A Bad Man Read online

  The driver opened a metal door, and they walked single file, Feldman in the middle, through a sort of narrow ceilingless passageway that curved and angled every few feet. Along the wide tops of the walls strolled men with rifles. Feldman looked up at them. “Head down, you,” a guard called. Every hundred feet or so was another metal door, which opened as they came to it.

  “Maximum security,” the deputy said.

  “Maximum insecurity,” said the driver.

  They came to a final door, which opened onto a big yard lighted with stands of arc lamps, bright as an infield. Across from him, about two hundred yards away, in an area not affected by the lights, he could see the outlines of buildings like the silhouette of city skylines in old comic strips. They took him to one of these buildings—all stone; he could see no joints; it was as though the building had been sculpted out of solid rock—and the deputy prodded him up the stairs.

  “You’ll have your interview with the warden here,” the deputy said.

  Feldman looked at his wrist for marks that might have been left by the chain. He was certain the deputy had abused him, that the business of the suitcase had been his own invention. There was something in the Constitution about cruel and unusual punishment. There was a slight redness about his left wrist but no swelling. He was a little disappointed. If he got the chance—he would study the warden carefully; didn’t they have to be college graduates?—he would report the deputy anyway.

  They took him to an office on the second floor.

  Feldman was surprised. For all the apparent solidness of the outside of the building, the inside seemed extremely vulnerable. There was a lot of wood. He could smell furniture polish. The old, oiled stairs creaked as they climbed them. It was like the inside of an old public school. There were even drinking fountains in the hall.

  “You wait here,” the deputy said. He opened a door—it could have been to the principal’s office; Feldman looked for the American flag—and pushed him inside.

  “The warden doesn’t want anyone around when he talks to a con,” the deputy said. “I’m sacking out. The driver’s your guard now. He’ll be right outside.” He closed the door and left the room. Feldman waited a few minutes and opened the door. A few things the driver had said made him think he might be approachable.

  The driver was sitting in a chair, a machine gun in his lap. “I’m no friend of yours,” he said. “Get back in there.”

  Feldman sat down to wait. I’m probably on television, he thought. They’re watching me this minute. Strangely, he felt more comfortable. If everything was just a strategy he could deal with them. Just don’t let them touch me, he thought. He fell asleep. Let them watch me sleep, he dreamed.

  When he woke up he expected to see the warden standing over him. It was not impossible, he felt, that the warden could even turn out to be the deputy. But when he opened his eyes no one was there, and he knew that there were no one-way mirrors, no hidden microphones, and was more frightened than at any time since he had been arrested. I’m in trouble, he thought, I’m really in trouble.

  He began to pray.

  “Troublemaker,” he prayed, “keep me alive. Things are done that mustn’t be done to me. Have a heart. If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what they know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

  He finished his prayer, and still seated, looked around the office. It was past midnight. He might have hours to wait yet. “You wait here,” the deputy had said. Was it a stratagem? They file you paper-thin with expectation and anxiety. I expect nothing. I’ll take what comes. He folded his arms across his chest, trying to look detached. It would be best, he thought, if he could sleep again. A sleeping man had a terrific advantage in a contest of this sort. It would invariably rattle whoever came to shake him awake. “You see what I think of you?” a sleeping man said to the shaker.

  But he wasn’t sleepy. He was too cold. It’s the altitude, Feldman thought. At night you need a coat up here even in summer. He looked down at his suit and stroked his sleeve. It was lucky he believed in appearances. (“A heavy material,” he had told the buyer. “In this heat?” “What should I wear in that courtroom, a luau shirt?”) A man of conservative, executive substance, silver-templed, and tan for a Jew. Never split a Republican ticket in my life, gentlemen.

  The door opened and Feldman looked up. A man stood in the doorway for a moment and then moved behind the desk and sat down. He had some papers with him which he examined as if they contained information with which he was already familiar, using them easily but with a certain disappointment.

