by Bill Granger
Henry stared at the rain out the side window of the gray government car all the way into the city.
They told him nothing. They barely tolerated his existence. When he had had to use the toilet facility on the airplane, he thought one of the marshals would hit him for the crime of having a bladder.
Henry McGee wore a prisoner’s look. His black eyes seemed to focus on some middle distance. He stared into tomorrow, which was fifty yards away. Five days before his sure-thing escape, and they were moving him. He wondered if it was Don Anthony’s doing.
The car delivered him to a high-rise triangular building on Van Buren Street. The building had narrow slits of windows and resembled three old-fashioned computer cards leaning against each other. The Loop elevated tracks permanently shaded the entrance of the building. Henry was disoriented by the noise of the El train passing overhead and by the silence of the federal marshals.
They passed him through security and turned his papers over to a man behind a gunmetal gray desk.
Henry didn’t ask any questions. They weren’t going to tell him.
They put him in a single room on the ninth floor of the high-rise prison called the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was very collegelike, much softer than Lewistown. Henry looked around the room. The guard said that since he had eaten on the airplane, there would be no further food until breakfast.
He looked out the window. It was a window, and the glass, while thick, was merely glass. He looked down at the glittering city. The Loop shone with light in the soft rain. The streets were full of cars. He could see trains. He saw the lights stretching out to the horizon, grids of light on lights. It saddened him inexplicably to be imprisoned so close to so many people.
“Hello, Henry.”
The interview room had no windows. It was in the federal court building one block north of the prison. Henry McGee had been escorted to the building by two somber federal marshals who handcuffed him, pushed him into another gray government car, and drove him one block.
“I could a walked,” Henry said.
“Streets are for free people,” one of the marshals had said.
Henry McGee wore handcuffs and stared at Devereaux. The Devereaux of his dreams faded into the real dimensions of this man. God, Henry hated him.
Henry rested his manacled hands on the table.
“Can you take these off?” he said.
Devereaux got up, went to the door, and summoned the marshal. The marshal removed the handcuffs and looked hard at Henry, as though he regretted doing this. He closed the door on the two of them.
Henry tried to keep down his excitement. Devereaux. There was going to be a trade after all. The Soviets had come through. The Soviets kept their promise, and Devereaux was going to have to eat crow about it. That’s the only thing this could mean. And to think he paid Don Anthony all that money to escape from Lewistown. Now he would go back to Moscow. He would still have fifty grand left. In Moscow, money could buy anything, the same as it could anywhere else in the world.
Henry McGee’s eyes were shining again, and he felt good for the first time since they took him out of Lewistown.
“The trade,” Henry McGee said.
“There’s no trade.”
“You’re shitting me. What am I doing here?”
“How’s life inside?”
“You couldn’t hack it.”
“Penitentiary.”
“What?”
“They call them penitentiaries. It’s a place for penitents. For bad people to regret their bad deeds. Do you regret yet sufficiently, Henry?”
“Come off this shit.”
Devereaux said, “We want to know something.”
He dealt the words like cards.
Henry stared.
“Skarda,” Devereaux said.
The name lay between them. Henry picked it up and examined it. “Skarda,” he repeated. It burned right back into the darkest part of his memory.
Devereaux waited.
Henry put the name back on the table. He stared at the man across from him. The walls were white, the room was a perfect box. If other humans existed, they were not aware of it. The room was the world and nothing was beyond.
“What’s in it for me?”
“Your cooperation is appreciated,” Devereaux said. “It shows a degree of penitence. The Lord loves a sinner who repents his sin.”
Henry waited.
“On March twelfth last year, you attacked and mutilated a prisoner. Henry Lewis Jackson. You cut off one of his balls.”
Henry McGee didn’t blink.
