TELEGRAPH

They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope. The rumpus out front has barely settled down when the six o’clock from Syracuse pulls through, factory whistles screaming and the bell gonging at the tractor works. Shoe rolls off his rack, feeling the cold concrete through his socks, steps to the basin and splashes his face with the tiny bit of water left standing, no light yet but everything in the cell within the arm’s reach of an amputee. He wrestles into his pants, shirt, vest and jacket, then jams his feet into the prison-issue gunboats and laces them up. By the time the lights are switched on in the tier, his own bare bulb flickering overhead, he is dressed and combed, ready to peel another day off his sentence. Shoe hooks the rack up flush to the wall, rolls the thin mattress, folds the blanket and lays the sorry excuse for a pillow on top. He does his morning set-up routine, facing the door and pressing hard against the concrete on either side with his arms, straining as if to push the walls apart, then reaching up to touch the ceiling, followed by a dozen squats, knees popping each time he bends them.

“Give him to us!” they shouted. “Hand the filthy bastard over!” That size crowd in the dead of night, police whistles shrilling and every one of the night bulls clomping out to the front gate, it must be some holy terror they’ve brought in, some spitting, unrepentant menace to society hustled past the warden’s desk and flung directly into a punishment cell. Wife-killer maybe, local enough to draw a mob, or maybe a chickenhawk caught with his beak where it shouldn’t be. Whatever the beef, it’s the first flash of novelty at Warden Mead’s hotel for months, and the boys will want to know the particulars.

Time for bolts and bars now, as Grogan, with his heavy tread, clangs up the stairs with Pete Driscoll gimping behind him. The long bar is sprung and Shoe stands with his hands on the grated iron, the levers clunking as the Captain and the trustee approach from the right— chunk! chank! and when his door is free Shoe pushes hard to swing it open, then grabs his shitbucket by the handle and steps out onto the wooden gallery walk. He stands at attention, face forward, shooting his eyes to Pete. But the trustee only raises his eyebrows, in the know but unable to pass it on, and follows Grogan unlatching the cells. The faintest light sneaks through the barred windows of the outside wall across from him now as the company forms up con by con, each with bucket in left hand and wearing their joint faces, indifferent to the day, waiting for permission to breathe. Grogan reaches the end of the tier, every man accounted for, and raps his metal-tipped stick once on the floor. The men half-turn left. Grogan raps twice and they begin to still-march in rhythm with each other, till he raps a third time and they short-step forward, single file along the gallery walk, right hand laid flat on the guardrail where it can be seen, and down the narrow iron stairs to the bottom, crossing the stone floor till the lead man reaches the wing door where they stop and wait in silence till all the tiers are in formation and then Grogan double-raps again and they head out past Captain Flynn counting at the door and into the damp, cold shock of the yard.

The line short-steps out from the north wing building then bends sharp to the right at the center walk, forming up double file now and waiting for Grogan, who lets them cool a moment, the breath of two hundred men visible in the yard, leaves just beginning to turn on the birches along the walk, a yellow-tinted canopy for the line of gray men with black stripes. They stand with eyes front, swindlers and pete-men, gashouse pugs and forgers, sneaks and stalls, smash-and-grab artists, pennyweights, till-tappers, boardinghouse thieves and moll-buzzers, each one willing himself invisible, hoping to be passed over by Grogan’s bloodshot eyes. The Captain, satisfied for the moment, raps twice against the stone of the walk and the double line moves, full-stepping the length of the great rectangle back to the brick shithouse.

It is still the Rule of Silence in line and at meals, though they nixed the Lockstep just last year. No more chugging along with your right on the shoulder and your left on the hip of the con in front, no more tripping on the new fish, no more easy slipping of kites into your front man’s waistband. It took Shoe three weeks to remember how to swing his arms.

It is cold in the yard as they march down the center walk, crows flapping down into the birches, the first frost of the season sitting pale on the grass, and cold in the shithouse as each line enters a door, Shoe flipping the bucket lid up, dumping last night’s business into a large stone hopper, scooping water into it at the next basin, shaking it to rinse before dumping it into the final basin and the Owasco River beyond on the way out, then adding it to the pile at the disinfecting station before forming up again. This will be the only exercise most of the cons get all day. Captain Grogan raps and they full-step back, past the punishment cells and the new brick shock shop on the south wing to the mess. Sergeant Kelso, looking more exhausted than usual, stands at the door counting as they enter in single file, shooting a look to Shoe as he passes. Shoe slaps his right hand to his left breast in salute as he marches by the Principal Keeper, the PK peeping each con with equal disinterest till they have filed down into their rows and stand, row after row after row after row, all facing the same direction, waiting at the long chow shelves. The PK turns, ganders that all is in order, raps his skull-cracker on the floor and a thousand men pull their stools from under the shelf, then step back to attention. He raps again and they sit as one, food already laid out in front of them, oatmeal sludge, two slabs of punk and a cup of lukewarm bullpiss which Shoe puts away mechanically, shying one of the bread slices back into the basket when the mess con passes, no food wasted at Auburn, no, anything you leave on the table you finish in the cooler. They are given only minutes to stoke up, though how many is not clear as there are no clocks or watches in the joint, at least none that a con can get a rubber at. The screws own not only your time, good and bad, easy and hard, but Time itself. The PK raps twice and they stand and exit by rows, spoon held out in the left hand and dropped into the washbin as they short-step out, Sergeant Kelso counting and giving Shoe another look, widening his eyes to indicate it is big news.

