Catch Me If You Can (23 page)

Gaston made up a document, setting down a lot of my crimes, the circumstances of my arrest and my interrogation, and let me read it. “If that is essentially correct, you will help yourself by signing it,” he said.

I couldn’t quarrel with the instrument. He’d even included the fact that he’d slapped me. I signed it.

The affidavit also disclosed how I’d been caught. Major airlines didn’t serve Montpellier, but it was visited frequently by stewardesses and other flight personnel. An Air France flight attendant, visiting relatives in Montpellier, had spotted me shopping a couple of weeks past and had recognized me. She had seen me get into my car and had jotted down the license number. On her return to Paris, she had sought out her captain and told him of her suspicions. She was positive enough about her identification that her captain called the police.

“I’m positive it’s him. I dated him,” she insisted.

I never learned which Air France stewardess put the finger on me. No one would tell me. I had dallied with several, over the years. I hoped it wasn’t Monique, but to this day I still don’t know the informant’s identity. I don’t think it was Monique, however. Had she seen me in Montpellier, she would have confronted me.

I was kept six days in Montpellier, during which time several lawyers appeared to offer their services. I selected a middle-aged man whose mannerisms and appearance reminded me of Armand, although he frankly stated he didn’t think he could win me my freedom. “I have gone over all the police documents, and they have you dead to rights,” he commented. “The best we can hope for is a light sentence.”

I told him I’d settle for that.

Scarcely a week after my arrest, to my astonishment, I was removed to Perpignan and the day after my arrival there I was brought to trial in a court of assizes, made up of a judge, two assessors (prosecutors) and nine citizen jurors, all of whom would jointly decide my guilt or innocence.

It wasn’t much of a trial, really, lasting less than two days. Gaston listed the charges against me and the evidence he’d gathered to support the accusations. There were ample witnesses available to appear against me.

“How does the defendant plead?” inquired the judge of my attorney.

“My client will offer no defense against these charges,” replied the lawyer. “In the interest of time, we would like to sum up our position now.”

He then launched into an eloquent and impassioned plea for leniency in my behalf. He cited my youth-I was still not twenty-one-and portrayed me as an unfortunate and confused young man, the product of a broken home “and still more of a delinquent than a criminal.” He pointed out that a dozen other European nations where I had perpetrated similar crimes had placed formal demands for extradition, once my debt to France was paid.

“This young man will, in all probability, never see his native land for many, many years, and even when he does return home, he will return in chains and only to face prison there,” argued the lawyer. “I need not point out to this court the harshness of the prison life this young man will have to endure here. I ask the court to take that into account in setting a penalty.”

I was adjudged guilty. But at the time I thought jubilantly that my attorney, if he’d lost a battle, had won the war. The judge sentenced me to only one year in prison.

I was remanded to Perpignan ’s prison, the “House of Arrest,” a gloomy, forbidding stone fortress constructed in the seventeenth century, and not until I had been there for a few days did I realize just how lenient the judge had been.

I was received by two guards who brusquely ordered me to strip and who then escorted me, still naked, to an upper floor where I was marched down a narrow corridor devoid of cells as such. On either side were only stone walls set with solid steel doors. The guards halted before one of the metal portals and one unlocked and opened the door. It screeched open with a sound reminiscent of a horror movie, and the other guard shoved me inside the dark cubicle. I stumbled and fell forward, striking my head against the back of the cell, for the cell was a sunken one. I had not noted the two steps leading to the floor. I was never actually to see the steps.

I was in total darkness. A damp, chilling, breath-stifling, frightening darkness. I stood up to grope around for the light switch and cracked my head against the steel ceiling.

There was no light switch. There was no light in the cell. There was, in fact, nothing in the cell but a bucket. No bed, no toilet, no wash basin, no drain, nothing. Just the bucket. The cell was not a cell, actually, it was a hole, a raised dungeon perhaps five feet wide, five feet high and five feet deep, with a ceiling and door of steel and a floor and walls of stone. The ceiling and door were chill to the touch. The walls wept chilly tears constantly.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. No light filtered into the cell from any source. There were no cracks in the overhead or walls. The ancient door to my steel and stone box seemed to blend itself into its aperture like a hermetic seal. My eyes did not adjust. The eyes do not adjust to total darkness.

