Sanchez stepped between us.
“Mr. Rawlins isn’t a police officer,” he said. “He’s here to advise the captain on the Gasteau killing.”
The policeman’s smile reminded me of Pharaoh. “That’s what happens when we let your kind up here,” he said.
I could think of five answers; only two of them involved words.
“Can we go on, Officer …” Sanchez looked closely at the flat badge under the officer’s shield. “Peters?”
Patrolman Peters stepped sideways and we went through the pair of swinging double doors behind him. The doors opened into a long, light-lime-colored hall. It was lit by bright lights in semiopaque glass bowls that were screwed into the ceiling.
We walked the length of the hall and then turned left down another, even longer hall. There were no doors along the way, just the tunnel.
A large roach scuttled down the corridor past us. He was scared, it seemed, and was hell-bent to get away from the direction we were headed.
“How long have you been sergeant?” I asked Sanchez.
I figured that I wasn’t a prisoner, or a criminal, and so I could speak freely.
But Sanchez didn’t see it that way. Either that or he was deaf.
Or maybe he was concentrating. The tunnels under the jail crisscrossed often, going off at various angles.
We turned and then turned again.
Each corridor was less green and more yellow. At the end of the final passage was a large iron door with a small portal fitted with extra-thick, bulletproof glass.
Through the glass we could see another door, this one like a cell door, formed from bars. On the other side of the bars was another, older police officer. When Sanchez tapped his badge on the glass the guardian looked up slowly. Sanchez showed his ID at the window. The older man got up, rummaged around a large metal key loop. There were only four keys but he had to try every one to open the barred door. He walked across the metal chamber, to the door that we stood behind, and peered at us.
He made a movement with his hand saying that he wanted to see Sanchez’s ID again. He looked at the picture for a long time and then started fumbling with the keys again.
After four attempts I heard the key slip into a lock and turn, but the door didn’t come open. The elder cop went back across the chamber. It wasn’t until he was safely locked away that he reached under his desk and pulled on something. A loud click went off in the door we were standing before and Sanchez pushed it open.
We entered the ironclad chamber.
“Shut it behind you,” the guard/cop said.
Sanchez obliged.
“What do you want?” the guard then asked.
“I’m taking Mr. Rawlins here to see Captain Fogherty.”
The cop looked hard at me. “He under arrest?”
“No.”
“Why’d you come this way?”
“This is the way the captain said to come.”
Another long look.
“Okay,” he said, and he fumbled with the keys.
Beyond him was another metal door that had to be unlocked. And beyond that was the dim-lit room of cages. Twelve boxes of crosshatched bars with a man, or two, in every cell. When we came into the room I could see, through the grated floor, another twelve cells below. The steel latticed ceiling revealed an upper cellblock. They all wore drab green pants that had the word PRISONER stenciled on them in dark red dye, and matching T-shirts. Each man stared silently, wondering if our presence there had to do with their case. They stared from their cots, or standing at the crosshatched bars, or squatting down on the steel toilet seat. They had nothing to hide, nothing to say.
Just thirty or so men living in cages underground. Like livestock waiting for some further shame to be laid on them. Like sharecroppers or slaves living in shanty shacks on the edge of a plantation.
There was evil in that room, and on that plantation too. Because, as I knew too well, if you’re punished long enough you become guilty of all charges brought against you.
“Mistah.”
It was a hoarse whisper. The man who called was black. He was half crouching, half lying at the grid cell door. The white of his left eye was full of bright blood. His nose was so swollen that he was gasping open-mouthed. There was blood coming from his mouth and you could see that he was missing teeth. I couldn’t tell if he had lost them in the fight or at some earlier time.
“Mistah.”
I slowed.
It was hard to tell through the bruises and the blood but I didn’t think that the man had reached twenty-five. Hefty but not loose, he’d taken off his shirt to mop the blood and sweat from his face.
Behind him, at the back of the cell, was another young man. This one, also black, was long and lean with his legs stretched out and crossed on the cot where he reclined. He was in repose with open eyes and the satisfied
