“He’s right.”
“He’s wrong.”
“No, he’s right. I dress up as a cop. I impersonate dames.”
“I make my own moon.”
“I fake petitions, a nickel a name. A dime for addresses. It’s very satisfying to make up people and where they live. Listen to this: Wilma Welfing Pearsall, 7614 Carboy Street, Marples, Ohio. Jerome Loss, Rural Route Two, Clegg, New York. Ed and Naomi Baird, Apartment 404, the Sinclair Apartments, 16 °Clipton Drive, Archer Hills, Oregon. I don’t mess with the zip code. Federal offense.”
“I give false measure,” a convict said.
“And I was a dentist who short-changed on teeth. I’d water the silver, adulterate gold. Delicious my fillings; they’d melt in your mouth.”
“I worked for a real estate firm. I seeded treasure in vacant lots for the suckers to see. I buried coins and statues and place settings for twelve — that sort of thing.”
A very small convict stood up. “I made the stock certificates that the con men sell,” he said. “Suitable for framing, they were. On a thin parchment, very expensive. The paper around the borders like the rough edges of the pages in old novels. Painstaking. I tore it myself. And a seal like a sunset or a harvest moon. A great wheel of a seal. Very official. Barbed at the circumference, the full three hundred sixty degrees.
“And the types. Hand-lettered. Glorious stuff: roman, italic, old-style roman, old-style italic. Cursive and minion. Sans serif, nonpareil. Brevier, bourgeois, and brilliant and canon. Columbian, English, excelsior too. And what we call the stones: diamond and pearl and agate. And primer I did. And great primer. Pica, of course, and small pica and double pica, and double-small pica as well. And much of this, you understand, in condensed and even extra-condensed. (To discourage the reading, I guess. I didn’t ask questions.) Only the great fictive companies themselves in extra-bold black letter. But almost illegible. Like a sketch of chop suey.
“But what I liked best were the pictures I drew. Spidery, thin as a watermark, of old engines, old cars. And a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, I took off a soap wrapper. And a factory after the one on the box of Shredded Wheat.” He sighed.
“Yes,” said a distinguished-looking convict. “I know the feeling. I was a quack. I worked with machines. I had an electrodynathermy machine, a honey. And an adgitronic nucleosiscope, cost me two thousand dollars. Also a honey. And I had this vibrating wooden box with insets for the patient’s hands. He’d wear coated rubber gloves and press down hard for fifteen minutes at a time for an advanced cancer. Less for something not so serious.
“I loved to watch the colored lights. There was no special sequence. I liked to hear the hum it made, the whiz and whir, the crackles, and crepitations and thuds. I don’t see the harm. I did a lot of good and may even have effected some cures, I think.”
“He’s wrong.”
“No, he’s right. Doc’s right.”
“He’s wrong. Two thousand dollars for a piece of equipment? Seeding all those miles of vacant lot? I don’t care how shallow a man buries that stuff, it’s backbreaking work. Or all those hours over a draughtsman’s board. Just take a look at the glasses that guy wears, not to mention the condition of his lungs from breathing those inks.
“No. Get in and get out. That’s what I say. Who needs all those props? Sure there’s satisfaction in the artist’s life, but we live in a practical world. Profit margins and overhead and cost per unit have got to be thought about. My money’s on the middleman. I’m a suborner myself. I can give you statistics. It costs me anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars to fix a judge today, depending, of course, on the offense and the defendant’s prospects of being convicted. All right, let’s take a closer look. We’ll take a relatively modest case: a white kid accused of a car theft. A first offense, and the kid’s from a nice middle-class family, say. It costs three thousand dollars to get that boy off. Of that three thousand I take home a grand, the judge fifteen hundred, and the rest is divided up between the officers of the court and expert witnesses like the social worker or the arresting officer. Notice that the judge gets more than I do. That’s important. I do that on purpose. And I’m pretty careful to let him know it too. Something like the same principle holds for the law clerks and the others. I know the judge’s unlisted number. That isn’t the point. I could reach him direct. The thing is, I try to implicate as many people as I can. I bring in the middlemen. If a conspiracy is wide enough no one gets hurt.”
“Me, I’m a fence. I receive stolen goods I might never see. I buy up a thousand transistor radios and never lay eyes on a single one. I don’t want to see it. I make a few phone calls, tell the trucks where to go.”
“Did you ever hear of champerty?” another man asked. “That’s what I do. I’m a party to law suits that don’t concern me. I bankroll a plaintiff. I buy him his x-rays. We split on the judgment. Some grievances I invent, I make up offenses. It goes back before Coke, the old common law.”
Feldman wondered why he had thought he should call for order before. There had been order. It was as ordered in here as a pageant or masque. Even the chairs made a circle.
“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” a man said.
“The chair recognizes the pirate,” Feldman mumbled. Pegleg’s wrong, he thought. No, he’s right. He’s wrong and he’s right.
A prisoner rose and spoke of hijacking the big rigs, of ambush at crossroads and hazardous tailgating through the mountains, broadside duels on dangerous turns at sixty miles an hour. Another agreed and told of how he put up false lights in treacherous waters to lure the shipping and then scavenged the wrecked vessels. A third was a rumrunner, a fourth the leader of bandits in caves in the hills who stole from the tourists. There was a bartender who worked for a ring of white slavers on the waterfront. He slipped Mickey Finns into the girls’ drinks. He showed how he winked a signal to a man at the jukebox when they collapsed on the stool. The appeal, they agreed, was in the strategy, the sense of maneuver, of logistics, the idea of government itself perhaps, some rich, loyal, aggressive joy taken in gangs and bands and mobs and rings.
A sour-looking convict got up to speak. “Crimes of anger,” he said. “Crimes of rage. What else is motivated? Give me spiters, men with grudges.” He told of barns he had burned, ricks he had put to the torch, the pets of enemies he had poisoned.
A young man stood up. He rolled the fairies, he said. He beat up the drunks. Another beat his wife and children. Someone else exhumed the dead; “I hate the lousy dead,” he said.
A man rose shyly. “I tried to kill myself and botched it. Suicide’s against the law, you know, although you don’t hear much about them putting a failed suicide in jail. I guess I’m an exception — an example to people. The psychiatrist says I probably didn’t really want to die if I couldn’t make it stick, but that’s not true. I want to die, I think, but that’s beside the point. What attracts me is the violence, the prose of the notes I leave behind, the halting syntax and the confessions and the passionate accusations. But even that isn’t the real point. It’s the other thing, the violence. I love the feel of the gun butt, the hard, quilted iron. The handles of knives too. Clubs. Whips. There’s a packed solidity in weapons, a center of gravity. You get a sense of lumps of power in your hands. The force is terrific. A hangman’s knot in a rope — like a full gorge — is the same. And poison. Discreet. The pills seem to weigh eighty pounds. And then there’s the pain you feel. All that power to inflict injury, and all that capacity to absorb it. That’s all there is. You know?”