by Ben Stevens
Obligingly, Pradel sat very still and said nothing. Once again Henri stood up; but this time he limped slowly about the room, marshalling his thoughts.
After a few minutes had passed, he said, ‘I have already explained that this story will take place in two parts – the latter half to be told now, the former… Later. You will extend me the courtesy of listening without interruption, and you will not drink another drop of brandy. I fear that it is not good for you.
‘I begin this tale having made my final, successful break from the penal colony of French Guiana, overcoming all the odds. I have spent seven years imprisoned for a crime I never committed, sent to rot in a hellhole of disease and despair, where further ‘crimes’ such as escape are punished with savage barbarity, both mentally as well as physically.
‘It is again to Venezuela that the ocean currents carry my little boat: unlike the previous time, they will not hand me back to the French authorities as Gomez is no longer in power.
‘I am welcomed like a long-lost brother by the inhabitants of a small village by the sea, and the authorities graciously inform me that I must spend a year here as a kind of ‘probationary’ period. After that, I will be given an official identity card and will be free to go wherever I want; free to leave the country, should I so wish.’
As Henri grew more impassioned by his tale, he walked and talked more quickly.
‘A year passes and I have fallen in love with Venezuela and its people, despite having been treated so abominably by this country in the past. I have learned to speak the language fluently, as I became more than passable in it during my last, two-year stay. But I yearn to live in a big city – I have not seen one of these since I was snatched away from the streets of Paris.
‘What to do? Simple: get to Caracas, as quickly as possible! There there will be ways of making good money, if a man has the zest and vitality for life that is wholly natural to a Venezuelan.
‘Yes: I will make my pile, and then somehow I will return to France and destroy the prosecutor who tried to destroy me. For he bears the most responsibility for my downfall. The jurymen? Thick fools: idiots! Swayed only by which member of the defence or prosecuting counsel has the most persuasive rhetoric, the glibbest tongue! No: I shall do the ignorant jurymen no harm whatsoever.
‘The judge? All that fair-minded man had been able to do was pass on the hammer-blow. It was obvious that he was unhappy with my being found guilty. But wait – les flics. Yes, they’ll get theirs – and in no small measure. Their corrupt methods were partly responsible for my ruin, after all.
‘It’s that prosecutor, Pradel, who’ll cop it first, though. Cop it good and hard. But even after eight years, having thought about it endlessly, I’ve still not decided exactly how.’
Henri gave a sudden, unnerving chuckle; he shook his head.
‘But I’m running ahead of myself here! I’ve only just arrived in Caracas, and the size of the city and its sheer life bewilders me. I have to again learn how to live on my wits, how to first spot an opportunity and then develop it. I make a vow to myself, however, that I will not commit even one crime, no matter how small.
‘For this country has given me my freedom, and so however I get my pile will be done through honest means. Even if I was never guilty of the crime of which I was convicted in Paris, I was still a bit of a rogue. But no more: now I am entirely straight.
‘Nightlife – sweet, sweet nightlife! Who needs the day when the dark holds all the pleasures of the world? And the people who seek such pleasures – drink; brief, unbinding love – they will of course do so in places called bars.
‘So I’ve seen the opportunity: now it’s time to develop it. There is an empty building almost in the centre of Caracas, and through sheer dogged persistence I manage to obtain the money to buy it. Then further capital is scraped together, so that I can obtain the necessary licences to turn my property into a late-night entertainment joint.
‘I buy what I think will be the necessary amount of drink and food; I hire dancing girls and decorate the place in lavish colours. I recruit door staff who will be courteous and yet quick to react should there be even a sniff of trouble. Prices are a little more than usual, but people are paying for a night out at a bar that’s better than anywhere else. That, at least, is what I’m banking everything on.
‘Yes, yes – it’s true! Attendance is better than I’d dreamed: I’d advertised well and now I am reaping the benefits. I am finally becoming a rich man; my ultimate goal, if still very far away, at least no longer seems quite so impossible to attain...
