The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  That was July of 1724. Two months later, Sheppard was captured for the third time and once more found himself in Newgate. This time, the authorities were determined not to let him escape. He was allowed no visitors. After a whole kit of escape tools was found hidden in his cell, he was moved to a special room known as The Castle. This room was windowless, in the middle of the prison, and with a securely locked double door. There was no furniture, nothing but a single blanket. Sheppard’s wrists were manacled, and his ankles chained, with the ankle chain slipped through an iron bolt embedded in the floor.

  Sheppard, at this time, was twenty-three years of age. He was short, weak, sickly, suffering from both a venereal disease and too steady a diet of alcohol. His physical condition, plus the manacles and the placement of his cell, seemed to make escape absolutely impossible.

  Sheppard waited until October 14th, when the opening of Sessions Court was guaranteed to keep the prison staff too busy to be thinking about a prisoner as securely confined as himself. On that morning, he made his move.

  First, he grasped in his teeth the chain linking the wrist manacles, squeezed and folded his hands to make them as small as possible, and finally succeeded in slipping them through the cuffs, removing some skin in the process. He then grabbed the ankle chain and with a single twisting jerk, managed to break the link holding him to the bolt in the floor.

  He now had a tool, the one broken link. Wrapping the ankle chains around his legs, to get them out of the way, he used the broken link to attack one wall, where a former fireplace had obviously been sealed up. He broke through to the fireplace, only to discover an iron bar, a yard long and an inch square, bisecting the flue a few feet up, making a space too small for him to slip by.

  Undaunted, he made a second hole in the wall, at the point where he estimated the bar to be, found it and freed it, and now had two tools as well as an escape hatch. He crawled up the flue to the floor above, broke through another wall, and emerged into an empty cell. Finding a rusty nail on the floor—for tool number three—he picked the door lock with it, and found himself in a corridor. At the end of the corridor he came to a door bolted and hinged on the other side. He made a small hole in the wall beside the door, reached through and released the lock.

  The third door, leading to the prisoners’ pen in the chapel, he popped open with the iron bar. The fourth door got the same treatment, and now he came to a flight of stairs leading upward. He knew his only chance for escape lay in reaching the roof.

  This sixth door was fastened with a foot-wide iron-plated bar, attached to door and frame by thick iron hoops, plus a large iron bolt lock, plus a padlock, and the whole affair was crisscrossed with iron bars bolted to the oak on either side of the door.

  Sheppard had now been four hours in the escape. He was exhausted, his hands were bleeding, the weight of the leg shackles was draining his energy, and the door in front of him was obviously impassable. Nevertheless, Sheppard went to work on it, succeeding at first only in bending the iron bar he was using for a tool.

  It took him two hours, but he finally managed to rip the crossed bars down and snap the bolt lock, making it possible to remove the main bar, and he stepped out onto the prison roof.

  So far, the escape had taken six hours. It was now almost sundown. Sheppard crossed the roof and saw the roof of a private house next door, twenty feet below him. He was afraid to risk the jump, not wanting to get this far only to lie down there with a broken ankle and wait for the prison officials to come drag him back. So, regretfully, he turned around, recrossed the roof, went down the stairs and through the chapel, back down the corridor and into the cell above The Castle, down the fireplace flue and back into his cell, which was ankle deep in stone and plaster from the crumbled wall. He picked up his blanket, retraced his steps again, and went back to the roof. He had forgotten tool number four, and so he had simply gone back for it!

  Atop the prison again, Sheppard ripped the blanket into strips, made a rope ladder, and lowered himself to the roof of the house next door. He waited there until he was sure the occupants had gone to sleep for the night, then he crept down through the house and out to freedom.

  In the ordinary manner of escapees, however, Sheppard could never learn to devote as much energy to staying out as to getting out. He spent the first four days hidden in a cowshed, until finally someone came along who would bring him a hacksaw and help him shed the ankle chains. He then went straight home, where he and his mother celebrated his escape by getting drunk together on brandy. They were still drunk when the authorities showed up, and this time Sheppard stayed in Newgate long enough to meet the hangman.

  Here is the core of the problem. The tougher the prison officials made their prison—the more they challenged Sheppard and told him that this time he couldn’t escape—the more determined and daring and ingenious Sheppard became.

  This misdirected genius was never more evident than in the tenman escape from Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State in 1955. Their escape route was a tunnel under the main wall, but one tunnel wasn’t enough for them. They also had tunnel routes between their cells, so they could communicate and pass materials and information back and forth. When they were recaptured—which, in the traditional manner, didn’t take very long at all—the full extent of their ingenuity and daring was discovered. Each of the ten carried a briefcase containing a forged draft card, business cards, a driver’s license, birth certificate and even credit cards and charge-account cards for stores in Seattle. Beyond all this, they all carried identification cards claiming them as officials of the Washington State prison system, and letters of recommendation from state officials, including the warden of the Walla Walla State Penitentiary. And four of the escapees carried forged state paychecks, in amounts totaling over a thousand dollars. Every bit of the work involved had been done in the prison shops.

