business like yours you work on a cost-plus basis-‘
‘Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a
dangerous item. For something like the gadget you’re talking about, it takes a little
more goose-grease to get the wheels turning. Let’s say ten dollars.’
‘Ten it is’
I looked at him, smiling a little. ‘Have you got ten dollars?’
‘I do,’ he said quietly.
A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had
brought it in with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is
obliged to bend you over and take a look up your works–but there are a lot of works,
and, not to put too fine a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up them–far enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting.
That’s fine,’ I said. ‘You ought to know what I expect if you get caught with
what I get you.’
‘I suppose I should,’ he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his grey
eyes that he knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight lightening, a gleam of his special ironic humour.
‘If you get caught, you’ll say you found it. That’s about the long and short of it.
They’ll put you in solitary for three or four weeks… plus, of course, you’ll lose your toy and you’ll get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I
will never do business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of
Bugler. And I’ll send some fellows around to lump you up. I don’t like violence, but
you’ll understand my position. I can’t allow it to get around that I can’t handle myself.
That would surely finish me.’
‘Yes. I suppose it would, I understand, and you don’t need to worry.’
‘I never worry,’ I said. ‘In a place like this there’s no percentage in it.’
He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in the
exercise yard during the laundry’s morning break. He didn’t speak or even look my
way, but pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton into my hand as neatly as
a good magician does a card-trick. He was a man who adapted fast. I got him his
rock-hammer. I had it in my cell for one night, and it was just as he described it It was no tool for escape (it would have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel
under the wall using that rock-hammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you planted that pickaxe end in a man’s head, he would surely never listen to Fibber
McGee and Molly on the radio again. And Andy had already begun having trouble
with the sisters. I hoped it wasn’t them he was wanting the rock-hammer for.
In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes
before the wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a package of
Camels to Ernie, the old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let
free in 1956. He slipped it into his tunic without a word, and I didn’t see the rock-hammer again for seven years.
The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard again. He
was nothing to look at that day, I can tell you. His lower lip was swelled up so big it looked like a summer sausage, his right eye was swollen half-shut, and there was an
ugly washboard scrape across one cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters,
all right, but he never mentioned them. ‘Thanks for the tool,’ he said, and walked away.
I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw in the dirt, bent over, and
picked it up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those worn by mechanics when they’re on the job, have no pockets. But there are ways to get around that. The