‘...A few years pass. An ugly bastard owns a few joints near my own, and he aims to queer my pitch. Reluctantly, I am forced to concede that living a completely crime-free life is not always going to be possible, if I am to protect what is rightfully mine.
‘Suddenly I turn the tables and the ugly bastard’s bars are my own – but those others which are owned by peaceable men continue to trade as normal. If I am attacked I will come out fighting, but I am no bully.
‘It is important that I continue to focus on my ultimate objective. For living the grand life that I do it would become all too easy to forget all about it – about the hammer-blow that almost wiped me out of existence.
‘But I fail to account for the power of love, until Marie enters my life and bewitches me with her beauty and her sweetness. As perfect a woman as God ever made, she persuades me to confide in her everything that has been gnawing away at my soul for more than a decade.
‘Unbelievably, I find myself making a vow to her: I will relinquish my vengeance. That evil prosecutor, those corrupt pigs: let those bastards die in their beds, if indeed the worms haven’t eaten them already. Why should they worry me any longer, now that I am loved, respected and wealthy? I have escaped the road down the drain: I am truly blessed and happy.
‘Or so I think. Dear God, how cruel you are to me! Who would think that my princess could get cancer at her young age, that her heavenly body could be reduced to skin and bone, that she could be so wracked with pain? The five years I have spent with her have passed in a blissfully happy haze, and now I throw money at doctors but they can do nothing. The disease is incurable. She is dying.
‘She is dead. Completely destroyed, utterly crushed, I take to drink and another ugly bastard sees the chance to make his move on my joint and I do nothing. My days are long ordeals of grief – a grief which is assuaged only by alcohol. I seek death, yet – as before – I refuse to end it all by way of suicide.
‘Instead I pick fights with dangerous sods in the hope that one of them will kill me. Unfortunately, Venezuelan hard-cases have a habit of helping their beaten opponent off the floor and buying him a drink, rather than producing a knife and finishing him off.
‘How long this all continues for I do not know – who can be conscious of the passing of time when reduced to such a state? A strange salvation comes courtesy of a cigarette I drop onto my bed, one night as I pass out as usual. I awake in hospital, severely burnt, my eye gone. A brave neighbour – one of my few friends who did not desert me when I turned wild – saw the flames and broke into my house, saving my life. But it is not expected that I will live, and so I am given morphine to ease my painful passage to the grave.
‘But in my mind I see the fat, sneering face of the prosecutor once again, and I realise that I should never have relinquished my revenge; not even for love, not even for Marie. She will be in my thoughts always, there will never be another woman in my life; but she is gone and I am here. I will not die.
‘Amazed, the doctors finally discharge me. Yes, there certainly will never be another woman in my life, even if I want one: I have been hideously disfigured, and it is months before I can even walk again. But I am grateful just to be alive. I have a showdown with the ugly bastard who took control of my club, and he agrees to buy it off me for an extremely decent price. This price is quickly agreed when I press a pistol against his forehead and state the required sum. He does not argue.
‘The card is obtained through an underworld contact of mine, an utterly straight man whose hefty fee guarantees his complete silence. I state the name – not Raymond, by the way – and the date-of-birth that I want printed. I have a photo of my ruined face taken, and marvelling at his work I pay my pal gladly.
‘Christ, I shake with anticipation! I am becoming ever closer to obtaining my revenge, to destroying those who’d sought to destroy me! I leave Venezuela, returning to France with absolutely no problem at all on my bogus identity card. The gendarmes stare at me only out of pity for a limping, one-eyed cripple; but sooner or later a few of them are going to look the same as me or indeed a great deal worse, if indeed they’re not killed by the fireworks I’m going to arrange at thirty-six, Quai des Orfevres – police headquarters.
