by R.J. Ellory
After the flames were out I took a scalpel from my pocket and slashed Truro’s face several times. By the time the other prisoners and half a dozen warders appeared, I had already dragged Truro from his cell onto the gantry, had bound a towel tightly around his face, and was struggling to carry him down to the medical facility. I went with him all the way, assisted in the bandaging of Truro’s head and hands, the areas worst affected by the fire. They sedated him with morphine, laid him in a bed, and telephoned the mainland for hospital clearance and the ambulance ferry.
I told the medical facility orderly to check on the state of the cell fire, and I was left alone with Henry Abner Truro for a little more than thirty minutes. In that time I stripped Truro naked, injected him with enough morphine to kill a horse, unravelled the bandages from his hands and face, used a lighter to sear the tips of the man’s fingers, and then set about beating his face to an unrecognizable pulp with the heel of his own boot. I dragged him into a small annex room where they kept the medical supplies and locked the door. I bandaged my own hands and face, dressed in Truro’s clothing, and was laid up in bed by the time the orderly returned. I could hear my own heart beating, could feel it thundering in my chest. I could smell my own heated breath against the bandages that surrounded my face. I could see almost nothing, and when the orderlies came and checked on me, when they took my pulse and listened to my heart, I felt the tension growing inside me like something alive. This was it. This was the moment I would make it out of Rikers. I believed I would, I had to believe I would, and if a second passed when I did not think of Harry Rose and what he owed me I could not remember it. I could see Harry’s face, I could sense the way he smiled as he took yet another fat wad of greenbacks from some poor schmooze … and I knew that half of those greenbacks were mine. It was my money. Had always been my money, and hell, I had earned it. Earned it with all these years of my life behind me in Rikers.
It was that passion and promise that kept my nerve. It was that feeling of redemption and justice that kept me from crying out in anger as the warders and orderlies asked one another whether they should unwrap my face and see how badly I was burned. It was the feeling that there might be a future for me if I kept my mind together that stopped me reaching for one of them, holding a scalpel to his throat and using them as a hostage to get myself out of there. The moment had been a long time coming, seven years coming, and there was nothing I would do to jeopardize the possibility that I might make it.
At one point one of the medical orderlies decided to take a look beneath the covering of my face. I sensed his hand approaching me, I could feel the pressure of his fingertips through the bandages, I was aware of how he gingerly started to peel it away. I was beneath that thing. Not Henry Abner Truro. Me, Johnnie Redbird.
I held my breath for one second more, and then I moaned out loud as if suddenly experiencing a moment of unbearable and excruciating pain. Someone said something: ‘What the hell’re you doing there? Don’t touch him. For God’s sake don’t touch him!’
I blessed that man, whoever he might have been, and I believed for a second there might have been a God.
An hour later I was carried out of Rikers Island on a stretcher and ferried across the channel. From the ferry I was transferred to a state hospital ambulance and rushed to the nearest adequate medical facility.
By the time I reached the St Francis of Assisi complex on Brautigan Street, the governor and senior warden of Rikers Island had found Truro’s body. Owing to the insular and independent nature of the Rikers Island system the discovery was not reported along official lines. The face was unidentifiable, and owing to the severe nature of the burns on the fingers they could not fingerprint the cadaver. So they X-rayed his teeth, matched the records to mine, and tried to figure out what had happened. The governor was a clever man, and though it was a couple of days before he figured out that he did not in fact have my body in his medical facility, he nevertheless did figure it out. Rikers Island carried a reputation second only to Alcatraz. There had been no previous escapes on his watch, and with his own retirement due in less than three years, he did not intend to leave with anything but a flawless record. Henry Abner Truro was cremated on the grounds of Rikers Island, and in the death records he appeared under the name Johnnie Redbird. They closed the book, and had no intention of opening it again.
As for myself, I made it hotfoot out of the back of that state hospital ambulance as soon as it drew to a halt against the sidewalk. Passers-by saw a man dressed in burned and bloodied denims, his face and hands bandaged, high-tailing it down Brautigan Street. They saw me once and once only, and that was the very last they would ever see of me. I disappeared. Vanished like smoke.
It took three weeks for me to find Harry Rose. Found him in a bar no more than walking distance from the beaten-to-shit tenement on East 46th Street. He was sitting minding his own affairs, drinking a straight-up Jack Daniels, a beer chaser, and I sidled up and took the stool beside him without a word.
Harry Rose near choked to death when he turned sideways and saw me. We said nothing for a good thirty seconds, and then I smiled like it was the new fashion down this way, asked if there was any hope of getting a drink.
