Papillon (9 page)

Chatal, who brought me the magazine, saw the money. He said nothing, but I tried to offer him some. He refused.

“We want to get moving,” I said. “Do you want to come with us?”

“No, Papillon. I’m involved in another one. I don’t want to try an escape until five months from now when my friend is free. Our
cavale
will be better prepared and a surer thing. I can see why you’re in a hurry—you’re an internee. But here, with these bars, it’s going to be hard. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you. I don’t want to risk my job. I just want to wait here quietly until my friend is ready.”

“Very good, Chatal. In this kind of life we have to be frank with each other. I won’t mention it again.”

“But I’ll still carry your messages and do errands for you.”

“Thanks, Chatal.”

That night we heard a burst of machine-gun fire. We learned the next morning that Julot had escaped. May God go with him; he was a good friend. He must have seen an opening and made the most of it.

Fifteen years later, in 1948, I happened to be in Haiti, where I’d come with a Venezuelan millionaire to make a deal with the president of the Casino to run his gambling tables. One night, as we came out of a night club where we’d been drinking champagne, one of the girls with us—as black as coal and as well educated as any daughter of a good French provincial family—said to me:

“My grandmother is a voodoo priestess and lives with an old Frenchman. He escaped from Cayenne and he’s been with her a long, long time. He’s drunk all the time. His name is Jules Marteau.”

I sobered up immediately. “Girl, let me see your grandmother right away.”

She spoke to the taxi driver in Haitian dialect and off we went at top speed. We passed a brightly lighted night club. “Stop.” I went up to the bar, bought a bottle of Pernod, two bottles of champagne and two bottles of the local rum. “Let’s go.” We stopped by the edge of the sea in front of a cozy little white house with a red slate roof. The sea came up almost to the steps. The girl knocked and the door was opened by a large black woman with white hair. She was wearing a shift that reached to her ankles. The two women talked in dialect. Then the old woman said, “Come in, the house is yours.”

An oil lamp illuminated a tidy room full of birds and fish.

“You want to see Julot? Wait, he’s coming. Jules! Jules! Somebody’s here to see you.”

An old man appeared, barefoot and dressed in blue-striped pajamas that reminded me of our uniform in the
bagne
.

“Who wants to see me at this hour of the night, Boule de Neige? Papillon! It can’t be!” He took me in his arms and said, “Bring the lamp closer, Boule de Neige. I want to see my old pal’s face. Yes, it’s you, you old bastard! It’s really you! Welcome! The house, the little money I have, my wife’s granddaughter—it’s all yours. Just say the word.”

We drank the Pernod, the champagne, the rum, and from time to time Julot broke into song.

“What times we had, eh, old pal? There’s nothing like a little adventure. I went through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Jamaica. Since then I’ve been here with Boule de Neige, the best woman a man ever had. When do you leave? Are you here for long?”

“No, just a week.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to arrange with the president of the Casino to get the contract for his gambling tables.”

“I’d like nothing better, pal, than to have you around for the rest of your life. But don’t have anything to do with that son of a bitch. He’ll have you murdered the minute he sees you’re doing good business.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“As for you, Boule de Neige, get your voodoo show ready, the one ‘not for tourists.’ I want the real thing for my friend.”

So Julot made his escape, but Dega, Fernandez and I were still waiting. From time to time I casually examined the bars over the windows. They were real railroad tracks, so nothing doing there. But there was still the door. Day and night, three guards were stationed there. Since Julot’s escape the surveillance had tightened. The rounds were made at shorter intervals and the doctor was less friendly. Chatal came into the room only twice a day, to give injections and to take temperatures. A second week went by; again I paid two hundred francs.

Dega talked of everything but escape. Yesterday he saw my lancet and said, “You still have it? Why?”

I answered angrily, “To save my skin and yours, if I have to.”

Fernandez was not a Spaniard but an Argentinian. He was a good man, a real adventurer, but he, too, was impressed by old Carora’s nonsense. One day I heard him tell Dega, “They say the islands are very healthy places, not like here, and it’s not so hot. Here you pick up germs and get dysentery just from going to the toilets.” Every day one or two of the seventy men in our room died of dysentery. And strangely, they all died when it was low tide in the afternoon or evening. No one ever died in the morning. Why? A mystery of nature.

That night I had a talk with Dega and Fernandez. I told them that the Arab turnkey sometimes came into the room during the night to pull back the sheets and examine the very sick. It would be easy to knock him out and put on his uniform (we all wore only smocks and sandals). Once dressed, I’d go out, grab a rifle from one of the guards, aim it at them, force them into the cell and close the door. Then we’d jump over the hospital wall on the river side, dive into the water and drift with the current. After that we’d see. Since we had money, we could buy a boat and food and set out to sea. They both categorically rejected the project. I sensed they’d grown apathetic; I was very disappointed. And so the days passed.

We’d now been in the hospital three weeks less two days. We had only ten to fifteen days maximum to try for a break. Today, a memorable day—the twenty-first of November, 1933—Joanes Clousiot came into the room. Someone had tried to kill him at the barber’s on Saint-Martin. He was almost blind; his eyes were shut tight and were full of pus. Once Chatal had left, I went over to him. He told me that the other internees had left for the islands more than two weeks before but that he’d managed to get left behind. An official warned him three days before they were to leave. He had put castor oil grains in his eyes, they abscessed, and the infection had got him into the hospital. He was game for anything and crazy to get going, even if he had to kill to do it. He had three thousand francs. Once his eyes were bathed with warm water, he would be able to see fine. I explained my escape plan. He liked it, but he said that if we were going to take the guards by surprise, there would have to be three of us. We could remove the legs of the beds, and armed with an iron leg each, we could knock them all out. According to him, even if we had their rifles, they wouldn’t believe we’d really shoot and they’d go alert the guards in the building Julot has escaped from, which was at least twenty yards away.