There was air entering the cell. Periodically a cold draft explored my skin like clammy fingers, raising goose bumps as much from the eerie sensation as from the chill. I wondered whence it came. Whatever its channels, they also were dark.

I slumped on the floor, shivering and feeling like I’d been entombed alive. Panic added to my shaking. I sought to calm myself by rationalizing my situation. Surely, I told myself, this was not to be the cell I would occupy during the entire year. Probably I was in here for observation. I discarded the theory immediately. Anyone observing me in this cell would have to have X-ray eyes. All right, then, I was being given a taste of what could happen to me if I misbehaved. I clung to the second supposition. Yes, this treatment was calculated to ensure my good behavior once I was released among the general prison population. After all, only unruly prisoners were confined in solitary under such harsh conditions, weren’t they? Certainly no civilized country would permit such cruel and inhumane punishment to be meted out by its prison warders without cause.

France does. Or did.

I was not fed my first day in Perpignan ’s prison. I had been placed in my grim cell late in the afternoon. Several hours later, exhausted, cold, hungry, bewildered, frightened and desolate, I laid down on the hard floor and fell asleep. I slept curled in a ball, for I am six feet tall.

The screeching of the door awakened me. I sat up, wincing from the soreness and cramps caused by my uncomfortable sleeping position. The dim form of a guard loomed in the doorway. He was placing something on the steps inside my crypt. I was galvanized into action as he straightened and started to close the door.

“Wait! Wait!” I shouted, scrambling forward and placing my hands against the inside of the door, trying to restrain its closing.

“Why am I being kept in here? How long will I stay in here?”

“Until you have completed your sentence,” he said, and shoved shut the door. The words clanked on my ears with the metallic finalness of the door slamming against the stone jamb.

I fell back, stunned by the ghastly truth. A year? I was to live in this black coffin a year? Without light? Without bedding? Without clothing? Without toilet facilities? And without God knows what else? It was impossible, I told myself. No man could live in such a dark void, under such conditions, for a year. He would die, and his death would be slow and torturous. It would have been better had I been sentenced to the guillotine. I loved France. But what kind of country was it that countenanced such punishment for such a crime as mine? And if the government was ignorant of such prison conditions, the people unknowing, what manner of men were the French penologists, into whose hands I had been delivered? Depraved monsters, madmen, perverts, undoubtedly.

I was suddenly scared, actually fearful. I did not know how, or if, I could survive a year in this Stygian vault. I still have nightmares from my stay in Perpignan ’s House of Arrest. Compared to Perpignan prison, the Black Hole of Calcutta was a health spa, Devil’s Island a vacation paradise.

I had not expected prison life to be easy. My one experience behind bars, and then for only a few hours, had convinced me that jails and prisons were not nice places to reside. But nothing I had ever read, heard or seen had ever indicated that imprisonment could be as brutal and heartless as this.

I felt around and located the food the guard had broughc. It was a quart container of water and a small loaf of bread. The simple breakfast had not even been brought on a tray. The guard had simply set the container of water on the top step and had dropped the bread beside it on the stone. No matter, I wolfed down the loaf of bread and gulped down the water in one swig. Then I huddled miserably against the wet granite wall and contemplated the machinations of French Justice.

Mine was not a term in prison, it was an ordeal designed to destroy the mind and body.

The menu in Perpignan prison never varied. For breakfast, I was served bread and water. Lunch consisted of a weak chicken soup and a loaf of bread. Supper was a cup of black coffee and a loaf of bread. The monotonous diet varied only in the time it was served or in the order it was served. I had no means of telling time and I soon lost track of the days, and the guards who served the meals further confused my attempts to keep a mental timetable and calendar by alternating the schedule of my meager rations. For instance, for several days breakfast, lunch and dinner might be served regularly at seven, noon and five, but then, abruptly, dinner would be served at ten a.m., supper at 2 p.m. and breakfast at 6 p.m. I am estimating the times. I really never knew at what hour I was fed, or whether it was day or night. And not infrequently I was fed only one or two times daily. Occasionally I wasn’t fed at all during the span of the day.

