Chapter Two
I
I became aware of voices, out of focus, coming from a long way off: voices
whispering to me from the end of a mile-long tunnel.
Then I became aware of a hot, dull ache in the middle of my chest, a pain that
grew as I slowly climbed out of the dark pit into which I had fallen.
I half opened my eyes.
White walls surrounded me. There was a dim shape of a man bending over me. He didn’t come into focus, and as the pain bit into me more sharply, I
shut my eyes.
But my mind was now active. I remembered the rush down the three flights
of stairs, the fight with the doorman, the wild terrified screams of the long-
legged blonde and my blind, stupid rush into the street. I heard again the two
bangs from the cop’s gun.
Well, I was caught. My futile attempt to grab some easy money had finished
in a hospital bed with a cop standing over me.
“If he’s not all that badly hurt,” a voice said suddenly, “why can’t I shake the
punk and snap him out of it?”
A tough, hard cop voice you hear on the movies and can never imagine ever
talking that way to you.
“He’ll come out of it,” another voice said. “No point in rushing things,
sergeant. He’s had a lucky escape. Another inch to the right and he would have been a dead man.”
“Yeah? I bet he’ll wish he was dead by the time I’m through with him.”
I was alert now and I peered at the two men standing by my bed. One of them was soft and fat and in a white overall: he would be the croaker. The other
was a big man, fleshy with a red blunt featured face, small hard eyes and a
mouth like a razor cut. His shabby, dark clothes and the way he wore his hat
told me who he was: he was a cop, the owner of the tough voice.
I lay still, riding the pain in my chest I began to wonder what had happened to Roy.
He hadn’t panicked the way I had. He had gone up the stairs while I had
rushed blindly down into the arms of the law. Had he got away?
Unless he had been seen leaving the building, he was in the clear. I was the
one who had been caught I was the one who had seen the money in Cooper’s safe. I was the one who had talked to the doorman about Cooper’s movements. I was the one who had been seen running down the stairs. Roy
was out of all this.
Then I remembered the sound the crowbar had made as Roy had slammed it
down on Cooper’s head. It had been a terrible blow: made terrible by a
viciousness I hadn’t expected to be in Roy.
I experienced a sudden feeling of sick fear. What had happened to Cooper?
Had Roy killed him?
Then I became aware of the smell of stale sweat and tobacco smoke so close
that I opened my eyes and found myself staring up into the cop’s red, brutal face.
We were alone. I hadn’t heard the doctor leave, but he must have gone, for he
wasn’t in the room.
The cop grinned at me, showing his tobacco-stained teeth. It was like a wolf grinning at me.
“Okay, punk,” he said “Let’s have it. I’ve been waiting two days and nights
to talk to you. Let’s have it.”
That was the beginning of it.
They seemed to have a vague idea I hadn’t done the job alone. They had
nothing to go on, but they kept at me, trying to find out if I had had someone
with me. I said no, and I kept on saying no.
They told me Cooper was dying and I would be up on a murder charge. If I
had had someone working with me, now was the time to spill it. I told them I
had handled the job alone.
Finally, they got tired of trying to make me admit I wasn’t alone.
Finally, too,
they had to tell me that Cooper was recovering. They seemed pretty sore that
he was going to recover.
“But you could have killed him,” the sergeant with the tobacco-stained teeth
told me, “and that’ll make an impression on the judge. You’ll get ten years
for this, punk, and you’ll regret every one of them.”
From the hospital I was transferred to the State Jail. I remained there for three
months while they got Cooper into good enough shape to give evidence
against me.
I’ll remember the trial for as long as I live.
When I was brought into the court room, I looked around. The first person I
spotted in the spectators’ gallery was Janey. That surprised me. She waved
her hand at me and I managed somehow to smile in return. She was the last
person I expected to see there.
Then there was Franklin, my boss at the Lawrence Safes Corporation, and
sitting by his side was Roy.
Roy and I looked at each other for a brief moment. Roy looked pale and thin.
I imagined he had been sweating it out during those three months, wondering
if I were going to give him away.
