BOUDREAU PUT AWAY the binoculars and sat down heavily behind his desk to consider his situation. An ancient electric fan clattered uselessly, barely stirring the sluggish air.
The situation, his situation, was not good. He had watched the making of the coffin, the burial of Barbe-Bleue. There had always been a problem with the Frog. Like the prisoners, he thought of Ducharme as the Frog. Sooner or later, the Italian would kill the Frog, or try to kill him. Personally, he would like to see the Frog dead, but the Colonel wouldn’t like it.
That meant trouble for him. Why couldn’t the Frog find some other lover to torment? One thing St. Joseph had was plenty of queers. Why couldn’t the stupid Italian drop his dirty pants and let the Frog have his way?
The American was another problem. The man had done nothing to attract suspicion, but Boudreau knew. There was something dangerous about the man that came through his silence, his careful indifference. He had read through the American’s dossier, as he read through the files on all his charges, and he knew, from his past history, the American would give him trouble one of these days.
A dossier told much about a man; the file was the man. Mirandola’s file was like Mirandola himself—flat, brief, uninteresting. One senseless murder, then his life stopped. Gendron’s file was different. It was long and filled with police suspicions; accusations rather than convictions, which meant that the American had done many things for which he had not been caught. The American was a man to watch.
Boudreau found himself wanting a drink, but he couldn’t chance it with the new Colonel around. It didn’t matter. When he retired there would be plenty of time for drinking. During the first years he had dreamed the conventional dreams of the minor colonial official. A café for tourists close to one of the great railway stations in Paris. Later he thought about a country inn somewhere in the South, because he had grown accustomed to the sun and would miss it. Then, finally, he knew he would never go back to France. Perhaps he would open a bar in Cayenne, the capital of Guiana; go into the tourist business.
The pension was all he had to count on. He had gambled most of his life on that pension, and there was no bigger gamble than that, and he’d be damned to everlasting hell if he’d let them take it away from him.
The new Colonel was a stiff-necked, pompous Nazi-loving son of a bitch. That was all right. Politics was a game for fools. He had survived many Colonels and, by God, he would survive this one. But he’d have to watch himself.
Ducharme’s loud voice disturbed the quiet of the compound, and Boudreau got up and watched through the broken shutters while the Frog marched Mirandola and the American back to the death house and locked up the shovels. The Frog was telling the Italian not to spoil the shape of his ass by gaining too much weight. Boudreau didn’t like the look on Mirandola’s face.
There was nothing he could do right now about that situation, but he could talk to the American. He roared for his orderly and Corporal Provencher opened the door to the outer office.
“Find the American prisoner, Gendron, and bring him here,” Boudreau said. He didn’t like, didn’t trust Provencher. He got along too well with the Frog. “Then you go out and count every palm tree on the island. Get out!”
Gendron came in and stood at attention in front of the Captain’s desk. The Captain’s holster, unclipped from his belt, lay unbuttoned and empty on the desk.
“It’s where you can’t get it,” Boudreau said. “What good would it do you if you did manage to get it?”
“No good, sir,” Gendron answered.
Unlocking a drawer in his desk, Boudreau took out the American’s dossier. Then for a while he read through what he already knew, pausing to sip at his heavily sugared coffee. By now the damned drink had reached body temperature and it would get warmer than that. Gendron stood waiting. After thirty years in the tropics Boudreau still sweated a lot, but to the American, accustomed to working in the sun, the Captain’s office seemed almost cool. A big fly with gauzy blue wings buzzed around the room while the Captain read slowly. Even a man as sensible as Boudreau had a few peculiarities, and killing flies with rubber bands was one of them. Without looking up from the file, he reached into a drawer with his left hand and found a rubber band and broke the loop by grinding it against the top of the desk with his thumbnail. The fly was interested in the cloudy sweetish drink. Boudreau let the fly get closer. It came in for a landing and walked across the scarred desk top toward the glass. The Captain didn’t look up at Gendron as he aimed and snapped the rubber band. A perfect snap shot; the fly died.
The were all crazy in Guiana, Gendron decided.
“How did you end up here, Gendron?” Boudreau asked abruptly.
“Murder, sir,” Gendron said. “It’s a long story.”
Pretending to be irritated, Boudreau clicked his fingers and pointed at the American. “You may be in for murder, but you’re on this island because of insubordination. When I ask you a question you will do nothing but answer it. If the answer you give is too long I will stop you. If I do not like the answer I will do something about it. You heard the question—now answer it.”
Gendron kept his voice level, the pace slow. “I was a bodyguard for an American millionaire, a Maine Frenchman like myself. His name was Cloutier. I was a Marine sergeant attached to the American Embassy in Paris. Cloutier made his money in lumber and when he had enough of it he came to France. He had money and political connections at home, so the Ambassador had to be nice to him. I was assigned to him as driver and general bodyguard. He liked having me around because we came from the same state. I guess having me around was a reminder of how far he had come. I didn’t object when he pulled strings to get me out of the Marines and onto his payroll as full-time bodyguard. He was worried about being kidnaped, that’s why he thought he needed a bodyguard. I traveled a lot with him, to different countries. I stayed on with him after he married a French girl much younger than he was.”
“More your own age,” Boudreau commented.
“That’s right, sir. It got complicated. One night we thought he was passed out drunk, but he wasn’t and he caught us together. He had a gun, but I took it away from him and killed him with it. I got away and joined the Legion but Cloutier’s people got a line on me after five years. I thought they couldn’t touch me in the Legion—that’s supposed to be the law—but Cloutier was such a big shot they made an exception for me. Two detectives brought me back from Algeria. That’s about everything, sir.”