  Compare this with the record of a jail such as the so-called “model prison” at Chino, California. Escaping from Chino is almost incredibly easy. There is a fence, but no wall, and the fence would be no barrier to a man intent on getting away. The guards are few, the locks fewer, much of the prisoners’ work is done outdoors, and the surrounding area is mostly wooded hills. For a man determined to escape, Chino would offer no challenge at all.

  And yet, Chino has had practically no escapes at all!

  Perhaps the lack of challenge is itself the reason why there are so few escapes from Chino. The cage in which the prisoner must live is not an obvious cage at Chino. He is restricted, but the restrictions are subtle, and he is not surrounded by stone and iron reminders of his shackled condition. At tougher, more security-conscious prisons, the challenge is flung in the convict’s face. “You cannot escape from here!” Inevitably there are those who accept the challenge.

  The challenge at Chino—and at other prisons constructed from much the same philosophy—is far different. “You should not escape from here! And when you know why society demands that you stay here, you won’t need to escape. You will be released.”

  Both challenges demand of the prisoner that he think, that he use his mind, his wit and his imagination. But whereas the one challenge encourages him to think along lines that will drive him yet further from society, the other challenge encourages him to think along lines that will adjust him to society.

  No matter which challenge it is, there will always be men to accept it, as the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary—from which the ten convicts escaped with their forged-card-bulging briefcases—inadvertently proved, back in 1952. He gave the prisoners a special dinner one day in that year, in honor of the fact that a full year had gone by without the digging of a single tunnel. Three days later, during a normal shakedown, guards found a tunnel one hundred feet long.

  LOVE STUFF, COPS-AND-ROBBERS STYLE

  This was first published in the Los Angeles Times on May 7, 1972.—Ed.

  The gangster is coming back. To the movies, that is; in real life, he never went away. But in the m
otion picture, after dominating the screen throughout the ’30s and into the ’40s, the mob departed, muscled out by—something, I forget what. And now at last they’re coming back.

  But with a difference. The crooks are no longer quite what they used to be. The crime movies way back when were built on the headlines of the time, of course, based on the Dillingers and the Capones of that era, but somehow the people were altered in translation and came out totally unlike anybody who had ever trod this earth. Something Runyonesque occurred, and both the crooks and the society they lived in became jauntier, stronger, better.

  You could always trust a deathbed confession, for instance; if Humphrey Bogart said the kid wasn’t in on the jailbreak, the warden took his word for it and the kid went free. Edward G. Robinson might try to bump off a tough DA, but it would never occur to him to try to buy him off. And James Cagney might rob banks for a living, but he’d die before he’d turn over secret military information to a foreign power; he was a crook, yes, but he was an American crook.

  And like all the rest of the movie crooks of that time, he had a tough line of patter and a fast right hand and a lot of self-reliance, and if he finally had to walk that Last Mile, he did it with his head up and his shoulders back.

  But not only the crooks were better than life in those movies; the whole world was. The DA really didn’t take bribes. Reporters loved their jobs so much they constantly risked death to bring in the story. Justices of the peace would put on a ratty bathrobe and marry a sweet young couple on the lam at any hour of the night. And when the bank robbers got to the bank there was a parking space out front.

  The people in those movies also had a language all their own, never heard anywhere other than a sound stage. All their sentences, for example, began with the word “say,” as in, “Say, you can’t get away with that.” Or, “Say, that’s a pretty snazzy heap you got there.” Or, at particularly important turns, “Say, don’t I know you from someplace?”

  Well, all things do come to an end, and sometime around World War II the boys all turned legit. Robinson suddenly showed up as an insurance investigator, Cagney metamorphosed into Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Bogart came twitching back as—an assistant district attorney.

  Be that as it may. Wherever they went, and for whatever reason, something broke up that old gang of ours, and the screen was a blander place without them. But now, at long last, they do seem to be coming back.

  Though with a difference. Things never do return exactly as they were before. What would Edward G. Robinson’s Rico, for instance, think of Warren Beatty’s Clyde? Akim Tamiroff once played a syndicate boss named Steve Recka, who played the organ in moments of stress, who lived with his Oriental mistress (Anna May Wong), and whose downfall was caused by his futile love for a girl from the upper classes; the level of romance in Don Corleone is pretty well summed up by his style of overcoat.

  The fact is, the romance has gone out of our lives, and we aren’t going to believe anybody who claims otherwise. For example, I wrote a comic robbery novel a couple of years ago called The Hot Rock, which was recently turned into a movie. At one point in the film the crooks use a helicopter, and director Peter Yates had a grand time showing the helicopter moving among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  Most of the people who’ve talked to me about that picture say they loved that sequence, and I think I know why. It’s almost the only romantic moment in the whole film, and by the time it comes along the audience already knows these crooks are simply ordinary shmos trying to make a living like anybody else; romance when it does happen is accidental and incidental and a happy surprise, as in life. The audience is pleased for the characters because they’ve been given a good moment, which is still possible for any of us, and therefore both hopeful and believable.

