Ascension Day

by John Matthews

  Jac approached the main gate of Libreville. Fourteen foot high, matching the perimeter fence, with another three-foot of rolled razor wire on top.

  After announcing his meeting with Chief Warden Haveling and handing over his card, Jac checked his watch while the guard phoned through for confirmation. Four minutes late; not too bad. But from the sprawl of the place, it looked like it was going to take him another four or five to actually get to Haveling’s office.

  The guard returned, handed him back his card, and pointed along the shale road ahead.

  ‘Ignore the first three buildings, two one side, one the other – all single storey – and after a lil’ more than a mile, you’ll see the main building. Can’t miss it. Rises up four floors out o’ nowhere. Visitors’ parking on the right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘…Three thousand eight-hundred inmates – forty per cent increase since the late fifties, which led to three new blocks being built in the grounds. All high risk or death row prisoners are held in the main block, with time allowed out of holding cells for them just two hours a day, unless they have allocated duties or privileges – though that never includes field work. Their work assignments are again all within the main block, which is like a fortress.’

  Of the half-dozen or so workers that Jac passed that troubled to look his way, at best they were sullenly curious, at worst surly and menacing; no smiles. It was difficult for Jac to believe that these were the best of the bunch.

  ‘Sixty-one per cent African-American inmates, sixteen per cent mixed race, and twenty-three per cent white. And with the guards, that ratio is reversed. Only nineteen per cent are black or mixed race – though a marked improvement on twenty or thirty years ago. Take the clock back to the early sixties, and there wasn’t a single black guard.’

  But as Jac entered deeper into the bowels of Libreville’s main block, he began to appreciate the difference. Here, at best the stares were surly, at worst taunting and disturbingly intense; and there were a few smiles, though invariably leering and slanted, as if fuelled by madness, or challenging, as if viewing him as prey.

  Jac felt that the stifling oppression and heat of the block – unless he was imagining it – seemed to be getting more intense as he progressed, pressing heavier on him with each guard check-point and heavy steel gate opened and bolted shut behind him. And as a few sexual taunts were thrown at him as he passed the cells – ‘Like the way you walk, pretty boy’, ‘Sweet ass – I could fuck you right through that Armani’ – he felt his face tingle and burn.

  He was probably still flushed, agitated, his shirt sticking to his skin, as he was ushered into the contrasting coolness of Warden Haveling’s wood-panelled office. But he knew immediately – unless Haveling had taken to appearing as surly as his prisoners or was far more upset by his tardiness than he’d envisaged – that something serious was wrong.

  It was that time of day.

  Leonard Truelle nursed the two fingers of Jim Beam between his hands with due reverence, as if warming his hands through the glass. Then, with a faint gleam of expectation in his eyes, brought it to his lips and felt its warmth and aroma trickle slowly down. He closed his eyes in appreciation. Pure nectar. With a part sigh, part murmur as he felt its after-burn, he set the glass slowly down.

  The hand clamping over his came an inch before the tumbler touched the table, and he flicked his eyes open again, startled.

  ‘What the… oh, oh… it’s you.’

  ‘Now that’s no way to greet a long-lost friend.’

  ‘You startled me, that’s all. Probably because it has been so long.’ Nelson Malley, Nel-M, or just plain Nel. Almost five years now, but it wasn’t a face he was ever likely to forget. There was a tinge of grey now in Malley’s tight-knit curls, and it looked as if his mahogany skin tone was becoming greyer each time, as if someone had thrown potash in his face which hadn’t completely washed off.

  ‘Anyway, nice to see you again.’ Nel-M gave Truelle’s hand a couple more squeezes – though to Truelle they felt threatening rather than reassuring – and as Nel-M felt the trembling there, he smiled. ‘Is that because of me? I’m touched. Or because you haven’t kicked this stuff yet?’ Nel-M flicked his hand towards the whisky tumbler as he lifted it away.

  Truelle didn’t want to let Nel-M inside his head, show weakness either way. ‘Expecting Sharon Stone any minute, and, you know, first dates. Always nervous.’ Truelle forced a weak smile. ‘I might need some Dutch courage to actually get to fuck her.’