  Feldman watched the warden, if this was the warden. (Already he had begun to do what all strangers in new situations do—attribute to others exalted rank, seeing in each comfortable face an executive, a person of importance.) He was a man of about Feldman’s age, perhaps a little younger. Feldman guessed they were the same height, though the warden was not as heavy. What struck him most was the man’s face. It seemed conventional, not unintelligent so much as not intelligent. It was, even at midnight, smooth—not recently shaved, just smooth—as though lacking the vitality to grow hair. Its ruddiness could probably be accounted for by the heavy sun striking at this altitude through the thin atmosphere. He might have been one of the salesmen who called at his store. Feldman had hoped, he realized now, for someone mysterious, a little magical. He saw, looking at the warden’s face, that it would be a long year.

  “Is it all right with you if I open a window? It’s a little stuffy in here,” the man said.

  “I’m cold,” Feldman said.

  “I’m sorry,” the warden said, getting up. “I have to open the window.” He opened it and came around the front of the desk to where Feldman was sitting.

  “Mr. Feldman,” he said, “I’m Warden Fisher, a fisher of bad men.”

  Feldman stood up to shake hands. The warden turned away and went back to stand by the open window.

  “Be seated, please,” the warden said. “In this first interview I like to get the man’s justification.”

  “Sir?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “They say I’m guilty.”

  “Are you?”

  Feldman answered carefully. There was some question of an appeal, of getting his case reopened. Probably there was a tape recorder going someplace. The warden was trying to disarm him. “No, of course not,” he said, undisarmed.

  The warden smiled. “I’ve never had an affirmative answer to that question.” Feldman, disarmed, at one with all the robbers, bums, murderers and liars in the place, felt he needed an initiative.

  “You may want me to put this in writing later,” he said, “but I feel I have certain legitimate complaints about the way I was treated coming up here.”

  The warden frowned, but Feldman went on. He explained about his watch and the money. Telling it, he knew he sounded like a fool. He didn’t mind. It added, he felt, to an impression of innocence. “I have reason to suspect, too, that the deputy took money from certain enemies of mine in exchange for showing me off to them in my humiliation.”

  The warden nodded. “Go on,” he said.

  Feldman felt the warden was bored by the story, but he couldn’t stop. When he came to the part about the toilet he tried to get outrage into his voice. Somehow it sounded spurious. He finished lamely with an allusion to the final proddings and shoves.

  “Is there anything else?” the warden asked.

  “No sir,” Feldman said.

  “Do you have any proof? Would Dedman or Freedman or Victman testify to any of this?”

  Feldman admitted they probably wouldn’t. “I’m not lying though,” he added helplessly.”

  The warden opened a second window. “The deputy’s a pig,” he said suddenly. “He ought to be in prison. Without proof, however—”
/>   Feldman shrugged sympathetically.

  “He ought to be in prison too, I mean,” the warden said, turning to Feldman.

  “I’m innocent,” Feldman said mechanically.

  “All right,” the warden said, “that’s enough.”

  It was. He regretted having spoken. He didn’t know what it was tonight. Every action he had taken had been ultimately cooperative. It was a consequence of being on the defensive. Feldman knew how easy it was to accuse. That was the trick the warden had been playing on him. He had to assert himself before it was too late. If he had the nerve it would be a good idea to push the warden, to run behind his desk and sit in his chair. Then he seized on the idea of silence. To speak, even to speak in accusation was, in a way, to fawn. Let the warden make the mistakes, he thought. Mum’s the word. He folded his arms.

  “It’s easy for me to believe you’ve been wronged,” the warden was saying. A trap. Shut up. Forewarned is forearmed. “There are enough bad men in the world. We all have our turn as their victims.”

  Not me, Feldman thought.

  “What I want to know,” the warden said, “is what you’ve done.”

  Feldman said nothing.

  “Answer me,” the warden said.

  “I’ve done nothing.”

  “All right,” the warden shouted, “I said that’s enough. Since you’ve been here you’ve spoken only of your own injuries. Granted! What else?”

