"Looking good, Cream," CO Polsen said as I came into the rec room a few days later. "Like to see you in shorts. I bet that p.u.s.s.y of yours has seen plenty of action, so I'd fit right in."

I moved past him without breaking stride or looking at him: Polsen had const.i.tuted himself an enemy, and right now the only defense I could come up with was to pretend he didn't exist.

The problem had really begun over my fight in the shower: he'd been watching on the monitors and felt cheated by my taking out my a.s.sailants before anything serious got under way. But his hostility was exacerbated the night after I got my camera, when I was running a load of laundry. The laundry room lay beyond the rec room, so I was watching TV with some of the women while I waited on my clothes.

Polsen was one of the CO's on duty. He abruptly called Dolores out of the room.

The sudden slackness in her face and her dragging posture as she obeyed made me get up a few minutes later and follow after her into the laundry room.

Polsen was behind the door trying to pull down her jeans. Dolores was struggling to keep them up, hissing, "No, please don't do this, please don't do this, I'll tell the lieutenant," and he was laughing and saying she was dirt, no one believed her lies, but that if she did say something, he'd see she got into segregation so fast it would make her head spin. I had been practicing with my wrist.w.a.tch and used it now, wishing I could tape him as well. Polsen looked up and I turned quickly and moved my clothes out of the washer. He let go of Dolores, who ran from the room back toward the prison wing. Polsen gave me a look that liquefied my hamstrings.

When I returned to the common room, the women in front of the television shrank from me: they all knew why Polsen had called Dolores away, and they had watched from the shadows the byplay that took place when I went into the laundry. None of them wanted Polsen to think they supported me.

Back in my cell I wrote down a verbatim account of Polsen's language and what I'd seen, with the date and the time. I interleaved the pages with a copy of Cosmo, which I'd bought at the commissary as a cover for my notes. When Freeman's intern came out the next day to tell me my trial date was set for the last week in September, I managed to slide the magazine to her in a flurry of exchanging doc.u.ments. I asked her to take the magazine away with her and keep it for me. I wasn't sure what use I'd make of my notes, but I didn't want to leave them in my cell-we'd already been locked down twice for searches in my short time at Coolis.

Before she left, the intern asked if I was ready to post bail. It was hard to say no, but I wanted to get a look at the clothes shop. I said I'd give it one more week before throwing in the towel.

I was pretty sure at least one CO was going into rooms on our wing after lights out-it was the only explanation I could think of for the banging doors and cries that sometimes woke me in the night. But none of the women ever said anything.

There were several pregnancies in the prison, I noticed, among women who had been inside for over a year-in one case six years.

When I asked about it during my letterwriting sessions, the women clammed up.

One of them whispered to me in line at dinner later that someone named Cynthia spent a year in solitary for filing a report on a CO who raped her. The prison said she made up the charge to try to shorten her time. After that, people were more afraid than ever to complain. Usually, too, if they got you pregnant they gave you drugs. "They say, oh, your cycle out of balance, you take these. Then you sick for three days, a week, and you lose the baby."

Chemically induced abortions, in a country that banned RU486. How enterprising of the Department of Corrections. I wondered who made the diagnosis and who dispensed the drugs, but we had gotten our trays and my informant scuttled across the floor to join her friends.

If Polsen decided to come into my cell after lightsout, what would I do? The thought made me lie tense in bed that night and for some nights after.

39.

An Audience with Miss Ruby At the start of my third week I was a.s.signed to a kitchen shift, a miserable job, especially in summer. We lugged fiftypound pots of food between stove and steam table, carried out mounds of refuse, slipped in grease on the filthy floor, got covered with burns from careless cooks flinging hot food around. The work paid sixty cents an hour. My coworkers were sullen and sloppy and made it harder to keep from getting injured.

The only job action available to Coolis workers was refusal to work. This led to a ticket, and enough tickets sent you to solitary confinement, but usually after your stint in segregation you got a new work a.s.signment. Turnover was high in the kitchen, but I couldn't afford time in segregation, so I grimly kept at my post.

"This isn't a vacation resort," the CO in charge would say if a woman complained of a burn or a sore back. "You should have thought of that before you thought a life of crime was fun. You're not here for your health, but to learn a lesson."

I had already learned that such medical care as existed was hard to come by.

When a woman had hot grease spilled down her arm, the CO in charge of the kitchen upbraided her for crying over nothing. The next day she didn't come in to work; I learned from the comments of the other women that her arm had become a ma.s.s of pustules in the night. She had been treated by the inhouse "doctor," a CO who had studied prenursing for a year at the local junior college before getting into Coolis.