“We suspect you murdered Luis Maria Miranda. He was your buddy in Lewistown, Henry. A hit was put on him, and it was probably you. You were his pal, Henry, how could you kill a pal? But then you stuffed that Eskimo girl in the trunk of a car in Anchorage—”
“Shit, Devereaux, I was probably the lead pilot in the attack on Pearl Harbor, too,” Henry McGee said. “Let’s clean up the blotter.”
Devereaux went on as though Henry had not spoken. “We’re afraid we might lose you, Henry. We’re considering sending you to a maximum-security institution.” The words were flat cards again, laid out like solitaire, all the words strung out across the table with no kings or aces showing. Henry stared at them and he didn’t have a play. Time to shuffle the deck.
“Marion. It’s our maximum prison. It’s in southern Illinois, Henry. You’ve heard of it.”
Everyone had. Everyone knew about the bad places. Marion was the worst. They had the kid spy—the one called Falcon—locked up down there, and it made him so crazy he was fighting in the courts to get out. The other spy, the guy who gave the secrets to the Israelis, he was there, too. The only way you got out of Marion was to die. Everyone was hard-core, everyone was doing maximum time. Marion was the waiting room of hell.
Henry McGee had seen the inside of Lubyanka once. He had gone into the basement rooms where the Cheka had beaten Reilley, the British spy, to death. He had smelled the hopelessness of the basement rooms, the smell of blood spilled and death torn out of living bodies. Marion would be like that, only he would not be tortured in a brutal manner. The torture would consist of days dropping, one by one, drops of rain on rock, wearing it down through the endless days of the endless millennium. Christ! Henry thought. He was scaring himself. He had to get control, grab the cards.
“What do you want?”
“Skarda. Tell us about Skarda.”
“Honestly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Skarda. What if he played Skarda now, just a card in a friendly game, and it turned out once they got Skarda, they screwed old Henry? Play a cool hand and don’t give nothing away. “Honestly don’t know.” Just to show he was lying.
“Honest Injun?” Devereaux said.
“Skarda. You want me to make something up?”
“Go ahead.”
“Skarda. Skarda was this old fella in Alaska, used to trap on the slope, was part Inipu’it. Ran into him in Fairbanks one winter—”
“That’s not good enough,” Devereaux said.
Henry blinked. “Skarda is a plan. Skarda is an operation to populate the north coast of Siberia with—”
“Henry, stop fucking around with me.”
“I ain’t fucking around. You wanna know something. I’m trying to tell you—”
“You’re hopeless. You couldn’t tell the truth if your life depended on it. It does, Henry, by the way. Depend on it. Marion is not a threat. It’s the reality of things. You think about it, Henry, and you get in touch with me when you’ve got something to say.”
“Shit. You want something from me, but you don’t want to give me anything. That ain’t fair, Devereaux.”
“Fair is for games,” Devereaux said. “Fair is what we are not about. You want to work with us, we can make life tolerable. You want to fuck with us, we can make you wake up screaming every morning. We make the nightmares, Henry.”
“You gonna scare me or just talk me to death?�
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Devereaux smiled. “Skarda, Henry. Think about him.” He got up, went to the door, called the marshal. Henry sat still at the bare table and thought about Devereaux. His back was turned. Henry could get up and hit him real sharp on the neck below the skull. Practically guarantee that he’d kill him. Then what? Then Marion for sure and leg chains and all the rest of the shit. Henry tried to keep down the violent hatred. He tried to keep Skarda clearly in mind.
The marshal put the large, heavy handcuffs back on his wrists and led him out of the room. He went down in the prisoner’s elevator, back into the gray car, back to prison. The Loop was around him. Girls in bright dresses, men in suits, children, cops, taxicabs…
He blinked at the self-pity welling in him. He pushed it down.
Skarda.
He sat in the common room on the ninth floor and stared at the television set. The dumber the program, the more they liked it. They were like children, really, and Henry had to hold back this edge of contempt for his fellow inmates. They lined up and they marched when told to march, and they schemed in the most childish ways, schemed for little favors or treats. They pretended to be men and women, and the endless perverse cruelty and kindness of that fantasy infected so many lives that reality was blocked out.
