Exact Revenge

by Tim Green

  Lester puts his hand on my arm.

  “There was a cistern,” he says, dropping his voice to the faintest whisper, “below this block. There’s a tunnel down in this shit in the basement. The tunnel goes west toward the shop. Halfway there, there’s a manhole. Welded shut. It took me eight years to break the seal. I’ve spent ten more clearing out the overflow pipe inside the cistern. It goes through the wall. The end of it’s buried under the Owasco Outlet. It runs just the other side of the south wall. It’s full of water most of the year, but in late summer the water level drops and you can get in there. I’m almost through.

  “I see what you think,” he says. “The way you roll your eyes sometimes when I talk. But it’s real, kid. It’s all real.”

  23

  THE SLIDE CHANGED, and Lexis stared hard at the low country cottage surrounded by a brooding sky. A small peat fire, a single splash of brilliant orange in a world of gloom, fought bravely, if hopelessly, against the bold brushstrokes of van Gogh’s tempest. The screen went black and the lights went on.

  Everyone around the long table clapped and blinked in the direction of the curator, who took a slight bow and thanked them all for coming. He’d see them next month and he hoped they would enjoy the exhibit. Lexis left the room, passing by the others piling up outside the elevator. Important people pushing and jostling like everyone else. Lexis would rather walk.

  On the outside, the Guggenheim is like an upside-down wedding cake. Inside, the exhibit space is the walls along a long slow spiraling walkway that climbs from the ground floor to the top. Lexis was halfway down the ramp on the Level 4 Rotunda when she heard her name and stopped.

  Hurrying after her was Pablo Truscan, the long-legged art critic from the New York Times. Truscan looked more like an undertaker with his gray skin and sunken eyes. He had an old-fashioned, droopy mustache. When he caught her, he touched behind his ear before taking her hand.

  “I heard about your paintings,” he said. “I’d love to see them.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m flattered but I’m afraid I don’t show them.”

  Lexis turned to go, but Truscan hurried after her.

  “I understand,” the critic said, touching his ear. “It’s just that I’ve heard about all the pain and emotion in them.”

  Lexis continued down the museum’s broad spiraling walkway, her shoes slapping against the smooth floor. She could hear Truscan breathing hard. At the second level she stopped in front of a Chagall painting, Around Her.

  Pointing at the face of Chagall’s dead wife, she said, “He lived for her. That’s pain people want to look at. Not mine.”

  Lexis began to walk more quickly and Truscan dropped back. Outside, she squinted and made a visor of her hand against the summer sunshine. From the corner of her eye she saw a man in a blue blazer and gray slacks stand up from a bench and approach her. There was something familiar.

  “Lexis?” he said, stepping in front of her.

  She jumped.

  “It’s me, Dan Parsons.”

  Raymond’s mentor still had that round red face, but he wore glasses now instead of contacts, thick ones with brown plastic frames that magnified eyes whose sparkle had dimmed. His nose seemed bigger and the curly white hair had receded nearly to the top of his head. He offered her what was left of that once-broad smile and she smiled back.

  “Dan, I’m sorry, I just-”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You were thinking. Are you in a hurry? Could you walk a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  They crossed Fifth Avenue and walked into Central Park, where they took the path that circled the pond.

  “Last time I saw you, I was still with my firm,” Dan said. Broad green trees towered above them and sunlight scattered the blacktop path.

  “And you’re not practicing now?”

  “Here and there. More money in the stock market,” he said, then gave an abrupt laugh. “Until it tanked, anyway. I was up there pretty good. Rode the bubble. Had my own plane. A Falcon. But you know, easy come-”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I hate to ask,” he said. “I know it’s been a long time and people generally don’t like to bring up the past, but I’m in a pretty tight spot. I remember what you tried to do for Raymond’s dad so I thought, maybe.”

  “What do you mean tried to do?” she asked. She had given Paul Russo twenty thousand dollars in cash to help Raymond’s father when she heard from Dan that he was in serious financial trouble.

