The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  There were communists in the prison, but they were mostly black. Henry tried to engage them in political discussion, but their perspectives and his were very different. They talked the politics of liberation and fulfillment of a race. Henry was beyond all that. Politics was a real thing, not a wish list. It was money and power. Power turned into money, and money was power from the beginning. You just needed a certain number of chumps behind you, and you could buy the world. He couldn’t get these black guys to understand it because they came from a real world, knew too much about how real things were, and turned to Communism as Christians turn to God.

  He finally discovered the mob on the sixteenth month in prison.

  He had been aware of them. Everyone was aware of the members of the Mafia and respected them, even the guards who provided them with weekend passes to nearby motels for visits with women, and large, pasta-filled dinners.

  Very cold for May. The clouds scudded on a wild blue sky. The wind shivered down the valleys. Exercise time and the blacks were playing their endless game of basketball, their shoulders shining with sweat, their swift and elegant dances done back and forth, up and down the court, the round ball arcing in triumph to the basket, the bodies crushed beneath the net. Shouts and shoves, grown men laughing like children in a prison yard. It was full of beauty and melancholy and life.

  “Don Anthony,” Henry McGee said. “I want you to know me so that you can trust me and so that you can help me.”

  The olive eyes seemed amused, but nothing else in that large, stolid face gave any indication of the mood of the man.

  They were watching the basketball game in the sports yard. Don Anthony did not stand alone, but when Henry approached, they stood aside, as though what they had to say to each other was in confidence.

  “Maybe I know you, you ever think of that?” Don Anthony said. Softly. The New Jersey accent was there, but so was the whispery shadow in the voice. Everything was softened in the presence of Don Anthony. He walked in his own time, in his own music, and everyone respected it because of the alternative. Henry McGee guessed that his music was II Trovatore.

  “I know you know everything. But stories got stories sometimes. I tell good stories.”

  “A man of stories,” Don Anthony said. He paused. He had tried to make it sound profound, but it had just seemed stupid. Henry McGee caught that.

  “The melanzane, they play basketball. I swear the fucking game was invented in Africa—they brought it on the boat with them,” Don Anthony said. For a moment, Henry was puzzled by the common Italian slur for blacks—he had never heard it—but figured it out.

  Henry said nothing. His hands were bunched inside his pea coat. He stared at the game. He hated games. He had noticed that morning this was his sixteenth month in prison. Two hundred eighty-five more just like this one and maybe they would parole him. He would be seventy-six years old. The thoughts of time pressed him too hard, and he had to say something to Don Anthony.

  “I got five hundred thousand,” Henry said.

  The olive eyes went very wide and loving. Without looking at Henry, Don Anthony put a little burr of interest in his soft Jersey City voice: “That’s more money than God. How come you didn’t get a better lawyer? There ain’t no way anyone has to do time with money like that.”

  “It wasn’t a question of the lawyer,” Henry McGee said. “Sometimes when the government goes after you, there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”

  “When they wantcha, they gotcha,” Don Anthony agreed. He was a realist. He shrugged. “Yeah. Well. You could make it more comfortable with money. Spread it around. These guards are only human, they got families to support. You want a little something nice, they can make it nice. You can buy anything in this joint, you know that.”

  “If the government finds out about the money, they take it.”

  “Ain’t that just like them? They don’t play fair.”

  Henry stopped. Was Don Anthony making fun of him? He waited for a moment to let the silence talk. They heard the shouts from the basketball courts. Black kids played the game in the ghetto, now they did it in prison; life was all the same.

  “Well, you made it tough on yourself, Henry McGee, playing the spy. You’re a spy, I hear.”

  “I was a spy,” Henry said.

  “Yeah. You ain’t a spy now,” Don Anthony said.

  “No.”

  “ ’Cause you’re inside and there ain’t nothin’ to spy on.” He turned to Henry McGee. The face was cold, not amused. His skin was like gray pebbles. “ ’Cept me. You spy on me, huh?”

