I OPEN MY EYES to The Swing. When Lester first showed it to me, it meant nothing. A pretty baroque painting with soft colors. A pink dress. A broad beam of sunlight through the blue-green trees. A dainty shoe sailing through the air. A young man in the bushes gazing up with admiration. An older refined gentleman entertaining the beautiful young woman. But as I began to study it, it wasn’t long before I knew it for what it was. A picture of betrayal.

I have used this painting over the past year to secretly fuel my hatred for the people who betrayed me. The light coming through the window is proof that at least I have not betrayed my friend, even if it costs me everything. I search within myself for even a flicker of contentment. I don’t know why, but there is nothing there. I am an empty grave.

The escape hole behind the toilet is so big it makes me ache.

I reach up and slip my finger between the edge of the paper and the metal ceiling, tearing the print free. The paper shears off at the corners where it has been taped. I spread my fingers and mash the print into a ball, then throw it onto the floor.

All the things in the cell besides my bunk and spare set of clothes belong to Lester. They said someone will take care of his things. I haven’t decided whether or not I will earn my way back into the box. I realize that I enjoy the small freedoms I’ve become accustomed to. The sun. The rain on my face. Long walks around the yard. The books. The question is this: How safe will I be without Lester?

I hop down and roll everything into my mattress. After breakfast, I sling the roll over my shoulder and a guard walks me across the yard to E block. I feel naked without Lester by my side.

When the first officer at the desk looks up, I recognize the shadowy face as Bluebeard’s. His hair is longer and slicked back with pomade, but his beady eyes still have their gleam.

“Well, well,” he says, “the big bucks were snortin’ and a-pawin’ in here this morning like they smelled a doe in heat, and I guess they did.”

His long hairy fingers slide over the change sheet, a yellow pointed nail comes to a stop halfway down the page. He turns his head and raises his voice to a group of officers standing in the doorway.

“Seventeen ready to go?” he says. “New girl’s here.”

He leers at me and says, “I know you’ll be wanting to bunk up once you decide who your new daddy’s gonna be, but for now, I hope you’ll like your new home.”

A guard marches over and says, “Uh, Marty. Seventeen still ain’t ready. Garden Hose says he ain’t goin’.”

“Well, you tell Garden Hose I’m gonna come in there and tickle his ass with my stick,” Bluebeard says, putting his hand on his baton as if to prove he means it.

“Told him that already.”

“Well, gas the motherfucker out of there,” Bluebeard says.

“You’ll have to call the lieutenant.”

“And I’ll do that,” Bluebeard says. With his chin in the air, he picks up the phone and punches in a number.

He glares at the guard who brought me and says, “Take her back to A block while I fumigate that bug.”

To me, Bluebeard says, “Don’t you worry, little lady. We’ll have your room for you real soon. Why don’t you go out and have a drink by the pool?”

I walk back across the yard to my cell and unroll my bunk. I lay down and stare at the ceiling, empty except for the four corners of the print. I have decided that my next interview with Bluebeard will send a message to the entire prison. It will be nothing for me to launch myself across his desk. I will roll his head between my hands like a melon, snapping his neck and tearing the spinal cord between the third and fourth vertebrae. If I’m going to go to the box, I might as well go in style. When I do get out-if I get out-I feel pretty confident that after something like that, no one will bother me.

I am reviewing the technique in my mind when I hear Lester’s gravelly voice at the end of the hall. I jump down and grab the bars. He shuffles slowly toward our cell, prattling to the guard.

“Clear one,” the guard says in a loud voice.

I step back.

“Open one.”

The bars vibrate and the door slides open. Lester stands there. His enormous eyes are shiny and brimming with tears.

“Later, Jim,” he says to the guard in a choked voice.

He steps inside and the bars hum shut. He opens his arms and steps toward me, hugging me. The tufts of his hair tickle under my chin.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he says, his voice muffled by my shirt. Then he pushes me away. “You should be gone.”

“I… couldn’t.”

Lester shakes his head and sits down on the edge of his bunk, laughing softly, but crying at the same time.

“You’re a prince, kid,” he says, looking up. “Like my own.”

“They tried to move me,” I say. My own eyes are watering. “I was gone. E block, but the cell wasn’t ready. They said you were going to die.”

“They wish,” he says. “The state would love to have my bunk, but I’m tougher than that.”

“Are you all right?”

Lester swats his hand in the air and says, “A minor episode. I’ll outlive the doctor. Happens all the time. Sit.”

I sit down next to him, and Lester claps my right hand between both of his.

“Tonight,” he says, in a whisper, “we go. We’ll make it this time.”

“My God, Lester,” I say. “I mean, I was gone. Do you get it? They moved me out. Then some bug named Garden Hose decides he won’t leave the cell…”

“I don’t know about God, kid,” Lester says, “but destiny… That’s another story. And what you’ve done… The loyalty?

“We still need to split up when we get out,” Lester says, “but not for long.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about unimaginable wealth,” Lester says, shaking my hand in his, his eyes glittering at me. “I’m talking about sharing it with you, kid. I… I didn’t know before. Even after all we’ve been through. Money does things to people, and we’ll be on the outside. Things will be different.”

Lester’s eyes turn glassy and he looks across the cell as if he were peering out over the ocean. He tells me about an old Adirondack lodge built by Thomas Durant on Lake Kora, a place that burned to the ground at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lester bought the only standing building, a guest cottage, in 1964.

“You can only get there by water and it has a cobblestone foundation like a fortress,” he says. “Dry as dust. Perfect temperature. Fifty degrees in the middle of summer or the dead of winter.

“I turned it into a huge vault,” Lester says. “Brought a locksmith up from Baltimore and two boilermakers from Peoria. The floor is these two-inch-thick oak planks, and with the hardware, you’d have to use dynamite to get it open.”

“What’s in it?” I ask.

Lester lowers his voice and leans toward me. His big eyes blink and he peers hard through the gloom.

“Almost everything I ever stole,” he says. “I was going to live modestly and work for twenty years. Then I was going to sell it all and retire to New Zealand. I still will, but I don’t need all that. Put together, by now it’s got to be worth close to a billion.”

“A billion?” I say. “As in nine zeros?”

“There was a trainload of stuff from the Louvre that Hitler was having shipped from Paris to Berlin. It never made it,” Lester says. “I spent over ten years stealing it and now I’m giving half of it to you…”

“What can you do with it?” I ask.

“Sell it,” Lester says with a shrug.

“To who?”

“Sotheby’s,” he says. “Christie’s. I’ll call the director of fine arts. Happens all the time. He’ll be outraged, but in about a week I’ll get a call back from someone who’ll just happen to be looking for what I’ve got.”

Lester tells me the exact location of the cottage and how to get into the vault. There are two bank vault tumblers. The combination is derived by assigning a numeric value to each of the letters in his son’s name-Seth Cole-and subtracting them from fifty for the first descending to forty-three for the last.