A Moment in the Sun (123 page)

“I don’t read the evening editions,” Kelso confides to the Dago as he carefully peels the towel off, “as I don’t find it conducive to sleep. A stroll around the block after your meal, says I, a friendly hand of pinochle with the neighbors, but nothing to tax the mind.”

“So—big news at the Exposition,” Shoe offers casually. The keeper’s train of thought is prone to frequent derailment, and Shoe has learned to steer him back on track.

“A terrible business. A national shame.”

DiNucci, who is bending down with razor in hand to scrutinize the Sergeant’s lathered neck, looks to Shoe, who nods for him to get busy.

“ ‘Just get yourself down here on the double,’ says the PK, and an order is an order, so I climb into the uniform and I says to Margaret, says I, ‘This will be a great deal of effort about
noth
ing when it comes out in the wash.’ ”

The Sergeant points his chin toward the ceiling to help DiNucci with his scraping.

“And so you can imagine my bestonishment when I arrive to find several hundred extremely agitated citizens, many of them strangers to our town, camped across the street at the station.” Kelso raises his voice to be heard over the whine of an electric table saw. “ ‘Michael,’ I says to myself, ‘this is not the new policy of the New York Central Railway, these are not passengers awaiting transport in the wee hours, but an unlawful assembly determined to obstruct the orderly machinations of our judicial system.’ ”

“All these years on the job,” muses Shoe, “have sharpened your powers of deduction.”

Kelso raises an eyebrow at Shoe.

“And who, might I ask, is the one of us with
STATE PRISON
stamped on all his buttons?”

“You got me there, Sergeant. So—there was a crowd—”

“A mob, it was, with the bloodlust in their eye, refusing our instructions to peacefully disperse themselves. Captain Singleton was in the process of reading them the Riot Act—”

“That’s a real thing?” interrupts the barber. “The Riot Act?”

“Real as rain. There’s a copy in Warden Mead’s office.”

DiNucci shakes his head. “Live and learn.”

“So this mob—” prompts Shoe.

“Disrespectful is the least of it. Halfway through the Captain’s declamation the train pulls in and all hell breaks loose. The boys in Buffalo have been all over this Goulash fella, you can see that the minute they drag him off the car, he’s been through the wringer backwards and forwards, and he takes one look at his reception committee and his knees give way, the detectives on either side holdin him up by the bracelets, and then the crowd rushes forward—careful of that bit there, it can be tricky—”

Nose carefully shaves the cleft in Kelso’s chin.

“Goulash,” says Shoe.

“Some sort of Hunkie appellation,” frowns the Sergeant. “I heard him say it in the Warden’s office when we took his information, but it’s Goulash to me. Oh, the mob went after that lad hammer and tong they did, and they had him on the ground more than once before we could drag him up the steps and into Administration. I split a few heads with my stick, I can tell you, and there was others got a rifle butt in the chops for their trouble. Twas like one of your lynching events in Old Dixie, only instead of a blackie on the rope it’s an alien assassin that’s insinuated himself onto our fair shores to strike a blow at liberty.”

“It sounded like a hell of a donnybrook out there.”

“I tell you, Shoe, if it hadn’t been for the bravery of our boys in blue they’d have cheated the State for sure.”

“An assassin.” Shoe muses. If you show too much interest they start to think it’s dope you shouldn’t be in on.

“A sniveling little hop o’ me thumb that’s laid a great man low.”

And sometimes you just have to pop the query. “Who did he kill?” asks Shoe.

The Sergeant turns his head to glare. “And where in God’s name have you been?”

“Cell 43,” says Shoe. “Third tier, north wing.”

Kelso raises a brow. “Not so easy to follow the game when you’re incarcerated, is it? That’ll teach you a lesson.” He closes his eyes and settles back, as if the subject is closed.

DiNucci begins on the Sergeant’s cheeks, stretching the skin with his thumb and shaving with long, careful strokes. Shoes gives him the nod to pitch in.

“Sergeant,” asks the Dago, idly curious, “have you ever seen a moving picture?”

It isn’t what Shoe had in mind. DiNucci is in for thirty, having settled his unfaithful wife, as it happens, with a razor, and when asked why by the judge was reported to answer “Cause I didn’t own a gun.”

“Indeed I have,” answers the keeper.