  It was no contest. He wasn’t free to remain silent. The thing to do was to yield, to throw himself not on the warden’s mercy but on his will. He wants words, Feldman thought, I’ll give him words. He wants guilt? Let there be guilt.

  “It says in that paper on your desk what I did,” Feldman said hoarsely. “It says I did favors.”

  “What else?”

  “That I was a middleman, a caterer. That they came to me. That I didn’t even have to advertise. Ethical. Like a doctor.”

  “This is nothing,” the warden said. “You’re wasting time.”

  “All right. I filled needs. Like a pharmacist doing prescriptions. Did you ever know anyone like me? The hell. A woman needed an abortion, I found a doctor. A couple needed a kid, I found a bastard. A punk a fix, I found a pusher. I was in research.”

  The warden shuddered.

  “Wait,” Feldman said, “you haven’t heard anything. In my basement. In my store. In a special room. Under the counter. I’ve found whores, and I’ve found pimps for whores. You don’t see it on the shelf? Ask. You have peculiar tastes? Feldman has a friend. What I said about the doctor and the pharmacist—that’s wrong. I was like a fence. I was a moral fence. That’s what it says I did.” He stopped talking. “One more thing,” he said in a moment, looking around, “this isn’t a confession.” He raised his voice. “Warden Fisher wanted me to talk, so I’m talking. I’m just repeating in my own words what’s written in his paper. None of it is true.”

  The warden stared at him.

  “That last takes care of your tape recorders,” Feldman told him. “And if you’re thinking of clipping it just before I added that, let me point out that I wasn’t speaking in my natural voice.”

  The warden shook his head.

  “I never took a penny,” Feldman whispered.

  “I can’t hear you,” the warden said.

  I never took a penny, he mouthed. “I did favors. I helped people. The whole case against me turns on whether I accepted money. I never did. And if you want to know my justification, it was for fun I did it,” he told him softly.

  He spoke again in his normal voice. “According to your records, Warden, I accepted money from a Mrs. Jerome Herbert for arranging an interview with a judge who was to hear a case against her husband. Mrs. Herbert had a charge account at my store. We had just installed a new billing system. She received an unitemized bill for five hundred dollars, which she paid with a personal check made out to me. God knows what she bought from me for five hundred dollars, but it wasn’t an interview with any judge. God knows, too, why she would pay an unitemized bill or why she would make the check out to me, but that’s what happened. That’s why I’m here now. It was the machine’s mistake.”

  “I smell you,” the warden said quietly.

  “What?” Feldman asked. “What’s that?”

  “I smell you.”

  The pee, Feldman thought, embarrassed. He looked down at his pants and touched one palm of his trouser leg. It was still damp. The altitude—pee didn’t dry. That deputy bastard.

  “I told you,” Feldman said, “you want evidence? There’s evidence. Send my piss to your crime lab.”

  The warden moved suddenly and grabbed Feldman’s trousers, bunching the damp material in his fist, squeezing it. “That,” he said, “that’s nothing. I smell you.”

  “What do you mean?” Feldman said, genuinely angry. “What kind of thing is that to say? What kind of way is that for a warden to talk? The deputy was ignorant, but you’re supposed to know better. I won’t be insulted by you, by someone in authority. I’m warning you. I have plenty of friends in this state.”

  “You still think this is a game, don’t you?” the warden said. “You still think some philosophical cat and mouse is going on here. You bad clown, you wicked fool with your nonsensical impersonations and your miming and your boastful confessions. You bad, silly man, this is no game. Can you understand? You’re here for a year in this state’s licensed penitentiary, and it’s no game. There are no tape recorders. When I want you to confess I’ll have you beaten up and you’ll confess. Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” Feldman said quietly.

