Set Me Free

by Salvatore Striano

  I’ll show them exactly what kind of inmate I am.

  When 8 p.m. comes around I go into my cell and pretend everything is normal. My cellmate is already in there. He’s Spanish, but he’s so long and thin and white he looks like a Swedish asparagus. He’s got the lower bunk on the right-hand wall. Next to the bed is the toilet and on the wall opposite the bunk bed there’s a stone shelf to put some things on, and two little cupboards for our personal effects. That’s it. We don’t need anything else, since we only come in here to sleep.

  The HIV guy responds to my greeting but doesn’t say anything else. He’s flicking through a magazine. I arrange my things in the cupboard in silence.

  I climb onto the top bunk and make my bed with the prison sheets and blanket. Then I come back down. He’s completely calm, he doesn’t take any notice of me. But I know he’s keeping an eye on me.

  I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to cause a scene and I’m tired. I go to the toilet, then climb back up on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Maybe he’ll say something now, tell me he’s HIV-positive. I can’t be the one to start because I’m pretending I don’t speak Spanish, but he doesn’t know that. He could say something. Surely he’s going to finish that stupid magazine and say something.

  Dinner arrives and there’s still not a peep out of him. We eat in a silence that keeps getting heavier.

  Does he know that I know?

  I find myself lying back down staring at the ceiling, without having resolved the problem. That’s it, I’m going to have to get down and face him.

  I can’t hear a sound coming from the bottom bunk. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. What do you know—I’m going to have to wake him up to punch his lights out.

  But maybe he thinks I’m asleep and that’s why he’s not talking to me.

  Okay, I’m going to lean over. Yeah right, and what am I going to say? And in what language?

  Stewing over all these alternatives, I end up falling asleep. And when I wake up the HIV guy is doing something really strange.

  He’s standing in front of the cupboard, naked from the waist up, and he’s wrapping magazines around his chest, attaching them with sticky tape. He opens one, places it on his body, opens another and places it so that the edges overlap, then takes another one and he’s back at the start—he’s so skinny that three magazines go all the way around. Then he gets going on another layer.

  The man’s not just HIV-positive, he’s crazy.

  That’s it, if I don’t clear this up right away there’s going to be trouble. I jump down from the bed. He turns and gives me a kind of smile, handing me the magazine he’s holding.

  ‘You want some?’ he says in Spanish. ‘I’ve got some spare, but you’ll need to replace them.’

  I’m on him in a flash. I spin him around and pin him against the wall. He’s light and thin, and when he hits the wall some plaster falls into his hair. Looking frightened, his hair dusted with plaster, wrapped up in magazines like some kind of human sandwich, he’s such a comical sight that I almost burst out laughing, but that feeling soon passes. He could probably kill me slowly.

  ‘When were you going to tell me, eh?’ I tighten my grip, even though I don’t need to, because he’s already immobilised. In fact, he’s shrinking away from me, like he wants to drive himself into the wall. ‘When were you going to tell me you’re HIV-positive?’

  2

  ‘I’ll fight, till from my bones my flesh be hack’d.

  Give me my armour.’

  Macbeth in Macbeth

  Act V, Scene III

  ‘You. Come with me. We’re going to settle this at el Tigre.’

  He spoke in Russian but I understood. The shadow cast across the wooden floor as he approached was about the size of a five-storey building. I don’t even have to look up to know who it is. And I know who he’s pissed off with.

  He’s Russian and everybody knows him. His name is Ivan.

  My brain is whirring away like a computer in the few seconds I spend pretending to concentrate on the three kings I’m holding. I’m at the Italian table, so he can’t do a thing. The Italians are the most powerful and the most respected group in here, and as long as we stick together nobody touches us. It’s just like with the Hotheads back in Naples: if we went around in a group nothing could happen to us. The moment one of us stepped away, he got taken out.

  Except that in Naples I could carry two guns everywhere I went.

