I shook my head. “I’ve learned some things, but not enough. It seems reasonably clear that Nicola died of injuries she got here, although I don’t think I can ever prove that. There’s some reign of terror that goes on with the women in the clothes shop where she worked—the foreman today threatened the children of a woman who was talking to me. Whether that’s random—there’s a lot of vile abuse that goes on here, most of it sexual assault—or whether there’s something specific they don’t want the women talking about, I don’t know. It’s mighty peculiar that the only women who work back there can’t speak English.”
Morrell tapped the table impatiently. “Vic, do I have your permission to go to Freeman and tell him to bail you out as fast as possible? He might be able to appear for you in a Chicago court tomorrow instead of waiting through the weekend.”
I rubbed my face, overwhelmed with a desire to lay my head down on the table and cry my heart out. Everything I’d been doing seemed so futile, ever since the night I’d stopped to help Nicola Aguinaldo. My career was in shambles, I was demoralized from my weeks in Coolis, I didn’t know any more than I had a month ago about why BB Baladine was gunning for me.
“Yeah, tell Freeman to bail me out. I don’t have much time left in here before everything comes unglued for me in here, anyway. Everyone on the jail side knows I speak English, that I was even writing legal letters for some of the women. It won’t be long until that word gets over to the creep who runs the clothes shop, and then I’ll—well, the best–case scenario is I’ll be assigned back to the kitchen.”
“Vic, I don’t know whether you’re heartbreakingly gallant or only out of your mind, but you’re worth a dozen of Alex Fisher, with her stock options thrown in besides. Don’t do anything too foolish before Freeman can post bail.” His lips brushed the back of my hand and he was gone.
CO Polsen wasn’t on duty; the woman guard patted me down in a perfunctory way and sent me to my cell to be counted before dinner. I brushed the back of my hand against my cheek. I had one last chance to learn something tangible at Coolis. I don’t know if it was gallantry or insanity that was driving me, but the only plan that came to me made me so cold that I lay shivering under my blanket while Solina and her friends marched in formation to the dining hall.
41 Photo Op
In the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote a letter to Lotty. A light in the corridor came through the grated window at the top of our door, projecting a small grid of light on the wall behind our toilet, enough for me to make out the shape of my words on the page without being able to read them.
I wanted Lotty to know how important she’d always been to me, since my student days at the University of Chicago when I’d been not only young but rawly unsophisticated. She took me under her wing and taught me basic social skills I’d missed growing up in a rough neighborhood with a dying mother. Somehow over the years she’d moved from being a kind of fulfillment of my mother to a more equal friend, but she’d never lost her importance for me.
If I am foolhardy, daring without judgment, I wrote, it isn’t because I don’t love you, Lotty. I hate to bring you grief, and if I am seriously injured you will grieve. I don’t have an answer to the conundrum. Not the old masculine swagger that I couldn’t love you as much as I do if I didn’t love honor more. Something more restless drives me, a kind of terror that if I don’t take care of things myself I will be left with a terrible helplessness. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you’ve kept that helplessness at bay. Thank you for your years of love.
In the morning I quickly put it in an envelope without reading it over. On my way to breakfast I handed it over to CO Cornish for the outbound mail.
The condemned woman’s last meal: cornflakes, powdered orange juice, watery coffee, a piece of soggy toast. At nine, CO Cornish brought me to the gate of the prison’s work wing. There we were counted again and marched down the hall to our assignments. One group was escorted to the room of phone banks, where Miss Ruby and other well–spoken inmates took hotel reservations for families crossing America on their summer vacations. The rest of us were taken farther down the hall to the sewing room. We stood at attention while we were counted for a third time, this time by Wenzel and Hartigan, and then sent to our machines.
Before I could start on the pile of pieces I had left over from yesterday, Hartigan grabbed my arm. “You!” he spat at me in English. For one heart–stopping minute I thought maybe Baladine had already tracked me down and given orders to treat me in some unspeakable way.
