Ransom (16 page)

teen years old before I found out how he made his dough, and I only found that out because someone chopped him down, with a Thompson gun, right outside our front door. That was in- 1932. Yeah, 1932.” He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the present, trying to look back at the years he had tried to forget. “My old lady knew what my father did - I dunno whether she condoned it, but she never made any excuses for him. They were both from Sicily and maybe she believed in the Mafia and the way it went about things. I dunno - I never stopped to ask her. I ran away from home the day they buried my old man and I never went back, never saw my mother or my sisters again.” He had been talking with his eyes downcast, as if memory were something he had laid out on the table in front of him; but now he looked up. “You’re not taking any of this down?”

“Not unless you want us to,” said Jefferson. “That file doesn’t really concern Inspector Malone and me. Not tonight, anyway.”

Parker nodded. “Maybe it’s all only what they call extenuating circumstances and I don’t think the powers-that-be want any of that. They’ve already made up their minds about me.” There was no bitterness in his voice nor in his thin smile. “What they’d never believe is that I became an anarchist because I didn’t believe in a society that had room for characters like my old man. I’m a very moral man - I even believe in God. I’ve read ‘em all and preached ‘em all - Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta. But I believe in God and - maybe I should’ve been a priest - I think Christ preached a better brand of propaganda than any of them. But don’t tell that to my friends upstairs - they’d think I was a Jesus freak and I sure as hell ain’t that.”

Malone, without lifting his arm from the table, stole a glance at his wrist-watch. “What happened after you ran away from home?”

“America, that’s what happened. All of it.” Parker put his head back and for a moment his eyes were those of a

young man. “Jesus, it was a country then! Lots wrong with it - but still it had something. If we could have taken it over then - ” He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray filled with the butts of the day’s visitors, the brown and white ends of other people’s nerves. “But I’m tired now - “

“Keep going, Fred,” said Jefferson, his impatience showing for the first time. “You can’t stop now.”

Parker smiled again. “You misunderstand me, Captain. I mean I’m tired of what I’ve been doing all these years. The kids today are different - I don’t even speak their language. I had nothing to do with that bombing we’re in here for. Okay, okay - ” He held up a hand. “I know. You’re not the one I’m supposed to plead before. But if they offer me a ticket to Cuba tomorrow, I’m gonna take it. Do you think the Mafia operates there?”

“What has the Mafia got on you?” Malone asked.

“Nothing.” Parker opened his hands in the gesture Malone had seen several times that night. “I don’t even know what they know about me. But they must have kept tabs on me all this time. How, Christ knows. I changed my name three times after leaving ‘Frisco - it was 1936, ‘37, before I became Fred Parker. When the file started -” He grinned at Jefferson.

“Parker,” said Malone carefully, “something is going to happen to my wife and the Mayor’s wife if we don’t release you from here and fly you to Cuba - “

“I know that, Inspector. It’s not a deal I would’ve planned myself- I’ve never traded lives, women’s or men’s. That would only reduce me to my old man’s level.”

“We don’t even know if their lives haven’t already - been finished.” Malone shut his eyes for just a moment: for Christ’s sake, Malone, don’t lose hope! When he opened them he saw the look of sympathy on the face of the young black guard behind Parker and he nodded gratefully. “We could sit still, release you and just wait for the women to be delivered. But we have no guarantee that that is what is going to happen. You say you’re a moral man. If you get

away to Cuba and my wife and Mrs Forte are never returned, are - killed, are you going to come back and help us put the finger on the muderers?”

Parker took his time about replying; then he lit another cigarette, said through the smoke, “I’d do that if I knew who they were, Inspector. But I don’t know who they are. I’m as much in the dark as you are. I’m sure the Mafiosi could help you more than I can.”

Malone shook his head. “They wouldn’t have sent us to you. If they knew anything definite, they’d have put a price on it.”

“You’re learning, Inspector. Do you have the Mafia in Australia?”

“They may be there, but so far they’ve been no trouble.” Malone looked up, feeling sick now with disappointment; he had learned nothing, except that the Mafia never lost track of even the distant members of its family. “Thanks for coming down to see us, Parker.”

