Bartender: When I got back from Europe in ’19, shrapnel in my hip, I couldn’t find a job for two solid years. I got so angry, I had to fight to keep from putting my hands around someone’s throat. I kept asking, What was the point? I might’ve thrown in with a guy like you. I almost did, to be honest. But I never could’ve thrown in with punks like we’ve got running around today.
Reporter: Mr. Sutton?
Sutton: Yeah?
Reporter: I’m just looking at this file here, and it says you and Eddie, while robbing a bank, fired off machine guns? And tear gas? Then led cops on a high-speed chase through the heart of midtown? That doesn’t sound so—nonviolent.
Bartender: What’s with this kid?
Sutton: I wish I knew.
Reporter: But I just—it’s in the files.
Sutton: Have you never known newspapers to get anything wrong?
Bartender: What’s the next stop on the nickel tour, Willie?
Sutton: Broadway and One Hundred Seventy-Eighth.
Photographer: Uptown again. Right by the stadium. I can’t help mentioning that we just came from there.
Sutton: Patience and Fortitude here are miffed that I’m taking them through my story in chronological order.
Bartender: How else would you tell a story? What happened there, Willie?
Sutton: That’s where they shot poor Eddie.
The soda jerk from the corner drugstore comes to Willie’s door, says Willie has a phone call. Willie bundles up, walks down to the drugstore, slips into the phone booth.
Sutty, it’s Eddie.
How’s tricks?
I need to go to New York.
How come?
I need new license plates.
Seems awfully far to travel for new plates.
What choice do I have? I can’t show residence here in Philly.
Mm. Okay. Call me when you get back?
Will do.
Be careful.
So long.
December 1933. One year since Willie escaped Sing Sing. He holes up in his apartment, drinking brandy, playing Christmas records on an old Victor. Feeling nostalgic. Thinking of Happy, Wingy, Daddo. And Mr. Untermyer. Willie wonders if Cicero has read about the exploits of his former gardener.
Now he thinks of Bess. He pours another brandy. What he wouldn’t give to spend Christmas with her. Ah Bess. My heart’s darling. The door blows off its hinges. Ten cops burst into the apartment. Willie jumps out of his chair just in time to catch a right cross from a detective with a flattop haircut, then a haymaker from another detective with a face like raw meat.
Willie, cuffed, comes to in the backseat of a cop car. Detective Flattop is driving, Detective Meatface is riding shotgun, doing all the talking.
Might never have found you but for your friend, Plank.
Plank? Who’s Plank?
That’s a hot one. He’s only the dumbest guy in East New York. He aint got no job but he drives a brand-new Cadillac and wears hunnert-dollar suits, that’s who Plank is. His neighbors noticed sump fishy, called us. We put a tap on his phone. Bingo bango, here we are.
Doesn’t sound like the kind of moron I’d have anything to do with.
Your pal Eddie Buster Wilson aint winnin no brain contests neither. He got you and Plank on the blower this mornin, shot the breeze like it never occurred to him the line might be tapped. You he told he was goin to New York. Plank he told to meet him at Motor Vehicles. So—two and two together. Four. A little Welcome Wagon we ranged frim. He shoulda give up, but he chosed to lead us on a merry chase. Too bad frim.
What happened?
Shut up.
What’d you do to Eddie?
Shut up. You’ll find out soon enough.
Sutton stands on the corner, the wind at his back. He looks at the George Washington Bridge a block away. It’s swaying in the wind. Or maybe Sutton is swaying. A woman wrapped in two threadbare coats walks past him, guiding a little girl on a bike with training wheels. One training wheel is missing.
Bleak fuckin corner, Sutton says, huddling deep into Reporter’s trench coat.
Reporter pulls out his notebook, waits for the little girl to pass. So Eddie died here, Mr. Sutton?
Better if he had. No, he was shot here, but he lived. One of the bullets cut his optic nerve. He spent the next twenty years groping around a cell at Dannemora. A judge set him free in ’53. Eddie walked out of court with a cane, everything he owned wrapped in a sheet. They said he’d learned to read Braille. I saw that in the paper, I wept.