The stench of the over boiled food and the sight of roaches and mouse droppings took away most of my appet.i.te; if it hadn't been for the fruit my clients brought me I don't think I would have eaten. After a week in the kitchen I was so exhausted it was hard to remember why I'd decided to stay in jail instead of posting bail. I was lying on my bunk Friday night, trying to make up my mind whether to call Freeman and ask him to bail me out on Monday, when Solina came in to say that Miss Ruby had sent word over that she wanted to see me.

On my first day at Coolis, Cornish had sent me back to my cell with a reprimand because jail inmates were supposed to use recreation facilities at a different time than the prisoners, but I'd learned early that was a regulation the CO's enforced only if they wanted an excuse to write you a ticket.

The main reason I hadn't seen Miss Ruby in the rec room since Independence Day was her work schedule. She had one of the cushy jobs, the phone reservation desk for the Pa.s.sport chain of motels and rental cars. While most prison jobs ran from nine to three, the reservation lines had to be staffed twentyfour hours a day. She'd been on the noontosix shift, and I hadn't known to look in the rec room for her in the mornings.

A day earlier I'd written a letter to Rapelec Electronics for a woman, explaining why she was not able to take part in her jobtraining program and requesting that an opening be kept for her in September. The woman paid me with a box of six local tomatoes, the best food I'd eaten since my arrest. I took two of them as an offering and went with the woman who'd brought the message from Miss Ruby; Jorjette had grown up with one of her granddaughters.

It took some doing to get the guards to let Jorjette and me into the rec room in the morning. CO Cornish, on duty that morning, worked closer to the rules than Rohde or Polsen did on the afternoon shift. Jail inmates didn't have recreation privileges until 3:00P.M.

"Vic going to show me her basketball shot," Jorjette whined. "You know everyone say she the best, she beat Angie. And we got kitchen duty in one hour; we gotta go now if we're going at all."

"We could do it another time," I said. "Although another time I probably won't have any tomatoes. Do you grow them yourself, Cornish?"

I held one out for him to look at. He admitted that gardening was his hobby but that his tomatoes hadn't ripened yet.

"You have one hour down there, girls," he finally said, accepting the tomato as he signaled to the man behind the bulletproof gla.s.s to release the lock on the jailwing door.

When we got to the rec room, a woman CO I didn't know was on duty. She was watching Oprah with a handful of women on the couch. Miss Ruby sat in the middle of the group, her irongray hair freshly cut and curled, sh.e.l.l earrings three or four times regulation size in her ears.

Her eyes flicked at Jorjette and me when we came in and pulled up chairs nearby, but she gave no sign of noticing us until Jorjette approached her during a commercial break and asked nervously how Miss Ruby was doing today.

Miss Ruby inclined her head, said as well as anyone could in this heat, too hot to go outside, but she longed for a breath of fresh air. Jorjette said, well, it was pretty hard on everyone but she knew Miss Ruby's joints suffered real bad in the heat. Maybe she'd like a nice fresh tomato, to remind her of the fresh outdoor air?

"Cream here brought it for you special."

Miss Ruby accepted the tomato and jerked her head toward the far end of the deal table. The CO stayed on the couch watching Oprah, and the handful of other women left us alone: Miss Ruby wanted privacy, Miss Ruby got privacy.

"I can't make up my mind about you, Cream," she said when we were seated. "Are you a fighter or a Good Samaritan? First you beat up a couple of g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, but now I hear you spend your spare time writing letters for the girls. Some of them think you're an undercover cop."

I blinked. Of course in a way that was the truth, but I didn't know Miss Ruby and I couldn't trust my secrets to a stranger, especially one who seemed to be plugged in to the gossip pipeline as thoroughly as Miss Ruby was.

"If I'd known my life history mattered here, I'd have written it up on the bathroom wall," I said. "I was arrested same as everyone else."

"And that would be for what crime, I wonder?"

"You know the sad old story about the man who leaves his wife for a cute young thing? And the first wife, who worked hard and put him through school and scrimped so he could build his business, she gets left with the shirt on her back and not much more? And he gets the kids, because how can she give the kids a decent home when she doesn't have any money and she has to be out at work all day?"

"I heard a bunch of versions of that story in my time." She kept her eyes straight ahead, talking in a prison mumble out of the corner of her mouth.

"My twist on it is I figure the guy for about the meanest b.a.s.t.a.r.d in Chicago. So I take the oldest child. A boy, who's overweight and sensitive, and Daddy likes to beat on him, make him cry, then beat on him some more for crying like a girl.

Daddy had me arrested for kidnapping."