  It took me no time to work out the purpose of those gossip magazines my HIV-positive cellmate wrapped around himself. In here everybody wears magazines stuck one over the other like samurai armour. That way, when the time comes, before reaching your back the knife has to go through Prince Albert of Monaco, Belén Rodríguez, the Infanta of Spain on horseback, and several other layers of gossip about the world’s most beautiful people. If you’re lucky, the blade only leaves a scratch. If you’re unlucky, before knifing you they’ve taken you to ‘el Tigre’—that’s the bathroom, a place with no CCTV cameras—taken off all your magazines layers and broken all your bones.

  Which brings us back to the great big Russian wardrobe standing by our table. I glance at the hand I’m holding my cards with. My thumbnail is white from clutching them too tight. I look up.

  ‘Who have you got a problem with?’ I ask. He spoke in Russian and I respond in Italian—we can understand each other just fine.

  Antonio, sitting opposite me, nods imperceptibly. His eyes are saying, Don’t get up, tell him to fuck off, don’t go with him. You’re a damn fool—scimunito!—you gotta stay here! We can’t get split up! He’s told me this a hundred times. He’s an old Sicilian who’s doing two life sentences; his extradition is taking a while because they don’t have life sentences in Spain. They won’t send you home if they think you’ll be locked away forever back in Italy. But sooner or later the two governments always come to some kind of agreement. The Sicilian has taken a liking to me. He says that if my extradition goes through before his, he will miss me.

  He’ll be missing me even sooner than he thought if the Russian slits my throat in el Tigre.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have started smuggling in mobile phones.

  I’d been in prison a few days when I took Toc-toc to one side and said, ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’

  A stroll could help get my head around the current state of things. I’d already come to an agreement with my HIV cellmate. He turned out to be not such a bad sort after all. But I wasn’t willing to share a cell with that sort of a chemical weapon, so I told him he had to cause a ruckus and get transferred somewhere else. He did. So that problem was solved without any nonsense.

  Next I had to work out how to carve out a role for myself so that I could have a nice, quiet sentence and maybe put together a bit of money. This is not a prison, it’s a jungle, and there’s all kinds of stuff going on—drugs, gold…but it’s not as though you can corrupt a guard with Monopoly money. What was going to be my business?

  ‘I don’t mind it in here, but making phone calls is a real pain in the arse…I’ve given up,’ I ventured to Toc-toc.

  ‘Hey, I can get you a phone, you know,’ he replied, eager to please as always. My ears pricked up.

  ‘What…so people sell them?’

  He nodded. ‘Two or three guys do. They get the guards to bring them in. We pay two million lire.’

  It’s classic street crime: the price doubles once you need to buy something illegal. Plus in here you’ve got the surcharge for the guard: a bribe of five hundred thousand lire (though, if you’re lucky, you might make a little something with the exchange rate). A tray of lasagne? Five hundred thousand. A carton of smokes? Five hundred thousand. So two million, five hundred thousand is not that much. Why aren’t there more mobile phones around?

  ‘It hasn’t really taken off,’ says Toc-toc.

  I can see that for myself.

  ‘This will be my trade,’ I declare.

  A private mobile phone can come in handy for anyone. Sure, you
’re allowed one phone call a day, but what if you want to make two? What if you need to not only talk to family but also keep on top of your business dealings? If the guards catch you with a mobile phone it’s two days in solitary, and that’s not such a big deal.

  There’s a market to be made here, I thought.

  ‘It’s not easy to get them in,’ Toc-toc warned me.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it?’ I pretended to think about it.

  ‘You need a guard,’ he said earnestly, as though corrupting a guard was a difficult undertaking.

  This is why Toc-toc will only ever be the errand boy, the one who waits in line to get his bosses coffee. But I’m no errand boy.

  ‘They’re not called guards, they’re called don Pedro.’ And I smiled, for the first time since I got here.

  Actually, my guard is called don Juan. After a few days of scouting, I chose him.

  ‘I wish they were all like the Italians,’ he said. ‘You guys are polite. You’re people who know how to live life.’ It’s something I’ve heard from other guards, even other inmates.

