“You’re just the man, Donny, I need a hand . . .”
Inside the apartment there was a curious combination of twilight and halogen glow. For his own reasons, Stu had decided to block off what light there was with thick shutters, which also acted as a protection against burglars. Donny had often slept there in front of the TV, his body sunk into the sofa cushions. He automatically went over to the fridge, and looked inside, without taking anything. Stu went on with what he was doing. It looked like a complicated operation, and, from a distance, reminiscent of Prohibition, a time these boys had never known.
“Can I ask what you’re doing?”
“It’s a parcel for Uncle Erwan.”
There were ten large cups of black coffee, a packet of sugar and six bottles of pure alcohol on the table where Stu was working.
“Coffee liqueur, it’s his drug, the idiot says it helps him digest. I must really love him. Just to wind me up, he won’t just drink Irish coffee, like any other Irishman, the stuff you can buy in the shops, oh no, he’s got to have it home-made, that’s what comes of hanging out with those fucking Italians. It’s a real bind, I tell you. You have to mix ninety percent proof alcohol with sugar and coffee, but not just the sort of coffee I normally get, it’s got to be espresso, the real thing, a sort of mud I get them to make at Martino’s opposite. While I’m mixing the bottles, you can go to and fro, I need ten more cups like this, Martino knows. Geddit?”
“Stu, I’m in love.”
“What’s that to me? You, in love? Who with?”
“Linda Mae Barker.”
“Don’t know her.”
“She’s a playmate.”
“Let’s see.”
Donny held out the magazine, and immediately regretted it, gripped by jealousy at the thought of other eyes on his beloved.
“Her? You’re having me on. She looks my mom when she was at school. Take the tray and six cups, don’t let them get cold, it mixes better when it’s still warm.”
“I want to know what happened to her.”
“? . . .”
“. . .”
“She must be dead, what year is it?”
“’72.”
“’72! You’re crazy – you’re talking about an old woman, that’s disgusting.”
“What happened to her? What did she become after that? Is she married, has she got kids? Did people go on saying, ‘I saw you naked in Playboy, that was a while ago.’ Did those photos change her life? For better or worse? Did she regret it? Or did she think she was lucky? What does she look like now? A woman who, for just one month, drove half the men on the planet mad – is she just growing old like all the others?”
Stu stopped fiddling with his bottles. He looked worried.
“It’s just a stage you’re going through, it’s not serious, but you’d better talk to someone. I was a bit strange at your age too, but this is something else.”
“I’m going to write to Hugh Hefner, he’ll know what’s become of her.”
“Who’s that?”
“The man who founded Playboy. He invented bunnies.”
“I’d take care if I was you, with all those nuts who write in. You’ll have the cops round.”
“I could look on the Internet, on one of those ‘Friends Reunited’ sites.”
“Yeah, and what about just falling for someone your own age. How about the little singer we saw at the Studio A party?”
“Linda Mae may need me just now.”
“Just now I’m the one who needs you, so go and get the fucking espressos, so I can send off this fucking parcel; we’ll think about your problems after that, OK?”
They finished the job, Stu put the stopper in the last bottle and then got out the wooden case in which the coffee liqueur was going to travel across the United States from West to East.
“Your Uncle Erwan, is that the garage man?”
“Are you crazy? I’d tell Uncle Dylan to go fuck himself if he asked me to do anything. Erwan’s in Rikers, with the long-stay guys, he’ll never get out. Idiot hasn’t got any family, except me, so I’m the fool who has to make his crappy liqueur.”
Stu’s favourite uncle was the eldest of the Dougherty brothers. He had left Los Angeles towards the end of the Sixties in pursuit of the Pasionaria of a short-lived revolutionary movement. As the only member of the armed wing of this movement, Erwan had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Rikers Island, the New York State prison, for no less than having tried to kill the President. Stu, who had never known his uncle other than behind bars, had great respect for him, not so much for his political convictions as for the length of his sentence, which gave him some kudos in the neighbourhood.
“I didn’t think alcohol was allowed in jail.”
“The only thing that’s not allowed where he is, is credit. Anyway, he’s part of the scenery there, they practically allow him to go out to buy his packet of tobacco. He plays cards with the guards, plays the mediator when there’s a fight, he’s always been a good spokesman. He says it’s not a good example to follow.”