  So although the crooks are coming back, they aren’t quite the same breezy glib semi-indestructible crew they were the last time around. Organized crime, whether treated seriously as in The Godfather or comically as in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, is simply a business these days, operated by businessmen with business problems to resolve; nothing at all like the Cagney-Bogart business partnership in The Roaring Twenties, brought to an end by trouble over a girl singer (a “chantoozie,” as the boys used to say).

  And the big robbery, too, has changed. Whether done seriously as in The Split or comically as in The Hot Rock, the boys are no longer anything at all like the tough loner of High Sierra who was pulling one last job to get the money for a crippled girl’s operation. The thieves, too, are businessmen these days, small independent businessmen trying to survive in the era of the major corporation.

  Does the return of the crook to the motion picture mean that America is becoming more crooked than it used to be, or that Americans will start to turn crooked by the thousands after seeing these movies? I think just the reverse is true; we have more laws this year than we had last year, and several thousand more laws are on the books now than existed before World War II. We’re so law-abiding we’re strangling in all the rules and regulations, and it’s a respite and a relief for all of us to see contemporaries of ours who survive somehow outside the law’s crushing grip.

  So even in a deromanticized world, even as a businessman among businessmen, the crook still has one advantage over most heroes of fiction. Stepping outside society, operating without regard for those proliferating rules that hem in the rest of us, he is in one of the few businesses where romance can still happen. Not as frequently as when gang members were putting their kid brothers through medical school, but sometimes they do get that occasional helicopter ride. And we get to ride along with them.

  SEND IN THE GOONS

  This essay was first published in the Washington Post Magazine on July 18, 1999. Attentive Westlake fans will notice that the opening paragraphs describe an experience that Westlake gave to his protagonist in his 1962 novel 361.—Ed.

  In November 1957 I completed my enlistment in the U.S. Air Force. I had been stationed the last year and a half in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, and I was very ready to go home. There’s a lot good to be said for the military, but from that point on I preferred to say it from a distance.

  I left Germany on a cold and sunny day, flying by Military Air Transport Service to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, from where I would be bused to Manhattan Beach Air Force Station at the southern end of Brooklyn (the military at times has trouble getting names right) to receive my discharge papers. I was looking forward to it.

  At that time, most planes did not cross the Atlantic in one hop, but stopped somewhere to refuel. It seems to me Goose Bay in Labrador was the most frequent stopover, but in this case we went to the Azores, a rather grim sheaf of volcano tips jutting out of the middle of the ocean and claiming to be part of Portugal, although the rest of Portugal is a thousand miles away.

  When we arrived and deplaned—a couple hundred passengers, a mixed bag of officers and enlistees and family members, already a little travel-scuffed, expecting a wait of an hour or so while the plane was being refueled—we were told that a major storm had descended on the east coast of the North American continent and had closed every airport from Florida north. We would have to stay in transit barracks here in the Azores until the storm went somewhere else.

  Remember, I was on my way to get my walking papers from the Air Force, an event I was looking forward to and which would happen promptly at journey’s end, as soon as the damned journey ended. How long are we going to be stuck here in the Azores? Nobody knew.

  I don’t suppose anybody on the plane was really happy about this turn of events. There were families aboard with little children. There were staff-level officers who’d always assumed they were more important than weather. There were grunts going home on leave. And there was me, who would become a civilian just as soon as ever I got to Manhattan Beach.

  I don’t want to say anything bad about an ally, and I presume Portugal is still an ally, but the Azores are never, ever going to be mistaken for
Club Med. The weather, probably the leading edge of my friend the storm, was overcast and clammy. The landscape was vertical and dour, darkly jagged, unfit for human occupancy, rather like a Bronte novel without the characters. If there were a Michelin guide to the place, it would consist of one word: Don’t.

  We orphans of the storm were restricted to a transit camp under the control of the Portuguese army, which was mostly short wide guys in dark uniforms who looked like they came out of one of those barroom scenes from Star Wars. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see, and we single enlistees were housed in the kind of cots-in-rows vast open dormitory usually reserved for winos of a certain age. It was the kind of place where nobody wants to wind up, certainly not at twenty-four. (I’ll try not to mention the food.)

  Also, none of us had packed for an extended stay. Most of my stuff had been mailed home, and I was traveling light. Socks and underwear I could wash, but I very quickly ran out of anything to read. And now what?

  Just sit there, little boy blue, that’s what, sit there and count your fingers. And the days. We spent a night, and then we spent another night. The storm, meanwhile, continued to spend all its time on the Eastern Seaboard.

  We people of the plane were not a cohesive group. We’d never met before, had nothing in common but irritation, and would have been happy to see one another’s backs. So I assure you there were no impromptu softball games, no glee clubs were formed, and not one photo of a wife or girlfriend was passed around. No one suggested reunions. Each of us merely simmered in his or her own private stew.