Apparently it was only my ineptitude as a seamstress that made Hartigan grab me. In a graphic mix of Spanish and English he explained I was being demoted to a cutter. The pay there was a flat dollar–thirty an hour, did I understand?
“Comprendo,” I said through lips thick with anger.
For the next three hours, with one ten–minute break, I stood in the cutting room, pinning stencils to thick stacks of cotton, then holding the stacks in position as automatic shears sliced through them. It was backbreaking work, made harder by Hartigan’s periodic eruption into the room to yell, “Vamos, mas rapido!”
All last night as I had lain sleepless on my bunk and in the morning as I moved the heavy plastic stencils onto the fabric, I kept rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to do. My chance came at lunchtime. We were allowed to put aside the stencils and turn off the shears just as the Cambodian woman gathered up the previous hour’s sewing output onto the trolley. While everyone else moved into formation for lunch, I followed the trolley down the hall in the other direction. As people chattered and milled around stretching their sore arms, neither Wenzel nor Hartigan noticed I was going the wrong way.
The Cambodian woman rang a buzzer in the door. When it opened I followed her inside. In the confused medley of light and noise that greeted me, I couldn’t make anything out at first: giant machines, women in Corrections Department smocks, the ratcheting of conveyor belts. It was a major production plant. I moved to a conveyor belt carrying T–shirts.
Lacey Dowell’s face stared up at me. Her red hair was artlessly tangled, her lips half–parted in a mischievous smile. The smile was repeated half a dozen times as shirts passed in front of me on the belt. Hot lights overhead made me start to sweat; I realized they were there to dry wet ink—two women operating a giant press on my right were stamping decals onto shirts the Cambodian woman was unloading from the trolley. At a second belt facing me, another pair were stamping Space Beret insignia onto denim jackets.
At the far end of the belts other women pulled the garments off, folded them, and fed them to someone operating a commercial iron. Another pair laid ironed clothes in boxes. I watched in frozen fascination, until a shout behind me galvanized me. I began snapping the stem of my wrist camera, taking pictures as fast as I could, of Lacey’s face, of the belt, of women pressing decals onto shirts and jackets.
A man grabbed my arm, yelling, “What the hell are you doing in here? Where did you come from?”
I darted away, trying to snap a picture of the machines themselves, of the workers, of anything where I could get a clear view. The man who’d yelled out at me began to chase me. I ducked under a conveyor belt and skittered on my hands and knees toward the entrance. The women feeding shirts to the iron stopped working and huddled against a wall. Clothes began to pile up and then fall to the floor.
My pursuer tripped on the T–shirts and bellowed for backup. CO Hartigan came through the door on the run. Jackets and shirts tumbled from belts and got tangled in the machinery. Sirens howled and the clanking machines ground to a halt.
I ducked under Hartigan’s outstretched arm and pushed open the door, with some foolish hope of pretending I’d gotten turned around and ended up in the room by mistake. Wenzel was on the other side of the door. He seized my arms. I slid my legs around his ankles and with the fury that had been boiling in me for a month, took his feet out from under him. He fell backward, still holding me, but his grip loosened as he fell, and I pulled a
way, rolling on my side and coming up in a crouch.
Hartigan was facing me, pulling a gun. I twisted away, then suddenly lost control of my limbs. I was shot through the air as from a cannon and careened headfirst onto the pile of jackets. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The skin on my chest stung. My legs were wet, and I smelled urine and burning cloth. My arms and legs jerked spastically.
Hartigan stood over me, a smile of exultant sadism on his face, and lifted one large booted foot. I managed to wrench myself sideways just before he kicked me. His boot sank savagely into my ribs, and then into my skull.
When I woke I was in a dark room. My head pounded violently. I tried to lift a hand to feel my head but I couldn’t move my arms. My ribs ached and my stomach heaved. I shut my eyes and passed out again.
I felt a hand on my arm and someone saying, Is she alive? I wanted to pull my arm away but I still couldn’t move it. I was alive, someone else confirmed, but I wasn’t going anywhere, they could take off the manacles.
