–three for the heavy denim jackets. Some of the women were so fast they could make nine or ten jackets an hour. One of my neighbors was turning out thirty–two T–shirts an hour.
When I started, one of the women was detailed to show me how to assemble a shirt. She put one together at lightning speed, unwilling to slow down her own production to show a newcomer the ropes. I had followed her moves as best I could. By the end of the second day, I had worked out how to do eighteen an hour, but of those only ten or so met the quality–control standards; the ruined ones got deducted from
my pay. And if Wenzel was angry at a woman—as he was with me—he would deliberately destroy a garment and then deduct the cost from her pay. One thing about prison labor: there is no shop steward or Labor Department to take a grievance to. If the foreman is pissed off at you and wants to spit at you or slap you or destroy your output, there’s not a lot you can do about it.
In a twist of irony, we sewed little tags into the shirts that read Made with Pride in the USA. So I had learned one thing—that the shirts in the commissary were made in the prison, although the ones we sewed were all plain white. Maybe they were shipped to one of the men’s prisons for the Mad Virgin or Captain Doberman to be embroidered onto them.
In an adjacent room, women operated heavy shears to cut out the pieces to the garments we were sewing. A pair of runners went between the cutting room and the sewing room, bringing us the raw materials for construction.
We got two ten–minute breaks in our six–hour shift, with half an hour in the dining hall, but most of the women except the smokers preferred to work through their breaks. As Miss Ruby had said, the crew here were all foreign, primarily Hispanic but with a handful of Cambodian and Vietnamese women.
Also as Miss Ruby had said, most of the women in the clothes shop were housed together. They arrived in a group in the morning, were escorted to the dining hall or commissary in a group, and were taken off together to a separate floor at night. I hadn’t been moved over to their quarters, but I was closely monitored now by the CO’s. So closely that I decided I had better speak only Italian, or my fractured Spanish, from now on, even in my cell.
My withdrawal from English made Solina and the crowd begging for letters at first tearful, and then furious. In revenge, Solina started smoking heavily in the cell, as if hoping to provoke me into yelling at her in English instead of Italian. She fell asleep each night with a cigarette burning on the floor beside her, when I would climb down to make sure it was out—I didn’t want to go through everything I was enduring only to suffocate in a cigarette fire.
It seemed absurd to think that I could fool the CO’s into thinking I wasn’t really an English speaker, but I hoped to keep the pretense in place long enough to learn something about Nicola’s end. CO Polsen was the likeliest to get me into trouble. When he was on duty in the afternoon, responsible for taking me over for recreation after my work shift ended, he showered me with foul language. When he did that, I treated him as if he were part of the ambient air, but if he tried touching me I would shout loudly—still in Italian—and keep shouting until I could move away from him to a public space. It wasn’t a great defense, but it was the only one I could think of. I hoped I learned something useful soon, because I didn’t know how much time I’d have before either the women or Polsen decided to take me apart.
In the shop I trailed around with the smokers during our brief breaks, trying to ask them about Nicola or about the clothes—where did they go when we finished them? Illinois law said that anything manufactured in the prisons had to be for prison consumption, but I’d never seen any of these plain shirts or jackets for sale in our commissary. And our—or at least my coworkers’—output was enormous.
It was the size of the production, and the fact that no English speakers were working in the shop, that kept me going, despite my hacked–up hands and the fury that the foreman Erik Wenzel kept unleashing on me.
The other thing that kept me going was a room down the hall where our goods were sent when they were done. Every hour Wenzel and CO Hartigan, the subordinate who’d taken my money from Miss Ruby to give me my assignment, collected our output, inspected it, wrote on a card how much was usable, and stacked the finished goods on a giant trolley. One of the Cambodian women pushed the trolley down the hall to the next room.
My second morning, during the smoking break, I sauntered after her. When the door opened to admit the trolley, I saw a kaleidoscope of lights, machines, and people. Before I could look more closely I was flung hard to the ground. I rolled over, ready to kick my assailant. I actually had my legs scissored, pulling in to strike, before I remembered myself. Wenzel stood over me, his face red with fury, and ordered me back to the workroom in a mix of English and Spanish. His Spanish wasn’t any better than mine, but it included an array of crude words for female anatomy that startled me. He wrote me a ticket, my third since coming to Coolis. My tickets could get me put in segregation at any moment, since they were all for offenses that could be construed as physical assaults.
