Episode 141 · The Property Sheet

Behind them, a car door opened and closed. A man was coming across the snow from the dark sedan, a man in a gray coat with a briefcase under his arm, walking carefully so as not to get his shoes wet. He did not look at the stones or the steam or the green grass. He looked at the guard. Soles had never seen him before. He knew the type anyway. A man who could walk past a hole in a prison wall without looking at it had already decided what it would be called.

— You’re the one who was on the east wing last night?

— Yes.

— Good. Come with me. We’ll write your report together.

He said it pleasantly. Then he looked at Soles and at the investigator, and smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes.

— Until the report is done, he said, nobody talks to anybody. I’m sure you understand.

They wrote it in the director’s office, because it was the only room in the administration block where the radiator worked.

The director was not there. His coat was still on the hook behind the door and his coffee cup was still on the desk, half full, with a skin on it. The man in the gray coat moved the cup to the windowsill without looking at it, took the director’s chair, opened his briefcase and took out a block of lined paper and two pens. He gave one pen to the guard. He kept the other one for himself.

— Sit down, he said. You must be tired.

The guard sat down. He was tired. He had not noticed it until the man said so, and now he felt it all at once, in his back, in his eyes, in the hands lying on his knees. His knee did not hurt. He kept his hands still.

— Let’s start from the beginning, the man said. What time did your shift start?

— Ten.

— And until midnight, everything was normal?

The guard thought about the warm wall. About the steam rising up to the window of the last cell. About the man on the floor in the dark, facing the wall, saying It’s tonight.

— Yes, he said.

— Good.

The man wrote something on his block. The guard had a pen and nothing to write on, and did not ask. The man had small, neat handwriting that leaned slightly backward.

— At midnight you did the count.

— Yes.

The man took him through the rest the same way, in small steps that were easy to agree with. Everyone present. A scream on the second floor, one of the inmates, nobody knew why. The lights going out, at least where the guard had been. The emergency lamps, after a while. The guard said yes to each of them, because each of them was true, and the man nodded as if every yes were a very good answer and wrote it down.

Then he looked up and smiled, and the smile was friendly and tired and patient, the smile of a man who had done this many times and knew how it ended.

— You know what happened next better than I do, he said. But let me tell you what we already know, and you stop me if I get something wrong. All right?

The guard said all right.

— The old boiler under the administration block was repaired two weeks ago. Badly, it turns out. Gas built up in the service tunnel that runs under the east wing. When the power failed, a spark from a relay ignited it. There was no big explosion, just enough to crack the foundation at the end of the wing. The ceiling came down in places. The east wall of the yard, which was over a hundred years old and had been on the repair list since before you started working here, collapsed. In the confusion, some of the inmates got their doors open. Some of the doors were warped by the blast. Some were opened with keys taken from a guard who was injured. The inmates panicked, rioted, and a number of them escaped through the gap in the wall. Is that more or less right?

The guard looked at him.

He thought about the door of cell nine, bulging outward like clay. About the man in socks looking at his bloody hands and saying It’s open as if it were a miracle. About the young guard smiling at the gate with the keys in his hand. About the older guard counting the doors.

— There was no smell of gas, the guard said.

— No?

— I was there. There was steam. It smelled of wet stone. There was no gas.

— Gas in a tunnel doesn’t always smell, the man said gently. It depends on the gas. You wouldn’t necessarily know.

He wrote something on his block. The guard could not see what.

— The doors, the guard said. Cell nine. He pushed it out with his hands. I saw it.

— He kicked it until the frame gave. It was already warped. The whole wing had shifted. You’ve been here nineteen years, you know how old those frames are.

— With his hands. I saw it.

— In the dark. With steam everywhere. After a man had screamed and the lights had gone out.

The man put his pen down.

— I’m not saying you’re lying, he said. Please understand that. You were frightened. Anyone would have been. In the dark, with steam everywhere, things can look different from what they are. That’s why we write reports in the morning. So the night doesn’t write them for us.

The guard said nothing.

— How many inmates escaped? the man asked.

— I don’t know. I didn’t count.

— Twenty-three. Nineteen were brought back by eight this morning. Most of them didn’t get farther than the road. One was found in a bus shelter, asleep. One walked to his mother’s house and sat in her kitchen until the police came. They were cold and confused and some of them didn’t remember how they had got out. That’s also normal, after a night like that.

— And the other four?

— Will be found.

He did not say it as a hope.

— One of the four is the man from the last cell on the east wing. The one from Vineward.

— Yes.

— You saw him leave?

— Yes.

— Through the wall.

— Over the stones. Where the wall had been.

— Alone?

— Yes.

The man opened a folder the guard had not noticed before. Inside it was a single sheet of paper, and the guard recognized it at once, because it was in his own handwriting. The property sheet. Coat. Watch. Wallet with no money in it. One folding chair, wood, used.

— The storage room was locked this morning, the man said. Nothing was taken from it except this. A chair.

He put his finger on the line.

— How did an inmate get a chair out of a locked storage room in the middle of a riot?

The guard could have lied. He would think about that later, on the bus, and at home, and for many nights afterward. He could have said that the door had been forced, or that he did not know, or that the chair must have been moved earlier by someone else. The man in the gray coat would have written it down and nodded and been satisfied, because it would have fit.

— I gave it to him, the guard said.