6.The Alcatraz Rose

by Anthony Eglin

  “A good question, young man.” The tall ranger smiled. “Prisoners were woken at six thirty and breakfast was served in the dining hall at seven. After returning, they had to tidy their cell and put their wastebasket outside. At seven thirty, those inmates who were allowed to work started their shifts. They were assigned jobs in the laundry, tailor shop, electrical shop, model shop, where they made furniture, and so on, all overseen by guards and civilian shop foremen. They returned for lunch at eleven thirty and afterward could rest in their cell for a half hour, then resume their work until four thirty. At nighttime, in later years, starting at six thirty they had what was called music hour—usually harmonicas, guitars, small instruments. Dinner was a half hour later and lights-out at nine thirty . . .”

  The tour continued to the library, then into the prisoners’ mess hall and kitchen. Still lagging behind, Kingston was content to simply look around and take in the grim, characterless surroundings.

  Finally, they emerged into the cheering sunshine of the recreation yard. Again, Kingston attempted to transport himself back over fifty years, imagining what the “yard” meant to prisoners. One of the few times they were not locked up in their cells or elsewhere within the pitiless walls of the prison. Today was sunny, with a stiff breeze coming off the treacherous waters of the bay, but he knew that many days it was bitterly cold and cloudy or fogbound. He gazed around the large rectangle with its concrete floor tufted with weeds, the high stone walls topped with cyclone fencing and barbed wire, the guard cage and walk high in the corner. He pictured the impromptu handball and softball games and prisoners huddled in groups on the wide terraced steps—the “bleachers,” as they were called—leading to the cell blocks, some sitting against the wall, out of the wind, playing chess and checkers.

  “Sir! Sir.” Kingston looked over his shoulder. He’d lagged a little too far behind; his group was waiting on the steps. The ranger was calling him. “Don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “We’re going to the museum next.”

  The tour of the prison finally over, Kingston spent the next forty minutes visiting the gardens. There were seven in all, including the Warden’s Garden and the Prisoner Gardens. This was where one of the privileged inmate gardeners, Ryan Matthews—whom Andy had mentioned—had used salvaged materials to build garden terraces, a greenhouse, and even a birdbath. Although these gardens had been replanted and now were cared for by the Garden Conservancy, Kingston marveled at the creation these inmates had wrought, the visual pleasure and cheer they had provided for all the inmates to enjoy. Starting with little or no knowledge, with limited seeds, plant material, and other resources, it was testimony to their fortitude, determination, and perseverance in striving to somehow improve and beautify the surroundings and miserable existence under the most severe and hopeless of conditions.

  “Gardening is the purest of human pleasures,” Kingston muttered Sir Francis Bacon’s quotation to himself.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stood on the deck of the Alcatraz ferry, hair windblown, gripping the cold iron railing, watching the fog roll in. In the near distance, but always appearing deceptively close, loomed the gray-white silhouette of the city, its skyscraper windows shimmering with the reflected light of the sun setting over the Golden Gate. Civilization and its discontents crossed Kingston’s mind.

  He had a few discontents of his own at that moment, chief among them what had happened at the very end of the tour, when he had inquired about the Belmaris rose. The docent had taken him to an uncultivated section on the west side of the island to show him the rambling specimen.

  The rose had finished its once-a-year flush and was no longer in bloom.

  Examining the canes and leaves only, the rare and elusive Belmaris rose could have been any of hundreds. He was beginning to believe that he’d come all this way for nothing.

  And that was a disconcerting thought indeed.

  18

  WHEN KINGSTON RETURNED to the inn that evening, after an excellent dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf, a message from Andy Harris awaited him at the desk requesting that Kingston call him any time up to eleven P.M. or, failing that, in the morning. In his room, he took Harris’s card from his wallet and made the call. Harris answered after two rings.

  “It’s Lawrence, Andy. I just received your message.”

  “Good. How was the tour?”

