The Pledge (43 page)

“He is nothing,” Duprey said slowly. “He lost himself somewhere, or perhaps he only lost his soul and forgot to return and look for it.”

An odd character, Professor Duprey, Bruce thought as he saw Duprey and Legerman, still hotly engaged, disappear into the woods with the minister's group. Bruce enjoyed listening to them, but right now he wanted to be alone. Since the four men had joined him in prison, life had become more variegated, more interesting. Mostly, he would sit and listen, hardly ever projecting his own point of view. Scharnoff was downbeat all the way; in contrast, Oscar Hill was totally dedicated to the excitement of being in prison. He invested it with a fraternity of notable men and women, beginning with Socrates. Since he could not find the
Trial and Death of Socrates
in the prison library, he wrote to his wife to have whoever was keeping it in print send it to him. Like Bruce, he turned to
Pilgrim's Progress.

Strange, interesting people, Bruce reflected as he made his way through the woods. They changed the quality of prison, but he was not sure that he welcomed this. He had spent most of his life with people who read books and newspapers and had ideas, even if the ideas were stale and often stupid. Here he had been discovering the curious pleasure of silence. When he worked, his speech was mostly limited to instruction; the speech of the men he worked with was limited to women and sports.

Silence was filled with other things, faint, distant sounds that entered his mind without disturbing it. This shadowed forest, with its mighty tree trunks, like columns in a cathedral, reaching up to a roof of leaves, was filled with awesome silence. Here and there, sunlight came through in narrow strokes, the golden shafts dancing with the tiny creatures of the forest air. It moved Bruce and in some small way exalted him, as if he had been let in on a great secret that few knew. It must have been almost like this when the first white men came to these ancient mountains.

He walked back to the prison alone. It was past midsummer, the dog days of August, the sun hot, the air still and heavy. He sat on the lawn, cross-legged under a tree. He must have dozed. He opened his eyes and saw Professor Duprey.

“Do you meditate?” Duprey asked him.

“You mean sitting cross-legged? No, I never learned. I'd like to.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Please.”

“I can't sit cross-legged,” Duprey said. “Too much good wine, too much good food, and now they put me in the library. I'm reading Proust. Never read him before, but if you tell anyone that, I shall deny it under oath. I am bored to tears. War is boring when no one is killing; prison is even more boring. That's the cruel punishment of being in prison, boredom, boredom, boredom. What was I doing, a Quaker in a war? I was with the Friends' Service, one of our ambulances. Boring, too. You know, the Buddhists have a myth about God, the spirit, the force, the mind of the universe, whatever. We'll call it God. God could do all things, make all things — space, the universe, the planets — create all that is or ever will be, and God was here forever because it was God who created time. But this great mind that created all that ever was faced a thing that He could not defeat.”

“Boredom?” Bruce ventured.

“Ah, you know the story.”

“No. But I'm in prison. Tell me how God dealt with boredom.”

“Yes, that's the beautiful part of the story — a kind of special Buddhist beauty. Until now, God had created nothing that felt or saw or conjectured or reacted. Now, in the face of boredom, he shattered Himself into a billion, billion, billion fragments, and each fragment became a sentient creature, and in each sentient creature there was a tiny, infinitesimal part of the Godhead, and that tiny part carried only one instruction — to unite itself with all other sentient creatures so that one day God might be whole again.”

“It's very pretty,” Bruce agreed. “Did the Buddha Himself create the story?”

“Who knows who created it?”

“He might have done better to remain God and forget about the sentient beings.”

“You're bitter?”

“No. Strange thing is, I'm not. But there are times when I'm filled with unbearable sorrow and not for myself. I envy Legerman. I have the feeling that he's unconquerable.”

“He's a strong man. But he looks only in front. Your gift, Bruce, is that you can look in any direction you choose.”

