Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

“You get yourself transferred out of the gym,” he said. “Easy as that.”

I managed a not-entirely-honest grin. “You mean you wouldn’t unload me?”

He knew what I meant, and grinned back, “Nah,” he said. “We talked it over, and you’re okay. You’d keep your mouth shut.”

My grin still shaky, I said, “I thought maybe you were bringing me out right now to unload me.”

“What, on the street?” He shook his head, and his own smile turned hard. “No disappearances around that gym,” he said. “No searches, no mysteries. If we figured we had to bump you, we’d do it right in the prison, a long way from the gym.”

My throat was dry. “How?” I said, and swallowed. He shrugged. “You could fall off one of those upper tiers in the cell-block,” he said. “You could get mixed up in somebody else’s knife-fight out on the yard. We could get you transferred to a place with big machines.”

That last one made me close my eyes. “All right,” I said. “I get the idea.”

When I opened my eyes again, he was giving me a quizzical grin. “You’re a funny bird, Harry,” he said. “Anyway, now’s when you say whether or not you want to come in.”

“I want to come in.”

“Even though there’s stuff I can’t tell you in front.” That was the second time he’d mentioned that. But what stuff could there be? Maybe I had to promise that if anybody else discovered the tunnel I would join in with the murdering. It was a promise I would definitely make and definitely not keep. What else could there be? I said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been outside now, and I want to do it again. I’m with you.”

His grin this time seemed to show relief; maybe his assurances about not unloading me if I’d chosen the other way hadn’t been one hundred percent accurate. Maybe if I’d decided to transfer away from the gym I would have found myself working amid big machines.

The grin, though, whatever it meant, didn’t last long; it was followed by a serious look, meaning that now we were going to get down to business. He said, “You got somebody holds your stash on the outside?”

All my money was held for me by my mother, which didn’t seem the best thing to tell him, so I just said, “Sure.”

He reached into a pocket and slid a dime across the table toward me. “There’s a phone booth over there,” he said. “Call your contact, collect. Tell him to send a check for twenty-three hundred bucks to Alice Dombey at two-twenty-nine Fair Harbor Street, Stonevelt, New York.”

I repeated the name and address, and went to the phone booth.

My mother was home, and utterly bewildered. In her heavy German accent she said, “Horreld, you’re out from prison?”

“Not exactly, Mama. What I’m doing is kind of a secret.”

“You escaped from prison?”

“No, Mama. I’m still in prison. For another two or three years. Mama. Listen, Mama, can you keep a secret?”

“You doing another joke, Horreld?”

“Absolutely not, Mama. This is very serious. It is absolutely not a joke, and if you don’t keep this secret I could wind up getting killed. I mean it, Mama, this time I’m dead on the level.” I was immediately sorry I’d used that last phrase.

But apparently my sincerity had made an effect on my mother, because in a more normal tone she said, “You know I wouldn’t tell a secret on you, Horreld.”

“That’s good, Mama, that’s fine. Now listen—”

I told her what to do, to take the money out of our joint savings account and make up a money order and where to send it. She copied everything down, saying, “Ya, ya,” the whole time, and when I was finished with my instructions she said, “Horreld, tell me the truth. Are you lying?”

This was the formula of truth between us, and had been since I was a little boy. Whenever she said, “Horreld, tell me the truth. Are you lying?” I then told her the absolute truth. She had never used the power lightly, and I had always taken it seriously. When two people are as close as mother and son, they have to find some method by which they can live together within one another’s foibles, and this was the way we had chosen to permit us to live together inside the network of secrecy, fraud and double-dealing which is the natural dwelling place of the confirmed practical joker. So now I said, “I’m telling you the truth, Mama. I need the money for a secret reason that I can’t tell you about. I’m still in prison, and if you tell anybody, even Papa, about my calling you or about you sending the money, I’ll be in a lot of trouble with the law and also in a lot of trouble with some very tough people in the prison. I could get killed, Mama, and that’s the truth.”

“Okay, Horreld,” she said. “I’ll send the money.”

“Thanks, Mama,” I said, and went on to ask after Papa’s health and how were things at the used-car lot which had been my last place of employment before my trial. She said, “A man came in and said there was sand in his gas tank, and Mr. Frizzell wants to know was that you.”

“I’m afraid it was, Mama,” I said, and on that note we ended the conversation.

Phil was waiting patiently in the booth. I gave him his dime back and said, “The money’s on its way.”

“Good.” He gestured at my coffee. “You done?”

“Sure.”

We left the luncheonette, strolled two blocks past clothing stores and appliance stores and five-and-tens, and then Phil pointed across the street and said, “I got to go to the bank.”

“The bank?”

“I got an account there.”

He said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a convict to have an account in a local bank. But of course it was, wasn’t it? For this particular convict it was, anyway.

And for me, too. I felt as though my brain had been injected with Novocaine, which was slowly wearing off. Feeling, sensation, understanding were gradually coming to me. I was outside the wall .

And I was crossing the street, I saw, toward not one bank but two. On the right was a hulking gray stone Greek temple, with pillars and complicated cornices and all. Gold lettering on the windows said Western National Bank . On the left was a perfect study in contrasts, a four-story building that couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The upper floors showed mostly wide office windows interspersed with red or green plastic panels, and the first floor contained a Woolworth’s on one side and a bank on the other, both with large windows fronting on the street. The bank, called Fiduciary Federal Trust on its windows, was cheek by jowl with Western National and couldn’t have been more different. Western National was as grim and tight as the prison I’d just come from, while Fiduciary Federal was wide open; through its big windows I could clearly see the open, airy, brightly lighted interior, with lines of customers and a sense of casual bustle.

Phil and I crossed the street and promptly bumped into one another as I angled toward Fiduciary Federal to find him angling toward Western National. “Oops,” I said.

He pointed to the Greek temple. “That one,” he said.

“Oh. I just took it for granted, uh...” I gestured toward the cheerful openness of Fiduciary Federal. It hadn’t occurred to me Phil might choose the bank that looked like a prison.

“A couple of the other guys use that one,” Phil said, as though that were some sort of explanation.

We went on into the bank. The inside was austere, echoing and high-ceilinged; more a Buddhist temple than a Greek, somehow. Phil took a check from his wallet, filled it out, and cashed it with a smiling girl teller who apparently knew him. They exchanged hellos and comments on the weather. Then he gestured to me, saying, “Here’s a friend of mine, Harry Kent.”