Czytaj książkę: «Sutton»

ONE

HE’S WRITING WHEN THEY COME FOR HIM.

He’s sitting at his metal desk, bent over a yellow legal pad, talking to himself, and to her—as always, to her. So he doesn’t notice them standing at his door. Until they run their batons along the bars.

He looks up, adjusts his large scuffed eyeglasses, the bridge mended many times with Scotch tape. Two guards, side by side, the left one fat and soft and pale, as if made from Crisco, the right one tall and scrawny and with a birthmark like a penny on his right cheek.

Left Guard hitches up his belt. On your feet, Sutton. Admin wants you.

Sutton stands.

Right Guard points his baton. What the? You crying, Sutton?

No sir.

Don’t you lie to me, Sutton. I can see you been crying.

Sutton touches his cheek. His fingers come away wet. I didn’t know I was crying sir.

Right Guard waves his baton at the legal pad. What’s that?

Nothing sir.

He asked you what is it, Left Guard says.

Sutton feels his bum leg starting to buckle. He grits his teeth at the pain. My novel sir.

They look around his book-filled cell. He follows their eyes. It’s never good when the guards look around your cell. They can always find something if they have a mind to. They scowl at the books along the floor, the books along the metal cabinet, the books along the cold-water basin. Sutton’s is the only cell at Attica filled with copies of Dante, Plato, Shakespeare, Freud. No, they confiscated his Freud. Prisoners aren’t allowed to have psychology books. The warden thinks they’ll try to hypnotize each other.

Right Guard smirks. He gives Left Guard a nudge—get ready. Novel, eh? What’s it about?

Just—you know. Life sir.

What the hell does an old jailbird know about life?

Sutton shrugs. That’s true sir. But what does anyone know?

WORD IS LEAKING OUT. BY NOON A DOZEN PRINT REPORTERS HAVE ALREADY arrived and they’re huddled at the front entrance, stomping their feet, blowing on their hands. One of them says he just heard—snow on the way. Lots of it. Nine inches at least.

They all groan.

Too cold to snow, says the veteran in the group, an old wire service warhorse in suspenders and black orthopedic shoes. He’s been with UPI since the Scopes trial. He blows a gob of spit onto the frozen ground and scowls up at the clouds, then at the main guard tower, which looks to some like the new Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland.

Too cold to stand out here, says the reporter from the New York Post. He mumbles something disparaging about the warden, who’s refused three times to let the media inside the prison. The reporters could be drinking hot coffee right now. They could be using the phones, making last-minute plans for Christmas. Instead the warden is trying to prove some kind of point. Why, they all ask, why?

Because the warden’s a prick, says the reporter from Time, that’s why.

The reporter from Look holds his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. Give a bureaucrat this much power, he says, and watch out. Stand back.

Not just bureaucrats, says the reporter from The New York Times. All bosses eventually become fascists. Human nature.

The reporters trade horror stories about their bosses, their editors, the miserable dimwits who gave them this god-awful assignment. There’s a brand-new journalistic term, appropriated just this year from the war in Asia, frequently applied to assignments like this, assignments where you wait with the herd, usually outdoors, exposed to the elements, knowing full well you’re not going to get anything good, certainly not anything the rest of the herd won’t get. The term is clusterfuck. Every reporter gets caught in a clusterfuck now and then, it’s part of the job, but a clusterfuck on Christmas Eve? Outside Attica Correctional Facility? Not cool, says the reporter from the Village Voice. Not cool.

The reporters feel especially hostile toward that boss of all bosses, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. He of the Buddy Holly glasses and the chronic indecision. Governor Hamlet, says the reporter from UPI, smirking at the walls. Is he going to do this thing or not?

He yells at Sleeping Beauty’s Castle: Shit or get off the pot, Nelson! Defecate or abdicate!

The reporters nod, grumble, nod. Like the prisoners on the other side of this thirty-foot wall, they grow restless. The prisoners want out, the reporters want in, and both groups blame the Man. Cold, tired, angry, ostracized by society, both groups are close to rioting. Both fail to notice the beautiful moon slowly rising above the prison.

