Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Okay, Horreld,” she said. “I’ll send the money.”

  “Thanks, Mama,” I said, and went on to ask after Papa’s health and how were things at the used-car lot which had been my last place of employment before my trial. She said, “A man came in and said there was sand in his gas tank, and Mr. Frizzell wants to know was that you.”

  “I’m afraid it was, Mama,” I said, and on that note we ended the conversation.

  Phil was waiting patiently in the booth. I gave him his dime back and said, “The money’s on its way.”

  “Good.” He gestured at my coffee. “You done?”

  “Sure.”

  We left the luncheonette, strolled two blocks past clothing stores and appliance stores and five-and-tens, and then Phil pointed across the street and said, “I got to go to the bank.”

  “The bank?”

  “I got an account there.”

  He said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a convict to have an account in a local bank. But of course it was, wasn’t it? For this particular convict it was, anyway.

  And for me, too. I felt as though my brain had been injected with Novocaine, which was slowly wearing off. Feeling, sensation, understanding were gradually coming to me. I was outside the wall.

  And I was crossing the street, I saw, toward not one bank but two. On the right was a hulking gray stone Greek temple, with pillars and complicated cornices and all. Gold lettering on the windows said Western National Bank. On the left was a perfect study in contrasts, a four-story building that couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The upper floors showed mostly wide office windows interspersed with red or green plastic panels, and the first floor contained a Woolworth’s on one side and a bank on the other, both with large windows fronting on the street. The bank, called Fiduciary Federal Trust on its windows, was cheek by jowl with Western National and couldn’t have been more different. Western National was as grim and tight as the prison I’d just come from, while Fiduciary Federal was wide open; through its big windows I could clearly see the open, airy, brightly lighted interior, with lines of customers and a sense of casual bustle.

  Phil and I crossed the street and promptly bumped into one another as I angled toward Fiduciary Federal to find him angling toward Western National. “Oops,” I said.

  He pointed to the Greek temple. “That one,” he said.

  “Oh. I just took it for granted, uh…” I gestured toward the cheerful openness of Fiduciary Federal. It hadn’t occurred to me Phil might choose the bank that looked like a prison.

  “A couple of the other guys use that one,” Phil said, as though that were some sort of explanation.

  We went on into the bank. The inside was austere, echoing and high-ceilinged; more a Buddhist temple than a Greek, somehow. Phil took a check from his wallet, filled it out, and cashed it with a smiling girl teller who apparently knew him. They exchanged hellos and comments on the weather. Then he gestured to me, saying, “Here’s a friend of mine, Harry Kent.”

  I almost corrected him. Then, in a blinding flash, what he had done blossomed in front of me. He had given me an alias! For the first time in my life, with utter justification, I could be somebody other than Harry Künt. With an umlaut.

  She gave me a smile, saying, “How are you?”

  I gave her a huge smile right back. “I’m just fine,” I said. Oh, let my prison term never end, I was thinking. What did I care what they called me inside those walls; in this wonderful world outside I was Harry Kent. What a beautiful name, what a noble name! It sounded like something out of Shakespeare. Harry of Kent awaits without, milord. Without what, varlet? Without his fucking umlaut, milord.

  When we left the bank, Phil said, “Had enough for one day, Harry?”

  “No,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “Yeah, I know how you feel. You’d be surprised, after a while you get used to it. You get a turn to go out, you don’t even do it.”

  “Never,” I said.

  “I used to say that. You’ll see.”

  You never needed an alias as much as me, I thought, but I didn’t argue the point.

  8

  When we got back, a committee of five was waiting for us in the room where I’d been folding the football uniforms my first day. Jerry Bogentrodder was there, looking big and pink and friendly, but with a black circle around his right eye. Billy Glinn was there, looking big and gray and deadly. Eddie Troyn the military man was there, and Bob Dombey, still with the same suspicious weasel expression as when I’d first seen him hurry past this doorway, and Joe Maslocki, the battered ex-welterweight. I assumed Max Nolan was still on duty out by the half-door, and with Phil and me that was the full complement of eight.

  The five of them were sitting around the big wooden table in the middle of the room, and none of them seemed to have any expression at all on their faces. Phil, pulling another chair out to join them, said to Jerry, “What’s the black stuff around your eye?”

  “The goddamnedest thing,” Jerry said. “I found a thing like a kid’s telescope, and when I looked through it there was like this black paint or something on it. I can’t get it off.”

  Phil had settled into a chair, and I had followed suit. It was amazing how nobody was looking directly at me.

  “That’s too bad, Jerry,” Phil said. Then he jabbed a thumb toward me and said, casually, “Well, he’s in.” Suddenly everybody was grinning and shaking my hand, everybody was cheerful, everybody was telling me how glad they were to have me one of the crowd. The relief was patent on every face, even Billy Glinn’s. Yep, I would have been seeing those big machines all right.

  The welcoming ceremonies finally wore themselves out, and Phil turned to Joe Maslocki and said, “Okay, Joe. Tell him about the robbery.”

  9

  “Eep,” I said. Then, when everybody looked at me, I said, “Frog in my throat,” and pretended to cough. Billy Glinn whumped me on the back a little more than necessary.

