The Tower (1999) (2 page)

Sketch Duty was perhaps the only activity that the prisoners unanimously held to be important. It was the sole end of the prisoners' lives to obtain this hour of distraction each week. They could keep the pictures in their cells for two days, and then they were removed and taken to be analyzed at the criminal psychology department of the Ressler Institute on the mainland. The pictures were often used in lectures.

Aside from the occasional books they were allowed, Sketch Duty was all that the prisoners had to break the monotony. Inside the Tower, minutes could stretch to hours, hours to lifetimes.

Despair prevailed in the bowels of the prison; nobody would ever be released and nobody had ever escaped its dark confines. The inmates sat pressed against the metal bars of their cramped cells, reciting their tales in the broken tongues of idiots.

Chapter
2

A L L A N D E R Atlasia sat on the bed wrapped in a frayed blanket, his knees tucked tightly to his chin. The small bed was more than ample for his wiry frame. Outside, the waves pounded ceaselessly against the side of the Tower, causing the structure to hum with a deep vibration. Allander braced himself against the onslaught, relaxing his muscles slightly before another wave caused the Tower to shudder anew.

His long, stringy hair curved in wisps to his cheeks, a dark brown cascade that accented his high cheekbones. His eyes squinted, just barely, making him look either sarcastic or like a child protecting his eyes from the sun. At first glance, many people dismissed Allander as a skinny adolescent recently grown to manhood, but he was in fact quite strong.

Allander's moodiness was the most terrifying aspect of his personality. When he'd been in the correctional ward as an adolescent, nurses had noted that he seemed to wake up as a different person every morning. He was a whimpering child when the rain hammered against the window, a sullen boy who poked frogs' eyes out with his finger, a sweet youth who cried against a nurse's bosom, an angry adolescent who painfully tweaked the incipient breasts of the girls in the ward.

He could be deathly frail or dreadfully powerful. After a year in prison, he came down with a case of pneumonia. A nurse who was new on rotation failed to see the security signs outside his room. She unlocked the door and entered alone to check on him. His face was tinged blue and his teeth chattered loudly, causing an echo in the sterile room. She sat at his bedside and rocked the boy (who was now close to twenty) against her breast until he warmed beneath his blankets.

When the security guard walked past the infirmary, he noticed the open door. Gun drawn, he charged into the room and pulled the nurse away despite her protestations. After she complained about the incident, the warden released several photographs of Allander's victims for her perusal. She sat down after the second one, requested a glass of water after the fifth, and turned in her resignation after the seventh. Through the bars on his window, Allander watched her leave the prison, shaking her head, her steps slow and unsure.

When he was moved to the Tower after the "lawyer incident" (as it was referred to in the vague prison memo), he rode the elevator down through the Hole, bound, with an armed guard on each side and a sack tied over his head. He didn't flinch as the other inmates taunted him and screamed, banging the bars. It wasn't often that a new visitor came for them to play with. Allander was thirty-three years old.

He was placed in Unit 10A, and asked to turn around and back up against the door. From the safety of the platform, the larger guard reached through the bars and unlocked his handcuffs and thigh strap, then pulled the sack off his head and untied the gag. Allander wore a mask of calm, apparently not intimidated by the shrieks that carried up and down the Hole.

The ruckus quieted as the prisoners tired of their new toy. They resigned themselves to bed, their heads settling to rest on the stained yellow pillows. After the shouts stopped echoing, after not an inmate stirred in the jet, black night, Allander drew the thin blanket to his face and shook uncontrollably.

On rare occasions, high tide was moderate enough that the top three levels stayed above the ocean's brink. The water would remain just under the vents of Level Ten, so the guards would open them to aid the air circulation. In the deathly heat of the summer, the prisoners would lie bare-chested on their cots, fanning themselves with their blankets and dousing their bodies with water from the toilets. But as dusk fell like a funeral veil across the sky, the cool San Francisco air crept through the vents and into the bones of the prisoners. The guards would laugh as the inmates shuddered and clamored in their metal rooms.