  “Jesus,” Henry said. Jesus. It was the last thing he had expected. “I want to get out of here.”

  “Apply for a parole.”

  “I want to get out of here. I got five hundred thousand.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I give you a number and you check it out. Bank of Hong Kong, it’s my account. I’ll need fifty thousand to set up when I get out. You get four hundred fifty thousand.”

  Olive eyes made the face a shade warmer. Money was definitely a woman taking her clothes off. He couldn’t help it. Sometimes it gave him an erection, thinking about money. “Why you figure I can get you out when I got my own ass in here for nearly two years?”

  “Don Anthony. You’re one of the guys. You run your business affairs from here easy as from there. You got home here. You got your boys with you, you guys play cards, eat pizza, have parties with the broads. It’s better than being home in some ways, at least your wives aren’t around.”

  Don Anthony tried a precise smile. Unfortunately, his lips were thick and his large head with the olive eyes and the gray pebble skin made the gesture grotesque. “You do your homework about us. What is it? You working for the G? You working for yourself, maybe see if you get something? You cut that tutsone’s nut off, but we ain’t niggers and we don’t mess with you. Don’t mess with us. Beat it, McGee. I got nothing to say to you.” And he turned then, and Henry felt the stone in his belly again because the interview was ended.

  The black faces shining with sweat moved up and down the court. The black legs churned. The round brown ball arced again and swished through the basket.

  Luis Miranda became Henry McGee’s mark.

  Luis was doing bad time. He had gotten into three fights that involved staving off homosexual advances. The last fight had earned him a very bad scar on his left cheek, which, unfortunately for him, did not mar his beauty enough. He was a painting by Raphael and should be hung on a wall in the Vatican and not wear prison clothes and get those looks from large men.

  Luis was a hard-luck kid all the way. His parents were migrant workers, and he had grown up in a lot of places between the apple orchards of Michigan and the berry groves of upstate New York. His hands were hard from all the work he had done in his first twenty-two years.

  His twenty-third year started out with a bank robbery.

  The bank was in Hagerstown, Maryland, a branch of a larger bank out of Baltimore. Luis decided that year he would not get old and stooped like his father and have nothing to show for it. His father had said he should go into the army, but he flunked the test. Even the fucking army didn’t want him.

  He acquired a Spanish-made .22 automatic knockoff of a more reliable gun by Smith & Wesson. He went into the bank at 11:12 A.M. Monday and terrified the young teller, who gave him all her money. She put it in a McDonald’s paper bag he had carried into the bank with him.

  Luis Miranda raced out of Hagerstown down old U.S. 40 without a problem. The robbery had so upset the young teller that it was nearly six minutes before she came out of a terrified trance and informed Mr. Drexler, the vice president, she had been robbed.

  Sixteen minutes later, Luis pulled into the same McDonald’s where he had breakfasted before the robbery on milk and sausage biscuits. He had to use the lavatory. It was typical of him, his father might say, to go in and rob a bank without first going to the bathroom. He left the engine running and went inside.r />
  A moment later, two teens emerged from the restaurant and went to his car. They looked inside. They opened the doors.

  All this was laconically observed by two Maryland state policemen eating their lunch in an unmarked highway patrol car at the south end of the McDonald’s lot.

  “What the hell those kids doing?” one asked the other. The other, Wilbur Dasher, said, “Fuck you think they’re doing?”

  Both cops got out of their car as the kids pulled something off the front seat of Luis’s car. It was a McDonald’s paper bag. The first kid saw the cops approach and said something to the other. They turned and the first kid dropped the sack, tearing it. The money was caught in a light breeze and floated up before the surprised eyes of all four of them.

  “Jesus,” said both cops simultaneously.

  The kids turned and ran and the cops stood motionless. Money in the wind.

  And then Luis Miranda pushed open the door while buttoning his jeans. He saw the cops and the money and he thought about it and then put up his hands.