Reporter is writing, shivering. He shakes his pen. Ink’s frozen, he mutters.
Sutton reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out Bartender’s pen, hands it to Reporter.
Why did they shoot Eddie, Mr. Sutton?
The cops said he went for his gun.
Willie, Photographer says, your hands are shaking.
Sutton looks at his hands. He nods. He fumbles for his cigarettes, puts one in his mouth, pats his pockets. Either of you got a light?
Photographer hands him his Zippo.
Was anyone else in the car with Eddie, Mr. Sutton?
Sutton lights the Zippo, touches the flame to his Chesterfield. Eddie’s girlfriend, he says. Nina. She threw herself across Eddie’s body. That’s love for you. She got a finger shot clean off. She wrote to me in the joint for years. Her letters were tough to read.
Emotional?
Illegible. She had four fingers.
What happened to Plank?
He told the cops everything. Which still might not have been a disaster. But he told them where I lived. He just never forgave me for not letting him play dress-up.
What?
I warned myself a hundred times not to let that numbwit know where I lived. I knew he wasn’t a right guy. I knew. But Eddie kept vouching for him. Later I found out. At Dannemora some guys were trying to make Eddie their girlfriend. He was a great fighter, but he was slowing down, and he couldn’t take on five guys at once. Plank stepped in, saved Eddie’s ass. After that, in Eddie’s book, Plank had a free pass. Eddie—loyal to a fault. I should have known. Ah what am I saying? I did know. I did. But I didn’t act on it. Your gut kid. You remember Willie told you: In a tight corner your gut is the only real partner you’ve got.
SEVENTEEN
Two guards drag him down a long dim corridor. They toss him into a box, four by six, with a stone floor, stone walls, an extra-low stone ceiling. And a wall-mounted shelf of rusted iron. The bed, he guesses.
They shut the door.
Darkness.
Total, seamless.
Their footsteps grow faint. The door at the end of the corridor creaks, slams.
He looks around. He can see nothing. But he can hear everything. His blood slugging through his veins, his lungs expanding and contracting, his heart. He never realized until now that ribs are nothing but bars made of bone, and the heart is just a scared prisoner pounding to get out.
Easy, boy.
He shuts his eyes, curls into a tight ball.
His leg jerks. Did he just fall asleep? He opens his eyes. Is he asleep now? The darkness is darker. Almost liquid.
He looks up, down. Where is he? With great effort he remembers. Eastern State Penitentiary. Downtown Philly. He’s been here nine months, he thinks. Maybe a year. A few days ago the guards caught him making a papier-mâché bust of his head—with real hair saved from his haircuts. He’d planned to put the head on his bunk, to make the guards think he was sleeping, then hacksaw his way out.
They found his hacksaws too.
The warden, Hardboiled Smith, seemed personally insulted that Willie would try to leave Eastern State before his fifty years was up. Capone just did a bit at Eastern State, and even Scarface didn’t have the nerve to try an early departure. So Hardboiled ordered Willie thrown into the punishment block, also known as Iso. Also known as a Dark Cell. Willie dimly remembers Hardboiled saying: You can rot there for all I give a shit.
How long ago was that? Two da
ys? Two months?
He sits up, blinks. He wonders if this is the kind of darkness Daddo saw. The kind Eddie now sees. He wonders if the darkness of death can be any more complete. He prays that he’ll know soon. His arm jerks. Another muscle spasm. Did he just fall asleep again? How long was he out? Ten minutes? Ten hours? The not-knowing gnaws at the edges of his mind.
There are only two breaks in the darkness each day. A Judas hole claps open, a hand with a tin plate of food comes through. Willie doesn’t know what the food is, and tasting it doesn’t solve the mystery. Cornmeal? Oatmeal? Farina? It doesn’t matter. He scoops some into his mouth with his fingers, pushes the plate aside.
He’s allowed no visitors, no letters, no radio. No books. He’d kill for a book, though it would be useless in this darkness. To simply hold a book, to imagine what it might say, would be comfort. He vows, if he ever gets out of this Dark Cell, he’s going to memorize books, poems, so they’ll always be in his head, just in case.