We stayed in that bar three hours, retreated to a small corner table and consumed liquor like we’d seen the sign Drink Canada Dry and taken it as an instruction. Harry listened as I regaled him with the horrors of Rikers Island, and never once reminded him of how he owed me, of how seven years of my life had vanished and I’d come for my dues. He told me of himself then, his life, his beginnings, all the things I write of here, the things he hadn’t told me at the start … as if he wished to balance the scales, to show me how his life had been as hard as my own. I listened, listened well, and even though there was no thought at that time that I would ever write it down, it stayed with me – every detail, every word, as if my mind had become a sponge and I would now soak up everything that ever happened to me to compensate for the years I had lost.
Harry didn’t need reminding of his debt to me, and once we dragged ourselves from the bar and made our way back to East 46th, Harry showed me how much money he was keeping in shoe-boxes beneath the floor. It was like no time had passed at all, and though there was a dark shadow around me, a shadow I’d carried all the way from the Island, there was still something about me that could never change. I was Harry Rose’s sidekick, his compadre and friend. We were as good as brothers, and though a great deal of water had flowed beneath a great many bridges, there was still a fundamental agreement: we were in this thing together, always had been, always would be.
So Harry told me about the hundred grand scam. He told me about King Mike Royale, about Cynthia, Mary-Rose, Jasmine, Louella-May, Claudette and Tanya. He told me about the ease with which the fat motherfucker had taken him for all he’d possessed, about the sweat he’d broken to get it back. And it had been our money. Money that both of us had worked for before Carol Kurtz, Karl Olson and the hell of Rikers Island.
So I went back to work, did what I did best. I dressed like a plain-clothes cop, carried a badge and a tone of authority, and I trawled the bars and speakeasies, the juke joints and strip clubs until I got a fix on Mike Royale and where he was at. King Mike had ploughed his money into an upmarket bordello off of Edgewater Avenue between Cliffside Park and Fairview. Hell of a place, hell of a clientele, and the girls he worked out of that joint were some of the classiest broads a man might ever see off celluloid. Senators, congressmen, police captains, bankers, mobsters, councilmen and city officials; they were all down there to sink the pink torpedo, and the money they turned around dwarfed anything me and Harry Rose had ever imagined. Some said they pulled upwards of twenty-five grand a week, others said such a sum was an understatement of magnitude, but – truth be known – Harry and I didn’t so much as care for the long green as we did for King Mike’s head.
The only complication was that I had gotten myself a girl, a sweet little redhead from Hudson Heights who figured m
e for Gary Cooper. She hung around me like a bad cold, and though I cared for the girl, though I treated her well, I never saw myself as the settling type. Strange as it may seem now, there was something in the back of my mind that told me I could’ve been a father. Maybe I was crazy, because I sure as hell knew that the life I led was not something that would take a child. But nevertheless it was there, the thought was there, and there was little I could do to deny it. When she got pregnant I told her the truth I wanted her to hear; that there was no future here, that I was no more a father and a husband than I was a Tuscaloosa milkmaid. I gave her five thousand dollars, told her she could keep the kid or not – her decision and her decision alone – and then I made her leave. I lied to that girl, and I lied to myself, because there was that something inside of me that said I should do it, that I should let her stick around, that she could look after the kid while I did my day’s work. She squawled like an Apache tribal burial, but she went. There was one thing she understood from her time with me: I was a man who said only those things I meant, and what I meant was as good as law. It was only later, much later, that I thought about her again and whether that child had ever taken a breath. And when that thought came I would work so hard to convince myself that I had made the right decision for all concerned, but if I’d looked in the mirror I would have seen a man with a lie behind his eyes. Where she went and what happened I didn’t want to find out at the time; my mind was set on balancing the books with King Mike Royale.
It could have been a scene from a bad gangster B-movie, and perhaps we had intended it that way. Hugging the edge of the sidewalk in a dark sedan, me and Harry waited four hours one night until King Mike exited his bordello and started home. We followed his Cadillac Towncar across three miles of the city, and when he pulled up outside a sprawling adobe mansion on the outskirts of Fort Lee where Lemoine crossed I-95, we pulled up also, let the engine die quietly, and we waited. Waited two hours while lights went on and off inside that house, and when there was nothing but darkness we broke in and went upstairs.
The fact that King Mike’s bedroom reeked of alcohol, the fact that he barely stirred as we stripped back the covers and bound his hands and feet, gave us some idea of how much the man had drunk. Miracle he made it across town in one piece, I said as I started to slap King Mike’s face and poke him in the eye.
King Mike Royale, a man who had never had to walk a yard in his adult life, a man who ate and drank the best Manhattan had to offer, a man who believed himself not only above the law but more than likely above God, woke to find a stranger peering down at him with a paperclip in his hand.
There was very little explanation. There was a lot of pleading of course, and I hushed King Mike up to ask Harry why it was always the fat guys who moaned the worst. Seems the fatter they are the more they cry, I told Harry, and Harry laughed, and held King Mike’s head still while I straightened out the paperclip and pushed it through the fat guy’s eyelid.
