by Joan Brady
The silence in the Representatives Hall was growing oppressive. ‘I know you want to hear him speak,’ Jimmy said then. ‘Tell you what, let’s move on for now. I’ll rearrange the agenda until he arrives. The moment he gets here, he speaks. Okay?’
The audience rustled with discontent.
‘You haven’t seen him this morning?’ Becky said to Helen.
Helen shook her head. ‘His cell’s not answering either.’
‘Try it again. Kate, Donna, try to find him.’
Helen forced her way into the hallway to try his mobile again while Kate and Donna went in search through the crowds.
Three aldermen spoke. Two favoured the Coalition and were cheered. One favoured the UCAI contract and was booed. Helen, Kate and Donna returned to their seats. No sign of Morris.
When the aldermen finished, Jimmy said, ‘How about Mr Kline now? He here yet? Mr Kline?’
As before, the room fell silent.
‘Anyone here seen the guy?’ Jimmy said.
Once more, the silence held.
‘Look, I’m sorry about this folks,’ he said then, ‘but we got a vote to bring in. Before that, though, I want you to give Mr Sebastian Slad of UCAI a real warm welcome. Mr Slad?’
The aldermen clapped. Nobody else did. But Sebastian smiled benignly at the audience anyway. ‘I know some of you don’t like the idea of change much, but you all got the absolute commitment of UCAI that we’ll deliver this contract—’
‘Let us vote!’ The interruption was spontaneous, several people at once. The rest of the audience picked it up: ‘Let us vote! Let us vote!’ The chant spread to the crowds outside the chamber, then echoed through the building.
Jimmy’s temper was visibly fraying by the time he re-established quiet. ‘Today’s vote is a Council vote,’ he said irritably. ‘My opinion? Should this go to the people? Absolutely not. It’s nothing but a gut check. Aldermen, please stand to cast your votes. “Yea” to approve. “Nay” to disprove. Ms Petrie?’
‘Nay.’
The audience cheered.
‘Mr Murdle?’
‘Nay.’
The audience went wild.
‘Mr Senich?’
Mr Senich wasn’t a happy man. ‘I didn’t want to decide without hearing Mr Kline,’ he said, ‘but since he isn’t here, I’m going to have to vote to endorse the contract.’
The next vote went for Jimmy too. After that, they alternated.
‘Well, well,’ Jimmy said when the last alderman sat down, ‘divided right down the middle. That leaves the deciding vote to me.’ He couldn’t hold back a smile. ‘The resolution to sign the UCAI contract carries, six to five.’
27
TIPTON COUNTY, TENNESSEE: The same time
Dillon Effingham and his little brother Stonky danced and giggled along the west bank of the Mississippi River, in Tipton County, Tennessee, south of Memphis. They each had pockets full of Blow Pops, a lollipop with a hard candy exterior and bubble gum inside. Neither liked Blow Pops very much, but getting hold of so many at once was a real triumph.
The Mississippi is moody. It’s unpredictable. It cuts chunks of land in its path off from where they started. Before the earthquakes of 1811–1812, the people of Tipton County went to sleep on the river’s east bank. One morning they woke up on its west bank. But that’s not why the county was famous. Every area has something, the biggest bagel like Matoon, the first Indian scalp like Washoga. Tipton County was the Blow Pops capital of the world. Speaker Emeritus Effingham was deeply proud of that. ‘We produce a billion Blow Pops a year,’ he’d say to his nephews Dillon and Stonky. ‘Think of it, boys: one billion!’ He always carried a bag of Blow Pops. He stuffed his pockets with them too. The question was, how many could a kid steal off him in one raid? The two brothers had just broken the neighbourhood record.
They’d reached the gum inside their third Blow Pop – both of them feeling queasy – when they spotted what they thought was a small whale or maybe a dolphin in the distance. Something large and white. There are no whales or dolphins in the Mississippi. They went to investigate.
This strange shape had brown hair with gold streaks in it.