It’s full.

THE GUARDS LEAD SUTTON FROM HIS CELL IN D BLOCK THROUGH A barred door, down a tunnel and into Attica’s central checkpoint—what prisoners call Times Square—which leads to all cell blocks and offices. From Times Square the guards take Sutton down to the deputy warden’s office. It’s the second time this month that Sutton has been called before the dep. Last week it was to learn that his parole request was denied—a devastating blow. Sutton and his lawyers had been so very confident. They’d won support from prominent judges, discovered loopholes in his convictions, collected letters from doctors vouching that Sutton was close to death. But the three-man parole board simply said no.

The dep is seated at his desk. He doesn’t bother looking up. Hello, Willie.

Hello sir.

Looks like we’re a go for liftoff.

Sir?

The dep waves a hand over the papers strewn across his desk. These are your walking papers. You’re being let out.

Sutton blinks, massages his leg. Let—out? By who sir?

The dep looks up, sighs. Head of corrections. Or Rockefeller. Or both. Albany hasn’t decided how they want to sell this. The governor, being an ex-banker, isn’t sure he wants to put his name on it. But the head of corrections doesn’t want to overrule the parole board. Either way it looks like they’re letting you walk.

Walk sir? Why sir?

Fuck if I know. Fuck if I care.

When sir?

Tonight. If the phone will stop ringing and reporters will stop hounding me to let them turn my prison into their private rec room. If I can get these goddamn forms filled out.

Sutton stares at the dep. Then at the guards. Are they joking? They look serious.

The dep turns back to his papers. Godspeed, Willie.

The guards walk Sutton down to the prison tailor. Every man released from a New York State prison gets a release suit, a tradition that goes back at least a century. The last time Sutton got measured for a release suit, Calvin Coolidge was president.

Sutton stands before the tailor’s three-way mirror. A shock. He hasn’t stood before many mirrors in recent years and he can’t believe what he sees. That’s his round face, that’s his slicked gray hair, that’s his hated nose—too big, too broad, with different-size nostrils—and that’s the same large red bump on his eyelid, mentioned in every police report and FBI flyer since shortly after World War I. But that’s not him—it can’t be. Sutton has always prided himself on projecting a certain swagger, even in handcuffs. He’s always managed to look dapper, suave, even in prison grays. Now, sixty-eight years old, he sees in the three-way mirror that all the swagger, all the dapper and suave are gone. He’s a baggy-eyed stick figure. He looks like Felix the Cat. Even the pencil-thin mustache, once a source of pride, looks like the cartoon cat’s whiskers.

The tailor stands beside Sutton, wearing a green tape measure around his neck. An old Italian from the Bronx, with two front teeth the size of thimbles, he shakes a handful of buttons and coins in his pocket as he talks.

So they’re letting you out, Willie.

Looks like.

How long you been here?

Seventeen years.

How long since you had a new suit of clothes?

Oh. Twenty years. In the old days, when I was flush, I’d get all my suits custom-made. Silk shirts too. D’Andrea Brothers.

He still remembers the address: 587 Fifth Avenue. And the phone number. Murray Hill 5-5332.

Sure, Tailor says, D’Andrea, they did beautiful work. I still got one of their tuxes. Step up on the block.

Sutton steps up, grunts. A suit, he says. Jesus, I thought the next thing I’d be measured for would be a shroud.

I don’t do shrouds, Tailor says. No one gets to see your work.

Sutton frowns at the three reflected Tailors. It’s not enough to do nice work? People have to see it?

Tailor spreads his tape measure across Sutton’s shoulders, down his arm. Show me an artist, he says, who doesn’t want praise.

Sutton nods. I used to feel that way about my bank jobs.

Tailor looks at the triptych of reflected Suttons, winks at the middle one. He stretches the tape measure down Sutton’s bum leg. Inseam thirty, he announces. Jacket thirty-eight short.

