‘I like you, Louie, I really do. You remind me of a man I used to know, a friend of mine, he’s dead now, he was just like you.’
‘Who was he, your pimp?’
‘My brother, sort of.’
‘What you mean is, the man was you. The man you used to be before you lost your soul. It’s a corny routine; I’ve seen it too many times before.’
‘The reason you resist is, you know it’s true.’
‘One phone call away.’
‘You’ve got me wrong. We’re both fighting for the same thing. I told you before, heads on sticks, that’s what it all comes down to.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re on the wrong side, the side of the bad guys.’
‘And who are the good guys?’
‘Man called Big Nose George Parrott. But that wouldn’t mean anything to you. Big Nose George Parrott is one of the people they never tell you about.’
‘They told me, he ended up as a pair of shoes. Is that what you want out of life? Your greatest ambition is to be a pair of shoes?’
‘You would never understand.’
He began to slide sideways and shuffled his body to get upright again. ‘You really going to leave me tied up here while my little girl waits for her daddy to call?’
I gave him a stony stare and he laughed. ‘I love you, Louie, I really do. Only a man too decent for his own good could come up with a plan as crap as that. You need to be a tough guy, you see, but you’re not a tough guy, so there’s no point trying to play one when you’ve got a heart made of white chocolate candy.’
‘You can push that button once too many times. I’m not that nice.’
‘Let me tell you about Big Nose George Parrott. I spent ten years once living among the Big Nose George Parrotts. A long time ago I was a prison guard out at the Cardiganshire State Penitentiary at Tregaron Bog. You know that place?’
‘Tregaron Pen? Who doesn’t?’
‘They’ve closed it now, but when it was still going it was a bad prison, full of terrible brutality. You think I’m no good, you should have seen the rest of the guards. Your old school games teacher was one of them.’
‘Herod Jenkins?’
He laughed. ‘They never told you that? Oh yes. He was in charge of the chain gang, sat all day on his horse, holding a shotgun. With a sour look on his face.’
‘I know that look.’
‘I have to say, building a place like that in the middle of Tregaron Bog was a nice touch; whoever thought of that knew what he was doing. There were a lot of shallow graves in that bog, and the people who had dug them were inside the prison.’
‘They say criminals always return to the scene of the crime.’
‘They do say that, don’t they? What do they call that?’
‘Ironic.’
‘No, there’s a word for it . . .’
‘Living above the shop?’
‘No, it’s biological, like parasitical.’
‘Symbiosis.’
‘That’s it!’ He looked pleased, like someone completing the crossword. ‘Symbiosis.’
‘I guess it would have made it hard to tunnel out. Prisoners are a superstitious lot.’
‘That’s true. They were happy to risk the gunshot from the man on the horse, but most of them drew the line at tunnelling through a bone yard.’
‘Where does Big Nose George Parrott fit in?’
‘Whole place was full of people like him. I was there the day they took over. Many of the inmates were in for terrible crimes, on multiple life sentences without possibility of parole. That means there was no hope, and without hope a man loses interest in behaving like a civilised person. It was a pressure cooker and one day it blew. There was a riot. The procedure in a situation like that was straightforward: we got out of there as fast as we could and locked it down. Leave them to have their fun and work off the excess energy. No hurry. Turn the electricity off, call up the national guard, and order the pizzas. You think you know me, but you don’t know the half of it. You can’t know until you know what I’ve seen. Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Nix.’
‘How about a cigarette – they’re in my jacket pocket.’ I nodded assent and fished a packet out of his pocket and a lighter. I put the cigarette between his lips and lit it. A moment of unsettling intimacy. He stared up at me, his face less than a foot away.
‘Thanks,’ he said, the cigarette still between his lips. I took it out for him and he carried on with his story.
‘A few guards were trapped on the inside, but they were lucky. They died quickly. The ones who weren’t so lucky were in the segregation wing. That was where we kept the prisoners who had to be protected from the others. Some of them were in on sexual charges, with minors, but many were there because they had given evidence against the other inmates at trial. Normally, they shouldn’t have been in the same prison as the folks their testimony sent down, but this wasn’t a normal sort of prison.’ He stopped and I put the cigarette back between his lips. He took a couple of puffs and so we carried on.
‘Once it all kicked off, the first thing everybody did was raid the infirmary. They drank the rubbing alcohol and filled their mouths with fistfuls of drugs, any drugs, it didn’t matter. If it was pharmaceutical they took it. Soon they were insane. They knew the national guard would show up and retake the prison, but they also knew it would be a few days before that happened. In the meantime, they were going to let off some steam. The prison was laid out in concentric rings with the segregation block at the centre. We surrendered two rings but kept to the outer one, which had the towers. It gave us a ringside seat. So we sat up there eating pizza and watching. It’s not something you would want to watch, but somehow you just can’t tear your gaze away. Even if you did, you could still hear it and that was worse.’ He paused and looked at me and it was as if the mask of facetiousness and irony slipped from his face and I saw fear.
‘Crazed on alcohol and drugs and the pent-up fury that comes from years of brutal abuse in a prison which you are never going to leave save in a wooden box, they broke into the segregation block. It took a while because they had electrical central locking and the power was down. They were all carrying torches like in a medieval witch hunt. At first, all they could do was hurl abuse at the segregated prisoners. The block was one long corridor, with the cells arranged down one side, with floor-to-ceiling bars. So although they could see each other pretty good, the men couldn’t get in to the cells. This went on for a while until one of the prisoners turned up with oxy-acetylene cutting gear they’d found somewhere. They started cutting. The bars in a place like that are toughened steel; it’s not easy to cut. It takes a while. You’ve got to remember, the guys trying to get in knew the segregated prisoners personally. They saw them in court and they had seen them from a distance, sometimes, through a window, across a yard. They knew them. These were the men whose evidence had sent them down for life without parole. And now they were inches away. All they had to do was wait until the torch cut through the steel. Eventually it did, and the mob poured into the first cell. While this was all going on, the people in the other cells on the same corridor couldn’t see anything, but they sure could hear it. They could hear what happened in that first cell. Then the mob moved on to the second cell. And the same thing would be repeated, and all the guys in the cells further down got to listen to it. A process like that takes time, but they all knew no rescue was going to happen, the cavalry were not going to show up that night. The men in the cells towards the far end had to listen to it all night; it took until dawn to do the whole block, they had to listen. When I lie awake at night I picture what goes through the mind of a man in a night like that. You know what’s going to happen to you, you know there is no power on earth that is going to save you; all you have is hours and hours of listening and waiting your turn.’ He paused and added simply, ‘I knew one of the guys in the end cell.’