Papillon (56 page)

“Grandet, is that knife yours?”

“Well, it’s here in my place, so it must be.”

The warden examined it carefully and saw that it was as clean as a new penny.

The doctor returned from the toilets. “It was a double-edged dagger that killed the men. They were knifed standing up. It’s hard to understand. No
bagnard
would let himself be killed like a rabbit without trying to defend himself. Somebody here has to have been wounded.”

“But you saw for yourself, Doctor. No one has so much as a nick.”

“Were these two men dangerous?”

“Very. The Armenian was almost certainly Carbonieri’s murderer. He was killed in the washhouse at nine yesterday morning.”

“We’ll shelve it,” the warden said. “But keep Grandet’s knife. Everybody to work now, except those of you who are sick. Papillon, did you report sick?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t waste much time avenging your friend. I’m not a fool, you know. Unfortunately I have no proof and I know we’ll find none. For the last time, does anybody have anything to say? Anyone who can cast light on this double crime will be disinterned and sent to Grande Terre. You have my word.”

Absolute silence.

The Armenian’s entire
gourbi
reported sick. When they saw that, Grandet, Galgani, Jean Castelli and Louis Gravon became sick at the last minute. The room emptied. We were the five in my
gourbi
, the four in the Armenian’s, plus the watch repairer, the old fellow who kept muttering about the cleanup he had in store, and two or three others, including the Alsatian—big Sylvain.

Sylvain lived alone and had only friends in the
bagne
. He was a highly respected man of action and the author of a singular deed that had got him twenty years at hard labor. All by himself, he had attacked the mail wagon on the Paris-Brussels Express, knocked out the two guards, and thrown the mail sacks onto the bank where his accomplices picked them up. They had netted a very pretty sum out of it.

Seeing the two
gourbis
whispering in their respective corners and unaware that we had agreed not to fight for a week, Sylvain spoke up. “I hope you don’t have a pitched battle à la The Three Musketeers in mind?”

“Today, no,” Galgani said. “That’s for later on.”

“Why later on?” Paulo said. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Though for myself, I don’t see the point of us killing each other. What do you say, Papillon?”

“I have just one question. Did you know what the Armenian was going to do?”

“On my word of honor, Papi, we didn’t know a thing. And you want to know something else? If the Armenian weren’t dead already, I’m not sure I would have let him get away with it.”

“Well, if that’s the way it is, why don’t we bury the hatchet right now?” Grandet said.

“It’s O.K. with me. Let’s shake on it and forget the whole sad mess.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m a witness,” Sylvain said, “and I’m glad it’s over.”

At six o’clock the bell rang. When I heard it, I couldn’t help seeing last evening’s scene once again: my friend’s body, upright, bearing down on our boat. The picture was so vivid, even twenty-four hours later, that I couldn’t wish the same fate even on the Armenian and Sans-Souci.

Galgani wasn’t speaking. He too knew what had happened to Carbonieri. He was sitting astride his hammock, staring straight ahead. Grandet hadn’t come in yet. Still looking off, Galgani said in a low voice, “I only hope that Armenian son of a bitch isn’t eaten by the same sharks that got Matthieu. It would be too much if the two of them ended up in the same shark’s belly.”

The loss of that wonderful friend left a big empty space. I had to get away from Royale as soon as possible.

“Now there’s a war on and the punishment is even tougher, this is no time to louse up a
cavale
, is it, Salvidia?”

I was talking with the Italian of the gold
plan
I’d known on the convoy. We were sitting in the washhouse, having just read the bulletins describing the new measures pertaining to escapes.

I told him, “But no death sentence is going to keep me from trying. What about you?”

“Papillon, I can’t take any more of this. I’ve got to go, no matter what. I’ve asked for a job as orderly in the lunatic asylum. In the storeroom there they have two fifty-five-gallon barrels which would make a very nice raft. One is full of olive oil, the other of vinegar. If they were carefully tied together, I think you’d have a good chance of reaching Grande Terre. There’s no surveillance on the outside wall surrounding the building. Inside there’s only one infirmary guard with a few cons who concentrate on the patients. Why don’t you go up there with me?”