The judge was a little guy with a thin, mean face and stony eyes.
I didn’t stand a chance of beating the rap.
Cooper, much thinner, with his head in bandages, told how I had come to
open the safe and how he had asked me for a duplicate key.
The long-legged blonde got onto the witness stand. She had on a sky blue dress that showed off her curves in a way that had every man in the court
room, including the judge, staring at her.
She explained that she sang at one of Cooper’s clubs and from time to time
she visited his apartment to discuss with him the songs she wanted to sing.
Everyone in court knew why she visited Cooper’s apartment at one o’clock in
the morning, and you could see by the way they looked at Cooper how much
they envied him. She said Cooper had been out of the room when I had
opened the safe. She said she saw me look inside the safe, then shut the door
and pretend I hadn’t opened it.
Cooper told the judge how he had found me in front of the open safe. He said
when he had closed with me, I had hit him on the head with an iron bar.
Franklin surprised me by coming forward and speaking for me. He said I was
the best workman they had, and up to now they had always found me completely trustworthy. But he was wasting his breath. I could see he made
as much impression on the judge as a handful of grit thrown at an armoured
truck.
My attorney, a well-fed, middle-aged chiseler, seemed to have trouble in
keeping awake. After he had heard the evidence for the prosecution, he
looked over at me, grimaced, got slowly to his feet and announced that his
client—that was me—now pleaded guilty and threw himself on the mercy of the court. Maybe there wasn’t anything else he could do, but I felt at least he might have made it sound as if he were sorry. The way he said it, I and everyone in the court got the impression he was already concentrating on his
next case.
The judge stared at me for several sadistic moments. Finally he said I had
committed a breach of trust. In my particular job a man had to be trustworthy.
I had endangered the reputation of an old-established firm where my grandfather and my father had served as faithful servants. He said that as this
was my first offence he had been tempted to treat me leniently. He didn’t kid
me for one moment. I could tell by his hard little eyes that he was talking for
the sake of hearing his own voice. He said my brutal, savage attack on
Cooper—an attack that might have ended in a murder charge—had placed me
beyond the mercy of the court. He then sentenced me to ten years’ penal
servitude. I would be sent to the Farnworth Prison Camp where they would
know how to deal with a man of my viciousness.
That was the moment when I was tempted to betray Roy, and he knew it. I
turned to look at him and our eyes met. He was tense and sitting bolt upright.
He knew what was going on in my mind. He knew I had only to point to him
and tell the judge he was the man who had hit Cooper for me to get off the
hook for at least a couple of months for a new trial, and maybe, if it could be
proved that Roy had hit Cooper, for me not to go to Farnworth.
Farnworth was a notorious chain gang prison farm, some two hundred miles
in the interior, and had been the subject of a number of newspaper articles
over the past three years when public spirited journalists had called on the
authorities to close the camp, which they described as the nearest thing to a
N.azi concentration camp as made no difference.
I had read the articles, and like a lot of people, I had been shocked by what I
had read. If the newspaper men were telling the truth, the conditions at
Farnworth were as h0rrible as they were disgraceful.
The thought of serving ten years in that hellhole made my blood run cold.
Roy and I looked at each other. As we stared at each other, I remembered a
lot of small, unimportant things he had done for me when we had been at school together and when we had worked together. I remembered his jeering, friendly sympathy when my girlfriends had let me down. I remembered the
long talks we had had together and the plans we had made if we ever got hold
of some money. It was those things that made it impossible for me to betray
him. I gave him a grin: it wasn’t much of a grin, but at least it told him he
was safe.
I felt a heavy hand of one of the cops who had stood by my side during the
trial drop on my arm.
“Get moving,” the cop said under his breath.
I looked at Janey, who was sobbing into her handkerchief. I looked at Roy
again, then I went down the steps out of sight of the court, out of the world of
freedom into a future that held no hope for me. The only thought that kept me
going while I waited to be taken to Farnworth was that I hadn’t betrayed Roy.
That thought helped me to keep my self-respect: and because of where I was
going, that was something I just had to hang onto.
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