The Take

by Christopher Reich

  Dinner arrived punctually. He ate quickly, putting aside the sardines for later. Afterward, he rested for an hour, dozing fitfully. He woke at nine and showered. Toweling dry, he regarded himself in the mirror. The scar on his hip from the policeman’s bullet had hardened to a weal the size of a bottle cap. The bullet that had struck his shoulder had done more damage, shattering the clavicle and tearing the deltoid muscles, requiring two bouts on the operating table.

  The result was an eight-inch incision that after all the years had gone white as bone. He had other scars, but these were from prison: a few puncture wounds in the abdomen, a nasty zigzag on his ribs courtesy of a serrated shank, and a patch on his thigh where he’d been scalded by boiling water. All these he viewed with bemusement. The other guy had gotten worse on every occasion.

  Which brought him to the unsightly memento on his scalp.

  He leaned closer to the mirror, running a finger along the jagged mark. Until a few years ago, his hairline had covered it entirely. But Father Time owed him no favors, nor did he expect any. He’d cheated death once too often. The scar on his forehead was a reminder that each day was a gift.

  He closed his eyes, remembering the day long ago. He saw himself coming out of the shower, naked, unarmed, and wholly unawares. “Ledoux,” shouted someone behind him. He turned and stepped into the blow, delivered with an enemy’s worst intentions. The weapon was an iron bar fashioned from the leg of a prison cot, its leading edge sharpened like a hatchet. There had been no pain—not then, at least. There had been only a sickening crunch that exploded in the space between his ears and the leering face of the man who wanted him dead. He would forget neither as long as he lived.

  Simon opened his eyes.

  He still owed the other guy for that one.

  Weak people avenge. Strong people forgive. Intelligent people ignore.

  Another of the monsignor’s gems.

  The jury was still out as to which of these Simon was.

  Life in a box.

  The cell measured ten paces by six.

  Concrete walls that bled with damp.

  A steel cot. No mattress. No blanket.

  A hole in the floor.

  A spigot.

  A weak incandescent bulb protected by a sturdy cage that burned all day and all night.

  Two meals a day.

  Breakfast: bread, coffee. Dinner: boiled potato, egg, and, once a week, a square of dark chocolate.

  No books.

  No music.

  No television.

  No clocks.

  Each day an endless journey to the boundary of his sanity.

  Who betrayed you?

  Every Sunday he was taken from his cell, escorted up the long stairway and into a small yard, confined on all sides by a twenty-foot-high wall. He knew it was Sunday because of the church bells. On the other side of the wall, cars drove past, mothers walked with their children, groups of men shouted on their way to the football match. Life went on.

  Summer ended.

  Fall.

  The brief Marseille winter.

  Spring.

  A year passed.

  Who betrayed you?

  Another Sunday.

  Finally, one hour outside. Sun on his face. The smell of grass. Of exhaust. Of the world in which he’d once lived.

  A man was standing in the yard. A prisoner. Pale as chalk. Wild hair going gray, falling past his shoulders. Once a strong man. Broad beamed. Rangy. A face carved from stone. A man who refused to yield his dignity.

  “My name is Paul.”

  “Simon.”

  They looked at each other and Simon could see by his expression that they shared a wretched condition.

  “How are you, my son?” said Paul.

  “Better now,” said Simon. And for a reason he did not know, nor could later explain, he approached the old man and hugged him, holding him close until his muscles weakened and he could hold him no longer. “Better,” Simon repeated.

  “Me, too,” said Paul. “I thank you.”

  The men walked to a corner of the yard, as far from the guard as they could get.

  “How long?” asked Paul.

  “A year,” said Simon. “I think. What month is it?”

  “September.” Paul smiled. “I think.”

  “And you? How long?”

  Paul didn’t answer. He merely shook his head. Too long.

  The guard appeared and ordered Paul inside. “Listen for me,” he said as he was led away.

  That afternoon, as Simon lay on his cot, hands behind his head, staring at a monstrous centipede that had emerged from a crack in the ceiling, asking himself if he were hungry enough to eat it, he heard a tap, tap, tap coming from the wall. It was a new sound, divorced from the pinging of the generator and the buzzing of the light bulb and the stomping of the guards’ feet as they walked up and down the stairs.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Simon rolled off his cot and grabbed his spoon. He tapped it against the wall, but it was fashioned of such flimsy metal, it made little sound.

  The tapping stopped.

  A week passed. And another. Two precious Sundays and no other man in the yard. And then, one more week later, Paul was there again. A miracle.

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  Simon did. A life story delivered in one hour—less, even—a blitz of emotion, of hope, and of regret. Last, he told about his crime, about the day he was betrayed.

  “What is his name?” asked Paul.

  “I can’t,” said Simon.

  “But you know?”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “And so?”

  “He’s for me.”

  In parting, Paul said: “Two paces from the back wall. Five fingers above the floor. Dig.”

  And then he was gone.

