6.The Alcatraz Rose (18 page)

“What about shipping the cuttings?”

“Not a problem. It’s been common practice for well over a hundred years, believe it or not. With the advent of the Internet, millions of newly propagated plants are shipped worldwide every year. It’s so simple that almost anyone can do it.” He paused, placed his knife and fork neatly side by side across the empty plate, and leaned back with a satisfied sigh.

Harris smiled. “Good, eh?”

“I should say. Best sole I’ve had in a long time.”

Not thirty seconds later, the attentive waiter returned to take their plates and orders for coffee. Both declined dessert.

“Talking of the plant hunters,” Kingston said, chagrined to realize he was about to lapse into his professorial mode but unable to stop himself, “in Queen Victoria’s day, the botanists used what were called Wardian
cases to transport and ship young plants back to Britain from all over the globe. The wood-and-glass case was named after its inventor, Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward.”

“Quite a handle.”

Kingston smiled. “Very Dickensian. It was nothing more than a tightly sealed container of condensed moisture, that looked like a small greenhouse, the forerunner of today’s terrarium. He couldn’t have chosen a more demanding voyage to try them out, though. He shipped two cases filled with ferns and grasses to Australia, a journey that took several months. The plants arrived in perfectly good condition.”

“You’re teaching me new respect for horticultural history.”

“You’ll have to forgive me.” Kingston smiled and shook his head. “It’s been fifteen years now and I still forget I’m not in the classroom.”

“Dealing with the history of Alcatraz every day, I know the feeling.”

“I believe it was Samuel Butler who said, ‘God cannot alter the past, but historians can,’” Kingston said, smiling.

“Amen.”

Kingston’s smile faded as something suddenly occurred to him. “Andy, you raised the idea that we may have been going about all this backward, and should be looking at it from our viewpoint, from England.”

Harris nodded. “It was just a thought, that’s all.”

“But think about it. We’ve been assuming—or I have—that Jennings, aka Reginald Payne, wrote the notes in the book for a friend, or friend of a friend, who was interested in rare roses. But what if he did it not for anything as prosaic as an English garden, or for the warden of Alcatraz, but for one of the inmates?”

Andy’s eyebrows shot up. “An inmate? What would a murderer or a bank robber want with a rose? It makes no sense.”

Kingston held up a hand. “Perhaps not, but hear me out. What if one of the inmates approached the warden or his secretary—who happened to be obsessed with roses, as many people are—and said that he could lay his hands on the rarest rose on the planet? What do you think the response would be?”

“I have no idea. Fiction is the first word that comes to mind. The men we’re talking about were America’s most notorious, hard-core
prisoners: murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and high-profile gang bosses. They spent most of their time figuring out how to escape, not planning how to import roses.”

Coffee arrived, giving Kingston a short breather before having to respond to Harris’s unequivocal reaction. “You’re right, of course,” he said, stirring cream and sugar in his cup. “But what if—and this may be an even greater stretch—what if it was an inmate already known to Jennings?”

Harris’s expression was ambiguous, and he seemed hesitant to answer right away. Either a sign of self-reproach, after his being so defensive, thought Kingston, or he was tiring of what he thought were harebrained questions.

“Highly unlikely,” Harris said, “considering that Jennings is English and all the Alcatraz inmates were American.”

Kingston took a careful sip of hot coffee, looking at the historian over the steam from his cup. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Jennings couldn’t have had some kind of previous criminal relationship with one of the prisoners. I don’t have any evidence that Jennings went to the States, but it’s conceivable that one of the inmates might have crossed paths with Jennings in London.”

“Even if that were the case, where does it get you? I can’t see that it changes anything.”

While Harris was taking a long sip of his coffee, Kingston was pulling on his earlobe, his eyes wandering vacantly around the room. “I have a question, Andy,” he said, shrugging off his lapse of attention.

“Shoot.”

“The robbery in England took place in 1957, and Alcatraz closed in 1963. How many prisoners were on the island during those six years? A reasonable guess.”

“Over twenty-nine years, the highest number of prisoners was around three hundred and the lowest about two hundred twenty. If I were to guess for the last six years, it would be the lower number.”

“I assume there’s a list, a record of those incarcerated in those years?”

“I’m sure there is.”

“Would it provide a history, a background of each inmate?”

“I can see where you’re going, but I still think it’s an exercise in futility. By combing through the lives of two-hundred-plus inmates, you hope to find evidence pointing to one prisoner who could have known Jennings?”

Kingston shrugged. “It’s worth a try. We’ve exhausted everything else.”

“You’re a stubborn son of a gun, I’ll say that much. I’ll see what I can come up with. All I can say is that you’ll have a lot of reading and crystal ball gazing to do.”

At Sam’s front door, they shook hands and exchanged cards, with Harris promising to get to work right away pulling together the list of prisoners.

Fifteen minutes later, Kingston stood on the deck of the
Hornblower
, the Alcatraz ferry, as it sliced through the whitecapped chop of San Francisco Bay, seagulls circling and squealing over the throb of its engines. On such a cheerful though breezy afternoon, the fast-a pproaching island, its gray rocks daubed with wildflower color and patches of untold shades of green, wasn’t quite so forbidding as he’d remembered from a previous visit twenty-some years ago when he was merely a curious tourist with no agenda.

He was looking forward to the tour, particularly the restored gardens that Greg Robinson and Andy Harris had told him about and, of course, he was excited at the possibility of seeing the Belmaris rose, if it was still blooming.

17

C
LANG
! C
LANG
! C
LANG
!
The resounding metallic din echoed around the steel and concrete walls, stone floors, and three-story ceilings of Cell Block D. For effect, the park ranger conducting the tour had just slammed shut a steel-barred door to a nine-by-five-foot cell, the only fixtures a narrow bed, a toilet, a tiny wall-mounted sink, and a metal table, all affixed to the concrete walls.

