Westlake, Donald E - Novel 35
Page 1
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner
Donald E.Westlake
I woke up and it was still dark. I sat bolt upright and said, "Hey!"
"Mmf?" A sleepy form moved in the darkness next to me. "What?"
"What time is it?"
"Um. Oom." Rustling and rattling. "Twenty after five."
"Holy Christ!" I shouted, and jumped out of bed. "I've got to get back to prison!"
She sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Squinting at me, she said, "I've known some weird guys, Harry, but you're the winner. I've had them wake up and say, 'I've got to get back to my wife' 'I've got to catch a plane/ 'I've got to go to Mass.' But I never in my life heard anybody say they had to go back to prison."
HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER is the story of Harry Kunt, a practical joker who winds up in the state prison when one of his hoaxes accidentally injures two Congressmen.
In the jail he meets seven tough cons with their own private tunnel into the prison town, making them the world's first prisoner commuters.
In the town there is a pair of banks (continued on back flap)
M- EVANS AND COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK IOOI7
M. Evans and Company titles are distributed in the United States by the J. B. Lippincott Company, East Washington Square, Philadelphia, Pa. 19105; and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.,
25 Hollinger Road, Toronto M4B 3G2, Ontario
Copyright (c) 1974 by Donald E. Westlake
All rights reserved under International and Pan
American Copyright Conventions
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-92922
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 087131-149-6
Designed by Paula Wiener
Manufactured in the United States of America
987654321
74-09508
for Abby—the jentle jailer
Contents
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3
4
5
6
7
8
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10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
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37
38
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40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
1
SOMETIMES I THINK I’M good and sometimes I think I’m bad. I wish I could make up my mind, so I’d know what stance to take.
The first thing Warden Gadmore said to me was, “Basically, you’re not a bad person, Kunt.”
“Kunt,” I said quickly, pronouncing it the right way, as in koont. “With an umlaut,” I explained.
“A what?”
“Umlaut.” I poked two fingers into the air, as though blinding an invisible man. “Two dots over the U. It’s a German name.”
He frowned at my records. “Says here you were born in Rye, New York.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Wry, New York.
“Makes you a U.S. citizen,” he said, and peered at me through his wire-framed spectacles, challenging me to deny it.
“My parents came from Germany,” I said. “In nineteen thirty-seven.”
“But you were born right here.” He bunk-bunked a fingertip on his desktop, as though to suggest I’d been born in this office, on that desk.
“I’m not denying American citizenship,” I said.
“I should think not. Wouldn’t do you any good if you did.”
I felt the confusion was now coming to a natural end, and that nothing I said would be useful, so I remained silent. Warden Gadmore frowned at me a few seconds longer, apparently wanting to be sure I didn’t have anything else contentious to say, and then lowered his head to study my records some more. He had a round bald spot on the top of his head, like a small pancake on a dead hedgehog. It was a very serious head.
Everything here was serious: the warden, the office, the very fact of the prison itself. I relished seriousness now, I felt it was long overdue in my life. It seemed to me that jail was going to do me a lot of good.
The warden took a long time over my records. I spent a while reading his name on the brass nameplate on his desk: Warden Eustace B. Gadmore. Then I spent a further while looking around this small crowded office at the black filing cabinets and the photographs of government officials on the institutional green walls and the rather disordered Venetian blinds raised over the large window behind the desk. Gazing over the warden’s bald spot and through that window I could see a kind of smallish garden out there, completely enclosed by stone walls. A fat old man in prison denim was at work in the gray November air, wrapping burlap around the shrubs bordering the garden. A narrow rectangular brick path separated shrubs and grass from the inner flower bed, at this time of year full of nothing but dead stalks. Next spring, I thought, I’ll see those flowers bloom. It was, all in all, a comforting idea.
Warden Gadmore lifted his head. When he peered up at me through his glasses I could no longer see his bald spot. “We don’t tolerate practical jokers here,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Hunk-bunk; he prodded my records. “I don’t find this amusing reading,’’ he said.
“No, sir.” Wanting to reassure him, I added, “I’m cured, sir.”
“Cured?” He squinted, as though to hide his eyes from me behind his cheekbones. “You mean you used to be crazy?”
Was that what I meant? “Not exactly, sir,” I said.
“There wasn’t any insanity plea at the trial,” he said.
“No, sir. I wasn’t crazy.”
“I don’t know what you were,” he said. Bunk-bunk. “You injured a number of people.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Including three children.”
“Yes, sir.” And two Congressmen, though neither of us mentioned that.
He frowned at me, squinted at me, strained toward me without quite moving from his seat. In his fussy way he was on my side; he wanted to understand me, so he could understand what was wrong with me, so he could fix it.
