by Ben Stevens
‘But in my mind I see the fat, sneering face of the prosecutor once again, and I realise that I should never have relinquished my revenge; not even for love, not even for Marie. She will be in my thoughts always, there will never be another woman in my life; but she is gone and I am here. I will not die.
‘Amazed, the doctors finally discharge me. Yes, there certainly will never be another woman in my life, even if I want one: I have been hideously disfigured, and it is months before I can even walk again. But I am grateful just to be alive. I have a showdown with the ugly bastard who took control of my club, and he agrees to buy it off me for an extremely decent price. This price is quickly agreed when I press a pistol against his forehead and state the required sum. He does not argue.
‘Now I have money, what’s next? A false identity card, that’s what. And I realise that God has in fact been kind to me in allowing my face to be destroyed: I could walk around Paris in broad daylight and never be spotted as the escaped prisoner Henri Grandet by either friend or enemy.
‘The card is obtained through an underworld contact of mine, an utterly straight man whose hefty fee guarantees his complete silence. I state the name – not Raymond, by the way – and the date-of-birth that I want printed. I have a photo of my ruined face taken, and marvelling at his work I pay my pal gladly.
‘Christ, I shake with anticipation! I am becoming ever closer to obtaining my revenge, to destroying those who’d sought to destroy me! I leave Venezuela, returning to France with absolutely no problem at all on my bogus identity card. The gendarmes stare at me only out of pity for a limping, one-eyed cripple; but sooner or later a few of them are going to look the same as me or indeed a great deal worse, if indeed they’re not killed by the fireworks I’m going to arrange at thirty-six, Quai des Orfevres – police headquarters.
‘Play it cool, brother, play it cool – that’s what I say to myself a hundred times a day. That prosecutor: you’ve got to take him apart first. You owe him the most of all. Where do I look for him, though? I’ve quickly discovered that he’s no longer the official prosecutor at the Palais de Justice of the Seine.
‘Shit! Did I really think, after all that’s happened in my life, that it would be so easy for me to locate that bastard? God, please hear me now: just this once I need you on my side!
‘I’m staying at the George V hotel, near my old stomping ground Montmartre. I realise that it’s time to find the seediest bar within this district, and to have a discreet word with the old lags who gather there each night. There’ll certainly be a few former members of the underworld there, and such types as likely as not will know all about the whereabouts of one Pierre Pradel. Doubtless several of them owe him a debt or two as well, although I dare not make them party to my plans.
‘I find my bar and enter… Spectacular, extraordinary good luck, quite against the way things usually go for me! Who do I see but an old mate of mine who was put on the same ship as me to French Guiana! We go back a long way, all the way to when I got life for a murder I never committed, and he got ten years for stealing a bicycle. And the prosecutor at both our trials was Pierre Pradel.
‘Of course, such are my injuries that he doesn’t even recognise me at first. When I tell him who I am he is so shocked he cries like a baby. He has long since given me up for dead. We talk for hours: he is doing okay for himself but the appalling severity of the sentence he received for a minor crime still rankles him. He blames the judge until I make him see that it was all Pradel’s fault. This swine caused the hammer-blow to fall: all the judge did was to make this blow official.
‘We talk further, far into the night. More good fortune: my old mate knows where Pradel spends every day. We leave the bar when it finally closes and sit in a small park. My mate agrees with everything I have come here to do; even more, he will help me to do it, so that he too can have his revenge. It would be too risky for me to attempt to buy a house in a suitably remote area of France, even using my false identity – too many questions might be asked. Instead I will give my friend the necessary funds for him to buy it.
‘The rest is up to me. I visit the café and make the fat shit’s acquaintance over the period of a month or so, in between working like a demon to make the necessary changes to the house that has recently been bought in a somewhat remote area of Pas de Calais...
‘I can see that Pradel trusts me – that he delights in having someone to whine to. He thinks I’m his friend! There: everything is in place. Let’s go!’
Exhausted by talking, Henri slumped back down in his chair and stared at Pradel. The former prosecutor’s fleshy face was a ghastly white, and he slowly shook his head as his lips moved noiselessly.
‘What’s the matter, Pierre? Has the cat caught that famous prostituted tongue of yours?’
Pradel suddenly sunk forward; it looked for a moment as though he would fall from his chair to the floor. Stopping himself, he mumbled, ‘So what now, hey, what now?’
‘Pierre, I fear that you’re not well,’ said Henri with deathly satire.
‘I am sick,’ croaked the fat man.
‘It is that brandy – it is no good for you, especially when laced with a certain drug that sends you slowly, if a little uncomfortably, to sleep. You’re almost there now, man: when you awaken I’ll tell you the first half of my story.’
‘Henri, I – ’ Pradel began; then he fell onto the hard wooden floor, where he lay quite still.
Standing up, Henri prepared to carry him downstairs to the cellar. Then from out in the large hall there came the noise of a key being placed in the front door – something that made Henri start...
Darkness – pitch darkness. Who could say how long he’d been unconscious for; and what manner of drug was it that made his head ache so unmercifully now that he’d awoken?
Moaning, Pradel adjusted his position on what he considered was a wooden bench – and fell straight onto the concrete floor.
