On the street Agry had lived outside the society on which he’d preyed and had paid little heed to its mechanisms. Once inside, thrust into a densely structured society he couldn’t escape, he had seen that there were only two mechanisms that counted: domination and submission; and two kinds of inmate: the leaders and the led. The vast majority were more than content to be the latter. He’d also seen that, at the right moment, submission was a path to domination. You couldn’t go against the hierarchy. He’d learned that the hard way as a teenage Marine when he’d broken a drill sergeant’s jaw. It was the hierarchy that contained the power, not the individuals who filled it. A weak man high in the hierarchy was vastly more powerful than a strong man outside it.
Nev was strong and at the time he’d come up to the River the barn boss on D, Jack ‘Hammer’ Cutler, was just recovering from his second heart attack. Jack still moved the wheels but his time in the infirmary had taken all the piss out of him and his crew was on the wane, losing influence and muscle. Agry had allied himself to this, the weakest crew. He’d also befriended Dennis Terry in Maintenance. He’d also courted Bill Cletus, then just a sergeant. Using Terry’s contacts with outside suppliers and his own still-fresh contacts in the world, he’d organised a new smuggling network, strengthened Cutler’s crew and become Cutler’s right arm. One night he’d arranged with Cletus to have his own and Jack’s cell doors left open. In the wee hours he’d straddled Cutler’s chest with his knees and clamped an immovable hand over his mouth and nostrils. Next morning Cutler was found dead from his third and final heart attack.
The internal economy of the River was as complex as that of Manhattan. You had two and a half thousand guys who worked and lived in a shithole. They wanted things: home comforts, sex, drugs, magazines, tobacco, candy bars, pictures of girls, any crumbs of pleasure and relief they could get their hands on. The turnover of faces was pretty fast. There was a hard core of men with long sentences but Agry reckoned over a two-year cycle eighty per cent of the faces changed. These men had visitors – girlfriends and wives, brothers, mothers – and visitors brought gifts: cash and drugs. A mother tearfully kissing her son goodbye at the end of her monthly visit would slip him a couple of twenties, maybe even a couple of C’s. A girlfriend might have a condom wrapped round a gram or two of coke stashed in her cheek or up her cunt. Postal gifts too, radios and training shoes with a little something extra stowed inside. Plus the men earned prison scrip for their jobs. Easily a million bucks a year – maybe double that – in hard cash money flowed in every year, was translated into goods and comforts, and then made its way out again in the pockets of truck drivers, delivery men and guards. To an inmate the cash itself was toilet paper. Agry turned it into something you wanted: something to ease the pain, something to remind the homesick souls of all they’d left behind.
Agry sometimes reflected that he’d made more of himself in here than he ever would’ve done outside. He ran a business, an organisation, in the toughest market there was. Some of his guys didn’t know shit from toothpaste but if he asked them to they’d ram their heads through the bars of their cell door. Others, like Tony Shockner, had more brains than he did and took care of a lot of fine detail for him. Violent punishment, when necessary, was always swift and extreme. His men usually handled that. Periodically, when he heard a whisper that some new hardcase not long up thought him soft, he would unleash a spasm of his own personal brutality.
Agry’s crew supplied drugs and liquor on D but left the rest of the prison to DuBois and Grauerholz. Drugs gave a good return on the dollar but, ubiquitous as they were, there wasn’t the turnover. Agry reckoned he’d made more on electrical goods and porn than Larry ever did out of cocaine and Mexican brown. He’d built something extraordinary: that was the word Klein had once used in Agry’s cell, eating coffee cake and sipping tea with Claudine. Agry had never quite warmed to Klein. He was too self-contained. An outsider with power and therefore unusual. Maybe unique. And maybe Agry was jealous, just a little, of the peals of laughter Claudine gave out when Klein said something funny that Agry would never have thought of. But Klein wasn’t a threat and he was good for Claudine. Plus he’d sure as hell given Agry better treatment for these goddamned chest infections than that cocksucker Bahr had ever done. And Agry appreciated that word too: extraordinary. No one had ever said that about him before. Now that extraordinary was being torn apart all around him.
