Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (40 page)

But he did not say that, and why not? Because in his conscience he did not fully believe in his brief, and because he must have begun asking himself questions about the honesty of the pigs who had put it together.

The trial was stopped, and they ordered a supplementary inquiry,
the second in this case
.

One of the newspapers said, “Such a lack of conviction is most unusual.”

Of course the supplementary inquiry provided
no new facts whatsoever
. Corsican Roger? Of course he was never found. During this further inquiry the
Gardes republicains
played it straight; when they were asked about the incident in July they gave evidence against Mayzaud. In any case, how could a man who proclaimed his innocence, and proved it logically, and felt the court favorably inclined toward him, how could this man throw the whole thing up and suddenly say, “I was there but I wasn’t the one who fired; it was Corsican Roger?”

And what about the other trial, Papi? The last, the decisive hearing: there where the dry guillotine began to work, there where at twenty-five your youth and your faith in life received the great hammer blow of a life sentence; where Mayzaud, sure of himself once more, apologized to the prosecuting counsel and admitted having made a mistake in July; where you shouted at him, “I’ll rip off your mask, Mayzaud!”.... do you really want to hive through all that again?

Do you really want to see that courtroom again, and that gray, unhappy day? How many times do I have to tell you that thirtysix years have gone by since then? Do you want to feel that savage blow on the jaw again, the swipe that forced you to struggle for thirty-six years to be able to sit on this bench in the Boulevard de Clichy, in your Montmartre? Yes, indeed; I want to go down those first steps of the ladder that took me to the very bottom of the pit of human degradation, I want to go down them one by one again, so as to have a better notion of the road I traveled.

How different it was when I entered the second courtroom, a good-looking boy in a perfectly cut double-breasted suit. In the first place the sky was so low and rainy they had to light the chandeliers. This time everything was draped in red, blood-red. Carpets, hangings, judges’ robes--as if they had all been dipped in the basket that holds the heads of guillotined men. This time the judges were not about to go off for their holidays; they had just returned from them; it was not the same as July.

The old hands of the law courts, the attorneys and magistrates and so on, know better than anyone how the weather, the time of the year, the character of the presiding judge, his mood that day, the mood of the prosecuting counsel and the jury, the defendant’s and his lawyers’ fitness--their form--can sometimes influence the scales of justice.

This time the president did not pay me the compliment of asking me to explain my case myself; he was quite satisfied with the monotonous voice of the clerk of the court reading out the indictment.

The twelve bastards who made up the jury had brains as damp and dreary as the weather; you could see that in their moist, dull, haif-witted eyes. They lapped up the baloney of the indictment.

There was absolutely nothing human about the prosecuting counsel.

I felt all this the moment I glanced quickly round the court. And I had sized it up exactly; during the two days the trial lasted they hardly let me speak at all.

And now came the same statements, the same evidence, as in July. No point in going over it in detail; it was the same party beginning all over again with the one difference that, if I felt outraged, and if I sometimes burst out, they shut me up at once.

There was only one really new fact, the appearance of the taxi driver Lellu Fernand, the witness for my alibi, who had not had time to give his evidence before the postponement in July--the only witness the pigs had never been able to find: a myth, according to them.

Yet he was an essential witness for me, because he stated that when he went into the Iris Bar saying “There’s just been a shot,”
I was there
.

They accused him of being a put-up witness.

Here, on the green bench, thirty-six years later, fury seized hold of me again; I felt neither the cold nor the drizzle that had begun to fall.

Once again I saw the boss of the Iris Bar come into the witness box and state that I could not have been in his place when Lellu came in to say there had been a shot outside, because two weeks before he had forbidden me to enter his bar. That meant I was such a bloody fool that in a job as serious as this, with my freedom and perhaps my life at stake, the alibi I gave involved a place where I was not allowed to go! And his waiter confirmed his evidence. Naturally they forgot to add that permission to stay open until five in the morning was a favor granted by the police, and that if they told the truth their closing time would be brought back to two o’clock. The boss was defending his till and the waiter his tips.

Maître Raymond Hubert did all he could, and so did Maître Beffey--a Maître Beffey so disgusted that he reached the point of open war with Mayzaud, who, in confidential police reports, tried to damage his standing as a lawyer by giving details of sexual matters that had nothing to do with the case.

Now it was the end, I was the last to speak. What could I say? “I’m innocent. I’ve been framed by the police. That’s all.”

The jury and the court withdrew. An hour later they returned and I stood up while they went back to their places. Then in his turn the president rose: he was about to read the sentence. “Prisoner at the bar, stand up.”

And so firmly did I believe I was in the court, there under the trees in the Boulevard de Clichy, that I jumped to my feet, forgetting that my legs were pinned against the back of the bench, which made me fall back on my ass.

So it was sitting, not standing as I ought to have been, that there under the boulevard trees in 1967, I heard the toneless voice of the president who, in October, 1931, pronounced this sentence: “You are condemned to penal servitude for life. Guards, take the prisoner away.”

I was just about to hold out my hands; but there was no one to put on the handcuffs; there were no
Gardes républicains
beside me. There was no one except a poor old woman curled up at the far end of the bench, with newspapers on her head to protect her from the cold and the rain.

I untwisted my legs. Standing at last, I let them get over their stiffness and then, lifting the papers, I put a hundred-franc note into the hands of this old woman, sentenced to extreme poverty for life. For me, “life” had hasted only fourteen years.

And still keeping under the trees in the middle of the Boulevard de Clichy, I walked along to Place Blanche, pursued by the last image of that trial--myself standing to receive the unbelievable blow that wiped me out of Montmartre, my Montmartre, for nearly forty years.

