6.The Alcatraz Rose (19 page)

He had a few discontents of his own at that moment, chief among them what had happened at the very end of the tour, when he had inquired about the Belmaris rose. The docent had taken him to an uncultivated section on the west side of the island to show him the rambling specimen.

The rose had finished its once-a-year flush and was no longer in bloom.

Examining the canes and leaves only, the rare and elusive Belmaris rose could have been any of hundreds. He was beginning to believe that he’d come all this way for nothing.

And that was a disconcerting thought indeed.

18

W
HEN
K
INGSTON RETURNED
to the inn that evening, after an excellent dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf, a message from Andy Harris awaited him at the desk requesting that Kingston call him any time up to eleven
P
.
M
. or, failing that, in the morning. In his room, he took Harris’s card from his wallet and made the call. Harris answered after two rings.

“It’s Lawrence, Andy. I just received your message.”

“Good. How was the tour?”

“Outstanding. A huge improvement on the one I took back in the eighties. The landscaping is very impressive. I bought a book,
Gardens of Alcatraz
, which shows a lot of the old and the new. I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

“Indeed, I have a copy. I recommend it whenever I get the chance. They’ve done a great job over the years, sprucing the place up.” Harris cleared his throat. “Anyway, Lawrence, I wanted to get to you as soon as possible because driving home this afternoon, I started thinking about our conversation, and a thought occurred to me. I don’t know if it’s of interest, but one of the surviving Alcatraz prisoners lives right here in the Bay Area.”

“An inmate?” Kingston’s ears pricked up.

“Yes. I met him once at a reunion—”

Kingston couldn’t help interrupting. “Reunion? I find it hard to imagine these . . . what shall I call them, alumni? . . . getting together to reminisce about the ‘good old days.’”

Andy chuckled. “Actually, it
was
called the Alcatraz Alumni Gathering. It was in 2003, the seventieth anniversary of the prison, and
all ex-inmates and guards were invited. A surprising number attended. Anyway, this chap, Darrell Kaminski, and I got on quite well, despite his knowing that my father was an officer. He’s probably in his eighties by now. If you can squeeze in the time, and he’s agreeable, I may be able to set you up with an interview.”

Kingston didn’t hesitate. “That’s extraordinary. I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity like that. What would you tell him, though? The reason?”

“I’d just tell him the truth—that you’re a respected doctor and botanist from England, here on a very short trip, trying to find out why and how the rose showed up at Alcatraz, and if he can give you thoughts about life on the island from an inmate’s viewpoint. From what I recall, he’s not the most talkative type, but with your accent and charm I’m sure you’ll be able to get him to open up.”

“I’ll do my best.”

The two men talked details, including Kingston’s schedule—he was leaving in two days—and Harris’s own availability. Andy agreed to call Kaminski first thing in the morning and see if they could arrange to meet.

“I’ll get back to you the minute I have word.”

“I can’t thank you enough for doing this. If he does agree to a meeting and nothing comes of it as far as the rose is concerned, at least it will give me something to tell the grandkids: that I once interviewed a prisoner of Alcatraz.”

Harris chuckled. “You’ll be the only living person in England to have done so.”

Two days later, on Thursday afternoon, Harris and Kingston, in Harris’s Ford Explorer, emerged from the connector tunnel from Oakland into Alameda, a laid-back mostly residential community on the Bay, and arrived at their destination: Magnolia House, a cluster of single-level apartment units. Andy parked under the shade of a giant magnolia, and they followed the signs along a path that crossed a lawn, still damp from the morning’s sprinklers, leading to Kaminski’s apartment.

Harris rang the bell and the door opened almost immediately. Facing them, with what could barely pass as a smile, was a tall man in his eighties, who seemed in remarkably good shape for his age.

“Come in,” Kaminski said in a gravelly voice, opening the door into a short hallway. As they entered the living room, Kaminski moved purposefully, with no telltale signs of age whatsoever. A few wrinkles here and there and thinning white hair, but other than that he showed none of the physical legacies expected of a man who had spent more than half his adult life behind bars.

After introductions, they sat in a sparsely furnished but near-obsessively clean and tidy room with a picture window that looked out onto dapple-shaded lawns and sandy pathways. In the car, Kingston and Harris had laid out basic ground rules for the interview, agreeing to limit the scope of their questions, focus the conversation on the Alcatraz rose, at least until Kaminski seemed comfortable, and not complicate matters by mentioning Brian Jennings or the security van robbery in England.

Both men declined Kaminski’s offer of coffee or a soda. Kingston crossed his legs on the lumpy sofa, looked into Kaminski’s unblinking eyes, and got down to business.

“First, Darrell, let me say that I truly appreciate your allowing us into your home for a brief talk. As Andy told you, my interest in your time spent on Alcatraz is limited only to a rare rose—nothing more, nothing less. It may all sound frivolous and trivial to you, but we—a couple of botanists and a historian back in England and myself, who have been working on this puzzle for months now—are still at a dead end.”

Kaminski glanced at Harris before speaking. “Yeah, Andy told me your problem. But I still don’t know why you’d think I’d know anything about roses.”

“I understand. It must have sounded like a strange request.”

“I gave up doing interviews years ago. It took only two or three before I realized that all the reporters really wanted to know about was the sensational stuff, what it was like locked up in America’s toughest prison: the escapes, the brutality, riots, killings, all that kind of crap. You’re lucky. Andy is pretty persuasive.”

“And it’s much appreciated. So can you tell me what you remember about the gardens on the island? How many there were?”