"Uhhunh. And you couldn't make bail. Everyone says you got a real lawyer, not a PD. Not to mention, of course, your fancy education that lets you write all those letters."

"Guy's got a lot of important friends. The judge set bail at a quarter of a million. If your friends ran a financial check on me they could tell you why I couldn't pull together that much money overnight."

"And how'd you learn to fight like you do, taking out two big women in the shower?" she demanded. "Not to mention Angie, which I watched you do."

"Same way Angie did," I said softly. "On the streets of Chicago. Ninetyfirst and Commercial to be exact. But I was lucky. My mother wanted me to have an education, and she made me study when the other girls on my street were getting pregnant or doing drugs."

Miss Ruby thought this over. "I don't know whether to believe you or not. But I hear you've been asking questions about a young woman who used to be here. I hear you've been saying you want to talk to me about her. And so here I am, talking to you, wondering how you know her and if that's the real reason you're at Coolis."

I sidestepped the comment. "I never met Nicola Aguinaldo. I know her mother.

Seora Mercedes is grateful to you for looking after Nicola."

"Hmm. She's not very grateful in person."

"She doesn't have any money. And she doesn't have a green card. She's afraid to come out here in case they inspect her doc.u.ments and report her to INS, and she can't write in English. But Nicola's last letter to Seora Mercedes brought her great comfort, because Nicola told her mother you were keeping an eye on her."

Miss Ruby inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. "And how did someone like you come to be friends with Nicola's mother?"

I smiled. "I didn't say we were friends, but that I know her. Before my own arrest I was trying to help Seora Mercedes find out what happened to Nicola.

You know that she died?"

Miss Ruby gave another brief dip of her chin.

"All the women say you know everything that happens in this prison. I want to know what happened to Nicola. How did she get to the hospital?"

"If you're not a cop yourself, they put you here to talk to me." She spoke with finality but didn't try to move away from me.

"Cops don't give a rat's toenail for who killed a poor little girl who didn't even have a green card to her name."

"So who did put you in here?"

"You know who Robert Baladine is?" When she shook her head no, I explained that he owned Coolis and that Nicola had worked for him before she was arrested.

"He's the man I was talking about, and he's got way more power and money than I ever will. He likes the idea of me being locked up in his prison."

She finally looked at me directly, thinking over my story, which had the unusual virtue of being mostly true-even if it might leave her thinking Baladine was my exhusband. "n.o.body knows what happened to Nicola. I heard a lot of different stories, and I don't know which is true. The CO's said she had female difficulties and went into the hospital, where she ran away. Someone else said she got tangled up in one of the big machines in the clothes shop and got killed and the guards were scared they'd be punished for not turning the machinery off in time, so they dumped her body in Chicago. And some girls are saying she beat up on a CO, which is silly, because she wasn't much bigger than a minute, let alone those men."

"She actually died in Chicago," I told her.

Miss Ruby liked having inside information, more than a whole bushel of tomatoes, and she questioned me closely on Nicola's death. After I told her what I knew-omitting how I'd come on Nicola to begin with-I asked how she came to take Nicola under her wing.

"Too many of these girls here don't have any respect for any other human being on the planet. Nicola came from a country where old people are treated with respect-someplace near j.a.pan, which is probably the reason why. She saw how my shoulders and neck bother me after talking on that phone for six hours, and she used to rub the knots out for me. Of course I tried to help her in a few little ways myself."

While Miss Ruby talked, I wondered if perhaps Nicola had never made it to Coolis Hospital. Maybe Captain Ruzich had her taken to Chicago directly from the prison. No, that didn't work-the floor head at the hospital's prison wing clearly had known about Nicola. Unless she'd been primed to say Nicola had been on the ward when she wasn't?

"I need to find someone who will tell me what went on in the shop the day Nicola left here. Or I need to get a job working over there."

Miss Ruby grunted. "You can't get girls to talk about what goes on in the clothes shop. Of course everyone around here is more or less scared, the guards can take away your commissary privileges or your phone calls or put you in seg.

But the girls in the clothes shop, they don't talk to anyone. And of course, for the most part they don't speak English anyway."

"So if I wanted to get into the clothes shop, I'd have to be a foreigner."

"First, you have to lose at your trial. The jail girls, they get kitchen duty and other ugly stuff, but they don't ever get the jobs that pay anything decent."

"I really need to see the inside of that shop," I said, looking across the room.

CO Polsen was in the doorway, eyeing me in a way I didn't like, but I willed him out of my mind. "How much would it cost, and who could arrange it for me?"

"What's your real business here, Cream?" Miss Ruby asked softly.