‘Fuck!’ ten-year-old Dillon cried. ‘It’s a person!’ He paused. ‘I think.’
What would little boys do without the mobile phone? Dillon took a closer look, then threw up Blow Pops all over the corpse while eight-year-old Stonky called 911 on his mobile.
28
SPRINGFIELD, MARION & KNOX COUNTY, ILLINOIS: The same time
Quack’s years of business administration at the University of Chicago had been an agonizing boredom. They hadn’t borne fruit until he reached South Hams prison all those years ago and taught David how to run his drug trade as though it were a McDonald’s franchise.
As he explained it – taking relish for the first time in this very American institution – McDonald’s began with a modest location and a dream to bring their hamburgers to as many people in as many places as they could. There was no reason why David shouldn’t do just that with drugs: reliable products at steady prices to any prisoner who could afford them. It took weeks to develop a strategy: ‘a management system’ Quack called it. Once they had it, David kept it operating for all of the fifteen years that remained of the eighteen he spent inside. He satisfied his customers. He moved with the changing markets. He developed new ones. He kept his profits high and his people in line, his customers as well as his subordinates.
But the freedom to employ violence had been more important than either Quack or David realized. It was the only control mechanism David knew, and it had proved useless in turning Otto’s Autos into a house. The men he’d told to go away didn’t even try to come back. Potential replacements were no better: the same fearless, self-satisfied faces, the same sense of entitlement that seemed to him to border on the moronic. Lillian spotted him sitting alone on a pile of breeze blocks at the construction site, his arm in a sling; his chest bandaged, his head in his hands, cigarette balanced on the blocks beside him. The cement mixer stood silent. So did the brick splitter and the digger. She pulled her car to a stop, got out and went to sit beside him.
‘Where’s your crew gone to, boy?’
‘They don’t like me very much,’ he said, not glancing up.
‘Well, that don’t surprise me none. You don’t treat ’em right. What happened to that arm? One of them hit you with a shovel?’
‘A Soviet general tried to kill me with a railway spike.’
‘A Soviet general, huh? You try to kill him back?’
‘I got private cops following me around. They stopped me.’
‘You getting too much of the sun, child,’ she said.
‘Why aren’t you with old Mrs Freyl?’
The day was as hot as its predecessors, as humid too; just sitting in it was enough to make a person sweat. There was no shade on the construction site. Lillian pulled out an umbrella. She’d carried one ever since the long-term forecast starting warning of storms way back in June. She opened it over them both, then sighed. ‘David, I got to talk to you.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I got a email from Little Andy.’
David glanced up at her then, scanned her face. ‘You have to be joking.’
‘From the Warden’s office.’
He rarely smiled, but he hadn’t heard anything so funny in years. ‘How’d he manage that?’
‘He’s saying he don’t want to see me no more.’
‘You got it on you?’
Lillian opened her handbag, handed him a copy, watched him read it.
Tell David, Quack hopes that tomorrow we’ll have more fine weather. I know your tricks, Lillian Draper. I know what you think. I know the games you play. Never come see me again.
David gave it back. ‘He doesn’t mean it.’
She nodded. ‘What’d they do to that boy in there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You mean you ain’t gonna tell me
.’
‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’
‘What’s that stuff about “fine weather”?’
‘Search me.’
Lillian knew it meant something, but she just nodded. Men are such guarded creatures, too wary to say what they mean even when the answer can’t really matter very much. ‘He got raped, didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘David, last time I seen Andy, he looked better. Put on a little weight. Smiling some. Getting a interest in things, talking about computers and stuff. But he didn’t tell me nothing. This here email makes me think he’s heading back right where he came from, and he don’t want me to know about it.’
David shook his head. ‘Not likely.’
‘You willing to come out with me again?’
‘I have to go anyhow.’
‘“More fine weather”?’
‘Something like that.’ He took out a cigarette, lit it, handed it to her. She took a drag, then handed it back.
‘David, can I ask you a question?’
‘I’m all yours.’