“And what is it, exactly?”

“Just what the words say. A picture that moves. Say you had one of their cameras pointed at us right here. Once the fillum was developed, an audience in New York or Buffalo would be able to see every flick of your blade, every snip of the scissors.”

DiNucci frowns. “Why would they want to see that?”

“It’s the novelty, isn’t it? Seeing it projected on a wall rather than in actual life.”

“There’s plenty things I’d rather see than a shave and a haircut.”

“As would we all. But could you get the camera apparatus close enough to photograph them?”

The Dago ponders this, wiping foam from his blade onto his apron.

“This Goulash character,” says Shoe, casually stepping in to the lull, “did you run him through the usual reception?”

Kelso shifts in the chair. “Nothing usual about it. The Buffalo dicks drag the boy up the stairs like a rag doll and unlock the bracelets and throw him down onto the floor in the Warden’s office, where he begins to froth at the mouth and cry out like a banshee. ‘You’re going to kill me!’ says he. ‘I know you’re going to kill me!’ ”

“And where would he get that idea?”

Kelso opens one eye to search Shoe’s face for irony.

“If you had shot the President,” he says, “you might expect a bit of rough treatment.”

DiNucci gasps. “The President of the United States?”

“No—the President of the Skaneatles Culinary and Debating Society. You think if he’d shot any simple fecking rubberneck at the fair he’d rate a hemp brigade the like of what we saw here last night?”

“So he’s foaming at the mouth,” Shoe prompts, “this Goulash—”

“Doctor Gerin is there and he slaps the lad and yells, straight into his face, ‘Drop the theatricals,’ says he, ‘we know yer faking it!’ ” Kelso shakes his head. “Can you imagine that, making a show that he’s insane when he’s only a fecking little anarchist.”

Shoe rubs elbows with murderers on a daily basis, men who have killed for money or passion or survival, and most of them seem pretty well organized upstairs. To kill somebody for a hinky-dink idea of how the world ought to work, and to do it in broad daylight in front of ten thousand witnesses—this, he thinks, would qualify you as a serious candidate for the bughouse.

“That what he copped to?” he asks. “Being an anarchist?”

“Words to that effect,” the screw answers nasally as DiNucci pinches and lifts his honker to get at his upper lip. “Anarchist, anti-Christ, something along those lines. He knew what he was about and said as much between all his blubbering. So we just pulled his clothes off and yanked a cooler suit onto him and chucked the murdering little bastard into isolation.”

“They had me down there in the nut-hatch for a couple years,” says DiNucci, a troubled look on his face. “Right after the trial.”

“Matteawan.”

“I had to beg them to send me here. That place’ll drive you crazy.”

Crazy. Unless, thinks Shoe, Goulash was only following orders, was the worst kind of sap, buying into some load of malarkey he heard in a speech. Like these ginks who can’t wait to climb into Uncle’s uniform, think they’re fighting for Old Glory and instead get sent to some monkey patch in the Pacific to snatch the goods for the ones who got the whole game rigged, the ones who’d sic the bulls on a sorefoot private soldier if he dared to call at their back door for a drop of water.

“So they’ll burn this character for sure,” says Shoe.

Kelso shakes his head. “The President has only been wounded, and he is a solid, fleshy man. Girth is Nature’s strategy for protecting the vital organs. No, Mac will come through like a champion. And our little friend in the punishment corridor,” he nods toward the south wing, “will be with us indefinitely.”

Shoe tries to wrap his mind around it. “Shooting the President.”

“Some are born to greatness,” declaims the Sergeant as DiNucci gently pats astringent on his face, “and some seek notoriety through its de
struc
tion. Now go get me the paper, and be quick about it.”

Shoe leaves the noisy woodshop and full-steps down the center path, crows solemn above him, filling the birches, as he heads for the administration building. There are bulls strolling the tops of the walls, bulls on the parapets, peeping him all the way across the yard. He sees Lester Gorcey on all fours with the rest of the grounds detail, frowning at the grass as if daring it to grow. Shoe slows, then stops a few yards away and kneels to pretend to deal with his laces. At least one of the bulls up top, probably that wildass Thompson, must have him in the sights by now.

“New guest on the Row,” he says softly, keeping his eyes fixed on his gunboats. “Shot the President in Buffalo.”

