But Saturday afternoon Ciro got stoned and in Walter’s face because Walter had sold him for an extra dessert to a retarded man who had the worst body odor in the stockade.
“You don’t like it, you? You t’ink you better than other people? You t’ink you got a say in what I do?” Walter said. “Tell me how you feel about that in a couple of days, you li’l bitch.”
Walter put out the word. For the next twenty-four hours, Ciro was anybody’s punch.
On Sunday evening an inmate in the Aryan Brotherhood picked up Ciro in a bear hug and carried him into a shower room. There, he was made to put on panties and a bra and perform in front of three other men tattooed with SS lightning bolts and blue teardrops at the corners of their eyes. Inside the AB, tear-duct tats indicate the bearer has canceled someone’s ticket. Membership in the Brotherhood is for life. In terms of effectiveness, their cruelty and violence have no peer. Ciro Goula had always believed, in a bizarre fashion, that his profligacy would protect him from wolves. But Walter Lantier had just volunteered him for duty inside a concrete mixer.
The four AB members in the shower room laughed at him, then sodomized him and plunged his head in a toilet bowl. When he screamed for help, they plunged his head into the water again and flushed the toilet. That’s when Otis Baylor strayed into their midst.
“What the hell is the matter with you fellows? What kind of men are you?” he said, gathering up Ciro from a puddle of water on the floor. “Shame on the bunch of you.”
“Where do you think you are, Jack?” one of the inmates said.
“You watch your manners, my friend. Or I’ll be back for you,” Otis said.
The inmate who had addressed Otis looked at him in disbelief, a matchstick frozen in the corner of his mouth. He tried to hold Otis’s stare but his eyes broke and he lowered his head. His friends remained motionless, as cave dwellers might if a stranger entered thei
r cave and kicked their food into a communal fire. Otis hefted Ciro to his feet and half carried him down a corridor, past a row of cells, to a barred security gate, on the other side of which two uniformed guards looked at him openmouthed.
“This man needs to be in a hospital. Y’all have a serious discipline problem in here,” he said.
OTIS WAS WEARING jailhouse denims and a waist chain when the turnkey brought him to the interview room. Through the window I could see the coils of razor wire on the security fence outside and empty fields in the distance and a rural road that was lined with trash. I asked the turnkey if he could remove the chains. He shook his head and closed the door behind him.
“They got you in segregation?” I said.
“Is that what they call it?” Otis replied.
“Believe it or not, it’s for your own protection.”
“Then why am I in chains?”
Because a jail is not an adjustable institution, I thought. But Otis was a hardhead and I knew my words would be wasted on him. “I need your permission to go on your property in New Orleans,” I said.
“What for?”
“I think Bertrand Melancon may have stashed stolen goods in your carriage house or your yard.”
“Why would he do that?”
“The day you understand why these guys do anything is the day you stick a gun in your mouth,” I replied.
I thought he might lighten up. But he didn’t. “Get a warrant. That’s how you guys do it, don’t you?”
I leaned forward on the table. His wrists were cuffed to the chain that cinched his waist, and made me think of fins on the sides of a beached fish. “Listen to me. The stolen property I’m talking about belongs to your neighbor Sidney Kovick. You know what kind of man he is. If I’m correct, namely that Bertrand Melancon did stash Sidney’s goods on your property, how long do you think it will take Sidney to come to the same conclusion? Furthermore, ask yourself what Sidney is capable of if he thinks you or a member of your family found them.”
He looked out the window at the sun shining on the spools of razor wire above the fence. “Do whatever you want, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“I admire your standing up for Ciro Goula. But he chose the life he lives and you can’t take his weight.”
“Have you ever been locked up in a place like this?”
“What if I have?”
“Then you know you don’t give an inch.”
“George Patton once told his men that wars are not won by giving your life for your country. You win wars by making the other poor bastard give his life for his.”
“I’m ready to go back to lockdown.”