And yet Agry, sweating in the candlelight, felt full.
Agry’s bedroom was dense with humidity and the body heat of sex. Perspiration clung to his scalp and made the pale hairs on his chest and belly look dark. In her red lipstick and underwear Claudine looked like a million dollars. Agry smiled to himself. She was costing the state of Texas at least that much and probably a lot more, now that the joint was being trashed on her behalf. If it was costing him too he would have paid anything to get what he had right now: this scrawny high-yeller bitch lying by his side.
Agry owned two double cells on ground tier, one knocked through into the other, at the cost of a huge bribe to Bill Cletus. In the room was a double bed with an orthopaedic mattress and peach-coloured sheets. The light was almost gone now and candles burned on the table throwing flickering shadows onto the raw granite blocks of the cell. Agry thought it was kind of romantic. He hoped Claudine thought so too, though she hadn’t said as much as yet. There was something hanging between them, something he had to clear up.
‘Why did you leave me?’ he said.
Claudine started to turn her head towards him. Agry put his hand on the back of her neck so she couldn’t turn any further. His fingers dug into the side of her throat until he could feel her pulse throbbing. It was steady, and not more than eighty despite the speed she’d snorted. Claudine was a cooler customer than most people gave her credit for. Agry had lived with her for four years. He knew. She’d dropped straight from the hole between her mama’s legs into a federal housing project in New Orleans and had been living on her wits against the odds ever since.
‘I di’nt leave you, honey,’ she said. ‘They took me. You remember it.’
Agry did indeed remember it. It had been like having blunt nails hammered through his hands. And the end of his dick. Cletus, whose pockets had bulged with Agry’s money more than a time or two, had turned up with half-a-dozen of his men dressed in padded vests and football helmets and violated the sanctuary of his suite in broad daylight. They’d dragged Claudine out of her cell and marched her off to B block. As she’d tottered off down the tier on the high heels Agry had paid a fortune for, with Cletus poking her in the back with his nightstick, the other six screws had held Agry pinned to the floor of his cell while he’d foamed at the mouth and threatened their families with extermination.
The humiliation had been without parallel. They’d even denied him a period in seg which would at least have afforded him a dignity of sorts. Agry had made a dozen written applications to Hobbes for a meeting, an explanation. They’d all been refused with Hobbes, so high and fucking mighty, telling him no prison official, and the warden in particular, was required to explain their actions to ‘the likes of him’. The likes of him. Hobbes had had the gall to finish his letter with some kind of fucking quotation: ‘He who has no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.’ Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.
The only word he’d been able to get from the guards was that Hobbes had moved Claudine to appease the niggers, and in particular that blackest of vile nigger cocksuckers Reuben Wilson, who’d felt that Claudine’s ‘captivity’ in D block was degrading to the black population as a whole. As if any level of degradation existed that they hadn’t already plumbed on the day they were fucking born. Well, Agry had found another level for them: he’d burned the fuckers down in their own cells, he’d settled their shit good. And as for Hobbes, kissing the ass of Reuben Wilson, the only broken city he had to think on was the wreck of his own fucking prison, his baby. Agry allowed himself a moment o
f gloating. There was still work to do. Good work. If they hadn’t all been against him before – Hobbes and Wilson – they were now. Agry snorted with contempt. He who has no rule over his own spirit. Agry had such rule. He’d shown them good. Finally there was Claudine and her betrayal. Her parole. An anonymous note, typed, had arrived in his mail three days before: Toussaint is coming up for parole. Would she confess? He leaned on the nape of her neck.
‘Whose idea was it to take you to B?’ he said.
The pressure pushed Claudine’s lips and face into the mattress, distorting her voice. ‘I don’t know. It sure warn’t mine.’
‘Was it Wilson?’
Claudine didn’t answer. Agry’s hand went into spasm.
‘Wilson! Wilson!’