Daylight then, slanting through the bars of the high windows as Grogan’s company enters the north wing again, and the crows, more crows than cons in the yard some mornings, ganging in the trees outside mocking the Rule of Silence. The men stand in formation till the Captain raps and they climb the iron stairs to their tiers, Shoe facing the cell at attention till the double rap and then stepping into his stone coffin, turning and pulling the grated door just short of closed. He waits till the footsteps come near and then gives the door a shake to prove the hinges are still good, and steps back. Chank! Chunk! the levers go down and he is double locked, standing with a checkerboard of light coming through the iron lattice and onto his body, waiting till whump! the long-bar falls into its brackets and seals the whole row before turning to check the mail. There is a kite, folded smaller than a dime and left between his pillow and blanket, written in haste with the char of a used matchhead, scrawled by Pete Driscoll and left by the other gallery boy, the Jew kid with the harelip. It is one short, shaky word and only that.

MACK, it says.

There is time for a coffin nail before First Work, and Shoe lights one from his boodle and stands blowing the smoke out through the grated iron. They say how Sitting Bull’s outfit and the rest of the horse Indians can write a telegram with a woodfire and a wet blanket, and Shoe wishes he could do the same when Grogan’s footsteps have faded and the tapping starts up. Tin cups on iron grating, nothing subtle, and all of them want to know the same thing. He uses his stool against the door to answer, thump, thump, thump, yeah, yeah, yeah to let them know he’ll find out what the rumpus was, what it meant, is there going to be a party in the shock shop, and then the bullpen door screeks open and it is Grogan back below them calling up.

“If I have to climb those feckin stairs an extra time,” he warns, “one of yez will pay for sure.”

And then even the crows are quiet.

There is Mack Crawford on the south wing and Mack something or other who works in the basket shop and any number of Irish and Scots cons, MacThis and MacThat, and there is Sergeant McCurran on the graveyard shift and Captain McManus who supervises the laundry. Pete’s message is like most prison dope, one-third bullshit and two-thirds speculation.

Shoe stabs out the cig and saves the butt in his boodle, never know when hard times will hit, and then the screws clomp up into the tiers again to make their music on the metal and it is First Work. Shoe jams his cap on this time and short-steps with the others to the iron stairs and down and out into the yard where the details are separated and marched away to their shops. Sergeant Kelso fingers him.

“Shoemaker.”

“Sir.”

“With me. Carpentry.”

Shoe falls out from his line and begins to full-step, slowly, toward the woodshop. Kelso strolls two steps behind him, waiting till none of the other bulls can see their faces before speaking.

“Opening day.”

It is Saturday, Shoe remembers, and the college boys will be knocking heads.

“They’re not giving anything on Princeton till they reach twenty-four fecking points. Can ye imagine that?”

Kelso smuggles Shoe the sporting pages from the Rochester rag and pumps him for advice on his wagers.

“Against Villanova?” says Shoe, eyes forward as he walks. “Take it.”

“Their first game of the season?”

“First game for Villanova too. They don’t belong on the same grass with the Tigers.”

“Same odds with Pennsylvania and Lehigh.”

“Take it. These are just warmup games for the big squads.”

“Harvard and Williams?”

Shoe considers for a moment. “Harvard takes their time on the field—”

“But Harry Graydon is fullback again.”

“I say they win by two, maybe three touchdowns. Be careful there.”

They pass the punishment cells and Shoe is aching to ask but that’s not how you play it with Kelso.

“I’ve got Cornell over Colgate—”

Kelso is a hopeless gambler, a pigeon born to be plucked. Shoe can only try to steer him away from his worst hunches.

“By a few maybe,” he cautions. “Starbuck is on the sidelines this year.”

“Then Yale, my God, they’ve only got three men coming back—”

“But their scrubs last year could lick most of the teams in the country, and this Chadwicke is the real article. Who’s the victim?”

“Trinity.”

“Trinity, right—they go down by at least three scores.”

They reach the carpentry building and wait at the door for the work detail to pass inside.

“I’ve got Army over Georgetown by four,” says Kelso when the gang has cleared.

“I’d steer clear of that. Georgetown is turning out a real eleven this year.”

“But Army—”

“—can’t bring their artillery onto the field.”

“Yer wrong about that, laddy.”

Shoe shrugs. “It’s your funeral, Sergeant. Personally, I’d run away like it was on fire.”

Lachman, the contractor, has the shop already banging away when they step in, cons at their benches sawing and staining, hammering together crates and coffins. Shoe worked here for a year, after they’d run him through the baskets and the horse collars, and he always loved the smell and having something to pound. Nose DiNucci is waiting by the chair on the keeper’s platform, his metal basin on a stool and his tools in a box on the floor. Kelso eyes the basin as he steps up.

“Is that water hot?”

“Hot as I can get it, Sergeant,” says the Dago, dipping a thin towel into the basin.

Kelso sits and leans back in the chair, sighing with pleasure as DiNucci wraps the hot, wet cloth around his beezer. Shoe stands on the floor next to the platform, by Kelso’s right hand, waiting. Runner duty is the beans—no heavy lifting, a chance to roam around the joint and poke your sniffer into things—but a lot of standing and waiting goes with it. Kelso starts to talk with the towel over his face while DiNucci makes with the brush and cup, working up a lather.

“I’m already under the blankets with the Missus,” he sighs, “when the fecking telephone rings. We’ve got the service now, the Warden insists on it—and they tell me there’s a passenger car been put on the night run from Buffalo and we’ll be getting a special delivery around three o’clock. ‘It’s the middle of the cold dark night,’ says I. ‘What could you possibly need me there for?’ Unawares as I was of the tragic events at the Pan.”

Shoe has been following stories of the great Exposition in the scraps of rag he’s been able to glom on to. Every watchpocket cannon and con artist not wearing stripes must be in Buffalo, working the herd.

“I don’t read the evening editions,” Kelso confides to the Dago as he carefully peels the towel off, “as I don’t find it conducive to sleep. A stroll around the block after your meal, says I, a friendly hand of pinochle with the neighbors, but nothing to tax the mind.”

“So—big news at the Exposition,” Shoe offers casually. The keeper’s train of thought is prone to frequent derailment, and Shoe has learned to steer him back on track.

“A terrible business. A national shame.”