  “Oh?” Dan said. He stuffed his hands in his pant pockets, looked at her, and then quickly away. “I thought you knew.”

  “What?”

  “He… well, you know how Raymond’s father was.”

  “Was? He died?”

  “That winter. After we spoke. They turned off his heat.”

  “But Paul Russo was going to give him the money. Anonymously,” Lexis said, stopping and gripping Dan’s arm.

  Dan shrugged. “He was proud, Lexis. Too proud, really.”

  “Russo,” Lexis said, “that son of a bitch.”

  She shook her head and scowled out at the rippled surface of the pond.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened,” Dan said, leading her along by the arm. “Listen, I’ve got a deal that’s pretty exciting. It’s just what I need, but the banks are all scared as hell right now and, well, I know your husband and Bob Rangle are pretty close and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind, Lexis.

  “If I could just get a meeting with him. Someone to jar his memory to the fact that I was a pretty decent contributor of his. That’s all I need. So that’s it. That’s where I am. Can I buy you a hot dog?”

  They had come to the path’s end at an entrance on Fifth Avenue. Lexis shook her head no and said, “Thank you.”

  “I’ll have one,” Dan said to the vendor, “and a Coke. You want a Coke?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Of course I’ll talk to Frank for you, Dan. Do you have a card or something I could give him to call you?”

  “Right here,” he said, removing a card along with the ten-dollar bill he gave to the vendor. “Hey, I want you to know, I didn’t come here to track you down at your meeting. I had some business and I just figured-”

  “No, that’s all right,” Lexis said. “I’ll try. It’s just that Frank is so busy.”

  Dan bit into his hot dog, leaving a streak of mustard on his lip, and shrugged.

  “Whatever you can do. I understand completely. The old days are… uncomfortable sometimes.”

  “And gone,” she said, offering a weak smile and waving to a cab.

  “That too,” Dan said, opening the door for her and licking at the mustard.

  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,” she said, getting in. “I do. Every day.”

  24

  LESTER QUICKLY SHOWS ME how to spin the drill bit using a small block of wood for the handle. It takes us an entire night of drilling to punch one small hole in the steel. When I ask about the hacksaw blade, he explains that he wore it out completely working his way through the welded seal of the manhole. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that twelve months is a reasonable goal for an opening big enough to squeeze through.

  We sleep in shifts and nap during the day. Every waking minute, I am either reading or Lester is teaching me things. Things he knows and things from books he gets at the library. I feel like a man who has a drink after being too distracted to know he was thirsty. Lester is right about the other inmates. They’re dogs and I treat them that way. I ignore their barking and, so far, none of them bite.

  I use the time when Lester is working his maintenance job to keep doing my katas and my push-ups and sit-ups. Lester sees me one day and criticizes my training. He says karate without grappling is like a gun without bullets.

  “Kid,” he says, “if you want to kick the ass of a bad man, you have to get in close.”

  He is old and bent, but he teaches me anyway. At fi
rst, I feel silly with my hands wrapped around his thin bones, twisting against the grain of his knotted joints. But whenever I think I’ve really got him, he pokes a pressure point that I never knew about and sends me reeling in pain.

  Lester also teaches me about poison.

  “It has always been the erudite way to kill someone,” he says. “In case something goes wrong-not that it will-and you end up back in here, you’ll be glad to have it.”

  The second man Lester killed in prison, he got with antifreeze. The Colombian he got with arsenic. For nearly two hundred years, the prison has stuffed rat poison down its holes. The sediment down in the basement is thick with it. Lester scraped the crust off his work clothes into a small plastic bottle, filled it with water, and spun it like a pinwheel on a string. A homemade centrifuge.

  “How do you get it into their drink?” I ask.

  “When I did the antifreeze, I was working the chow line,” he says, “but they won’t let me in there anymore. With the arsenic, I got a little eyedropper from the hospital, walked up to him, told him a funny joke, and squirted it right in his mouth.”

