by Simon Toyne
I once saw two of his dogs tear a young girl to pieces. She can’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. She slipped on the icy mud on our way to the factory one morning and struggled to get up, half-starved and frozen as she was. A few of us went to help her but Samler ordered us to leave her and go to work. We heard the snarls and screams as we trudged into the factory. None of us looked around. Afterwards I was asked to tidy up the yard, a euphemism for clearing away what was left of the girl. While I was shovelling bones and mud and bloody rags into a bucket, I heard Samler remark to a guard how it was a shame that he loved his dogs too much to starve them enough to finish jobs like these properly. How does a man become like that? Was he even a man at all?
After the war, when I was preparing to write this memoir, I tried to find out something of Samler’s background and upbringing, as if something there might explain what had turned him into the creature I knew. What I discovered was banal in its ordinariness – a string of unremarkable jobs, from selling sewing machine parts to managing an abattoir – before he became a campaign advisor for the fledgling National Socialist party. This was rewarded with a commission in the rapidly expanding German Army when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. I don’t know what I was expecting to find by digging into Samler’s past. Maybe some early trauma that might explain what had made him what he was. But there was nothing, no easy explanation, and that was even more chilling than discovering some sad story of a blighted childhood. It suggested to me that men like Samler simply exist, a splinter in evolution perhaps, a branch of the human species that is either more primitive or possibly more evolved than the rest of us, doing whatever they want without the burden of conscience or emotion to hamper them. His son served as a guard too towards the end of the war and he was the same: a prince in his father’s empire, a spoilt brat cut from the same dark cloth whose childish tantrums resulted in executions and torture. Samler encouraged it. He seemed proud. What kind of a father would do that?
The best way I can describe it is to say that Samler did not appear to possess a soul. Maybe he never had one, or maybe, as many of us in the camp believed, he had sold it to the Devil in exchange for the awful power he enjoyed as Commandant of Die Schneider Lager, a king in his own domain. Maybe he was the Devil himself. Whatever he was, I believe men like Samler are around us still. I fear it. And this is why I write this memoir and revisit these awful memories. It is to warn others that these creatures exist, co-existing with us, looking like us but not like us. They are there in the shadows, harbouring their hate, scratching slogans on walls, and waiting for the right circumstances to come howling back into the light.
40
Jean Baptiste stood in the sun and stared at his reflection in the broken tractor wing mirror wedged into a crack in the stone wall of the barn. The man who looked back was a stranger: black hair grown long; Jesus beard; hard eyes. He tilted his head and traced the white, ragged line where the hair didn’t grow, starting in his beard and ending at his left eyebrow, a souvenir of that first time he’d been attacked in Lannemezan after the judge decided to make an example of him.
– Given the nature of your job as a police officer … he’d said during sentencing … a figure of trust, a man expected to uphold the law, not break it, the court views your crime as greater than if an ordinary civilian had committed it. And though the court’s hands are tied by statute in terms of length of custodial sentence it does have some leeway in deciding where you will spend that time.
He had sent him to Lannemezan for twelve months, a bleak, concrete compound in the Midi-Pyrénées filled with lifers and violent career criminals. It was a bad enough place to be sent if you were a con but for ex-police it was practically a death sentence.
His attacker had been a small-time pederast named René Ibrahim looking to make a name for himself with the Da’esh contingent who ran C-Block. Ibrahim had attacked him in the dinner queue with a prison shiv – a toothbrush with the handle worn to a point – stabbing at his throat, aiming for the neck but catching his face instead.
Baptiste leaned in to the cracked mirror and tried to cover the scar with his beard but it only made him look more like a vagrant. He dipped the dirty sliver of soap he’d found by the stone evier into the bucket of cold water and started to work up a lather.
There had been blood everywhere when Ibrahim had cut him. Face cuts bleed almost as bad as arteries and blood had poured into his eyes, blinding him. He’d raised his arms and planted his feet apart to try and stay upright, but someone had kicked him in the side of the knee and he’d gone down and curled into a ball, feeling like that was it, that was how he would die. He remembered bracing himself for the kicks and when none had come he’d looked up, blinking away the blood to see two huge figures standing over him like tattooed angels, staring out at the dinner queue and daring anyone to make another move. One had waved the guards over – the guards who had been looking the other way – and stood over him until they came and took him away to the infirmary. The prison medic who stitched him up had been shaking so badly Baptiste could still see the tremor in the jagged line of his scar. He took his razor, rinsed it in the cold water and started scraping away his beard, starting at the site of his scar and working out.
They’d kept him in solitary until the stitches came out. He had never in his life felt more alone or scared. In prison, a man’s standing is dictated by the calibre of his enemies. The fact that a prison low-life like Ibrahim had confronted him in broad daylight showed how low he was in the pecking order. He was nothing, less than nothing. Even the guards had been prepared to stand by and let him die, and he knew as soon as he healed he’d be out there again. Only the silent giants with the tattoos had seemed to care one way or another if he lived or not. He thought about them a lot, about why they had saved him and what it would cost when he was released.