  “Outstanding. A huge improvement on the one I took back in the eighties. The landscaping is very impressive. I bought a book, Gardens of Alcatraz, which shows a lot of the old and the new. I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

  “Indeed, I have a copy. I recommend it whenever I get the chance. They’ve done a great job over the years, sprucing the place up.” Harris cleared his throat. “Anyway, Lawrence, I wanted to get to you as soon as possible because driving home this afternoon, I started thinking about our conversation, and a thought occurred to me. I don’t know if it’s of interest, but one of the surviving Alcatraz prisoners lives right here in the Bay Area.”

  “An inmate?” Kingston’s ears pricked up.

  “Yes. I met him once at a reunion—”

  Kingston couldn’t help interrupting. “Reunion? I find it hard to imagine these . . . what shall I call them, alumni? . . . getting together to reminisce about the ‘good old days.’”

  Andy chuckled. “Actually, it was called the Alcatraz Alumni Gathering. It was in 2003, the seventieth anniversary of the prison, and all ex-inmates and guards were invited. A surprising number attended. Anyway, this chap, Darrell Kaminski, and I got on quite well, despite his knowing that my father was an officer. He’s probably in his eighties by now. If you can squeeze in the time, and he’s agreeable, I may be able to set you up with an interview.”

  Kingston didn’t hesitate. “That’s extraordinary. I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity like that. What would you tell him, though? The reason?”

  “I’d just tell him the truth—that you’re a respected doctor and botanist from England, here on a very short trip, trying to find out why and how the rose showed up at Alcatraz, and if he can give you thoughts about life on the island from an inmate’s viewpoint. From what I recall, he’s not the most talkative type, but with your accent and charm I’m sure you’ll be able to get him to open up.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  The two men talked details, including Kingston’s schedule—he was leaving in two days—and Harris’s own availability. Andy agreed to call Kaminski first thing in the morning and see if they could arrange to meet.

  “I’ll get back to you the minute I have word.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for doing this. If he does agree to a meeting and nothing comes of it as far as the rose is concerned, at least it will give me something to tell the grandkids: that I once interviewed a prisoner of Alcatraz.”

  Harris chuckled. “You’ll be the only living person in England to have done so.”

  Two days later, on Thursday afternoon, Harris and Kingston, in Harris’s Ford Explorer, emerged from the connector tunnel from Oakland into Alameda, a laid-back mostly residential community on the Bay, and arrived at their destination: Magnolia House, a cluster of single-level apartment units. Andy parked under the shade of a giant magnolia, and they followed the signs along a path that crossed a lawn, still damp from the morning’s sprinklers, leading to Kaminski’s apartment.

  Harris rang the bell and the door opened almost immediately. Facing them, with what could barely pass as a smile, was a tall man in his eighties, who seemed in remarkably good shape for his age.

  “Come in,” Kaminski said in a gravelly voice, opening the door into a short hallway. As they entered the living room, Kaminski moved purposefully, with no telltale signs of age whatsoever. A few wrinkles here and there and thinning white hair, but other than that he showed none of the physical legacies expected of a man who had spent more than half his adult life behind bars.

  After introductions, they sat in a sparsely furnished but near-obsessively clean and tidy room with a pict
ure window that looked out onto dapple-shaded lawns and sandy pathways. In the car, Kingston and Harris had laid out basic ground rules for the interview, agreeing to limit the scope of their questions, focus the conversation on the Alcatraz rose, at least until Kaminski seemed comfortable, and not complicate matters by mentioning Brian Jennings or the security van robbery in England.

  Both men declined Kaminski’s offer of coffee or a soda. Kingston crossed his legs on the lumpy sofa, looked into Kaminski’s unblinking eyes, and got down to business.

  “First, Darrell, let me say that I truly appreciate your allowing us into your home for a brief talk. As Andy told you, my interest in your time spent on Alcatraz is limited only to a rare rose—nothing more, nothing less. It may all sound frivolous and trivial to you, but we—a couple of botanists and a historian back in England and myself, who have been working on this puzzle for months now—are still at a dead end.”

