Guilty Wives (17 page)

I WAS LED
into the anteroom, where I joined the three others. They’d had similar partings with their families, as indicated by their red, swollen eyes and lifeless expressions. They didn’t even have enough energy to hate me, at least not for the moment.

The trial was over. It had lasted just longer than three weeks. Our forensic experts and investigators had been given their opportunity to testify. The judges tolerated their testimony but didn’t appear to be listening much at all. They just had to be able to say they gave them their chance to speak.

The court deliberated for two days in closed session. I can’t imagine what took them so long. My guess was that the sentencing, not the verdicts, had tied them up.

In the courtroom, the three other husbands were there with their children. Jeffrey had taken Richie and Elena and left the Palais de Justice; they were on their way to Orly Airport for a flight back to Switzerland. That was my request. I didn’t want any of them to see me like this.

The presiding judge adjusted his microphone and cleared his throat.

“Today, we close one chapter and begin another. What will remain in history as among our republic’s most trying challenges, suffering the loss of a beloved president, has in some ways brought out the worst we have to offer. But ultimately, upheld by our republic’s resilient spirit, we will look back and see that this challenge has summoned the
best
we have to offer. We have proceeded with conviction but with compassion. We have proceeded with courage but with caution. And it is with the utmost certainty that this court believes, unanimously, that we have discovered the truth.

“The accused will stand.

“Winnie Brookes, it is the finding of this court that you are guilty as charged in the transfer judgment. You will serve a term of natural life in prison.

“Bryah Gordon, it is the finding of this court that you are guilty as charged in the transfer judgment. You will serve a term of thirty years in prison.

“Serena Schofield, it is the finding of this court that you are guilty as charged in the transfer judgment. You will serve a term of thirty years in prison.

“And Abbie Elliot, it is the finding of this court that you are guilty as charged in the transfer judgment. You will serve a term of natural life in prison.

“The prisoners will be remanded to the custody of the Minister of Justice and Liberty. With all deliberate dispatch, the prisoners will be transferred to the Women’s Institute for Justice and Reform.

“The members of this honorable court, having reached a final judgment by unanimous vote, have determined that this matter is concluded. The court stands adjourned.”

Everyone reacts differently. There’s no manual for it. Most of the spectators cheered upon the judge’s final words. Maryse Ballamont shook hands with her assistants. Winnie didn’t move. Serena’s legs nearly buckled. Bryah was the only one who actually wept.

Me, my reservoir of tears had dried up. I had exhausted every emotion of which I was capable. So, like any observer, I watched as the other women were led out and allowed one final embrace, albeit handcuffed, with their husbands and children. Reporters spilled in, now that the court had adjourned, and from a safe distance—one that was determined by the gendarmerie—they snapped photos of Bryah and Serena and Winnie with their grief-stricken families.

My family was gone. Gone for now, and gone forever. And still I couldn’t summon the energy to scream or cry. Instead, I just let my head fall back as far as it would go. I looked up to the ceiling, to beyond this courtroom.

And I burst into laughter.

IT WAS A
whir of gray outside as the bus sped along the A20 on its way toward Limoges. Gray, because the cold, dry winter had been unkind to the landscape of central France. Gray, because the concept of color had essentially disappeared for me.

The bus had a police escort, squad cars at our flanks and front and back. The
thwoop-thwoop
of the helicopter overhead competed with the sound of the bus’s engine as it coughed and struggled its way southward at high speed.

There were thirty-four of us, spread out over twenty rows and split by a single aisle down the middle. Almost three dozen of France’s newest prisoners or transferees. The worst of the worst. Killers and terrorists and sex offenders and drug dealers. An even mix of black and brown and white faces, hard-looking women with bitter eyes, their postures rigid, brimming with violence.

We were shackled at our wrists and ankles. Each row on the bus was bracketed by a steel cage that prevented prisoners from contacting those in the seats in front or behind them or across the aisle. We were caged chickens being taken to slaughter. And it smelled even worse. The odor from the lack of showers and fear-induced perspiration was almost suffocating.

“Maman! Papa!”
a woman two rows in front of me, across the aisle, called out.
“Où sont mes parents?”
Her head rolled back and forth as she moaned, pining for her parents.

In the front of the bus, Winnie stared aimlessly out the window, her washed-out expression and slumped shoulders neatly summarizing her condition. Her wrists and forearms were so bony that it was hard to imagine how the handcuffs could have restrained her. Her hair was flat and unwashed. She looked like someone had awakened her from several days’ slumber and thrown her on this bus.