On these nights, Allander would retreat to the safety of his bed and stare through the thin gaps in the vents. As moonlight spread across the water, it engendered figures and shapes, creatures and monsters that crept in the swirls and eddies. He stifled his cries as he saw clowns dancing above the whitecaps, their long, white arms reaching toward him through the waves, their laughing red mouths rippling in the water's surface, mouthing threats and delights eternal.

Only once did he lose control, and he hurled himself against the metal bars, screaming in despair. "JUST COME IN! Come in now and take me. TAKE ME!"

He collapsed, cowering in the corner under the vent. His eyes bulged wide in dreadful anticipation as he slowly became aware of the laughter filling the air around him.

Chapter
3

I N Unit 2A of the Dungeon was Tommy "Cuckoo T" Giacondia, perhaps the most famous living Mafia hitman. Tommy at one time had weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds, but since his imprisonment five years before, he had lost over a hundred. Now he looked thin and weak, his cheeks and eyes filled with shadow. His weight loss had no effect on his vocal capacity, however; he constantly bellowed complaints up the Hole, most of which dealt with the food. Evidently, Tommy was used to a more varied diet than a loaf for every meal.

"This shit," he would say. "I wouldn't feed this to my worst enemy. I wouldn't make his dog eat this shithouse brick if it pissed on my mother's grave."

This was perhaps because he dealt with his worst enemies (or those of the Berlucciano family) in far more colorful ways. His signature disposal method was an original one. He would tie up his victim in a closet of an abandoned warehouse, and then cut off the tips of his fingertips about midway down the nail. He would leave them to bleed to death or to die slowly of dehydration. They were usually found weeks after he left them, their fingers scraped down to the top knuckles from trying to escape.

Tommy ran into trouble on the Merloni hit. He had finished only the first two fingers of the right hand when the cops arrived at the scene. Tommy came out shooting and took two bullets to the gut, but was rushed to the hospital and lived to stand trial.

The victim testified with a large bandage wrapped around his hand. When photographs of Tommy's last hits were circulated to the jury, an accountant in the front row fainted. Needless to say, Tommy wound up with life, no parole. Perhaps even worse, he never found out who'd tipped off the police. This question consumed him, swimming through his mind on long afternoons until the bittersweet thought of revenge tightened his hands into fists.

But Tommy was a different man now. His time in the Tower had worn him down, like water over a rock. His edges dulled, he smoothed against opposition.

Although he was a horrible artist, he loved Sketch Duty passionately. One day, he refused to return his crayons when his hour was up. And when the time came for him to relinquish his picture, he would not. Using his semen, he pasted his childish drawing of a single potted flower on his wall bars and admired it as if it were a Renoir. The guards could not have prisoners disobeying the rules, and although they wouldn't open the unit door to retrieve the picture, they could render it worthless from outside.

Tommy regarded them nervously as they rode down on the elevator trailing a thick hose usually used for washing down the inmates. "Whaddaya want? Whaddaya want with my flower?" They didn't answer him; they just turned on the water full blast, dousing the unit and drenching the picture.

He shrieked and tried to block the stream with his body, but it was too late. The colors faded into the darkening paper and the ruined picture fell in a wad through the floor bars. He started crying like a child, big, round tears running down his cheeks. "My flower," he said over and over. "My beautiful flower."

That was the last time Tommy got Sketch Duty. In the Tower, one chance was all you had.

Although he kept up his contentious front, Tommy Giacondia was gone on the inside, rendered totally harmless. That was a bad thing to be in the Tower, surrounded by men who smelled weakness more strongly than anything else. So, as a means of protection, Tommy kept loud.

Across from him was Safran Habbad, a bomb specialist who worked contracts for Third-World countries. During a South American coup in the early eighties, he had taken out an entire government cabinet.