‘Play it cool, brother, play it cool – that’s what I say to myself a hundred times a day. That prosecutor: you’ve got to take him apart first. You owe him the most of all. Where do I look for him, though? I’ve quickly discovered that he’s no longer the official prosecutor at the Palais de Justice of the Seine.
‘Shit! Did I really think, after all that’s happened in my life, that it would be so easy for me to locate that bastard? God, please hear me now: just this once I need you on my side!
‘I’m staying at the George V hotel, near my old stomping ground Montmartre. I realise that it’s time to find the seediest bar within this district, and to have a discreet word with the old lags who gather there each night. There’ll certainly be a few former members of the underworld there, and such types as likely as not will know all about the whereabouts of one Pierre Pradel. Doubtless several of them owe him a debt or two as well, although I dare not make them party to my plans.
‘I find my bar and enter… Spectacular, extraordinary good luck, quite against the way things usually go for me! Who do I see but an old mate of mine who was put on the same ship as me to French Guiana! We go back a long way, all the way to when I got life for a murder I never committed, and he got ten years for stealing a bicycle. And the prosecutor at both our trials was Pierre Pradel.
‘Of course, such are my injuries that he doesn’t even recognise me at first. When I tell him who I am he is so shocked he cries like a baby. He has long since given me up for dead. We talk for hours: he is doing okay for himself but the appalling severity of the sentence he received for a minor crime still rankles him. He blames the judge until I make him see that it was all Pradel’s fault. This swine caused the hammer-blow to fall: all the judge did was to make this blow official.
‘We talk further, far into the night. More good fortune: my old mate knows where Pradel spends every day. We leave the bar when it finally closes and sit in a small park. My mate agrees with everything I have come here to do; even more, he will help me to do it, so that he too can have his revenge. It would be too risky for me to attempt to buy a house in a suitably remote area of France, even using my false identity – too many questions might be asked. Instead I will give my friend the necessary funds for him to buy it.
‘The rest is up to me. I visit the café and make the fat shit’s acquaintance over the period of a month or so, in between working like a demon to make the necessary changes to the house that has recently been bought in a somewhat remote area of Pas de Calais...
‘I can see that Pradel trusts me – that he delights in having someone to whine to. He thinks I’m his friend! There: everything is in place. Let’s go!’
Exhausted by talking, Henri slumped back down in his chair and stared at Pradel. The former prosecutor’s fleshy face was a ghastly white, and he slowly shook his head as his lips moved noiselessly.
‘What’s the matter, Pierre? Has the cat caught that famous prostituted tongue of yours?’
Pradel suddenly sunk forward; it looked for a moment as though he would fall from his chair to the floor. Stopping himself, he mumbled, ‘So what now, hey, what now?’
‘Pierre, I fear that you’re not well,’ said Henri with deathly satire.
‘I am sick,’ croaked the fat man.
‘It is that brandy – it is no good for you, especially when laced with a certain drug that sends you slowly, if a little uncomfortably, to sleep. You’re almost there now, man: when you awaken I’ll tell you the first half of my story.’
‘Henri, I – ’ Pradel began; then he fell onto the hard wooden floor, where he lay quite still.
Standing up, Henri prepared to carry him downstairs to the cellar. Then from out in the large hall there came the noise of a key being placed in the front door – something that made Henri start...
Darkness – pitch darkness. Who could say how long he’d been unconscious for; and what manner of drug was it that made his head ache so unmercifully now that he’d awoken?
Moaning, Pradel adjusted his position on what he considered was a wooden bench – and fell straight onto the concrete floor.
‘Henri!’ he bellowed, ‘Where am I?’
A strong light suddenly shone above him, although it put the cell only in a kind of murky twilight instead of the absolute darkness of before.
Squinting his eyes, his head pounding, Pradel looked up: ten feet above him were evenly-spaced, thick steel bars, like tramlines. Perhaps another ten feet above these was a narrow walkway; and Henri was stood on this looking down, his forearms resting on a thin handrail.