Skarda. If he had to play Skarda, how could he make it work for him? He had thought Skarda was dead in the water when he was picked up after the first part of the plan failed, the Alaska part.
“Sam Ricca,” the man said.
McGee turned. His gaze was level, waiting for a challenge or an invitation.
Sam Ricca was short and wide. He had big hands that had once hung a man on a basement meat hook. He had been a butcher once, working in a West Side abattoir, cutting steers into steaks. Then he was a butcher in a different trade. He did a greedy thing and stole more from an interstate shipment of television sets than he could get rid of. The G found the sets and nailed Ricca for them. Racketeering. It was laughable to Sam Ricca, but the seven to ten were not. He was fifty-five years old, and you started figuring out how many years you have left when you get that old.
“You’re Henry McGee,” Sam Ricca said.
Henry wasn’t making it easy. Maybe this fat greaseball was a fag.
“I got the word from a mutual friend.”
“Is that right?”
“Da fuck,” Sam Ricca said. Who was this jagoff? Little guy like him make about a half-dozen steaks and a few chops. He could cut this guy with the side of his hand, didn’t need a saw or knife.
Henry waited, seeing the hostility. He wasn’t afraid.
“Don Anthony told me to help you,” said Sam Ricca.
It was amazing. He had been in Chicago for only two days.
“He said you were trusted and that you and him had a deal. He said he didn’t do nothing to queer your arrangement, it was one of those things. He said it was easier in a way for you to get out of here.”
Henry didn’t want the hope rising in him any more than he wanted self-pity. You had to stay rational inside or you’d start believing any kind of fantasy.
“Tell me,” Henry said.
“Don Anthony said you were to get out. I get you out. That’s what it’s about.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“A debt I owe Don Anthony. It’s nothing to talk about.”
“What if I thought Don Anthony set me up?” He thought about Devereaux and thought about Marion maximum-security prison in southern Illinois.
“Then my debt is relieved, you piece of shit. So is my obligation to you. If that’s the way it is with you, then fuck it, I gave it a shot. I only had to give it a shot.” Sam Ricca got up from the folding chair.
“Sit down,” Henry said.
Sam Ricca sat down.
“How do you get out of here?”
“You afraid of heights?”
Henry blinked and shook his head.
“You strong? You look weak.”
“I’m strong.”
“What d’you press?”
“My shirt,” Henry said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t worry about nothing. You get outta here tomorrow night. I’m supposed to give you money, five dimes, help you on the road till you get to your bank.” Sam Ricca smirked, as if he had said something funny.
“If it’s so easy to get out of here, how come you’re here?”
“I’m a local celebrity,” Sam Ricca said. “The newspapers call me Sam ‘The Butcher’ Ricca. Newspapers. Well, I was a butcher in the trade. So I’m sitting a little time out till I get paroled, and I play cards, enjoy myself. I can do time. You got twenty-five to fifty hard, I hear. Don Anthony said you and him got an arrangement. Good. Anything I can do for Don Anthony is done.”
Henry waited for the commercial to end.
“All right. Here’s the easy part for me. I got a hundred feet of electrical cable. Black. I got a glazier’s knife. You get them both tomorrow night and you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Cut the fucking window and throw down the cable and shimmy down the side of the building, just like Batman and Robin.”
“You’re crazy.”
Sam Ricca let that go with a shrug.
“Ten years ago this fall, exact same thing happened. Two guys got out. They were out for a year before they fucked up, got caught in Kentucky or something. Same way. They put TV cameras on the roof now so that it won’t happen again. Except it don’t work that good when it’s dark. You just shimmy down the cable and you catch an El out of here.”
Henry thought about it. It was as crazy as the laundry basket idea at Lewistown and just as simple. He knew he would go along with it.