As he talked, Stu went on packing the bottles in the box, wrapping each one in a cylinder of corrugated cardboard for protection. Failing that, a magazine rolled round a bottle did just as well. He picked up the 1972 Playboy to wrap the last of the six, and was stopped by Donny’s horrified cry.
“Linda Mae!”
And holding his beloved against his heart, he made a momentous decision:
“Whether you help me or not, Stu, I’m going to find her. And I’ll tell her what she means to me.”
“Technically she could be your grandma.”
Stu picked up the other magazine lying on the table and tried to read the title
“The what . . . Gazette? . . . What language is this crap?”
“God knows, you find everything in those containers.”
Stu didn’t enquire any further and rolled the Jules Vallès Gazette around the black liqueur, which was now perfectly wedged in with the five others. He stuck the address onto the box: James Thomas Centre, 14 Hazen Street, Rikers Island, NY 11370, and made two string handles for easy carrying – he’d been doing this for a while.
“Supposing you find her one day, what are you going to say to her, your Miss May 1972?”
Donny thought for a while before answering:
“That I still believe in her.”
*
Rikers Island, the largest prison in Manhattan, New York, was home to seventeen thousand inmates, men and women, scattered throughout ten separate buildings. The island was a sort of state within a state, less than six miles from the Empire State Building, and it was the largest penal institution in the world. The preserve of the senior inhabitants could be found, well away from the others, in a building called the James Thomas Centre, in honour of the first African American prison guard. On this Mount Olympus of the underworld, there reigned several living legends of crime, major figures from the Mob, the last of the great mythical outlaws whom the public had never tired of hearing about. Each of them was serving sentences of up to four hundred years, long enough to die behind bars, be born and die again several times over. In order to be a member of this exclusive long-sentence club, you had to have been sent down for a minimum of two hundred and fifty years without parole.
And so it was that in this senior preserve, time was perceived differently to anywhere else.
These twenty inmates lived in exceptionally comfortable conditions; they were famous, and mostly rich; they had the sort of lawyers you would associate with the largest of trust funds, and their good relationship with the authorities had transformed their status into that of permanent residents rather than prisoners, and their cells into apartments comparable with the best to be found in central Manhattan. They would all die there some day, but none of them were in a particular hurry to do so.
That afternoon, two of the residents, who had been friends for four years (in their timescale, just time for a handshake), were sitting and chatting in their armchairs, smoking the ritual post-prandial cigar. The younger man, who had nonetheless been there longest, was the terrorist Erwan Dougherty; he had invited his neighbour opposite, Don Mimino, who was twenty years older than him, the godfather of all the godfathers of the Italian Mafia, who had been incarcerated for six years. Erwan was very cautious about all contact with others – he had remained in total silence for nearly eight years – and liked Don Mimino for his old-world manners, and his philosophy of life, which seemed to come from another era, as well as the quality of his conversation, which was only equalled by the quality of his silences. For the venerable Italian, the Irishman’s value lay in the fact that he was the only other Catholic in the building.
“I’ve decided to learn my native language,” announced Don Mimino.
“What do you mean?”
“I speak a sort of Sicilian dialect that was incomprehensible even in the next village. You only hear it nowadays in some parts of New Jersey! What I want to learn is the lingua madre, the language they speak in Siena. I want to be able to read Dante in the original. They say it’s great stuff. I’ve worked out that if I take a course in medieval Italian, I should be able to get through the Divina Commedia within five or six years.”
In the senior preserve, embarking on long courses of study was desirable for many reasons; most of them saw it as a better way of passing the time than exercise or television. But it wasn’t just that.
“Then I’ll move on to English,” he continued. “I’ve lived here for sixty years, and all I can talk is a mixture of immigrant patois and street slang, and I’m not proud of that. My ambition is to read Moby Dick without having to look up words at every page.”
It wasn’t just a matter of killing time, it was a way of finding a meaning, or even several, to this sentence which defied any understanding. How could you envisage the next three hundred years without some kind of purpose?
“I started late with Melville,” Erwan said. “When I got here, I first of all read the whole of Conrad and the whole of Dickens, then the whole of Joyce – he was from Dublin, like my parents. Then I started on a law course which took me eight years.”
