“Shit. You want something from me, but you don’t want to give me anything. That ain’t fair, Devereaux.”
“Fair is for games,” Devereaux said. “Fair is what we are not about. You want to work with us, we can make life tolerable. You want to fuck with us, we can make you wake up screaming every morning. We make the nightmares, Henry.”
“You gonna scare me or just talk me to death?”
Devereaux smiled. “Skarda, Henry. Think about him.” He got up, went to the door, called the marshal. Henry sat still at the bare table and thought about Devereaux. His back was turned. Henry could get up and hit him real sharp on the neck below the skull. Practically guarantee that he’d kill him. Then what? Then Marion for sure and leg chains and all the rest of the shit. Henry tried to keep down the violent hatred. He tried to keep Skarda clearly in mind.
The marshal put the large, heavy handcuffs back on his wrists and led him out of the room. He went down in the prisoner’s elevator, back into the gray car, back to prison. The Loop was around him. Girls in bright dresses, men in suits, children, cops, taxicabs…
He blinked at the self-pity welling in him. He pushed it down.
Skarda.
He sat in the common room on the ninth floor and stared at the television set. The dumber the program, the more they liked it. They were like children, really, and Henry had to hold back this edge of contempt for his fellow inmates. They lined up and they marched when told to march, and they schemed in the most childish ways, schemed for little favors or treats. They pretended to be men and women, and the endless perverse cruelty and kindness of that fantasy infected so many lives that reality was blocked out.
Skarda. If he had to play Skarda, how could he make it work for him? He had thought Skarda was dead in the water when he was picked up after the first part of the plan failed, the Alaska part.
“Sam Ricca,” the man said.
McGee turned. His gaze was level, waiting for a challenge or an invitation.
Sam Ricca was short and wide. He had big hands that had once hung a man on a basement meat hook. He had been a butcher once, working in a West Side abattoir, cutting steers into steaks. Then he was a butcher in a different trade. He did a greedy thing and stole more from an interstate shipment of television sets than he could get rid of. The G found the sets and nailed Ricca for them. Racketeering. It was laughable to Sam Ricca, but the seven to ten were not. He was fifty-five years old, and you started figuring out how many years you have left when you get that old.
“You’re Henry McGee,” Sam Ricca said.
Henry wasn’t making it easy. Maybe this fat greaseball was a fag.
“I got the word from a mutual friend.”
“Is that right?”
“Da fuck,” Sam Ricca said. Who was this jagoff? Little guy like him make about a half-dozen steaks and a few chops. He could cut this guy with the side of his hand, didn’t need a saw or knife.
Henry waited, seeing the hostility. He wasn’t afraid.
“Don Anthony told me to help you,” said Sam Ricca.
It was amazing. He had been in Chicago for only two days.
“He said you were trusted and that you and him had a deal. He said he didn’t do nothing to queer your arrangement, it was one of those things. He said it was easier in a way for you to get out of here.”
Henry didn’t want the hope rising in him any more than he wanted self-pity. You had to stay rational inside or you’d start believing any kind of fantasy.
“Tell me,” Henry said.
“Don Anthony said you were to get out. I get you out. That’s what it’s about.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“A debt I owe Don Anthony. It’s nothing to talk about.”
“What if I thought Don Anthony set me up?” He thought about Devereaux and thought about Marion maximum-security prison in southern Illinois.
“Then my debt is relieved, you piece of shit. So is my obligation to you. If that’s the way it is with you, then fuck it, I gave it a shot. I only had to give it a shot.” Sam Ricca got up from the folding chair.
“Sit down,” Henry said.
Sam Ricca sat down.
“How do you get out of here?”
“You afraid of heights?”
Henry blinked and shook his head.
“You strong? You look weak.”
“I’m strong.”
“What d’you press?”
“My shirt,” Henry said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t worry about nothing. You get outta here tomorrow night. I’m supposed to give you money, five dimes, help you on the road till you get to your bank.” Sam Ricca smirked, as if he had said something funny.
“If it’s so easy to get out of here, how come you’re here?”
“I’m a local celebrity,” Sam Ricca said. “The newspapers call me Sam ‘The Butcher’ Ricca. Newspapers. Well, I was a butcher in the trade. So I’m sitting a little time out till I get paroled, and I play cards, enjoy myself. I can do time. You got twenty-five to fifty hard, I hear. Don Anthony said you and him got an arrangement. Good. Anything I can do for Don Anthony is done.”
Henry waited for the commercial to end.
“All right. Here’s the easy part for me. I got a hundred feet of electrical cable. Black. I got a glazier’s knife. You get them both tomorrow night and you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Cut the fucking window and throw down the cable and shimmy down the side of the building, just like Batman and Robin.”
“You’re crazy.”
Sam Ricca let that go with a shrug.
“Ten years ago this fall, exact same thing happened. Two guys got out. They were out for a year before they fucked up, got caught in Kentucky or something. Same way. They put TV cameras on the roof now so that it won’t happen again. Except it don’t work that good when it’s dark. You just shimmy down the cable and you catch an El out of here.”
Henry thought about it. It was as crazy as the laundry basket idea at Lewistown and just as simple. He knew he would go along with it.
He cut the window. It took a half hour. Sweat formed on his face and forearms as he cut at the thick glass.
It was one in the morning and it was raining. The rain was perfect, Sam Ricca said, it made it hard for the TV cameras on the roof. Sam Ricca was fucking cheerful because he didn’t have to slide his 275 pounds down a skinny piece of electrical cable.
And where do you get a hundred feet of electrical cable inside a federal prison? Sam Ricca said the hardest part was getting broads in, that electrical cable was easy.
He pulled the glass inside. It came inside without a sound, stuck to the suction cups. He put the glass on the bed and covered it.
He wore his pea jacket and watch cap. He wore tennis shoes. He went out the window. One end of the cord was tied to the door of the cell.
He skipped down the side of the building, rappelling quickly, his feet against the wall here and here and here. He felt no fear. The concrete floor of the city yawned up at him, and the buildings were all around like narrow mountains that formed narrow, crowded valleys.
Ten feet short.
Henry dropped to the sidewalk, cushioning his fall with bent knees and then letting his body roll onto the sidewalk, taking the shock of the fall on his buttocks, shoulders, hands.
He stood up and felt a sharp pain at the back of his left ankle. He took a step, and the pain was not as bad. He could handle it.
He looked around. A bum slept in the doorway of a transient hotel. The bum smiled in sleep. Rain fell from the glowing red sky. An elevated rumbled overhead, lights winking.