“If it's a gift. You see, Lewis, I learned that the most awful things can go on in the world, and there is not one damned thing you can do about it. I don't know enough about the Communist Party to measure your criticism, but I have a sense that you are right. My trouble is that I fell in love with a communist of great inner and outer beauty. I said to myself, Trust this wonderful woman. I do trust her. I'd trust her with my life. But I also said to myself, If she belongs to that organization, then it's there. But she was duped. When we needed it, it wasn't there.”

“No one was there, Bruce.”

Sunday became Monday, and a letter from Molly said that she had put off her visit until mid-September. Her only explanation was that she could not explain. Bruce was falling prey to a prison disease, psychological, that might have been called “close to release.” Apparently, it overtook every convict Bruce spoke to, a terror that the convict would die before the day of release, or be too sick to move, or he would be told that he was denied his time off for good behavior — or any one of a dozen other possible but highly unlikely contingencies. It became more and more difficult to sleep, even after a grueling day in the garage. His temper shortened, and he found himself snapping at the convicts who worked in the shop with him. Legerman tried to help him. “You're as healthy as a horse. You look younger and better and certainly leaner than you did in India. You're not going to die, and any day now, Molly will be here.”

And Molly came, and the world brightened before it collapsed. She was waiting for him as he entered the visiting room. It was midday on a cold, damp September Saturday. Usually, visiting day was on Sunday or legal holidays. A Saturday was permitted under certain conditions, and Molly had sought this special permission with the excuse that her boss would not give her Sunday — but, as she told Bruce, with the hope that the visiting room would be entirely theirs.

Saturday was also a workday, and the message came to Bruce in the garage that he had a visitor in the Administration Building. He took the time to wash his hands as best he could. His blue shirt was stained and dirty, but that was from the nature of his work and he would not stop to change it. Between now and his release, less than a month away, there was no possibility of a visit from anyone but Molly, and he had written to her, half suggesting that she put the visit off, since the end of his term was in sight. She must have telephoned the warden for permission to come on Saturday.

She was sitting on one of the long benches in the visiting room, and she rose as he entered the room. Demming saw no purpose in taking a guard from his other duties and stationing him in the visiting room. If a prisoner wanted to escape, he would escape. There were no prison walls or locked doors here, so why give the prisoners a feeling that they must be watched? Thus, Molly was alone in the room, a tall stately woman in a long raincoat. She was hatless, her red hair coiled into a bun at the back of her neck, her smile full of sadness mixed with delight as he took her in his arms.

“You are beautiful,” Bruce whispered. “Beautiful and wonderful. Each time I see you, I realize that I can't properly remember how wonderful you are.”

“I like you too.”

“Sit here.”

They dropped onto the bench.

“I didn't mean I liked you,” she said. “What sort of an awful word is
liked
? Only for teasing. Do you know how you look?”

“Filthy?”

“Lean and hard and brown. Is this room bugged?”

“No.”

“How can you say that?” she whispered.

“I'm close to one of the guards and he talks to me. He told me that last month a couple of FBI men were down here, and they asked Demming how he felt about bugging the visiting room. He was incensed. He said that as long as he's the head of this institution, he will not have this room bugged.”

“Thank God for that. I'm going to whisper, and don't interrupt me until I'm finished. A Russian, name of Josef Dimitrov, defected to the British. Apparently, he's been a double agent for years, working with M-One. When it gets too hot for those creatures, they defect and become heroes in the West. Now, apparently, the creatures at M-One have gotten him to testify that you're a Soviet agent —”

“What!” He couldn't help the explosive response.

“Easy, darling. Yes, he will testify that you are a Soviet agent and that the Russians ordered you to take an assignment in India so that you could drive a wedge between Britain and America. The British are very uptight about this famine thing, and putting you down as a Soviet agent will undercut your book completely. The Labour government and the spy boys hate each other, and it appears that a British publisher wants desperately to publish your book. Johnson called me about it. He said the English publisher was offering an advance of twenty thousand dollars. I told him to take it.”

“Yes. Of course. That's wonderful. That will really set us up. But the other stuff is sheer, unmitigated horseshit.”

