Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  In 1959, police arrested him twenty minutes after he robbed a supermarket for $190. He and his accomplice had a good plan, but had gotten so drunk while working out the details that when they got to the supermarket everything went wrong. In the struggle to immobilize him, one of the police officers hit him in the head with the butt of his gun. The wound is visible in the side mug shot, like a saddle sore in the dirty and disheveled hair. In a full-body photo, he’s wearing a plaid shirt and frayed pants, a pair of big old shoes and no socks. The judge sentenced him to twenty years in the state prison in Missouri. When they took him out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he pushed the guards and took off running. They chased him for fifteen minutes before finally catching him.

  * * *

  In prison his behavior was irreproachable. Perhaps it was there that he discovered and perfected his talent for going unnoticed. He got along with other prisoners, but those who were closest to him saw him as a loner. He never spoke about his family or his past. The most he ever said was that his father and mother were dead. At the prison library, he read law books, geographical encyclopedias, self-help books, and spy novels. He had a special liking for maps and travel magazines and the James Bond books.

  He did exercises to stay fit, calisthenic routines, push-ups. He could walk on his hands. He did yoga in his cell and maintained the poses for hours. He was extremely thrifty. He did not smoke or play cards. He took amphetamines and trafficked in them. Someone once saw him injecting himself. His veins were very thin and he had trouble hitting them with the needle. He earned small sums of money renting out old detective novels and erotic magazines.

  In his quiet and furtive way, he was always examining different escape options. He told another inmate that his goal was to dig a tunnel all the way to Virginia and hide there forever in a cave, in a forest. He kept putting finishing touches on different life plans, working out details so small they acquired an illusory reality: once out of prison, he would plan one final stunt that earned him twenty or thirty thousand dollars; with that money he could live the rest of his life, spending very little, hiding on a beach in some fishing village in Mexico.

  * * *

  In December 1966, at his request, he underwent a psychiatric examination at the prison hospital. He complained of pain in the solar plexus, tachycardia, and something he called “intracranial tension.” He told the psychiatrist that he had learned all those words in a medical encyclopedia in the library. He read very close to the page, mumbling words, writing down the most difficult ones in a notebook so he could look them up in the dictionary. At various times, he claimed to have symptoms of cancer and heart disease. He would consult medical books and recognize every one of his symptoms as he read the description for some condition. He remembered waking up one night when he was ten years old and thinking he had gone blind. The psychiatrist diagnosed him with obsessive-compulsive personality and sociopathy. “The subject belongs to the anti-social type with anxiety and depressive features.” His IQ was 108, slightly above average.

  On April 23, he escaped from the prison hiding in a bread cart that other prisoners loaded into a delivery truck. The order for his arrest took nearly two weeks to be made public. In the poster with his mug shot and fingerprints the latter are wrong. The reward for any information leading to his capture was fifty dollars. He was offended by the amount when he found out. He had assumed, with unfounded optimism, that his escape would somehow land him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted.

  * * *

  After jumping from the truck, he started walking along the bank of a river following the railway line. He hid in a tunnel under the tracks until it got dark, listening to the radio, waiting for a news bulletin to alert people about his escape. He walked the entire night, occasionally eating half-melted chocolate bars. He went into hiding at dawn and took off after nightfall. When he saw a nearby house with lighted windows, he took a detour before the dogs started barking.

  He ran out of chocolate bars on the third day. His feet were very swollen but he would not take his shoes off. Had he done so it would have been impossible to put them back on. The third night he came to an abandoned trailer close to the river. He found half a bottle of wine, some food, and a blanket. He went into the woods and slept with the blanket under a tree. A downpour woke him and he started walking again, holding the dripping blanket over his head and shoulders. At daybreak, he sat shivering under the sun to dry. On the fourth night, his legs could barely hold him. On the fifth day it rained again. Using matches he had found in the trailer, he made a fire under a railway bridge. He tried to put it out when he heard people approaching. They were railroad workers and they asked him what he was doing there. He told them he was out hunting and would put out the fire as soon as it stopped raining. He arrived at a small town the morning of the sixth day. He waited on the outskirts until it was dark, then he went into a store and bought two beers and several sandwiches.

  * * *

  On May 3, 1967, he started working as a dishwasher in a restaurant in a Chicago suburb, the Indian Trail. He used the name John Larry Raynes. The owner, Mrs. Klingman, remembered him fondly and had been sad to see him leave so soon. “He was a very nice man,” she recalled, a year later when strangers began coming around to ask questions about him. “He was here two or three months. What a shame he had to go. He started as a dishwasher, but we promoted him right away and gave him a raise. I could not believe the state he was in. He had been hunting for a while and his feet were injured. My sister brought him one of those long bands from the hospital and taught him how to put it on. He was very grateful. I hope he’s okay now. Soon after he left, we wrote to him at the address he left us to tell him how much we appreciated him and to assure him we would always have a job for him.”

  He worked at the Indian Trail for eight weeks and earned $117. “He was very shy,” said a female coworker. “He was never the one to start a conversation. He was quite solitary. He said he had to leave this job because he had to go back to sea or he would lose his merchant mariner license.”