I was a forty reg when I came in this joint. I ought to sue.

Tailor laughs softly, coughs. What color you want, Willie?

Anything but gray.

Black then. I’m glad they’re letting you out, Willie. You’ve paid your debt.

Forgive us our debts, Willie says, as we forgive our debtors.

Tailor crosses himself.

That from your novel? Right Guard asks.

Sutton and Tailor look at each other.

Tailor points a finger gun at Sutton. Merry Christmas, Willie.

Same to you, friend.

Sutton points a finger gun at Tailor, cocks the thumb hammer. Bang.

THE REPORTERS TALK ABOUT SEX AND MONEY AND CURRENT EVENTS. Altamont, that freaky concert where those four drugged-out hippies died—who’s to blame? Mick Jagger? The Hells Angels? Then they gossip about their more successful colleagues, starting with Norman Mailer. Not only is Mailer running for mayor of New York, but he just got one million dollars to write a book about the moon landing. Mailer—the guy writes history as fiction, fiction as history, and inserts himself into all of it. He plays by his own rules while his rule-bound colleagues get sent to Attica to freeze their balls off. Fuck Mailer, they all agree.

And fuck the moon.

They blow on their hands, pull up their collars, make bets about whether or not the warden will ever be publicly exposed as a cross-dresser. Also, they bet on which will happen first—Sutton walks or Sutton croaks. The reporter from the New York Post says he hears Sutton’s not just knocking at death’s door, he’s ringing the bell, wiping his feet on the welcome mat. The reporter from Newsday says the artery in Sutton’s leg is clogged beyond repair—a doctor who plays racquetball with the reporter’s brother-in-law told him so. The reporter from Look says he heard from a cop friend in the Bronx that Sutton still has loot stashed all over the city. Prison officials are going to free Sutton and then the cops are going to follow him to the money.

That’s one way to solve the budget crisis, says the reporter from the Albany Times Union.

The reporters share what they know about Sutton, pass around facts and stories like cold provisions that will have to get them through the night. What they haven’t read, or seen on TV, they’ve heard from their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Sutton is the first multigeneration bank robber in history, the first ever to build a lengthy career—it spans four decades. In his heyday Sutton was the face of American crime, one of a handful of men to make the leap from public enemy to folk hero. Smarter than Machine Gun Kelly, saner than Pretty Boy Floyd, more likable than Legs Diamond, more peaceable than Dutch Schultz, more romantic than Bonnie and Clyde, Sutton saw bank robbery as high art and went about it with an artist’s single-minded zeal. He believed in study, planning, hard work. And yet he was also creative, an innovator, and like the greatest artists he proved to be a tenacious survivor. He escaped three maximum-security prisons, eluded cops and FBI agents for years. He was Henry Ford by way of John Dillinger—with dashes of Houdini and Picasso and Rasputin. The reporters know all about Sutton’s stylish clothes, his impish smile, his love of good books, the glint of devilment in his bright blue eyes, so blue that the FBI once described them in bulletins as azure. It’s the rare bank robber who moves the FBI to such lyricism.

What the reporters don’t know, what they and most Americans have always wanted to know, is whether or not Sutton, who was celebrated for being nonviolent, had anything to do with the brutal gangland murder of Arnold Schuster. A fresh-faced twenty-four-year-old from Brooklyn, a baseball-loving veteran of the Coast Guard, Schuster caught the wrong subway one afternoon and found himself face-to-face with Sutton, the most wanted man in America at the time. Three weeks later Schuster was dead, and his unsolved murder might be the most tantalizing cold case in New York City history. It’s definitely the most tantalizing part of the Sutton legend.

THE GUARDS MARCH SUTTON BACK TO ADMIN. A CLERK CUTS HIM TWO checks. One for $146, salary for seventeen years at various prison jobs, minus taxes. Another for $40, the cost of a bus ticket to Manhattan. Every released prisoner gets bus fare to Manhattan. Sutton takes the checks—this is really happening. His heart begins to throb. His leg too. They’re throbbing at each other, like the male and female leads in an Italian opera.