  The cops began to draw their pistols at that point. Later on, the cops made a point of telling Luis they had no intention of arresting him for anything until he put up his hands. The cops thought it was comical that Luis was dumb enough to surrender even before he was asked to.

  Every time Luis told the story to Henry, Henry tried to sympathize. It seemed as downright funny to him as it was to the cops, typical of all the fuckups of the world. Henry had a use for fuckups, though, and Luis would work out just fine.

  It took a few weeks to get around Luis, but Henry had patience when he saw a plan forming. It was just another story to him then, and Luis was a character in it, without flesh or blood. He was just someone to be used.

  Luis liked the nose candy, and Henry could get that. Anybody could get that if he had the price. There were a couple of dealers, but Henry used Amos Amad, a large, strapping black man from Chicago who was doing five to ten for importing narcotics. Amos had the best stuff.

  Luis got very heavily into it. Luis was grateful to Henry, not just for the nose candy, but for protecting him. Nobody put the hit on him anymore because there was Henry and nobody wanted to fuck with Henry McGee. Some of them figured Henry had turned Luis into his woman, but it wasn’t like that. It was just friendship, and Henry got good, really good, absolutely fine shit that put you on the moon or something.

  Henry would watch him get his turns at night, taking the stuff up his nose. Luis liked it that way, not freebasing, not doing some of the other silly things you could do with it. Shit, it was like smoking unfiltered cigarettes—just do it. And Henry would see Luis get weaker and weaker.

  Henry wanted him to kill someone, and Luis had to be weak enough to do it and strong enough to follow through on it.

  Luis had a homemade knife and it was good enough.

  Two days before the hit, Henry told him what he wanted him to do and told him he couldn’t have any more shit until he did it.

  Luis practically pleaded. Henry gave him one little line the first day, but that was that, just out of the goodness of Henry’s heart.

  The hit was a small man, smaller than Luis, named Giorgio Fontanelli. Fontanelli was the clown of the outfit guys, the runner and the gofer—and the pimp when it came down to it. He got the girls, got the coffee, went out for pizza. Once, in a comic weekend at a nearby motel on one of their frequent weekend furloughs, the guys mated Fontanelli with a 250-pound hooker named Sweet Sue. It would have made you die laughing. The woman practically smothered Fontanelli.

  Fontanelli worked on the garden. It was a good job if you had a feel for the soil and growing things, because you could grow just about anything in this part of Pennsylvania. Fontanelli grew tomatoes as big as this. He would like to have been a truck farmer in New Jersey, but his uncle and his brother and everyone else were employed by a different firm in a different line of work, and so he had gone into the mob the way some Irish kids become cops, because there’s an inevitability to it you don’t fight.

  Luis worked on the garden project as well. It was noted in his file he had been a migrant laborer, and the guidance counselor at the prison thought it would be good for Luis’s self-esteem to do work he was good at. It was not noted in his file that he hated it, even if he did it well. He felt the first pains in his limbs now from all the stooping; he would end up like his father. But in the joint.

  “I don’t understand, Henry, why I got to kill him?”

  “It’s kill or be killed in this life, Luis,” Henry McGee said. He spoke as calmly as a teacher. “But, actually, you just got to pretend to kill him.”

  Henry said it that way, just slow and simple.

  Luis shook his head. He wanted a rush right now real bad. It was the empty time of evening when they were all watching Leave It to Beaver reruns, and the tiers were full of noises made by caged men.

  “What I gotta do it for? I don’t get it, Henry.”

  “Bless you, Luis, you don’t have to get it.” Henry spoke in a country voice with a wide smile. It was his way. “I got a favor asked me and I said I’d do it. It’s a fucking joke, Luis, don’t you get it? Like the time they put Giorgio on that fat whore out at the motel. A fucking joke, but he won’t know it till I step in and end it.”

  “I don’t like to mess with dose guys. Dose guys is by themselves, they don’t let no one fuck with them.”

  “Ain’t no one fuckin’ with them, Luis. Don’t I tell you straight? I been taking care of you, boy. Don’t you feel a lot better about everything?”

