“The melanzane, they play basketball. I swear the fucking game was invented in Africa — they brought it on the boat with them,” Don Anthony said. For a moment, Henry was puzzled by the common Italian slur for blacks — he had never heard it — but figured it out.
Henry said nothing. His hands were bunched inside his pea coat. He stared at the game. He hated games. He had noticed that morning this was his sixteenth month in prison. Two hundred eighty-five more just like this one and maybe they would parole him. He would be seventy-six years old. The thoughts of time pressed him too hard, and he had to say something to Don Anthony.
“I got five hundred thousand,” Henry said.
The olive eyes went very wide and loving. Without looking at Henry, Don Anthony put a little burr of interest in his soft Jersey City voice: “That’s more money than God. How come you didn’t get a better lawyer? There ain’t no way anyone has to do time with money like that.”
“It wasn’t a question of the lawyer,” Henry McGee said. “Sometimes when the government goes after you, there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”
“When they wantcha, they gotcha,” Don Anthony agreed. He was a realist. He shrugged. “Yeah. Well. You could make it more comfortable with money. Spread it around. These guards are only human, they got families to support. You want a little something nice, they can make it nice. You can buy anything in this joint, you know that.”
“If the government finds out about the money, they take it.”
“Ain’t that just like them? They don’t play fair.”
Henry stopped. Was Don Anthony making fun of him? He waited for a moment to let the silence talk. They heard the shouts from the basketball courts. Black kids played the game in the ghetto, now they did it in prison; life was all the same.
“Well, you made it tough on yourself, Henry McGee, playing the spy. You’re a spy, I hear.”
“I was a spy,” Henry said.
“Yeah. You ain’t a spy now,” Don Anthony said.
“No.”
“ ’Cause you’re inside and there ain’t nothin’ to spy on.” He turned to Henry McGee. The face was cold, not amused. His skin was like gray pebbles. “ ’Cept me. You spy on me, huh?”
“Jesus,” Henry said. Jesus. It was the last thing he had expected. “I want to get out of here.”
“Apply for a parole.”
“I want to get out of here. I got five hundred thousand.”
“Is that right?”
“I give you a number and you check it out. Bank of Hong Kong, it’s my account. I’ll need fifty thousand to set up when I get out. You get four hundred fifty thousand.”
Olive eyes made the face a shade warmer. Money was definitely a woman taking her clothes off. He couldn’t help it. Sometimes it gave him an erection, thinking about money. “Why you figure I can get you out when I got my own ass in here for nearly two years?”
“Don Anthony. You’re one of the guys. You run your business affairs from here easy as from there. You got home here. You got your boys with you, you guys play cards, eat pizza, have parties with the broads. It’s better than being home in some ways, at least your wives aren’t around.”
Don Anthony tried a precise smile. Unfortunately, his lips were thick and his large head with the olive eyes and the gray pebble skin made the gesture grotesque. “You do your homework about us. What is it? You working for the G? You working for yourself, maybe see if you get something? You cut that tutsone’s nut off, but we ain’t niggers and we don’t mess with you. Don’t mess with us. Beat it, McGee. I got nothing to say to you.” And he turned then, and Henry felt the stone in his belly again because the interview was ended.
The black faces shining with sweat moved up and down the court. The black legs churned. The round brown ball arced again and swished through the basket.
Luis Miranda became Henry McGee’s mark.
Luis was doing bad time. He had gotten into three fights that involved staving off homosexual advances. The last fight had earned him a very bad scar on his left cheek, which, unfortunately for him, did not mar his beauty enough. He was a painting by Raphael and should be hung on a wall in the Vatican and not wear prison clothes and get those looks from large men.
Luis was a hard-luck kid all the way. His parents were migrant workers, and he had grown up in a lot of places between the apple orchards of Michigan and the berry groves of upstate New York. His hands were hard from all the work he had done in his first twenty-two years.
His twenty-third year started out with a bank robbery.
The bank was in Hagerstown, Maryland, a branch of a larger bank out of Baltimore. Luis decided that year he would not get old and stooped like his father and have nothing to show for it. His father had said he should go into the army, but he flunked the test. Even the fucking army didn’t want him.
He acquired a Spanish-made .22 automatic knockoff of a more reliable gun by Smith & Wesson. He went into the bank at 11:12 A.M. Monday and terrified the young teller, who gave him all her money. She put it in a McDonald’s paper bag he had carried into the bank with him.
Luis Miranda raced out of Hagerstown down old U.S. 40 without a problem. The robbery had so upset the young teller that it was nearly six minutes before she came out of a terrified trance and informed Mr. Drexler, the vice president, she had been robbed.
Sixteen minutes later, Luis pulled into the same McDonald’s where he had breakfasted before the robbery on milk and sausage biscuits. He had to use the lavatory. It was typical of him, his father might say, to go in and rob a bank without first going to the bathroom. He left the engine running and went inside.
A moment later, two teens emerged from the restaurant and went to his car. They looked inside. They opened the doors.
All this was laconically observed by two Maryland state policemen eating their lunch in an unmarked highway patrol car at the south end of the McDonald’s lot.
“What the hell those kids doing?” one asked the other. The other, Wilbur Dasher, said, “Fuck you think they’re doing?”
Both cops got out of their car as the kids pulled something off the front seat of Luis’s car. It was a McDonald’s paper bag. The first kid saw the cops approach and said something to the other. They turned and the first kid dropped the sack, tearing it. The money was caught in a light breeze and floated up before the surprised eyes of all four of them.
“Jesus,” said both cops simultaneously.
The kids turned and ran and the cops stood motionless. Money in the wind.
And then Luis Miranda pushed open the door while buttoning his jeans. He saw the cops and the money and he thought about it and then put up his hands.
The cops began to draw their pistols at that point. Later on, the cops made a point of telling Luis they had no intention of arresting him for anything until he put up his hands. The cops thought it was comical that Luis was dumb enough to surrender even before he was asked to.
Every time Luis told the story to Henry, Henry tried to sympathize. It seemed as downright funny to him as it was to the cops, typical of all the fuckups of the world. Henry had a use for fuckups, though, and Luis would work out just fine.
It took a few weeks to get around Luis, but Henry had patience when he saw a plan forming. It was just another story to him then, and Luis was a character in it, without flesh or blood. He was just someone to be used.
Luis liked the nose candy, and Henry could get that. Anybody could get that if he had the price. There were a couple of dealers, but Henry used Amos Amad, a large, strapping black man from Chicago who was doing five to ten for importing narcotics. Amos had the best stuff.