I looked back over my shoulder. Near the rear of the bus, Serena sat silently, her expression hardened, as if she were willingly numbing herself. The Olympic athlete inside her was rising to the surface; she was preparing for the mental and physical task of incarceration. She had heard the same things I had about this prison.

Bryah and I were in the same row, across the aisle from one another. She looked like a child enduring a nightmare. Her eyes were wide with dread as she scanned the bus’s occupants, a sampling of the population at the maximum-security prison where we’d soon be housed. She looked far younger than her thirty-two years. She was pretty and petite and as passive as they came. A guppy tossed into a pool of barracudas.

She looked at me and said, “I can’t do this. Not for thirty years.” I could hardly hear her over the engine and the helicopter. But I didn’t need to hear the words. I could see it in her eyes, in her trembling lips. She was coming unglued.

“You don’t have to get through thirty years,” I told her. “You just have to get through today.”

“Maman! Papa!”
the woman cried out.
“Où sont mes parents?”

“Écoutez,”
hissed the woman in the seat behind Bryah. “Hey, girl.”

I would have ignored her. Avoiding provocation in French jails had become instinctive for me, natural as blinking my eyes. But Bryah turned back to the woman.

The woman was heavyset and unkempt, with thick jowls, beady eyes, and eyebrows that looked like they’d been painted on. Her accent was heavy but her English was decent. “The woman who…asks for her parents?” she said. “She
killed
her parents. She…set them on fire.”

“Oh, my God.” Bryah put her manacled hands over her face.

“Do you want to know…who
I
killed?” she asked.

“No, she doesn’t,” I called out. “Leave her alone.”

“I killed my…cell mate…at Rennes…for…
ronflemont
…for snoring.”

Bryah burst into violent sobs, her shoulders trembling.

“Do you…snore, girl?” the woman asked, putting her forehead against the steel enclosure separating her from Bryah.

“Shut up!” I said.

“She was black, like you,” the woman said to Bryah. “I like black girls.”

“Don’t listen to her,” I called to Bryah.

“Do you want to be my…cell mate, black girl?”

Bryah curled into a ball, her body still trembling. “I can’t do this!” she cried. “I want to go home! Abbie, I want to go
home!
”

“Honey, hang in there! It’s going to be okay!” I shouted, gripping the steel cage. I wanted to sound calm and reassuring but it probably came out more like a desperate plea. Because it was. This was not a good time for Bryah to come apart at the seams. If she entered the prison like this, she’d be a walking invitation to anyone looking for an easy mark, to any shark sniffing for blood in the water.

With that, Bryah lurched forward and vomited on the floor. That flipped everyone’s switch on the bus. They cheered and shouted and heckled Bryah, the weakling, the loser in the Darwinian struggle inside this bus.

The fat woman behind Bryah didn’t let up. If anything, Bryah’s vulnerability seemed to encourage her. She banged the steel cage separating her from Bryah as though it were a drum.
“Une jolie fille comme vous serez très populaire dans ici,”
she taunted.

A pretty girl like you will be very popular in here.

“Shut up!
Taisez-vous!
” I yelled at the woman, banging on my own steel cage. I was only adding to the commotion, which had reached near-deafening levels.

“Vous pouvez fendre votre gorge avec ces menottes,”
she said to Bryah.

You can slit your throat with these handcuffs.

My blood went cold. She was explaining how Bryah could save herself the burden of prison and end her life right here on this bus.

“Vous avez tué le président!”
the fat woman shouted for the whole bus to hear.
“Quelqu’un va vous tuer.”

You killed the president. Someone will kill you.

“Shut up!” I cried. “Bryah—Bryah! Look at me. Bryah—”

“Fendez-vous votre gorge!”
the fat woman yelled. It became a chant on the bus. “Slit your throat! Slit your throat!” It was like a game for these animals. Who would be the first to break one of the newcomers?

Bryah, at this point, had her face between her knees, her shackled hands over her head. Trying desperately to hide, to drown out everything else. I don’t think she even heard my words of encouragement over the thunderous heckling and whistles and jeers.

She would need help in prison. We all would. Because what the fat woman had said was true.

Prisoners or not, most of these women were still French citizens. We killed their president. Somebody, at some point in this jungle we were about to enter, would try to do the same to us.

THE BUS FINALLY
left the A20, slowly navigated the roundabout—a traffic circle from which numerous roads branched off—and took a local road. As we neared our destination, the guards, safely ensconced behind a secure door at the front of the bus, insisted on quiet.