  Joe Maslocki waited impatiently for me to return to health. His bashed-in boxer’s face looked earnest and impassioned, and when I finally got Billy to stop whumping me so I could give my attention elsewhere, Joe leaned across the table and said in a low voice throbbing with intensity, “You know what we got, Harry? We got the greatest alibi in the world!”

  I looked at him.

  He waved a tattooed arm to include our surroundings. “How could we commit no crime? We’re in the big house.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Now, look,” he said, and bunk-bunked his finger on the tabletop just the way Warden Gadmore had done to my records, except that the warden had done it while thinking things over, and Joe did it to make a point. “We’re all gonna get outa here someday,” he said. “When’s the best time to pull a really big score, set ourselves up for life? Right now!”

  “That’s right,” Jerry said, and there was a general murmur of assent.

  “We been doing these little stings,” Joe said, “but that ain’t—”

  I said, “Stings?”

  “You know,” Joe said, throwing it away, “little burglaries, nothings.”

  “Small scores,” Phil explained to me, “to cover our expenses.”

  “Expenses,” I said.

  “The electric bill for the tunnel,” Phil said. “Civilian clothes, things like that.”

  “And don’t forget,” Jerry told him, “Fylax and Muttgood.”

  “Right,” Phil said. “We got two screws on the payroll.”

  So that was why Fylax had so patently disliked me. I said, “They know about the tunnel?”

  “What, you crazy?” Phil shook his head and said, “They know we got action, that’s all. They don’t ask, we don’t tell. We give them their salary and they mind their own business.”

  “Enough,” Joe Maslocki said. “Harry can figure it out for himself. You got an operation like this, you’re gonna have expenses.”

  “Well, sure,” I said. I’m in a madhous
e, I thought.

  “So we cover the expenses,” Joe said. “Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “But that’s not what I’m talking about,” he said. “Forget about copping TV sets and knocking over gas stations.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was happy to.

  “What I’m talking about,” Joe said, “is a major score. I figure somewhere around a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty grand.” He looked at Phil. “Am I right?”

  “That’s what we figure,” Phil said.

  They were all so calm, so businesslike. There was nothing to do but sit there and be just as calm. That, or run screaming from the room.

  Joe said to Phil, “Did you show him the banks?”

  “Just to look at. I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “Okay.” Still intense, plugging away like the welterweight infighter he used to be, Joe told me, “What we got out there is a couple banks you could knock over with a softball.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “Maybe not quite that easy,” Jerry said, grinning.

  “It’s a goddam easy couple of banks,” Joe insisted. “And they’re goddam full of money.”

  “You see,” Phil told me, “this is a twice-a-month town.”

  Should I pretend that made sense? I smiled blankly.

  “Most towns,” Phil went on, “the people get paid once a week.”

  “On Friday,” Joe Maslocki said.

  Phil nodded. “But this town,” he said, “only has two big employers, the prison and the Army base, and they both pay twice a month.”

  “The fifteenth,” Joe said, “and the thirtieth.”

  “So that means twice as much folding money,” Phil said, “every time somebody cashes their paycheck.”

  Joe, leaning passionately toward me, said, “You see the picture?”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  “Just before the fifteenth,” Phil said, “and just before the end of the month, the local banks get in a whole bunch of cash from out of town.”

  “Ah hah,” I said.

  He said, “At first we thought maybe we’d hit an armored car coming in. Eddie had a nice little scheme worked out for that.”

  “An ambush,” Eddie Troyn said; the military man. “Counter-insurgent tactics,” he said, and now I saw what his natural smile looked like. It was a simple baring of teeth, a curling back of the lips and widening of the mouth, and on a fully fleshed man it would have looked perfectly all right. But Eddie Troyn had no spare flesh at all, and the smile turned his normally bony face into a death’s head. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what this ex-military man had done to get himself reassigned to a penitentiary.

  But Joe Maslocki wanted my attention. “That was small change,” he said, pushing the idea away. “We want the whole thing. The whole thing.”

  “There’s only four banks in town,” Jerry told me. With a little grin he added, “Joe wanted to hit all four.”

  “We still could,” Joe said, as taut and intense as ever. “We blow up City Hall for a diversion, knock out all four banks at once. There’s eight of us, we could do it easy.”

  Eight of us. Including me.

  “Logistically,” Eddie Troyn said, “it’s quite a challenge. But not impossible, no, not impossible.” And he did his smile again.

  Phil said, “But we’ll settle for two. You’re lucky, Harry, you got here just in time to climb on the gravy train.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I smiled or something.

  He said, “You can see why I couldn’t tell you before you were definitely in.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Certainly.”

  “We’ve got three weeks,” Joe said.

  I said, “Three weeks?” Fortunately, one of the things a practical joker learns early in life is how to hide his reactions. I don’t believe I jumped more than half an inch off the chair, and I covered that movement by pretending to shift to a new position.

  Joe was explaining the timetable. “We got Christmas coming,” he said. “That’s when people spend money. We not only got paychecks getting cashed, we also got Christmas clubs, and we got people taking money out of savings accounts.”