Claudine’s neck was as close to breaking as it would ever be. She wheezed and struggled, unable to speak. Agry released the pressure. Claudine squealed into the pillow.
‘Yeah, Wilson. Was Wilson asked fo’ it. I dunno why. I dunno.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Stokely Johnson.’
‘What did Johnson say?’ growled Agry.
‘He din’n know why either. Just said I’s a disgrace t’ the brothers and it was up t’ him he’d of had me killed.’
‘That’s all? That’s it?’
‘That’s all.’
‘You lying yellow bitch.’
‘They treated me bad, Nev. Real bad. You don’t know how bad.’
For a second Agry felt in his throat the pleasure it would give him to kill her right now. The words sprang to his lips to confront her with her lies, her parole hearing. He swallowed them back. Whilst he knew and she didn’t he had control. There would be a better moment to spring it on her. He let go her neck.
Claudine broke into a spasm of thin coughs and suddenly Agry, watching her squirm, was choked with pity and understanding. She was only human after all. Why shouldn’t she want to get out of this fucking place? She needed time, sympathy, tenderness, all that good shit he’d read in GQ magazine about what the ladies wanted. On the table next to the candles was a bottle of Johnson’s baby oil. He leaned across Claudine’s back, took the bottle and poured some into the palm of his hand. He ran his hand over her back, spreading a sheen of oil.
‘How’s that feel, baby?’ he said.
Claudine replied without opening her eyes. ‘Good.’
Agry leaned on his left elbow and worked the oil into her skin a square inch at a time. This was something else he’d picked up from GQ. The babes loved it. They didn’t want just non-stop fucking. For himself he had never tired of the beauty of Claudine’s skin, its tone, its smoothness, the way it caught the light of the candles. The beauty flowed in through the tips of his fingers and his rage subsided and he felt a resurgence of the sense of fullness. It was the fullness of the king. The King. He was a king in the fullness of his power, glutted with conquest and victory. King of the world. His men now roamed the streets of that world, burning, raping and looting as was the privilege of an army of conquest. They had defeated superior numbers by sheer ruthlessness of purpose. He, Nev Agry, had imposed his will on the densest concentration of human disobedience, human anarchy, scowling, psychopathic, runaway human desperation to be found anywhere on the continent. He had evicted the false authorities from the precincts of his palace. He had driven the barbarians from the gate. He had taken back his stolen Queen with swift and merciless retribution. His word was justice. His word was law and the taste of it on his tongue was sweet.
Everything that had gone before and everything that was to come was worth this moment. Let the Devil demand whatever due he would. Most men grovelled their lives away, kissing the ass of fear day in and day out, sweating their yellow guts out for whoever cracked the whip above their heads. And the whip was always there, no matter how rich you were or how poor, because the whip sounded inside your own fucking head and it was the fear of dying, so you let the nearest cocksucker bossman piss in your mouth when he felt like it, or you delivered your balls into the cold, grasping hands of a greedy woman and let her twist them off, and all because you were afraid of dying. Well, Nev Agry wasn’t afraid. He was one in a million. He was extraordinary. He was a king in the fullness of his power. And he wasn’t afraid of God nor of man.
Claudine flinched and cried out and Agry returned from his reverie to the task in hand, rubbing oil on Claudine’s back.
‘Sorry babe,’ he said. ‘I press too hard?’
‘A little,’ she said.
Agry pressed again on the same spot – her left lower ribs – and again she flinched. A darkness rose in Agry’s chest. There was a bruise on her cheek too, which she’d told him she got coming back from the kitchen.
‘That’s a bruise,’ he said.
Claudine didn’t answer. Agry grabbed her shoulder and rolled her over on to her back. She looked at him for a second and he saw the fear in her eyes. He didn’t want her to feel fear. Not for him. And whoever else she felt fear for would have to die: She closed her eyes.
‘What did Johnson do to you?’ he said.
Claudine covered her eyes with her forearm. She clenched her jaw to stop her lips trembling. Agry felt his heart melting. He grappled in his memory to recall the gist of that goddamn article in GQ.
