It is bad companions, by God; our mothers were right.
The deposit slip told me how much I’d collected in cash. One hundred thirty-two dollars in bills, eighteen dollars and forty cents in change. One hundred fifty dollars and forty cents.
Yes, sir.
The cash all went into my pockets, except for a dime that Max Nolan found in the carpet two weeks later. The checks and deposit slip went back into the canvas bag, and I went back into the cold to unload them.
I walked a block, found a garbage can next to somebody’s house, and stuffed the bag in amid the corn flakes boxes. Then, jingling pleasantly, warm despite the cold, I marched back to prison.
12
I HAD BEEN OUT getting a Post Office box, and when I got back Joe Maslocki told me, “You better get over to the warden’s office. Stoon was around looking for you.”
“Stoon?” He was the guard who had accompanied me to the warden’s office my first day here. I said, “What’s the problem?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? I told him you were out looking for a box of stolen jockstraps.”
“Okay,” I said, and left the gym, and hurried across the yard toward the building housing the warden’s office.
This was two days after my successful milk box routine.
That hundred and fifty dollars had finished the job of cementing my membership in the tunnel club, particularly when I’d related how I’d hidden near the bank and had leaped out to assault a businessman with a brick, relieving him of his night deposit cash. But I had no intention of stealing any more money, with either brick or milk box, so that’s why I’d been out getting a Post Office box. I’d phoned my mother and asked her to send me a thousand dollars in a check made out to Harry Kent, and she had promised she would. With that money I would open a checking account, and from now on whenever the boys believed I was out making a sting I would simply return with money I’d withdrawn from the account.
I could see that life was going to get a bit complex in the months ahead. Talk about wheels within wheels. To the prison authorities I was an inmate. To seven of the inmates I was a tunnel insider, involved in robberies and assaults. To postal clerks and bank tellers and possibly other people on the outside, I would soon become an ordinary local citizen named Harry Kent. And only I-if things went well-would know the whole truth.
I hadn’t asked for this, I really hadn’t. I’d been reasonably content in the license plate shop. But the ball had started rolling, and so far I hadn’t found any way to make it stop.
Now, approaching the warden’s office, I suddenly remembered the last thing he’d said to me on our first meeting: “If you behave yourself, I won’t see you in this office again until you’re discharged.”
I wasn’t about to be discharged, not six weeks into my sentence. I had obviously not been behaving myself, but if the warden knew about the tunnel wouldn’t he want to see all eight of us, not just me?
Something’s gone wrong, I thought. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know yet how bad it was going to be, but one thing I knew for sure: something had gone wrong.
Guard Stoon was coming out of the building as I was going in. He looked at me and said, “Oh, there you are. Warden Gadmore wants to see you.’’
“They just told me,” I said.
“Come on, then.”
I followed him inside, and down the squeaky-floored hall. Glancing back at me, he said, “You find the jocks?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”
“The jocks,” he repeated.
Oh, of course: Joe Maslocki and his stolen jockstraps. Why had he given an insane excuse like that? “Yeah,” I said. “I found them.”
“Where were they?”
“One of the Joy Boys had them,” I said.
“Figures,” he said.
We went into the warden’s anteroom, and I waited fifteen minutes before Stoon came back out and said, “Okay, Kunt.”
“Kiint,” I said. “With an umlaut.”
Stoon’s reaction to everything was to express weariness. Expressing weariness, he said, “Warden Gadmore wants to see you now.”
I went into the office and stood in front of the desk. Warden Gadmore was looking at documents on his desktop, showing me his bald spot. He lifted his head finally, gave me a critical look, and extended a smallish piece of paper toward me. I went on looking at him, and he jiggled the paper slightly, saying, “Go on, take it.”
I took it. I was now holding a torn-off piece of ordinary white typing paper, about four inches square. Written on it in large, uneven printing, using a black felt-tip pen, were the words HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER.
The warden said, “Well, Kunt, what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Kunt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”
He gestured impatiently at the piece of paper in my hand. “That looks like perfectly good English to me,” he said. Behind me, over by the door, Stoon shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Yes, sir,” I said. I had no idea what was going on.
The warden said, “You think that's funny, Kunt?” He left out the umlaut.
I didn’t correct him; I'd suddenly understood what this was all about. I said, “Warden, I didn't write this.”
“Oh, no? Let me tell you something, Kunt. When that package of license plates was opened down there in Albany, and that girl Motor Vehicle clerk saw that message in with the license plates, she didn't think it was funny at all. Do you know what she did, Kunt?”
“Kunt, sir,” I pleaded. “With an umlaut.”
“She fainted!”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir, but I-”
“Kunt,” he said, more in sorrow than in anger, and more in mispronunciation than in either, “I thought we understood one another the last time you were in here.”
“Oh, yes, sir. I wouldn’t-”
“We don't have much of a sense of humor around here, Kunt,” he said.
Oh, to be outside. Oh, to have somebody call me Mr. Kent. “Sir,” I said, “I just didn't do it.”
“You were assigned to license plates,” he said. “Were you not?”
“Yes, sir, but-”
“You have a record of this sort of thing,” he said. “Have you not?”
“Well, I suppose I-not exactly this sort of-”
“You have the only mind that I know of in this institution,” he said, “that gets a twisted pleasure from this sort of prank.”
“I’ll take a lie detector test. I’ll swear on a stack of-”
“That’s enough,” he said, and made a sweeping palm- down gesture to cut off my protestations.
I stopped. A million words quivered in my throat, but I said none of them.
He frowned up at me. I was still holding the message in my hands, and I didn’t want to, I hated the association with it. On the other hand, it might not be psychologically sound to put it down on the desk with him staring at me like that.
Behind me, Stoon shifted his weight.
The warden took a deep breath. He lowered his head, opened a folder that presumably contained my records, and scanned various pieces of paper.
Movement attracted my eye. I looked over the warden's bald spot, out through his window at the small enclosed garden out there, and saw the stout old gardener, Andy Butler, pottering around again, just as he’d been doing the last time I was in this room. I didn’t see him pee on any bushes this time, but as I watched him packing mulch or something around the base of some plants, he lifted his head and our eyes met. I knew him slightly now, having been introduced to him by my toothless friend Peter Corse, and it pleased and heartened me when he smiled in recognition, giving a brief nod of the head. More than ever he looked like Santa Claus out of uniform.