Sutton: A Novel Part 38

Botchy rattles off nine names. Willie recognizes one. Akins. An imbecile, a nervous Nellie. Not exactly the 101st Airborne, this crew. But what choice does Willie have? It's the tunnel or nothing.

Part of him is resolved to stay forever in Eastern State, to die here, to be buried here, or reburied, as he thinks of it. In the last six years he's found contentment, even some happiness, in books. Books are all he has to live for, but some days they're enough. He's getting an education, finally, the education he never got as a boy, the education that might have made everything different. Even the name of the d.a.m.n prison-Eastern State-sounds like a f.u.c.ked-up college.

His dean is E. Haldeman-Julius. People call Julius the Henry Ford of literature, because he's created an a.s.sembly line of professors, scientists, eggheads, who churn out crisp, simple booklets on every subject under the sun, from Hamlet to farming, mythology to physics, U.S. presidents to Roman emperors. Everyone in America has read at least a couple of Little Blue Books-Admiral Byrd took a bunch to the South Pole-and Willie has read hundreds. His cell is filled with them. This year alone he's read A Guide to Aristotle; How to Write Telegrams Properly; Hints on Writing One-Act Plays; Evolution Made Plain; A Short History of the Civil War; Tolstoy: His Life and Writings; The Best Yankee Jokes; The Art of Happiness; Poems of William Wordsworth; Irish Poems of Love and Sentiment; A Book of Broadway Wisecracks; The Weather: What Makes It and Why; Essays on Rousseau, Balzac, and Victor Hugo; A Voyage to the Moon; and How to Build Your Own Greenhouse.

Once he's surveyed a subject with a Little Blue Book, he knocks down the seminal works within that subject. Currently he's tackling the cla.s.sics of philosophy-Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius. And psychology. He's read half of Freud, most of Jung, chunks of Adler.

When weary of his studies he simply rereads Wuthering Heights.

There are nights when he's satisfied with a hot meal and a few hours of reading before lights-out. He was fascinated recently to learn that the saints led similar lives. He read a Little Blue Book about them. They slept in cells, read all the time, did without women. So Eastern State isn't just his college, it's his hermitage. Or so he thought. Until right now. Listening to Freddie and Botchy, watching GIs muscle up for the biggest street fight in history, Willie feels ashamed. He realizes that he's grown soft. He's been betrayed yet again by that small voice in the back of his mind, always urging him to quit. Books are not all he has to live for. He has other things. The one thing. The same thing.

He's recently connected with Morley Rathbun, an accomplished sculptor and watercolorist on the outside, feted and celebrated until he stabbed his girlfriend-model in the neck. Rathbun now spends his days keep-locked, separated from other prisoners, doing oil portraits of people from his past. But sometimes he takes commissions, smuggled to him by corrupt guards. Months ago Willie sent the solitary artist three cartons and a detailed description. Rathbun's Bess now hangs in Willie's cell, its golden-flecked blue eyes looking hauntingly down on Willie while he studies, and sometimes while he writes long letters to the real Bess. Letters he never sends.

I'm in, he says.

The Angel of Death claps him on the back.

Photographer, his camera unjammed, snaps a dozen more shots of Willie and the wooden soldier, then moves Willie to the Christmas tree. Willie delights at the glittering, twinkling lights, and Photographer shoots him delighting. Now Photographer moves Willie to the railing overlooking the ice-skating rink. Willie looks down at the forty or fifty children gliding in slow ovals.

Nice, Photographer says. Yeah, yeah, that's a cool shot, Willie. Yeah. You look like you're thinking deep thoughts. Hold it. s.h.i.t. I'm out of film.

Photographer rummages in the pockets of his buckskin. I left the film in the car, he says. Be right back.

He runs across Rockefeller Plaza in the direction of the Polara.

Sutton lights a Chesterfield. He looks across the rink at an enormous golden statue. He calls back to Reporter: Who's that statue of kid?

Reporter steps forward. Prometheus.

Very good. You know your mythology. What'd he do?

Stole fire from the G.o.ds, gave it to mortals.

He get away with it?

Not exactly. He was chained to a rock and birds pecked at his liver for eternity.