Bryah hadn’t spoken for some time. An unceasing tremor vibrated throughout her body. Otherwise, her glassy eyes just gazed forward.

The bus rolled up to a set of large, ornate gates, built in a bygone era. From a small booth raised ten feet off the ground, like a tollbooth on stilts, a prison guard nodded at the driver and punched a button that opened the gates. I watched them close behind us as we entered the facility. I was now in prison.

The bus passed an open area that you’d call a prison yard, if a yard consisted solely of asphalt. It was like a sidewalk the size of half a football field. About a hundred women, most huddling in groups, most smoking cigarettes. Some were kicking around a soccer ball. Others strolled the perimeter, next to the twenty-foot fences.

The prison was mostly brick, five stories high, the top four of which housed the inmates. It was divided into four blocks—A through D—one of which we approached as the bus came to a stop. They were already greeting us, waving pieces of cloth through the barred windows or dumping garbage to the ground.

The four guards on the bus rose. Two got out. The other two unlocked the cage separating them from us and ordered us to our feet, row by row. We got out without incident. The air outside was cool and dry. There was an aroma of food. Chicken soup, I thought.

Outside, as we marched single file toward the main building, the jeers from the prisoners through their cell windows drowned out pretty much everything else. Much of it I couldn’t make out, either because it was French spoken too quickly, French lingo I hadn’t picked up yet, or another language altogether. But I did catch a few words, like
assassins
and
le président
and
Monte Carlo.
We were clearly the star attraction of the incoming prisoners.

We walked through a small courtyard toward a nondescript building that could have been any government office. As I was in the middle of the pack, I waited outside while the first people entered the building. Guards walked alongside us, sizing us up, intimidating us. They were all women, though some of them were more masculine than many men I knew. They were dressed in navy-blue uniforms and tall black boots, and carried batons and cans of pepper spray at their waists. I looked up at the barred windows, where the prisoners continued their taunting and garbage throwing. The guards seemed oblivious to it. They probably liked it. Whatever put the newbies in their place, from the outset.

Up ahead, the same woman started wailing again—
“Où sont mes parents?”
—and her legs buckled. None of the prisoners moved. But the guards quickly took note. One of them had her baton raised before she reached the prisoner.
“Où sont mes parents?”
the prisoner cried before the guard slammed a blow across her back. She fell to the asphalt and kept up her desperate sobbing. Two of the guards kicked her repeatedly, each blow a sickening
thud
against her torso, followed by a pained grunt. They didn’t stop, even after the prisoner was quiet, motionless. They were going to kill her—

“Stop!” I shouted.

“This is…interest to you?”

I jumped at the words; a guard had snuck up from behind, suddenly only inches from me, harsh nicotine breath on my face.

“What—what?”

“This is interest to you?” She had a wide face, with a thin scar along her right eye, and a crooked nose.

“That woman—she isn’t—”

I felt a searing pain in my ribs from the end of the baton. I tried to keep my wind and my balance but failed at both. I doubled over to the ground, breathless. The prisoners, from their cell windows, roared with approval.

The guard yelled something at me but I couldn’t hear her over the shouting. I looked up at her and she swung the baton, as though it were a golf club, into my ribs again. I couldn’t breathe and tried to blink away the black spots forming before my eyes. I braced myself against the asphalt and pushed myself up. The baton slammed down on my back and I collapsed again, chin first, to the hard surface.

She was yelling again, instructing me, but I couldn’t understand her and, it was now clear, I wasn’t going to win no matter what I did. When I stayed down, she hit me. When I pushed myself up, she hit me. When I looked at her, she hit me.

She was playing to the crowd, to the prisoners peering out their cell windows and egging her on with their cheers. She batted me around as a kitten would a mouse, striking me repeatedly on my back, my arms, my legs, my ribs.

I stared at her boots, thick and black and scuffed at the toe, taking the abuse until finally another guard came over and got me to my feet.

“Ne me regardez pas!”
the first one shouted, only inches from my face. This time I caught it. Don’t look at her. That much I had figured out.

The guard stood so close to me, her nose was touching my cheek.
“Vous êtes en France et vous parlez français,”
she said.

“Je…comprends,”
I managed through halting, pained breaths. Don’t eyeball the guards, and speak French when you’re in a French prison.

Lessons I wouldn’t forget. And if I did, they’d be quick to remind me.