He imagines his cell crowded with all the people he’s ever known, sitting, standing along the wall. They exhort him, joke with him. The nerve of this warden, they say, thinking he can break the likes of Willie Sutton. Yes, Willie tells them—it’s funny isn’t it? They laugh. He laughs. He screams with laughter. All the jokes in the world have been condensed into one joke that only Willie gets. Just as suddenly the joke isn’t funny. It’s tragic. He weeps.
In his third week of Iso he wakes to a voice. Hello, Willie.
At last they’re letting him have a visitor. Ah but not just any visitor. He crawls to her, wraps his arms around her legs, rests his head on her lap. How did our lives get so crossways, Bess? I don’t know, Willie. I thought we’d be together always, Bess. Me too, Willie.
It should be the simplest thing, Willie tells her, you love someone, they love you back. You said love was simple. But it’s not. Not for us. We must be cursed. I must be cursed.
Oh Willie.
Nothing has panned out for me. As a kid I thought I’d grow up to be happy. And good—I thought I’d be a good person, Bess. But I’m as bad as they come. The judge said.
No no no. You’re a good man who’s done bad things.
What’s the difference?
There’s a difference.
Are you still married, Bess?
She doesn’t answer.
Did you have the baby?
No answer.
Bess, are you happy? I need to know. If you’re happy, that would be enough.
He clutches her legs. He hears the guard laughing through the Judas hole.
They’re telling me our time is up, she says.
Don’t go, Bess.
She stands, passes through the wall. I’ll be back, Willie.
He crawls to the door, curls against the Judas hole, falls asleep.
They pile into the Polara. Photographer cranks the heat, grabs the radio. City Desk, come in, City Desk.
Garble static, where are you guys?
Uptown.
Uptown again? Can you guys garble swing by Rockefeller static Center? Get a garble shot of Sutton static standing in front of the garble Christmas tree? Special request from the powers that be. Static.
Ten four. Willie—you mind if we pause the nickel tour?
Sutton presses his face against the window. Nah. I’d love to see the tree.
So, Reporter says, Mr. Sutton. After you got arrested in Philadelphia, they put you in Eastern State?
Yeah. World’s first penitentiary. Built in the early 1800s by some seriously fucked-up Quakers. Terrible place. Naturally I tried to escape right away. They caught me, threw me in a Dark Cell. Which they also called Iso. I almost shattered. Then they tossed me into Semi Iso. Which meant I had a skylight. There was a long pole to push the skylight open, and pull it shut, and the pole never worked, so the skylight would always get stuck in the open position. Rats would scurry along the roof of the cellblock and fall through the skylight. But that was a small price to pay for having the sun and the moon. Then, finally, a guard tossed a Bible into my cell. That saved me.
So you believe in God, Mr. Sutton?
I was just set free on Christmas Eve kid. What do you think?
Have you always?
More or less. It’s people I have trouble believing in.
Would you call yourself—religious?
Nah. But in prison I found a lot of comfort in the fact that God makes mistakes. And that He regrets them.
It says that in the Bible?
Exodus: And the Lord repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people. You can’t repent of something unless it’s a mistake, right? Unless you’d do it differently if you had it to do over again? Jeremiah: The Lord will repent Him of the evil which he had pronounced against them. God feels so guilty at one point He says: I am weary of repenting. Boy does Willie know that feeling.
After eighteen months in Semi Iso, Willie is released into general population. It’s not liberating. It’s terrifying. He jumps at all the different voices, shies from the sudden whirl of faces. He knows he should work at resocializing himself, reacclimate himself to humanity, but during yardouts he prefers to sit alone, having a staring contest with the sky.
Every prisoner in general population must have a job. Hardboiled makes Willie a messenger. Six days a week Willie jogs back and forth across the prison grounds, carrying messages, documents, packages, from guards to administrators and back again. He also runs slop buckets up and down the towers. There are no toilets in the towers and guards can’t leave their posts. Thus, when Nature calls—buckets. Several times a day Willie stands at attention, waiting, while a guard groans and strains over a bucket. Then Willie carries the sloshing bucket down the steep tower stairs and out to the nearest toilet. Not the best way, he thinks, to reacclimate to humanity.