  Phil said, “There’ll be more cash than ever, the middle of December.”

  “So that’s when we do it,” Joe said.

  Phil gave me a big grin. “Some Christmas present, huh, Harry?”

  10

  The next night, I went out by myself to do a little sting.

  I had thought it would only be possible to get out during the daytime, but it seemed I was wrong. The gym was open every evening, for basketball and calisthenics and so on, which meant one or more prisoners had to be on duty during that time in the supply area. Activities in the gym, particularly inter-block league basketball games, frequently ran as late as ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, and some early member of the tunnel brigade had talked the prison authorities into believing it could take two hours or more to finish the clean-up after everyone else had left. So bunks were put into the supply area, and the night-workers were simply locked into the gym after everybody else had left.

  It all meshed very well. Since men on work assignment were only subject to two headcounts a day, at breakfast and at dinner, this meant we tunnel people could spend all day or all night on the outside. It would be possible to leave around nine in the morning and return by five-thirty, or to leave at about eight in the evening and not come back until six-thirty the next morning. The only limitations were that somebody had to be in the gym at all times to mind the store, but other than that the prison could be more or less reduced to a diner at which one ate two meals a day.

  All of which was lovely. But items like stings and bank robberies were less nice. So it was with mixed emotions that I went crawling out through the tunnel alone at eleven that night, to do my first sting.

  They’d all given me advice. “Don’t hit anything too close to the prison,” Bob Dombey had told me; but it was his wife Alice who lived in the house at the end of the tunnel, so I believe he was thinking more in terms of his neighborhood than the prison. Joe Maslocki said, “Swipe a car, use it to pull your job, then leave it right back where you got it. These hicks won’t even know it was gone.” “Don’t hit the Shell station out by the highway entrance,” Max Nolan told me. “The night guy there’s a cowboy. He packs a gun, he’s just crazy enough to blow your head off.”

  I thanked everybody, assured Max I wouldn’t hit the Shell station, and went crawling slowly away through the tunnel. There was a great temptation just to lie down on the carpeting midway and not worry about anything anymore, but I kept moving ahead, and eventually emerged in the dim light of the Dombey basement. Bob was spending the night at home tonight, and I could hear the sound of television from upstairs; Bob and Alice, spending a cozy evening before the tube.

  I left the house and walked aimlessly away, following the same route I’d taken with Phil yesterday, strolling along, trying to figure out what to do. I had so many problems I couldn’t make up my mind which one to think about first.

  There was the robbery, of course, coming up in less than three weeks; Tuesday, December 14th was the target date. And there was the more immediate problem of this alleged sting I was on.

  I was going to have to show something for my night’s work; but what? I owed Phil four dollars, Jerry seven, and Max three-fifty. I didn’t have a penny to my name, and no way to get anything. And I certainly wouldn’t actually commit any robberies, no matter what cute slang names they went by.

  The problem with money was that the prison authorities didn’t permit anybody to have cash. If a friend or relative sent a few dollars to an inmate, that money was impounded and the inmate was given an equivalent credit at the small store in Cell-block D which was the only legitimate place where money could be spent. Stationery and stamps, razor blades, chewing gum, paperback books, things like that. The idea of running things that way was to cut down on thievery inside the prison and also to cut down o
n contraband (drugs, homemade alcohol, pornographic pictures) by keeping the prisoners too stony broke to be able to buy anything on the banned list. There was some cash around the place, of course, despite the injunction against it, but I hadn’t as yet found a way to get hold of any of it.

  My own money, about three thousand dollars in savings now that I’d paid the twenty-three hundred for my share of the Dombey house, was all in a bank in Rye. There was no way on earth to get at it now, at eleven o’clock at night, five hundred miles to the south. And even if there were a way for my mother to get hold of it, how could she send it to me? Send it to the prison and it would be impounded, and I had no address on the outside. Letters sent to General Delivery can only be claimed by people showing proper identification, and that was something else I didn’t have.

  Besides which, come to think of it, I couldn’t call my mother in the first place. True I could make the call collect, but first I’d have to have a dime so I could reach the operator.

  My wandering had taken me to the business street where I’d been yesterday with Phil. A few cars drove by, but I saw no pedestrians. Looking around, trudging along in the cold air, I saw again those two banks next door to one another across the street. “A couple banks you could knock over with a softball,” Joe had called them. The gray stone Greek temple facade of Western National looked more solid and forbidding than ever at night, particularly with the pair of gold-colored metal doors ten feet high filling the space between the two middle pillars where the main entrance was by day. It didn’t look like a building you could hurt very much with a softball.

  Fiduciary Federal next door was a different story. Although closed and empty, it was as bright as day inside. Through the wide windows the canary yellow walls could be seen in the glare of huge fluorescent ceiling fixtures. From across the street I could make out the pens chained to the desks. A softball might conceivably get us into that place, but it would be like breaking into a goldfish bowl.

  The whole idea was impossible, that was obvious on the face of it. Breaking into either of those banks was absurd; breaking into them both simultaneously was lunatic.