DiNucci, who is bending down with razor in hand to scrutinize the Sergeant’s lathered neck, looks to Shoe, who nods for him to get busy.

“ ‘Just get yourself down here on the double,’ says the PK, and an order is an order, so I climb into the uniform and I says to Margaret, says I, ‘This will be a great deal of effort about nothing when it comes out in the wash.’ ”

The Sergeant points his chin toward the ceiling to help DiNucci with his scraping.

“And so you can imagine my bestonishment when I arrive to find several hundred extremely agitated citizens, many of them strangers to our town, camped across the street at the station.” Kelso raises his voice to be heard over the whine of an electric table saw. “ ‘Michael,’ I says to myself, ‘this is not the new policy of the New York Central Railway, these are not passengers awaiting transport in the wee hours, but an unlawful assembly determined to obstruct the orderly machinations of our judicial system.’ ”

“All these years on the job,” muses Shoe, “have sharpened your powers of deduction.”

Kelso raises an eyebrow at Shoe.

“And who, might I ask, is the one of us with STATE PRISON stamped on all his buttons?”

“You got me there, Sergeant. So—there was a crowd—”

“A mob, it was, with the bloodlust in their eye, refusing our instructions to peacefully disperse themselves. Captain Singleton was in the process of reading them the Riot Act—”

“That’s a real thing?” interrupts the barber. “The Riot Act?”

“Real as rain. There’s a copy in Warden Mead’s office.”

DiNucci shakes his head. “Live and learn.”

“So this mob—” prompts Shoe.

“Disrespectful is the least of it. Halfway through the Captain’s declamation the train pulls in and all hell breaks loose. The boys in Buffalo have been all over this Goulash fella, you can see that the minute they drag him off the car, he’s been through the wringer backwards and forwards, and he takes one look at his reception committee and his knees give way, the detectives on either side holdin him up by the bracelets, and then the crowd rushes forward—careful of that bit there, it can be tricky—”

Nose carefully shaves the cleft in Kelso’s chin.

“Goulash,” says Shoe.

“Some sort of Hunkie appellation,” frowns the Sergeant. “I heard him say it in the Warden’s office when we took his information, but it’s Goulash to me. Oh, the mob went after that lad hammer and tong they did, and they had him on the ground more than once before we could drag him up the steps and into Administration. I split a few heads with my stick, I can tell you, and there was others got a rifle butt in the chops for their trouble. Twas like one of your lynching events in Old Dixie, only instead of a blackie on the rope it’s an alien assassin that’s insinuated himself onto our fair shores to strike a blow at liberty.”

“It sounded like a hell of a donnybrook out there.”

“I tell you, Shoe, if it hadn’t been for the bravery of our boys in blue they’d have cheated the State for sure.”

“An assassin.” Shoe muses. If you show too much interest they start to think it’s dope you shouldn’t be in on.

“A sniveling little hop o’ me thumb that’s laid a great man low.”

And sometimes you just have to pop the query. “Who did he kill?” asks Shoe.

The Sergeant turns his head to glare. “And where in God’s name have you been?”

“Cell 43,” says Shoe. “Third tier, north wing.”

Kelso raises a brow. “Not so easy to follow the game when you’re incarcerated, is it? That’ll teach you a lesson.” He closes his eyes and settles back, as if the subject is closed.

DiNucci begins on the Sergeant’s cheeks, stretching the skin with his thumb and shaving with long, careful strokes. Shoes gives him the nod to pitch in.

“Sergeant,” asks the Dago, idly curious, “have you ever seen a moving picture?”

It isn’t what Shoe had in mind. DiNucci is in for thirty, having settled his unfaithful wife, as it happens, with a razor, and when asked why by the judge was reported to answer “Cause I didn’t own a gun.”

“Indeed I have,” answers the keeper.

“And what is it, exactly?”

“Just what the words say. A picture that moves. Say you had one of their cameras pointed at us right here. Once the fillum was developed, an audience in New York or Buffalo would be able to see every flick of your blade, every snip of the scissors.”

DiNucci frowns. “Why would they want to see that?”

“It’s the novelty, isn’t it? Seeing it projected on a wall rather than in actual life.”

“There’s plenty things I’d rather see than a shave and a haircut.”

“As would we all. But could you get the camera apparatus close enough to photograph them?”

The Dago ponders this, wiping foam from his blade onto his apron.

“This Goulash character,” says Shoe, casually stepping in to the lull, “did you run him through the usual reception?”

Kelso shifts in the chair. “Nothing usual about it. The Buffalo dicks drag the boy up the stairs like a rag doll and unlock the bracelets and throw him down onto the floor in the Warden’s office, where he begins to froth at the mouth and cry out like a banshee. ‘You’re going to kill me!’ says he. ‘I know you’re going to kill me!’ ”

“And where would he get that idea?”

Kelso opens one eye to search Shoe’s face for irony.

“If you had shot the President,” he says, “you might expect a bit of rough treatment.”

DiNucci gasps. “The President of the United States?”

“No—the President of the Skaneatles Culinary and Debating Society. You think if he’d shot any simple fecking rubberneck at the fair he’d rate a hemp brigade the like of what we saw here last night?”

“So he’s foaming at the mouth,” Shoe prompts, “this Goulash—”

“Doctor Gerin is there and he slaps the lad and yells, straight into his face, ‘Drop the theatricals,’ says he, ‘we know yer faking it!’ ” Kelso shakes his head. “Can you imagine that, making a show that he’s insane when he’s only a fecking little anarchist.”

Shoe rubs elbows with murderers on a daily basis, men who have killed for money or passion or survival, and most of them seem pretty well organized upstairs. To kill somebody for a hinky-dink idea of how the world ought to work, and to do it in broad daylight in front of ten thousand witnesses—this, he thinks, would qualify you as a serious candidate for the bughouse.

“That what he copped to?” he asks. “Being an anarchist?”