“Someone like her will fool you, Hartigan,” the first voice said. It belonged to CO Polsen. “Wenzel has a concussion from the blow she gave him. Leave her chained up, that way you’ll be sure.”
It was the fall, I wanted to say. I took his legs out from under him and he fell. But my jaw hurt and I couldn’t speak. Later someone brought me water. I was so grateful tears spurted out the sides of my eyes.
My cousin Boom–Boom had dared me to climb the crane, I tried to tell my mother. And why had I done it, she demanded in Italian. Do you need to do everything that crazy boy does? What are you trying to prove, that you’re a cat who has nine lives? My father told her to let me be, I had a concussion and two broken ribs and that was punishment enough. And my punishment, my mother shouted in English, if she’s taken from me in one of these crazy exploits you and your brother laugh at, I will never survive it.
I thought it would be safe now to open my eyes, because my father would be smiling down at me, but when I opened them I was in a cell—not the one I shared with Solina—one with a single bed in it. I heard a sharp snap. The pounding pain had subsided to a muted throb and I could move my head. I saw the door, with a window in the top and an eye bulging as it peered at me. There was a second snap as a shutter slid across the window, leaving me once more in darkness.
I kept dozing off into phantasmagoric dreams, where I was eight or nine or ten, with my mother as she made me practice scales until my arms hurt so much I begged her not to make me do music anymore, or with Boom–Boom at a Fourth of July picnic where the fireworks made my head ache and tears run down my cheeks. The fireworks smelled, too, like some kind of horrible uncleaned toilet.
The snapping shutter roused me periodically. I could move my arms now, but the pain in my ribs and gut was so great I didn’t move them much. I was alternating between drenching sweats and chills so violent they caused a rattling at my feet. I thought my bones were clanking, but when I tried to sit up to look at my feet, the pain in my stomach stabbed me brutally. I cried out and lay back down. Once when the shutter opened I had a flash of awareness: my legs were manacled together. It didn’t matter—I was in too much pain to walk anywhere. I shut my eyes again.
Someone asked again if I was still alive. I knew the voice, but my mind floated off. She’s not in good shape, a second man answered. She stinks, the first voice said. She’ll be in back, Polsen, you won’t smell her once you get her inside. Wenzel can’t drive; you’ll have to come along. Put on some gloves and a mask. Change her shirt; we don’t want to get into the mess we had with the other one, having to come up with a clean shirt because this one’s got burn marks on it.
CO Polsen. He was tearing off my shirt; he was going to treat me the way he had that other woman, and I was powerless to stop him. I would not cry I would not give him the satisfaction I would not cry when he touched the raw skin on my breasts. I was jerked upright, and the pain across my abdomen was so ferocious I blacked out. Then I was sick and my father was carrying me, but he was too rough, he was hurting me, my head and my stomach.
“No, Papa,” I begged. “Put me down.”
That made him laugh, and I cried for my mother but she couldn’t hear me. When he finally put me down it was on something hard, not my bed. “Mio letto,” I sobbed. “Voglio mio proprio letto.” He slapped my face and shut the door on me, and I remembered it hurt his feelings when I spoke Italian, because he didn’t speak it himself. “I want my own bed,” I repeated in English, but it did me no good, he started shaking the room from side to side so that my sore ribs and stomach bounced against the hard floor.
I kept passing out. I would come to when an extra–fierce jolt flung me against the floor. At some point the jolting stopped and the door opened. I had another brief moment of clarity: I was in a panel truck, lying on packing cartons. A couple of men approached me. I couldn’t protect myself as they seized me. They tossed me on the ground and slammed the van door shut. Polsen called me a stupid cunt and said this would teach me to mind my own business and then they left me on the ground and returned to the truck. The back door swung open as they drove off and several boxes bounced onto the road.
I saw now how Nicola Aguinaldo got out of prison and made it back to Chicago. And died.
42 Slow Mend
I looked up and saw the machine that made decals ready to push into me. My arms were manacled to the bed and I couldn’t lift them to guard my face. A man leaned over me. I didn’t want CO Polsen to know I was scared, but I couldn’t help crying out. The man called me “cookie” and seemed to be weeping. I shut my eyes and fell back asleep.