He cut the window. It took a half hour. Sweat formed on his face and forearms as he cut at the thick glass.
It was one in the morning and it was raining. The rain was perfect, Sam Ricca said, it made it hard for the TV cameras on the roof. Sam Ricca was fucking cheerful because he didn’t have to slide his 275 pounds down a skinny piece of electrical cable.
And where do you get a hundred feet of electrical cable inside a federal prison? Sam Ricca said the hardest part was getting broads in, that electrical cable was easy.
He pulled the glass inside. It came inside without a sound, stuck to the suction cups. He put the glass on the bed and covered it.
He wore his pea jacket and watch cap. He wore tennis shoes. He went out the window. One end of the cord was tied to the door of the cell.
He skipped down the side of the building, rappelling quickly, his feet against the wall here and here and here. He felt no fear. The concrete floor of the city yawned up at him, and the buildings were all around like narrow mountains that formed narrow, crowded valleys.
Ten feet short.
Henry dropped to the sidewalk, cushioning his fall with bent knees and then letting his body roll onto the sidewalk, taking the shock of the fall on his buttocks, shoulders, hands.
He stood up and felt a sharp pain at the back of his left ankle. He took a step, and the pain was not as bad. He could handle it.
He looked around. A bum slept in the doorway of a transient hotel. The bum smiled in sleep. Rain fell from the glowing red sky. An elevated rumbled overhead, lights winking.
He took another step. The pain was there but it was muted. The hell with it. He was free, and it scared him and pumped him up at the same time. He hurried across the street. He was free, by God! The dull months of prison fell away. He felt alive for the first time in nearly two years, alive in a way you can’t be inside. It was dangerous to be free, to have this feeling of power.
He saw the blue and white police car turn into the street ahead of him. He ducked into a dark doorway and waited for the car to pass. He had civilian clothes on and had left the jumpsuit in his cell, but a prisoner gets the feeling that anyone with a badge and gun can see right through the civvies and see the soul of the con.
The rain matted his black hair and streamed down the angles of his face. H
e raised his arm and hailed a cab.
He climbed inside. “Airport,” he said.
“O’Hare?”
“That one,” he said. He wanted to settle back but he couldn’t. He sat on the edge of the rear seat, and the cabbie looked back at him once or twice.
“You got a plane to catch?”
“Yeah,” Henry said.
“What time’s your plane?”
“Three.”
“Shit, you got two hours. Don’t get anxious.”
The cabbie looked at Henry in the rearview mirror. The man hadn’t moved. He seemed really nervous, and that made the cabbie nervous. John Mozart regretted picking up his fare. You never knew. Someone on the street when the bars were closed and you never knew. The guy was a white man, but even a white man could be dangerous.
The cabbie took the Eisenhower Expressway west under the post office to Spaghetti Junction, where the strands of three expressways connected in a bowl of ramps and crossovers. The cab climbed and then dropped and shot onto the Kennedy Expressway and headed northwest. The roadway was nearly deserted. The city was slick and empty beneath the orange lights of the side streets and the gloom of the rain. The skyline from the Sears Tower north two miles to the Hancock building tilted up and away, winking in the eternal nondarkness.
Shit, John Mozart thought, just give him the money. He played it out in his mind, because the guy didn’t say anything and sat hard on the rear seat and was staring straight ahead. Give him the money. Only don’t get hurt.
Henry was still on the edge of his seat, thinking about it. Two hours, would probably be that long before the first morning flights went out. Nobody caught a plane at three A.M. And where the hell was he going anyway?
He thought about a flight back to Alaska. He knew Alaska. He could use Alaska to get back into the Soviet Union, it wasn’t that hard.
But they knew that, too, didn’t they? They knew about Henry McGee right down to the nth degree. Bastard like Devereaux would have that covered. They’d sew up Alaska from Anchorage to Barrow, close it down at the airports because all the harbors were frozen now.