He must've had one of my lawyers. In the joint I read a booklet about religion. Alfred North Whitehead, brilliant guy. He said every religion at heart is the story of a man, totally alone, forsaken by G.o.d.

Do you think that's true?

It's all just theories kid. Theories and stories.

So, after the sewer debacle, Mr. Sutton-what then?

We dug a tunnel. Everything I went through in prison was a life lesson, but none quite like that tunnel. It seemed so hopeless at first. Every day we'd chip chip chip away, and every night we'd have almost nothing to show for it. We'd encourage each other, tell each other-little by little. Keep on. I still get letters from all around the world, people saying that my tunnel inspired them. People battling illnesses, people faced with all kinds of crises, write to me and say if Willie Sutton can tunnel out of a h.e.l.lhole like Eastern State, they can tunnel out of their problem, whatever it is.

How long was this tunnel?

Hundred feet.

You dug a hundred feet underneath the prison-with just your hands? That seems impossible.

We had a few spades, spoons. Kliney was a scavenger.

How did the guards not know?

The entrance to the tunnel was in the wall just inside the door to Kliney's cell. Kliney was a trusty, so he got into the woodshop and fashioned a fake panel to cover the entrance.

It still seems impossible.

It was.

Weren't you afraid of a cave-in? Of being buried alive?

I was already buried alive.

But a hundred-foot tunnel. How did the walls not collapse?

We propped them up with boards.

Where did you get boards?

If you gave Kliney two weeks he could get you Ava Gardner.

Through the summer of 1944 the tunnel crew works in two-man teams, in brief shifts of no more than thirty minutes, so that none will be noticed missing from his job. Willie spends half his time digging, half his time trying to manage the mood swings of his teammate, Freddie, whose rage to be out of Eastern State is psychotic. This only makes sense, since Willie recalls Shrink concluding in his notes that Freddie was borderline psychotic.

Freddie often reminds Willie of Eddie. The anger is similar, though the root cause is different. With Freddie it all starts with his height. He's painfully self-conscious about being five foot three. Botchy, who knew Freddie on the outside, says Freddie always, always wore lifts. Freddie's all-consuming need to get out of Eastern State feels somehow related. He can't bear people knowing how short he is. He needs those lifts. Size six.

Freddie also suffers from an unspeakable skin disease. Every few months his face and arms and chest erupt in hives and pus-filled sores. The prison doctors don't know the cause. The best they can do is send Freddie to local hospitals for whole blood transfusions, which only help sometimes. Freddie tells Willie during their time in the tunnel that it all started in his childhood. The youngest of twelve, he was sent to a foster home when his mother died, and he suffered his first skin attack after one of his foster siblings abused him. Some days Freddie wakes with his face so swollen, he can't open his eyes. But he still insists on going down into that tunnel. He makes Willie think of a mole. A psychotic mole.

Though not much taller than Hughie McLoon, Freddie is an astonishing physical specimen. He often takes off his shirt when he works in the tunnel, and his tattooed chest, arms and stomach ripple and swell with hard bulging muscles. Willie and Botchy joke that if they could only find a way to leave Freddie alone in the tunnel for a week, he could claw his way to downtown Philly.

Despite Freddie's anger, despite the constant air of violence that hovers about him, he's a lamb with Willie. He asks in worshipful tones about Willie's bank jobs, escape attempts, famous a.s.sociates. He can't believe Willie met Capone, Legs, Dutch. He wants to know all about Willie, and Willie answers his questions truthfully. It takes too much energy in the tunnel to lie. And somehow the truth takes less air.

Above all Freddie is awed that Willie has never betrayed a partner. Besides Eddie, Willie has never met anyone who hated a rat more than Freddie.

Some days, kid, we'd go down in the tunnel and it would be filled with rats. We'd stab them with our spades. They were big, plump-you had to stab them half a dozen times. My digging partner kind of enjoyed it.

The Angel of Death?

How'd you know that?

It's one of the thickest folders in the Sutton files.

