Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

The new insider, taking Eddie’s place, was a jolly, stout check-kiter from Buffalo named Red Hendershot. Max told me that when Hendershot had turned over his twenty-three hundred dollar entrance fee he’d said, “Here you go, the first good check I wrote in seven years,” and they wouldn’t let him through the tunnel until the check cleared.

There were other changes. Phil Giffin, Jerry Bogentrodder and Billy Glinn had pooled their nine thousand dollar bank profit, had rented a big loft downtown, and had opened a sort of school devoted to the martial arts; judo, kung fu, all that stuff. Max had grown very serious about Della, so much so that they were making plans to both return to college — she was also a dropout — once he got out of prison; in the meantime, Max wanted me to move out of our apartment because Della, in my absence, had moved in. So I wound up living with Marian, which wasn’t at all unpleasant.

A few days after I got back, they gave me a surprise welcome-home party, in the Dombey house. All the insiders were there, plus Marian and Alice Dombey and Della. Toasts were drunk and I became maudlin. There had been questions during the past month about the reason for my removal from privileges, but I’d evaded them all — until tonight. Tonight, when Jerry asked me just what had gone wrong to get me in trouble, I put my hand on his massive shoulder and I said, “Jerry, it’s a long story.” And I told him about the notes; the ones in the license plates, the one in snow on the roof, the one in the bottle in the soup, the one in the communion wafer, and finally the one made of flowers. By the time I’d finished my audience had grown, and several people wanted to hear it from the beginning, so I told it all over again. And then Alice Dombey, of all people, said, “But Harry, why did they think it was you?”

I knew now I’d gone too far to turn back; plus I was a bit drunk; plus I was maudlin. I was in a confessional mood, as when Andy’d had his farewell dinner. “Well,” I said, drawing it out, “it’s because I used to be a practical joker.”

That one settled slowly. Phil got it first and Billy Glinn got it last, but they all did get it. The eyes looking at me became increasingly speculative, and then increasingly flat. Marian, standing beside me, put both hands on my arm, and I could feel that she was trembling slightly.

Joe Maslocki was the one who finally broke the silence, saying, “Maybe you better tell us about that Harry.”

So I told them. “My parents were German refugees,” I said, and I went right on through. It took them a long while to like it but when Della started laughing Max followed suit and a while after that Jerry began to grin, and then Billy chuckled some, and one after the other they found things to amuse them in my past depredations.

Phil was last and the least amused, and when I got to the bank robbery attempts the best he could show was a strained smile while the rest of them hooted with laughter. But it was far enough in the past now, and the robbery had at last been successfully pulled off, so nobody got really angry. In fact Joe Maslocki told me, “You’re fucking ingenious, Harry. If you’d applied yourself to crime, you could have got rich.” And a little later Max said, “Harry, I understand the smoke bombs, and I understand sabotaging the truck. But what I don’t understand is, how did you do that storm?”

So I was finally out in the open, and it was all right. They knew my past, they knew what I’d done, they knew I wasn’t really a crook in their league, but they accepted me anyway. The party ended late and cheerful, with expressions of eternal friendship in all directions, and over the next several weeks every single one of the tunnel insiders came around to ask my recipe for stink bombs, or how to do some other one of my former outrages. I had become a kind of professor emeritus of the practical joke — retired, but still sought out for my expertise.

Marian, of course, had been hearing about the bank robbery for the first time during that party, and she wasn’t sure for a while whether or not she was going to forgive me for not trusting her completely. But I explained that rather than a question of trust it had been a case of me not wanting her to have to worry about me, so that too sorted itself out, and life at last did settle down to comfort and joy.

One afternoon in August, as Marian and I picnicked by a stream very near the Canadian border, I said, “You know, I keep thinking about Andy Butler.”

“They never found him, did they?”

“I don’t think they tried very hard. What could they charge him with? All he did was plant flowers.”

“Yes, and all you did was park your car beside the Long Island Expressway.”

I smiled, looking at the wild flowers along the stream bank. “Remember the book you gave me about the trickster?”

“It was about you.”

“No, it was Andy. I was just an amateur, but he’s the real thing. Knock knock.”

She stared at me. “What?”

“Knock knock,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, laughing in bewilderment. “Who’s there?”

“Amos.”

“Amos who?”

“A mosquito just bit me. Knock knock.”

“Did it really?”

“No, that’s just the joke. The first half. Here’s the second half. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Andy.”

“Andy? Andy who?”

“And he did it again.” I grinned at her. “The butler always does it,” I said.

“You don’t do it any more?”

I spread my hands out on the grass; the black dirt was cool beneath the green leaves. “I feel as though Andy drew that whole thing right out of me,” I said. “When I saw those flowers through the warden’s window, it was like nectar, it was warmth running through me. I was my own sun, shining on those flowers.”

“That was just relief.”

“No, it was more than that. I was changed, like dough turning into bread.”

“You won’t change back?”

“Into dough? Can’t be done.” Nodding, tossing pebbles into the stream, watching the sun-glints scatter, I said, “What I’m going to do, when my sentence is up I’m going to stick around this area. Get a job, settle down, be Harry Kent forever.”

Marian laughed at me. “Do you know, Harry,” she said, “prison has rehabilitated you!”

And so it had.