  Simon dug, using the handle of his spoon. He didn’t fear being discovered. The guard came morning and night to pass his meal through a slat in the steel door. Never more. Once, a long time ago, the wall had been impenetrable. Time and damp had weakened it, had softened hardest concrete to malleable mush. His small metal pick made easy headway through the rotting concrete and plaster. In a few days, he had fashioned a hole the width of his fist that extended nearly to his shoulder. At times he could hear Paul digging, too, and his spirits soared. It was not a question of escape but of communication. Of human interaction. Of grasping on to his only chance of maintaining his sanity.

  One day the two inconsequential tunnels met.

  Simon was saved.

  His name was Paul Deschutes. He had been educated in Belgium and taken the vows of priesthood. For a time, he was a servant of Christ, a soldier of Ignatius Loyola. A Jesuit. But no longer. More he would not say, except that he deserved his punishment.

  It was his wish to help Simon. He proposed to give him the education he had chosen to forgo, if Simon was willing. He would be the Abbé Faria to Simon’s Edmond Dantès. They were in Marseille, after all. Life would imitate fiction.

  Simon had no idea who Faria was or, for that matter, Edmond Dantès. The only Dumas he knew was a goalie who’d played with Bordeaux ten years earlier. His knowledge of literature, math, and science was an eighth grader’s. The last book he’d read was about Lucky Luke and Black Bart. It was a comic book.

  He told Paul this. He said he had no use for book learning, that he knew how to hot-wire a car in thirty seconds and how to cover an armored car’s vents with wet towels to force the guards to open the doors. He knew how to drive fast and to reload a pistol before the empty magazine hit the ground. He knew how to touch a woman so she’d never want to leave him and to kiss her like he loved her. That was enough.

  To which Paul laughed. But then he grew serious and asked a simple question: “Do you want to come back to this place?”

  Simon said no. He could not return. To come back would be to die.

  “Well, then,” said Paul.

  And so they began.

  Every morning after eating his b
reakfast and making his ablutions (a word he only learned in the course of that tumultuous year), Simon would lie on the floor and listen as Paul lectured. For three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, Paul would cover a dizzying range of subjects. He would speak about Picasso, the Second World War, and the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. About Napoleon and Bauhaus and Max Planck and Albert Einstein. About the Meiji Restoration and Arthur Rubinstein. A wildly random survey course on the learnings of Paul Deschutes in his seventy-three years on planet Earth.

  There was also instruction in language. Simon was already trilingual. While English was his mother tongue, he was also fluent in French and Italian. To which Paul added Spanish and Russian.

  But the area where Simon shined brightest was mathematics, and his abilities were all the more impressive as he had no materials with which to write the multitude of equations and concepts Paul discussed. His mind possessed the rare ability to hold abstract figures and apply sophisticated numerical concepts to them. When Paul talked about “the x and y axis,” Simon saw them effortlessly. When Paul recited the value of pi to the twentieth digit, Simon could repeat it instantly, and remember it the next day. And the next. When Paul explained the theory of prime numbers, Simon grasped it immediately and, without prompting, could list primes in order until you asked him to stop.

  And so they worked. Day in, day out.

  In time, Paul revealed more about himself. He’d lived all over the world. He’d taught at prestigious universities. He’d risen in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. For five years he’d served as the monsignor of Lyon. And then came the fall. A love of alcohol that he could no longer keep hidden. A greater love for women that he could no longer suppress. An affair. A child out of wedlock. Separation from the Church. Worse, an estrangement from God. An abandonment of principles. A descent into debauchery. Drugs. Crime. He gave details sparingly. His regrets were many. Over and over, he said he deserved his punishment. That he had sinned and fallen from God’s grace.

  But now, here, with Simon, he could begin his penance. He could try to atone. Teaching brought him closer to his God, even if his God chose to keep his distance.

  Simon called him “Monsignor Paul.”

  A warm spring morning in the yard, the air buzzing with keen, fresh scents of awakening, the earth damp, sprigs of grass pushing through the mud. Beyond the walls, the chirping of happy children walking with their parents to church, the chatter of families on a sunny, promising Sunday morning. And inside the walls, an hour of respite from the damning isolation.

  “Why are you here?” asked the monsignor.

  “You know why,” said Simon, and he began to explain about the morning so many months before when he and his crew had been betrayed.

  “I don’t mean that. I mean here. In the hole.”

  The question took Simon by surprise. Surely they had discussed the circumstances of their segregation at some point during the past months.

  “I killed someone for Signor Bonfanti,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  The monsignor continued and Simon knew he was after something. “So it was punishment?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh?”

  For once, it was Simon’s turn to perplex his mentor. “It was my choice.”

  “To come here? To spend your days in a bug-infested cell smaller than a shoe box?” The monsignor shook his large, shaggy head, laughing dryly at this impossibility. Simon had never seen him smile so broadly. The priest’s teeth were straight and white, and he became ten years younger on the spot.

  “What’s so funny?”

  A wave of the hand. “Nothing. Please go on.”

  Simon explained about his agreement with Bonfanti and explained that after killing the Egyptian, Al-Faris, he had been given a choice. He could give up the name of the man who’d betrayed his crew or he could serve an indefinite sentence in the hole.