  Kaminski glanced at Harris before speaking. “Yeah, Andy told me your problem. But I still don’t know why you’d think I’d know anything about roses.”

  “I understand. It must have sounded like a strange request.”

  “I gave up doing interviews years ago. It took only two or three before I realized that all the reporters really wanted to know about was the sensational stuff, what it was like locked up in America’s toughest prison: the escapes, the brutality, riots, killings, all that kind of crap. You’re lucky. Andy is pretty persuasive.”

  “And it’s much appreciated. So can you tell me what you remember about the gardens on the island? How many there were?”

  Kingston’s question was met with a grudging smile. “Depends what you mean by garden. Some were not much more than a few plants stuck in the rock walls along the roadside. One like that was planted in the foundations of some old houses that had been demolished. That was nice. Then there was the warden’s garden, but none of us ever saw that. The others were mostly on the west hillside—a couple, maybe. The only one familiar to us was near the Road Guard Tower below the yard—the recreation yard. We could see it on our way to work at the New Industries building. That was what I’d call a real garden. It was on a slope, each level was different, always lots of flowers in the summer, even a greenhouse built from scrap lumber by one of the guys assigned to the garden.” He paused and rubbed his chin in thought. “Ryan Matthews, that was his name. We talked a couple of times. He worked on it for years.”

  “Matthews.” Kingston nodded. The same man Andy had mentioned. “An inmate, I take it?”

  Kaminski nodded. “Yeah. And I can tell you, getting to work in the gardens didn’t come easy. Work assignments had to be earned. If you gave the staff no trouble, minded your own business, they’d give you some kind of grunt work first. If you stuck it out and did a good job and kept your nose clean, you could be awarded what was called ‘good time.’ That could eventually lead to a paid job in the industries building, where all the workshops were—the laundry, paint shop, carpentry, maintenance, that sort of stuff.”

  “Did you know any other men who worked in the gardens?”

  “Yep, a few—Curtis Sullivan and Vince Wellman were two. I didn’t know them that good, though. Sullivan was obsessed with plants and growing stuff. He could drive you crazy. He never talked about much else. Wellman was the opposite, quiet as a mouse. It was hard to believe he’d murdered someone.”

  “How were they chosen to work in the gardens? Who decided that?”

  “Hmm. I remember someone—Sullivan, probably—once mentioning that an assistant to one of the wardens took it on himself to start taking care of the gardens—that required labor, of course.”

  “Eliott Hofmann,” Harris said. “He was the secretary.”

  Kaminski shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. All I do know is we appreciated what he did. It was a god-awful depressing place and he, or whoever was responsible, made it a bit more cheerful.”

  “This Ryan Matthews that you mentioned. He must have gained a lot of trust and respect to be allowed to have the run of the garden.”

  “He did. He was one of the most intelligent guys on the island, as far as I was concerned. Some prisoners didn’t like his getting special treatment. I think it was because of the key.”

  “Key?”

  “Yeah. It happened before I arrived, but it was common knowledge. Not much went on in that place that remained a secret for very long.” For the first time, Kingston noticed a distant look in Kaminski’s deep-set eyes. “Sometimes information and knowledge could be like currency. And other times that sort of thing could be like a curse—could be dangerous. Something you wished you’d never known.”

  “I can imagine,” Kingston said, having a good idea what the man was alluding to.

  “No one can, really, Doctor, but that’s okay,” Kaminski replied. “Anyway, so the story goes, one day in the yard Matthews found a key a guard had dropped. Most of us might have been tempted to keep it, but he returned it.”

  “No wonder he landed the garden job.”

  “It was not only good for him, but in a way, good for us too, I guess. We got to enjoy the fruits of his labor, as it were.”

  “Do you know if Matthews or any of the other men who worked in the gardens were involved in any of the plant purchasing?”

  Kaminski shook his head. “That I wouldn’t know.”

  “What about you, Darrell?” Andy Harris asked. “You worked in the Industries Building, right?”