“Words to that effect,” the screw answers nasally as DiNucci pinches and lifts his honker to get at his upper lip. “Anarchist, anti-Christ, something along those lines. He knew what he was about and said as much between all his blubbering. So we just pulled his clothes off and yanked a cooler suit onto him and chucked the murdering little bastard into isolation.”

“They had me down there in the nut-hatch for a couple years,” says DiNucci, a troubled look on his face. “Right after the trial.”

“Matteawan.”

“I had to beg them to send me here. That place’ll drive you crazy.”

Crazy. Unless, thinks Shoe, Goulash was only following orders, was the worst kind of sap, buying into some load of malarkey he heard in a speech. Like these ginks who can’t wait to climb into Uncle’s uniform, think they’re fighting for Old Glory and instead get sent to some monkey patch in the Pacific to snatch the goods for the ones who got the whole game rigged, the ones who’d sic the bulls on a sorefoot private soldier if he dared to call at their back door for a drop of water.

“So they’ll burn this character for sure,” says Shoe.

Kelso shakes his head. “The President has only been wounded, and he is a solid, fleshy man. Girth is Nature’s strategy for protecting the vital organs. No, Mac will come through like a champion. And our little friend in the punishment corridor,” he nods toward the south wing, “will be with us indefinitely.”

Shoe tries to wrap his mind around it. “Shooting the President.”

“Some are born to greatness,” declaims the Sergeant as DiNucci gently pats astringent on his face, “and some seek notoriety through its destruction. Now go get me the paper, and be quick about it.”

Shoe leaves the noisy woodshop and full-steps down the center path, crows solemn above him, filling the birches, as he heads for the administration building. There are bulls strolling the tops of the walls, bulls on the parapets, peeping him all the way across the yard. He sees Lester Gorcey on all fours with the rest of the grounds detail, frowning at the grass as if daring it to grow. Shoe slows, then stops a few yards away and kneels to pretend to deal with his laces. At least one of the bulls up top, probably that wildass Thompson, must have him in the sights by now.

“New guest on the Row,” he says softly, keeping his eyes fixed on his gunboats. “Shot the President in Buffalo.”

Gorcey reaches out to clip a single blade that has dared to rise above its neighbors. Stick your head up in Auburn and they’ll cut it off. “Cleveland is dead?”

Not so easy at all, thinks Shoe, to keep track of the game in here.

“McKinley,” he hisses. “Hanging by a thread.”

He stands and continues down the path. Gorcey will share it with the grounds detail and they’ll clue in the whole south wing. Shoe slows as he passes the punishment cells and the shock shop, and though there is nothing to see but brick, can’t help running his eyes over it.

He’d been young when they transferred him up from Blackwell’s on his first jolt, young and stupid. Pilsbury wasn’t running the Island then and it had been a free-for-all, hard to tell the cons from the poverty cases from the derelicts they passed off as prison guards. You could buy a tumble with a whore for a half-dozen cigarettes. Pick up a nail too, since it was the diseased ones they sent to die there. He’d been out and about there, running with a gang, and then all of a sudden transferred to Auburn and forced to walk in lockstep like a fucking caterpillar’s ass and not a word past your gizzard from lights on to lights out and he kicked, told a keeper where he could put his stick but instead the screw put it hard over his head, more than once, and he woke up in the dark in a metal box on the Row.

First there was the sound, the steady deep thrumming of the prison dynamo through the wall, and then the sting of the rivets sticking up from the metal floor into his flesh. He was wearing a filthy uniform a size too large and shoes made of felt. He crawled to the nearest wall, rivets digging into his knees, and used it to pull himself shakily to his feet. His head was throbbing and there was dried blood on his face. The walls were all sheet metal, a little farther apart than in the cells upstairs. He felt his way around to a narrow, barred slit, head-high in a solid iron door, dizzy, grabbing the bars to steady himself, his mouth like dusty carpet as he began to shout.

“What happened? Where the fuck am I?”

“Where the fuck you think you are?” called a voice from over to the left. “And you don’t have to shout.”

It was true, everything they said echoing in whatever space lay beyond the iron door.

“What time is it?”

The laughter came from both sides, echoing. “You gotta be kiddin me.”

“How many of you down here?”

“Eight cells, half of em full now that you come. The fella in Number Three don’t talk.”

“Then how you know he’s there?”

“How you know I’m here?”

“I can hear you.”

“I might just be your imagination. You could be buried in a coffin somewhere, havin a dream.”

“Stiffs don’t dream.”

“How do you know?”

Whoever it was in the cell to the left, he didn’t like him.

“Relax, kid,” said a different voice from the right. “Whatever they got in mind for you, aint nothin you can do about it.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Number Eight.”

“He don’t have a name?”

“My name is Kemmler,” said the voice from the right.

Shoe knew that Kemmler was the gink they were going to hook up to their new electrical contraption at the end of the week.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It don’t matter now.”

“Number Eight,” says the first voice, “is three steps from the door to the chamber. So’s the Long Walk won’t be so long.”

Shoe gripped the bars harder, little sense of what was up or down in the total blackness. “I need to see a doctor.”

“Yeah, and I need a steak and some spuds and a jug of Scotch.”

“How bout water?”

More laughter then, echoing.

“When do they come?”

“They come when they want to and don’t when they don’t. You’ll get used to it.”

“For how long?”

“Depends on what you done.”

“Mouthed off to a keeper.”

“Which one?”

“Freidlander.”

There was no response but the grinding of the dynamo.

“Hey! You still there? Jesus, don’t leave me in the dark—”

“Don’t worry, son,” said Kemmler then. “We aint goin nowheres.”

He went back down on the floor then, scuffing along on his keister till he found the papier-mâché bucket, no lid, to throw up in. His head hurt like hell, and was still hurting like hell when there was a scrape and a clang and then light, enough light for him to see the four walls, nothing but sheet metal and rivets and the stinking bucket on the floor and some torn strips of newspaper left to wipe himself with and the little barred slit in the iron door that he rose and stumbled over to. On the other side of the door was a vaulted stone dungeon, maybe fifty feet long, and a screw he’d never seen before walking toward his cell, footsteps echoing in the cavern, holding a bullseye lantern hung from the ceiling by a very long chain.