  Nel-M smiled back, but his charcoal eyes fixed steadily on Truelle showed no hint of warmth; as always, icy and bottomless, as if they were independent monitors searching for weak points to signal what his next move should be. They cut Truelle to the core, ran a shiver up his spine.

  This drink now was part of a ritual, every Tuesday and Friday night when he left work. One glass of Jim Beam slowly and reverently sipped – then home. Before when he’d been on the wagon, he’d always felt in danger that if he had just one drink, he wouldn’t be able to stop. And on a couple of occasions, that was exactly how he’d started again. This was his way of proving that he was in control, could stop at just one drink – but he was damned if he was going to share his innermost secrets with Nelson Malley. He could feel Nel-M’s eyes still on him as he looked down thoughtfully at his glass, and shrugged to ease his discomfort.

  ‘Look, if you wanted something, why didn’t you come by my office – like most normal people?’

  ‘Normal people?’ Nel-M raised one eyebrow and smiled slyly. ‘Bit of a contradiction in terms in your line of work, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to rob any of your patients of their precious fifty minutes or, God forbid, get seen walking in and confused with all those crazies. I got a reputation to uphold.’ The smile broadened, then died just as quickly. ‘But you’ve probably guessed the reason I’m here now. No doubt you’ve seen or read the news: Durrant’s execution has been set. Only forty-seven days left now, and counting.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve read it.’ Truelle kept his eyes on his tumbler, didn’t want to risk what Malley might see in them.

  ‘And, well, we just wanted to make sure that you were still cool about everything. No last minute stabs of conscience.’

  Truelle smiled drolly. ‘We – as in you and Addy Roche?’

  ‘As in.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m cool.’ Truelle nodded, still staring at his glass. ‘Resigned to’ or ‘numbed by’ would probably have been more accurate expressions. He’d shed so many tears of conscience over Durrant that now there was nothing left. ‘I got rid of all my demons years ago.’

  Though looking at the tumbler now, he could almost still picture it being refilled time and time again, until he’d stagger from the bar in a daze. If he’d had a problem before Durrant, the aftermath was without doubt the main event. He’d drunk half the state dry before resorting to more AA meetings and colleague’s couches than he dared remember. But the problem was that he could never tell them what lay at the root of what was troubling him. Never.

  ‘You’re sure now that you’re cool about it?’ Nel-M pressed, laying his hand back on Truelle’s. ‘No recriminations?’

  Truelle shook his head and looked back at Nel-M. ‘I’m sure. No recriminations. Not any more.’

  But Nel-M kept his hand there, squeezing bit by bit harder as he stared into Truelle’s eyes, searching for doubt. He stopped short of a complete crush, and although he couldn’t discern anything from Truelle’s eyes – too lifeless, dulled by the years of drink – he could feel the tell-tale trembling back in his hand.

  ‘Though nice to know you still have feelings for me,’ Nel-M said, giving the hand one last pat before he lifted his away and, in the same motion – before Truelle could object – waved towards the barman.

  ‘And another of the same for my friend here.’

  Nel-M slapped some money on the counter and slapped Truelle on the shoulder. ‘Remember – stay cool.’ Then, with one last taunting smile, he hea
ded out.

  Truelle hardly acknowledged him, his eyes fixed on the second drink as if it was poison. He could feel the trembling in his hands reverberating now through his entire body. Of all the times he could do with a second drink, it was now. But he was damned if he was going to fall off of the wagon just for Nel-M. And the fact that Nel-M had bought the drink made it all the worse – it would be like supping with the devil.

  He knocked back the last of his first drink, closing his eyes again as he felt it trickle down. In control. Still in control. Then, bringing the tumbler down with a firm slam on the bar counter, he walked out.

  3

  4 days later

  ‘So, how was our good friend Truelle?’

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ Nel-M said. ‘After he got over the shock of seeing me.’

  ‘So, no signs of him falling apart?’