  “Yes sir,” the warden mocked. “You don’t understand yet, do you, actor? You still want me to say what’s always said. All right. ‘You play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you.’ All right. But don’t let that be any comfort to you. There aren’t any prizes for playing ball with us. I don’t care about your mind, and I promise no one will lay a finger on your soul. It’s your ass that belongs to us, Feldman. You want it back, stay out of trouble. Do the routines. Learn to think about your laundry. Keep your cell clean. Don’t put more on your tray than you can eat. Look forward to the movies. Make no noise after ten o’clock. Learn a trade. Try out for the teams. Pray for the condemned.”

  Feldman’s heart turned. He felt the homunculus riding it twist.

  “Stand up,” the warden commanded.

  He stood slowly, forcing himself to look at the warden.

  “There are some good men here,” the warden said. “I don’t want them corrupted by you.”

  He watched the warden glumly.

  “I don’t expect to see you again. Do you understand me? If we have business it’s to be conducted through a procedurally constituted chain of command, and the probability is I’ll initiate it. No more midnight meetings with the warden, actor.” He started to cough. “Get out,” he said. “Your stench gags me.”

  3

  Feldman’s cell was ten feet wide and a dozen deep, about the size of the room in his father’s house when he was a boy. This struck him at once, and since he noticed that the cells varied in dimension, and even in their basic shapes, he wondered if perhaps this information had not also been in his records, and if putting him there had not been meant as some subtle lesson.

  When he knew him better he asked his cellmate, a man named Bisch, what his room had been like as a child.

  “Like a kitchen,” Bisch said. “I slept by the stove.” The man was tall—Feldman thought of him at first as a mountaineer—with grayish bushy hair that tufted up from his temples. Everything he did he did slowly, moving deliberately to tasks with the loose moodiness of an athlete stepping up to a mark. He had great pulling-and-tearing power in his long dark hands. Feldman was afraid of him. A strangler, he thought, a chopper, a choker.

  Bisch had not even looked up, though he was awake, when Feldman was brought in, or when, moments later, Feldman urinated, splashing loudly, in the lidless toilet. They were awake together for hours th
at night, and though Feldman coughed and shivered, catching cold, the man said nothing.

  Maybe there’s a ritual, Feldman thought. Maybe a new prisoner is supposed to introduce himself and announce his crime. “Feldman’s the name, favors the game,” he said to himself experimentally. “Feldman, not guilty. Machine error.”

  It was, at first, like being in a hospital. What they all had in common was not their crime or their back luck or their contempt. Being locked up was their mutual disease, but because he was the most recent arrival he thought of himself as the sickest, the one with the greatest distance to travel to recovery, the most to lose. It did not matter that many of these men would never, as he would in a year, see the outside again. They were used to it. To judge by appearances, they were habitual criminals or men for whom being inside a prison was somehow a relief. Later he would look for the one called Pop, the one whom age made spotless, harmless, a saint by weary default of health and ego. Who volunteered to remain there always, who would be dangerous only if let loose, and then just long enough to get back, who would plan his last crime against society with the precision of a scientist and the knowledge of a Blackstone or a Coke, who knew even as he picked the lock or jimmied the window just how long he’d get, where to go till they caught him—only enjoying that much freedom, the two weeks like a sailor’s shore leave it would take to catch him. Nervous even in the local jail, wondering as he awaited trial if he had done enough to discount their mercy, their solicitude for his white hairs, his years, and calm only when pronounced guilty, and serene only back in the penitentiary. There was no such man.

  He did not really wonder very much about the other men, however. He gave them his thoughts when he was with them in the dining hall or as he watched them from his cell, exercising in the prison yard—because of his cold they allowed him to remain inside, though he saw no doctor—but most of the time he could think of no one but himself, again like a man coming into a hospital.

  As he began to feel better—now he was counterfeiting his cough—he worried about what to do with his time. During the daily hour of free time, he left his cell to see the library, as he had gone, too, to the swimming pool and gymnasium and crafts hall, as he had gone to all the facilities, hearing of them and finding them greedily, as on ocean liners he had taken his preliminary inspections of the ship, going into each of its salons and bays, only to decide, finally, on lunch in his cabin, or to sit for long hours in a deck chair.