He screamed louder than a fire siren, so we took the corner of the bedsheet and jammed it into King Mike’s mouth until it seemed he would choke. His one good eye did all the pleading then, and Harry and I took it in turns to rabbit-punch him, to hold a lighter to his testicles, to piss on him, to score deep bloody grooves in the flesh of his belly with a metal comb. After an hour we were bored, and King Mike, still remarkably conscious, was relieved of the bedsheet and told he could ask one question before he died.
Who are you? he gasped and gagged and spluttered.
Harry looked at me, I looked back, and then – laughing as if sharing some private joke – we told King Mike that he’d asked the question and now he was going to die.
Didn’t say we’d answer it did we, you fat motherfucker? Harry told him, and proceeded to tear the bedsheet into long strips which we used to lash him to the frame.
You want the money? King Mike asked us. Is that what you want? Take the goddamned money and leave me alive …
Harry sat beside King Mike as he sweated and bled and moaned.
What money would that be? Harry asked him.
The money in the bank, King Mike said. I got the best part of three hundred grand in a safety deposit box …
In a bank? Harry said. What the fuck use is money in a bank?
King Mike’s remaining one good eye widened and stared at Harry Rose. Was there a flicker of recognition there? Perhaps, perhaps not. Harry imagined that the last thing in the world King Mike would ever wish to do was remember the faces of those he had scammed. Besides it had been more than seven years since Harry had given this fat asshole a hundred grand.
You want the money in the bank? Harry asked me.
I tilted my head to one side and sort of half smiled. I shrugged my shoulders and said, You want it?
Means we’d have to keep this asshole alive while he took us there, wouldn’t it?
Reckon it would, I said. Whaddya think?
Harry shook his head. Naah, he said. Fuck it. Rather see him burn.
A wad of bedsheet went back in King Mike’s mouth. We tied him tight and fast to the frame. We packed pillows and blankets beneath his body until he looked like a bloodied prizefighter laid up in hospital after eight rounds with Primo Carnera.
From the dresser on the other side of the room we took two bottles of 1929 Armagnac and soaked the sheets, the pillows, the blankets and King Mike’s overweight form.
Then we lit him. And then we ran.
We started the car and drove to the end of the street, and when we saw flames through the upper-floor windows we looked at one another and nodded.
Vengeance is sweet, Harry Rose said.
Sweet as sweet can be, I said, and pulled away.
We hid out for two days in the apartment on East 46th, and it took only two days for us to realize the kind of trouble we’d caused.
King Mike Royale had been a connected man, as good as made in some circles, and there were those in positions of influence who were more than a little concerned that an investigation into his death might bring to the surface other facts that should never see the light of day. Harry and I talked. Talked a great deal. And when word on the street suggested there might be some possibility that one or two Italian families would lose on their investments in King Mike’s business, Harry suggested that I lose myself for the meantime, said he would stay behind and take care of our interests for a while, make sure the dust settled. Harry told me he was a known face, that if he suddenly disappeared people would ask questions, make some noise.
Mexico, I said.
Mexico, Harry agreed.
Take twenty or thirty grand with you, Harry said, and I’ll send more in the New Year. When you settle yourself contact me, let me know where you’re staying, and I’ll take care of things.
I was reticent, and there was something in my eyes that told Harry there was more going down than I was saying.
Rikers? Harry asked me.
I nodded. Rikers, I said. You were gonna take care of me while I was down there, Harry.
Harry nodded. He knew I was right. I lost all that money, Harry told me. The fat bastard we torched took all the money I had, and I figured it would be better to make the money back than to stay in Queens and be a shit-heel.
I nodded. Harry was right. And, besides, I still trusted Harry Rose, knew that a man such as Harry would always and forever maintain his principles. Like the thing with Carol Kurtz. Olson died because he killed a girl that Harry had cared for, wouldn’t have mattered if she was a two-bit hooker or Princess Grace of Monaco.
So I went, took twenty or thirty grand, and made it to Mexico, place called Ciudad Juarez over the Rio Bravo del Norte. Bought myself the top floor of a four-storey hotel, and after a month or so I sent a message to Harry Rose. Here I am, I said. Down here Mexico way, where the tequila runs free and the senoritas run freer. Come down and visit me sometime. Money I don’t need for a while. Seems you can buy a month of the high life for a Lincoln and change. Let me know when things cool down. Let me know if
you ever hear my name in the same breath as Rikers Island or King Mike Royale. Take care an’ all that.
Harry got the message, and in his heart of hearts he knew he’d let me take the fall once more. There was nothing to keep Harry in Manhattan, and the fact that my escape from Rikers was never reported in the papers made Harry think that the two of us could have headed down to Vegas and been kingpins once more. But Harry had become a solitary man, a man alone, and in the years that I had been away he’d earned himself his own reputation without me at his side. In some ways it had been good to have me back, but then again …
