“Dan, I’m sorry, I just-”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You were thinking. Are you in a hurry? Could you walk a minute?”

“Sure.”

They crossed Fifth Avenue and walked into Central Park, where they took the path that circled the pond.

“Last time I saw you, I was still with my firm,” Dan said. Broad green trees towered above them and sunlight scattered the blacktop path.

“And you’re not practicing now?”

“Here and there. More money in the stock market,” he said, then gave an abrupt laugh. “Until it tanked, anyway. I was up there pretty good. Rode the bubble. Had my own plane. A Falcon. But you know, easy come-”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I hate to ask,” he said. “I know it’s been a long time and people generally don’t like to bring up the past, but I’m in a pretty tight spot. I remember what you tried to do for Raymond’s dad so I thought, maybe.”

“What do you mean tried to do?” she asked. She had given Paul Russo twenty thousand dollars in cash to help Raymond’s father when she heard from Dan that he was in serious financial trouble.

“Oh?” Dan said. He stuffed his hands in his pant pockets, looked at her, and then quickly away. “I thought you knew.”

“What?”

“He… well, you know how Raymond’s father was.”

“Was? He died?”

“That winter. After we spoke. They turned off his heat.”

“But Paul Russo was going to give him the money. Anonymously,” Lexis said, stopping and gripping Dan’s arm.

Dan shrugged. “He was proud, Lexis. Too proud, really.”

“Russo,” Lexis said, “that son of a bitch.”

She shook her head and scowled out at the rippled surface of the pond.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened,” Dan said, leading her along by the arm. “Listen, I’ve got a deal that’s pretty exciting. It’s just what I need, but the banks are all scared as hell right now and, well, I know your husband and Bob Rangle are pretty close and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind, Lexis.

“If I could just get a meeting with him. Someone to jar his memory to the fact that I was a pretty decent contributor of his. That’s all I need. So that’s it. That’s where I am. Can I buy you a hot dog?”

They had come to the path’s end at an entrance on Fifth Avenue. Lexis shook her head no and said, “Thank you.”

“I’ll have one,” Dan said to the vendor, “and a Coke. You want a Coke?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Of course I’ll talk to Frank for you, Dan. Do you have a card or something I could give him to call you?”

“Right here,” he said, removing a card along with the ten-dollar bill he gave to the vendor. “Hey, I want you to know, I didn’t come here to track you down at your meeting. I had some business and I just figured-”

“No, that’s all right,” Lexis said. “I’ll try. It’s just that Frank is so busy.”

Dan bit into his hot dog, leaving a streak of mustard on his lip, and shrugged.

“Whatever you can do. I understand completely. The old days are… uncomfortable sometimes.”

“And gone,” she said, offering a weak smile and waving to a cab.

“That too,” Dan said, opening the door for her and licking at the mustard.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,” she said, getting in. “I do. Every day.”

LESTER QUICKLY SHOWS ME how to spin the drill bit using a small block of wood for the handle. It takes us an entire night of drilling to punch one small hole in the steel. When I ask about the hacksaw blade, he explains that he wore it out completely working his way through the welded seal of the manhole. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that twelve months is a reasonable goal for an opening big enough to squeeze through.

We sleep in shifts and nap during the day. Every waking minute, I am either reading or Lester is teaching me things. Things he knows and things from books he gets at the library. I feel like a man who has a drink after being too distracted to know he was thirsty. Lester is right about the other inmates. They’re dogs and I treat them that way. I ignore their barking and, so far, none of them bite.

I use the time when Lester is working his maintenance job to keep doing my katas and my push-ups and sit-ups. Lester sees me one day and criticizes my training. He says karate without grappling is like a gun without bullets.

“Kid,” he says, “if you want to kick the ass of a bad man, you have to get in close.”

He is old and bent, but he teaches me anyway. At first, I feel silly with my hands wrapped around his thin bones, twisting against the grain of his knotted joints. But whenever I think I’ve really got him, he pokes a pressure point that I never knew about and sends me reeling in pain.

Lester also teaches me about poison.

“It has always been the erudite way to kill someone,” he says. “In case something goes wrong-not that it will-and you end up back in here, you’ll be glad to have it.”

The second man Lester killed in prison, he got with antifreeze. The Colombian he got with arsenic. For nearly two hundred years, the prison has stuffed rat poison down its holes. The sediment down in the basement is thick with it. Lester scraped the crust off his work clothes into a small plastic bottle, filled it with water, and spun it like a pinwheel on a string. A homemade centrifuge.

“How do you get it into their drink?” I ask.

“When I did the antifreeze, I was working the chow line,” he says, “but they won’t let me in there anymore. With the arsenic, I got a little eyedropper from the hospital, walked up to him, told him a funny joke, and squirted it right in his mouth.”

“What was the joke?” I ask.

“If you and your friends don’t leave me alone, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Real funny.”

“To him it was.”

Every day, they give Lester a pill for his heart. He says there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s standard procedure in this country once you turn seventy to start taking heart medicine. When the hole in our cell is almost ready, he begins to break off small bits of his pills so he’ll have enough to get him through the first two weeks of our escape.

“After that,” he says, “I’ll be in New Zealand.”

We are lying in our bunks, waiting for the lockdown before we begin work. It is summertime and the air is hot and heavy, cooked over with the smell of human sweat, stale air, and fresh paint. My brow is beaded with sweat. I am wearing just my undershorts, and my arms are splayed out to my sides so my pits can dry.

Lester drones on about New Zealand. I am studying Fragonard’s eighteenth-century painting, a picture of happiness. The woman is happy, sailing up into the sunlight with her lover below. The lover is happy, he can see her wares beneath the ballooning petticoats. The husband is happy too, because he is ignorant of all this, an aging man with a fashionable and lovely young wife. I was ignorant too.

I am quiet after Lester finishes about New Zealand. He is waiting for me to reveal my own wistful plans. I know this because he’s mentioned it to me before, that if we get out we need to catch up on all the good things, put the past and all the bad things behind.

We hear the call of the guards up and down the block, and the lights go out. We are quiet for several minutes as the small bedtime noises of five hundred killers slowly wind down.

“We will escape,” Lester says, as if he were in the midst of a heated argument.

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” I say.

“Then why don’t you ever talk about your plans?” he asks.

“A wise man speaks because he has something to say,” I say, quoting Plato back at him, “a fool because he has to say something.”

“And if you were a fool? What would you say, kid?” he asks. “Are you afraid of what I’d think about your grand plan for revenge?”

“Who said that was my plan?”

“Aristotle said it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,” he says. “You’re an open book, kid, and even though I am against what you’re planning, I love you enough to tell you that if you’re going to succeed, you need to become more of a cipher than you are.”