Macalay knew that. Every cop knows that. It’s bad for your record.
And why? So the P.K. could keep his own record clear. So he could have a real reason to use the torture that was as necessary to him as grass to a cow, water to a fish.
Macalay, back from the Hole, back from the depths of his convict-thinking, summed it up. I’m in stir, but good, not a con holds my police background against me. I’ve got that, and it’s one thing I figured right from the start I had to get.
And I’ve got one other thing: I know how to handle the P.K., and the P.K. is the prison. The whole prison. But my neck is still in a noose. I got to act like I’m expected to act. The cons will expect me to get Hanning for squealing. I’ve got to make that play, and cross the next bridge when and if.
Macalay laughed inside, thinking of Strane smashing cockroaches, Strane, who should be retired, sitting on his old ass telling him he’d have to be tough. But Macalay’s face never moved a muscle. The screws didn’t like it if you laughed in the march-along.
He marched into the mess hall, eyes in front of him, hands at his sides as per regulations; but he had learned to see a lot without looking. He saw Hanning two files over, and Hanning saw him. Hanning’s look said, “Come on, you sonofabitch, I’m ready.” He saw Jock one file on the other side of him, and Jock didn’t look like he’d ever get his strength back. The P.K. had broken Jock; the P.K. could break anyone in time. Including Macalay.
Leon was on one side of him, and that was no good to him at all. But the man on the other side of him was an old stir-bum, Lefty something-or-other. As they bowed their heads and stood behind the benches, he gathered his breath; and as the chaplain started the grace, he told Lefty: “Hanning’s my meat and nobody else’s. Pass it.”
The Chaplain finished and they sat down and the bowls were placed on their tables: hot dogs, vinegary sauerkraut, boiled potatoes and watery spinach. Macalay speared hot dogs and potatoes and took his bread and Leon’s to make sandwiches; it takes twenty years to learn to eat prison sauerkraut. As the new head of Jock’s Jockies, he probably should have taken Leon’s sausages, too, but he couldn’t do it.
He knew the word was passing down the long tables. It was a thing that the rifle-screws on the balcony, and the swagger-stick screws walking up and down between the benches couldn’t stop; it happened at every meal that somebody passed the word. But never a lip moved, and not a wave of sound went anywhere but where it was aimed.
We’ve suspended the laws of physics, Macalay thought. We can make a tunnel out of air, and shoot sound through it! We ought to be studied by some of the eggheads at the colleges.
He reached out and scooped up Leon’s margarine, buttered a sandwich with it.
Leon looked at him sadly.
There was a commotion behind them, aways. The rifle-guards on the balcony stiffened at the rail, raking the place with their guns. Leon said: “What happened?”
A screw yelled: “Shut up, you! No talking in the mess hall,” and poked Leon in his back with his swagger-stick.
Macalay said: “Somebody passed out. The stinkin’ food they give you, you never know if it’s to be eaten or if it’s already been eaten. It’s a mystery somebody doesn’t pass out every meal.”
Nobody but Leon heard him say it.
The doors to the yard opened and two white-shirted trusties with a stretcher came in, trotting. The chug-chug of the infirmary’s old ambulance could be heard outside the door.
A gentle wind ran across the mess hall. Lefty let a breath of it go at Macalay. “Jock lost his lunch. He passed out.”
Macalay said: “A lunch like this ain’t much loss.” And he thought that with Jock laid up, Hanning became unquestionably his meat. It was up to him now.
The mess hall trusties served rice pudding.
5.
The P.K. assigned Macalay to the concrete block plant. It was rough work; pick up a shovel of cement, heave it in the hopper, follow it with a few shovels of sand, a few of gravel, one of stones and turn and do the same thing to the mixer on the other side.
It was work that left your arms trembling long after you were on your cot in the cell with the lights out and the radio earphones turned off. Macalay was the only man in the yard who had to tend two mixers at one time. His bad shoulder nearly killed him at night.
He heard Jock was in the clay-brick yard, unloading kilns. That wasn’t bad work, if the screws let the kilns cool before you had to unload them. He heard they didn’t with Jock. The P.K. was still riding both him and Jock.
Then he heard that Hanning had been given a job in the office, filing papers for the P.K.
That night he wrote a letter to Miss Billie Martin, Box 1151. He had to make an effort to remember the number.
Two days later he was hauled out of his cell right after lunch and told the P.K. wanted him.
Even though he knew what it was about, he felt the old thrill of fear go through his stomach and the small of his back. He didn’t even like to hear about the P.K. anymore; the P.K. was the cons’ favorite conversation piece.
But this time there weren’t screws in the office; it wasn’t even the same office. It was the one where the P.K. did his front work, a pleasant place with a trusty typing away at a desk, and the P.K. behind a bigger one, with a bookcase behind him, full of books on criminology and penology and institute management which he had never read.
Opposite him was Inspector Strane. He looked around as Macalay came to attention, his heels clicking.
The P.K. said: “All right, Macalay. At ease. The Inspector here has some questions to ask you.”
Inspector Strane said: “No use taking up your time, Mr. Odell.”
Odell, that was the P.K.’s name. He had another of those triangle things on this desk, like he had in the other room, the room that was plain and slick, so blood wouldn’t stain anything.
The P.K. said: “I like to cooperate.”
“And I appreciate it. But I would like to talk to Macalay alone now. If we could just have a little room to talk in, a cell, anything.”
“I ain’t likely to put a city police inspector in a cell. You g’wan an’ use my other office. You want somebody to take notes?”
“No.” Inspector Strane had not looked at Macalay. “You can’t get anything out of a convict if notes are being taken, Mr. Odell.”
“You can’t get anything out of Macalay anyway,” the P.K. said. “He’s one of the worst troublemakers in this can. I wisht you’da framed a more docile guy to send here.”
The Inspector was as stiff-backed as ever. “I don’t frame people, Mr. Odell.”
“That was a joke,” the P.K. said. “Just a joke. Okay, Strauss, take Inspector Strane over to my other office, take Macalay with him. You don’t have to stay with them, jus’ make sure Macalay don’t have a shiv on him. I don’t want any cops getting killed in my stir.”
The screw, Strauss, saluted. He snapped his fingers at Macalay to right-about-face; Macalay did. The Inspector followed them out. The P.K. said: “You guys on the cops don’t have any idea what we gotta put up with. You see the best side of them, when they still think they maybe are gonna beat the rap.”
When they were alone, Macalay stood at attention in front of the P.K.’s desk.
The Inspector, behind the desk, said: “All right, Mac, all right. Break it off.”
Macalay said: “Yes, sir.”
Strane’s eyes widened. Then he nodded, slowly, and began sliding the desk drawers open, slowly, smoothly, as though he’d once been trained as a second-story man. He found the mike in the middle drawer, left-hand side. He sat staring down at it for a moment, and then slowly grinned. He took his hat — his good felt hat — and jammed it down over the mike. Then he shut the drawer again. “There,” he said. “Sit down, Mac.”