Baptiste rinsed the razor in the bucket again and shaved the beard down his neck, stopping short of where his tattoos started.
The first thing he’d done when he was released from solitary was walk straight through the middle of the recreation yard. There was nowhere to hide anyway, so he decided to turn it into an act of defiance that screamed Here-I-am-motherfuckers-come-and-get-me. He wanted everyone to see him, and, more importantly, who he talked to.
He found the two giants in the weights room where most of the muscle monsters hung out. One was bench-pressing what seemed like every weight in the room while the other stood over him, guiding the bar back to the rests between repetitions. Baptiste had stood watching them, not quite knowing what to say or whether it was rude to interrupt someone while they were lifting the equivalent of a small family car. The giant finished his reps, grabbed a towel and walked straight past Baptiste. The other one followed. Neither spoke. Neither acknowledged him, but he followed too. He didn’t know what else to do.
He remembered that walk, back across the rec yard, into A-Block and up the stairs to the third-floor gantries. He felt eyes on him the whole way and registered the silence, like the whole prison was watching. The giants stopped at the end of the upper landing, stood aside and gestured for him to pass. There was only one cell left on the floor. The door was open and some kind of music leaked out, violent and angry. He hadn’t known what might happen to him inside that cell but he knew what would happen if he turned and walked away, so he squeezed past the two giants and went in.
Baptiste finished shaving and stared at himself again in the cracked mirror. The scar seemed less obvious now it was no longer framed by the beard. He should probably come up with a story about how he got it in case anyone asked: a motorcycle crash, maybe, or a sporting accident – something that didn’t involve prisons and home-made knives. He towelled himself off, tipped the soapy water on to the ground and headed back into the barn.
The kitchen table was clean and scrubbed, the carcass of the wild boar removed to LePoux’s cold store. A black suit jacket was draped over the back of a chair and a pair of black jeans and a white shirt lay fol
ded on the table, the same clothes he had worn every day to work for years. He stripped and started to put them on, feeling like he was piecing himself together again. LePoux would be back soon with a car, ready to head off in search of more lost pieces of his broken life.
The cell on the third floor of A-Block had belonged to a man called Marcel Marrineau. He was head of a prison gang of extreme nationalists and white supremacists known as the Brotherhood. Ironically, they were the minority in the predominantly Muslim prison population. Marrineau was a lifer serving his time for an exotic cocktail of convictions – murder, race hate, possession of illegal firearms and materials related to bomb-making – though all these charges seemed like smaller planets circling the central shining star of his main crime of burning down a mosque with a large crowd of people inside. His arms and chest were as big as the guys’ outside but his legs were withered and strapped together in the wheelchair that turned when Baptiste entered his cell. Marrineau looked him up and down before leaning over to turn down the angry-sounding music – Rammstein, Baptiste would find out later, Marrineau’s favourite group. ‘You know why you’re here?’ he’d asked.
‘Because of you,’ Baptiste said.
Marrineau nodded and smiled. ‘Because of me. You may have been police on the outside but in here you’re nothing, less than nothing. Only now I have made you into something. Something new. I know why you’re in here. I know what you did. And my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Which makes you my brother. And now everyone out there knows it too. That don’t mean you won’t get bothered, but you won’t get hassled by small-time beurs with sharpened toothbrushes like Ibrahim.’
And he was right. When Baptiste walked out of that cell and back across the yard, no one looked at him, or at least they pretended not to. And no small-timers came after him any more. Mostly they left him alone. Mostly. He had other scars too, but nothing like the one on his face.
Outside he heard the faint sound of a car engine, the hum of it carrying a long way in the stillness of the valley. He picked up his service weapon from the table and detached the magazine. It came out cleanly, everything smooth and oiled, and he opened a box of shells and started filling it. He glanced over at a photo pinned to the wall showing a small boy with big glasses standing at the edge of a playground and staring tentatively at the rides. It was slightly blurry, taken secretly with a zoomed-in camera. It was the only recent photograph he had of his son. Monsieur Belloq had sent it to him a few months before he was released.
He wondered now if it had all been planned, and those acts of kindness – the photo of Léo, being protected by the Brotherhood inside, the offer of somewhere to stay when he got out – all of it had been simply grooming him for this.
He slid the magazine back in place and felt the new weight of the gun. It didn’t really matter what had brought him to this point, all that mattered was that he was here. The past was irrelevant. There was no point in dwelling on it, he had learned that inside. All there was was today, right now. You didn’t think about the future because it made you weak. Except now Léo represented a future. And the thought of that didn’t make him weak, it made him strong and determined.
The car crunched to a stop outside and the engine stayed running.
Time to go get his life back.
41
Marie-Claude’s rattling Peugeot reached the outskirts of the city and she followed the signs for Toulouse–Blagnac Airport past the Stade Toulousain, where the locals worshipped rugby like a religion, and on to the grey steel and glass of the terminal building.
