The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Glass Room
They put me in the legal visit room because nobody had told them where else a suspended interpreter could go.
It was a narrow booth with a steel shelf on my side and a thick pane of glass, and a door on the left that opened onto the corridor.
A guard stood outside that door.
I recognized him from the second week, a heavy man with a gray mustache who had once held the door for me and said nothing.
He looked through the narrow window at me, and then at someone behind me in the corridor, and lifted two fingers.
Another man in a gray uniform stood at the far end of the hall.
He was not a guard.
He was an inmate with a mop and a bucket, an old man with a white stubble beard, who turned his head and signed at me across thirty feet of corridor with his mop hand, quickly, in the Buffalo way.
HE IS COMING. THE CAMERA IS BROKEN TODAY.
NOBODY FIXES IT UNTIL THE MORNING.
I stared.
There was a Deaf man in this prison, and he had been mopping the floor for nineteen years where nobody could see him sign.
He was the one who had taught Teo the Rochester sign, I realized, from library tapes and a stolen hour a day.
The mustached guard went out and the door closed.
The room was quiet, and I heard myself breathing.
Then the door on the far side of the glass opened, and they brought him in.
He was in the belly chain again, and the beige uniform, and his face was gray.
They sat him down on the other side of the glass, and unlocked one wrist and clipped it to the rail, and left the other free.
The guard on that side went out.
We looked at each other through two inches of glass.
He lifted his free hand and laid it flat against the pane.
I put mine against it.
It was cold, and I felt nothing, and I would have given a year of my life for an inch of cloth between us.
There was a gap at the bottom of the glass, an old slot for passing papers, five inches high and a foot wide.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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