‘Babe,’ he said, He stroked her hair. ‘You don’t have to keep it to yourself. It don’t do no good to bottle up that shit.’ A word sprang to his lips. ‘It’s traumatic.’
Claudine abruptly burst into tears. Goddamn, this stuff really worked. Agry felt a flutter of pride at his own sensitivity. The words tumbled from Claudine’s mouth. ‘Johnson raped me.’
Agry grabbed Claudine and pulled her to him. The darkness in his chest swelled enormously and became a fathomless blackness that reached his eyes and made him dizzy. He squeezed. The blackness was a vast pit screaming to be filled with human pain. Nothing else would do. Not freedom, not wealth, not love. Pain. There was a cracking sound and Claudine grunted. Agry concentrated and managed to loosen his arms. An image of Johnson’s face swam into his mind and the blackness was swept away by the urge to vomit. He fought the urge down and grabbed the bottle of Maker’s Mark from the table. His worst fantasies were confirmed. He stuck the neck of the bottle into his mouth and poured. He lowered the bottle without gasping. No, not his worst; only second worst. She hadn’t wanted Johnson. The black nigger shitdog had had to rape her. Agry fought the urge of his fingers to close round Claudine’s throat. He stroked her hair in silence. Claudine took her arm away from her eyes and looked at Agry with her big, dewy brown eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ said Agry, without conviction.
‘You know what he threatened to do to me?’
‘I said it’s okay for Chrissakes. He’s dead. I wish the fucker were still alive but he ain’t.’
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ said Claudine, ‘he always wore a rubber.’
‘Jesus,’ gasped Agry.
No trace of the recent sense of fullness remained. He suddenly felt intensely conscious of his own body. He wasn’t as strong as he’d used to be but he kept in shape. He could still bench one-seventy-five for six reps. But he didn’t have the type of physique where it showed to good advantage. He was naturally thick in the body and hips, short in the arms. Plus he was fifteen, twenty years older than Johnson. It galled him. Then the question arose from the depths of his bowels. He felt his cock shrivel and go numb as his mind, against his will, asked the question again, nagging, taunting, insistent. He felt a constricting band of anxiety tighten around his chest. He blurted the words out.
‘What was he like?’ he said. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
‘What do you mean?’ said Claudine.
Agry turned on her savagely. ‘I mean exactly what you think I fucking mean.’
Claudine cowered and for a second Agry was gratified to see the fear in her face. Let the bitch fuck with him and he’d make what Stokely Johnson thre
atened to do to her look like plastic surgery. He paused. He calmed himself. Jesus Christ. Johnson was just another dead nigger. Agry was king of the world. He was glad that only Claudine was around to see this. He swiped a handful of sweat from his face and flicked it against the wall.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘And the truth. No bullshit to make me feel better.’
‘He was longer than you,’ said Claudine.
The band round Agry’s chest wound in by another three or four notches. He kept his expression neutral. He was too cool a guy to let this kind of shit get to him. He had no worries. Size didn’t matter anyway, everyone knew that, if they’d read the right magazines.
‘But only by about an inch,’ continued Claudine.
Agry felt his face turning purple. Only an inch. Fucking hell, man. Who wouldn’t have killed his own mother or betrayed his best friend for an extra inch? The band of terror was strangling him. He couldn’t breathe.
‘But you’re thicker, honey. That’s what counts most,’ said Claudine.
Agry searched her face. Was she fucking with him or what? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t fucking tell. She had her butter-wouldn’t-melt face on.
‘Thicker?’ wheezed Agry.
Claudine smiled at him the way only she could. Those full lips set in a permanent pout. Cheekbones any real woman would’ve killed for. And the eyebrows. Shit. Claudine put her hand on his cock and Agry felt his throat vibrating with need. He got a hard-on that hurt. Suddenly he knew why he’d blown this scum barrel apart.
‘Thicker all the way,’ said Claudine. ‘From one end to th’other.’