A Bad Man (42 page)

His decision to lie low was consonant with the preparations he was making to renew his life on the outside. He wrote some letters to Lilly and even to Billy, though no replies came. He began also to direct inquires to the executives at his store—most, like Victman, had left when he went to prison, while others, seeing a chance to improve their position, had stayed on and taken the deserters’ places—but their replies, he discovered, held little interest for him. He had to force himself to follow the figures and detailed reports in the letters. He began to speculate about selling his store outright or merging it with one of the other department stores, and he wrote to his vice-president, asking him to look around for buyers. The reply came from Miss Lane:

Dear Mr. Feldman:

Mr. Nichols is on holiday now with his family, and due to the highly confidential nature of your inquiry, I thought it best to keep your letter here awaiting his return, and in the meantime to offer you some of my own thoughts about this matter. If I am out of line, Mr. Feldman, I hope you will understand that I make these remarks out of a sense of deep loyalty to you and to your store
.

I think I know how terrible this past year must have been for you, how very frightful imprisonment would be for anyone like yourself, who has lived apart from violence and viciousness all his life. I have seen a drawn gun but one time in my life—I mean the time that detective came into your office to arrest you—and although I am not a cowardly woman, my mind still registers the terror of that shock. A pistol! Loaded and pointed at a man who, whatever his faults, would never have offered physical opposition! Surely the guns of justice are no less dangerous and insulting than the guns of chaos. That you would never draw one yourself, I know as certainly as that there was never any wild anger in you, but only an experimental sort of cruelty and a will that sought resistance where there was none to be found—in the market place. (And now I think that maybe you have finally found it. In the prison, in the rifles of the guards forever pointed and loaded as in some eternal stick-up. In the bars of your cell, in the stone and steel and lead and leather—that vicious handful of the fierce old elements of the civil world. Am I right?)

I am sorry for you, Mr. Feldman, and I read your letter offering to put your store up for sale, and I despair. Believe me when I tell you it is not concern for my job that makes me bold now. I know my value (if you never did: I recall with pleasure the time you tried to reduce my salary, your suggestion when I was still green that I be paid by the job, by the pages actually typed, so much per letter, per envelope, per licked stamp, per search in the files, per appointment made, per telephone call taken in your absence, per staple driven true—oh, there were so many. I recall all our agreements—my counterproposals and yours. That was a combat!), and I know that I could get another job tomorrow. (Did you know, speaking of combat, that I stole from you? That I used my position as your private secretary to obtain merchandise for which I never paid? I tell you this in writing because I know that in our state a convict may not bring suit against anyone on the basis of evidence obtained while he was in prison. Don’t worry. I said I knew my value, and all I ever took was by way of closing the gap between that value and what you paid me. And that at list prices, so you’re still ahead, or rather, we’re exactly even because I probably owe you something for the charm of the arrangement, and even at that I may still be ahead, for I would owe you something, too, for the secrecy, the thrill of the guerrilla risk, the absurdity and outlandishness.)

There are some around here—your “executives,” your department heads, your lawyers—who say that you have marred your image with the public, that not understanding the terms of your crime, they will be unable to come to this store and feel uncheated. I have heard Mr. Nichols make the very suggestion to Mr. Ray that you make in your letter: that the store be sold or merged, at the very least that its name its name be changed. I hope you never agree to this. I know what went on in that basement. (I came in clothes you had never seen, in a veil—which, it happens, was merchandise I obtained from your store under false pretenses. I disguised my voice and told you that to earn money I meant to become a call girl, and asked if you would put me in touch with any contacts you might have. You told me that the big money was in dirty photographs and tried to talk me into buying an ordinary box camera and doing a series of indecent poses for a “family album” because that was more appealing, more intimate and dirtier than the ordinary studio shots, you said. You even wanted to sell me the “corners” so I could mount the photographs myself when they came back from the drugstore in your physician’s building, where you said they’d develop them.) And I don’t see the harm. (And don’t you see? You’re not the only one who needs freedom, and to be kept alive by the sense of the special. The woods are full of us.)