‘Henri!’ he bellowed, ‘Where am I?’
A strong light suddenly shone above him, although it put the cell only in a kind of murky twilight instead of the absolute darkness of before.
Squinting his eyes, his head pounding, Pradel looked up: ten feet above him were evenly-spaced, thick steel bars, like tramlines. Perhaps another ten feet above these was a narrow walkway; and Henri was stood on this looking down, his forearms resting on a thin handrail.
‘Take a good look around you, Pradel. Take a good look,’ instructed Henri.
Blinking rapidly, Pradel did as he was told. The brick-built cell was approximately eight-foot by eight-foot square, with a narrow plank attached to one wall. In one corner there was a flush toilet and a tiny hand-basin with one tap. Beside this hand-basin, placed on a folded blanket, there was a cake of soap, a toothbrush, a wooden spoon, and a mug.
And above the small door with a little hatch set in it, was the sign: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order.
‘What are you doing, Henri?’ asked Pradel in a voice he tried to make firm.
‘Let me talk about my trial, Pradel, and all that followed,’ answered Henri, his vague smile just discernible to the former prosecutor as he stared back up at the walkway.
Pausing to light a cigarette, he continued, ‘How certain my counsel was that I would be acquitted of the murder of a small-time pimp! The ‘evidence’ provided by the pigs smelt fishy and prefabricated even to the judge; he hinted heavily at this during his opening address to the court.
‘But I – ah, I was not so sure! Having grown up parentless and wild on the streets of Paris, I’d already crossed swords with the pigs on several occasions. After I’d been ‘interrogated’ about some trifling crime or other, I would leave the station with my balls twisted and swollen, my belly aching after some fifteen-stone porker had used it as a trampoline.
‘So I knew just how determined those bastards could be when they really wanted something – a confession or the like – and I knew that they were now going all out to fix me
good and proper. That they knew I had not been the one to kill the pimp – the ponce – mattered not one jot.
‘Still, this would not have resulted in me being found guilty had it not been for you, you loathsome swine. You stared at me dressed in my smart suit, at twenty-four little more than a boy, and you saw only another faceless man who needed to be destroyed.
‘On what did you notch your successes, Pradel? Your bedpost? And just how many were there – how many innocent men did you send to the guillotine or the penal colonies?’
‘Henri – ’
‘Shut up. My counsel fought valiantly, but they were no match against your foul rhetoric. The twelve twats on the jury went away and returned to find me guilty. By some miracle I was sentenced to life transportation instead of death: perhaps it is possible that the fair-minded judge sought to throw me the slightest of lifelines.
‘A few months later, and I was put aboard the boat – the Martiniere – along with all the other poor unfortunate sods bound for French Guiana. I became friends with just one man, who’d received a ten-year sentence for bicycle theft: some other trifling crimes he’d previously committed had been taken into account, all at the encouragement of one Pierre Pradel.
‘He was a little slow, my mate: I saw at once that he’d been sold down the river. We made a pact to escape as soon as we could, together, and I also made a private vow that one day I would kill the prosecutor who’d destroyed my life and also that I would kill as many pigs as possible.
‘The rumour was quickly spread – for those men like my mate and I who wanted to escape – that the hospital block was the best place from which to try. Arriving at the mainland my mate faked dysentery and I appendicitis, so that we were taken straight there.
‘That rumour had not been wrong! This was a soft touch and a half, and I soon got hold of a corrupt medical orderly who said that he could get me a fine boat for two thousand five hundred francs. There were some time-expired convicts on the outside who could provide such a thing, and at a suitably hefty fee.
‘I agreed, and paid this orderly half the sum from the money contained in my charger – a metal tube the size of my thumb that I kept hidden in my lower colon. You can take an educated guess at its entry point.
‘It was at this point that my mate lost his nerve. Were the break to go wrong we would be severely punished, and he was sure that with good behaviour he would get remission on his sentence. His wife, he assured me, was certain to be campaigning on his behalf in France.
‘Inwardly I was sceptical; most women realised that once their man went to penal they were almost definitely gone for good and for all, whether their sentence had been for life or not. The mortality rate in the colonies was sky-high.
‘But I respected his decision and so we shook hands and remained the best of friends. Brothers, almost. Now I prepared to break out on my own, armed with my knowledge of sailing that I’d acquired during a stay in St Malo a few years previously.
‘One rainy night everything was ready. The boat was waiting for me at a point of the river that ran close by the hospital block – the river that led straight to the sea and freedom. I managed to overpower the single screw who guarded my ward; but I must have hit him too hard – instead of knocking him out – which had been my intention – I killed him. Although he was only a screw his death saddened me. Up until this point I’d never murdered anyone.
‘I found my boat, paid some character the other half of the agreed fee, and by chance rather than by judgement – and half-dead with thirst, hunger and exposure – I reached Venezuela.
‘Seven years later this would prove to be my liberation; but now it was under Gomez’s wicked rule and so I was forced to work building roads with a gang of native prisoners. Conditions were hard; men died everyday from underfeeding and the brutal ill-treatment of the guards; but I was blessed with an iron-hard constitution and so I survived.
