Anyway, okay. The warden said be calm. He’d be calm. He was calm. There were certain dentists you could trust. They said, “This won’t hurt you,” and it didn’t. That was no guarantee you wouldn’t die from pain on the way home, but you knew you were safe just then. That’s how he felt. Safer, for the time being at least, than at any time since he’d come. That’s why he had spoken out his greeting like that. He was pretty happy. What couldn’t he do now that he was safe for a while?
“Bisch,” he told his cellmate, “watch my smoke.”
The first thing he did was to get Wall’s power of attorney. Then he got Flesh’s. Sky’s was more difficult. “Authority isn’t authority until it’s deputed,” Feldman said. “Responsibility doesn’t mean anything until it’s delegated.”
“I’m in charge of the operation,” Manfred Sky said sullenly.
“I know that, Manfred. I know that. Listen to me a minute. Did you ever see a general?”
“What is this? Why rake over the past? Just because I once sold phony Prisoner-of-War Insurance—”
Feldman had forgotten about the man’s war experience. He didn’t believe for a minute in Sky’s sore spot, but understood that it was fashionable just then in the prison for bad men to assume long, penitent faces, to “make warden’s mouths,” as the phrase had it. (He had thought it a chink in the warden’s armor when he realized that the man would settle for insincerity, but he had been quickly straightened out about that in Warden’s Assembly. “Forms, gentlemen,” the warden had roared over the convicts’ forced applause and cheers, “civilization is forms.” There was even some talk that the warden would soon reinstitute an experimental measure that had been abandoned shortly before Feldman’s arrival. When the practice was in force, a convict encountering a guard in the corridor had to greet the guard formally, inquire after his health, and his family’s if he had one. Then the guard had to do the same for the convict. Each was required to offer some minor complaint, some small concern — these didn’t have to be real — for the other to be solicitous about. The system had been discontinued, Feldman understood, because the prisoners were helpless to project a believable insincerity.)
“Did you ever see a general?” Feldman repeated. “Did he carry an M-one? Was he issued a trenching tool? Did he, except on formal occasions, wear as many ribbons as his driver, say? Manfred, I’ve seen a general. I sat with one across a conference table when the store was promoting defense bonds for the government. He had assistants — captains, majors, a full colonel. Manfred, those junior officers looked Toyland next to this fellow. Do you understand? West Point cadets, senior prom, Flirtation Walk. They looked like men who had never done anything more military than hold a sword above some R.O.T.C. lieutenant and his pretty bride. But that general, that general was a dream of power! In a khaki uniform, very plain, unribboned, almost a business suit. He deputed his messkit, Manfred, he delegated his knapsack. Just the stars on each shoulder like awry stick pins, like something in a brown firmament. He looked like the United States sitting there. He never opened his mouth. This was a complicated thing. I had lawyers from my staff; he had his judge-advocate people. I was asking concessions for the space. Many things had to be worked out. Decisions. He never said a word. With the eyes, everything with the eyes. He never made a sound. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I was sitting across from him and I heard this faint hum. Like a generator or a transformer. Oh, the power in that man. Don’t kid yourself, Manfred. He was in charge of his operation too.”
“Wow,” Manfred Sky said.
“I ask for your power of attorney, Manfred. Give me your hand on this.”
“Why? What’s in it for you?”
“Me?” Feldman said, “I’m a workhorse, Manfred, a grind. Feldman the fetcher, the rough and tumbler. This is true, Manfred. I have no executive gifts. I haven’t the gift of silence. Hear how I talk. It’s a failing.”
Flesh and Walls were listening. Feldman had simply promised them he would do their work.
“How about it, Manfred?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Look, Flesh, look, Walls. Look at Manfred. With the eyes, everything with the eyes.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Manfred said.
“What would you say to a bribe, Sky?”
“Done,” Sky said.
Then Feldman took down the chewing-gum displays. Walls, who had taken some trouble with the arrangement of these, objected. “Wait,” Feldman told him, “you’ll see.”
He cleared away the toothpaste tubes. He had Flesh hide the cigarettes, and he removed the shaving creams and aerosol deodorants. He stood back critically and looked at the shelves. “My God,” he said, “the candy!”
“Wait, I’ll get it,” Walls said.
“Never mind,” Feldman said, “I will.”
He took away the famous kinds and allowed those he had never heard of to remain. He was very discriminating. There were seventeen boxes of Licorice Brittle, two dozen tubes of Flower Balls. Rose, Gardenia, Gray Orchid, Pine — some of the other flavors. He gave prominent space to some curious unwrapped bars of hardened confectioners’ sugar. They had precisely the texture and taste of the candy sockets that support the candles on a child’s birthday cake. They had jelly centers. Not by bread alone, Feldman thought.
He opened the soft-drink cooler and peered inside. He removed the Coke and Pepsi Cola and 7Up and all the fruit flavors except guava. He held up a bottle of bright mauvish liquid. There was no label. He read the cap. “Fleer’s,” it said. Hits the spot, Feldman thought, and returned it to the cooler.
Then he picked through the tray of combs, leaving out only the wide, eight- and ten-inch ones and removing all the tightly toothed pocket combs. These he placed in a large cardboard box into which he had already put writing paper, packets of envelopes, ball-point pens and all the number-two pencils. He covered the box and shoved it under the counter out of sight. He found a single box of number four hard-lead pencils, and these he built in a rectangular construction on the top of the counter.
He discovered some shoetrees, which he hung on a tall revolving razor-blade stand from which he had first removed all the double-edged blades. (He allowed a few packages of odd-shaped injector blades to be displayed.) He arranged the greeting cards, first transferring to the cardboard box all those cards whose messages of sympathy or celebration seemed rather ordinary. He was left with a small, curious assortment: “Get Well Soon, Stepmother”; “Bon Voyage, Cousin Pat”; “Best Wishes for the April Primary”; “Too Bad Your Dog Was Run Over”; “Welcome Back to Civilian Life, General”; “Congratulations, Comrade, on the Success of Your Strike!”
He took away all the Kleenex and white pocket handkerchiefs, substituting five carefully folded floral-pattern babushkas the men sent as gifts. There were other gift items: three travelling clocks, a portable iron and several umbrellas. Then, in a massive ziggurat, he arranged six dozen bottles of suntan lotion that had arrived yesterday by mistake. He stood back to appraise what he had done. “How do you like it?” he asked Manfred. Sky stared at him.
The canteen opened for an hour and five minutes in the afternoon. (The scheduling of canteen hours was among the more complicated arrangements at the prison. This was Thursday. On Thursday those men who hadn’t taken their free hour at ten in the morning on Monday could take it with an increment of five minutes at two-thirty in the afternoon.)