  ‘None that I could see, beyond the normal PMT – post-Malley tension.’ Nel-M chuckled briefly. ‘He claims that he exorcised the demons over Durrant years ago. And apparently he’s also kicked the demon drink. Truelle was reluctant to tell me himself – but I checked back with the barman after he left: it appears he goes in there only twice a week and has just a single Jim Beam each time. And he left the extra drink I bought him.’

  ‘Impressive. And the gambling?’

  ‘Unless he’s using a bookie or is into some private games we just don’t know about – looks like he’s clean there too.’

  ‘Sound almost too good to be true. Two vices overcome.’

  The voice at the other end was punctuated by laboured breathing from years of emphysema and, as a chortle was attempted, it lapsed into a small coughing fit.

  Adelay Roche, Louisiana’s second richest man, twenty-ninth nationally. He’d earned his main money in petro-chemicals and refining, and his detractors claimed that his emphysema was God’s punishment for poisoning the lungs of millions of others; whereas his supporters said that it was brought on by the death of his beautiful young wife twelve years ago. As many years ago now as the age-gap between them.

  VR, Vader-Raider, he was unaffectionately nick-named, homage to his breathing problems and his fierce reputation for corporate raiding. On occasion, he’d ask people what the VR stood for, and, not wishing to upset him, they’d either claim that they didn’t know or, with a tight smile, ‘Perhaps “Very Rich”.’ Roche would nod knowingly. ‘That’s nice.’ He’d long ago heard what the initials stood for, but couldn’t resist watching them shuffle awkwardly around the issue.

  ‘And what about Raoul Ferrer?’ Roche enquired.

  ‘I haven’t caught up with him yet. I thought I should speak to you again first.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. He could be more of a worry. Two money demands now. No knowing when we might get another.’

  ‘True.’ Nel-M didn’t say any more, just let the steady cadence of Roche’s breathing get there on its own.

  ‘If that’s going to be an ongoing situation, then we might have to nip it in the bud. Let me know how you read it once you’ve met with him.’

  ‘Will do.’ As much of a green light as he was going to get from Roche. He might have to nudge that situation along himself.

  ‘Oh, and there’s a new lawyer been handed Durrant’s final plea at Payne, Beaton & Sawyer. Name of Jac McElroy. Doesn’t have too much experience, from what I hear – so looks like end-of-the-line throwing-in-the-towel time. Otherwise they’d have given it to someone with a bit more weight. But warrants watching all the same.’

  A small shudder would run through Jac’s body at times; a small electrical surge buzzing through him for no reason, often in the dead of night and just when he was on the verge of sleep, snapping him back awake again.

  The same chilling shudder that had run through him when his mother’s voice had lifted from her weary, trembling body into the silent, expectant rooms of the sprawling Rochefort farmhouse they’d called home for the past nineteen years, to tell him that his father was dead. That had been daytime, hot and sunny, though the large house had never felt colder when that news, even though half-expected, dreaded for so long, finally came from the hospital.

  And he’d felt that same shudder even more in the following months: at his father’s funeral, when the bank foreclosed and the bailiffs came, with his mother’s muffled sobbing through walls or half-closed doors, or after his father had appeared in a dream, smiling warmly, telling him everything was okay. Lived before I died. Or sometimes for no reason that he could fathom, as if telling him there was something he might have missed. Stay awake for another hour staring at the ceiling and you might just work out what it was. Some magical way of getting your family out of this mess. After all, you’re the man of the house now.

  The Rochefort artist’s retreat had been his father’s dream for many a year, long before he finally summoned up the courage to pack in his job at a small design and print company and transplant his family from a cold, grey Glasgow to the sun-dappled vineyards and wheat-fields of the Saintonge. And now the dream had died along with his father, as his father in his fading years knew all too well it would, many saying the money problems had in fact caused his illness: income dwindling, financial problems mounting and banks pressing in pace with the cancer eating him away; a race as to which would hit the tape first.

