Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

I did not correct his pronunciation. I nodded.

“Back when this gym was first built,” he said, “maybe fourteen years ago, there was a guy in here doing a five-and-dime, and it was a cousin of his wife’s was one of the subcontractors. You follow me?”

I didn’t, yet, but I nodded.

“So what happened was,” Giffin said, “the wife of the con bought herself a house across the street from the gym, just past where they tore all the other old houses down. Then her cousin and a couple guys, they dug a tunnel across the street from the basement of the house right into the gym construction. You follow me?”

“He escaped,” I said. And I was thinking that the tunnel must still exist, and Giffin and his friends must be organizing themselves into an escape attempt of their own. I had blundered into the middle of a group of desperate men planning a prison break, and I was God damn lucky those records of mine had painted me as black as they had.

But Giffin shook his head. “What,” he said, “are you crazy? I already told you, this guy’s doing a five-and-dime. How long’s he gonna be in? Three years at the most, and he’s out on parole. For that he should break out, put himself on the ten most wanted list?”

“Oh,” I said. A five-and-dime; five-to ten-year prison term. “Then I don’t follow you,” I said.

“You got the picture of the tunnel?”

“I think so.”

“Right,” he said. “It goes from the basement, it crosses under the street, it comes over to the gym. Now this subcontractor, he’s doing the concrete block on the outer walls, so what he does, he makes an extra wall in one section, so he’s got a space like three feet wide between two walls that nobody knows anything about. And he puts in concrete block steps, and they lead down to the tunnel.”

“The locker,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “There’s three lockers across there that you can’t open from the outside unless you got the key. You pull on them otherwise, they act like they’re stuck. You know the way them kind of lockers slide sometimes.”

I nodded.

“Behind those three,” he said, “is the way in to the steps that go down to the tunnel.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “But if this fellow didn’t want to escape, what’s the use of the tunnel?”

“You don’t get it?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

Giffin leaned forward even closer, smoke curling into his eyes, and tapped me on the knee. “He used to go home for lunch,” he said.

I gaped.

“That’s right,” he said. “Two, three times a week, the last fifteen months of his stretch, he’d go on home maybe ten o’clock in the morning, shtup the wife, eat a little pasta, watch the reruns on TV, say hello to the kids when they got home from school, then shlep on back over here for dinner headcount.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“That’s just the word, Kunt,” he said.

“Call me Harry,” I said.

“Beautiful is the word, Harry.” Giffin winked through his cigarette smoke, and finally leaned back. Sitting on the bases, legs spread a bit, hands on his knees, he said, “So now you got the idea.”

I frowned. “Wait a minute,” I said. “That was fourteen years ago. That man’s been out for years and years.”

“Well, sure. Whadaya think, that was him pulled down on you?”

I didn’t know what I thought. I said, “There’s people still using the tunnel?”

“Naturally.” Giffin grinned a little, the cocky grin of a man on top of the heap. “A special few of us,” he said. “We get ourselves assigned to sports supply, we work out a schedule of who goes when, and we take life the way we can get it.”

“You get yourselves assigned?”

Another wink. “Some of us got a certain influence,” he said.

The subculture of the trusties again, though I didn’t know it yet. I said, “Then I wasn’t supposed to be here, was I?”

“Up till now,” he said, “we managed to keep strangers out of here, but for some reason the warden’s got a bug up his ass about you. Usually when the warden wants to give somebody soft duty for a reward, and he’s gonna send the guy here, our friends talk him out of it. If the con’s an intellectual, we get him sent to the library instead. If he’s an ordinary joe, we get him made a driver or maybe a messenger. But the warden’s got this thing about how you should experience teamwork or something, see how people get along together in sports. Nobody could do a thing about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged. “Not your fault,” he said. “We figured maybe we could keep you dumb on it, at least till we found out more about you, and maybe after a week or two we could unload you somewhere.”

“You mean, kill me?”

“Shit, no. What’s all this stuff about killing? We’d just plant a shiv under your bed before an inspection, something like that. Get you taken off privileges.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But the first thing that happens,” he said, sounding disgusted in retrospect, “is you go poking your nose around and walk right into Eddie coming back.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe such a fuck-up.”

“I kept seeing these guys go past my door,” I said. “And you and Jerry Bogentrodder were both so mysterious, I thought there was a poker game going on back there.”

“A poker game.” He shook his head again, then sighed and slapped his palms down decisively on both knees. “Well, what the fuck,” he said. “You’re here, you seem okay, we’ll take a chance on you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You keep your mouth shut and your nose clean,” he said, “after a while we’ll let you go for a little walk yourself.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Giffin,” I said.

“Call me Phil,” he said. Getting to his feet, he stuck his hand out for me to shake. “Welcome aboard, Harry,” he said.

I stood. I took his hand. “Glad to be here, Phil,” I said.

We were standing at the shelved half-door, Phil and I, looking out at basketball players practicing their lay-ups. In the last two weeks Phil had gotten steadily more friendly and open with me, based mostly, I think, on the fact that I’d never informed the authorities about the supply area’s tunnel.

Well, why should I? There was nothing to be gained by informing, and everything to lose. In addition to the promise that someday soon I too would be able to use that tunnel, there was the pleasant safety of my association with Phil and his friends. I was now myself a part of one of those groups that Peter Corse had pointed out to me on the yard, was a member of the group whenever I was in public either on the yard or at the mess hall, and the reputation of the group was now my reputation as well. I could even take a shower on a Monday or a Thursday if I so desired; no Joy Boy would dare to lay a hand on me.

Now Phil and I were chatting casually about this and that when Eddie Troyn arrived, looking as foolishly neat as ever in his pressed prison denim. A onetime Army officer, Eddie had a passion for military neatness that tended to make him look like a dressed-up mannequin in a sporting goods store. He was the fellow I’d seen in civilian clothing my first day here.

“Hi, Eddie,” I said. I’d gotten to know all seven of the tunnel insiders in the last two weeks, and they had all reluctantly gotten to know and accept me, though none of the others were quite as friendly as Phil Giffin and Jerry Bogentrodder.

“Hello, Harry,” he said, and added, “thanks,” when I pulled the half-door open for him to come in. “Going through,” he told Phil, which was the shorthand they used with one another; meaning, of course, that he was taking the tunnel.