  * * *

  Every evening, after leaving the restaurant, he took a bus back to a rented room. Every night he drank one or two beers before going to sleep. He read the paper, the Chicago Tribune, in its entirety, especially the classified ads. He listened to his transistor radio. Sometimes he read cheap mysteries or spy novels set in Canada and Latin America, magazines with gaudy illustrations on the covers: half-naked women with red lips and open mouths, their eyes dilated by fear, being attacked by wild animals, natives, and alien monsters, while men in safari clothes came to their defense. He bought the books from street vendors. He wrote down every expense. A few nights a week he treated himself to a bar where he would sit and drink vodka and orange juice. He did not like the taste of whiskey.

  * * *

  In July 1967, he was in Montreal. This was the first time he started going by the name Eric Starvo Galt, borrowed from one of the evil megalomaniacs of the James Bond novels, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He rented a room in a boardinghouse near the docks by the Saint Lawrence River. His street was lined with bars, nightclubs, and cheap hotels. In the first floor of the building was the Acapulco club, sporting a neon sign that promised SHOWS FROM ACAPULCO, SOMBREROS, SERAPES. At the time, some six thousand ships came to the port of Montreal every year. That’s where the heroin from Marseille came in. Whenever he struck up a conversation with someone at a bar or restaurant, he told them he was a sailor on leave and that soon he had to get back on a ship. He frequented the Neptune Tavern. The lamps there hung from old helms attached to the ceiling. The furniture was dark oak and had gilded copper fittings like the storage chests in boats.

  * * *

  On the morning of July 19, he robbed a supermarket at gunpoint and escaped with 1,700 Canadian dollars. That afternoon he bought a brown suit, wool pants, a white shirt, a yellow shirt, a yellow swimsuit, red pajamas, socks, underwear, and ties. At the exclusive hair salon of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, he got
a haircut and, for the first time in his life, a manicure, done by a young woman in uniform. On July 21, he commissioned a brown wool suit made to measure.

  * * *

  Until then, he had never owned a suit or worn a tie. He had never slept with a woman who was not a prostitute. With a knowing grimace, based mostly on his fictional experience, he would say to one of the other inmates at the prison that women were only for using and throwing away, that a man on the run should never trust them.

  On July 31 he was staying at the Grey Rock Inn, a hotel next to Lake Ouimet in an area with forests and mountain tourist enclaves. That night, in one of the hotel lounges where a dance orchestra was playing, he met an attractive woman in her mid-thirties who had noticed him because he was the only person sitting alone at a table, not dancing. She had two small children and was going through a bitter and complicated divorce. She had come to the hotel with a friend looking for a few days of respite. “He was clean, elegant, shy. It was his shyness that attracted me to him. He was an educated man who listened attentively and did not talk much. There was so little aggression in him. All the other men there just kept hounding you, trying to touch you, they just wanted to take you to their rooms or cars as soon as possible. Eric was different. He wasn’t loud or presumptuous. He was generous with his money, but without waste and without making a big deal when he invited me. I managed to get him on the dance floor. I don’t really like dancing. But how clumsy he was. He had no ear for music. I tried to teach him, and he played along. He told me he was from Chicago, and worked for his brother’s business. I think I felt very comfortable with Eric. He seemed so lonely and lost. Not that I pitied him, I just wanted to help him have some fun and not be so alone. As the night went on he became more comfortable with me and also more protective. When other men approached me in jest, Eric drove them away, calm but very firm. A woman likes that. Especially a woman who feels rejected. We drank a lot, but neither one of us got drunk. We knew exactly what we were doing. Later we went to his room. I stayed there till morning. My experience with men is pretty limited, but it would be a lie to say Eric did not behave normally. As for his impression of me, I felt very flattered.”

  She was surprised that a man so well-dressed would drive such an old car. He explained, with obvious embarrassment, that the car actually belonged to his brother’s wife. They met again some time later, in Montreal. He was more nervous, more absent. The conversation turned to racial issues and suddenly he seemed like a different person, violent, tense with anger, though he never raised his voice. He told her she defended blacks only because she did not know how they were and had never had to live near them.

  * * *

  On August 25, he came to Birmingham, Alabama, on a train from Chicago. He spent the night in a hotel across from the station. In the hotel register he signed John L. Raynes. The next day he rented a room in a boardinghouse that had no name or sign. It was in a seedy area, frequented by prostitutes, drug dealers, and drunks. He used the name Eric S. Galt and said he was a naval engineer who worked designing boats at a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The owner of the boardinghouse thought he was an exemplary guest, well-dressed, decent, out of place in the neighborhood. “He left every morning after breakfast and did not come back until dinnertime.” At night, he sat quietly to watch television in the living room. He never received visits or phone calls.