  “And you refused?” said the monsignor.

  Simon didn’t reply. He was standing there, wasn’t he?

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because you’re a tough bastard who doesn’t forget or forgive.”

  “That’s about right.” The answer pleased Simon and he couldn’t ignore the surge of pride, the reflexive swelling of his chest.

  “Sure you made the right decision?”

  “I’ve had eighteen months to think it over.”

  “And you don’t know how much longer you’ll be here?”

  Simon shook his head and the monsignor looked away, his face screwed up in the way it got when he was thinking. After a minute, he returned his gaze to Simon.

  “How do you know it’s going to be worth it?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, this fellow you’re after may have died since then,” the priest explained reasonably. “Or he may have moved away. Maybe he found God.”

  “Coluzzi? No. He’s alive. I can feel it. And he definitely hasn’t found God. I’ll see him again.”

  “And when you do?”

  “I’ll do what I have to do.”

  “Take his life?”

  “He’s getting off easy dying. The way I see it, he killed four of my friends.”

  “And nothing you can do will bring them back,” said the monsignor, adding force to his words for the first time that morning. “Do you think they would do the same for you? Pretty expensive ticket to punch.”

  Simon wanted to say yes, but in truth, he didn’t know. He could only answer for himself.

  “I guess, Simon, my question is, are you really here for them or are you here, suffering like this, for yourself?”

  “I’m here because I have to be.”

  “That may be so, but it isn’t you who made that decision.”

  “What does that mean? Who else made it for me?”

  The priest shrugged and Simon knew that it was his way of saying that there were mysteries in the world and that any man who thought he knew all the answers was a fool. After a moment, he drew nearer.

  “You’re not here,” he said, “because you blame this man, this Coluzzi. You’re here because you blame yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “‘It is mine to avenge,’ sayeth the Lord. ‘I will repay. In due time, their foot will slip. Their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’”

  “Save the Bible for the next guy.”

  “I believe that’s you. How many more do you think I will have the chance to help?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Look at me.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  Simon cast his gaze elsewhere. In the short time they’d known each other, the priest had grown visibly weaker, his skin grayer, his shoulders more stooped.

  The monsignor put his hands on Simon’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “‘Do not repay evil with evil,’” he said slowly, meaningfully. “‘Repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so you may inherit a blessing.’”

  “You’ve got a lot of them up your sleeve this morning.”

  The monsignor put back his head and smelled the air. “I have hope, Simon, and my hope is you.”

  But the hours in the yard were not just for examining his soul. The monsignor had more practical advice to pass along, some of which surprised Simon, and at first even hurt him.

  “Hit me.”

  Another Sunday. Cold and rain instead of the spring sunshine. An atmosphere of gloom inside the yard, and outside, where no voices could be heard, no joyous cries from passing children. Just quiet, and quiet was the enemy when you spent your days locked up alone in a cell underground.

  “Did you say ‘Hit me’?” asked Simon.

  The monsignor nodded easily, as if this were the most normal request in the world. “In the face. Here. A jab to the cheek.”

  “I will not.”

  “Frightened you might hurt m
e?”

  “You should be frightened, not me.”

  “All right. Suit yourself.”

  Simon enjoyed an uneasy laugh, when suddenly something slapped him in the face and his cheek smarted. “Hey!”

  The monsignor had assumed a fighting stance, feet shoulder-width apart, hands raised.

  “Did you just hit me?” asked Simon.

  The priest nodded and motioned with his fingers for Simon to approach. “Do as I tell you. Don’t worry.”

  Simon studied the priest, appraising him in a new and not entirely friendly manner. “You’re sure?”

  “Go for it.”

  Simon smiled at such juvenile words coming from the smartest man he’d ever met. He raised his fists and threw a tentative punch. The monsignor batted it away. Simon tried again, harder this time. Again the priest blocked it, redirecting the blow in a manner that caused Simon to lose his balance and stumble.

  Retaking his position, Simon decided to let the priest have one, a real haymaker, the results be damned. He hadn’t figured the monsignor to be a big mouth, but, hey, if he wanted to get punched, Simon was willing to oblige.

  He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. He moved this way and that, shoulders bobbing, then threw a punch, restraint leaving him as he struck out, putting all his muscle behind it.

  His wrist snapped and the punch hit nothing but air. This time the priest took hold of his fist and tossed him over his hip and onto the dirt, where he landed flat on his back.

  Simon scrambled to his feet. “How?” he asked, winded. “What…”

  “I wasn’t always a man of the cloth,” said the monsignor.

  “Where did you learn that? I mean, whatever that is that you just did. Karate or kung fu or—”

  “Not karate. Something I picked up in Mozambique.”

  “Where?”

  “A country in Africa. Lots of jungle. Beautiful beaches. And the women…” The monsignor caught himself. “Anyway, it’s Portuguese and Brazilian and a mix of some others. I don’t know that it has a name. Would you like to learn?”

  Simon answered in a heartbeat. “Absolutely.”