Green River Rising Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Willocks

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Word

  Prologue: The Valley

  Part I: The Rising

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part II: The River

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Welcome to Green River…

  After three years’ hard time, minding no-one’s business but his own, Ray Klein wins his parole and chances his hand at a romance with prison psychiatrist Juliette Devlin. That same day, tribal war erupts and the prison – and its infirmary ’ falls into the hands of its inmates.

  Klein must choose either to claim his freedom and leave the ones he cares for to die, or risk everything and fight…

  Hell begins now…

  About the Author

  Tim Willocks is a novelist, screenwriter and producer. He was born in Cheshire in 1957 and has lived in London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, County Kerry, and Rome. After qualifying as a doctor from University College Hospital Medical School, he went on to specialize in psychiatry and addiction. Translated into twenty languages, his novels include The Religion – the first novel to feature Mattias Tannhausaer – Bad City Blues, and Green River Rising. He has worked with major Hollywood directors, dined at the White House and holds a black belt in Shotokan karate. His new book, The Twelve Children of Paris, also featuring Tannhausaer, is set during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.

  Also by Tim Willocks

  Bad City Blues

  Bloodstained Kings

  The Religion

  The Twelve Children of Paris

  Green River Rising

  Tim Willocks

  Dedicated to

  JOSEPH ROY WILLOCKS

  Who took me to the pictures, and taught me how to show a manly bearing.

  ‘I have been studying how I

  may compare this prison

  where I live unto the world.’

  Richard II

  William Shakespeare

  THE WORD

  ‘Imagine darkness, if you will, and in that darkness bars of steel encrusted with the rust and filth of ages. The bars are set in blocks of granite rock as ancient as the hills in which time forged them, and stacked above and mortared fast are yet another hundred feet and more, of granite, block on block.

  ‘Between these bars and through this subterranean wall flows an effluvium, the sewage foamed with scum of twenty-five hundred desperate men, and of countless thousands more before them.

  ‘Breathe this infernal air. Taste it. For it is the smell and taste of punishment, raw and pure, and this dissolving slag contains the paradox of a tortured and incomparable race. Here that race must find their home, their final blind communion with insatiable and uninhibited waste, the waste that is the destiny of all. This sewer in the bowels of a monstrous gaol, this sewer in the sewer of the world, is where necessity ends and possibility begins: in the glory and the pain of utter loss.

  ‘This is The Green River.

  ‘And this is the tale of its rising.’

  PROLOGUE

  THE VALLEY

  A MILLION MAN-YEARS of confinement had burnished the surface of the granite flags to a greasy smoothness ingrained deeply with filth and despair. As Warden John Campbell Hobbes crunched along the central walkway of B block he could feel in his bones the imprint of generations of shuffling feet. In his throat he could taste the corruption of stale sweat and infected phlegm, the commingled vapours of nicotine and hashish. Here was the impacted stink of human waste and pain, concentrated, hyper-distilled and stored for decades beneath the high glass roof which rose in a great vault above the triple-stacked tiers of the teeming cell block. This was where men were sent to kneel and where those who didn’t want to learned the way.

  Somewhere on the planet there were worse places in which to spend time – much worse – but none of them were located in these United States. This was the best that civilisation could do: a civilisation which Hobbes had watched crumble before his eyes and which he now despised with all the contempt his prodigious intellect could muster. The steel cleats on his wingtips struck a relentless beat against the flagstones as he walked and somehow the sound put him in mind of his duty. That duty, that policy, was to discipline and punish and Hobbes had pursued it as diligently as any man could. Yet today he would turn his back on it. Today he would pursue that policy by other means.

  Today John Campbell Hobbes would shatter the jewel of discipline with the hammer and chisel of war.

  Three paces behind Hobbes strode a phalanx of six guards in full riot gear: helmets and visors, Kevlar body armour, nightsticks, perspex shields and Mace. The public address system – eight loudspeakers mounted above the rear gate sallyport – played a military tattoo of drums and pipes to which Hobbes and his men swung along in time. The drums filled Hobbes’s limbs with a power without measure and drowned the murmurs of the convicts herded out onto the overhanging gantries. They hated him, blindly and without understanding, and though in the past it had tormented him today he welcomed their hate.

  Stone. Drums. Punishment. Power.

  Discipline was all.

  Hobbes was all.

  By other means.

  There was a pause in the raging momentum of his thoughts. Hobbes checked himself, checked the writhing coils of his mind for any trace of error, hubris or doubt. He found none. It was so. A universe could only be reshaped by the unleashing of cataclysmic and unpredictable forces. The great physicist had been wrong: God did indeed play with dice. And in the grim and shabby universe that was Green River State Penitentiary John Campbell Hobbes was God himself.