I said, “I’ve learned my lesson, sir. I want to be rehabilitated.”
The guard standing back by the door, the one who had walked over with me from the Orientation Center where I had spent my first night here at Stonevelt Penitentiary, shifted his weight in his big black gunboat shoes, expressing by the creak of his movements his disdain and distrust. He’d heard that line before.
Bunk-bunk. Warden Gadmore gazed past me, thinking. I gazed past him, watching the old gardener outside, who was now calmly peeing on a shrub. Finished, he zipped himself and wrapped the same shrub in burlap. A warm winter.
“Against advice from several quarters . .
Startled, I refocused on Warden Gadmore, who was frowning at me again, waiting to capture my attention. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Against, as I say,” he said, “advice from several quarters, I have decided to give you a work assignment here. I don’t know if you appreciate what that means.”
I looked alert and appreciative.
“It means,” he
said, looking very solemn, “that I'm giving you a break. Very few individuals prefer to sit around their cells all day with nothing to do, but we only have work for about half our inmates. New men usually have to prove themselves before they get a work assignment.” “Yes, sir,” I said. “I see. Thank you.”
“I’m taking a chance on you, Kunt,” he said, pronouncing it wrong again, “because you don’t fit any of our normal categories of prisoner.” He began to check them off on his fingers, saying, “You aren’t a professional criminal. You ar—”
“No, sir,” I said.
“—en’t a radical. You did—”
“No, sir.”
“—n’t, uh.” He looked slightly exasperated. “You don’t have to say, ‘No, sir,’ every time,” he said.
“No, sir,” I said, and immediately bit my lower lip. He looked down at my records again, as though he’d been reading from them aloud, though he hadn’t been. “Where was I?”
“I’m not a radical,” I suggested.
“Exactly.” Nodding seriously at me, checking the items on his fingers again, he said, “You didn’t commit a crime of passion. You aren’t here because of drugs. You’re not an embezzler or an income tax evader. None of our standard prisoner categories fits your case. In one way of looking at things, you aren’t an actual criminal at all.”
Which was true enough. What, after all, had I done? I had parked a car on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway on a Sunday afternoon in early May. That, however, was an argument which had already been rejected at my trial, so I didn’t pursue it now. I merely looked eager and innocent, ready to accept whatever decision Warden Gadmore might choose to make.
“So I’m assigning you,” he said, “to license plates.”
Vision of self adorned with license plates, fore and aft; obviously not what he meant. “Sir?”
He understood that I didn’t understand. “We manufacture license plates here,” he said.
“Ah.”
“I’m assigning you,” he said, sneaking another quick look at my records to see where he was assigning me, “to the packaging shop, where the plates are enveloped and boxed.”
Solitude in a cell must be worse than I’d imagined. “Thank you, sir,” I said.
Another look at my records. “You’re eligible for parole,” he told me, “in twenty-seven months.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you’re sincere about rehabilitation—”
“Oh, I am, sir.”
“Obey our rules,” he said. “Avoid bad companions. This could prove the most beneficial two years of your life.”
“I believe that, sir.”
He gave me a quick suspicious look. My eagerness was perhaps a little more fervent than he was used to. He chose not to press the point, though, but merely said, “Good luck, then, Kunt.” (With an umlaut, I thought, but didn’t say.) “If you behave yourself, I won’t see you in this office again until you’re discharged.’’
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded past me at the guard, saying, “All right, Stoon.” Then, looking down at his desk as though I’d already left his office, he closed the file of my records and tossed it into a half-full tray on the corner of his desk.
Prison etiquette requires that the guards hold the doors for the inmates. Pretending not to know that, moving quickly while pretending to move slowly, I reached the doorknob before Guard Stoon. The chewing gum I’d been packing motionless in my left cheek I quickly palmed while turning, and pressed it to the underside of the knob as I pulled the door open. It’s a brand of gum which, so long as all the flavor hasn’t been chewed out of it, remains semi-moist and gooey for half an hour or more after leaving the chewer’s mouth.
I had opened the door, but Stoon gruffly gestured me to precede him. I did, knowing he would only be touching the knob on the other side while closing the door, and the two of us left the office building and headed across the hard dirt prison yard toward my new home.
2
MY NAME IS Harold Albert Chester Kunt. I am thirty-two years old and unmarried, though three times in my early twenties I did propose marriage to girls I’d become emotionally involved with. All three rejected me, two with embarrassments and evasions that were in a way worse than the fact of the rejection itself. Only one was honest with me, saying, “I’m sorry. I do love you, Harry, but I just can’t see spending the rest of my life as Mrs. Kunt.”
“Koont,” I said. “With an umlaut.” But it was no use.
