Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (18 page)

An enormous corridor; steel doors right and left, each with a kind of clock over it: a clock with only one hand. Thermometers. Right away I grasped that we were in the corridor of the deepfreeze of a big slaughterhouse. We stopped at a place where there were several tables standing in the corner. “Well, now,” said the chief pig. “I’ll give you one last chance to think it over. These are meat lockers. You understand what that means? So for the last time, where have you put the jewels and the other things?”

“We know nothing about any jewels or about any ties,” said Leon.

“Okay, lawyer. You can go first.”

The cops unbolted a door and opened it wide. A kind of icy fog came out and wafted down the corridor. Having taken off Leon’s shoes and socks they shoved him in.

“Shut it quick,” said the chief, “or we’ll be frozen, too.”

“Now, Chilean. Are you going to talk, yes or no?”

“I’ve nothing to talk about.”

They opened another door and pushed the Chilean in.

“You’re the youngest, Wop [my passport had an Italian identity]. Take a good look at these thermometers. They show minus forty. That means that if you don’t talk and we stuff you in there in a sweat, after the party you’ve been through, its ten to one you’ll catch pneumonia and die in hospital in less than forty-eight hours. I’m giving you one last chance, you see: did you rob the pawnbroker’s by going through the tie shop, yes or no?”

“I’ve nothing to do with those men. I only knew one of them, long ago, and I just met them by chance in the restaurant. Ask the waiters and barmen. I don’t know whether they had anything to do with this job, but I’m dead certain I didn’t.”

“Well, Macaroni, you can perish, too. I’m sorry to think of you dying at your age; but it’s your own fault. You asked for it.”

The door opened. They shot me into the darkness, and hitting my head on an iron-hard side of beef hanging from a hook, I fell flat on the floor: it was covered with ice and hoarfrost. Immediately I felt the appalling cold seize upon my flesh, pierce right through and reach my bones. With a terrible effort I got to my knees, then, clinging to a side of beef, I stood upright. Every movement hurt, after the beating they had given us, but in spite of that I thumped my arms and rubbed my neck, cheek, nose and eyes. I tried warming my hands under my armpits. All I had on were my pants and a torn shirt. They had taken my shoes and socks, too, and the soles of my feet hurt terribly as they stuck to the ice; I felt my toes beginning to freeze.

I said to myself, “This can’t go on for more than ten minutes-- a quarter of an hour at the most. Otherwise I’ll be like one of these sides of beef: a lump of deep-frozen meat. No, no, it’s not possible. They can’t do that to us! Surely they can’t freeze us alive? Stick it out, Papi. A few minutes more and the door will open. That icy corridor will seem as warm as toast.” My arms were not working anymore; I could no longer close my hands or move my fingers; my feet were sticking to the ice and I no longer had the strength to pull them away. I felt I was going to faint, and in the space of a few seconds I saw my father’s face, then the prosecutor’s floating over it, but that was not so clear, because it merged with the faces of the cops. Three faces in one. “How strange,” I thought. “They are all alike, and they are laughing because they’ve won.” Then I passed out.

What was happening? Where was I? As I opened my eyes there was a man’s face leaning over me, a handsome face. I could not speak, because my mouth was still frozen stiff with cold, but inside my head I asked myself what I was doing here, stretched out on a table.

Big, powerful, efficient hands rubbed me all over with warm grease, and gradually I felt heat and suppleness coming back. The chief cop was watching, two or three yards away. He looked hot and bothered. Several times they opened my mouth to pour a drop of spirits into it. Once they poured too much; I choked and shot it out.

“There we are,” said the masseur. “He’s saved.”

They went on rubbing me for at least half an hour. I felt that I could talk if I wanted to, but I preferred keeping my mouth shut. I realized that over there on the right there was another body lying on a table the same height as mine. He was naked, too, and they were rubbing and massaging him. Who was it? Leon or the Chilean? There had been three of us: but with me on this table and the guy on the other, that only made two. Where was the third? The other tables were empty.

Helped by the masseur I managed to sit up, and I saw who the other one was. Pedro the Chilean. They dressed us and put us into those padded overalls specially made for men who work inside deepfreezes.

The chief pig returned to the attack. “Can you speak, Chilean?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the jewels?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“And what about you, Spaghetti?”

“I wasn’t with those men.”

“Okay.”

I slipped off the table. I could barely stand, but once I was up I felt a healthy burning on the soles of my feet. That pleased me although it hurt, and I felt the blood flowing inside me, racing round my whole body with such strength that it thumped in the farthest veins and arteries.

I thought that for one day I had gone as far in horror as possible, but I had got it wrong, quite wrong.

They put Pedro and me side by side, and the chief, who had now recovered his self-assurance, called out, “Take off their overalls.”

They took them off, and there I was, naked to the waist: straight away I started shivering with cold again.

“And now take a good look at this,
hombres
.”

From under a table they dragged a kind of rigid parcel and stood it up on end in front of us. It was a frozen corpse, as stiff as a board. Its eyes were wide open and fixed, like two marbles: it was hideous to see, terrifying. Big Leon! They had frozen him alive!

“Take a good look, horn bres,” said the chief again. “Your accomplice wouldn’t talk; so all right, we went all the way with him. Now it’s your turn, if you’re as stubborn as he was. I’ve been given orders to be merciless, because this job of yours is much too serious. The pawnshop is run by the state, and there’s an ugly rumor in the town--people think it’s a racket worked by some of the officials. So either you talk, or in half an hour you’ll be like your friend here.”

