But when he didn’t respond to their attentions, the girl-boys relaxed back into routine, and left him alone. Quizzically, he noticed that inside himself he rather missed the fuss they’d made over him, and, shuddering, he told himself he had to finish this up quick, make his play before he slid down the easy chute of convict thinking.
So he concentrated on Hanning.
It was a thing he could do well — hate Hanning. The convict part of him and the copper part of him could hate Hanning equally.
Hanning didn’t bat an eye when he found Macalay in the office. He didn’t allow himself to be stared down. What Hanning might be cooking up for him, he had no way of knowing. But he was wary, even as he knew Hanning to be wary of him.
He found out something right away: Hanning was “married” to one of the file clerks. Somehow or other this surprised Macalay; it changed his opinion of Hanning from sheer hatred to something pretty close to contempt. Still, he worked on how he could put this information that he’d uncovered about Hanning to use.
For two weeks he didn’t speak to the squealer. Then the time for the annual report to the Governor came up, and the office staff were put on overtime. It meant they had to eat dinner, at least, in the office, while the rest of the population got supper in the mess halls. The P.K.’s whole career depended on those reports; if anything went wrong with them, the Warden might stop writing his book, the Deputy Warden might stay home for a while, and the P.K.’s life would be wrecked. So nothing was too good for the clerks who made out the report.
Macalay searched and searched, and finally found an opening. There was a nice little thing in the annual mess report he could use. But, instead of going right to the P.K. with it, he waited. That night he took his supper plate over to Hanning’s desk. “Hi, boy.”
Hanning looked up, startled, his face an angry white.
“I don’t want these mashed potatoes,” Macalay said. “I’ll swap them for your string beans.” Macalay made the swap quickly with his fork. Then he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Hanning. He said: “Brother, I was sure out to get you.” He forked overdone beef into his mouth. “When a guy first gets out of that Hole, he’s like an animal. Hell, man, if you hadn’t yelled, I was gonna do it myself. You probably saved my life, yellin’ when you did.”
Hanning was getting back to normal. “Well, yeah, that furnace. We’d’ve all croaked in a little while, and the P.K. — he woulda found some way of covering up.”
“That’s right,” Macalay said, and went on eating. “You holding that against me? You know — about Russ?”
Hanning shook his head, his eyes glistening with relief. “That bastard?” he said shrilly, in his eagerness to square things with Macalay.
Macalay dropped it then, but he kept on talking to Hanning once in awhile — just casually for a couple of days. At the end of that time he gave Hanning’s sweetie — they called him Piney — a knitted muffler Leon’s mother had sent him.
Then Macalay went to the P.K. He was very careful to stand at attention while he talked. “Sir, about the mess hall report.”
The P.K. growled, but it wasn’t the growl he’d used at previous interviews. This one took place in the polite office, too. “What about it?”
“I notice the Principal Keeper says that food costs went up three percent in the last year.”
“Yeah?”
“I went over to the library and looked it up. Overall food costs in the country went up eight percent. Instead of apologizing, the prison can claim an actual reduction in costs of five percent.”
The P.K. looked pleased. But he hated to be nice to anyone. “Yeah?” he said. “I can claim it, but can I make it stick?”
“I want to make a chart on it. A graph.”
“Hey, that’s all right. Yeah, you do that.”
“I’ll need some help. I’ll have to go talk to the steward, and the chief cook. Get the real dope. Make it look professional. I could do it myself, but it’d take me a week. Two guys could get it all done in half a day.”
“Okay. Take any of the clerks you want.”
So the next morning found Macalay and Hanning in the kitchen. Macalay had worked it smoothly; Hanning’s last suspicion was gone. He should have known all along that a squealer would also be yellow. Hanning behaved like any other greedy weakling let loose in the kitchen; went around nibbling stuff, bumming coffee, flirting with one of the fry-cooks till he got a steak broiled in butter.
The kitchen activity was rising to the noontime peak. Lunch had to be gotten out; three thousand cons had to eat. Nobody paid any attention to anybody else.
Macalay got a piece of rag out of his pocket; it was used to dust typewriters, but this one was fresh. He slipped a boning knife from a butcher block, wrapped the rag around the handle, moved it up and down a couple of times to remove prints, and palmed it under the clipboard he was taking notes on.
He said: “Hanning, you got to help me a couple of minutes.”
Hanning was talking to his friend, the fry-cook. “Aw, Mac...”
“You’ve goofed off all morning. I’ll have to bring one of the other clerks back with me after lunch if—”
“All right, all right.”
Macalay led the way to a meat box. If Hanning had any suspicions left, they must have disappeared when he saw how casually Macalay let him take the rear. They walked into the box, and Macalay gestured with his pencil hand; the other held the clipboard and the knife. “We gotta make a count of those carcasses,” he said. “You go along and call out to me, lamb, beef, pork, whatever they are. Only take us a minute.”
Hanning stepped forward towards the chilled meat. Macalay kicked the heavy vault door shut, and put the pencil in his pocket.
He said: “Turn, Hanning. Turn and take it.”
Hanning turned, his mouth open to say something. Then he saw the knife, and his mouth stayed open. But the color ran out of his face. He was standing by a big side of mutton, and his face, which had been the color of the red meat, ran down the scale until it just matched the suet.
“You think you were going to squeal and get away with it?” Macalay asked. “You got soft in the head, just because I talked easy to you.”
Hanning’s Adam’s apple was jerking up and down like there was a fish hook in and somebody was playing it with a reel.
“Go on and yell,” Macalay said. “These boxes are soundproof.”
“You — you—”
“Let me do the talking,” Macalay said. “You’re trying to say I can’t get away with it. You’re wrong. Nobody saw us come in here. And in this cold, your body’ll stiffen so fast, the docs’ll never be able to say what time you got it. And I got alibis for every minute of my time — from when I checked with the steward out there, and him with one eye on the clock that tells him when to serve lunch, till ten minutes ago, when your friend Piney’s gonna swear I was in the office with him.”
“Piney?” Hanning asked. Blood — maybe the blood that had drained out of his cheeks — was flooding the whites of his eyes, tracing red veins across them. “Piney’s gonna—”
“Piney don’t love you any more,” Macalay said. “Nobody loves a squealer. Anyway, Piney wants a guy who can look after him. Dead men don’t.”
He raised the knife, holding it in front of his chest, fist around the wooden handle, hand turned over. He walked towards Hanning.
And it was hard for him not to hurry, not to step forward fast and let the knife do the work. The dirty squealer! It wasn’t right that a snitch should live in the world of decent cons!
The knife would do it. It was sharp and thin, worn down to a sliver of the finest steel. It would go in the soft space between the breast bones and slide up, easy as taking a drink, up to the left and into the heart, and there’d be one squealer less to stink up the world.