  “What was the joke?” I ask.

  “If you and your friends don’t leave me alone, I’m going to have to kill you.”

  “Real funny.”

  “To him it was.”

  Every day, they give Lester a pill for his heart. He says there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s standard procedure in this country once you turn seventy to start taking heart medicine. When the hole in our cell is almost ready, he begins to break off small bits of his pills so he’ll have enough to get him through the first two weeks of our escape.

  “After that,” he says, “I’ll be in New Zealand.”

  We are lying in our bunks, waiting for the lockdown before we begin work. It is summertime and the air is hot and heavy, cooked over with the smell of human sweat, stale air, and fresh paint. My brow is beaded with sweat. I am wearing just my undershorts, and my arms are splayed out to my sides so my pits can dry.

  Lester drones on about New Zealand. I am studying Fragonard’s eighteenth-century painting, a picture of happiness. The woman is happy, sailing up into the sunlight with her lover below. The lover is happy, he can see her wares beneath the ballooning petticoats. The husband is happy too, because he is ignorant of all this, an aging man with a fashionable and lovely young wife. I was ignorant too.

  I am quiet after Lester finishes about New Zealand. He is waiting for me to reveal my own wistful plans. I know this because he’s mentioned it to me before, that if we get out we need to catch up on all the good things, put the past and all the bad things behind.

  We hear the call of the guards up and down the block, and the lights go out. We are quiet for several minutes as the small bedtime noises of five hundred killers slowly wind down.

  “We will escape,” Lester says, as if he were in the midst of a heated argument.

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” I say.

  “Then why don’t you ever talk about your plans?” he asks.

  “A wise man speaks because he has something to say,” I say, quoting Plato back at him, “a fool because he has to say something.”

  “And if you were a fool? What would you say, kid?” he asks. “Are you afraid of what I’d think about your grand plan for revenge?”

  “Who said that was my plan?”

  “Aristotle said it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,” he says. “You’re an open book, kid, and even though I am against what you’re planning, I love you enough to tell you that if you’re going to succeed, you need to become more of a cipher than you are.”

  “Meaning?”

  Lester sighs.

  “I had a son,” he says. “His name was Seth. Died when he was eight. It was the year I killed the prison guard. I don’t know, I think if he hadn’t died, I never would have tried a museum.”

  “I thought you had a small van Gogh?” I ask. My blood rises. Even after all this time, I am afraid of being duped. There is still a small voice inside my head telling me Lester is a fake, a brilliantly colorful fake. That we will get out of this cell and there will be no manhole. No cistern.

  He is laughing quietly at me, as if he knows what I’m thinking. He says, “I did. But everything I stole until Seth died was from private collections. The market for stolen masterpieces is every bit as lively and lucrative as the ones auctioned at Sotheby’s. Everything I stole was already stolen. Until Seth died… I guess I stopped caring.

  “But,” he says, “my point is this. We would play chess, my kid and I. He was good. Exceptional, really. Had my noggin. Even more. But he was a kid, and so he’d always be looking at the pieces he wanted to move. I’d watch his eyes and know what move he was thinking about before he even did it. Like you, kid. I see it in your eyes. The hatred. The determination. Everyone else is gonna see it too.”

  “I don’t care if they see it,” I say. I can feel heat in my veins. My voice is louder than it should be.

  “Like Carl. He doesn’t care,” Lester says, and the image of that doughy mass murderer fills my mind. The ear-to-ear grin when he scoops up a spoonful of corn. The consternation over a plate full of olive-colored peas. An open book.

  “You think I want to be here?”

  “You’re safe here, kid, behind these walls,” Lester says. “Just like Carl. For instance, what are you going to do about her?”

  The breath goes out of me.

  “I… you…” I say.

  “I read all about it,” he says. “The whole joint talked about it back then. But you were convicted and then that winter the space shuttle went down and then there was Colonel Ghadafi and Libya and people forgot about Raymond White.