I don’t blame my parents. They’re German, they know their name only as an ancient Germanic variation on the noun Kunst, which means art. They came to this country in 1937, Aryan anti-Nazis who emigrated not because they loved America but because they hated what had become of Germany. So far as possible, they have remained German from that day to this, living at first in Yorkville, which is the German section of Manhattan, and later in German neighborhoods in a number of smaller upstate towns. My father eventually learned to speak English almost as well as a native, but my mother is still more German than American. Neither of them has ever seemed aware of any undercover implications in the name we all share.
Well, I have. The wisecracks started when I was four years old—at least I don’t remember any from further back than that—and they haven’t stopped yet. I would have loved to change my name, but how could I explain such a move to my parents? I’m an only child, coming to them rather late in their lives, and I just couldn’t hurt them that way. “When they die,” I’d tell myself, but they’re a long-lived pair; besides, thoughts like that put me in the position of wishing for my parents’ death, which only made things worse.
I came to the early conclusion that my name was nothing more than a practical joke played on me by a rather sophomoric God. There wasn’t any way I could get even with Him directly, of course, but much could be done against that God’s wisecracking creatures here below. Over my life, much has been done.
The first practical joke I myself performed was in my eighth year, the victim being my second grade teacher, a woman with a rotten disposition and no heart, who regimented the children in her charge like a Marine Sergeant with a bunch of stockade misfits to contend with. She had a habit of sucking the eraser end of a pencil while thinking up some group punishment for a minor individual misdemeanor, and one day I gouged the gray-black eraser out of an ordinary yellow Ticonderoga pencil and replaced it with a gray-black dollop of dried dog manure carefully shaped to match. It took two days to infiltrate my loaded pencil onto her desk, but the time and planning and concentration were well worth it. Her expression when at last she put that pencil into her mouth was so glorious —she looked like a rumpled photograph of herself—that it kept the entire class happy for the rest of the school year, even without the array of frogs, thumbtacks, whoopee cushions, leaking pens, limburger cheese and dribble glasses which marched in the original eraser’s wake. That woman flailed away at her students day after day like a drunk with the d.t.’s but it didn’t matter. I was indefatigable.
And anonymous. I ve read where Chairman Mao says the guerilla is a fish who swims in the ocean of the populace, but I was already aware of that by the age of eight. The teacher invariably gave group punishments in response to my outrages, and I knew of several of my classmates who would have been happy to turn in the ‘guilty’ party if they’d had the chance, so I maintained absolute security. Besides, my activities weren’t limited to authority figures; my classmates, too, spent much of that school year awash in molasses, sneezing powder, chewing gum and exploding light bulbs, and would have loved an opportunity to chat en masse with the originator of all the fun. But I was never caught, and only once did discovery even come close; that was when a group of three fellow students entered the boys’ room while I was stretching Saran Wrap over the toilets. But I was a bright eight- year-old, and claimed to be taking the Saran Wrap off the toilets, having discovered it there just in time to avoid a nasty accident. I was congratulated on my narrow escape, and was not su
spected.
So. In the second grade, the main elements of my life were already firmly established. My name would be an object of crass humor, but I would return the insult with humor just as crass but much more decisive. And I would do so anonymously.
Until, in my thirty-second year, I would leave a carefully painted naked female mannequin sprawled leggily on the hood of a parked Chevrolet Impala on the verge of the Long Island Expressway just west of the Grand Central Parkway interchange on a sunny Sunday afternoon in early May. Returning from a neighborhood bar forty-five minutes later, I would find that one result of my prank had been a seventeen-car collison in which twenty-some people were injured, including the three children referred to by Warden Gadmore, plus two members of the Congress of the United States and the unmarried young ladies who had been sharing their car with them.
Neither the warden nor I had mentioned those Congressmen, but they were the deciding factor. Even with the injured children I might have gotten off with a suspended sentence and a warning; the Congressmen got me five to fifteen in the state pen.
3
MY FIRST CELLMATE, who was also the man I would be replacing in the license plate shop, was named Peter Corse, a stout wheezing old man with watery eyes and dough-white skin and the general aspect of a potato. When I met him he was a very bitter man. “My name is Kunt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”
And he said, “Who pays for my upper plate?”
I said, “What?”
He opened his mouth, showing me a lower set of tiny teeth of such porcelain-white falseness that they looked as though he’d stolen them from a doll. Above were gums that looked like a mountain range after a forest fire.
Thumping these gums with his doughy thumb he said, “Oo ays uh iss?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was beginning to believe I’d been locked in a cell with a mental case, a big overweight dough-white old man who was crazy as a loon. Wasn’t that unusual punishment? I looked back through the bars at the corridor, but of course Guard Stoon was already gone.