Papillon (32 page)

The director’s replacement—the director had been taken to the hospital—led me back to my yard. “We’ll see about you later, Frenchie,” he said.

The next day the director was back with his shoulder in a cast. He asked me for a written statement against the guard. I did everything he asked and with pleasure. The business of the sleeping draught was completely forgotten. Luckily for me, they couldn’t have cared less.

A few days later Joseph Dega offered to try to organize something from the outside. I had told him that a night break was impossible because of the lights on the walls, so he looked into the possibility of cutting the current. With the help of an electrician, he found it could be done by tripping the switch on a transformer outside the prison. I was to buy off the guard on the road side, the one in the yard and the one at the door to the chapel. It was more complicated than I expected. First I put pressure on Don Gregorio—via Joseph—to give me back ten thousand pesos under the pretext that it was for my family, not to mention “persuading” him to accept two thousand pesos to buy a present for his wife. Then I had to find out which guard was in charge of scheduling the tours of duty on the wall and buy him off. He was to get three thousand pesos, but he wanted no part of the negotiations with the other two guards. It was up to me to find them and deal with them myself. I would then give him their names and he would schedule their watch according to my directions.

The preparations for this
cavale
took over a month. At last every detail was worked out. Since we didn’t need to worry about the guard in the yard, we cut the bars with a metal saw. It had three blades. The Colombian who had made the hook was alerted. He cut his bar in installments. On the designated night, a friend of his who had been pretending to be nuts for some time was to bang away on a piece of metal while singing at the top of his voice. The Colombian knew that the guard had complied only on condition that the break be limited to two Frenchmen. If there was a third man, he’d shoot him. But he wanted to try it all the same and thought that if the three of us stuck closely together, the guard wouldn’t be able to make out in the dark whether we were two or three. Clousiot and Maturette drew lots to see who would go with me. Clousiot won.

The first moonless night came. The sergeant and two policemen had half their money. This time I didn’t need to cut the bills in half; they were already cut. The police were to pick up the other halves at the Barrio Chino where Joseph Dega’s wife worked.

The light went out. We went to work on the bar. It was sawed through in less than ten minutes. Wearing dark pants and shirts, we climbed out of the cell. The Colombian, naked except for a black undershirt, joined us in the passageway. I shimmied up the bars of our door, climbed around the overhang and threw the hook with its three yards of cord. I was on top of the wall in less than three minutes. I hadn’t made a sound. Flat on my stomach, I waited for Clousiot. The night was blackest black. Suddenly I saw, or imagined I saw, a hand reaching up and pulled. There was a ghastly noise. Clousiot had climbed between the wall and the overhang and had caught the belt loop of his pants on the metal. I stopped pulling. The noise stopped. I pulled again, thinking that Clousiot was unhitched. But the metallic clatter continued. I pulled until he was free; then yanked him up and over.

Shots rang out from the other sentry posts. Unnerved by the noise, we jumped from the wrong part of the wall; here the street was twenty-five feet below, whereas farther along to the right there was a street only fifteen feet below. As a result, Clousiot broke his right leg again. I couldn’t get up either. I had broken the arches of both feet. The Colombian dislocated his knee. The rifle shots brought out the guard on the street side. We were picked out by a big electric lantern and guns were aimed at us. I wept with anger. On top of that, the guards wouldn’t believe I couldn’t stand up. I crawled back to the prison on my knees, prodded on by rifle jabs. Clousiot and the Colombian hopped on one foot. My head was streaming blood from the whack of a rifle butt.

The shots had waked Don Gregorio, who luckily was on duty that night and therefore sleeping in his office. Without him the guards would have finished us off. The one who had roughed me up the worst was the sergeant I had paid to post our two accomplices. Don Gregorio put a stop to it. He threatened to haul them up before the tribunal if they did us real harm. This magic word brought everyone to heel.