I had scarcely reached that wonderful square before the magic lantern went out, and all I saw were a few bums sitting there at the exit from the Metro, squatting with their heads on their knees, asleep.

Quickly I hooked round for a cab. There was nothing here to attract me, neither the shadow of the trees that hid the glare of artificial light nor the brilliance of the square, with its Moulin Rouge blazing away for all it was worth. One reminded me too much of my past, and the other proclaimed, “You don’t belong here anymore.” Everything, yes, everything had changed; get out quick if you don’t want to see that the memories of your twenties are dead and buried.

“Hey! Taxi! Gare de Lyon, please.”

In the suburban train that took me back to my nephew’s, I recalled all the newspaper articles that Maître Raymond Hubert had given me to read after my conviction. Not one of them could avoid speaking of the doubt that had hung over the whole case;
Le Journal
gave it the headline “A Dubious Case.”

I hooked up these papers later.

An article from
L’Humanite
of October 28 deserves to be quoted at length.

        
CHARRIERE-PAPILLON CONDEMNED TO PENAL SERVITUDE

                    
           
FOR LIFE

In spite of the persisting doubt as to the identity of the real Papillon, the jury of the Seine convicted Charrière of being the Papillon who is said to have killed Roland Lepetit on the Butte one night in March.

At the beginning of yesterday’s hearing, the witness Goldstein, upon whose statements the whole charge rests, gave evidence. This witness, who remained in continual contact with the police and whom Inspector Mayzaud said he had seen more than a hundred times since the tragedy, made his statements on three separate occasions, each deposition being more serious than the last. It is clear that this witness is a loyal helper of the criminal police.

While the witness was uttering his accusations, Charrière listened closely. When Goldstein had finished, Charrière cried, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand this Goldstein: I have never done him any harm, and yet he comes here and pours out lies whose only aim is to get me sent to penal servitude.”

Inspector Mayzaud was recalled. This time he claimed that Goldstein’s evidence was spontaneous. But skeptical smiles were seen in court.

For the prosecution Siramy made a rambling closing speech in which he observed that there were several Papilions in Montmartre and even elsewhere. Nevertheless he asked for a conviction, though without being exact as to the sentence, which he left to the jury.

Maitre Gautrat, representing the family, comically held up penal servitude as a school of “moral betterment” and then asked that Charrière should be sent there for his own good, so as to be made an “honest man.”

The counsels for the defense, Maitres Befley and Raymond Hubert, pleaded innocence. It did not follow that since Corsican Roger, otherwise Papillon, could not be found, Charrière, otherwise Papillon, was therefore guilty.

But after a long retirement the jury came back, bringing in the verdict of guilty, and the court sentenced Henri Charrière to penal servitude for life, awarding the family one franc damages.

For years and years I have asked myself this question: why did the police go all Out to screw a little crook who they
themselves
said was one of their best helpers? I have found a single answer, the only logical one: they were covering up for someone else, and this someone else was a
genuine informer
.

The next day, in the sun, I went back to Montmartre. I found my old haunts again, the Rue Tholozé and the Rue Durantin; and the market in the Rue Lepic.

I went into 26, rue Tholozé to see the concierge, pretending to be looking for someone. My concierge had been a big fat woman with a hairy wart on her cheek. She had vanished, and a woman from Brittany had taken her place.

The Montmartre of my youth had not been stolen; no, everything was there, absolutely everything; but it had all changed. The dairy had turned into a laundromat, the local bar into a drugstore, and the fruit shop into an automat.

The Bandevez Bar, at the corner of the Rue Tholozé and the Rue Durantin, used to be the meeting place for women from the post office in the Place des Abbesses; they came and drank their little glass of
blanc-cassis
, and to make them fly off the handle we solemnly reproved them for getting blind drunk while their poor husbands were working. Well, the joint was still there; but the bar had been moved to the other side, and the two tables were no longer in their right place. What’s more, the owner of the bar was a
pied noir
from Algeria, and the customers were Arabs or Spaniards or Portuguese. Where can the old boss have vanished to--the fellow from the Auvergne?

I went up the steps that lead from the Rue Tholozé to the Moulin de Ia Galette. At least the handrail had not changed; it still ended as dangerously as ever. It was here that I had picked up a poor little old man who had fallen on his nose, not seeing well enough to make out that the rail stopped so soon. I stroked the rail: I saw the scene again and I heard the old man thank me: “Young man, you are truly kind and very well brought up. I congratulate you upon it, and I thank you.” These simple words so disturbed me that I did not know how to set about picking up the gun I had dropped as I leaned over him; I did not want him to see that the good young man was maybe not as kind as all that.

Yes, my Montmartre was still there all right. It had not been stolen from me--they had just stolen the people.

That evening I went into a rough bar. I chose the oldest of all the old guys there and I said to him, “Excuse me, but do you know So-and-so?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“Inside.”

“And So-and-so?”

“Dead.”

“And So-and-so?”

“Don’t know him. But you ask a lot of questions. Who are you?”

He raised his voice a little on purpose, to attract the others’ attention. It never misses. An unknown who just walks into a men’s bar like that without introducing himself or having a friend--you have to find out what he’s after.

“My name’s Henri. I’m from Avignon and I’ve been in Colombia. That’s why you don’t know me. Be seeing you.”

I did not linger but hurried off to catch my train so I’d be sure to sleep outside the Département of the Seine. At no price did I want them to notify me that I was forbidden to be there.