“You,” said the screw when he shined the bullseye in through the window slit, “step back from there and get your cup.”

Shoe took two steps back, then located a tin cup on the floor by the door. The narrow spout of an oil can was poked through the bars, waggled.

“Come get it.”

Shoe brought the cup under the spout and the screw tilted the can for a moment before pulling it out, leaving less than a finger’s thickness of water in the cup.

“What’s this?”

“What’s it look like?”

“That’s all I get?”

“One gill,” said the screw, “twice a day.”

“Can’t nobody live on that.”

“Do your best,” said the screw, and moved on to the next cell.

The water barely wet his mouth, not enough to work up a full swallow. He pressed his face against the window bars, just able to see the screw shining the bullseye lamp into the last cell in the dungeon corridor, then turning to head back his way.

“How long I got to be here?” he asked, trying to push the desperation from his voice.

“Keep count of your water,” said the keeper as he opened the door to the south wing, then extinguished the lantern and let it swing back into the dungeon. “One gill twice a day, you keep count. When we let you back into the population you can figure the time.”

The door to the wing slammed shut, the key grinding in the lock, then darkness again and the rumble of the dynamo and Shoe smelling his own puke in the tiny cell. He threw his cup hard and listened to it ping off the wall and rattle on the metal floor and then he lay down, rivets digging into his hide, stripping his filthy jacket off to roll into a cushion for his head. He lay for some time, probably awake cause who could dream such a monotonous hell and then there was a new voice, deep and echoing, singing in what he thought might be Yiddish.

“Who the fuck is that?” he called out from the floor.

“Number Three,” answered the con in the cell to his left.

“I thought he didn’t talk.”

“Singin aint talkin.”

The song was strange and mournful, full of quick risings and fallings and things that sounded more like moans than words.

“How long does he go at it?”

“No saying.” The echo from the vaulted chamber made it sound like the singer was everywhere, like the cell was Shoe’s head and the con was inside of it, wailing. “But when he stops you kind of miss it.”

Shoe was there long enough to learn to sleep through the singing, or to work it into his constant nightmare, was there when Number Two got pulled out and sent back to the tiers, a little gimpy con he later got to know was Pete Driscoll, was still in stir the day they came for Kemmler and made history with their electric death chair. A regular crowd come into the vault that day, four screws for an escort and a holy joe mumbling from his Bible, Shoe only getting a glimpse of the condemned man’s back as they led him out through the other door, the one that led to the shock shop.

It was the last he ever pulled cooler time. If he could con college-educated pigeons out of their pocket stuffing he could convince a bunch of dimwit screws he was a square egg, a new man. It was still your life, zebra suit or no, and you had to make the best of it.

The crows are restless in the afternoon, shifting from tree to tree, scolding each other, bending the branches with their weight. Shoe reaches the administration building and halts in front of Riordan.

“Shoemaker, sir. On an errand for Sergeant Kelso. Second floor.”

The keeper nods and he enters, climbs the stairs. There are no more than a half dozen runners assigned on First Work, and the day-shift turnkeys are used to seeing him loose. He knocks before entering and then stands just inside the bullpen door, waiting, with eyes locked on nothing, for them to cop to his presence. Dortmunder has his jacket unbuttoned, straddling the bench by his locker, his huge belly resting on the pine.

“It took us some time to perfect the procedure,” he says, “but now they come from all over the country, all over the world to observe it. You’ll get a go at it soon enough.”

Flanagan is there, and Gratz who the cons call Der Captain after the guy with the walrus moustache in the comic panels and a new one nobody has a nickname for yet.

“When we did our first it hadn’t been used on anything bigger than a dog.”

“There was that trolley worker in Rochester,” offers Flanagan.

“Oh, there was no doubt the juice would do for the job, no doubt at all. But the trolley fella was an accident, left smoking on the cobblestones with his hair stuck out like a scalded cat. A stray bolt from a thundercloud would have done the same to him. But an execution is a solemn business, a state function, and we had no idea if the contraption they’d rigged together down there was capable of completing the task in a dignified manner.”

“Ax-murderer, as I recall,” says Gratz.

“A brute of a man. You were here then, weren’t you, Shoe?” Flanagan somehow knowing he is there without turning to look.

“Two cells down from him on the Row.”

Dortmunder squints his eyes. “You? In the punishment block?”

Shoe shows them a wistful smile. “Before I got wise to how the joint operates.”

“It was just at sunrise,” Flanagan recalls. “ ‘Take your time, boys,’ says he, ‘and do it right.’ He even asked us to snug up the electrode on his head.”

“This is before we knew to stuff a bit of wet sponge in there,” says Dort-munder to the rookie screw. “To improve your connectivity.”

“Then we dropped a hood over his face, so as not to upset the witnesses present—”

“A full house that morning, two dozen at least. Novelty will always pack them in.”

“And as soon as we had him squared away they yanked the lever for the first jolt.”

“It took more than one?” asks the new man.

Dortmunder sighs. “We didn’t have our own dynamo then, and a belt came loose on the one they’d borrowed. Kemmler only got a prick of the devil’s tail and it stopped.”

“He must have been scared.”

“One might suppose so,” says Gratz. “But we stuck a scrap of shoe leather between his teeth before the hood went on, and he was unable to share his observations.”

“So they fixed the generator—”

“In a flash. And the second helping—well, there were members of the press observing and the effectiveness of the device to be established—”

“It must have been at least four minutes.”

“Full power?”

“Oh, he yanked the lever all the way down, all right.”

“Just to be certain. It was ‘Molly, ye’ve burnt the roast’ in there.”

“The whole body stiffens,” says Gratz, tensing his muscles and arching his head and shoulders backward, “and if it wasn’t for the straps fastened tight it would fly clear across the room.”