Kingston was among a group of two dozen visitors. Already knowing most of the facts and figures, he remained in back of the group, often moving away, more intent upon observing than listening, trying to imagine what it must have been like being an inmate in what was once the most formidable maximum-security prison of all time.

“That’s a sound that no prisoner ever forgot, even if he was lucky enough to get out of here,” the ranger said, facing the unsmiling visitors. “Within these walls lived the country’s toughest and most dangerous and most famous prisoners.” He waved a circling hand.

“When they arrived here, prisoners had a decision to make: whether to obey the rules or not. That decision affected their lives dramatically. Prisoners who chose not to behave ended up in a harsher place, here in the prison’s treatment unit.”

“There are four blocks like this, A to D, and each of the corridors had a name. There was Michigan Avenue, Broadway, Sunset Boulevard—and this one, between Blocks C and D, was aptly nicknamed Seedy Street.”

This is Block D,” he said, voice echoing. “Thirty six of the least popular cells in Alcatraz, where the unruly and violent inmates were housed.
Inmates here stayed in their cells twenty-four hours a day. Typically they were only allowed out once a week for a shower and exercise.

“Down there at the end,” he said, pointing, “are the solitary confinement cells, numbers nine through fourteen. The notorious ‘hole,’ as they were called. The cell doors there don’t have bars; they’re solid steel. Those isolation cells had no toilet or running water, no mattress, no light fixture, and they were colder than the other cells. Treatment in these cells sometimes included total darkness, sleeping on the floor with only a blanket, and a restricted diet. Confinement usually lasted several days, but no longer than nineteen. By the way, at night the wind used to howl through those windows up there. They face San Francisco and the setting sun.”

Kingston looked up at the gun galleries at each end of the block, visualizing the armed guards watching the inmates round the clock. He closed his eyes, imagining the yelling and swearing, the whistles, the bells and incessant hubbub from the cells, the clatter of boots on the iron walkways and stairs, the guards shouting orders. It was grim and depressing. He walked back to his group.

The ranger, standing next to the bars of one of the standard cells, was still talking. “Cells like this one had to be kept tidy and in good shape. Any articles found in the cells or on prisoners, such as drugs, alcohol, money, tools that could be used to inflict injury or employed in escape attempts, were considered contraband and subjected the inmate to disciplinary action. Toilet paper, matches, soap, and toiletries were issued to the cells twice a week, and inmates could request hot water and a mop to clean their cells. The bars, windows, and floors of the prison were cleaned daily. Talking was permitted in the cell block and in the dining hall as long as conversations were quiet and there was no shouting, loud talking, or singing. Any questions?”

A young boy raised his hand. He wanted to know what the prisoners did all day.

“A good question, young man.” The tall ranger smiled. “Prisoners were woken at six thirty and breakfast was served in the dining hall at seven. After returning, they had to tidy their cell and put their wastebasket outside. At seven thirty, those inmates who were allowed to work
started their shifts. They were assigned jobs in the laundry, tailor shop, electrical shop, model shop, where they made furniture, and so on, all overseen by guards and civilian shop foremen. They returned for lunch at eleven thirty and afterward could rest in their cell for a half hour, then resume their work until four thirty. At nighttime, in later years, starting at six thirty they had what was called music hour—usually harmonicas, guitars, small instruments. Dinner was a half hour later and lights-out at nine thirty . . .”

The tour continued to the library, then into the prisoners’ mess hall and kitchen. Still lagging behind, Kingston was content to simply look around and take in the grim, characterless surroundings.

Finally, they emerged into the cheering sunshine of the recreation yard. Again, Kingston attempted to transport himself back over fifty years, imagining what the “yard” meant to prisoners. One of the few times they were not locked up in their cells or elsewhere within the pitiless walls of the prison. Today was sunny, with a stiff breeze coming off the treacherous waters of the bay, but he knew that many days it was bitterly cold and cloudy or fogbound. He gazed around the large rectangle with its concrete floor tufted with weeds, the high stone walls topped with cyclone fencing and barbed wire, the guard cage and walk high in the corner. He pictured the impromptu handball and softball games and prisoners huddled in groups on the wide terraced steps—the “bleachers,” as they were called—leading to the cell blocks, some sitting against the wall, out of the wind, playing chess and checkers.

“Sir! Sir.” Kingston looked over his shoulder. He’d lagged a little too far behind; his group was waiting on the steps. The ranger was calling him. “Don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “We’re going to the museum next.”

The tour of the prison finally over, Kingston spent the next forty minutes visiting the gardens. There were seven in all, including the Warden’s Garden and the Prisoner Gardens. This was where one of the privileged inmate gardeners, Ryan Matthews—whom Andy had mentioned—had used salvaged materials to build garden terraces, a greenhouse, and even a birdbath. Although these gardens had been replanted and now were cared for by the Garden Conservancy, Kingston marveled at the creation
these inmates had wrought, the visual pleasure and cheer they had provided for all the inmates to enjoy. Starting with little or no knowledge, with limited seeds, plant material, and other resources, it was testimony to their fortitude, determination, and perseverance in striving to somehow improve and beautify the surroundings and miserable existence under the most severe and hopeless of conditions.

“Gardening is the purest of human pleasures,” Kingston muttered Sir Francis Bacon’s quotation to himself.

Fifteen minutes later, he stood on the deck of the Alcatraz ferry, hair windblown, gripping the cold iron railing, watching the fog roll in. In the near distance, but always appearing deceptively close, loomed the gray-white silhouette of the city, its skyscraper windows shimmering with the reflected light of the sun setting over the Golden Gate. Civilization and its discontents crossed Kingston’s mind.