Kingston’s question was met with a grudging smile. “Depends what you mean by garden. Some were not much more than a few plants stuck
in the rock walls along the roadside. One like that was planted in the foundations of some old houses that had been demolished. That was nice. Then there was the warden’s garden, but none of us ever saw that. The others were mostly on the west hillside—a couple, maybe. The only one familiar to us was near the Road Guard Tower below the yard—the recreation yard. We could see it on our way to work at the New Industries building. That was what I’d call a real garden. It was on a slope, each level was different, always lots of flowers in the summer, even a greenhouse built from scrap lumber by one of the guys assigned to the garden.” He paused and rubbed his chin in thought. “Ryan Matthews, that was his name. We talked a couple of times. He worked on it for years.”

“Matthews.” Kingston nodded. The same man Andy had mentioned. “An inmate, I take it?”

Kaminski nodded. “Yeah. And I can tell you, getting to work in the gardens didn’t come easy. Work assignments had to be earned. If you gave the staff no trouble, minded your own business, they’d give you some kind of grunt work first. If you stuck it out and did a good job and kept your nose clean, you could be awarded what was called ‘good time.’ That could eventually lead to a paid job in the industries building, where all the workshops were—the laundry, paint shop, carpentry, maintenance, that sort of stuff.”

“Did you know any other men who worked in the gardens?”

“Yep, a few—Curtis Sullivan and Vince Wellman were two. I didn’t know them that good, though. Sullivan was obsessed with plants and growing stuff. He could drive you crazy. He never talked about much else. Wellman was the opposite, quiet as a mouse. It was hard to believe he’d murdered someone.”

“How were they chosen to work in the gardens? Who decided that?”

“Hmm. I remember someone—Sullivan, probably—once mentioning that an assistant to one of the wardens took it on himself to start taking care of the gardens—that required labor, of course.”

“Eliott Hofmann,” Harris said. “He was the secretary.”

Kaminski shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. All I do know is we appreciated what he did. It was a god-awful depressing place and he, or whoever was responsible, made it a bit more cheerful.”

“This Ryan Matthews that you mentioned. He must have gained a lot of trust and respect to be allowed to have the run of the garden.”

“He did. He was one of the most intelligent guys on the island, as far as I was concerned. Some prisoners didn’t like his getting special treatment. I think it was because of the key.”

“Key?”

“Yeah. It happened before I arrived, but it was common knowledge. Not much went on in that place that remained a secret for very long.” For the first time, Kingston noticed a distant look in Kaminski’s deep-set eyes. “Sometimes information and knowledge could be like currency. And other times that sort of thing could be like a curse—could be dangerous. Something you wished you’d never known.”

“I can imagine,” Kingston said, having a good idea what the man was alluding to.

“No one can, really, Doctor, but that’s okay,” Kaminski replied. “Anyway, so the story goes, one day in the yard Matthews found a key a guard had dropped. Most of us might have been tempted to keep it, but he returned it.”

“No wonder he landed the garden job.”

“It was not only good for him, but in a way, good for us too, I guess. We got to enjoy the fruits of his labor, as it were.”

“Do you know if Matthews or any of the other men who worked in the gardens were involved in any of the plant purchasing?”

Kaminski shook his head. “That I wouldn’t know.”

“What about you, Darrell?” Andy Harris asked. “You worked in the Industries Building, right?”

“Yeah. I started in a workshop where they made concrete blocks used for building retaining walls around the island. After that, I worked in the laundry and then the carpentry shop.” He stopped, that same enigmatic smile again. “That’s what I did for a living outside, before I convinced myself that I could make a better living holding up banks.”

Harris nodded, smiling. “What about conversation?”

“Conversation? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Well, with over two hundred men confined in such close quarters, with a monotonous routine and a controlled existence around the clock,
with little or no news of the outside world, what did you talk about in the yard and the dining room, in the few times that you had the chance?” Harris asked.

Kingston was surprised. This was far from a gardening question. He wondered why Harris had asked it. To keep the man talking, he supposed, to keep him comfortable. Not a bad idea, Kingston thought. A tactic he’d used on more than one occasion himself.

Kaminski was shaking his head. “I dunno—about anything that happened that day, news from outside. Meaningless stuff mostly. Sports was always big, mostly baseball for some reason, though we never got to watch any. No TV, only books and magazines.” He scratched his broad forehead and glanced around momentarily. “What did we talk about?” he murmured to himself. “Friends, families, places we’d been, jobs we’d had, cars . . .” He paused and shrugged. “Anything at all that happened, I guess. It didn’t matter, really. It could be something stupid, like the food we’d had that day, or more exciting, like arguments among the prisoners, fights, protests . . . escaping, of course. That was always on everyone’s mind.”

“Escape.” Kingston, despite himself, was curious. “When an escape was being planned or actually taking place, how was it kept a secret, not so much from the guards but from the other prisoners?”

Kaminski glanced briefly at Andy Harris. “I’ll answer your question in a roundabout way. Andy knows how this all works as well as anybody. In Alcatraz, more than most prisons, there was an unwritten set of rules you learned starting from day one. These were not rules laid down by the warden or the screws but by the prisoners. Call it an inmate culture if you wanna be fancy. The shrinks called it the convict code. It’s an understanding of the ‘them’ and ‘us’ state of coexistence: them being the guards and us being the prisoners.

“Some of this you learned early on from other prisoners, a lot by seeing what went on around you every day, like how other inmates handle given situations, right or wrong. It was all about putting up a united front against the guards and authority. Standing up for each other, never ratting on another con, not getting into arguments or fights with other inmates, not being nosy, keeping stuff to yourself, never lying or stealing—the goal for all of us was to serve the least possible time on
the Rock and get to enjoy what little pleasure and privileges there were, until we got our walking papers.” Kaminski paused, looking at Kingston with an awkward expression. “I don’t think I answered your question too well, Doctor, did I?”