1960 - Come Easy, Go Easy Read online

  I had trouble with the lock of the glass doors. In an ordinary way, I would have fixed it in three or four seconds, but my hands were shaking. I finally got the doors open as Roy began to curse me.

  He joined me as I pushed open the doors and we walked silently and quickly to the stairs. We had decided not to use the elevator in case the doorman hadn’t gone to bed and wondered who was around.

  We walked up the stairs. We didn’t meet anyone. Both of us were panting when we reached Cooper’s front door.

  This time I had no trouble with the lock. The first key I tried unlocked it.

  I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark hall. Roy crowded in after me. For some moments we stood motionless, listening. We heard only a clock ticking somewhere and the occasional rumble of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  “Come on! come on!” Roy said. “What are we waiting for?”

  I moved into the lounge and turned on the light

  Roy followed me and shut the door.

  “He certainly knows how to live, doesn’t he?” he said as he looked around. “Where’s the safe?”

  I went over to the fat nude and swung aside the frame. I spun the dial, setting the combination. Then using the key I had cut when I had cut Cooper’s duplicate key, I unlocked the safe and pulled open the door.

  “Take a look!”

  Side by side, we stood staring at the neatly stacked piles of hundred dollar bills.

  “Gee!” Roy’s fingers gripped my arm. “This’ll put us on easy street for the rest of our lives!”

  Then we both heard a sound that froze us: the unmistakable sound of a key being pushed into a lock and the lock snapping.

  I was so scared I couldn’t move. I just managed to turn my head to stare at the closed door, but the rest of me was paralysed.

  But not Roy.

  For a split second, he remained frozen, then he became alive. He slid away from me with the quickness of a lizard. He snapped off the light as the door pushed open.

  The light from the hall fell into the darkened room, making a rectangle of hard white light in which I stood.

  Standing in the doorway was the long legged blonde. For maybe a second we stared at each other.

  Then she started back and let out a scream that went through my head like a red-hot wire.

  “There’s someone in here!” she yelled. “It’s a burglar!”

  Cooper’s bulky frame loomed up behind her. He pushed her aside and came storming into the darkened room.

  All this happened so fast I was still standing in front of the open safe, scared silly and unable to move.

  The girl bolted out of the apartment and started down the stairs, screaming like a train whistle.

  I could see Roy’s dim outline as he pressed himself against the wall by the door. As Cooper came into the room, he didn’t see Roy. He was glaring at me and his hands were extended as if he were going to grab me by the throat Roy moved silently. I saw him swing the heavy crowbar we had brought with us in case we had trouble with the locks. He slammed it down on Cooper’s head as Cooper made a grab at me.

  Cooper went down like a felled ox. His clawed fingers scraped down the front of my coat as he fell.

  “Quick!” Roy gasped. “Out!”

  We could hear the girl screaming as she bolted down the stairs.

  I rushed to the door.

  “Chet!” Roy’s voice came behind me in a hiss of fear. “Not down! Up!”

  But I was already on the stairs, going down. My mind was frozen with panic. I had only one thought—to get out into the open and to get away.

  “Chet!”

  I heard him, but I kept on. I reached the second floor and started a blind rush to the head of the stairs. An apartment door facing me opened, and a thin, white haired scared looking man peered out. We glared at each other, then he hurriedly slammed the door shut I took the next flight of stairs in three thudding jumps, lost my balance and sprawled on the landing. I struggled to my feet and dived frantically down the last flight of stairs into the lobby.

  The long legged blonde was crouching by the doorman’s office door. She stared in horror at me, her red lips parted and this nerve jarring scream coming out of her.

  The doorman, in shirt and trousers, his hair standing on end, came charging up from the basement and flung himself at me. We went down together in a heaving, thrashing assortment of arms and legs.

  I hit him about the head and body and I took a couple of stiff pokes in the face before I threw him off. I staggered up and made a dive for the door.

  As I got it open, the doorman began blowing a police whistle. This whistle and the girl’s screams made an inferno of sound that galvanised me into the rain.

  I ran down the drive into the street. I could still hear the girl’s screams, but the piercing blast of the police whistle rose above any noise she could make.

  With my heart pounding and sweat running down my face, I bolted down the street. I heard a man’s voice yell after me. I looked back to see a shadowy outline of a man in a peak cap, pounding down the street after me.

  I kept on running, then I heard the bang of a gun. Something that sounded like a hornet zipped past my face.

  I dodged frantically and darted across the street to where it was darker.

  The gun banged again. I felt a giant’s hand thump on my back and I sprawled face down in the road. White hot pain bit into me. I tried to roll over, but the pain paralysed me. The last thing I remembered before I blacked out was the sound of pounding feet coming towards me.

  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 Nazi 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 horrible 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.

  II

  Farnworth wasn’t a prison of high walls and cells. It was a prison of chains, sharp-shooting guards and savage dogs.

  If the days were terrible, the nights were worse. At the end of each day, seventy-seven stinking, unwashed men were herded like cattle into a bunkhouse fifty feet long and ten feet wide with one small barred window and an iron-studded door. Each man was shackled to a chain that circled the bunkhouse. He was shackled in such a way that whenever he moved the other men were jerked awake by the communal chain tightening.

  After a day in the burning sun, working until every bone in your body ached, the slightest irritation became intolerable. Often when a man was restless in his sleep and jerked the chain, his neighbour struck at him, and vicious fights were continually breaking out in the stifling darkness.

  Once we were locked in the bunkhouse, the guards left us alone until the morning. They didn’t care how many fights broke out, and if anyone got murdered, it meant just one less for them to bother about.

  There were only twelve guards to look after the prisoners. At night they went off duty with the exception of one man. This man, Byefleet by name, was in charge of the dogs. There was
something so savage and primitive about him that even the dogs were scared of him.

  The dogs were kept in a big steel pen during the day and they were kept short of food. They were as dangerous as tigers.

  At seven o’clock each night, the prisoners were chained to their bunks and the guards went off duty. It was then Byefleet, a giant of a man, fat, with the face of a pig, came into his kingdom. Carrying a baseball club, he would go to the steel pen and let the dogs out.

  No one except this pig of a man dared to move into the open before half-past four in the morning when the dogs were herded back into their pen and the guards came on duty.

  Night after night I lay sleepless in my bunk while I listened to the snarling of the dogs as they walked around the buildings that made up the prison farm.

  Before I could escape from this hellhole I knew I would have to find some way of fixing those dogs.

  From the moment I stepped inside Farnworth prison I had made up my mind to escape. I had been in this prison now for ten days, and already they were ten days too many. If it hadn’t been for the dogs, I would have crashed out after the first night and taken my chance of being shot down. Neither the lock on my ankle chain nor the lock on the bunkhouse door presented any difficulties.

  During my first terrible night in the bunkhouse, I had managed to loosen a piece of wire from the grill that served as my mattress, and after a struggle that left my fingers bleeding, I had succeeded in breaking off a strand some three inches long. With that and a little patience I could fix any Farnworth lock.

  It drove me half-crazy to know I could escape from this stinking bunkhouse if it hadn’t been for those snarling dogs out there in the darkness. Somehow I had to dream up an idea to fool them.

  During the days that followed, I came to the conclusion that an escape attempt in daylight was out of the question.

  Every morning we were marched to the fields, guarded by sot guards armed with automatic rifles and on horseback.

  The road to the fields was as bare of cover as the back of my hand. Long before I could reach the distant highway or the river, I would have been shot down by one of the guards who would come after me on his horse.