He was captured in the United States a few years later, fulfilling a contract on a Massachusetts senator who was a strong advocate of gun control. Safran was cornered in the house after he'd set the bomb, and he'd refused to surrender. It exploded in the kitchen, and although he was on the second floor, he still lost half the flesh on his face to the blast, as well as a considerable amount on his back, arms, and legs. He'd attempted to burn down his hospital room to avoid his trial, hoping perhaps to rise from his ashes and spread his wings, but his escapade had failed and he was sentenced, ironically, to life.

The first day Safran moved to Level Two, Tommy greeted him in his usual manner.

"You stupid falafel-eating Seven-Eleven prick. You shut the fuck up if you gonna live here by me. Bombing houses of families, you're a sicko. A spaccone."

Safran swore back at him in several languages before commenting on Italy's paltry effort in the Second World War, implying that it was due to the deficient genital dimensions of the soldiers. The two men were quickly embroiled in the first of many violent arguments in which neither understood much of what the other said.

Alone on Level Three was Mills Benedick. The guards decided to leave Unit 3A vacant rather than subject even a Tower prisoner to Mills on a daily basis. He stood hunched over, his rounded shoulders heaving as he loudly drew breath.

An unusual amount of body hair covered him, curling thickly around his shoulders and arms. There was no line where his head hair ended in the back and his body hair began. Mills ate by shoving his loaf against his mouth, grunting and sucking the food in.

Mills had escaped a high-security mental institution two years after he was committed. He'd become a serial rapist in his brief stint in the outside world, committing five rapes in the seven days he was free.

He would break into single women's homes during the day and hide until they came home from work and went to sleep. Sneaking to their beds, he would pounce on them, quickly pressing duct tape over their mouths and eyes. Once he had their heads adequately fixed to the beds, he would undress the women slowly and stare at their naked bodies. Then, from his heavy perch upon their chests, he'd begin to masturbate. Finally he'd unleash himself on their bodies, hurling himself into them and thrashing until he was relieved.

Six of the women had severe bite wounds on their breasts and faces; one victim had even died mid-act (the forensic pathologist concluded), when Mills had ripped out her larynx with his teeth.

The day he was captured, Mills had fled a rape scene after he'd heard sirens approaching. He'd run several miles over rough terrain with tree branches cutting his arms and cheeks. Sweat ran into his cuts and his eyes, and he'd begun to bellow with pain. A frightened farmer, believing there was a wild animal on the loose, had called the police.

The police tracked Mills to a church in the hills, and they positioned themselves outside, peering through binoculars to fix his location.

Inside, the sun bled harshly through the stained-glass windows, casting distorted images across the pews. Mills sat on the stairs leading to the altar, holding his head in his hands, dust floating about him in the multicolored air. When he raised his head, the light ran madly across his unshaven face.

The police burst in from their silent vigil, shattering windows and breaking down doors. Mills stood on the stairs and screamed, a terrified, primal roar, his face distorted as spittle flowed over the brink of his bottom lip, spilling onto his bristled chin. Before verbal contact could be established, a scared rookie sank two tranquilizer darts into Mills's upper chest. Mills woke up on Level Three.

Another personality in the Tower was Cyprus Fraker, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard from Alabama. His Klan chapter had grown to be influential at a local political level and, eventually, he was indicted on charges of embezzlement.

Cyprus was less immediately dangerous than the other inmates, but he wound up in the Tower because at Maingate he'd led the Aryan Fist organization, which had been responsible for several prison assassinations. The officials thought it better to separate him from his followers and his outside contacts, so they had placed him in the Tower. Racial violence at the prison had abated as a consequence.

Cyprus lived in Unit 9B, where, in his underwear, he would sit for hours, tilted back on his bed, singing country songs. He managed to catch a number of water rats that made their way into the Tower, and he snapped their necks and hung them by their tails from the ceiling bars. Whenever the Hatch was opened, they would twirl in the air like wind chimes.