‘Take a good look around you, Pradel. Take a good look,’ instructed Henri.
Blinking rapidly, Pradel did as he was told. The brick-built cell was approximately eight-foot by eight-foot square, with a narrow plank attached to one wall. In one corner there was a flush toilet and a tiny hand-basin with one tap. Beside this hand-basin, placed on a folded blanket, there was a cake of soap, a toothbrush, a wooden spoon, and a mug.
And above the small door with a little hatch set in it, was the sign: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order.
‘What are you doing, Henri?’ asked Pradel in a voice he tried to make firm.
‘Let me talk about my trial, Pradel, and all that followed,’ answered Henri, his vague smile just discernible to the former prosecutor as he stared back up at the walkway.
Pausing to light a cigarette, he continued, ‘How certain my counsel was that I would be acquitted of the murder of a small-time pimp! The ‘evidence’ provided by the pigs smelt fishy and prefabricated even to the judge; he hinted heavily at this during his opening address to the court.
‘But I – ah, I was not so sure! Having grown up parentless and wild on the streets of Paris, I’d already crossed swords with the pigs on several occasions. After I’d been ‘interrogated’ about some trifling crime or other, I would leave the station with my balls twisted and swollen, my belly aching after some fifteen-stone porker had used it as a trampoline.
‘So I knew just how determined those bastards could be when they really wanted something – a confession or the like – and I knew that they were now going all out to fix me good and proper. That they knew I had not been the one to kill the pimp – the ponce – mattered not one jot.
‘Still, this would not have resulted in me being found guilty had it not been for you, you loathsome swine. You stared at me dressed in my smart suit, at twenty-four little more than a boy, and you saw only another faceless man who needed to be destroyed.
‘On what did you notch your successes, Pradel? Your bedpost? And just how many were there – how many innocent men did you send to the guillotine or the penal colonies?’
‘Henri – ’
‘Shut up. My counsel fought valiantly, but they were no match against your foul rhetoric. The twelve twats on the jury went away and returned to find me guilty. By some miracle I was sentenced to life transpo
rtation instead of death: perhaps it is possible that the fair-minded judge sought to throw me the slightest of lifelines.
‘A few months later, and I was put aboard the boat – the Martiniere – along with all the other poor unfortunate sods bound for French Guiana. I became friends with just one man, who’d received a ten-year sentence for bicycle theft: some other trifling crimes he’d previously committed had been taken into account, all at the encouragement of one Pierre Pradel.
‘He was a little slow, my mate: I saw at once that he’d been sold down the river. We made a pact to escape as soon as we could, together, and I also made a private vow that one day I would kill the prosecutor who’d destroyed my life and also that I would kill as many pigs as possible.
‘The rumour was quickly spread – for those men like my mate and I who wanted to escape – that the hospital block was the best place from which to try. Arriving at the mainland my mate faked dysentery and I appendicitis, so that we were taken straight there.
‘That rumour had not been wrong! This was a soft touch and a half, and I soon got hold of a corrupt medical orderly who said that he could get me a fine boat for two thousand five hundred francs. There were some time-expired convicts on the outside who could provide such a thing, and at a suitably hefty fee.
‘I agreed, and paid this orderly half the sum from the money contained in my charger – a metal tube the size of my thumb that I kept hidden in my lower colon. You can take an educated guess at its entry point.
‘It was at this point that my mate lost his nerve. Were the break to go wrong we would be severely punished, and he was sure that with good behaviour he would get remission on his sentence. His wife, he assured me, was certain to be campaigning on his behalf in France.
‘Inwardly I was sceptical; most women realised that once their man went to penal they were almost definitely gone for good and for all, whether their sentence had been for life or not. The mortality rate in the colonies was sky-high.
‘But I respected his decision and so we shook hands and remained the best of friends. Brothers, almost. Now I prepared to break out on my own, armed with my knowledge of sailing that I’d acquired during a stay in St Malo a few years previously.