  “Yeah. I started in a workshop where they made concrete blocks used for building retaining walls around the island. After that, I worked in the laundry and then the carpentry shop.” He stopped, that same enigmatic smile again. “That’s what I did for a living outside, before I convinced myself that I could make a better living holding up banks.”

  Harris nodded, smiling. “What about conversation?”

  “Conversation? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Well, with over two hundred men confined in such close quarters, with a monotonous routine and a controlled existence around the clock, with little or no news of the outside world, what did you talk about in the yard and the dining room, in the few times that you had the chance?” Harris asked.

  Kingston was surprised. This was far from a gardening question. He wondered why Harris had asked it. To keep the man talking, he supposed, to keep him comfortable. Not a bad idea, Kingston thought. A tactic he’d used on more than one occasion himself.

  Kaminski was shaking his head. “I dunno—about anything that happened that day, news from outside. Meaningless stuff mostly. Sports was always big, mostly baseball for some reason, though we never got to watch any. No TV, only books and magazines.” He scratched his broad forehead and glanced around momentarily. “What did we talk about?” he murmured to himself. “Friends, families, places we’d been, jobs we’d had, cars . . .” He paused and shrugged. “Anything at all that happened, I guess. It didn’t matter, really. It could be something stupid, like the food we’d had that day, or more exciting, like arguments among the prisoners, fights, protests . . . escaping, of course. That was always on everyone’s mind.”

  “Escape.” Kingston, despite himself, was curious. “When an escape was being planned or actually taking place, how was it kept a secret, not so much from the guards but from the other prisoners?”

  Kaminski glanced briefly at Andy Harris. “I’ll answer your question in a roundabout way. Andy knows how this all works as well as anybody. In Alcatraz, more than most prisons, there was an unwritten set of rules you learned starting from day one. These were not rules laid down by the warden or the screws but by the prisoners. Call it an inmate culture if you wanna be fancy. The shrinks called it the convict code. It’s an understanding of the ‘them’ and ‘us’ state of coexistence: them being the guards and us being the prisoners.

  “Some of this you learned early on from other prisoners, a lot by seeing what went on around you every day, like how other inmates handle given situations, right or wrong. It wa
s all about putting up a united front against the guards and authority. Standing up for each other, never ratting on another con, not getting into arguments or fights with other inmates, not being nosy, keeping stuff to yourself, never lying or stealing—the goal for all of us was to serve the least possible time on the Rock and get to enjoy what little pleasure and privileges there were, until we got our walking papers.” Kaminski paused, looking at Kingston with an awkward expression. “I don’t think I answered your question too well, Doctor, did I?”

  “After a fashion. It was about how you kept things secret from one another. If an escape attempt was in the planning, how was it kept secret in such a tight-knit community? I assume there was a sort of prisoners’ grapevine.”

  “Most things, you kept to yourself. But once in a while some prisoners got to know—like it or not—about things like escape attempts because it often involved their help or cooperation, particularly those in the workshops who could lay their hands on materials and tools and machinery, what have you. But nobody would ever tip off a guard if he knew something was going down. Never.”

  Kingston couldn’t help noticing that Kaminski had that same faraway look in his eyes as before—when he’d talked about information as something that could be dangerous to possess.

  “I’m wondering, Darrell,” he continued, knowing he was straying from the game plan. “Did you ever hear anything that you wished later you hadn’t?”

  A longer pause followed. Kingston wondered if Kaminski was going to answer the question, or dodge it altogether.

  “Only once,” Kaminski said at last. “I never told anybody about it. At the time, it gave me a few sleepless nights, though. I haven’t given it too much thought since. No reason to, really.”

  Kingston and Harris exchanged a glance.

  “Go on,” Andy urged.

  “It happened about a year before Alcatraz was shut down, and I was moved to McNeil Island. One weekend I got lucky and was assigned to collect the softballs and handballs that landed outside the recreation yard walls. Usually there were only a few, so most of the time you could just sit and look at the view or just walk around the scrubby area outside the wall.”