Boudreau looked at the file again. “You make it sound so neat,” he said. “You say this Cloutier’s friends or associates tracked you down. Your dossier says Mrs. Cloutier was the one.”
“That’s correct, sir. Mrs. Cloutier hired private detectives to track me down.”
“Why?”
“Because I killed her husband, sir.”
“No.” Boudreau closed the file and drummed his fingers on the stiff paper cover. “Things get into dossiers that are never said in court. The police seem to think perhaps Mrs. Cloutier shot her husband, that you ran away to cover up for her, that you were the only one besides herself who knew the truth and could perhaps make trouble for her at some future date. So, thinking she could lose her head as well as her husband’s millions if you turned up again with accusations, she kept after you. She was the one who sent you here. You didn’t try to defend yourself and the police, whatever they thought privately, were delighted to close the case. Tell me something, Gendron, don’t you want to get back to France so you can kill her?”
“No, sir.” Gendron meant what he said. Among the prisoners of Guiana, injustice and revenge were the two favorite topics of conversation. Gendron was interested in neither. Killing Cloutier’s wife was something he should have done a long time ago, right after she started yelling for the police because he wouldn’t help her to get rid of the body.
The Captain closed the file and put it back in the desk. “You know what I think, Gendron? I think you’re going to try to make trouble for me. You think you’re tough and smart. You could be like that if you were on the outside—but not here. Nobody here is tough or smart or they wouldn’t be here.”
“I’ll be smarter the next time, sir.”
“Silence.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Boudreau slammed his fist on the top of the desk. “You won’t be smarter because you’ll still be here. You think you can walk around playing it cool, putting your plan together. It won’t work. You heard the Colonel this morning. Let me explain something. Make trouble for me, try to escape, and I’ll cripple you for the rest of your life. You’ll stay in the tiger cages until you start to rot. That isn’t just a figure of speech but a fact.”
“Yes, sir,” Gendron said.
There was no one else in the room, so Boudreau could say what he pleased. “You were a smart man before you got yourself sent here. Now listen to me and be smart again. I don’t care whether you live or die, whether you’re guilty or innocent. All I care about is the trouble you can cause me. I can’t say that often enough. You know the difference between you and me?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Because I’m me and not you. You think you can look out for yourself. That isn’t true. But I can. I can look out for myself. I have that much freedom left. I’m looking out for myself because I’m all I’ve got. You think the same thing, but again you’re wrong. You think you exist but you don’t. You think being here is just something that happened to you, that your life is out there, away from Guiana, waiting to be taken up and lived again. You’re wrong. I wouldn’t even be talking to you this way if you weren’t a man of some intelligence.”
“Yes, sir,” Gendron said.
“You say that but you don’t believe it. The way you behave toward the other prisoners proves that. That’s another problem. It wouldn’t be a problem for me if we didn’t have Colonel Gamillard to think of. You know why the other prisoners don’t like you?”
“No, sir.”
“Because you don’t think you’re a prisoner. You’re wearing the same dirty uniform and you eat the same slop they do, but somehow you think you’re different. Being here is temporary, something that happened to you, something that merely happened—one of those things, as you Americans say. Answer me—am I right?”
“No, sir,” Gendron lied.
“They’ll kill you if you don’t change,” Boudreau said. “I won’t be able to stop it, and maybe they won’t kill you as mercifully as Barbe-Bleue killed the Nazi. But that isn’t my point. However they kill you, you’ll be dead, and the Colonel won’t like it. I won’t either because the Colonel won’t. You could go into solitary. How would you like that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Boudreau thumped the desk again. “You’re a fool,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Picking up a steel pen, Boudreau used the handle to scratch his head. Then he sighed. There was no way of getting through the man’s studied indifference. Boudreau had questioned thousands of men in his lifetime and usually even the most hardened volunteered some opinion on what was said, displayed some emotion. Gendron did neither and perhaps these Americans really were different, Boudreau thought.
“What was Sergeant Ducharme saying to Mirandola?” he asked abruptly.
“When was that, sir?”
“Answer me—what did he say?”
“He told him to hurry up,” Gendron answered. “He told me the same thing.”
“He didn’t say he wanted the Italian’s ass?”
“No, sir.”
“You know the Sergeant is a queer?”
“No, sir.”
Boudreau was exasperated. “Then what did you think he was?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think about the Sergeant.”
“What about me? Do you think about me?”
“No, sir.”
“Here’s your chance,” Boudreau said. “I know you’re busy but take the time and think about me. My name is Georges Pascal Boudreau, and I have been in the colonial service for more than thirty years. I have been a jailkeeper that long. Make trouble for me and I will destroy you. I know all the ways. Now get out.”
Gendron gave the same answer. “Yes, sir.”
After he had gone Boudreau felt tired. He had said what he had intended to say; perhaps he had said too much. Perhaps the American would think about what had been said. Boudreau didn’t think so. Actually he hadn’t said what he had intended to say; more or less he had—but not exactly. It was a mistake to say too much to prisoners; it was a mistake to say too much to anyone.
“You are getting old,” he told himself.
Bored, he turned in his chair to switch on the shortwave radio. When the radio was new many years ago it was possible to bring in stations from many faraway places. The radio belonged to him, purchased years before at a time when the world—his world—meant more than French Guiana. It was a Pye radio, made in England, and he still remembered the words they used to advertise it—“The world at your fingertips.”
A long time ago, certainly. Now there were only two stations he could get. He sighed, thinking of the days when New Orleans and that clanky jazz came in easily. Now he could get some crazy station in Venezuela and the official station in Cayenne.
He did what he always did: He tried the Caracas station first. Miracles were still possible, they said. He might get something besides the rhumba music. He didn’t. He switched over to the other station.