Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

“I’ll walk back with you,” Phil said. To me he said, “See you in a minute.”

“Right.”

They walked away, disappearing amid the bins and shelves, and I watched the basketball players do their lay-ups. Figure eight, with the basket at the center. One man looped in from the right, received the ball, drove under the basket and did his shot, while another man looped in from the left, took the rebound, and passed it to the next man looping in from the right. The man from the right then proceeded on to the end of the line coming from the left, and the man from the left...

I was going to sleep. The damn thing was hypnotic; symmetrical, regular, flowing, easy, rhythmic...

I was going to sleep again. Looking around, I saw that Phil had left his cigarettes and matches on the half-door’s shelf. I took a cigarette from the pack, took one paper match, and stuffed it head last into the cigarette. I used a second match to push it well in, so that when I was finished the match head was not quite an inch from the end of the cigarette. I tossed the other match away, shook half a dozen more cigarettes from the pack, put my doctored cigarette back, returned the other cigarettes in front of it, and put the cigarettes and matches back where they’d been on the shelf.

And all the while I was idly remembering what I’d been told by Phil about the tunnel. That original day tripper, a man named Vasacapa, had been unable to keep its existence totally a one-man secret. He’d been forced to let a few of the trusties in on it, and as a result the tunnel had multiple users from the very beginning. But no one who had ever used it was interested in escaping, nor in doing something foolish that would get them all caught. Either they were short timers like Vasacapa himself, or they were so high on the trusty ladder, with so many in-prison privileges and advantages, that they didn’t want to risk losing their position.

During Vasacapa’s last two months in prison, he had actually held down a part-time job in a local supermarket on the outside, as an assistant produce manager. Once he was a free man, he shifted to full-time employment in the same store, and of course he kept the house at the other end of the tunnel. His former fellow inmates continued to use the tunnel, and Vasacapa constructed a private entrance from his driveway into the basement for them, so they could travel at any time they pleased without disturbing him or his family.

Three years ago Vasacapa had died, and his widow had decided to sell the house and go live with a married daughter in San Diego. Over the years, as each tunnel insider had finished his prison term, his place had been taken by another inmate, chosen by the insiders in a democratic vote; like a fraternity. When the widow informed the current insiders of her plans, they realized they couldn’t let the house be sold to a stranger, yet no one of them had the cash — or credit — to buy the place himself. So they pooled their resources and bought the house as a group. The wife of one of them — Bob Dombey, the shifty-eyed first man I’d seen coming from the locker room — had been brought up from Troy, New York to front the combine, had bought the house in her own name, and was now living in it.

The agreement was that the group owned the house, and that a member whose term was up and who left the prison gave up his share but was paid back his investment That had originally been twenty-three hundred dollars per man; so that now whenever an insider left prison, the group gave him twenty-three hundred dollars, which it then got back from the man who took his place. If an insider died, which had happened twice so far (both times of natural causes), the new man still paid the twenty-three hundred dollars, which was sent without explanation to the deceased’s next of kin.

My appearance had screwed up this well-oiled operation completely. The man I’d replaced, a professional arsonist out now on parole, had been paid his twenty-three hundred dollars, but the group couldn’t ask me for the money unless they were willing to let me in as an equal partner, and none of them was at all sure that was the case. I’d been more or less shoved down their throats by the warden, and most of them resented it.

So they didn’t know what the hell they were going to do. Nor did I. And in the meantime my only course was to wait, keep my mouth shut, and hope for the best.

If only I knew what was best. The idea of going through that tunnel of theirs once was very pleasant, very exciting; but the idea of becoming a part of this conspiracy was terrifying.

The whole situation raised yet again my old problem: was I good, or was I bad? A hardened professional criminal would simply join in with these commuters, pay his money, and live content within the bent rules. A truly honest man, interested in perfecting society and rehabilitating himself, would have gone to the warden and told him the full story at the first opportunity. But I, stuck somewhere between the two extremes, dithered, did nothing, and waited for circumstances to sort things out without my help.

Phil was away with Eddie Troyn for about ten minutes. When he came back, the basketball players were still making their infinity sign and I was still brooding about my prospects. Phil had Max Nolan with him, and he said, “Max can take over at the door here for a minute. Come on with me.”

“Right,” I said. “Hello, Max.”

He nodded, neither friendly nor hostile. A muscular, thick-waisted man of about thirty, Max Nolan looked more like an outside agitator living near a university campus than a professional crook. He had thick brown hair, a bit longer than prison regulations allowed, and a bushy, drooping moustache, and he was serving ten-to-twenty for various kinds of grand larceny. In fact, Max had started out as a campus radical, had seen jail the first couple of times as a result of anti-war demonstrations, had moved on from there to drug busts for possession, and then had graduated to burglary and the use of stolen credit cards.

There’s a funny double progression going on in prison these days, as more and more radicals arrive, sentenced for drugs or politics. The rebels are radicalizing the criminals, which is why there’ve been so many prison riots and strikes recently, but at the same time the crooks are criminalizing the radicals. A college graduate who enters prison for smoking marijuana or bombing an army recruiting office comes out knowing how to jimmy apartment doors and crack safes. A few years from now the world in general may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Anyway, Max was one of this new breed, who had been at Stonevelt three years and managed to ingratiate himself early on with both establishments: the official one headed by the warden, and the unofficial one run by the trusties. “It’s just like college,” he told me once. “You brown-nose the teachers and buddy-buddy your roommate.”

But he told me that when he knew me better. At this point he merely nodded when I said hello, and let it go at that. So I went away with Phil, who led me back to the locker room at the rear of the building, where I found three of the others waiting for us, sitting on the benches or lounging against the lockers.

I stopped dead when I saw them. Eddie Troyn, Joe Maslocki and Billy Glinn. Joe Maslocki was a former welterweight boxer in for manslaughter, a tough guy with a battered face and chunky body; he was the second returnee I’d seen that first day, the one I’d felt impelled to call “sir.” Billy Glinn was simply a monster, a being designed for no purpose other than to destroy people with his bare hands. He wasn’t quite as tall nor quite as wide as Jerry Bogentrodder, but he gave an impression of much more strength and much more viciousness. He seemed denser than most human beings somehow, as though he’d actually been born on some larger, heavier planet. Saturn, maybe.