Law was the most popular choice, followed by psychology, with literature a poor third. Some wanted to explore the workings of the legal code, discover hidden meanings and traps, and fully grasp the details of what exactly had caused them to end up on this island. Erwan, for example, had passed his bar exams so as to reopen his file and conduct his own defence. Psychology and allied subjects were also much in demand, anything concerning the mechanism of the human mind, starting with their own – indeed some simply went straight into analysis – this in order to put the troubles of the past in their place and then to be able to face the future with serenity. Psychology was also a way into other disciplines, and it helped them to understand the laws governing groups and hierarchies. In the senior section you had the opportunity to embark on a subject and expect to fully master it, exhausting it right down to the smallest detail, while taking daily care to update the sum of knowledge. Who, in the outside world, could possibly hope to achieve such thoroughness?
Other inmates studied with the sole aim of gaining good conduct points and achieving parole, which could knock ten or fifteen years off a sentence. Some of the more determined inmates had managed to reduce their sentences from a hundred and sixty to a hundred and fifty years.
Unlike the rest of the world, the Rikers seniors did not see death as the final reckoning. The final reckoning, for them, would be their first day of freedom. They had to cling on to the idea that one day, in two or three centuries’ time, they would walk free and set off to discover a new world. Then there would be plenty of time to actually die.
“Then what?” Erwan asked, relighting his Romeo y Julieta.
“Well, then I might be tempted by one or two of the Asian languages. I spent so many years fighting the Japanese and Chinese Mafias that I think it might be time to start trying to understand how these guys work, and speaking their language might help.”
“When I finished my diploma in Chinese medicine, I studied Taoism and learned about their techniques for longevity, and that led naturally on to Tai Chi. Some of the legends tell of ancient masters who lived for between nine hundred and a thousand years.”
“I gave up all forms of physical activity at an early age.”
“You’ll come round to it, Don Mimino. Not immediately, but you’ll come round to it eventually.”
“We’ll see. I’ll study ancient medicine, and then specialize in rheumatology. My back is killing me . . .”
Someone knocked at the door. Unlike those of other cells, the senior ones were only closed with doors and partitions, and only had bars on the windows. “Chief” Morales, the head guard of the West Wing, which included the senior section, came in, carrying a box.
“It’s my idiot nephew’s regular parcel,” Erwan said, cutting it open with a knife. “You’ll have a drop of liqueur with us, Chief?”
“Sorry, haven’t got time. Block B is playing up.”
The guard, just as a formality, glanced inside the box, weighed up a couple of bottles, and left the cell. Chief Morales, despite his youth, was well respected by the inmates for his good sense and willingness to solve problems.
“We’ll miss him when he retires,” said Don Mimino.
Erwan opened a bottle and sniffed the still-fresh aroma of coffee.
“A guy from Milan introduced me to this when he was staying here, back in the Seventies. It’s less creamy than Irish coffee, less sickly. Between you and me, I’ve never really liked Irish whiskey either.”
Don Mimino took a sip from the little black glass his host handed to him.
“Buono.”
Erwan unpacked the five other bottles, put them in the cupboard and gathered the wrapping paper up into a pile. He was about to put them in the bin when his eye fell on the Jules Vallès Gazette.
“Hey, Don, is that French?”
The old Italian put on his glasses and inspected the cover.
“I think so, yes.”
“I’m not much good at languages, but I might have liked French. I’ll think about it.”
“A lot of irregular verbs, they say.”
“Suppose we did it together, Don Mimino? That’s an idea! In four years we’ll be fluent, and I suggest we make French the official language during liqueur time. Could be fun!”
“You’re all mad, you Irish . . .”
They clinked glasses and knocked back their drinks. Don Mimino, out of idle curiosity, took the Jules Vallès Gazette back to his cell, to study it in peace. He was tempted by the idea of learning French for just one reason: he would be able to watch the films on the Classics Channel without having to read the subtitles; he found French police films from the Fifties much closer to reality than American ones from the same era. Oddly he felt himself to be closer to Jean Gabin than George Raft.
He spent the afternoon learning by heart the subjunctive endings of the auxiliary verbs essere and avere. Then he dined alone in his cell, and dozed off in front of a variety show on Rai Due which he got on satellite TV. Late that night, he woke up, worried about having insomnia, couldn’t sleep, and picked up the Jules Vallès Gazette. Really, he thought, it was a difficult language . . . Learning Chinese pictograms would be easier than this. But still, in fifty or sixty years, who knew? Before closing the magazine and trying to get back to sleep, Don Mimino’s tired eyes caught sight of one line of text at the bottom of a column. Just more words, but this time in a familiar language.
Malavita Page 15