The next day Clousiot’s leg was put in a cast at the hospital. The Colombian’s knee was set by a prisoner and strapped with an Ace bandage. During the night my feet swelled as big as my head and turned black and red from the clotted blood. The doctor made me soak my feet in warm salted water and applied leeches three times a day. When they were gorged with blood, the leeches let go by themselves and were put in vinegar to disgorge themselves. It took six stitches to close my head wound.

As a result of all this, a journalist wrote an article about me. He said that I’d been the leader of the chapel revolt, that I had poisoned a guard, and, to top it off, that I had mounted a mass break with the help of accomplices from the outside, since someone had cut off the electricity by tampering with the transformer. “Let us hope that France relieves us as soon as possible of its public enemy number one,” he said in conclusion.

Joseph Dega visited me with his wife, Annie. The sergeant and the guards had each come to claim the other half of their money. Annie wanted to know what she should do. I said they should be paid since they had stuck by their word. It was not their fault that we had failed.

For a week now I’d been pushed around the yard in an iron wheelbarrow that also served as a couch. My feet were propped up on a length of material stretched taut between two sticks attached vertically to the handles of the wheelbarrow. It was the only position I could tolerate. Still swollen and congested with blood, my feet couldn’t stand the slightest pressure even when I was lying down. Fifteen days later the swelling was down about half and I was taken for X-rays. It was then that I learned that I had broken both arches. I’ve been flat-footed ever since.

Today’s newspaper announced that the
Mana
was coming for us at the end of the month with an escort of French police. It was now the twelfth of October. We had eighteen days left. We must play our last card, but what could we do with me and my broken arches?

Joseph was in despair. He told me that all the Frenchmen and the women of the Barrio Chino were dismayed at the thought of how hard I’d fought for my freedom and that in only a few days I’d be back in French hands. I drew comfort from the fact that so many people were on my side.

I abandoned the idea of killing a Colombian policeman. I couldn’t bring myself to kill a man who had done nothing to me. Maybe he was helping out his mother and father, maybe he had a wife and children. I smiled at the prospect of having to search out an evil policeman with no family. How should I put it to him: “If I kill you, are you sure no one will miss you?” On the morning of the thirteenth I was really in the dumps. I examined the picric acid I was supposed to eat to get jaundice. If I was in the hospital, I might be able to escape with the help of some men Joseph would hire. The next day—the fourteenth—I was a beautiful lemon yellow. Don Gregorio came to see me in the yard. I was in the shade, lying in my wheelbarrow with my feet in the air.

Without beating around the bush, I attacked. “Ten thousand pesos for you if you can get me into the hospital.”

“I’ll try, Frenchie. Ten thousand pesos don’t matter that much, but it hurts me to see you fight so hard and not get anywhere. The trouble is I don’t think they’ll let you stay at the hospital on account of that story in the paper. They’d be scared.”

An hour later the doctor had me sent to the hospital. I was in and out in nothing flat. From the ambulance I was placed on a stretcher, and I was back in the prison two hours later after a detailed examination and urinalysis.

It was now the nineteenth, a Thursday. Joseph’s wife, Annie, came to see me with the wife of a Corsican. They brought me cigarettes and candy. Their friendliness turned that dreary day into pure sunshine. I’ll never be able to express how much the support of these people of the Barranquilla underworld meant to me, or how much I owe to Joseph Dega for risking his job and his own freedom to help me escape.

In the course of our conversation Annie said something that gave me an idea.

“Dear Papillon,” she said, “you’ve done everything humanly possible to get back your freedom. Fate has been cruel to you. All that’s left for you is to blow up the prison!”

“How about that! Why don’t I blow up this old prison? I’d be doing the Colombians a great service. If I blew it up, maybe they’d build a new and cleaner one.”

I kissed the charming ladies good-by for the last time and said to Annie, “Ask Joseph to come see me Sunday.”

On Sunday, the twenty-second, Joseph was there.