“As an orderly?”

“Not a chance, Papillon. You know damn well they’ll never give you a job at the asylum. It’s too far from camp and there’s very little surveillance—they’d never let you near the place. But you might get in as a lunatic.”

“That would be a really tough one, Salvidia. When a doctor classifies you as loony, he’s giving you the right to do anything you like. You’re no longer responsible for your actions. Just think of the responsibility the doctor takes on when he admits that and signs the diagnosis. You can kill a con, a guard, a guard’s wife, a kid, anyone. You can escape, commit any crime in the book, and justice has no recourse. The worst they can do is wrap you up in a straitjacket and put you in a padded cell. And they can’t even do that for very long; after a certain time they have to relax the treatment. So, no matter how serious your crime, even if it’s an escape, you get off scot-free.”

“Papillon, I trust you, I’d really like to do a
cavale
with you. Do your damnedest to join me at the nuthouse. I realize it must be pretty grim to find yourself, a well man, in with all those nuts. But since I’d be an orderly, I’d be able to back you up and help you through the tough spots.”

“You go to the asylum, Roméo. I’ll look into it and study the early symptoms of madness so I can convince the doctor. It wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have him class me as irresponsible.”

I embarked on a serious study. There was no book on the subject in the
bagne
library, so at every opportunity I discussed it with men who had been sick. I gradually arrived at a pretty clear idea of what was involved:

1. All lunatics had terrible pains in the cerebellum.

2. Often they had buzzing sounds in the ears.

3. Since they were very nervous, they couldn’t lie in the same position for any length of time. Their bodies were racked with nervous spasms, and the strain on them was intolerable.

The important thing was to have
them
discover these symptoms, not to display them openly. My madness must be just dangerous enough to make the doctor commit me to the asylum, but not so violent that it justified the extreme measures of hair shirts, beatings, withholding of food, hot or cold baths, etc. If I played my cards right, I might manage to fool the doctor.

I had one thing going for me: why would I want to fake madness? Since the doctor would not be able to think up a logical answer to this question, I might be able to get away with it. Anyway, it was my only chance. They had refused to send me to Diable, and I couldn’t stand the camp after my friend’s death. To hell with procrastination! I made my decision. I’d go to the doctor on Monday. No, I mustn’t report myself. Better if someone else did it, someone who could be trusted. I would do a couple of slightly strange things in our
case
. Then our guard would report it and put me down for a doctor’s visit.

For three days I didn’t sleep, didn’t wash and didn’t shave. I masturbated several times each night and ate practically nothing. Yesterday I asked my neighbor why he’d removed a picture of mine that never existed. He swore he’d never touched any of my things. It made him so nervous he changed places. Our soup often sat for a while in the pot before being distributed. I walked up to the pot and pissed in it in front of everybody. The look on my face must have impressed everyone because there was absolute silence.

My friend Grandet said, “Papillon, why did you do that?”

“Because they forgot to salt it.” And paying no further attention to the others, I got my bowl and held it out for the guard to serve me.

The silence continued while everybody watched me eat my soup.

Those two things did it. I was taken to the doctor without my saying a word.

I asked him, “Are you O.K., Doc?” Then I repeated the question. The doctor looked at me, stupefied. I looked at him perfectly naturally.

“Yes, I’m O.K.,” the doctor said. “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Then why did you come to me?”

“For no reason. They told me you were sick. I’m glad to see it isn’t true. Good-by.”

“Wait a minute, Papillon. Sit down. Now, look at me.” And the doctor examined my eyes with a lamp that gave off a small ray of light.

“You didn’t see what you expected to, did you, Doc? Your lamp isn’t powerful enough, but I think you understand all the same, right? Tell me, did you see them?”

“See what?” the doctor asked.