“I know that. And we don't need that money to set us up. The book is a national best seller, and there are already sixty thousand copies in print, and a paperback house is offering twenty-five thousand for the paperback rights, and Johnson has rejected their offer and intends to put it up for auction. I am told that's a new wrinkle in the book business. But the sheer, unmitigated horseshit can't be taken lightly. Sylvia has been notified that they will take you into custody here at this prison the day your sentence ends, and with the witness of this stinking Russian, they are going to indict you for espionage.”

His heart sinking, an empty sickness inside him, Bruce whispered, “I don't believe that. It's too crazy. They don't make such things out of the whole cloth. It's movie stuff. It's not real.”

“No, my darling, it's real. Do you imagine anyone could invent this kind of lunacy? I asked Sylvia whether they could convict with this kind of thing, and she said in a Washington court with a Washington jury, they could convict the Pope of bigamy — and a conviction with the charge of espionage, with this crazy war in Korea, could mean life imprisonment or even the death sentence.”

Bruce shook his head hopelessly. “I can't face that.” He was dying inside, slowly, agonizingly. He conquered an impulse to leap to his feet, scream, break his way out of there.

“On the other hand,” Molly said deliberately, “you might very well face the charge and beat it. Sylvia thinks we could get a change of venue, and with that, away from Washington, with an honest judge, a jury might find you not guilty.”

“And that's all we have to hope for, a jury that isn't terrified?”

“No. We have other things to hope for, and we are not going to wait for some rotten, cowardly jury to throw away your life. Now let me tell you what I worked out. Your release date is October twelfth, which is a legal holiday, which means it is a visiting day. October twelfth actually begins at one minute past midnight on the night of October eleventh; from that moment on you have served your scheduled legal time, and you are a free man with the right to walk out of here. No one can contest that. No one can charge you with attempting to escape. In the normal course of things, prisoners leave here some time between nine and twelve in the morning. I have made all my careful inquiries. Most prisoners are picked up by car. Others are driven to the bus station at Marlinton. Sylvia and I have been over this time and time again. On the eleventh of October, you will become increasingly nervous — only to be expected and of course people notice. You let it be known, subtly, that I will pick you up about noon the next day. By then, the warden will probably know that there is a hold on you, but he may not tell you until the morning of the twelfth. In any case, you are too nervous to sleep. I understand you get your city clothes on the eleventh, and it's reasonable that you put them on. Bedtime, you're too nervous to sleep. You follow me until now?”

“I think so.”

“Do they have a bed check? I think you mentioned that they do sometimes?”

“Sometimes. It's uneven. Usually at ten o'clock. We rise early and we work hard. Most of us are asleep at ten.”

“No dogs, are there?”

“No dogs.”

“And what about a night watch?” Molly asked.

“I get your drift. Yes, two four-hour shifts. Ten-thirty to two-thirty. Two-thirty to six-thirty. But on cold nights, they hole up mostly. No one ever tries to escape. The last escape was four years ago. No one here serves more than two years, and the punishment for escape is five years.”

“You won't be escaping,” Molly said. “You're free. Listen, you don't sleep because you're too nervous to sleep. You sit on the steps in front of the barracks. You know the guards, and if one of them sees you sitting there, he'll understand, won't he?”

“I suppose so. But where does all this get us?”

“At midnight, you're free. You walk up to the Administration Building and around it. The moon will begin to rise toward one o'clock, so there's no need to hurry. If a guard sees you —”

“He won't.”

“OK. Now the entrance to the driveway of the Administration Building is off Route Thirty-nine. Do you remember how that is?”

“Pretty well. I've seen it. I went out a couple of times to pick up supplies at Marlinton.”

“Good,” she said. “Very good there. You will turn left on Thirty-nine and walk down the road about half a mile. If a car approaches, you'll see the lights and you hide in the bushes or some such thing. I'll be in my car, parked, just off the road. I spotted the exact place. Now understand, my love, that even if this goes wrong, you've broken no law and you haven't attempted an escape. They can only bring you back.”