The guards march him back to his cell. You got fifteen minutes, they tell him, handing him a shopping bag.

He stands in the middle of the cell, his eight-by-six home for the last seventeen years. Is it possible that he won’t sleep here tonight? That he’ll sleep in a soft bed with clean sheets and a real pillow and no demented souls above and below him howling and cursing and pleading with impotence and fury? The sound of men in cages—nothing can compare. He sets the shopping bag on the desk and carefully packs the manuscript of his novel. Then the spiral notebooks from his creative writing classes. Then his copies of Dante, Shakespeare, Plato. Then Kerouac. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. A line that saved Sutton on many long nights. Then the dictionary of quotations, which contains the most famous line ever spoken by America’s most famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, a.k.a. Slick Willie, a.k.a. Willie the Actor.

Carefully, tenderly, he packs the Ezra Pound. Now you will come out of a confusion of people. And the Tennyson. Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone. He says the lines under his breath. His eyes mist. They always do. Finally he packs the yellow legal pad, the one on which he was writing when the guards came for him. Not his novel, which he recently finished, but a suicide note, the one he began composing an hour after the parole board’s rejection. So often, he thinks, that’s how it happens. Death stands at your door, hitches up its pants, points its baton at you—then hands you a pardon.

Once Sutton’s cell is packed, the dep lets him make a few phone calls. First he dials his lawyer, Katherine. She’s incoherent with joy.

We did it, Willie. We did it!

How did we do it, Katherine?

They got tired of fighting us. It’s Christmas, Willie, and they were just tired. It was easier to give up.

I know how they felt, Katherine.

And the newspapers certainly helped, Willie. The newspapers were on your side.

Which is why Katherine’s cut a deal with one of the biggest newspapers. She mentions which one, but Sutton’s mind is racing, the name doesn’t register. The newspaper is going to whisk Sutton aboard its private plane to Manhattan, put him up at a hotel, and in exchange he’ll give them his exclusive story.

Unfortunately, Katherine adds, that means you’ll have to spend Christmas Day with a reporter instead of family. Is that okay?

Sutton thinks of his family. He hasn’t spoken to them in years. He thinks of reporters—he hasn’t spoken to them ever. He doesn’t like reporters. Still, this is no time to make waves.

That’ll be fine, Katherine.

Now, do you know anyone who can pick you up outside the prison and drive you to the airport?

I’ll find someone.

He hangs up, dials Donald, who answers on the tenth ring.

Donald? It’s Willie.

Who’s this?

Willie. What are you doing?

Oh. Hey. Drinking a beer, getting ready to watch The Flying Nun.

Listen. It seems they’re letting me out tonight.

They’re letting you out, or you’re letting yourself out?

It’s legit, Donald. They’re opening the door.

Hell freezing over?

I don’t know. But the devil’s definitely wearing a sweater. Can you pick me up at the front gate?

Near the Sleeping Beauty thing?

Yeah.

Of course.

Sutton asks Donald if he can bring him a few items.

Anything, Donald says. Name it.

A TV VAN FROM BUFFALO ROARS UP TO THE GATE. A TV REPORTER JUMPS out, fusses with his microphone. He’s wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit, a camel-hair topcoat, gray leather gloves, silver cuff links. The print reporters elbow each other. Cuff links—have you ever?

The TV reporter strolls up to the print reporters and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas. Same to you, they mumble. Then silence.

Silent Night, the TV reporter says.

No one laughs.

The reporter from Newsweek asks the TV reporter if he read Pete Hamill in this morning’s Post. Hamill’s eloquent apologia for Sutton, his plea for Sutton’s release, addressed as a letter to the governor, might be the reason they’re all here. Hamill urged Rockefeller to be fair. If Willie Sutton had been a GE board member or a former water commissioner, instead of the son of an Irish blacksmith, he would be on the street now.