By the end of 1944 they're almost at the wall. But they're so far from Kliney's cell, they're running out of air. Willie and Freddie go down to relieve a team and find them panting, minutes from pa.s.sing out. Kliney calls a meeting of the tunnel crew and warns everyone against pushing too hard. If someone becomes incapacitated down there, or dies, Hardboiled will throw them all in Iso for the rest of their lives.

Darkness is a factor too. Drop your spade or sharpened spoon, it might take you twenty minutes to find it. Kliney hooks a thin wire into his cell's electric socket and strings the wire all the way down the tunnel, to power a half dozen bulbs. Now there is light. And air. He also hooks up a rotary fan stolen from the warden's office.

How long exactly did it take to tunnel out?

Almost a year. Things started going faster when we finally intersected with the sewer, so we could throw loose dirt in there. Before that we had to bring the dirt out in our pockets, scatter it in the yard.

Sutton watches a group of children skating backwards, figure-eighting, spinning. Look, he says. They're so graceful. So innocent. Was I ever that innocent?

Reporter spots a pay phone next to the snack bar. Mr. Sutton, I need to call my girlfriend.

Go ahead. Free country.

Um. Well.

I'm not going to take a run-out powder on you kid. I'll be here when you get back.

Maybe you could come with me?

I'm not sitting with you in a phone booth while you call your ball and chain. Besides, better you don't call her. Ever.

Mr. Sutton.

You don't love her.

Because I hesitated when you asked me?

You're wasting your time. A thing you should never waste. And you're playing with fire. You're putting yourself in a position where you might have to leave hot. Never leave hot.

What does that mean?

When I started running my own crew, taking down banks, I had a rule. Never leave a bank hot. I always made double sure we'd walk out nice and easy, our wits about us. Before the alarms went off, before the cops showed up-before there was any gunplay.

This relates to my girlfriend how?

Banks, broads-always leave on your terms, before you can't. With a girl, that means before she's seeing someone else and you marry her out of jealousy. Or before the rabbit dies and you're trapped. Never leave a bank hot, never leave a broad hot.

Sutton glowers at Prometheus. Bottom line, kid, choose your partner carefully. The most important decision you make in life is your partner.

And what should one look for in a partner?

Someone who won't rat.

I mean a life partner.

So do I.

Sutton looks down, sees a young girl, five or six, wearing thick blue ski pants, a hat with a furry red ball on top. She's inching around the rink, held by her father. As if feeling the weight of Sutton's gaze, she looks up. Sutton waves. She waves back-nearly falls. Sutton flinches, turns away. He looks at Reporter for several long seconds. I have a daughter, he says.

Really? I didn't see anything about that in the files.

When I first walked out of Dannemora, in '27, I b.u.mped into a girl from the old neighborhood. I was fresh out of the joint, angry, lonely, living in a flop, and this girl was crowding twenty-five, which was old maid territory back then. It was like when I b.u.mped into Marcus. The fuse meeting the flame.

Reporter jots a note.

My daughter, Sutton says-then stops himself. I don't let myself start too many sentences with those words. I've got a long list of regrets, G.o.d knows, but she's near the top. Early on, her mother would bring her to see me in Sing Sing. You know what smells the opposite of a prison? A three-year-old girl. Those visits were torture. They say a child makes you want to be a better person, but if you're already a lost cause, if you're facing a fifty-year bit, a child just makes you want to dry up and blow away. Hard as they were on me, the visits were harder on the kid. And her mother. So they stopped coming. Her mom filed for divorce. Disappeared. I didn't blame her.

I wonder why there's nothing in the files about that, Mr. Sutton.

Sutton shrugs, points at his head. I pulled all the files on that subject from my own mental filing cabinet-long ago.

He rubs his leg, grimaces. People who say they have no regrets, that's the bunk, that's a grift. Like living in the present. There is no present. There's the past and the future. You live in the present? You're homeless. You're a b.u.m.

Sutton takes one last look at the skaters. My daughter, he says. She must be about forty now kid. She probably wouldn't know me if she walked past us right now.

Sutton turns, looks at Reporter, winks: But I'll bet you all the money I ever stole-I'd know her.

