“You’re sure this’ll keep anybody else from coming in my cell?” Allen asked.

“I put it right up on the board. You can go in and look at it.” Allen went into the security room, and beneath his name he saw the slip with the notation “Do not put inmate in Milligan’s cell.” It was covered with transparent tape and it looked permanent.

Milligan painted in a frenzy of productivity. Paintings for the guards, for the administrators, for Mom and Marlene to take home and sell. One day he was asked to do one for the front lobby, and Tommy painted a huge canvas that was to be hung behind the admissions desk. He made the mistake of signing his own name to it, but before he presented it, Allen discovered the error, blacked out the name and signed it “Milligan.” Most of these paintings did not satisfy him. They were for trading or selling quickly. But one day he became involved in a painting that was very important to him, adapted from a painting he saw in an art book.

Allen, Tommy and Danny took turns working on “The Grace of Cathleen.” It was originally planned to be a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady holding a mandolin. Allen worked on the face and hands. Tommy worked on the background. Danny painted the details. When the time came to put the mandolin in her hands, Danny realized he didn’t know how to paint one, so he painted in a piece of sheet music instead. For forty-eight hours, without stopping, they took turns working on it. And when they were done, Milligan collapsed in his bunk and slept.

“Steve” had not spent much time on the spot before Lebanon. An expert and daring driver, he had been behind the wheel a few times when he was younger, and boasted of being the best driver in the world. Ragen allowed him on the spot in Lebanon after Lee was banished, because Steve, too, had the ability to make people laugh. He was, Steve liked to brag, one of the best mimics alive. He could imitate anyone and send an audience of inmates into spasms of laughter. Imitations were his way of mocking people. Steve was the hell-raiser, the perpetual impostor.

It angered Ragen when Steve imitated his Yugoslavian accent, and it infuriated Arthur when he mocked him by talking

in a lower-class British accent. “I do not speak that way,” Arthur insisted. “I do not have a cockney accent.”

“Hes going to get us into trouble,” Allen said.

One afternoon Steve was standing in the corridor behind Captain Leach, arms crossed, mimicking Leach’s manner of rocking back and forth on his heels. Leach turned and caught him at it. “All right, Milligan, you can practice your performance in the hole. Maybe ten days in isolation will teach you a lesson.”

“Allen warned us something would happen,” Arthur said to Ragen. “Steve is useless. He has no ambition, no talent. All he does is laugh at people, and while observers may laugh at his antics, the individual who is mocked becomes our enemy. You’re in domination, but I put it to you that we hardly need more enemies.”