Gorcey reaches out to clip a single blade that has dared to rise above its neighbors. Stick your head up in Auburn and they’ll cut it off. “Cleveland is dead?”

Not so easy at all, thinks Shoe, to keep track of the game in here.

“McKinley,” he hisses. “Hanging by a thread.”

He stands and continues down the path. Gorcey will share it with the grounds detail and they’ll clue in the whole south wing. Shoe slows as he passes the punishment cells and the shock shop, and though there is nothing to see but brick, can’t help running his eyes over it.

He’d been young when they transferred him up from Blackwell’s on his first jolt, young and stupid. Pilsbury wasn’t running the Island then and it had been a free-for-all, hard to tell the cons from the poverty cases from the derelicts they passed off as prison guards. You could buy a tumble with a whore for a half-dozen cigarettes. Pick up a nail too, since it was the diseased ones they sent to die there. He’d been out and about there, running with a gang, and then all of a sudden transferred to Auburn and forced to walk in lockstep like a fucking caterpillar’s ass and not a word past your gizzard from lights on to lights out and he kicked, told a keeper where he could put his stick but instead the screw put it hard over his head, more than once, and he woke up in the dark in a metal box on the Row.

First there was the sound, the steady deep thrumming of the prison dynamo through the wall, and then the sting of the rivets sticking up from the metal floor into his flesh. He was wearing a filthy uniform a size too large and shoes made of felt. He crawled to the nearest wall, rivets digging into his knees, and used it to pull himself shakily to his feet. His head was throbbing and there was dried blood on his face. The walls were all sheet metal, a little farther apart than in the cells upstairs. He felt his way around to a narrow, barred slit, head-high in a solid iron door, dizzy, grabbing the bars to steady himself, his mouth like dusty carpet as he began to shout.

“What happened? Where the fuck am I?”

“Where the fuck you think you are?” called a voice from over to the left. “And you don’t have to shout.”

It was true, everything they said echoing in whatever space lay beyond the iron door.

“What time is it?”

The laughter came from both sides, echoing. “You gotta be kiddin me.”

“How many of you down here?”

“Eight cells, half of em full now that you come. The fella in Number Three don’t talk.”

“Then how you know he’s there?”

“How you know I’m here?”

“I can hear you.”

“I might just be your imagination. You could be buried in a coffin somewhere, havin a dream.”

“Stiffs don’t dream.”

“How do you know?”

Whoever it was in the cell to the left, he didn’t like him.

“Relax, kid,” said a different voice from the right. “Whatever they got in mind for you, aint nothin you can do about it.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Number Eight.”

“He don’t have a name?”

“My name is Kemmler,” said the voice from the right.

Shoe knew that Kemmler was the gink they were going to hook up to their new electrical contraption at the end of the week.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It don’t matter now.”

“Number Eight,” says the first voice, “is three steps from the door to the chamber. So’s the Long Walk won’t be so long.”

Shoe gripped the bars harder, little sense of what was up or down in the total blackness. “I need to see a doctor.”

“Yeah, and I need a steak and some spuds and a jug of Scotch.”

“How bout water?”

More laughter then, echoing.

“When do they come?”

“They come when they want to and don’t when they don’t. You’ll get used to it.”

“For how long?”

“Depends on what you done.”

“Mouthed off to a keeper.”

“Which one?”

“Freidlander.”

There was no response but the grinding of the dynamo.

“Hey! You still there? Jesus, don’t leave me in the dark—”

“Don’t worry, son,” said Kemmler then. “We aint goin nowheres.”

He went back down on the floor then, scuffing along on his keister till he found the papier-mâché bucket, no lid, to throw up in. His head hurt like hell, and was still hurting like hell when there was a scrape and a clang and then light, enough light for him to see the four walls, nothing but sheet metal and rivets and the stinking bucket on the floor and some torn strips of newspaper left to wipe himself with and the little barred slit in the iron door that he rose and stumbled over to. On the other side of the door was a vaulted stone dungeon, maybe fifty feet long, and a screw he’d never seen before walking toward his cell, footsteps echoing in the cavern, holding a bullseye lantern hung from the ceiling by a very long chain.

“You,” said the screw when he shined the bullseye in through the window slit, “step back from there and get your cup.”