“And the smoke—”

“That’s your resistance,” says Dortmunder. “I’ve discussed it at length with the electrician fella—”

“Davis.”

“Him. And he explained to me that different bodies present different resistance to the electrical current. For instance, electricity will pass through copper wire—”

“Like shit through a tin horn.”

“So to speak—”

“What I don’t understand,” says Flanagan, squeezing his brow into a frown, “is why a tin horn would have shit in it in the first place?”

“We’re getting off the subject here, gentlemen.” Dortmunder heaves a thick leg over the bench and pulls himself to his feet. “The greater the resistance the electricity has to pass through, the greater the heat generated. So if a great deal of electrical current—voltage is the word for it—attempts to pass through a body of great resistance—an ax-murderer, let us say—you can imagine the heat that might result.”

“So a stouter man—”

“—will burn hotter than a little wisp like this Goulash fella, should it come to that. It’s scientific fact.”

“Is McKinley on his way out?”

They all turn then and look at Shoe.

“And to what do we owe your presence here, Shoemaker?”

Shoe straightens slightly. “Sergeant Kelso requests that I bring him the newspaper, sir.”

Dortmunder jerks his head toward the jumble of early edition lying on the end of the bench. “And when did Kelso learn to read?”

Shoe steps forward to gather up the entire pile. “Thank you, sir.”

“Now, green corn through a goose, I understand,” says Flanagan, brow still knitted. “It paints a lively picture. But shit in a horn, or any other musical instrument for that matter—”

Dortmunder rolls his eyes to Shoe and jerks his head toward Flanagan. “And you cons complain about the Rule of Silence.”

In the anteroom Shoe nicks a stub of a pencil, slipping it through the string dangling by the roster sheet on the wall. He stops on the stairway landing halfway down, out of sight but able to hear any movement from the bulls, and makes his kites, scribbling on scraps torn from the newspaper and folding them a dozen ways before slipping them into his jacket pocket. He sees that there is both the Auburn paper and the Buffalo News and quickly separates the local rag and stuffs it under his shirt.

He drops one of the kites, without breaking stride, only inches from Lester Gorcey’s grass snippers as he passes.

“I sent you for the newspaper,” Kelso complains when Shoe steps back into the shop, “not for an Easter egg hunt.”

“Your brothers in blue were shooting the breeze.” He hands Kelso the News. “It took a while to get their attention.”

“Like a bunch of old hens.” The keeper disappears behind the unfolded sporting pages. “It’s a wonder the lot of yez don’t scarper over the wall some day while they’re up in the bullpen floggin their gums.”

DiNucci is finished with his work, putting his equipment away. He raises his chin to Shoe, who flicks a kite into the Dago’s box. Nose will be cutting at the broom shop next and can whisper the news to the boys there. Shoe takes a quick peek at the News headlines about the assassination attempt.

“Jeffries versus Ruhlin,” muses Sergeant Kelso from behind his wall of paper. “What d’ye make of it, Shoe?”

First Work ends and Shoe heads up Kelso’s company, full-stepping to the shithouse to retrieve their cleaned buckets and full-stepping back to the north wing to be counted and single file up the iron stairs to the tier and waiting, counted again, till they step into their cells and are locked down. There is a half-hour before dinner and Shoe carefully works the stub of pencil into the lining of his cap just behind the bill where it won’t show and reads through the Auburn paper he’s smuggled. He’ll need to lay that off during Second Work. They search the cells while you’re out, picking one or two at random and going over them with a jeweler’s loupe, even his own. There is no trust in trustee anymore, not enough confidence left in the world to work a paying dodge.

The bulls on the outside, in the old days, understood the game. Oh, they’d give you a whack on the noggin if they caught you below the Dead-line south of Fulton without a pass from the Chief, or if you were late with your contribution, but they understood that if the marks were on the square there was no way to beat them. Green goods, the glimmer drop, gold bricks—if they got no larceny in their hearts they’ll walk straight away from you. And if you trimmed the wrong bird, somebody connected, the word came down and an envelope appeared on the desk of the local Tammany chief, every cent accounted for, the offended party reimbursed, minus handling, and then it was back to business. Byrnes ran the detectives then, and was as square as you could ask for, insisting on solid evidence before he beat a confession out of you. But once the Lexow Report come out and they put that little four-eyes Roosevelt in charge it was every man for himself. No order left in the game, no sense of proportion. Like the play that bought him this bit.

The high hat from Philly and his midget sidekick are practically begging to be taken, three rows ahead in the swells’ box and piping Shoe and Al’s conversation, till finally the high hat turns and hoists an eyebrow at them. “I gather that you gentlemen are searching for an investor?”

Al Garvin playing sore and thumping Shoe on the chest. “I told you to keep your voice down, you mutt.”

And Shoe, feigning sly and stupid at the same time. “Look, Mister, it’d be better if you didn’t hear nothin, see?”

The high-rollers all gathered for the Stakes at Saratoga and every dip and swindler on the East Coast gathered to take a swipe at them. Fred Taral was favored riding Archduke but the suckers were leaning toward Willie Sims up on Ben Brush—the little goat could fly on a dry track—and him and Al discussing a proposition about buying the race, just loud enough to be overheard by Mr. Silk Drawers and the one who keeps braying that he’s the Gold King of the Yukon.

“What he said, Mister,” echoes Al. “Forget you heard it.”

“I didn’t hear an amount mentioned,” says the sidekick.

You set the hook right and they practically choke trying to swallow it.

He and Al trade another look, like now that they been caught at it there’s no use lying.

“Too rich for our blood,” says Al.

“Perhaps we could be of service,” the high hat says, winking to show it’s only a lark, a trick that naughty boys might play. “But of course we’d need to be assured of the outcome.”

“We can’t guarantee you Ben Brush wins,” Shoe cuts in. “Only that Arch-duke don’t.”

