“Is it fair to ask what you’re working on?” he said. “Or is that off-limits?”
“Perfectly fair,” she answered, “although I don’t have a one-line synopsis worked out. I can tell you what it is not. It’s not a prison book. Very little of it will actually take place inside a prison. There might be a scene like what we’re doing here, with a character entering a high-max penitentiary for the first time. I must say, these triple...”
“Deuces. Triple deuces.”
“The body alarms are a great detail.”
“I could get you some technical specifications.” He was moving toward his phone.
“Oh, no, thank you. The fence outside, it’s electrified?”
“Five thousand volts.” He settled back against the sill with an incongruous smile. “We lose a few birds every spring and summer.” A moppy spider plant browned at the fringes spoke to the aridity of his office. “I gather you’re doing something on Luther Trait.”
“Something, yes. There are similarities.”
The odd smile again. “I’m wondering what you think you’ll get from him. From meeting him face-to-face, I mean. None of my business really, but we do take our jobs seriously here. I’d like to think there’s real interest here on your part, in prisoners, in crime — not just in exploitation. I’d like to think you are something of a student of the criminal mind and not just another writer stirring the pot. I’m hoping that your coming here isn’t just a publicity stunt.”
She nodded, feeling tested. The truth probably fell somewhere in the middle. She was certainly conscious of the publicity value of this rare meeting with Luther Trait. And she was aware of the market pressure to follow Last Words with an even bigger book, thereby reinforcing her bestseller status and putting her on track to getting her scratchboard portrait on a Barnes & Noble tote bag. She knew from experience that quality was rarely enough to get a novel into buyers’ hands, that there had to be a hook, something to reach beyond everyday readers and tap at the shoulder of the public at large. Something topical, something urgent, what they call in the trade “that Big Book feeling.” Something to push it to the front of the bookstalls. The Holy Grail of publishing was the Controversial Bestseller.
At the same time, she was writing about crime, and not a multigeneration romance or a mother-daughter weeper or a memoir. Criminals and their methods and mind-sets. Where was the appeal? This was something she thought about more and more often. What was it about violent crime that attracted her interest at all?
“I just want to get things right,” she said.
The warden smiled a moment, distant with thought. “Well, I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with Trait,” he decided. “Not much entertainment value there. But — I suppose I might’ve said the same about Jasper Grue.”
She smiled wanly, sensitive to people confusing her fictional antagonist with his real-life model, or assessing the relative entertainment value of her work. But more than that, the warden’s remarks reminded her that she was now indeed inside the same building as Grue. Sharing space with such a creature, breathing the same square acre of air. She wondered suddenly if she had given this visit sufficient thought. She asked the warden who else was incarcerated there.
“We have them all. Anyone you can think of, and some you probably can’t. Not merely the most violent, although we do house them. But some of these men have a certain drive, something innate, an indomitable criminal will. It takes work to keep your sanity while confined twenty-three-and-a-half hours each day in a windowless, double-doored, six-by-eight pod, denied all human interaction. We’ve seen some breakdowns. You remember Feretti, the New York mafia don?”
“Sure.”
“Hallucinations. Self-mutilation. We finally had to ship him out. His family’s lawyers were going to sue, but that would have meant their don’s condition leaking to the New York papers. He’s no tough guy anymore. Off the record?”
She was not a journalist, never had been. “Sure.”
“For the worst of the worst, a life sentence means freedom. Take away their fear of death, all hope of eventual release, and what do you have? You have empowered a criminal, over whom you no longer wield any influence. We are not a vengeful society, but order must be kept, a certain decorum. Our goal is to restrict a prisoner’s freedom, not establish it. The system requires something more, some penultimate level of punishment short of death in order to keep these career criminals in check. That is the primary function ADX Gilchrist serves in the federal prison system. This is hell on Earth. A necessary dungeon. No fraternizing allowed. No contact visits. No central mess hall or congregate recreation yard. No weight training. A regime of absolute silence. No sleeping between six a.m. and ten p.m. No work opportunities, and no pacifying movies or television. And for many, twenty-four-hour video surveillance. We move inmates through the facility electronically, opening and closing all gates and doors by remote control, thereby eliminating most contact with guards. We have not had a single violent incident since we went online. What you see here is the future of high-tech penology. In a sense, we are no longer jailing these irredeemables. We are merely watching them until the day God Himself commutes their sentence here on Earth. This place is more like a nursing home than a prison.”
“A nursing home.”
“You can use that.” He straightened, as though to indicate he was back on the record. “We care for the most dangerous, the most escape-prone, the most famous and infamous, the most threatening and most threatened criminals in the federal prison system. Terrorists. Serial killers. Members of the Medellin and Cali drug cartels. Mariel Cubans. The Libyans who tried to blow up the New York Stock Exchange. The heads of every major national prison gang, which we call ‘disruptive groups.’ The Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrillas, the Mexican Mafia — these men didn’t get to the top by a vote. Witness Security cases, and prisoners who have to be separated from one another. All the big CIA spies. And your man, Grue. Take the worst of the rotten apples from every Level-Six institution system-wide, seal them inside Gilchrist to rot together, and thereby improve the quality of the harvest overall.”
He was pushing it a little with that harvest metaphor, which sometimes happened, people getting grandiloquent in a writer’s presence.
“A real rogue’s gallery,” he finished. “A treasure trove of bad guys. Enough to keep you going for an entire shelf of books, I’d imagine.”
His telephone buzzed. Trait was ready. Warden James opened his office door and led her out, ever considerate, intent on playing Virgil to her Dante.
“Now, Luther Trait,” he said. “He’s got the thickest jacket in central file. Everything about him is recorded — movement, meal consumption, books read, everything. Trait is a ‘blue-book’ inmate, a resident of Echo Unit, ‘The Director’s Unit’ as it’s known, thirteen underground pods that are the most isolated in the facility. Yes — even in this place, there has to be some higher level of punishment for these men to fear, because that is all they respect. Echo Unit is the hardest time in the federal prison system. That’s where Feretti was when he cracked. The most notorious cases, spies, terrorists, dissidents. It’s both political and symbolic. Trait has ‘walkalone’ status outside Echo, meaning that if he travels anywhere inside the prison or out — the rare occasions when he is subpoenaed to testify in an accomplice’s criminal trial — he travels in four-point restraints in the company of our number-one extraction team. We can put on a pretty good show if we want to. The cameras in his pod go dark one hour each week, per court order; other than that, he’s always under the glass. But let me say this.”