I continued to look ahead, speaking as she did, out of the side of my mouth. "I want to see Robert Baladine destroyed. If I can learn what happened to Nicola, I may find a way to make him . . . well, sorry he ever crossed my path."

"If revenge is what you want to eat for dinner, you're going to get yourself a bad case of indigestion. It never pays, believe me, Cream. I tried that meal for a lot of years, before Jesus showed me a better way."

She paused, as if waiting for me to say amen, sister, or ask for her conversion story, but even for her help I couldn't pretend to a faith I don't own.

Disappointed at my lack of interest, she finally said, "No one wants the jobs in the clothes shop; the stories on how they treat the girls over there are too unpleasant. So I never heard of anyone bribing her way in before-usually they're crying to get out. And most of them sleep and eat together, too. So if you want to get in, well, Lieutenant Dockery, she's in charge of the work details, and no one ever gave her a bribe in their life: she's strict but fair. But Erik Wenzel-he's in charge of the shop-he's another kettle of fish. And he's not a CO, he's some manager they hired, like they do for my reservations work-someone who knows how the job is supposed to be done. Give me a day or two. I'll see what I can find out."

She tapped my arm with a manicured finger. "You don't know how to behave here, Cream. Maybe you're the toughest b.i.t.c.h on your block in Chicago, but that makes you a challenge to the CO's: they want to break you. There are no secrets in Coolis. And the CO's know them, too. There's always some girl willing to tattle to them in exchange for some favor, a better work a.s.signment, or real makeup-you notice how most of the girls here are black, but the makeup in the commissary is made for whites? Which, by the way, you can wear with your skin, but most of us can't. So if you can come up with some carmine nail polish and lipstick for me, it would make me move faster on your strange request.

"Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you, Cream, Troy Polsen is a bad man, but don't go beating him up. The satisfaction you'd get wouldn't be worth it. You'd land in segregation, and you'd never get out of it, so you'd go to your trial in prison clothes, and you know how that will look. Watch yourself, Cream."

Polsen yelled to Jorjette and me that we were due in the kitchen. "You're not on vacation here; move those lazy buns."

"Exquisite manners," I murmured. "It's either that or the cuisine that keeps me coming back. I appreciate the warning and the offer of help, Miss Ruby. I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but . . ." I let my voice trail away suggestively.

"Why am I helping you? You don't need to know everything about my life." She smiled suddenly. "This I'll tell you for nothing: I have a big bone of curiosity. My mama always said it would be the death of me, but I want to know what goes on in that shop myself. I have to spend another eight years in this building. I hate there being stuff about it I don't know."

Polsen came over and yanked me roughly to my feet. "Come on, Princess Di, they want you at Buckingham Palace."

As he shoved me toward the corridor I couldn't help wondering if my own bone of curiosity would be the death of me.

40.

Sewing Circle "Mannaccia!"I swore."Puttana machina!"

My fingers had once more slipped on the stretchy fabric so that the armholes puckered up. While I used the little clippers to pull the threads out, I flexed my shoulders, trying to ease out the knots in my neck as well. None of the women around me stopped or looked up. They were tied to the whirring machines, working on jackets and leggings, their fingers moving so fast the movement of arms, fabric, and needle was a blur of motion.

"Hey, you, Victoria!" Erik Wenzel suddenly stood in front of me. "I thought you said you knew how to run this machine. Sabes usar esta mquina. "

When they spoke Spanish, the men always used the familiar form of you. I said in Italian how insufferable Wenzel's manners were, then added in Spanish,"S, s, se usarla."

"Then act like you canfabricar. " He s.n.a.t.c.hed the shirt from my fingers, ripping it in two, and slapped my head. "You've destroyed this shirt so it can't be used. La arruinaste! It comes out of your pay. No te pago por esta! "

It had taken almost my whole four hundred dollars cash to get here; so far all I'd learned was that in a prison shop the foreman can do whatever he d.a.m.ned well wants. Miss Ruby managed somehow to spread the money among CO Rohde in the jail wing, his counterpart in the prison wing, and one of Erik Wenzel's subordinates who put together the work rosters for the clothes shop. She told the man that I was a fragile immigrant far from home and she thought kitchen work might kill me. Miss Ruby got a Revlon lipstick and compact, and they weren't easy to come by either.

I hoped I never had to depend on sewing to pay my bills. I thought it would be a cinch to run one of those machines, and I thought it would be a holiday after the misery of working in the prison kitchen, but after four days all I had to show were a permanent knot in my shoulders and neck, bruised and bleeding fingers from getting in the way of the needle, and three dollars and twentyfour cents in earnings, which wouldn't be paid into my trust account until the end of the week.