My wits had not yet come back, and the sight so churned me up that for three long seconds I felt like talking. The only thing that prevented me was that I didn’t know where the other hiding places were. They’d never believe me and I’d be in worse danger than ever.

To my utter amazement I heard a very collected voice, Pedro’s voice, say, “Come on now; you can’t frighten us with that stuff. Why, of course it was an accident--you never meant to freeze him; it was an error of judgment, that’s all; but you don’t want another error with us. One you can get away with; but three, three foreigners turned into blocks of ice, that mounts up. And I can’t see you giving airtight explanations to two different embassies. One, okay. Three, it’s too much.”

I could not help admiring Pedro’s steely nerve. Very calmly the pig looked at the Chilean, not speaking. Then, after a little pause, “You’re a crook, and that’s for sure; but I have to admit that you’ve also got guts.” Turning to the others he said, “Find them each a shirt and take them back to the prison: the judge will look after them. With brutes like this there’s no point in going on with the party--it’s a waste of time.” He turned his back and walked off.

A month later they let me out. The tie merchant admitted I had never been to his shop, which was true: the barmen stated that I had had two whiskies by myself, that I had already booked a table for one before the other two appeared, and that we had seemed very surprised to meet one another in this town. Still, they ordered me to leave the country in five days, because they were afraid that as Leon’s so-called countryman (Leon also had an Italian passport) I would go and tell the consulate what had happened.

During the inquiries, we had been brought face to face with a guy I did not know but Pedro did--the pawnshop employee who had put him on to the job. The very evening we divided up the take, this silly cunt presented a girl from an all-night bar with a splendid antique ring. The pigs were tipped off, and they had no difficulty in making him talk: that was why Big Leon and Pedro were identified so quickly. Pedro the Chilean stayed there, hooked on this business.

I took the plane with five hundred dollars in my pocket. I never went near my hiding place; it was too risky. I took stock, to see how things stood after the hideous nightmare I had just been through; the papers reckoned the pawnshop job at two hundred thousand dollars; even if they had exaggerated and doubled it, that still left a hundred thousand; so in my hole I had about thirty thousand. Since the value had been reckoned according to the amount lent on the jewels, that is to say half their real value, and if I sold them without going through a fence, then by my calculations I should be the owner of more than sixty thousand dollars! So I had what I needed for my revenge, as long as I did not break into it for living. This money was sacred; it was for a sacred purpose, and I must never use it for anything else
upon any pretext whatsoever
.

In spite of the horrible way it ended for my friend Leon, this job had been a triumph for me. Unless indeed I was forced to help the Chilean; but in a few months he was sure to send a trusted friend to collect his nest egg so he could pay his lawyer and maybe organize a break. Anyhow, that was our agreement-- each with his own hiding place so that no one of us should be connected with the fate of the others. I hadn’t been in favor of that method, but it was the customary way of working in the South American underworld--once the job was done, then each for himself and God for all.

And God for all... if it was really Him that had saved me, then He had been more than noble; He had been magnanimous. And yet God could not possibly have been the artisan of my revenge. He did not want me to take it, and that I knew. I remembered that day in El Dorado, the day before I was to be let out for good. I had wanted to thank the God of the Catholics, and in my emotion I had said to Him, “What can I do to prove that I am sincerely grateful for your kindness?” And it seemed to me that I heard the words, just as though a voice were speaking to me, “Give up your revenge.”

And I’d said no; anything else, but not that. So it could not have been God who took care of me in this business. Impossible. I’d had luck, that was all, the luck of the devil. The good Lord above had nothing to do with that kind of shit.

But the result--oh, the result was there all right, buried at the foot of an ancient tree. It was a huge weight off my mind, knowing I possessed what I needed to carry out the plan I had been feeding my heart with these last fourteen years.

How I hoped the war had spared the villains who sent me down! Now all I had to do, while I waited for my D-Day, was to look for a job and live quietly until I could go and dig up my treasure.

The plane was flying at a great height in a brilliant sky, way above a carpet of snow-white clouds. It was purity up here, and I thought of my people, my father, my mother, my family and of my childhood bathed in light. Beneath that white cumulus there were dirty clouds, a grayish, unclean rain--a fine image of the earthly world: that desire for power, that desire to prove to others that you are better than them, that dry, heartless desire you see in the kind of people who do not give a damn if they destroy a human being as long as by doing so they gain something or prove something.

8

Caracas again. It was with real pleasure that I walked the streets of this great living city once more.

I had been free twenty months now, and yet I still hadn’t become a member of this community. It was all very well to say, “All you have to do is get a job,” but besides not being able to find any suitable work, I had trouble speaking Spanish, and many doors were closed to me because of this. So I bought a textbook, shut myself in my room and determined to spend however many hours it took to learn Spanish. I grew angrier and angrier; I could not manage to hit the pronunciation, and after a few days I flung the book to the other end of the room and went back to the streets and the cafes, looking for someone I knew who could find me something to do.

More and more Frenchmen were coming over from Europe, sickened by its wars and political upheavals. Some were on the run from an arbitrary justice that varied according to the political climate of the moment; others were looking for peace and quiet--a beach where they could breathe without someone coming tip every other moment to take their pulse.

These people were not like Frenchmen, though they were French. They had nothing in common with Papa Charrière or any of the people I had known in my childhood. When I was with them, I found they had ideas so different and so twisted in comparison with those of my young days that I was quite at sea. Often I’d say to them, “I believe that maybe you shouldn’t forget the past, but that you should stop talking about it. Is it possible that even now, after the war is over, there are supporters of Nazism among you? I’ll tell you something: when you talk about the Jews, it’s like seeing one race spew out hatred against another race.