“Don’t be an ass. Are you a doctor or a vet? You’re not going to tell me you didn’t see them before they hid? Maybe you don’t want to tell me, and you’re playing me for a fool.”

My eyes glistened with fatigue. My appearance—unshaven, unwashed—helped. The guards listened, transfixed, but I refrained from any act that might have justified their intervention.

The doctor went along with the game so as not to excite me. He stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “Yes, Papillon, I didn’t want to tell you, but I did see them.”

“Doc, you lie with your goddam colonial self-control. You didn’t see a damn thing! You were looking for three black specks in my left eye. I see them only when I’m looking into space or reading. When I look in the mirror, I see my eye clearly, but not a sign of the three specks. They hide the second I pick up the mirror to look for them.”

“Put him in the hospital,” the doctor said. “Take him there immediately without going back to camp. Papillon, you said you weren’t sick. Maybe so, but I think you’re very tired and I want you in the hospital for a few days’ rest. Is that all right with you?”

“What’s the difference? Hospital or camp, it’s still the islands.”

I had taken the first step. A half-hour later I was in the hospital in a well-lighted cell with a clean bed and white sheets. The sign on the door said, “Under observation.” Little by little, helped by the power of suggestion, I became a lunatic. It was a dangerous game: I had worked up a tic that twisted my mouth, and I bit the inside of my lower lip. I studied how in a mirror and got so good at it that I found myself doing it without thinking. Mustn’t play this game too long, Papi. The effort to seem unbalanced could have serious consequences, even leave permanent damage. Still, I had to play the game with my whole soul if I was to achieve my goal. I had to get into that asylum, have myself classified as irresponsible and leave
en cavale
with my pal.
Cavale
! The magic word carried me away; I already saw myself astride my two barrels, being carried to Grande Terre with my buddy, the Italian orderly.

The doctor stopped by every day. He took a long time examining me; we always spoke to each other politely and nicely. He was troubled, but not yet convinced. So I told him I had the first symptoms—the shooting pains in the neck.

“How are you, Papillon? Slept well?”

“Yes, thank you, Doctor. Pretty good. Thanks for lending me your copy of
Match
. But sleep, that’s something else again. The trouble is that in back of my cell there’s a pump for watering something, and the shaft goes pang-pang all night, right through the back of my neck, and there’s a kind of echo inside me going pang-pang too. It keeps going all night long. I can’t stand it. I’d be very grateful if you could get my cell changed.”

The doctor turned to the orderly guard and muttered, “Is there a pump?”

The guard shook his head.

“Guard, put him in another cell. Where would you like to go?”

“As far as possible form the damned pump. At the far end of the hall. Thanks, Doc.”

The door closed; I was alone in my cell. But I was aware of an almost imperceptible sound. I was being watched through the spy hole. It had to be the doctor, for I hadn’t heard his steps moving off when he left. Quickly I stuck my fist out against the wall which my imaginary pump was behind and cried out—but not too loud: “Stop, stop, you filthy bastard! When will you finish that watering, asshole?” Then I threw myself on my bed and hid my head under the pillow.

I didn’t hear the small brass plate close over the hole, but I made out the sound of retreating steps.

I changed cells that afternoon. I must have put on a good show because two guards and two orderlies were assigned to accompany me the few feet to my new one. They didn’t say a word, so I didn’t speak to them. I just followed them silently. Two days later I produced the second symptom: noises in the ear.

“How are you, Papillon? Did you finish the magazine I gave you?”

“No, I couldn’t. I spent the whole day and most of the night trying to smother some mosquitoes or gnats or something. They’ve made their nest in my ear. I stuffed it with a piece of cotton, but it doesn’t work. I can’t seem to stop the zzin-zzin-zzin sound their wings make. But even worse is the buzzing. It never stops. It gets on your nerves, Doc. What do you think? Maybe asphyxiation, and if it doesn’t work, we could try to drown them. What do you say?”