Anyway, I hope you reconsider your idea about selling the store. The world is getting to be a terrible place, and I don’t know if it’s your kind or their kind who make it more awful, but if we must have terror, let it be gay and exciting, I say
.

I know you may fire me for this letter, but if you sell the store I don’t care anyway
.

Yours in Crime,
Silvia Lane

Feldman fired her. He wrote Billing a confidential letter to ask if she had a charge account at the store. She did, and he assumed that she would continue to use it. Figuring what she had been worth to him over the years at his figures, he subtracted this amount from his estimate of what
she
might have figured she was worth to him at her figures. Her figure was seven percent higher than his; she had been with him nine years, so she owed him, he guessed, $4,410. In a second confidential letter from Billing he learned that on the average she spent about $640 a year in his store. This, with her employee’s discount of twenty percent, represented $800 in purchases. Now that she was no longer with the store she would lose the discount, and so he wrote Billing a third confidential letter, asking them to research what single girls of Miss Lane’s approximate age and income and educational background could be expected to spend with him each year. The answer that came back was $500. She would be sore at him for firing her, of course, but he knew that buying habits, once established, were as strong as instincts. Say she spent only $400 a year. Round off the $4,410 she owed him to $4,400. He could get his money back, hiking her bills at the rate of fifty percent a year. It would take work. Sooner or later someone as efficient as Miss Lane would wonder why she was paying $600 a year for only $400 worth of merchandise. Carrying charges. (Beautiful things could be done with carrying charges.) Nickel-and-diming her on every bill. Here and there a really gross mistake in his favor. Occasional charges for items never purchased. Then some really flashy stuff with her credits if she objected. The rest to be done with seconds, damaged goods and the clever substitution of inferior merchandise. It would take work, all right, and patience, but the important thing was that it could be done. Of course, it meant that he could not sell his store for twenty-two years, but if that’s what it meant, that’s what it meant. She wanted combat? He’d give her combat.

In the prison, however, he was never more docile. He had gone underground. He tightened his belt and became a very Englishman of austerity. Realizing how close he was to being discharged—his Statement of Remaining Obligation was sent from the state capital on the same day he received an answer to his last letter to Billing—he regarded the time he spent there more bitterly than ever. He no longer speculated about Warden’s Mind or the meaning behind the sytem. Nor did he seek advantage. (In a way, he was actually grateful to Ed Slipper for exposing him. If Slipper had still been under an obligation to him, even one the old man did not acknowledge, he might have felt compelled to extract it, might have done something that would get him into trouble. The trick now was to stay out of trouble.)

When one day he awoke with what he was certain was a fever, he panicked. Suppose he was wrong, he reasoned. Suppose he reported to the infirmary and had no temperature—he would be charged a day for goldbricking. Suppose, on the other hand, he reported for work and the fever cut into his efficiency. Suppose he made a mistake; why, they would charge him for that too. Weeks could be added to his term. The percentage player would report to the infirmary, but suppose the fever had clouded his reason and he wasn’t reading the percentages clearly. What was he to do? In the end he decided—perhaps unreasonably; he was aware of that—that one ought not arrive at a decision and then, simply on the basis of some estimated margin for error, reverse that decision. But again, could he say he had
arrived
at a decision when he was only
inclined
toward one? What
was
he to do? What?

Eventually he went to the infirmary. His temperature was 102, and they put him to bed. Weak, feverish, feeling as if he would throw up, pains in his arms, his legs, all he could think of was that it was good time, perfect in fact, that it couldn’t be counted against him: that he was safest as a sick man. He resented the medications but took them obediently, unwilling to give any trouble which could boomerang. He thought it a hideous irony that perhaps the very medicines he took to make him well enough to return to that part of the prison where the dangers were might have been purchased with the funds he had given to Slipper.