Willie and Freddie are the first ones who spot roots. April 1945. Willie sees Freddie's face light up, then Freddie frantically pointing. Roots mean gra.s.s, and gra.s.s means they're directly under the strip of lawn that runs along Fairmount Avenue. At the same moment they both understand-technically they're free.

Freddie starts clawing upward. Willie holds him back.

We have to wait for the others, Freddie.

But Freddie won't stop. Six feet from the surface, four feet, he's clawing up, up. Willie grabs Freddie around the neck, pulls him back down into the tunnel. Freddie pushes Willie away. Willie grabs Freddie by the collar. By the hair. Freddie turns, swings, hits Willie in the nose, grabs a fistful of Willie's shirt and punches him again in the nose, and again. The nose would be broken if there were anything left to break.

Freddie resumes clawing. He's nearly at the surface. Willie, his nose streaming blood, yells at him: You can't do this, Freddie. You're betraying the others. We're all in this together. If you do this, you're no better than a rat.

Freddie stops. He slides down, slumps against the muddy wall of the tunnel. Heaving, gasping, his rash-covered face bright pink, he says: You're right, Willie. I lost my f.u.c.kin head. The idea of bein out. I got crazy.

They crawl on all fours back down the tunnel and spread the word among the tunnel crew. It's time.

The next morning everyone gathers in Kliney's cell. They've always planned for the escape to take place right after breakfast, when the greatest number of prisoners are moving about. Now, with no discussion, no need for discussion, they line up and jump through the hole, one by one, like paratroopers over the target. Kliney takes the lead, then Freddie, then Botchy, then Akins, then seven other guys, then Willie. One by one they slide down the shaft, into the tunnel, crawling crab-like toward freedom.

Nearing the hole, seeing the sudden shaft of white daylight, Willie is overcome. A kind of religious ecstasy floods his heart. He erupts in a prayer of thanks. Oh G.o.d I know that I'm a sinner and I know that I've led a sorry life but this moment is clearly a gift from you and this shaft of light and this fresh air is your blessing and I can't help but believe it means you haven't given up on me yet.

He climbs up up up, through mud, roots, gra.s.s, pokes his head out of the hole. It's one of the first warm days of spring. He smells the moist earth, the new flowers, the warm sweet syrupy sunshine. He pushes his shoulders through the hole, then his hips, his chest, and flops onto the ground, covered with blades of gra.s.s and mud. A second birth. He wasn't born, he escaped. He lies on his side and blinks up at the black walls of the century-old prison. Hand-cut stone, jagged battlements, long narrow slits for windows. He's been inside this place for more than a decade and he never knew how hideous it was.

He gets to his knees, looks up the street, catches a glimpse of Freddie and Botchy rounding a corner. He looks across Fairmount and sees a truck driver, mouth agape, who chose this moment to pull over and open his thermos and check his map. He hears heavy footsteps behind him. He turns. Two cops. He jumps to his feet and runs.

Bullets spark along the pavement beside him. He dashes around a car, across a lawn, leaps a child's tricycle, sprints down an alley, bursts through a door that leads into some kind of warehouse. He shuts the door, crouches in a corner. Maybe they didn't see him.

Come out or we'll shoot you through this f.u.c.kin door.

He walks out, drenched, filthy, inconsolable. All that work, all those months of chipping, sc.r.a.ping, digging, for a three-minute jog in the spring sunshine.

Along with Willie, eight of the others are captured right away. One manages to stay free for a week, then knocks at the front gate of the prison. Tired, hungry, he asks to be let back in. That leaves just Freddie and Botchy still at large.

Each member of the tunnel crew is brought in chains before Hardboiled. The crash-out is front-page news across the country, around the world, and Hardboiled sees that this will be his legacy. He'll forever be the laughingstock who let twelve prisoners dig a hundred-foot tunnel under his nose. He's not the sort of man who can shrug off being laughed at. Someone must pay.

There are ancient punishment cells at Eastern State. Prisoners call them Klondikes. They're belowground, barely larger than sarcophagi, and they haven't been used in decades. Hardboiled orders each member of the tunnel crew stripped and dropped into a Klondike.

They will stay there, he decrees, until the last two are recaptured.