‘You was young and pretty when you went to prison too. How come you ain’t HIV positive?’
He frowned, turned away, turned back. ‘Official statistics indicate very few prisoners are, less than two per cent.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Some people are naturally immune.’
‘Just luck?’
‘You could say so.’
David Marion landed a life sentence when he was a mere fifteen years old, younger than Andy if not quite so pretty, made of tougher stuff but still recovering from internal injuries courtesy of a Springfield police ‘interrogation’ about the murder of two men. He hadn’t confessed to the crime. He hadn’t denied it either. He hadn’t spoken at all, and there’d seemed to him a perverse justice in being sent to the very prison that bore his name, Marion Federal Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.
There’d been nobody in his cell when he’d arrived. He tossed his few possessions on the floor and lay back on the narrow lower bunk of the cement-shelf beds that occupied nearly half the space. He was staring at the bottom of the top bunk when his cellmate Pama walked in. Before David had time to move, a full-fisted blow caught him on the side of the face and slammed his head against the concrete wall behind him.
‘In here, bitch, you be the nigger,’ Pama said. ‘In here, you be my nigger. You belong to me. As soon as I gets me my dinner, I gets me some of your pretty white pussy. I bet it’s nice and tight.’
He left David spitting blood into the sink.
First comes panic. Then the mind goes cold. The counsellor’s office at the end of the cell block stayed open until lockdown. The counsellor himself was so wrapped up in a game called Ebony Castle on a very early computer that he only waved a hand towards the wall. David went over to the shelf holding forms that inmates could use to file complaints, authorize them to make telephone calls, receive mail. A mug sat there, a heavy glass mug with a wood handle. David pretended to study the paperwork while he slipped the mug under his shirt. Back in the cell he smashed the glass section of the mug against the concrete floor until jagged glass stuck out of it like lions’ teeth.
Pama returned from his dinner, stretched, yawned and gave David a dazzling smile. Pama was a big man; he had to bend head and shoulders to ease himself back onto the lower bunk. He leaned against the concrete wall and patted the spot beside him.
‘Come on over here and sit next to Pama. Talk to me.’
David glanced away.
‘Come on, sugar. You ain’t still mad at me, is you?’
David got up. Pama leaned towards him, but before he could unbend his body to get it out of the bunk, David thrust the jagged glass into his eyes. Blood spurted. Pama screamed. David hacked in a frenzy at eyeballs, nose, cheeks, mouth, every piece of soft flesh around the face and throat.
By the time the guards arrived, Pama was curled in a foetal position, and David stood over him with the bloodied mug.
David spent three months in isolation for that, but he’d turned Pama into a blind man. That scared people. David figured he wouldn’t have to go through any more crap when he got out of solitary as long as he stayed looking crazy enough to blind the next guy in Marion who made a move on him.
He was safe.
Back in those days, Illinois law required prisons to educate the under-16s to a sixth-grade level; David’s record said he was illiterate. The guards sat him down in an interrogation room with a slender man in his forties, dark haired, green eyes that didn’t focus on anything.
David could hardly believe it. Another blind man. And almost the first words out of this blind man’s mouth tossed him back as meat for the system’s sexual predators.
‘You do not belong in this facility, Mr Marion,’ Hugh Freyl said to him. ‘I will arrange a transfer at once.’ David’s reputation wouldn’t have spread to another prison. Another prison meant nothing to him but another Pama.
‘I ain’t going nowhere.’
‘This is a federal prison, and yours is not a federal offence.’
‘I got to stay where I am, hear me? What the fuck does a blind cocksucker know about what I need?’ In those days, before Hugh cleaned up David’s speech, it was pure Illinois street kid.
‘You were convicted of murder in a state court, Mr Marion. Do please understand that my only purpose in arranging a transfer is to make your life more bearable.’ Hugh was new to prisons at the time. All Freyls made contributions to the more unfortunate of the world, and he was eager to do good. ‘I understand you cannot read at all. Can this be true? Mr Marion? It is not going to help to ignore me, you know. I am not prepared to go away. How about your alphabet, Mr Marion? Do you know your letters?’
