Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

I knew instantly that they’d decided what to do about the problem of me, and I stared hopefully into each face, trying to read what that decision had been. But there was nothing there; Billy Glinn looked like a monster killing machine as always, Joe Maslocki looked like a welterweight boxer between rounds, and Eddie Troyn looked as military and disapproving as ever.

When Phil tapped my arm I jumped as though he’d used a live wire instead of his finger. I stared at him, and he pointed, saying, “Put those on, Harry.”

I looked where he was pointing, and saw a pile of civilian clothing on the nearer bench. Suddenly smiling, suddenly feeling wonderful, I said, “I’m going through, huh?”

“That’s right,” Phil said, and when I looked around at the faces I now could see they were all smiling. They’d accepted me.

The civvies were rumpled tan slacks, a green plaid flannel shirt, a green V-neck sweater with gaping holes in both armpits, and a reversible cloth zippered jacket, blue on one side and brown on the other. “That’s the best we could do,” Phil said, while I was putting the stuff on.

“It’s fine,” I told him. “Fine.” And it was; anything that wasn’t prison blue denim pants and prison blue cotton shirt was fine and more than fine.

I was reversing the reversible jacket, thinking my ensemble called more for the brown side than the blue, when a sudden thought struck me. What if they’d made the other decision? What if in fact they hadn’t really decided to accept me, but had decided to unload me instead? What better way to unload somebody than to walk him off the prison grounds, walk him directly to the shallow grave and then shoot him, or cut his throat, or have Billy Glinn reduce him to component parts?

I looked around again at their four faces, while I fumbled with the reversible jacket. It was true they were all smiling, but were those actually smiles of friendship? Was Phil Giffin’s smile comradely or smug? Was Eddie Troyn’s smile so strained only because it was unmilitary, or also because it was untrustworthy? Was that smear on Billy Glinn’s face a grin of friendship or a leer of anticipation?

Phil said, “You ready, Harry?”

Christ, no, I wasn’t ready. But what could I do? Plead with them, promise them eternal silence if they would only let me go? I would plant a shiv in my cell myself just before inspection. I would do whatever they wanted.

I blinked, licked my lips, was about to speak when Joe Maslocki said, “Really gets to you, don’t it, Harry? Getting outside the wall.”

Friendship; it couldn’t be anything else. They’d accepted me. “That’s the way I feel, all right,” I said, and slipped on the jacket.

Through the looking glass. Through the locker.

It was a narrow squeeze through the locker doorway, but inside there was more room. Two side partitions and the back were gone, leaving a space the width of three lockers and about four feet deep — a rectangular opening through the fake inner wall to the rough concrete block surface of the actual exterior wall.

There was light, a dim bulb screwed into a simple porcelain fixture over our heads. Phil had gone ahead, and the other three were coming along behind me. Steps led steeply down to the left, concrete block steps flanked by tight concrete block walls, leaving a space no more than two feet wide. We descended eight steps to an area with the dimensions of a telephone booth. Phil knelt and crawled away into a large circular opening at floor level, so once again I followed.

Concrete pipe, drainpipe, about three feet across. More dim bulbs were spaced along the top at long intervals, and the curving bottom of the pipe was covered with carpeting. It was easy and smooth, traveling on all fours on soft broadloom; when they’d used the word “tunnel,” I hadn’t thought it would be like this.

Every so often, the color and texture of the carpet would change, and I finally realized these were remnants, strips left over after wall-to-wall carpeting had been installed. The subcontractor, Vasacapa’s cousin-in-law, had apparently made his customers bear the cost of this construction; the concrete pipe, too, had surely been finagled from some other site.

After what seemed a very long time, I at last emerged into a long narrow corridor, again with carpeting on the floor. I stood up and moved to one side to let Joe Maslocki through, while at the same time I looked around at this new place.

The left wall was rough concrete, and so was the short wall behind me with the drainpipe hole in it. The right-hand wall was a framework of two-by-fours, with what looked like paneling attached to it on the other side. The corridor extended about fifteen feet to a flight of stairs going up.

“We never go out more than two at a time,” Phil told me, while the others crawled out of the tunnel. “We’ll go first.”

“Fine,” I said. I was feeling claustrophobic; first the tunnel and now this narrow corridor, filling up with tough and dangerous men.

Had they accepted me? Why should they; I wasn’t one of their breed, any more than I was of honest men’s breed. I was some sort of misfit, stuck forever in the middle. Or maybe not forever, not if I was in the process of delivering myself to some isolated place to be unloaded.

Once again paranoia touched me, and I peered at the faces crowded around mine. But it didn’t do any good to stare; I could look at a man and he would seem amiable and friendly, and the next time I looked the exact same expression would seem tough and menacing. How can you ever know what’s going on in people’s heads?

“Come on,” Phil said.

No choice. I followed him along the corridor and up the stairs. An ordinary wooden door on the left led out to the most beautiful mundanity: a gravel driveway, with weeds growing between the ruts. It was about two in the afternoon, a crisp, cloudy, late November day in upper New York State. The air was cold and clear, the pale gray cloud cover was low but not oppressive, with no suggestion of rain.

Phil and I walked down the driveway to the sidewalk. Ahead of us, across the street, reared the anonymous high gray wall of the penitentiary. It looked like a sculptured impression of the clouded sky. I live behind that wall, I thought, and for once the idea of my forced retirement didn’t please me.

At the sidewalk, Phil turned right and I went with him. The houses on this side, facing that heavy wall, were small single-family units, with tiny front yards and barely room for a driveway between houses. A working-class block, shabby but respectable blue-collar.

At the corner Phil and I turned again, away from the prison. Looking back, I saw Joe Maslocki and Billy Glinn coming out the driveway and going down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I said to Phil, “Where we headed?”

“We’ll just take a walk,” Phil said.

We walked three blocks through the same kind of residential neighborhood before we reached a business street. For all that time, Phil seemed content to just stroll along and breathe the free air, and I did the same. When we got to the business street, we stopped in a luncheonette, Phil got us two coffees in a booth, and then he said, “Well, Harry, whadaya think?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

“You want in?”

Later I would have more than one occasion to give that question deep thought, but at the moment it was asked I considered none of the implications; such as, for instance, the criminal nature both of the act and of my new companions. I was outside the wall, it was as simple as that. “I want in,” I said.

“There’s maybe more to it than you know right now,” he said. “I got to tell you that.”

The tiniest of warning lights went on at the end of some culde-sac of my head, but I was looking the other way. “I don’t care,” I said. “Besides, what’s the alternative?”