Solomon reluctantly wound his window up to make it harder for the security cameras to see inside and watched an orange-and-white plane rise up from behind the main terminal building with a deep rumbling roar, its wheels tucking up as it climbed into the air. He pointed to a sign with ‘P5 & P6 – Eco’ written on it. ‘Head to the long-stay car parks.’
Marie-Claude fell in behind a large, black Audi SUV with tinted windows and a tow-bar on the back. ‘What’s the plan?’ she said. ‘I mean, if we’ve come to hire a car, I hope you’ve got money, because I don’t and my credit cards are pretty much toast.’
‘We’re not going to hire a car,’ Solomon said.
Ahead, the Audi turned off the road and entered a vast tarmacked field of multicoloured metal and glass. ‘Follow that car and park as close to it as you can.’
‘Are we gonna steal a car?’ Léo whispered.
‘Not exactly.’ Solomon pulled the worn quarter he’d found by the side of a Texas road out of his pocket, rolled it back and forth across his knuckles, flicked it into the air then caught it and slapped it down on the back of his hand. ‘We’re going to make one disappear.’ He removed his hand and the coin was gone.
Marie-Claude took a ticket at the barrier and followed the Audi into the heart of the car park, parking a row along from it between a dusty blue Volkswagen and a polished silver Porsche.
‘How about that one?’ Léo said, pointing at the gleaming car. ‘Can we make that one disappear?’
Solomon smiled. ‘I admire your sense of style, but we need something a little less showy.’ He looked over at the black Audi, where a stormy-faced man was hauling cases angrily out of the back and thrusting them at his waiting wife and two children.
‘Wait here,’ he said, leaning forward to talk to Marie-Claude. ‘Collect together everything you want to bring and keep out of sight.’
‘Hey, wait! Where are you—’
But it was too late. Solomon was already gone.
He watched the tall, pale man walk away from the faded red Peugeot and frowned when the woman and boy didn’t follow. Maybe they were waiting to make it look like they were travelling separately.
A plane banked over the car park, the noise of its engines like the sound of the sky ripping apart. He felt it rumble inside him and a sudden, blinding pain rapiered through the centre of his skull. He gripped the wheel, closing his eyes against the agony of it. It felt like something inside him, trying to split him open and escape. One day it would. One day soon. Episodes like this were getting more frequent, more painful. The thing inside him was getting stronger. He tried to breathe through the pain, his hand fumbling across the dashboard to the glove compartment and the relief that lay inside.
Outside the sound of the jet engines began to fade but the pain in his skull did not. It was like a great pressure, pushing up and out like lava through rock. He found the catch to the glove compartment and twisted it open, his hand sending pill bottles clattering as he fumbled for the metal hip flask containing the only thing that could cool this heat and calm the beast inside him. His hand closed round the cold metal and he dragged it out, sending more bottles rattling to the floor. The pressure in his head was like an explosion now, a huge, hot expansion of air in something too small to contain it. He unscrewed the lid, lifted the flask to his mouth, and sipped the bitter liquid.
The relief was instant, like water tipped on a fire. The liquid was morphine sulphate, the brand name Roxanol, but he knew what it really was. He took another sip, seeking the sweet aftertaste of the honey he mixed in to try and soften the bitterness of the liquid. It didn’t really work, the bitterness was too profound, but he had come to associate the taste of honey with relief from the pain and continued to add it. Honey also held significance for the thing he was becoming, because honey was the taste of mead, the drink of Wotan, the liquid of poetry and knowledge.
He opened his eyes and the colours of the world burned around him, the sun reflecting off the windscreens in blades of light. He looked over at the bus stop and the world drifted and stretched like something not quite solid. The shuttle bus was there and he wondered how much time had passed since the pain had engulfed him, because it had not been there before. People crowded the doors, waiting for others to get off. Not long then.
He switched his attention back to the car. He could see the woman inside, along with the boy. No one else around. If what he sought was inside the car, he could eas
ily take it. Seize the boy, put the blade to his throat, and his mother would do whatever he asked.
He leaned forward in his seat, looked up to make sure there were no cameras nearby, took a deep breath and felt the pressure shift a little in his head. The pain was gone but the thing that had brought it was still there – the thing that would soon overwhelm him and complete his transformation. He screwed the cap back on the flask, scooped the spilled pill bottles into the glove compartment and locked them away.
Outside, the colours were beginning to fade and the world seemed a little less dreamy. Over by the bus stop the passengers were streaming away into the car park, searching for their keys and their cars. He looked back at the faded red Peugeot. He would wait until the bus had gone and the passengers had found their cars and driven off. Then they would be alone in the car park, no cameras bearing witness: just the woman, her son – and him.
42
The screen beeped and Amand looked up. He had been immersed in the book and was surprised to discover a new command box had appeared in place of the countdown.
Three attempts remaining. Failure to input correct password will result in computer being permanently locked.
He leaned forward, his head humming with what he had read and what Marie-Claude might have used as a password. He typed in ‘DieSchneiderLager’ and the screen shuddered.
Incorrect Password. Two attempts remaining.
He typed it again, in capitals this time. Another shudder.