The next time I woke I realized the machine was the arm holding an IV drip. I wasn’t wearing manacles but had lines running into both arms and an oxygen tube in my nose. A woman was feeling my left wrist. She had on a yellow sweater and smiled when she saw me watching her.
“You’re all right, you know. You’re with friends, so don’t worry: you’re not in prison and you’re going to recover.”
I looked at my wrist. It was empty. I didn’t have my watch, my father’s watch that he’d worn for twenty–five years.
I croaked something and she said, “Your watch didn’t come over from the hospital with you. I’ll ask Dr. Herschel about it.”
This seemed so disastrous to me that I began to cry. The woman in the yellow sweater sat down next to me and wiped my eyes, since I was having trouble moving my arms. The fingers on my right hand were in splints, but both my arms were so sore it seemed like too much work to lift them to wipe my eyes.
“We’ll do everything we can to get your watch back to you. Now that you’re awake I want to see if you can drink something. You’ll recover faster if you can start to eat on your own. As soon as you drink a bit of this, I’ll call the hospital about your watch.” She cranked the bed up, and I swallowed something sweet.
I croaked again.
“You’re in the Grete Berman Institute. Recovering from your injuries.”
I knew I had heard of the Grete Berman Institute, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I went back to sleep, puzzling over it, but after that I began recovering, drinking more each time I woke, staying awake for longer intervals. Sometimes the man who called me “cookie” was there, and I finally remembered it was Mr. Contreras. I tried to smile and say something so that he’d know I knew him and appreciated his being there; I could just manage to say “Peppy,” which made him start to cry again.
Once when I woke, the woman in the sweater handed me my father’s watch and helped me strap it onto my wrist. I was relieved to have it back but still felt upset, as if I were missing something of even greater importance. The woman in the sweater urged me to drink miso broth. I was getting stronger—in a few days I’d be able to have rice, and then I’d be strong enough to remember what was troubling me.
I was too tired to think. I gave up worrying about the watch and drifted between waking and eating and struggling upright: the wound in my abdomen made sitting up an exquisite p
ain. It was only three days, in fact, between my first waking up and my shaky progression from bed to chair and a tour of the hallway, but the pain and the painkillers stretched time’s passage in odd ways.
On the day that Mr. Contreras helped me into a chair so that I could eat my rice and watch the Cubs, Lotty came in. Sammy Sosa had just hit his forty–sixth home run, but Mr. Contreras muted the television and with rare tact left us alone.
When Lotty saw me out of bed and in a chair, she burst into tears and knelt with her arms around me. “Victoria. I thought I was going to lose you. Oh, my dear one, I am so thankful to have you back.”
Close to her I could see how much gray was in her hair; for some reason that made me cry as well. “I thought you would chew me out.”
She blinked back her tears. “Later. When you’re strong enough to fight back.”
“She mustn’t have too much agitation, Dr. Herschel,” the nurse said.
Lotty pushed herself to her feet. Despite the gray hair, she still moved with easy agility. I smiled foolishly at her. She didn’t stay long but the next evening she returned with Morrell. The two together told me my story.
A state trooper had found me on the Belmont exit ramp to the Kennedy around three on Sunday morning. The boxes that tumbled out of the back of the truck when CO Polsen drove off had saved my life: a motorist, swerving to avoid them, noticed me lying in the road and called the cops. The state troopers rushed me to Beth Israel, where Dr. Szymczyk—the same surgeon who’d been on call the night I found Nicola Aguinaldo—patched me together.
I had been luckier than Nicola on several counts. When Hartigan kicked me, I’d managed to twist away enough so that my ribs took the main force of his blow. He had badly bruised my intestine and I had developed a severe infection, which accounted for my fever, but when the state trooper found me, the wound had only just begun to perforate the peritoneum. Nicola already had such advanced peritonitis when I came on her that she didn’t have much chance for survival.
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