‘Two years of this I suffered, until finally the French authorities were alerted to my whereabouts and a boat was sent to get me. Back in French Guiana I was tried for the crimes of escape in the first degree and murder – this in itself carried an automatic death-sentence.
‘By stoutly defending myself I managed to get the murder charge reduced to one of manslaughter, and then I was given my sentence: a year’s solitary confinement for escaping, coupled with five years for manslaughter – to be served concurrently. Six years’ solitary in all.
‘So, Pierre, it was straight to the island of Saint-Joseph and the Reclusion Disciplinaire – or, as it was better nicknamed by the lags in penal, ‘The Devourer of Men’. It was certainly sadists of your type of warped mentality who designed this prison within a prison, with its countless dim tiny cells in which a man was compelled to live in absolute silence; never seeing another person, never hearing a word being said.
‘Through a small hatch in the iron door food was given three times a day, and a dreadfully poor amount at that. Deprived of all stimuli, shut up like a wild animal for X amount of years, is it any wonder that men frequently chose suicide as their only way of release?
‘I have tried to recreate your cell in a similar fashion. This is why I had to wait a month before I could bring you here – and, of course, I also used this time in order to gain your trust.
‘First I dug out a great deal of the cellar, so that I would have enough height for this walkway; and then I built what holds you now. Look at these thick steel bars on top of your cell, as I did once upon a time, and imagine screws wearing slippers – so that there should not even be the noise of footsteps – walked ceaselessly back and forth along the walkway, staring down into the dim murky pits at…
‘At what? At men sat with their head in their hands, at men masturbating as the only way of relieving the eternal tedium, at men swinging from a noose made out of their own trousers? This was hell: a hell lost and forgotten on some tiny tropical island.’
Henri paused long enough to light another cigarette.
‘I was put into my cell – number 136 – and for a long, long while I stared at the notice written above the door: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order. This was all I would be reading in six years. I was twenty-seven – I would be thirty-three upon my release, and as likely as not hopelessly mad. No other convict had ever been given a six-year sentence before: four or at the very most five was deemed to be the limit of any man’s endurance.
‘I tackled the problem logistically: five years was next to impossible to come through; and yet a few men had done just this, without committing suicide and without going mad. So what was another three hundred and sixty-five days?
‘I vowed to myself that this enforced solitude would be only a temporary hiccup to my plans of escape and revenge: that upon my release I would make another, ultimately successful break.
‘Having done this, I took to pacing my cell for sixteen hours each and every day; then, absolutely exhausted, I would fall into a deep sleep during which I dreamed vividly – of family, friends, past loves, beautiful landscapes. Such was how I obtained my temporary release from this living death.
‘How slowly days, weeks, months and years pass without another soul to talk to! There in the passing, nightmare twilight and then complete darkness of a Reclusion cell I fought to stay alive and sane, grimly focusing my mind on the fact that all the time, time was passing. An obvious thing to say, but what significance this had to my situation and what strength it gave me.
‘And the silence – dear God, the absolute dead silence! Occasionally some poor bastard would reach the end of his tether and shout and scream – something which played on my nerves horribly. It is quite depressing to hear a man going mad. It was then that I considered the silence to indeed be preferable.
‘The cells of the suicides were always opened in the dead of night – or, at least, what I judged to be the dead of night. Both men either side of me chose to end their torment this way, and on each occasion I heard the soft voices of two screws talking
as they cut the man down.
‘Sometimes… Sometimes a black mood fell upon me, and once I actually took off my trousers before I managed to get a grip on myself. There was no doubt that the odds against me making another, successful escape were high indeed: just how many men had tried and failed already? But even if I was to die while attempting to escape, surely this was better than hanging myself in this small dark hole.
‘Morning: wake up and walk – one, two, three, four, five, about-turn. One, two… Coffee and bread given to me through my hatch: eat this and continue walking. Lunch – soup or something similar; dinner a lump of boiled meat. Hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, and I was certainly burning more calories than I could afford through my ceaseless exercise.
‘But walk I must, on and on and on. Christ knows how many thousands of miles I tallied up during those endless years. And what did I frequently think about as I walked? I’ll tell you: somehow getting back to France and cutting out a fat prosecutor’s tongue.
‘Yes: first his tongue; and then a few days later I’d put out his sharp cruel eyes. That fat shit, he’d take a week to die. How encouraging such thoughts were – this idea that some fine day I’d have this flabby poof on toast.
‘But anyway – six years I got, but the authorities weren’t as cruel as all that: I got a year’s remission for excellent behaviour, for never making a row like so many of the other luckless sods.
‘My door was opened, the Governor himself looking at me almost with admiration and saying, ‘‘Grandet, your sentence is over. This is the 25 November 1939.’’
‘I staggered out of the accursed Reclusion and into the sunlight, which seemed almost to burn out my eyes. God, how beautiful that blue sky was! And the white birds, and the foamy sea! I – I who had never believed in God before now – there in front of three screws and the Governor I fell to my knees and I wept, thanking Him for having given me the strength to survive what I had. Even there in that dim timeless cell lost amongst countless others He’d found me, giving me courage in the dark.