In three days he was well enough to be discharged, and was granted an additional half day of “soft duty” to be performed in and about his cell. He was as grateful for the three and a half days he had gained as some other man might have been for a long, paid vacation. But he was careful not to appear too happy, lest his happiness be counted against him.

Indeed, his expression was now one of intense disengagement. He could have been one of those stone-faced palace guards whom tourists try to ruffle for a photograph. He performed all his duties—even those which he had once found loathsome, like scrubbing the toilet bowl or, in the canteen, fetching the petty items the prisoners requested and ringing up the petty sales—with a determination that rose from the bedrock of the will. In the exercise yard he counseled his body like a fight manager, and with the effort of a trained athlete, managed to get through his now near-perfect mimes of the ordinary strolls and walks and pacings of the unmarked convicts. Only he knew how much he sweated. (Perhaps it was this that had brought him down sick before, and unwilling to risk the disease again for fear that he might not have temperature the next time—sure, immunities, antibodies and unhealth’s diminishing returns—he let up a little, allowing his body those occasional epileptic leaps of character that he had formerly feared.)

He went to the movies when they were shown, and paid careful attention to the plots for fear that a disarmed answer to a guard’s or fellow prisoner’s question about the film might be taken amiss and register a chain of consequences that he would live to regret. He devoured the prison newspaper for the same reason, and familiarized himself with every notice on every bulletin board. (Confronted from time to time with some strange new obligation—“Prisoners not involved themselves with intramural athletics are nevertheless required to pick a sport and a team, and to familiarize themselves with the records of all the players on that team”—he never speculated as to meanings. Meaning was beside the point; only performance mattered.) He memorized his table assignments as if the numbers had been state secrets and he a spy, and because prisoners were encouraged to have interests as well as duties, he participated in a hobby club, joylessly teaching himself to make irrelevant little leather and wooden artifacts. He took special care to be in the right place at the right time, rushing to his cell long before lockup, conspicuously present at each major census four times a day and at most of the minor ones on each half-hour.

Yet for all his attention to detail, for all the assiduity which the prospect of his release provoked in him, he never became what could be called a “model prisoner.” He had none of the cheerfulness of such men, nothing of their dopey good will. Even this was calculated, for he anticipated the effect that such falseness might have on others. (And by “others” he meant
everyone
.) Instead, he sought to impart a sense of performance without eagerness, a careful balance of going through motions and touching all bases. (Ironically, he behaved exactly as a good cop would who neither hated nor cared for his suspects.) This, of course, made him vulnerable too, and he was aware of the dimensions of that vulnerability, knowing that he must appear to them exactly as he was, keeping nothing of himself in reserve, his distaste for his plight obvious, the desperation behind his willingness to do his job clear to anyone. In short, his eagerness, though it was the reverse eagerness of a model prisoner, was clearly visible. Anyone could see it. Yet it was his only feasible choice: tight-faced to walk the tightrope, his discomfort and hatred public as a monument. If this were a lying low it was a lying low with his head visible, his bald spot bright as a bull’s-eye.

Besides, there was still the notoriety of the bad-man crap: news items about him in the paper, editorials, the book of his life a public record in the library, his club the only one disbanded by a warden’s fiat in thirty-five years, the semi-sent-to-Coventry treatment from the other prisoners, whose only remarks to him since Warden’s Assembly had smacked of command, distinctly like the no-nonsense exchanges between officers and men. Why, he had not had conversation as such in months. (And now that he thought of it, when
had
he had it? When had he last listened to someone else or spoken to offer an opinion that another might take or leave alone? He had always been in Coventry. He could not remember a time when he hadn’t been, though again, now that he thought of it, he had listened to Miss Lane’s letter, reading it over to see what she thought. Then he fired her.) How low, then,
could
he lie? But despite their ominous interest in him, he behaved the deaf-mute, a pretended mantle of invisiblity as fastidiously assumed as ever any by some discreet serving man in the presence of his quarreling masters.
That
was it. Of course! They had turned him into a nigger, and he had learned to live under threat, a quality of last-hired, first-fired doom dogging his steps and days.