“It’s four grand,” says Al. They have moved up a couple rows and lean on the divider behind the swells now. “But we only got three-fifty, maybe four hundred between us.”

If you can get them adding and subtracting, working percentages, you’re more than halfway home.

“And if we were to make up the deficit—?”

“Then the Archduke gets assassinated in the backstretch.”

The tall one and the runt trade a look.

“We’ll need to witness the transaction,” says the swell.

Garvin stands then, swiveling around like he’s peeping the stands for Pinkertons. “I’ll go square it with Taral. Catch up with me in ten.”

Shoe is left to hold the pigeon’s wings.

“Woman troubles,” he explains. “Alla these jockeys they’re crazy for women. Get used to all that power between their legs, if you know what I mean.”

The sawed-off character, who has informed them and everybody within shouting distance that he is Flapjack Fredericks and that he made a pile in the gold fields, winks then, digging an elbow into the high hat. “Women can be an expensive hobby.”

“You’re telling me,” Shoe returns, and then the fourth race ends, Taral picking his nag up by the tail and dragging it into third.

“Money problems or no,” muses Shoe, “he’s a hell of a horse-pilot.”

Shoe takes them on the fox hunt then, in and out of doors, under the stands for a while, lots of nosing out to peep both ways and then wave them ahead. Give the ginks a thrill. They come out by the far end of the paddocks and there is Garvin with little Sammy Chase dressed like Fred Taral—the green silks from the last race splattered with turf, whip resting over his shoulder—deep in conversation. Shoe whistles low and Al pricks his ears up and hustles over, mopping sweat off his dome with a rag. Nobody could sweat on cue like Al Garvin.

“The guy is impossible,” he sighs. “He wants another two beans.”

Shoe is steamed at Al for upping the ante without squaring it beforehand. He’d done it once before, playing the nag-doctor who’d lost his license and was willing to dope the favorite for a modest sum, and almost queered the grift.

“From each of youse,” adds Al.

“Greedy little midget,” hisses Shoe.

“I don’t think that should pose any difficulty,” says the high hat, holding up a hand. If there was anything else quicker than a glacier in the race it would be a tough sell, but everybody agrees it’s strictly Ben Brush and Archduke, with the rest of the tailbangers left back at the gate.

“Also he worries you might be a pair of plainclothes bulls,” says Al. “So he don’t want to meet you.”

The high hat pulls out a card, presents it. “This should allay his fears.” Like a Pinkerton couldn’t print up a phony greeter.

Shoe is able to peep that it says YARDLEY ENTWHISTLE JR. with a Philly location and then something about legal services. Shysters make good pigeons cause they think they know all the angles.

“I don’t carry a card,” Fredericks admits, not to the manor born. “But where sporting men gather to match their greenbacks, I am legendary.”

Al nearly chokes on this one, but keeps up his game. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, “but I’d bet my mother he don’t act so suspicious if we let him sniff the kale up close.”

Garvin can turn on the color if that’s what they’re looking for, give them a story to tell back at the club.

So Yardley surrenders a thin stack of hundreds that look like they been ironed and the Gold King peels off his green from a wad that could choke an alderman and Al scampers back with that and the calling card. There’s a little back and forth and then Sammy snatches the bills, looks over, and raises his whip. A nice touch, the jockey salute to seal the deal.

“The thing is,” confides Shoe as he leads the swells, lighter by several grand, back to the stands, “we don’t any of us want to lay our action with the same book. They get wise and the odds are gonna tumble.”

“I have a personal wager in mind,” winks the high hat, in very high spirits. “A gentleman of my acquaintance who merits a good fleecing.”

Shoe seconds the high hat’s grin. “I’d like to see his face when Taral puts the collar on that oat-burner in the stretch,” he says. “That boy can make a horse run backwards.”

Shoe shakes hands then and thanks them for being so white about the whole deal. He and Garvin and Sammy Chase are at the station waiting for the westbound by the time the post horn blows for the Stakes.

There is always the chance with the Lovesick Jockey that the pigeon will make out, that whatever gluepot he’s put his cheese on will have its best day ever and outrun the favorite to the wire. Ben Brush was small and ugly but nobody’s dog, all heart and flying hooves, and with the Dueling Dinge up on his back he had a shot. As it happened, though, Archduke not only took him but took him from behind in the stretch, Fred Taral driving him through a crowd with the whip and the Duke kicking turf in everybody’s faces by the finish. The Gold King just laughs it off, says We been skinned, buddy, but Mr. Yardley Entwhistle Jr. is honor-bound to fork over another grand or two to the gink he’d planned on trimming. A man without humor, he calls a judge he happened to go to a high-toned diploma mill with and makes noise about heading up a commission to probe and castigate and the judge tells his pals in Albany who get a healthy rake-off from Saratoga and immediately passes on not only a verbal description of the three of them but a drawing—seems Yardley is a wizard with the pen and ink—all so quick that no word goes out, no warning, no Send back the take and we’re square, just they all get pinched stepping out of a Pullman in Poughkeepsie and run before that very same judge.

Not so bad, fixable even, only Al Garvin tends to unwind with a couple shots of the hard stuff after a good score, nerve tonic he calls it, and is so tight he don’t remember Yardley Entwhistle Jr.’s card still sitting in his coat pocket.

“Three years for this?” Shoe complained when Tammany had thrown their hands up and the mouthpieces had said Cop a plea and scarpered with their pay and the judge, Yardley Jr.’s old classmate, settled his hash.

“One year for this,” said the judge, “and the other two for all the things you’ve done we never caught you at.”

Which, strange as it might seem, is some consolation.