  * * *

  On August 30, he bought a used white ’66 Ford Mustang. It was a sleek sports car, low roof, sharp hood, red leather interior, and a radio with plastic imitation-ivory buttons. James Bond drove a red Mustang in one of the films from that period. He had seen the ad in the local newspaper. The seller was surprised to see him take the wad of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, in broad daylight, right on the sidewalk, and start counting. He told him he worked as a sailor on a cargo ship in the Mississippi, between New Orleans, Memphis, and Saint Louis. The car had 14,291 miles. He loved the work, he explained, but the shifts, twenty-one days at a time, were exhausting. The seller thought it odd how pale he was for someone who worked on boats, and also that his hands were thin and soft. He noted the lack of a wedding band.

  * * *

  The owner of the boardinghouse was delighted with him. “I can’t imagine a nicer person than Eric S. Galt. Quiet, polite, clean. He paid on time and in advance at the beginning of every week. If we made small talk, he talked mostly about the weather. He seemed like a nice guy who was temporarily out of work.”

  * * *

  A driver’s license application in Alabama states that he was born on July 20, 1931, weighed 175 pounds, stood at five feet eleven inches, had blue eyes and brown hair, and was a merchant sailor unemployed at the time. He passed the practical exam with a high score. According to the medical certificate, he had perfect vision in both eyes.

  * * *

  He purchased a secondhand portable typewriter. On September 1, he used it to write a letter to a company in Chicago that sold photography supplies. He ordered a Kodak projector, a Kodak Super 8, and a control with a six-meter cable. On October 5, in a photography store in Birmingham, he bought a Polaroid camera. He would carry it with him everywhere until the day he was arrested, eight months later. He liked buying things by mail and filling out the order forms that came in the magazines using his typewriter. He sent a money order for one dollar to a company in Hollywood, requesting a product, E. Z. Formula, that could turn a glass surface into a one-way mirror. The product had been advertised in a pulp magazine. He read and clipped offers for correspondence courses, hair-loss treatments, manuals to learn karate or hypnosis or stenography. He wrote to the Modern Photo Bookstore in New York and ordered the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography from an ad he clipped from Modern Photography magazine. He left a very clear imprint of his left thumb on the coupon.

  * * *

  Every Sunday at 9:00 p.m., he would find a bar where he could watch FBI: The Ten Most Wanted Criminals and the countdown of the Ten Most Wanted criminals in the United States. Every Sunday, he expected to see his name and mug shot on the list.

  * * *

  He did not have a passport, or a birth certificate, or a social security number, or any documentary evidence of previous employment. He had a driver’s license, a car registration under the name Eric Starvo Galt, a safe-deposit box at a bank, and the address at the boardinghouse. He felt more confident using a real address in conjunction with the fake name: 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama. He carefully filled out all the order forms in uppercase and typed the addresses on the envelopes. Whenever he left the house, he took the stamped envelopes with him. He took some small satisfaction in sliding them into the blue mailbox.

  * * *

  As soon as he was settled in Birmingham, he enrolled in dance classes. He was mostly interested in Latin dance, cha-cha, bolero, mambo. The instructor said he was “a clumsy loner who came once or twice and could not have learned how to dance even if he had come every day for the rest of his life.” He was quiet and evasive. He had a straight, sharp nose, a strong southern accent, and he talked like someone from a rural area despite his city clothes. He wore a gold ring with a dark stone.

  * * *

  He came back to the boardinghouse every evening with The Birmingham News under his arm and some weekly magazine. He read them carefully in his room, word by word, from the headlines on the first page to the classifieds, news about agricultural competitions, calendars of religious services at different churches, lists of births, and obituaries. On October 1 he saw a classified ad for a used gun, a .38-caliber snub nose revolver, Liberty Chief model, made in Japan. He called the number and went to the seller’s house, who later could not recall his face. He paid sixty-five dollars. The seller’s son did remember him: he said the man was probably in his early to mid-forties, around 170 pounds, five feet eight or nine inches tall, had dark hair, graying on the sides, a southern accent, and was wearing a sports shirt and jeans.

  * * *

  He was suffering from insomnia,
a sore throat, and a dry cough. He feared it was pneumonia, or lung cancer. A doctor prescribed him antibiotics. He visited a psychiatrist, who sat there nodding, paying more attention to the clock than the patient, and who finally prescribed him an antidepressant.

  * * *

  On October 6, early in the morning, he packed the car with his suitcase, typewriter, and cameras, and said goodbye to the owner of the boardinghouse. He told him that he had finally found work on a merchant ship that was leaving from Mobile the next day. He drove through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas almost without stopping.

  He covered almost 1,250 miles in thirty hours. He took amphetamines to stay awake. He saw the highway, straight and unchanging, open before the headlights, the neon signs of the gas stations, the clusters of old cabins where black people lived, motels, twenty-four-hour fast-food restaurants, a horizon of monotonous forests, cotton plantations, and increasingly arid red plains. On the afternoon of October 7 he crossed the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. They put a sticker on his window identifying him as a tourist and marking the date of entry. While in prison, he had read an article about Puerto Vallarta, in True magazine: white-sand beaches, palm trees, bungalows by the ocean. You had to take a dirt road from Acapulco, which was more of a mud river by the end of the rainy season.