T
HE
F
IRST
C
AVALE

T
ONIGHT
I
BUTTONHOLED
D
EGA, THEN
Fernandez. Dega said he had no confidence in the plan but that he would pay any amount of money to get his internment lifted. He asked me to write Sierra, tell him that it had been suggested to him and was it at all possible? On the same day Chatal brought back the answer: “Don’t pay anybody to lift your internment. It has to come from France, and no one, not even the director of the penitentiary, can do it. If you’re desperate, you can try to get out, but only the day after the boat—the
Mana
—leaves for the islands.”

We had eight days left before we were to leave for the islands, and I began to think it might be better to escape from there rather than from our room in the hospital. In the same note Sierra had said that if I wanted to, he would send a liberated convict to talk to me and help me prepare a boat behind the hospital. He was from Toulouse, his name was Jésus, and he had prepared Dr. Bougrat’s escape two years earlier. In order to see him, I’d have to go for X-rays in another building. This place was built into the hospital wall; the
libérés
were provided access with fake passes. He warned me that before being X-rayed I should remove my
plan
, for the doctor might notice it if he took a picture of me below my lungs. I sent Sierra a note telling him to send Jésus to X-ray and to get together with Chatal to have me sent too. That same night Sierra told me it would be the day after tomorrow at nine.

The next day Dega and Fernandez both asked to leave the hospital. The
Mana
had left that morning. They hoped to escape from their cells in the camp. I wished them good luck; my plans were unchanged.

I met Jésus. He was an old
libéré
, as dry as smoked fish, with two ugly scars across his weathered face. One eye wept all the time. Ugly face, ugly expression. He didn’t give me confidence, and the future proved me right. We spoke quickly.

“I can fix you up a boat for four or at most five men. A barrel of water, food, coffee and tobacco. Three paddles, empty flour sacks, needle and thread to make the mainsail and a jib. A compass, a hatchet, a knife, five quarts of rum. All for twenty-five hundred francs. There’ll be no moon in three days. Starting on the fourth, if you agree, I’ll wait for you in the boat every night for eight days from eleven to three in the morning. Once the moon shows the first quarter, I’ll stop waiting. The boat will be exactly opposite the corner of the hospital wall. Guide yourself by feeling the wall, for you won’t be able to see it even from six feet away.”

I didn’t trust him, but I still said yes.

“What about the money?” Jésus asked.

“I’ll send it through Sierra.”

We parted without shaking hands. Not a good start.

At three o’clock Chatal went to the camp to give Sierra the money: two thousand five hundred francs. It’s thanks to Galgani I have this money to gamble, I reflected, and it’s risky. Just so long as he doesn’t spend it all on rum!

Clousiot was ecstatic; he was full of confidence—in himself, in me and in the project. Only one thing bothered him: the Arab didn’t come every night, and when he did come it was usually too early. Then there was another problem: who to pick for a third. There was a Corsican from the Nice underworld named Biaggi. He’d been in the
bagne
since 1929 and was now in the maximum-security ward under suspicion of having killed a man. Clousiot and I discussed whether we should speak to him and when. While we were talking, a boy of about eighteen came up to us. He was as pretty as a girl. His name was Maturette and he had been condemned to death for the murder of a taxi driver, then given a reprieve because of his age—at the time, seventeen. There had been two of them, a sixteen- and a seventeen-year-old, and when they appeared in court, each declared he’d killed the taxi driver. But the driver had been hit by only one bullet. Their behavior in court aroused all the cons’ sympathies.

Maturette approached us and, in his girlish voice, asked us for a light. We gave it to him and I threw in a present of four cigarettes and a box of matches. He thanked me with a seductive smile and we let him go.

Suddenly Clousiot said, “Papi, we’re saved. I know how we can get that Arab in here as often and any time we like. It’s in the bag.”

“How do you figure?”

“It’s easy. We’ll tell that kid, Maturette, to make the Arab fall in love with him. Arabs like boys, you know. It’s a cinch he’ll want to screw him. All the kid has to do is put on an act, saying he’s afraid of being seen, and we’ve got the Arab coming in exactly when we want him.”

“Let’s give it a try.”

I went over to Maturette; he received me with another seductive smile. He thought he’d aroused me with the first one. I said straight off, “I just want to talk to you. Come into the toilets.” We went in and I began, “If you repeat one word of what I’m about to say, you’re a dead man. Here it is.” I told him our plan and asked him how much money he wanted, or did he want to escape with us?

“I want to escape with you.”

Agreed. We shook on it.

He went off to sleep and, after a few words with Clousiot, I did too. The next night, at eight o’clock, Maturette sat down next to the window. The Arab didn’t need to be called. He came by himself and they talked in low voices. At ten o’clock Maturette went to bed. We had been in bed with one eye open since nine. The Arab came into the room, made the rounds twice, found one man dead. He knocked on the door, and soon afterward two stretcher-bearers came and took the corpse away. Corpses turned out to be useful for they justified frequent visits by the Arab at any hour of the night. Following our advice, Maturette made an assignation the next night for eleven o’clock. The turnkey arrived on time, passed by the boy’s bed, pulled his feet to wake him up, then went on to the toilets. Maturette followed. Fifteen minutes later the turnkey came out, went straight to the door and left. At the same time Maturette went back to his bed without speaking. The next night the same thing, but at midnight. Everything was working like a dream. The Arab came whenever the boy asked him to.