“Just a minute.” Parker stubbed out his cigarette, stood up. He looked at the young guard. “Would you do me a favour, Mr Irving, and leave us alone for two minutes?”

The guard looked at Jefferson. “I’m not supposed to - “

“I’ll take the responsibility. Do me and Inspector Malone a favour too.”

The guard looked at Malone, indecision mixed with sympathy on his young bony face, then he nodded, stepped outside the door and pulled it closed behind him.

“How big are the files on the other guys?” Parker asked Jefferson.

“I looked at them this afternoon. The ones on Ratelli and Latrobe started the day they were picked up. We don’t know anything about them other than their names.”

“I know Ratelli. It’s not his real name - I’m not gonna tell you what is - but I know a little about him. But Latrobe - he’s a blank page. Try him.”

“Fred,” said Jefferson slowly, “you haven’t got it in for the kid, have you? We’re trying to save a coupla women’s

lives. We don’t have time to help you revenge yourself on some kid who’s rubbed you the wrong way.”

“Have more faith, Captain. That’s what anarchy is, you know, having faith in people. No, the kid’s okay as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even know if he can help, but I can tell you - he’s the only one amongst us who could have someone on the outside working for him. The rest of us - ” He shook his head. “McBean, Fishman, Ratelli, they all come from families so uptight they don’t even let off firecrackers the Fourth of July. Me? You think the Mafia would want me out?”

“Why have they kept tabs on you so long then?” said Malone.

“They’re another bureaucracy. They just never want to let you go.” He held out the claw of his hand to Malone. “Good luck, Inspector. In a proper society there would be no need for kidnapping.”

“I’d like to think so,” said Malone. “You just have more faith in human nature than I have, whatever the society.”

“Faith,” said Parker, forty years on the road to his New World and now knowing he had been standing still all the time, “it’s the only banner I got left. They just won’t let me wave it in a place like this.”

He went out, the door clanging shut behind him, and Malone looked at Jefferson. “Do you sometimes feel sorry for the so-called enemies of society, feel you may even be on their side?”

“Too often for my own comfort,” said Jefferson. “Well, let’s see if this kid Latrobe will talk to us.”

But Latrobe wouldn’t talk to them, refused to come down to them from his cell up on the seventh floor. Jefferson and Malone went back to the Warden’s office. Davidson, his feet up on the desk, sat up as they came in, put down the paperback book he had been reading.

“‘TheFemale Eunuch. I think I’d rather handle what we got in here than a bunch of Women’s Lib.”

“Has your wife read the book?” Jefferson asked.

“You kidding? I let her read that, I wouldn’t bother to go home. This would be Sunnybrook Farm compared to home.”

“I don’t read any of it. Come Liberation Day for women, I’m gonna let them walk right over me - it’ll be easier. Phil, we want to go up and take a look at young Latrobe. Okay?”

“Just a look? Okay, but don’t make too much fuss up there, John. We got some mean bastards on that floor, just waiting for an excuse to start something.” He picked up his phone, gave instructions to someone on the other end. As he put it down he said, “They say everything is quiet up there now. For Ghrissake, don’t disturb ‘em.”

“Are Parker and the others on that floor?”

“No, we got ‘em spread around, so’s they can’t communicate with each other.” He picked up the book again, settled back in his chair. “Female eunuchs. I’ve met one or two women I thought should’ve had the balls cut outa them.”

A guard took them up in the elevator, waited with them until another guard had unlocked the barred gate on to the bridge, the central area that joined the two tiers of cells arranged on either side of it. The door was closed quietly behind them and the guard, another young black, said softly, “Most of ‘em are sleeping. I’ve woked Latrobe, but he ain’t said anything, ain’t even got off his bed.”

He led them down to a cell at the far end of the bridge. In the cells they passed, open-barred cubicles that offered no privacy, Malone was aware of figures stirring, slowly rising from their beds like disturbed animals. He saw the eyes watching him and he thought, I’m in a zoo: those are cages and that’s a menagerie of killers behind those bars.

“Dig Whitey.” He barely heard the whisper, but it seemed to grow on its own echoes in the bare-walled chamber; it was taken up by other voices, finally rising to a scream: “Kill Whitey! Kill! Kill!”