  The Penitentiary had been designed by an English architect named Cornelius Clunes in an age when it had still been possible to combine philosophy, art and engineering in a single fabulous endeavour. Commissioned in 1876 by the governor of Texas, Clunes had set out to create a prison in which every brick was imbued with the notion of a power both visible and unverifiable. No dark dungeon was this. No squat, brutal box. Green River was a hymn to the disciplinary properties of light.

  From a cylindrical core capped by a great glass dome four cell-blocks and two work blocks radiated away at sixty degree intervals like spokes from the hub of a giant wheel. Beneath the dome was a central watchtower from which a spectator could enjoy a clear view down the central walkway of all four cellblocks. The block roofs were mounted on smooth granite walls that overhung the top tier of cells by twenty feet. The kingposts, tie beams and rafters of the roof were constructed of wrought iron and covered with extravagant sheets of thick green glass. Through the glass
streamed the all-seeing light of God: a permanent surveillance that induced in the cowering inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility, and ensured the automatic functioning of power. Looking outside from the window of his cell the convict could see the encircling walls with their resident riflemen; from the bars of his door he saw the central observation tower with its cameras and guards. At night his cell was illuminated by a dim green bulb and the walls and walkways by spot-lights. A man entering Green River said goodbye to darkness for the duration of his stay. Darkness permitted at least the illusion of privacy and invisibility, places where a man might try to reconstruct some sense of his own individual existence. Light was discipline, darkness was freedom. Because the inmate was constantly visible he could never be sure whether he was being spied upon or not and thus became his own warder, perpetually watching himself on his jailer’s behalf. Green River was an architecture of power built upon the paranoid fantasies of the guilty.

  Here in cellblock B was the Valley of the Long Distance Runners. Such, at least, was the name given to them by their leader, Reuben Wilson. All the inmates on B were black. There was no official segregation policy but in an environment saturated with danger and fear men naturally drew together in tribal groups and in the interests of an uneasy peace Hobbes and his guards allowed it. C block was Black and Latino; A block was mixed Latino and white; D was exclusively white. An antagonistic juxtaposition of hostile forces waiting to be unleashed. War being mankind’s natural state, peace was only ever a prelude and a preparation. As Hobbes walked down the valley past a seething crowd of sullen, sweating faces the only quality he was able to identify in their eyes was a virulent nihilism born of prolonged and mindless suffering.

  At the far end of the block – and within easy distance of the sallyport to the yard – stood a microphone on a raised dais. As he approached the dais Hobbes felt rivulets of sweat running down his neck into his shirt, and from his brow into his eyes. He resisted the urge to wipe his face. Cornelius Clunes had invented his masterpiece in the damp and gloom of Victorian London. An unforeseen effect of his iron and glass extravaganza, when realised in the sub-tropical climate of East Texas, was to turn the prison into a giant greenhouse which captured the rays of the sun and deposited their energy in the sweltering bodies of the imprisoned. In the old days the conditions were so appalling that the prison population was regularly decimated by outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and yellow fever. During these episodes the prison had been turned over to its inmates and food dropped in from the walls until the contagion burned itself out. Because the prisoners took it upon themselves to do what the authorities had dared not – and slaughtered wholesale those showing signs of infection – an outbreak of disease in those days had produced a spasm of violence so extreme as to be beyond even Hobbes’s imagination.

  After the Second World War the prison had been closed with the opening of a hygienic modern penitentiary north of Houston, but in the Sixties a soaring crime rate, air-conditioning and the singular vision of John Campbell Hobbes had brought Green River back to life. Green River, he felt, was his. His universe. A superb instrument, the panoptic machine, established on the edge of society and through which the deviant but still human elements of that society would be disciplined, punished and divested of their capacity for antisocial acts before being returned to civil life. An endeavour, no one could deny, of unquestionable nobility. But over the past twenty years Hobbes had seen his instrument turn – slowly at first, then uncontrollably – into a foul zoo that mocked his original intention. His presentations to the State Bureau of Corrections had been ridiculed by some, admired (if secretly) by others, and rejected by all as politically unworkable. Very well. The time had come at last to show them the consequences of their blindness. Hobbes reached the dais and climbed up behind the microphone.

  The sound of pipes and drums stopped abruptly.

  The block was never silent. Never. But for a moment, in the sudden aftermath of the music, the great stacks of cramped cells seemed almost quiet.

  Hobbes drew in a deep breath, swelling his chest and squaring his shoulders. Below the dais, in a shallow V formation, stood his guards. Beyond them towered the steep cage-lined walls, the cages giving way to granite blocks, the blocks in their turn to iron and glass, the iron and glass to the glare of the sun. The convicts had been rousted from their cells and stood smoking and scratching their private parts as they leaned over the safety rails running along the catwalks. Few of them wore the regulation issue denims without some form of additional decoration. Many were naked to the waist. Pitiable gestures of defiance. Defiant or not Hobbes had their attention now, if only because his impromptu ‘State Of The Union’ addresses represented a welcome novelty in the unbroken tedium of their lives. As he stood there before them, broad and craggy, bald, black-suited, face of bitter stone, the almost-quiet evolved into a growing rumble from the crowd. At first it was just belly and throat sounds, preverbal growls of raw anger, as if the five hundred men were a single organism. Then out of that formless rage came shouts. In the overheated air, thick with the smell of perspiring bodies, the words seemed to tumble towards Hobbes in slow motion.