Footsteps on the stairway again and the long bar clunking, the litany of cell doors opened till it is his own and Shoe steps out. Dinner is mutton stew today, one of his favorites. Monday is bean soup, ham, and potatoes, Tuesday pork and beans, beef stew on Wednesday, Thursday hash and cornbread, Friday chicken and gravy, Saturday mutton and Sunday just the oatmeal porridge in the morning, chapel, and the long day alone in your cell to think about how hungry you are. Captain Grogan leaves them standing for a long count. Goulash will be getting his two ounces of bread about now, and the gill of water to tease his gullet with. Grogan taps and Shoe half-turns with the others. Double tap and the cons short-step down the gallery.

The mutton is hard to swallow today, tougher than usual. Shoe has grown to hate the back of the head of the second-tier con who sits at the shelf in front of him. Keepers stroll up and down the rows, making sure you keep your jaws working and your glimmers fixed on nothing. They could march you straight from First Work to dinner if they wanted, and save everybody a lot of routine. But routine is the point, to make you feel like a cog in the world’s slowest gristmill, grinding, always grinding, instead of a person with enough left upstairs to have an idea of your own.

He scored an apple last week, first of the fall, traded for a word in Grogan’s ear about who should fill Wiley Wilson’s spot on the bottom row. Wiley had been in since two days before Lincoln was shot. “Or else,” he liked to say, “they would of pinned that on me too.” Wiley locked up in the next cell during Shoe’s first jolt here, and he’d been at Auburn through the yoke and the paddles and the shower-bath torture and finally been made gallery boy on the bottom so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs anymore. On Wednesday he didn’t step out with the rest in the morning and when Captain Lenahan went in to rap him on the shins with the stick he didn’t twitch. Shoe was on the detail, holding a corner of the blanket they carried him out in, the old man dried out and weighing next to nothing. He’d lived past all his kin, so a couple of the mokes from the south-wing coal gang dug him a hole in the little prison patch and they dropped the body into it.

Pete Driscoll had left the apple in the fold of Shoe’s mattress. Shoe took most of the evening to finish it.

Second Work he is running for Dudley in clerical, who likes to keep you hopping. Get me some water, get me some chewing gum, pull down the shade, pull it back up, run this note here, run that note there, run down to the kitchen and get me some java.

“More when I know it,” Shoe whispers as he doles the kites out in the shops, cons hissing questions at him when their supervisor isn’t looking.

“Shoal-gosh,” says Stan Zabriski in the ironworks. “That’s how you say it.”

“The Hunkie.”

“He’s Polish. You say the c-z like a s-h.”

“You people expect to get ahead in this country,” Shoe tells him, “you better straighten that out.”

He is less than surprised, proud even, that the scrap of newspaper he left at the broom shop has beat him to the ironworks.

“Telling jokes, he is,” says Sergeant Kelso when he stops by clerical to check on his pay slip. “Sitting up with his hand firm on the tiller of the ship of state. That’s our Mac.”

“You’ve heard more?”

“The wop who drives the breadwagon got it straight from the special edition. They’ve dug out all but one of the bullets and he’s as right as rain.”

“Thank God,” says Dudley, scribbling in his ledger. “If that damn cowboy gets in we’re all cooked.”

Kelso sits on the edge of the desk. “Oh, Teddy’s all right. A bit impetuous is all. The boys on Capitol Hill will cure him of that soon enough.”

Shoe stands by the blackboard memorizing the shift assignments for the next month. Never know what you might earn with that sort of dope to pass out. “So they left a slug in him?”

“Let sleeping dogs lie, says I. If Mac’s not squawking it’s best to leave it sit there.”

“Sit where?”

“If they knew,” says the keeper, giving Shoe an exasperated look, “d’ye think they wouldn’t have yanked it out of him by now?”

As you come in from Second Work there is a bin full of bread and Shoe grabs two slices to take up to his cell, thinking of Shoal-gosh down there sitting on the rivets, pondering his future with an empty stomach. His future that sits only three steps away, on the other side of the barred oaken door. Shoe pulls his rack down and lays out the mattress and blankets and sits on the edge of it, slowly eating the bread and draining the tin cup of warm coffee left on his shelf. They come through twice a night down in the punishment cells, shining the bullseye lantern in on your face and calling your name and if you don’t repeat it right away they come in and kick you where it hurts. What surprised him was how there could be bedbugs when there was no bed, by the third day a lively nest of crotch crickets in his pants. Scratching their bites and finding and killing them became his only entertainment. The Yiddish singer fell apart a week after they fried Kemmler, screaming how his brains were leaking out through his ears and pressing his shit through the narrow slit in his door till the bulls got arm-weary from slugging him and wrote him a ticket to Matteawan.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Grogan asked Shoe when he finally wobbled back out into the yard, pale and squinting, his teeth loose with scurvy.

“You win.”

“We always do,” smiled the keeper.

There are worse things, he muses, than doing a three-spot in Auburn. It could be your home, like old Wiley, in the slammer so long that everybody outside forgets you. Or you could be stuck on the Row like this Shoal-gosh, listening to the dynamo grind.

A little before lights-out Pete Driscoll gimps down the gallery, pausing by Shoe’s door.

“Garvin says he’ll give you three-to-two the President lives.”

They’ve planted Al in the south wing, but he and Shoe manage to keep a few wagers running—Al lost a bundle to him on Bryan in the last election, everything he’d won on the Gans–McGovern scrap. It helps to pass the time.

“He’s betting on Mac?”

“Says he’ll serve his full jolt in the White House and waltz on back to Canton.”

According to the papers every two-bit croaker in Buffalo stuck their fingers in the guy, searching for the missing slug. Shoe’s own father walked out of the hospital with a clean bill of health from the docs, only to be kayoed by an infection a week later.

“Tell him I’ll take it for fifty.”

Pete limps away, going down the iron steps one at a time. The bulb hanging overhead flickers, then goes out with the light in the rest of the wing as the seven o’clock from Syracuse rattles past outside. Shoe lies on his back in his prison-issue union suit and listens to the prison telegraph. Tapping from above, tapping from below, tapping from all sides, the bars singing with questions. They all want to know, but Shoe has no answer.

He dreams of crows.