My glimpse into the room had been so fleeting, I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen. How secret could it be if the Cambodian women were allowed into it? Yet my coworkers were so fearful of talking about it that it must be very secret indeed. The only women who worked back there had been given life sentences—that was all I could glean. No one ever talked to them—they were housed in a separate part of the prison.
When I persisted in trying to ask about the room the next morning, the smokers backed away from me in a cluster, as if I were a wolf going after a flock of pigeons. CO Hartigan was a heavy smoker himself; the women eyed him nervously when I talked to them.
“Tu preguntas demasiado,” one of the women finally whispered to me when Hartigan had gone into the cutting room to deal with a machine that had stopped working. “No sigas pregontando por Nicola. Do not keep asking about Nicola. She learned that her baby was dead, and she wanted to go to Chicago to bury the child. Of course no one would let her leave, but she was mad with grief and began pounding on Wenzel with her tiny hands. He and Hartigan shot her with those guns of theirs that fire electricity, and then they laughed and made sport with her. Now, ask nothing more. For us she never existed, and the guards will punish you severely if they know you are inquiring about her. And they will punish me if they think I remember her.”
Her hoarse Spanish was hard for me to follow, but before I could ask her to repeat anything she flinched and tried to duck back into the workroom. CO Hartigan grabbed her arm and then one of her breasts, which he twisted until she gasped in pain.
“You’re not talking out of turn, are you?” he asked the woman. “Remember: we know where your little boys are. Sabemos donde son tuos niños.“
Her eyes were streaming and she spoke pantingly. “Only tell woman, she no have money, no get my cigarette. She lazy, not working, why I think she pay back someday?”
I knew her quick wits were protecting herself, not me, and the look she gave me was one of loathing. Hartigan let her go and slapped me for good measure: I was a lazy cunt, he said, and they weren’t going to give me a free ride forever.
Once again I controlled myself in the nick of time. Rage and helplessness were so bottled and boiling inside me, I knew I had to leave Coolis soon; even if the guards didn’t harm me I was destroying myself. If I didn’t learn something soon that I could use against Baladine, I would forfeit my only chance to understand what was going on in the clothes operation. I had a pretty clear picture at least of why Nicola had gone to the hospital, even if I didn’t know how she’d died in Chicago, but it wasn’t anything I could use to get her killers arrested.
I didn’t want to think about what might have lain behind the woman’s phrase that the guards “made sport” with Nicola. I only knew I had to move fast before either my language fraud or my ineptitude with the sewing machine landed me in trouble. How fast I’d have to move was made clear to me on my return to the jail wing that afternoon, when I got a summons to see a visitor.
Morrell stood up on my entrance, an old–fashioned courtesy so remote from the mores of Coolis that I blinked back tears. It was a Thursday; as always midweek, the visitors’ room was almost empty.
Morrell squeezed my fingers, a fleeting pressure that the CO in the room overlooked. “You need to leave as soon as possible, Vic.”
I agreed, thinking of the abuse I was enduring, and started to detail some of the language and actions of the CO’s and the work shift managers.
Morrell cut me short. “That’s appalling, Vic, but that i
sn’t what I mean. Things have come unraveled on the outside. Since Baladine left Chicago shortly after your arrest, he apparently didn’t know what had happened to you. He’s coming back from Europe tomorrow. He knows—or will know when he lands—that you’re here. And while you’re in Coolis he has the power to have you treated more harshly than you want to imagine.”
I shivered involuntarily. “How do you know this?”
He gave a glint of a smile. “I’m a journalist, I have press credentials. I’ve started being very attentive to Alex Fisher at Global, told her I’m working on a book about the security business.”
To my chagrin I felt a stab of elemental jealousy. In the midst of my potpourri of misery and fear, I was picturing the contrast between Alex, with her clear, smooth skin and Rodeo Drive wardrobe, and my own bedraggled condition. Like seducing Murray wasn’t good enough for her, she had to take Morrell, too. I muttered something farouche about her being able to make sure he got a good movie deal for his book.
“In that case I’d better get a contract before she reads it. She thinks highly of you, by the way, and says it’s a pity your stubbornness gets in the way of your success. I’ve told her you were out of town, vacationing until your trial, and I don’t think she’s double–checked that news. And since she’s extremely busy, she’s been happy to palm me off on her poor overworked assistant. Who’s not sophisticated enough to keep news to herself. Like the urgent e–mail Baladine sent Alex yesterday demanding to know your whereabouts after making bail. It will take them this long”—he snapped his fingers—”to learn you’re in here. Have you found out what you wanted to know?”
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