“A party,” I said. “In the bank?”
“All over the fucking bank,” he said. “Three o’clock comes around, they throw the customers out, they lock the door, they break out the booze and the record player and they proceed to have a blast.”
“Good Christ,” I said. “It’s as bad as the stink bombs.” “It’s worse than the fucking stink bombs,” Phil said. “When Joe got there in the typewriter truck, he didn’t notice what was going on. We’re all in the luncheonette waiting for our coffee, we can see what’s happening, but he’s right there on the sidewalk in front of the fucking place and he doesn’t notice anything going on. So he gets the typewriter out of the truck and goes over and knocks on the bank door, and it isn’t till some secretary opens the door wearing the guard’s hat that Joe notices there’s maybe some activity taking place inside the fucking bank.” Phil had a really remarkable capacity for expressing disgust. While marveling at that, I said, “So what did he do?” “What could he do, the dipshit? He gave her the typewriter. So now we got to cop another fucking typewriter for the next time we try the job.”
The next time. “Ah,” I said.
“One good thing,” he said, “you’ll be able to come back into it by then.”
“Right,” I said. I tried to sound enthusiastic.
“Anyway,” he said, “I thought you’d like to know.” He looked at his watch. “Listen, I gotta take off, I’m bowling with Max tonight. I’m maybe joining that league of his.” “That’s nice,” I said. Next time. They’re going to try again. I’ll be able to come back into it.
Phil started away down the corridor, then stopped and looked back. He still looked disgusted. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think God doesn’t want us to rob that fucking bank.”
32
ON WEDNESDAY, THE FIFTH OF JANuary, Fred Stoon came for me in my cell just after eleven in the morning and escorted me once again to Warden Gadmore’s office. The warden was genial, and declared himself pleased at my development. “You’ve done very well, Kiint,” he said. Pronouncing my name right had become an absolute habit with him.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I want you to know I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
“You’re an interesting case,” he said. “I’ll be frank about that. You’re getting along with Andy Butler?”
“He’s a great man, sir,” I said.
“In the spring, if you want,” he told me, “I’ll transfer you out of the gym, make you Andy’s assistant in the garden out here.”
My stomach closed up like a day-blooming flower, but I knew better than to sound anything but delighted. “Thanks a lot, sir,” I said. “I’m sure that would be wonderful.”
“It’s almost like being outside the prison,” he said, turning to smile fondly at the garden, which was now, as the saying goes, covered with a mantle of white. A mantle of pale gray, actually, since the prison incinerator had not as yet been upgraded to match pollution-emission standards.
“I’m sure it’s-nice, sir,” I said. Damn that hesitation; I could only hope he hadn’t noticed it.
Apparently he hadn’t. Turning back to me, still with the genial smile on his face, he said, “But that’s for the spring. If you continue as well as you’re doing now, and I’m sure you will.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“For now, you’re back on your regular assignment at the gym.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“That’s all. Kiint,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, and turned for the door.
Behind me, the warden said, gently, “And there won’t be any more of those notes, will there?”
ling. Turning back, I said, “Warden, honest, that isn’t me.”
“But there won’t be any more,” he suggested.
Sincerely, but with terror, I said, “I hope not, sir.”
“We both hope not, Kiint,” he said, and his smile-if this isn’t an absurd statement-had teeth in it.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and left. And walking back across the yard toward the gym, I chewed over these two new worries that I could add to the growing pile of them on my forehead. A promotion from the gym to the garden would just about finish me, wouldn't it? If I wasn’t finished first by the appearance of another of those goddammed ‘help’ messages. If they weren’t my doing, and they weren’t, then I couldn’t control their appearance or non-appearance. I had no way of knowing if or when another of the damn things would strike.
Biter bit. The practical joker is placed in a position where he can learn the trepidation and apprehension of the victim. Goody.
Ho, in one of the poems of his prison diary, says, “So life, you see, is never a very smooth business, And now the present bristles with difficulties.”
But it’s impossible to fret over difficulties forever, particularly when things are, at least for the moment, going right. I had completely forgotten my cares and woes by the time, four hours later, I entered Marian’s apartment, Marian’s bed and Marian, in that order; I wasn’t worried at all.
“I thought you might forget me,” Marian said, smirking.
“Ha ha,” I said.
33
ALICE DOMBEY NEEDED CULTURE the way the John Birch Society needs Godless Communism; it defined her existence and furnished her with purpose. Plump and matronly and as neat as a zeppelin, she was not at all what I’d expected from the wife of weasely Bob Dombey, not even after the fruitcake and the book. She managed to let me know within an hour of our meeting that she belonged to a dozen book clubs, subscribed to a dozen of the more cultured magazines, saved old copies of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, had bought the imitation paintings all over her walls at different visits to the Greenwich Village Art Show, drove to places like Albany and Buffalo to browse in their museums, and had ferreted out a Monday Club of like- minded local ladies to join. “It helps us ‘keep up’ with current events,” she told me, smiling in her bubbly way, and the quotation marks fairly hummed in her voice.
Marian loved her. The two women got along beautifully from the outset, Marian humoring Alice and Alice “allowing for” Marian, as she would undoubtedly herself have phrased it. Each permitted the other to feel superior, and what more could anybody hope for than that? The dinner party we had been invited to, at which I met Alice and at which Marian was introduced to the rest of the tunnel insiders, turned out to be a successful affair all the way around, though I did personally spend a lot of the evening twitching with leftover apprehension. I couldn’t seem to get used to the idea that the boys knew that Marian knew and that it was all right.
My second day back in the gym I’d learned that one of my fears, about Phil and the others finding out I’d told a girl in town the truth about myself, had already happened, and I’d been wasting my time chewing my nails over that particular indiscretion. Max, immediately on my telling him and swearing him to secrecy, had gone straight to Phil and told him the whole story. He had also given Phil my side of it, the presence of Stoon and the absence of a sensible alternative, and finally he had given Phil an encouraging report about Marian herself. So the group had met and discussed the situation and eventually had decided it wouldn’t be necessary to murder Marian and me after all. “You got a majority in the vote,” Max told me. I said, “It wasn’t unanimous?” and he said, “Don’t worry about the past, Harry.”
So Marian was now an insider, and I was the only one present with a date at the Dombey dinner party at which I finally met Alice, and which was given mostly in my honor, to celebrate my return to full privileges.
The dinner party itself was a bit unreal. Alice Dombey, wife of a convicted professional forger, produced an incredibly complex and tasty dinner (Gourmet was one of the magazines she subscribed to) for eight AWOL cons who sat around making polite conversation with one another. Alice beamed genteelly at everybody, used her knife and fork as though it were an intricate skill she’d learned from a correspondence course, and actually extended her pinky when lifting her coffee cup.