“Listen, try to bring me a stick of dynamite, a detonator and a Bickford cord on Thursday. I’ll see if I can get hold of a drill for brick.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to blow the hell out of this prison wall. And in broad daylight. Promise five thousand pesos to that yellow taxi. He has to be in the street behind the Calle Medellin every day from eight in the morning until six in the evening. He’ll get five hundred pesos a day if nothing happens and five thousand if it does. I’ll be coming through on the back of a strong Colombian who’ll carry me to the taxi. If the taxi driver is willing, send the dynamite. If he’s not, then it’s the end. I give up.”

“Count on me,” Joseph said.

At five o’clock I had myself carried into the chapel, explaining that I wanted to pray alone. I asked for Don Gregorio to come and see me. He came.

“It’s only eight days until you go.”

“That’s why I wanted to see you. You have fifteen thousand pesos belonging to me. I want to give them to my friend before I go so that he can send the money to my family, and I want you to take three thousand pesos in thanks for the way you’ve protected me from the guards. You’d be doing me a great service if you could get me the money today along with a roll of gummed tape so that I can get it ready for my friend by next Thursday.” “I’ll do that.”

He came back and handed me the twelve thousand pesos, still in halves, keeping three thousand for himself.

Back in my wheelbarrow, I called my Colombian friend over to a quiet corner. I described my plan and asked him if he thought he could carry me on his back for the twenty or thirty yards to the taxi. He gave me his word. So that part was all right. I made my plans on the assumption that Joseph would come through. I took up a position in the washhouse early Monday morning, and Maturette—who shared with Clousiot the “chauffeuring” of my wheelbarrow—went to find the sergeant to whom I had given the three thousand pesos and who had paid me back with such a savage beating.

“Sergeant Lopez, I’d like to talk to you.”

“What do you want?”

“For two thousand pesos, I want a strong three-speed brace and six drills for brick. Two one-tenth of an inch thick, two four-tenths and two one-half inch.”

“I have no money.”

“Here are five hundred pesos.”

“You’ll have them tomorrow at one when the guard changes. Get the two thousand pesos ready.”

The next day at one o’clock I received the tools in a wastepaper basket that was emptied when the guards changed. Pablo, my Colombian strong man, picked them up and hid them.

On Thursday there was no sign of Joseph. Then, toward the end of visiting time, I was called in. Joseph had sent an old wrinkled Frenchman in his place.

“The things you’re expecting are in this piece of bread.”

“Here’s two thousand pesos for the taxi. Five hundred for each day.”

“The driver of the taxi is an excitable old Peruvian. Don’t get into a fight with him.”

They had put the bread in a big paper bag along with some cigarettes, matches, smoked sausages, a piece of butter and a flask of black olive oil. As the guard at the door was rummaging through the bag, I gave him a pack of cigarettes, some matches and two sausages. He said, “How about a piece of bread to go with it?”

That was all I needed!

“No, buy your own bread. Here’s five pesos. Otherwise there won’t be enough for the six of us.”

Jesus, that was a close one! Whatever made me offer the
mec
sausages! We ducked him as fast as possible. I’d been so unprepared for the bread episode that I was covered with sweat.

“Tomorrow, the fireworks. Everything’s ready, Pablo. You must make the hole exactly under the overhanging tower so the cop on top won’t see you.”

“But he’ll hear me.”

“I’ve thought of that. At ten in the morning that side of the yard is in the shade. We have to get one of the metal workers to hammer on something against the wall near you and in the sun. Two men would be even better. I’ll give them five hundred pesos apiece. Try and find two men.”

He found them.

“Two friends of mine have agreed to stand there hammering as long as necessary. The guard won’t be able to hear the drill at all. You station yourself in your wheelbarrow a little away from the overhang and get into a discussion with the Frenchmen. That way you’ll screen me from the guard on the other corner of the wall.”

In an hour the hole was drilled. Thanks to the hammering and the oil on the drill, the guard suspected nothing. The dynamite was wedged into the hole and the detonator attached to an eight-inch wick. We moved away. If everything went well, the explosion would blow open a big hole, the guard would fall with his sentry box, and I’d be through the hole on Pablo’s back and off to the taxi. The others would be on their own. Clousiot and Maturette would probably get to the taxi before me, even though I was going first.