The TV reporter stiffens. He knows the print guys think he doesn’t read—can’t read. Yeah, he says, I thought Hamill nailed it. Especially his line about banks. There are some of us today, looking at the mortgage interest rates, who feel that it is the banks that are sticking us up. And I got a lump in my throat at that bit about Sutton reuniting with a lost love. Willie Sutton should be able to sit and watch the ducks in Prospect Park one more time, or go to Nathan’s for a hot dog, or call up some old girl for a drink.

This sets off a debate. Does Sutton actually deserve to be free? He’s a thug, says the Newsday reporter—why all the adulation?

Because he’s a god in parts of Brooklyn, says the Post reporter. Just look at this crowd.

There are now more than two dozen reporters and another two dozen civilians—crime buffs, police radio monitors, curiosity seekers. Freaks. Ghouls.

But again, says the Newsday reporter, I ask you—why?

Because Sutton robbed banks, the TV reporter says, and who the hell has a kind word to say for banks? They should not only let him out, they should give him the key to the city.

What I don’t get, says the Look reporter, is why Rockefeller, a former banker, would let out a bank robber.

Rockefeller needs the Irish vote, says the Times Union reporter. You can’t get reelected in New York without the Irish vote and Sutton’s like Jimmy Walker and Michael Collins and a couple Kennedys in one big Mulligan stew.

He’s a fuckin thug, says the Newsday reporter, who may be drunk.

The TV reporter scoffs. Under his arm he’s carrying last week’s Life magazine, with Charles Manson on the cover. He holds up the magazine: Manson glares at them.

Compared to this guy, the TV reporter says, and the Hells Angels, and the soldiers who slaughtered all those innocent people at My Lai—Willie Sutton is a pussycat.

Yeah, says the Newsday reporter, he’s a real pacifist. He’s the Gandhi of Gangsters.

All those banks, the TV reporter says, all those prisons, and the guy never fired a single shot. He never hurt a fly.

The Newsday reporter gets in the TV reporter’s face. What about Arnold Schuster? he says.

Aw, the TV reporter says, Sutton had nothing to do with Schuster.

Says who?

Says me.

And who the fuck are you?

I’ll tell you who I’m not. I’m not some burned-out hack.

The Times reporter jumps between them. You two cannot get in a fistfight about whether or not someone is nonviolent—on Christmas Eve.

Why not?

Because if you do I’ll have to write about it.

The talk swings back to the warden. Doesn’t he realize that the temperature is now close to zero? Oh you bet he realizes. He’s loving this. He’s on some kind of power trip. Everybody these days is on a power trip. Mailer, Nixon, Manson, the Zodiac Killer, the cops—it’s 1969, man, Year of the Power Trip. The warden’s probably watching them right now on his closed-circuit TV, sipping a brandy and laughing his fat ass off. It’s not enough that they have to be part of this massive clusterfuck, but they also have to be the dupes and patsies of some crypto fascist macho dick?

You’re all welcome to sit in my truck, the TV reporter says. It’s warm. We’ve got TV. The Flying Nun is on.

Groans.

SUTTON LIES ON HIS BUNK, WAITING. AT SEVEN O’CLOCK RIGHT GUARD appears at the door.

Sorry, Sutton. It’s not happening.

Sir?

Left Guard appears behind Right Guard. New orders just came down from the dep, he says—no go.

No go—why?

Why what?

Why sir?

Right Guard shrugs. Some kind of beef between Rockefeller and the parole department. They can’t agree who’s going to take responsibility, or how the press release should be worded.

So I’m not—?

No.

Sutton looks at the walls, the bars. His wrists. The purple veins, bubbled and wormy. He should’ve done it when he had the chance.

Right Guard starts laughing. Left Guard too. Just kidding, Sutton. On your feet.

They unlock the door, lead him down to the tailor. He strips out of his prison grays, puts on a crisp new white shirt, a new blue tie, a new black suit with a two-button front. He pulls on the new black socks, slips on the new black wingtips. He turns to the mirror. Now he can see the old swagger.