After a year of good behavior Willie is rewarded with a better job. Hardboiled makes him secretary to the prison psychiatrist. Willie types up the chapters of a textbook Shrink is writing, and notes from Shrink’s therapy sessions. Reading the harrowing confessions of his fellow prisoners, their gruesome autobiographies, Willie begins to think about his own. While typing Shrink’s transcripts he begins to type up notes for the narrative of Willie Sutton—a memoir, a novel, he isn’t sure.
Sometimes, at the end of a workday, Willie will sit and chat with Shrink, mainly because he doesn’t want to leave the book-filled office, the best-smelling place in the prison. It’s redolent of glue and paper and pencil shavings. Willie has no interest in being psychoanalyzed, and Shrink seems relieved to be off duty, so the chats are always strictly informal.
Shrink is roughly Willie’s age, mid-thirties, but looks much older. Anyone would think that Shrink is the one who’s done the hard time. His hair is sparse, his cheeks hollowed out, his eyes plump with fatigue. He always wears the same green tweed blazer, which doesn’t flatter him. It makes his chest and shoulders look twice as concave. One day Shrink brushes some ashes off the green blazer and interrupts Willie in the middle of a story about Marcus. Don’t you think it’s remarkable, Willie, that you’ve never made a mistake?
What now?
Whenever you’re caught, it’s always someone else’s fault. You always describe yourself as a sort of lone knight, on a solitary crusade, forced to work with others—and it’s always they who trip you up.
Well, I’m just telling you what happened.
On the other hand, don’t you think it odd that you speak so well of your quote unquote clan? When they haven’t done right by you at all?
I don’t know if I’d say that either.
But you have said it, Willie. I’m only saying it back to you. Your brothers were monsters. Your sister was invisible. Your parents were cold.
Well. Now. Um.
Tell me more about your father. What did he do?
I told you. He was a blacksmith.
But what did he do?
Shod horses.
And?
Made tools.
; Such as?
Hammers, axes, nails.
Don’t blacksmiths make locks?
Sure, all kinds of locks.
Shrink lights a cigarette. He uses a black holder like President Roosevelt and smokes a foreign brand that smells like an electrical short.
So your father, who never spoke to you, made locks. And you are now locked up—in part for picking locks. You think that’s all coincidental.
Isn’t it?
Shrink smokes, shrugs. Tell me more about Bess.
Willie would rather not. But he picks a story at random, tells Shrink about their first night at Coney Island, then summarizes the robbery of her father.
It’s commendable, Shrink says. In a way.
What is?
You remain devoted to this girl, even though she used you, destroyed your future, without so much as a by-your-leave.
I didn’t say that.
But it goes without saying, Willie. She led you into a life of crime, then ran off, got married, and left you holding the bag.
Willie feels his cheeks growing hot. Her father forced her, he says.
She doesn’t sound like the sort of girl whose father can force her to do anything. In fact, wasn’t it her rebellion against her father that was the start of all your troubles? Forced her? Willie, come now, you know better than that.
Willie asks if he can bum a cigarette. Maybe these chats with Shrink aren’t so informal after all.
Later Willie researches Shrink, as he once did Mr. Untermyer. This time he doesn’t have the resources of a great library at his disposal, so he ransacks the doctor’s office files. Once again he’s shocked by what he learns. Besides being the world’s leading expert on the criminal mind, Shrink is an authority on hypnosis. So there it is. Shrink is somehow putting Willie under. Why else would Willie be spilling his guts? How else would Shrink know so much? Many of the stories Willie tells Shrink are lies, but Shrink still manages to find the seeds and kernels of truth within. How else but through hypnosis?
In early 1936 Shrink sits in his leather chair, smoking, reading a book by Bertrand Russell, while Willie types up his most recent Jungian session with a murderer. Willie has played chess many times with this murderer—he never knew. He makes a mental note: from now on let the man win. As he stacks the typed pages, and slides them into a folder, Willie thinks about the way Shrink spoke to the murderer. Gently, without judgment. Willie slots the folder into the filing cabinet, eases into the chair across from Shrink.
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