  ‘Listen, Juan. I need someone I can trust in here,’ I explained.

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘In all senses. For starters, I need someone to pick up my wife from the airport and bring her here.’ Once a month Monica flies in from Naples to see me, and I don’t like her going around on her own.

  ‘You want me to be your driver?’

  ‘I want you to do everything. Accompany my wife, leave her with me for a couple of extra hours, run some errands…I’ll give you whatever you want.’

  ‘You can’t give me everything I want.’

  ‘I’ll give you four million a month.’

  He gave a start. All the guards look like they’ve just dragged themselves down God knows what mountain to get here. For someone like don Juan, four million lire a month is a nice little nest egg to put aside for retirement.

  ‘I’ll ask no questions. I accept.’

  From then on, in addition to those tasks, don Juan brings me five mobiles a month that I resell to other inmates. That way I can pay him and buy everything I need, like hash and a tray of cannelloni once in a while. Because, while prison in Spain might be more humane than in Italy, the food they give you is diabolical. All these miserable soups…I live on milk and biscuits, sardines and tinned food.

  I hide the mobile phones in packets of cereal, or biscuits or sugar: I open them carefully with a blade, so you can’t see the cut, I slide the phone in and I reseal it to look as good as new. If the guards see a box is still sealed they don’t open it when they come to do a search.

  When you’re wandering about, though, you keep your phone in your pocket and wear earphones. That way if you come across a guard you start singing to yourself, so he doesn’t realise you were moving your lips because you were talking on the phone. There’s so much singing going on, the place is starting to look like a scene from a musical. After some time, there are quite a lot of phones in circulation, because, it doesn’t take me long to become number one in business.

  Except that the previous number one was this Russian guy.

  I look my Sicilian tablemate in the eye, to let him know I’ve got the message. Then I move some of the prison banknotes, which we’re using as chips.

  ‘I raise you,’ I say softly. Then I finally look at the Russian. I stand up.

  What am I? I think to myself. I’m basically the walking dead. I may as well take a risk while I’m still alive…We all have to die sooner or later. Preferably later.

  ‘Follow me,’ I order him, as though I were a metre taller than him and not the other way around. The most important thing is not what you feel inside, but the confidence you convey. With bullies like the Russian, that confidence becomes even more important. And that’s why I see a puzzled look on his face: nobody treats the Moscow Colossus like that. He’s wondering: what weapon must I be hiding? Could I somehow have smuggled in a gun?

  I walk ahead, signalling for him to follow me, and I head towards el Tigre. I sense his mass of flesh lumbering behind me. I feel like I’m about to throw up but I force it back down.

  I have no weapon, not even a knife. I wasn’t looking for trouble but I always manage to find it anyway. I know that as soon as we both cross the threshold into the bathroom, I’m a dead man. Not even industrial-strength disinfectants can eliminate the smell of blood and terror from el Tigre. It’s a place with no cameras. A place with no escape.

  This is the end, I think as I approach the door, which feels like the door to hell. A short-lived hell, hopefully, where it will all be over quickly. (Possibly to be followed by that other hell.)

  But I refuse to let the fear show on my skin or in my eyes. I turn and nod for him to go in. I hold the door open.

  ‘Please,’ I say in a wry, ironic invitation. ‘After you.’

  He has the face of a blond bull. I raise my chin. The message I’m communicating is that I’m not afraid, but he ought to be. Look at me, you great big Russian, I’m not frightened. I’m pissed off because you interrupted my poker game.

  I can hear the cogs of his brain ticking over, like mine were just a minute ago. But his cogs are slow. He can’t get beyond two plus two, so right now he’s thinking: If this guy is so keen to get me into el Tigre, it’s got to be a trap. He must have some way of killing me. Everybody knows these Italians are always one step ahead of the devil himself. And speaking of Italians…

  He looks behind him. Big mistake: my mates are wearing the kind of scowl that leaves little room for doubt. If he gets out of the bathroom alive and I don’t, he’ll be next.