  ‘Hey, Warden! Yo’ mama like to take it in the ass!’

  The voice came from the third tier and was followed by a gust of laughter. With slow movements Hobbes took a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow in silence.

  ‘She tol’ me that’s the way you all like to stick it to her but your meat just way too small.’

  More laughter. From the second level came a shout of ‘Warden Teeny Meat!’ Hobbes still did not speak. He folded his handkerchief and let the noise build further. The cavernous space around him filled with waving arms and shaking fists, gaping pink mouths, jaundiced eyes smeared with broken blood vessels, yellow teeth parted in bigotry. When Hobbes could no longer make out any individual sounds in the storm of abuse he leaned forward over the mike.

  ‘I pity you all.’

  Hobbes spoke softly, letting the amplifiers give volume to his words. The noise from the cells subsided. Despite their rage they wanted to hear him. Hobbes lingered and looked up at the tiers, stopping here and there to pick out an individual face. He nodded to himself as if in sorrow and spoke again.

  ‘Lower than animals.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Yes!’ Hobbes snapped his head towards the shout. ‘Confined to your cages without knowing why! Pathetic scapegoats for a world you lack the basic intelligence to understand!’

  Hobbes felt his voice rising in pitch. He brought it down again.

  ‘You may imagine that you are here to be punished: for your miserable acts of depravity and violence; for the bestial rapes and killings that you boast of in your filthy holes. Wrong.’

  Hobbes dropped his voice a tone.

  ‘Quite wrong.’

  He made them wait and they waited.

  ‘Your lives are far too worthless to justify the existence of a machine of this ingenuity. Alternatively, you may think you are here as a deterrence – to yourselves and others. Wrong again. No one cares that you choose to slaughter, rape and poison each other in your stinking ghettoes. Personally I applaud such behaviour.’

  So far his speech had been received in relative silence. Now a murmur of anger rippled along the catwalks. Hobbes gave them a grim smile.

  ‘I know that there are innocent men amongst you.’ He said this without sarcasm. ‘Oh yes. Truly innocent. Victims of a knowing and outrageous injustice.’

  Another murmur, this time louder. Hobbes injected more feeling into his voice.

  ‘And I accept that in the wider scheme of things you are all victims of that same knowing and outrageous injustice. That, my friends, is why you are here.’

  As the truth of his words sank into minds dulled by deprivation the growling grew louder still and Hobbes raised his voice to a shout.

  ‘Your true function, if you would know it, is to provide a caste of sub-human scum whom society can des
pise and fear and hate. Listen to me. Listen!’

  Hobbes glanced up to the second tier and amongst the yelling faces picked out Reuben Wilson, a lean, pale black in his thirties who watched him with a quiet stare. Hobbes held Wilson’s gaze and waited. Wilson made a gesture with his hand. As if by magic the cons in Wilson’s vicinity fell silent, a silence which spread in seconds to encompass the whole block. Hobbes was impressed but not surprised. He nodded to Wilson and continued, speaking slowly so that they would understand what he was saying.

  ‘You exist – purely and simply – to provide a filth drain, a septic tank into which the rest of us can excrete our own malice and cruelty, our lust for vengeance, our dark unspoken fantasies of violence and greed. Your pain is essential to the smooth functioning of civilisation. But do not flatter yourselves. Your individual crimes – no matter how shocking – have no meaning whatsoever. All that is required is that you be here, innocent or guilty, good and bad alike. You are a pot to be shat in – that and nothing more. Understand that. And know that I understand it too. And as you lie weeping in your cells I want you to reflect on this: that just by being here you are doing excellent service – a good job – for the society you so despise.’

  There followed a long pause as they struggled to take in the full meaning of what had been said. Hobbes watched, gripped by the mass personality of the crowd. Somehow they would all get it at once. The crowd murmured and sighed. A live current leapt back and forth between the tiers.

  Suddenly, in a single impulse, five hundred men exploded with rage. A torrent of obscenity, of bellowing throats and stomping feet and shaking fists, swept like gale-driven waves through the cellblock and broke against the pillar of rock that was John Campbell Hobbes. Below him the line of guards shifted nervously, shuffling closer together and fingering their Mace. A single faltering step would precipitate violence. Yet as a surge of adrenaline charged through his central nervous system and verified as nothing else could the certainty of his bold design, Hobbes knew no fear. He bellowed into the microphone.