  But it was difficult for Jac to get angry with his father for the financial fall-out after his death because, as his father’s good friend Archie Teale had said, unlike most people he’d actually lived his dream, and Jac’s abiding memory of that period was of an almost idyllic childhood: looking over his father’s shoulder as he’d bring to life with his paintbrush a patchwork quilt of vines, lavender and sunflower fields spread before them; Jac sitting on the hillside by the L-shaped farmhouse, the sun hot on his back, his father in the courtyard below sweeping one arm towards the same patchwork landscape as he instructed a group of eight by their easels – his father living his dream and the rest of the family happily riding along in the wake of that glow; powder-white sand slipping egg-timer slow through Jac’s fingers on an Isle de Rey beach, or chasing small fishes through its shallows, his father telling him if he ran fast enough and scooped down quick enough with his cupped hands, he might finally catch one. But, of course, he was never able to.

  Those had been the overriding images in Jac’s mind from those years, rather than remembering his father tired and wasting away, his mother weeping and the court’s gavel and bailiffs’ knocks that had marked their final days in France.

  Jac saw his father as some fallen-through-no-fault-of-his-own hero, rather than the failure that others, particularly his aunt, had labelled him.

  And so as the months passed the brief shudders in the dead of night became less frequent, then finally one day stopped, and Jac was able to sleep easy.

  So when that brief shudder hit Jac again, snapping him awake in the dead of night after he’d visited Larry Durrant for the first time, it caught him unawares.

  He stared up at the ceiling long and hard, wondering what it could be: that one vital detail or clue he’d missed reading Durrant’s trial files? A hint at how to handle this fresh problem with the attempted break-out and the injured guards? But all that lifted from the muted streetlight orange-greys on his ceiling was the last image to hit him before he’d awoken: Durrant in his cell, lonely and afraid, sweat beads massed on his forehead with the crippling fear that he was about to die – the antithesis of the cool and distant, guarded front he’d shown to Jac – reaching out to say something, but the words never forming in his mouth.

  But with the e-mail that was waiting on Jac’s computer when he switched it on early the next morning, Jac wondered if it was some kind of strange premonition.

  Only two lines, his blood ran cold as he read it, a nervous tingle running down his spine.

  Looked like he might have a breakthrough with Durrant before he’d hardly started.

  4

  ‘Whadya call that, fuckhead? I could cue a better shot with my dick.’
<
br />   ‘I didn’t see you do so well with that last yellow.’

  ‘That’s ’cause there were two other fuckin’ balls in the way, Stevie Wonder. This one, you had a clear shot.’

  Nel-M had arranged to meet Raoul Ferrer in a bar in Algiers.

  Ten years ago it was a no-go area day or night, but now, with a string of new bars and restaurants nestling in the shadows of the dockside warehouses, according to local city guides it was now inadvisable to walk around only after midnight.

  They’d been perched up at the bar only a few minutes when the argument erupted at the pool table a couple of yards to their side. As the insults picked up steam and the two opponents moved closer, one of them raising his cue stick threateningly, Nel-M shifted from his bar stool.

  ‘Let’s get outta here.’

  ‘No, no. Wait a minute,’ Raoul said. ‘This is just gettin’ interesting.’

  One thing Nel-M hadn’t considered, looking at the warped leer on Raoul’s face. The excitement of the fight.

  ‘Look, I haven’t come here to watch a bunch of goons fight. We got business to discuss.’ Nel-M turned and took a pace away.

  Raoul got up and lightly tugged at his arm. ‘Come on, man. Won’t take a minute to kick-off, by the looks of it.’

  Nel-M noticed the man with the raised cue stick, a biker with wild red hair, flinch and fleetingly gaze their way. He hoped Raoul hadn’t read anything into it.

  ‘You wanna watch that wise mouth.’ Red-hair waved the cue stick more threateningly at his opponent. ‘Otherwise one day someone will bust it wide open.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ His opponent stepped forward, taunting, challenging. ‘Will probably be the best fuckin’ shot you’ve had all night, too.’

  They were running out of script. One more minute and Raoul would guess that something was wrong, that it was all staged.