Sutton (37 page)

Metaphorically, you mean
.

Do I seem like a guy who speaks in metaphors? Christmas 1936, I did the Australian crawl through human feces. Literally
.

I’m sorry, I’m not following
.

There was this sewer underneath Eastern State
.

Okay
.

The rumor was, it led to freedom. But I found that it led to shit and more shit and that shit then led to deeper realms of shit. When they caught me, they threw me back in a Dark Cell, then back in Semi Iso. They almost broke me that time. I was so desperate for human contact, any contact, I drained the water from the toilet and spoke through the pipes to the man in the next cell. At least I think he was in the next cell. We could barely hear each other, but we’d speak for hours—one of the strongest bonds I’ve ever had with another person. Then one day the voice was gone. Got released, died, I never did find out. A year or so later, when they let me out of Semi Iso, I was a good boy. I took correspondence classes, got a degree in creative writing, became a model prisoner. Swimming through shit—it changes a person
.

I would think
.

Shit.
People use that word too casually. They say
shit
when the littlest thing goes wrong. They’d never say it so freely if they actually had to swim through it. In fact, people would think different about everything they want in life if they asked themselves: Am I willing to swim through shit for it?

Sutton faces Reporter, throws back his shoulders like the wooden soldier. Is there anything right now, kid, that you’d be willing to swim through shit for?

Let’s see. You, standing at the site of the Schuster murder, telling me who killed Arnold Schuster
.

Sutton pulls Reporter’s trench coat tighter around himself. Shoves his hands deep in the pockets. You really missed your calling kid. You should have been a cop
.

The seats in the prison movie theater are boards set on cinder blocks. They wobble like seesaws every time a new man sits down. Willie is watching newsreels.
The bloodiest fighting so far for our brave GIs!
He wobbles as someone sits heavily on his right. Freddie Tenuto, a hothead from South Philly. Black eyes, sideways nose, bad skin—real bad. Angry skin for an angry man. A mob assassin, Freddie was known on the streets as the Angel of Death. Willie wobbles again. Someone sits heavily on his left. Botchy Van Sant. Another Philly guy. Hatchet face, smile like a wince.

Spring 1944. Operation Gardening is under way. Under the boom-boom of Allied bombers bombing the Danube, Botchy and Freddie tell Willie that they’re digging a tunnel. They have nine guys working round the clock. They’ve already gone twenty feet down, through solid rock, and now they need to dig a hundred feet straight ahead and they’ll be under the lawn along Fairmount Avenue. Then all they need to do is dig straight up, thirty feet.

Where’s the tunnel start? Willie asks.

Under Kliney’s cell, Botchy says.

Willie nods. Kliney is a scavenger, a pack rat, and a nut. It makes sense that he’d be involved in a scheme like this.

Big job, Willie says.

The Angel of Death whispers in his ear: That’s why we need you, Willie. We need a place to put the dirt.

They think the best place would be the sewer, and Willie is the local sewer expert. They want Willie to tell them where their tunnel is likely to intersect with the sewer pipe. But Willie isn’t eager to go underground again. It’s been seven years since his sewer excursion,
seven years
, and still he has nightmares. He still wakes up spitting shit. Also, he gets a bad vibe, a Marcusy, Plankish vibe from the Angel of Death and Botchy. One is ruthless, the other is hopelessly dumb. The Angel of Death got his nickname not because he kills, but because he kills for pleasure, and Botchy got his nickname because he botched so many holdups. Willie keeps staring at the screen. Now it’s a newsreel about the journalists waiting to cover D-Day.
Say hello to the brave cameramen preparing to record the Allied invasion of Europe!
Who else is in? he asks.

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 damn prison—Eastern State—sounds like a fucked-up college.

His dean is E. Haldeman-Julius. People call Julius the Henry Ford of literature, because he’s created an assembly 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 classics 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. Shit. 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 gods, 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 God
.

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 hellhole 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 associates. 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 passing 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.