a few words Sierra showed him to a little room communicating with the main hall and then came back to us. ‘Papi, let me embrace you. I’m delighted to be able to do you and your friend a very good turn. You’re both of you down for internment … No, let me finish. You’re down for life, Papillon; and Dega, you’re down for five years. You got any cash?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then give five hundred francs apiece and tomorrow morning you’ll be sent to hospital. You for dysentery. And you, Dega, you must bang on the door during the night – or better still, let someone call the screw and ask for the orderly, because Dega’s asthma’s killing him. I’ll look after the rest of it. There’s just one thing I ask of you, Papillon, and that is to give me fair warning if you clear out: I’ll be there when you say. They’ll be able to keep you in the hospital for a month, at a hundred francs a week each. You must move fast.’
Fernandez came out of the little room and in front of us he handed Sierra five hundred francs. Then I went in, and when I came out I gave him not a thousand but fifteen hundred francs. He refused the five hundred. I did not like to press him. He said, ‘This dough you’re giving me’s for the screw. I don’t want anything for myself. We’re friends, aren’t we?’
The next day Dega, Fernandez and I were in an enormous cell in the hospital. Dega was hurried in during the middle of the night. The attendant in charge of the ward was a man of thirty-five called Chatal. He knew all about us three from Sierra. When the doctor came round he was to show a motion that would make me look like I was falling apart with amoebas. Ten minutes before the inspection he was to burn a little sulphur for Dega and make him breathe the gas with a towel over his head. Fernandez had an enormously swollen face: he had pierced the skin inside his cheek and had blown as hard as he could for an hour. He had done it so conscientiously that the swelling closed one eye. The cell was on the first floor and there were about seventy patients in it, many of them dysentery cases. I asked Chatal where Julot was. He said, ‘In the building just over the way. You want me to tell him something?’
‘Yes. Tell him Papillon and Dega are here; ask him to show himself at the window.’
The attendant could come and go as he liked. All he had to do was to knock at the ward door and an Arab would open it. The Arab was a turnkey, a convict acting as an auxiliary to the warders. There were chairs on the right and the left of the door, and three warders sat there, rifles on their knees. The bars over the windows were lengths of railway line: I wondered how one could ever get through them. I sat there at the window.
Between our building and Julot’s there was a garden full of pretty flowers. Julot appeared at a window: he had a slate in his hand, and he had chalked BRAVO on it. An hour later the attendant brought me a letter from him. It said, ‘I’m trying to get into your ward. If I fail, try to get into mine. The reason is you’ve got enemies in your ward. So it seems you’re interned? Keep your heart up: we’ll do them in the eye yet.’
Julot and I were very close to one another because of that business at Beaulieu, where we had suffered together. Julot specialized in the use of a wooden mallet, and that was why they called him the hammer-man. He would drive up to a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the day, when all the finest jewels were on show in their cases. Someone else would be at the wheel, and they’d pull up with the engine running. Julot hopped out with his mallet, smashed the window with one blow, grabbed as many jewel-cases as he could hold and darted back into the car, which shot away with a scream of tyres. He brought it off in Lyons, Angers, Tours and Le Havre, and then he had a go at a big Paris shop, at three in the afternoon, getting away with jewels to the value of close on a million. He never told me how or why he was identified. He was sentenced to twenty years and he escaped at the end of four. And as he told us, it was in coming back to Paris that he was arrested: he was looking for his fence, so as to kill him, for the fence had never given Julot’s sister the large sum he owed him. The fence saw him prowling in the street where he lived and tipped off the police. Julot was picked up and he went back to Guiana with us.
It was a week now that we had been in hospital. Yesterday I gave Chatal two hundred francs: that was the weekly price for keeping both of us. By way of making ourselves popular we gave tobacco to the people who had nothing to smoke. A sixty-year-old tough guy from Marseilles, one Carora, had made friends with Dega. He was his adviser. Many times a day he told him that if he had plenty of money and it was known in the village (the French papers gave the news about all the important cases), then it was much better for him not to escape, because the freed convicts would kill him for his charger. Old Dega told me about his conversations with old Carora. It was in vain that I said the antique was certainly no sort of use, since he had stayed here for twenty years: he paid no attention. The old man’s tales made a great impression on Dega, and although I kept his courage up as well as I could it was heavy going.
I sent a note to Sierra asking him to let me see Galgani. It didn’t take long. Galgani was in hospital the next day, but in an unbarred ward. How was I to set about giving him back his charger? I told Chatal it was absolutely necessary for me to talk to Galgani: I let him imagine we were preparing a break. He told me he could bring him at five to twelve on the nose. Just as the guard was being changed he would bring him up on to the verandah to talk to me through the window; and he’d do it for nothing. Galgani was brought to me at the window at noon: straight away I put his charger into his hands. He stood there before me and wept. Two days later I had a magazine from him with five thousand-franc notes in it and the single word, Thanks.
Chatal passed me the magazine; and he had seen the money. He did not mention it, but I wanted to give him some: he would not take it. I said, ‘We want to get out. Would you like to come with us?’
‘No, Papillon, I’m fixed elsewhere. I don’t want to try to escape for five months, when my mate will be free. The break will be better prepared that way, and it’ll be more certain. Being down for internment, I know you’re in a hurry: but getting out of here, with all these bars, is going to be very difficult. Don’t count on me to help you – I don’t want to risk my job. Here I can wait in peace until my friend comes out.’
‘OK, Chatal. It’s better to speak straight. I won’t ever talk to you about this again.’
‘But still,’ he said, ‘I’ll carry notes for you and deliver messages.’
‘Thanks, Chatal.’
That night we heard bursts of machine-gun fire. Next day we heard it was the hammer-man who had got away. God be with him: he was a good friend. He must have seen a chance and made the most of it. So much the better for him.
Fifteen years later, in 1948, I was in Haiti, and there, together with a Venezuelan millionaire, I was working out a deal with the chief of the casino for a contract to run the gambling in those parts. One night I came out of a club where we had been drinking champagne, and one of the girls who was with us – coal-black, but as well brought up as the daughter of a good French provincial family – said to me, ‘My grandmother’s a voodoo priestess, and she lives with an old Frenchman. He escaped from Cayenne. He’s been with us now for fifteen years, and he’s almost always drunk, Jules Marteau is his name.’
I sobered up instantly. ‘Chick, you take me to your grandma’s right away.’
She spoke to the cab-driver in Haitian patois and he drove off at full speed. We passed a night-bar, still open and all lit up. ‘Stop.’ I went in, bought a bottle of Pernod, two of champagne and two of local rum. ‘Let’s go.’ We reached a pretty little red tiled white house on the beach. The sea almost lapped its steps. The girl knocked and knocked, and first there came out a big black woman with completely white hair. She was wearing a wrapper that came down to her ankles. The two women spoke in patois and then she said, ‘Come in, Monsieur: the house is all yours.’ An acetylene lamp lit up a very clean room, filled with birds and fishes. ‘Would you like to see Julot? He’s just coming. Jules! Jules! Here’s someone who wants to see you.’
An old man appeared, barefoot and wearing striped blue pyjamas that reminded me of our prison uniform. ‘Why, Snowball, who can be coming to see me at this time of night? Papillon! No! It can’t be true!’