Malone kept walking, waiting for some reaction from

Jefferson and the guard. They came to the end cell and only-then did the guard say, “You and Latrobe are the only white men on this floor, Inspector. Maybe it would have been better if you’d let Captain Jefferson come up by himself.”

“It’s too late now,” said Jefferson. He had to raise his voice above the din; the prisoners were yelling and chanting and banging on the bars of their cells. “What’s the score on this floor?”

“Every cell’s full, Captain, two to a cell. We got all sorts -half a dozen rapists, coupla sodomists, six on murder raps, some dope pushers, half a dozen crazies - you name it, we got ‘em up here.”

All the inmates were awake now, all standing at the bars to their cells, some standing quietly like men waiting to be let out, but most of them screaming, yelling, sobbing, kicking at the bars with the heels of their shoes. It sounded like pandemonium; then Malone noticed there was a rhythm to the bedlam. There was the occasional off-beat scream or thumping on the bars, but Malone guessed that came from one or two of the psychopaths. But the very steadiness of the rhythm invoked its own feeling of fear in Malone. This was controlled hatred, the intelligent use of anarchy against those like himself, the whites who ran the society they hated. No wonder Fred Parker, the out-of-date anarchist, was exhausted and finished.

The guard switched on a nearby light, looked at his watch. “I gotta call downstairs, Captain. Every ten minutes we gotta report in by phone to the control room.”

As the guard walked back to the entrance gate the inmates chanted Kill, Kill, Kill at him, but he took no notice of them; the shouting was a gesture, like the chanting of campus demonstrators, and they had no real hatred of him. He wore the wrong uniform but he had the right colour, there was still some hope for him.

“Every ten minutes right around the clock they report in,” said Jefferson. “You never know when the psychos are

gonna go crazy and start trying to kill themselves or the guy in with them. Looks like we got one here.”

“I am a political prisoner,” said the young black standing inside the bars. He was thin and he had the biggest eyes Malone had ever seen in a man’s face; they reminded him of the eyes he had seen in the faces of starving children in pictures of Asian famines. The man’s hair was in paper curlers, the hair wound tightly into thin strands that stuck straight out from his head; his head looked like a black pudding studded with fancy cocktail picks. He was dressed in a yellow frilled blouse and a red-and-yellow flared skirt and he was barefooted. He’s straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Malone thought, a caricature piccaninny. The man’s voice had a high lisping note to it: “Women’s Liberation is a legitimate movement - “

“There are no political prisoners in here.” Malone was surprised at the coldness in Jefferson’s voice. Even though he must know he was dealing with a mentally unbalanced transvestite, it seemed to be a sore point with Jefferson that the jail was holding political prisoners. “Every one of you who is in here is here because he broke the law. Whether he broke it for political reasons doesn’t matter - he broke it and that’s why he’s here. You’re not here because of your politics.”

“Bullshit,” said a voice from the back of the cell.

The transvestite looked over his shoulder. “You are right, honey, but that’s no language to use in front of a lady.”

I’m dreaming all this, Malone thought. I’m exhausted and worried and now everything is becoming a nightmare. The chanting had almost died awav and evervone in the cells was trying to hear what was being said down at the end cell; occasionally there would be a scream or a wild laugh, but the offender would angrily be told to shut up. A barred window high in a wall at the end of the bridge was partly open and through it came the sound of the storm as it tore its way through a narrow alley outside. There was a thick smell in Malone’s nostrils, of sweat and ammonia and stale

food and excreta, the sour smell of prison, and somewhere in a cell on the upper tiers a man was crying quietly, like a child afraid of the dark. And in front of Malone and Jefferson the thin dark head with its paper curlers swung itself back and forth on its bony shoulders.

“No respect, no respect! How can we get equality when there’s no respect?”

Jefferson looked past the transvestite into the back of the cell. A white youth lay on a bunk, hands behind his head, dark expressionless eyes staring down past the lower planes of his face at the two policemen. “Mr Latrobe, we’d like to talk to you.”

Latrobe said nothing, the expression on his still face remaining unchanged. Malone could not see him clearly in the gloom, but one feature did mark him: through his long dark hair there ran a broad white streak, as bizarre in its way as the paper curlers on the head of the other man in the cell.