I never left the cell. Not once during my stay in the hoary jail was I permitted outside for exercise or recreation. If the prison had a day room where prisoners might read, write letters, listen to the radio, watch television or play games, I was not among those privileged to share the facility. I was not allowed to write letters, and if any of my relatives knew I was jailed at Perpignan and wrote me, I did not receive the mail. My requests, made of the guards who served the meals, to contact my relatives, my attorney, the Red Cross, the warden or the American consular authorities were ignored save once.

On that occasion, the guard smacked me alongside the head with his huge hand. “Don’t talk to me,” he growled. “It is not permitted. Don’t talk, don’t sing, don’t whistle, don’t hum, don’t make any sound or you will be beaten.” He slammed the heavy door shut on further pleas.

The bucket was my latrine. I was not given any toilet paper, nor was the bucket removed after use. I soon adapted to the stench, but after a few days the bucket overflowed and I had to move around and sleep in my own fecal matter. I was too numbed, in body and spirit, to be revolted. Eventually, however, the odor became too nauseating for even the guards to endure, apparently. One day, between meals, the door creaked open and another convict scurried in with the furtiveness and manner of a rat, grabbed the bucket and fled. It was returned, empty, a few minutes later. On perhaps half a dozen other occasions during my time in the tiny tomb, the procedure was repeated. But only twice during my imprisonment were the feces cleaned from the floor of the cell. Each time a guard stood by at the door while an inmate hosed out the cell and then picked up the accumulated water in the hole with a mop. Both times I managed a makeshift shower in the spray of the hose, daring the wrath of the guard. Both times the cleaning was performed in absolute silence.

Those were the only times I was able to cleanse myself to any extent during my term, although occasionally I used a portion of my water ration to rinse my hands or to anoint my face.

I was not allowed to shave nor was I ever given a haircut. I am hirsute by heritage, and without the means to curb their growth, my hair and beard sprouted prodigiously. My hair was soon below my shoulders, a tangled, sodden skein, and my beard brushed my chest. Both hair and beard were oiled and perfumed with excrement, for I could not avoid soiling myself in my own wastes.

Lice and other insects small enough to gain admittance to the fetid cell nested in my body hair and feasted on my flesh. I developed sores from my scratching and these became infected from contact with the always present filth. My body soon became a mass of scabs, a living petri dish for the culture of myriad forms of bacteria. In the cramped confines of the hole, shrouded in blackness, I lost my sense of balance and fell often as I attempted to move about, stretch myself or perform simple exercises, nicking or bruising myself against the rough walls or the hard floor and further adding to my wounds.

I weighed 210 pounds when I was received at Perpignan. The tedious diet did not contain enough nutrients or calories to maintain me. My body began to feed upon itself, the muscles and tendons devouring the stored fats and oily tissues in order to fuel the pumps of my heart and my circulatory system. Within weeks I was able to encircle my biceps with my fingers.

I was not alone in my misery. I soon concluded that most if not all of the steel doors in Perpignan prison sealed a wretched inmate.

The stone walls between the cells were too thick to permit talk between adjoining prisoners, but they were by no means soundproof. Unintelligible shouts and curses, screams of pain and anguish, and muffled groans and cries washed softly along the corridor outside almost constantly, sometimes ceasing abruptly only to start again within minutes. The sounds, always laden with despair, permeated the walls of my dank box, filtering through the stone and seeping up from the floor like the sighs and sobs of some beleaguered banshee. Sometimes, however, the sounds had the qualities of rage and anger, reminiscent of the distant howl of a hunting wolf or the defiant yipping of a hurt coyote.

Sometimes the sounds were my own, for in my loneliness I often talked to myself just to hear the sound of a human voice. Or I would stand stooped before the door and scream at the guards to let me out or demand that I be treated like a human being, with dignity and consideration if not respect. I cursed them. I cursed myself. I ranted and raved, wept and screamed, chanted and sang, laughed and bellowed, shouted and banged the bucket against the walls, splattering excrement all over my crate-like cell. I felt I was going mad.