  “I feel better with some of that,” Luis said, not pointing.

  Henry nodded. “So you want to do me this favor, Looey?”

  “What you want me to do?”

  “In the garden. You just pretend to go off your nut out there, and you swing your hoe at Giorgio.”

  “Shit, I could get shot doing that.”

  “I’m gonna be right there. Don’t you worry. I’ll grab your hoe and wrestle you down, and we’ll watch the little guinea shit in his pants. Mr. Anthony is gonna be out there, all the guys. It’s a joke.”

  Luis had two more lines and felt better about it. Henry was his friend. Henry was a tough dude, and he wasn’t no fag, so he never asked Luis for anything. Henry was the kind of guy Luis wanted to meet on the outside, someone who had it together, someone who could show Luis how to do the thing right. Like a father.

  Luis reasoned it through that night.

  It went just right.

  Giorgio very nearly got clocked by the sharp edge of the hoe, because Luis was higher than the Empire State Building when he took his swing.

  Henry saw to that. Not the white lady this time but the standard tees and blues, and it just about put Luis over the moon.

  When Henry knocked him down, it was just the way he planned it.

  Don Anthony wasn’t there. He heard about it later. It was no joke to him.

  He called Henry to conference that night and explained that the world was a matter of favors. Luis was sleeping soundly in his own cell, dreaming his cocaine dreams. Luis was a friend of Henry’s. Henry should ice him. That was a favor, Don Anthony explained.

  Henry very nearly could not keep the excitement out of his eyes.

  4

  CHICAGO

  The plan was to get Henry McGee out of Lewistown prison, which would not have been very difficult. Don Anthony lived in the federal prison as though it was his summer home. He had his friends around him; he had women when he wanted them; always there were pasta, cards, and telephone calls to the sports betting people in Las Vegas. As Henry had observed, why would Don Anthony want to escape from that?

  The escape was planned for October 19. It was a variation on the hidden-in-a-laundry-basket theme. The simple plans always worked best. The escape was planned for Sunday, so that it would take the authorities nearly a full day to realize Henry McGee was gone.

  Henry earned his escape by dint of $450,000 and by killing Luis Miranda. Luis’s death s
addened him for at least thirty seconds because he and Luis had been close. He killed Luis in his sleep as a favor to Luis. He pushed a pillow over Luis’s face and pushed down until there was no breath in the thin body. Someone found him in the morning before breakfast, and his death was attributed to substance abuse because an autopsy revealed the presence of great amounts of cocaine in his system.

  The neatness of the murder—as well as the quickness of it—pleased Don Anthony nearly as much as the thought of $450,000. Don Anthony, who specialized in interstate theft, particularly theft from airports, was probably worth $10 million. But money was more than a way of life, it was a way of counting. If Henry McGee had been a paesan, Don Anthony would have made him pay anyway.

  The trouble with the escape plan was that it came too late.

  On October 14, federal marshals came for Henry McGee. They prepared him for travel. They put leg irons on him, so that he could only walk with small, waddling steps. They handcuffed him with heavy metal. And then they took him out of Lewistown prison.

  All his belongings were sent with him. They found the homemade knife and confiscated it. They did not find the cocaine. At least, none of the search party acknowledged finding cocaine, and Henry thought they had just confiscated it for their own use.

  Henry McGee was taken by car to Philadelphia International. The plane to Chicago departed at seven P.M. He asked one of the marshals why he was being taken to Chicago, a place he knew nothing about. The marshal suggested he shut the fuck up. The flight took ninety-four minutes, and the plane descended through bumpy clouds to land. It was raining in Chicago. The marshals walked Henry through the long, glittering corridors of O’Hare Airport to a gray government car parked in a no-parking zone at the lower level. The marshal opened the back door and guided Henry in, putting his hand on Henry’s head so that he would not bump it on the door frame. The gesture was humane, but there was something very threatening about it as well, because it made the prisoner feel the hand of the guard, which reminded him of his manacles and his utter helplessness.