  “I did too, but I was interested in the players. To see how the tragedy played out. I saw in the newspaper when the girl married a cop and I watched him become a big shot in the casino world and move to New York City. Every once in a while you’ll see him standing behind the governor in some group shot. The DA, Villay, he’s a federal judge. Maybe on his way to the Supreme Court.

  “Then there was the guy who got the congressional seat after you were arrested. Rangle. He’s out of politics now, but he made the most of it. He married one of those fancy society women and moves money around on Wall Street. I always found it… interesting how well all three of them did…

  “The girl too, I suppose.”

  “And why do you suppose that?”

  “I just don’t know much about her,” Lester says. “They don’t write about her. Just him. He’s a little shady. Got caught up in a racketeering probe of some real estate development company. She’s still there, though. I saw a picture of her next to him in the New York Post when he got cleared.”

  I realize that my hands are clenched around the folds of the bedsheet and my teeth clamped tight. I am breathing through my nose, practically snorting.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” I ask.

  “Next Tuesday is a new moon,” he says. “We’ll be leaving. I didn’t want you to dwell on it, but I don’t want you to do something stupid either.”

  “Like walk up to him on the street and blow his fucking head off?”

  “I’ve taught you almost everything I know, kid,” he says. “I’d hate to see all that go to waste. You could have a nice life for yourself. Isn’t it enough to be free?”

  “No,” I say, “it’s not. You’re the one with the rule about exacting revenge.”

  “That’s for in here,” he says.

  “Not to me,” I say.

  I get down from the bunk and hold out my hand for the drill bit. Lester gives it to me and I softly pound it into its block handle. I press the bit into the corroding plate next to last night’s hole. The toilet bowl is damp and cool against my cheek. I push and grind. Push and grind, letting the sharp steel edge bite into the plate, shaving out thin curly strips a micrometer at a time.

  Soon, I hear the rattle of keys. The f
irst walk-by always includes a night count. They do two a night. I climb into my bunk and close my eyes. I hear the footsteps of the guard. My eyelids glow briefly red as he swipes the beam of his flashlight over my face. In minutes, I hear him walking back down the company. Keys rattle again and the door hums and the latch clanks into place. I slip down off the bunk. Lester is asleep and I go back to work.

  I was in jail eighteen years before I came here. I spent six months in the box. It’s been just over a year since we started to drill. The final week passes like a blink. Lester encourages me not to eat much. The thinner I am, the easier it will be to fit through the hole. That’s not a problem. I’m not hungry anyway.

  It’s time.

  25

  MY HEART POUNDS against my ribs. I glance over my shoulder and up at the window. I see nothing but the faint reflection of bars. The moon is dark. Lester and I always whisper, but tonight our hissing can barely be heard. Our bunks are stuffed with quietly crumpled newspaper. We have saved our own hair clippings and stuck them onto the papier-mâché masks that Lester has painted to look like us. In each of our pockets is a small Ziploc bag that contains some cash Lester has hoarded over the years as well as a detailed road map of central New York.

  I hear the quiet snap of metal, Lester twisting our escape hatch free from the thin mooring that held it in place. The other edges we have filed smooth. We have bailed out the toilet, draining it into the sink. The pipe lies on the floor in the corner.

  Lester squirms through the hole and waves to me. I am naked, glazed in Vaseline. I pass my clothes through, then slip my head into the hole along with my right arm. My left shoulder gets stuck and I feel the bite of the steel. A bead of sweat falls from my nose. I squirm and a small noise sneaks out of my throat. Lester hushes me quietly and whispers that it will be all right. Relax.

  I feel his twisted hands on my head and back. He turns me gently, the way a doctor will deliver a child, easing me through the hole. My hips stick, but only for a moment. I am out. I stand with my bare feet on the narrow iron grid of the catwalk. The stink of sewage rises up on the back of the exhausted heat, but my spirit soars. I stand there, greased and naked in this new world. I want to raise my hands over my head and cry out, but instead, I quickly pull on my clothes.