  Is it really in his best interest to hurt me?

  I can see the moment the final cog turns. Two plus two equals four, and four equals ‘it’s not in my best interest’.

  There’s an instant when I’m on the edge between victory and disaster. Time stands still.

  Then the Russian turns and leaves without a word, pushing past the Italians who have gathered.

  I reckon I’ll lock myself in the bathroom for five minutes all the same. At least until my legs stop shaking.

  When I get to my third month of Spanish prison I realise I have a problem: I don’t want to leave.

  Since the episode with the Russian, no one has given me any trouble. My phones are selling better than at a shopping centre, and the Italians are stronger than ever. This is in part because, let’s be honest, in this dump, there’s nobody to match us: there are many of us and we’re rich, powerful and smart. Even the guys from ETA respect us.

  The Europeans in this prison don’t cut too fine a figure: the English are good at distilling moonshine but as dull as a Latin Mass; the Russians, who are supposed to be cluey con artists, are keeping their heads low after their chief meathead’s pathetic showing…The worst are the Spaniards with long sentences who have jobs in here: they’re a bunch of worthless informers, and after thirty years inside have at most three teeth apiece. We Italians, on the other hand, are well organised with codes and rules—basically the complete opposite of what we’re like on the outside. We’re the best smugglers, we’re the best poker players, and our names are always in the papers. We’re the aristocrats; the rest of the inmates come to us for everything. We even write their love letters.

  We only have to rely on others for a few items. Drugs, for instance. The South Americans have the monopoly on cocaine: one guy in here sent five kilos of the stuff to the judge who convicted him, just to spite him. The Arabs deal in hash. For heroin, it’s the Turks, but they only deal on the outside. Heroin has no place in here. It’s a drug for losers. Soft drugs are the start of something messy, for sure, but they’re not connected with so much drama. Heroin annihilates you, it extinguishes you, takes away your dignity, makes you unpresentable. There’s very little of it in circulation.

  ‘I see you,’ says the Little Prince, who has come to play poker at the Italian table. He’s the only foreigner we’ll accept because he sells drugs to us. He’s under thirty,
tall and elegant, with a long, dark face and an actor’s good looks. He really does look like a desert prince and he is, in fact, rolling in money. He’s crap at poker, though—any time he has a good hand he goes all red in the face. He loses twenty or thirty million lire a day and just laughs it off. His uncle provides petrol to the drug dealers back in his country, he owns all the service stations from Ceuta to Rabat, along the main trade route for hash.

  You make a lot of useful friendships in prison.

  ‘I fold,’ I say, putting my cards down on the table. I’ve got to meet with don Juan, who will be handing over a bunch of mobile phones. This is strange. Tomorrow Monica is supposed to visit, and that would be an ideal time for the delivery. Usually I arrive in the visiting room with my bag of stuff—some food so she and I can eat lunch together, that sort of thing—and when don Juan comes to get me at the end of the visit he puts the phones in the bag. Then he pretends to search me, and that’s that.

  So why has he brought the delivery forward to today?

  I bring Toc-toc along, who has become my official translator—I’m still pretending not to know Spanish. This way, once in a while, someone lets something slip in my presence. And in prison, information is gold.

  ‘Here you go,’ says don Juan, handing me a bag with six mobile phones. He’s looking at Toc-toc, puzzled—don Juan knows I speak his language, so he’s wondering why I’ve brought my translator.

  I take a quick look around. There are at least two CCTV cameras.

  Why is this arsehole is trying to frame me? Did Monica not transfer his payment for this month?

  I don’t reach for the bag, and I give him a dirty look.

  ‘Huh?’ He furrows his brow. ‘These are the ones you asked for.’

  Toc-toc begins faithfully translating but I gesture to him to keep quiet. This little farce is getting on my nerves and I need to think fast.

  ‘Come on, then. Hurry up, before someone comes,’ don Juan urges me. He’s starting to look around, too, acting all on edge. He really is trying to frame me. I knew it.