He faces Tailor. How do I look?

Tailor jiggles his coins and buttons, gives a thumbs-up.

Sutton turns to the guards. Nothing.

Right Guard alone leads Sutton through Times Square, then past Admin and toward the front entrance. God it’s cold. Sutton cradles his shopping bag of belongings and ignores the cramping and burning and sizzling pain in his leg. A plastic tube is holding open the artery and he can feel it getting ready to collapse like a paper straw.

You need an operation, the doctor said after the insertion of the tube two years ago.

If I wait on the operation, will I lose the leg, Doc?

No, Willie, you won’t lose the leg—you’ll die.

But Sutton waited. He didn’t want some prison doctor opening him up. He wouldn’t trust a prison doctor to open a checking account. Now it seems he made the right call. He might be able to have the operation at a real hospital, and pay for it with the proceeds of his novel. Provided someone will publish it. Provided there’s still time. Provided he lives through this night, this moment. Tomorrow.

Right Guard leads Sutton around a metal detector, around a sign-in table, and to a black metal door. Right Guard unlocks it. Sutton steps forward. He looks back at Right Guard, who’s belittled and beaten him for the last seventeen years. Right Guard has censored Sutton’s letters, confiscated his books, denied his requests for soap and pens and toilet paper, slapped him when he forgot to put a sir at the end of a sentence. Right Guard braces himself—this is the moment prisoners like to get things off their chests. But Sutton smiles as if something inside him is opening like a flower. Merry Christmas kid.

Right Guard’s head snaps back. He waits a beat. Two. Yeah, Merry Christmas, Willie. Good luck to you.

It’s shortly before eight o’clock.

Right Guard pushes open the door and out walks Willie Sutton.

A PHOTOGRAPHER FROM LIFE SHOUTS, HERE HE IS! THREE DOZEN REPORTERS converge. The freaks and ghouls push in. TV cameras veer toward Sutton’s face. Lights, brighter than prison searchlights, hit his azure eyes.

How’s it feel to be free, Willie?

Do you think you’ll ever rob another bank, Willie?

What do you have to say to Arnold Schuster’s family?

Sutton points to the full moon. Look, he says.

Three dozen reporters and two dozen civilians and one archcriminal look up at the night sky. The first time Sutton has seen the moon, face-to-face, in seventeen years—it takes his breath.

Look, he says again. Look at this beautiful clear night God has made for Willie.

Now, beyond the crush of reporters Sutton sees a man with pumpkin-colored hair and stubborn orange freckles leaning against a red 1967 Pontiac GTO. Sutton waves, Donald hurries over. They shake hands. Donald shoves aside several reporters, leads Sutton to the GTO. When Sutton is settled into the passenger seat, Donald slams the door and shoves another reporter, just for fun. He runs around the car, jumps behind the wheel, mashes the gas pedal. Away they go, sending up a wave of wet mud and snow and salt. It sprays the reporter from Newsday. His face, his chest, his shirt, his overcoat. He looks down at his clothes, then up at his colleagues:

Like I said—a thug.

SUTTON DOESN’T SPEAK. DONALD LETS HIM NOT SPEAK. DONALD KNOWS. Donald walked out of Attica nine months ago. They both stare at the icy road and the frozen woods and Sutton tries to sort his thoughts. After a few miles he asks if Donald was able to get that thing they discussed on the phone.

Yes, Willie.

Is she alive?

Don’t know. But I found her last known address.

Donald hands over a white envelope. Sutton holds it like a chalice. His mind starts to go. Back to Brooklyn. Back to Coney Island. Back to 1919. Not yet, he tells himself, not yet. He shuts off his mind, something he’s gotten good at over the years. Too good, one prison shrink told him.

He slides the envelope into the breast pocket of his new suit. Twenty years since he’s had a breast pocket. It was always his favorite pocket, the one where he kept the good stuff. Engagement rings, enameled cigarette cases, leather bill-folds from Abercrombie. Guns.