David’s thoughts were racing. The next Pama wouldn’t get even as far as the first Pama had. There wouldn’t be any solitary this time either. Books make good shields. A schoolbook given out by an old blind guy could easily hide an inch-long blade. Jab it into the neck and you’re home.
‘I try reading and I get to keep the book, right?’ he said to Hugh.
‘Of course, Mr Marion. It belongs to you.’ Hugh opened the briefcase that sat on the floor between them and felt around inside it for a moment. David watched – fascinated despite himself – while the blind fingers tremble-touched their way across the Braille titles on box files inside. Hugh pulled one out, opened it, spread an embossed manuscript in front of himself and handed a comic to David.
A comic? Way too thin, wouldn’t hide anything, wouldn’t protect against anything. ‘Ah, fuck,’ David said, turning to the guard. ‘Get me out of here.’
‘Not yet, Mr Marion,’ said Hugh. ‘You haven’t even looked at it. Perhaps . perhaps you can see at a glance that it is too difficult.’
‘Get me out of here,’ David repeated.
‘Too easy?’
‘Get me out—’
‘We are going to be together for a full forty-five minutes, Mr Marion, whether you like it or not. Let me see if I can find something more to your taste.’ Hugh tried a manila folder that held a supermarket newspaper.
‘Shit,’ David said.
Then came Playboy.
‘Guard!’ David cried.
‘What is it with you, Mr Marion? What do you want?’ But Hugh’s questions were addressed more to himself than to David. ‘All right. I will try a small experiment.’ He reached into his briefcase, lifted out another manila folder.
Before he had a chance to open it, David said, ‘Fuck it, man, I hate Dick Tracy.’
Hugh smiled. ‘Do you? How very interesting. How do you know it is Dick Tracy?’
‘It was the first fucking thing you showed me.’
This time Hugh’s smile was delighted. ‘This is the folder that contains Dick Tracy, yet there is nothing to indicate that fact except a notation in Braille. Nor did I state the comic’s title when I handed it to you. Your criminal record indicated intelligence, but you clearly have
an exceptional brain. You can even recognize a Braille title after a single glance.’
David stared at him with loathing.
‘I know how interested the more intelligent convicts are in the law. Sometimes everything else seems irrelevant.’ Hugh pulled a heavy volume out from beneath the box files. ‘This is the third edition of The American System of Criminal Justice by the great jurist George F. Cole. Do you think it might serve you a little better?’
Better? David could hardly believe it. It was perfect, more than an inch thick. It could hide a two-inch blade, maybe even more. But his pleasure snapped shut at once. No prison authority was going to let him take such a thing away. ‘I hate people shitting me.’
‘I have cleared all these books with all the relevant authorities, Mr Marion,’ Hugh said. ‘From today forward, the Cole will serve as your official reading primer. If you will accept it as such, that is. I suggest we begin with the introduction.’
David felt a shiver of anticipation. That was unexpected, and in its way it made the whole thing funny: Pama to Hugh Freyl to David: blind man to blind man to hitman.
Illinois State Correctional Institutions transferred David to South Hams State Prison, as it was called in those days, less than a month later. The attack that he’d known would come took place in the shower only hours after his release into the general population. Before the guy died, David grabbed his testicles, sawed them off and delivered them – wrapped up in pages on American justice – to the General of the Insiders, South Hams’ most powerful gang.
The Insiders were impressed. They welcomed this crazy kid as their youngest member ever. David got prison tattoos to make sure everybody knew exactly who was behind him until he grew up enough to re-establish the reputation he’d left behind him at Marion.
But a crucial change had taken place in that shower. David hadn’t understood the seductive power of killing before, the moment of transfiguration in teasing apart with his own hands the fabric that binds life to death – in hearing the delicate sigh that turns a healthy predator into meat ready for a butcher’s block.
