Free The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 by Laura Lippman, Otto Penzler Page A

itself. A week of talking to other inmates, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety—some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens to comment on the action; ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most outspoken transvestite. Things were going well. Even Espejo joined in the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.
    Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.
    “I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. “How can I learn the script?”
    Henry smiled. They were lying together on the top bunk, close, naked.
    “I can teach you.”
    Later he’d remember the look on Rogelio’s face, and the hope implicit in his own offer. Perhaps by saying these words, Henry was already imagining a life outside those walls.
    When Rogelio didn’t respond, Henry pressed him. “Who do you want to be?”
    Rogelio thought for a moment. “The servant is the one who dies?”
    Henry nodded.
    “How?”
    “He’s stabbed in the back.”
    “Well, then,” Rogelio said, “I guess that should be me.”
    When the play was performed, three weeks later, Henry paid special attention to that scene. He and Rogelio had worked on the script every night, pacing in their cell, bouncing the servant’s lines back and forth until Rogelio knew them by heart, but he had insisted on practicing the death scene on his own. Out of timidity, Henry thought, but when he saw the performance he realized that he had been wrong. The entire population of Block 7 was watching: hard, fearless men who gasped at the sight of Rogelio staggering. They recognized the look of terror on his face. They’d been that man; they’d killed that man. They watched Rogelio fall in stages, first to his knees, then forward, clutching his chest, as if trying to reach through his body to the imaginary knife wound. Henry and the others, all of them held their breath, waiting, and were rewarded with a final flourish: Rogelio’s right leg twitching. Espejo was the first to stand and applaud. The play wasn’t even over.
     
    Henry was released that November, thinner, older, after a year and a half in prison. He didn’t say to Rogelio, “I’ll wait for you.” Or, “I’ll see you on the outside.” But he thought those things, held them secret but dear, until the day, a few months later, when two of the more volatile sections of Collectors rose up to protest conditions inside. Block 7 had the misfortune of sitting between them, and when the army arrived to put down the revolt, it too was destroyed. Henry heard the news on the radio. The men who had made up the cast of
The Idiot President
all died in the assault, shot in the head, or killed by shrapnel, or crushed beneath falling concrete walls. More than three hundred inmates from Blocks 6, 7, and 8 were killed, and though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day too. He lost Rogelio, his best friend, his lover—a word he had never used, not even to himself. In the days after, he sometimes woke with the taste of Rogelio on his lips. Sometimes he woke to the image of Rogelio lying dead of a knife wound.
    Henry mourned, even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth the tragedy both broke him and spared him the need ever to think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of his release and drive home, feigning optimism.

JIM ALLYN
Princess Anne
    FROM
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
     
    H OWARD PICKED UP his blinking line.