Of course, Matthews thought, the system required Georgies. It might be that justice itself required Georgies.
He became a punk, a snitch, a white rat, the man never to be used honorably, since he respected only the threat of violence, who could, for the good vainly done him, return only treachery. Fear was his only friend and master. The wise hard-hearted English politician had correctly foretold Georgie Laplace — his soul was a slave's.
Poor Georgie, thought Matthews, fishing through the young man's paper. The guy's worst affliction was his sharp comprehension. He scudded around the state's jail system with his intelligence soldered to his back like a bottle rocket pinned by a State School sadist to a frog. He even had the wit not to ask why. It made him interesting company. It made him worth fighting for sometimes.
Matthews and his client conferred in a chapel in the jail's old wing, a relic of gentler days. The chapel had been temporarily divided by partitions of wallboard and Plexiglas that reached a third of the way to the ceiling and were being slowly vandalized.
There were a couple of conferences in progress that afternoon, and quarters were close. The two guards, whom the inmates called "hacks," could hear every conversation from their station. Matthews's young client, across the misted plastic and dirty wallboard, looked frightened out of his wits.
Thirty-five feet away, at another partition, a maniac called Brand was in what looked like flirtatious conversation with a tall toothy red-headed woman. It was of Brand that Georgie Laplace was particularly frightened.
"He's gonna break my fingers, man," Georgie told his lawyer. "He said that. He told me he was gonna break my fingers at lunch."
Georgie's half-whispered, stuttering terror was distracting to Matthews, who was trying to extract Georgie's particulars from a welter of false and misleading documents.
Matthews put his glasses on to look at Brand, a kind of local character, though quite a dangerous one. Matthews had seen him before: a man about thirty, powerfully built. He had curly blond hair that cascaded over his brows with cavalier deviltry. In spite of his silly fair mustache, girls, often to their subsequent regret, found him wicked cute.
Brand, without question, was destined for the hospital. The word on the block was that to get into the hospital you had to do something queer enough to make the tabloids. If you pulled weird shit, maimed some fuck, you might get hospital time. Matthews was also taken with the man's visitor, who seemed to represent the educated classes.
"Brand's gonna break my fingers, no shit," Georgie was saying.
Brand's visitor had laid out a set of tarot cards on the surface provided on her side of the barrier. She seemed to be charting her patient's destiny.
"Did he tell you he'd break your fingers?" Matthews asked.
"Fuckin'-A right he told me! He says, 'What you bet I can break your fingers? Not everybody could do it,' he says. 'Most wouldn't do it,' he says."
"So what did you say to that?" Matthews asked.
"What did I say? What would you say?"
"Keep your voice down," Matthews said.
The young woman sat very tall. She wore an ankle-length suede skirt and boots and a turtleneck top that favored, in Matthews's view, the swell of her small breasts and firm shoulders.
Matthews watched them. The woman was laughing at something Brand had said, and Matthews felt a rush of what he thought might be a very basic form of sexual jealousy. Here, safely confined, we had self-selected alpha man, recognizable by his readiness to snap off your digits on a whim, exchanging a few sexual signifiers with the condescending female of the species. It wasn't pretty, but it was the real thing.
"Hey, counselor," Georgie wailed. Instinctively, he lowered his voice. "How about gettin' me out of this tank?"
"Lay low for a while," Matthews whispered. They both watched Brand. "You know how it's done. Hey, who's the broad with him? Not his wife?"
Georgie almost smiled. "She's a shrink, man. She's his shrink."
"With tarot cards?"
"She's, like, telling his fortune," Georgie explained.
"Okay," Matthews told him. "Just stay away from him. Try not to attract his attention."
"Oh, yeah," Georgie said. "Good fuckin' luck."
"I'll have a word with the administration tomorrow. We'll get you moved. Trust me."
Georgie's face fell. "Tomorrow? I thought today. You got my hopes up."
"You're too much of an optimist. Some things can't be done in a day. Make it through the night," Matthews said. "You'll be okay tomorrow."
Matthews watched his client walk out of the chapel. And sure enough, the man called Brand, ignoring his pretty adviser, turned predatory eyes on Georgie Laplace.
The prison-rights people called the place a "zoo," but it was worse, Matthews thought; it was a fish tank, a vivarium. The men in it had been reduced beyond apes; they were devolving into the stuff under the pine needles on the forest floor. Some of them bit. The big ones ate the little ones.
So Matthews had to picture Brand and Laplace back there in the supposedly secure new wing. Jeopardy! on the box, Georgie Laplace sitting on his hands, ignoring his baloney sandwich, watching for his enemy. On one side, Brand, precognitive superman; on the other, Georgie Laplace, Baconian villain.
Matthews stuffed his papers in the case and started out. He felt depressed and edgy; angry, too. It was the wretched, dangerous time of day, and he was all the things the program said you should not be. Hungry. Angry. Alone.
The pretty counselor still had her tarot cards spread out on the surface of the barrier. She called after her client.
"Don't forget to take your meds, Mr. Brand."
Brand turned and laughed at her, possessor of a beautiful secret. Matthews shuddered. He stopped in the chapel doorway for a moment and felt something move against his foot. One of the jailhouse cats, a huge gray eunuch, wrapping itself against his calf and ankle. Part Persian, with a fluffy neck and huge stupid eyes, the cat was a survivor of milder, homelier days at the jail. The old main section had looked like the Big House in a Cagney movie, but had been in fact a reasonable place where the sheriff and his family lived with their cats. There were no family accommodations now, and the surviving cats simply made trouble.
Matthews pulled his foot away.
"Beat it," he told the thing. On the whole, he liked cats. "Scram."
A broad-breasted, tough-looking, gray-haired woman came through the door and took the cat in her arms.
"Jackie," she said to it. "Hey, Jackie, watcha doin' in the chapel?" She was wearing a ski outfit and a New England Patriots watch cap. "Watcha doin', huh?"
A hack beside the chapel door said, "Hi, Sister."
"Hiya, Charlie." She stroked the cat under its chin and looked at Matthews. "Hiya, bub. Lawyer, are ya?"
"That's me," Matthews said.
The woman was called Sister Sophia. She was a nun or an ex-nun; Matthews had never got it quite clear. She functioned as a social worker, employed by one of the neighboring service agencies, and as the prison's Catholic chaplain. For her part, she seemed a jolly soul. She had seen him many times before but seemed never to be able to distinguish one lawyer from another.
With the cat slung across her forearm, she looked over the chapel, where the young psychologist was carefully wrapping her tarot deck in a beige silk handkerchief.
"I see something I don't like," the nun said. She carried the cat out through an open metal door, released it into the office area and came back. "I see a lot of superstitious — I don't want to use the S-word!"