TURNING AWAY FROM the window, Boudreau knew that he could cross off the new Sergeant as a possible ally. Provencher too. He had always treated Provencher fairly well, but he knew that Provencher had long since turned against him. It would have been wiser to make a friend of the Corporal, of many other men under his command; that wasn’t his way and now he was paying for it.
Boudreau shrugged. It was too late now. Back in his chair, he reached around and turned up the radio until the chinky Latin music filled the room.
“Send the prisoner in,” he called out in response to knuckles rapping on the door.
Gendron came in with Provencher behind him. “You want me to turn down the radio, sir?” Provencher asked.
Boudreau shook his head and waited for the orderly to get out. It would be better to send the man on some errand; that had been his first thought when he sent for the American. The radio would have to do; anything else would be too obvious. Ducharme would hear about it anyway and, through him, the Colonel.
Provencher was closing the door with great reluctance. Before it closed all the way, Boudreau raised his voice to a furious bellow. “How would you like to go back to the pit, you lying son of a bitch? You lied to me last night, and now I want the truth.”
Still shouting, Boudreau got out of his chair and went to the door. Then, satisfied that it was closed, he sat in his chair.
Gendron had tensed when the pit was mentioned, but something about the way the Captain shouted stopped him from doing anything. Whatever else Boudreau was, he wasn’t a shouter.
There was another chair in the office, and Boudreau pointed to it, motioned Gendron to bring it close to the desk, to sit down. “Stand up if the door opens,” Boudreau told him. Gendron sat down. It was strange to sit in a cushioned chair—any chair—after such a long time. Bitterly, he wondered if the careful, sneaky Captain would offer him a drink and a cigarette.
Boudreau did neither, not that it would make much difference now, but the old habit of caution persisted. “How is the escape plan going?” he started, cursing himself for wasting time. He stopped and tried to put his thoughts in order. He knew that wasn’t what he wanted to do. What he wanted to do—what he didn’t want to do—was to take that first, that last big step that would place him in the shadow of the guillotine.
“You don’t want to talk about that, sir,” Gendron said, knowing damned well that the radio wasn’t turned up because of what he might say.
“All right.” Boudreau got ready to take that step which the cautious part of his brain told him to avoid. He cursed himself again. Almighty God, it was hard to put himself outside the law. Breathing in hard, he said, “You run to the Colonel with what I’m going to say I’ll... The Colonel will believe me, not you. Then I’ll see you dead, you hear me?”
Gendron didn’t know what Boudreau wanted, but he said, “You’re doing it the wrong way, Boudreau.” Now it was up to Boudreau to stop him right there. He hadn’t sirred the Captain.
For a moment a frown showed on the Captain’s face. It went away, and he relaxed. Suddenly he felt completely relaxed. It wasn’t true that the Colonel wouldn’t believe the American’s story, if he chose to talk. The Colonel would want to believe. Running to the Colonel might make it easy for the American. Boudreau didn’t care. “You’re right,” he said.
“About what?”
“What I said about not trusting you.”
“Don’t trust me, sir.”
Looking at the door, Boudreau could almost hear the orderly’s heavy breathing on the other side. “Maybe I can’t trust you, Gendron. I think I can. Don’t talk—listen.”
Gendron didn’t say anything.
“All right,” Boudreau started again. Quickly, watching the door, he went over the situation, his situation. With a less intelligent man than the American he would have tried a somewhat different approach. Some men would like to be told that he was thinking of their welfare as well as his own. The American would never believe that, so he stressed the point that he was asking for Gendron’s help only because there was no one else.
Gendron nodded but said nothing when Boudreau explained about the Germans. The Gestapo! It couldn’t get much worse than that.
“You know what they’re doing to the Jews,” Boudreau went on. “They may have the same plans for Guiana, for you.”
“You don’t have to sell me on how bad the Gestapo is. They won’t do anything to you but take away your job. What’s so bad about that? You’ll still be alive, you can go back to France. Now me, I’d like to get out of here any way I can. There has to be something else.”
Maybe there was. It was a struggle for Boudreau to admit, even to himself, that there might be something else. The smile he gave Gendron was slightly apologetic. “Somehow, the Germans bother me. Not the Germans in France because France is so far away. Well, yes, maybe the Germans in France bother me, too.”
“You want to fight Germans, is that it?”
“What?” Boudreau was surprised. The American had said what he had been reluctant to say to himself. All his life he had moved like a man in a minefield and now...
It was madness, but he liked it. Which only proved what a lunatic he had become in his old age. “You’re right,” he said. “I would like to fight Germans. To kill Germans.”
There he sat: Boudreau, the reluctant patriot. He knew part of it was his pension. Not all of it.
“I have some men I can count on,” Gendron said. He wasn’t ready to give their names to the Captain, not yet. “I can get more, not many, maybe enough. I don’t want any guards. I don’t care how they say they feel about the Germans, guards talk out of both sides of the mouth.”
“Then you can’t trust me either. What will you do with the guards?”
“Kill them,” Gendron answered. “Those that want to be killed. Listen, Boudreau, we don’t have time to give every guard a loyalty test. No problem with the prisoners: they want to get out.”
The Captain made an attempt to exert his authority. “There will be no unnecessary killing,” he said.
“Anything you say,” Gendron said, knowing that only a miracle would get them off the island without a lot of killing. And he didn’t believe in miracles.
“You tell your men no unnecessary killing,” Boudreau said. “I mean it, Gendron.”
A fly buzzed in the room. Gendron thought it might be smart to kill the Captain as soon as the shooting started. Maybe not. He wondered if he’d been a convict too long.
Boudreau bent over to look at his old-fashioned silver watch lying open on the desk. “No more time to talk. I’ll have you brought back here tomorrow. Stand up.”
The Captain’s smile was awkward. “I have to do this.”
A punch rocked Gendron’s head to one side. Boudreau hit him again, bringing blood to the corner of his mouth. “Screw you, Captain,” Gendron said.
Boudreau called for the orderly to come in.
Lying awake in the darkness, hands folded behind his head, Gendron waited for the Jolly Rapist to light the stub of candle. At sundown the guard locked them in, complaining about how bad some of them smelled. The sun was gone, but it was still early, and for a while there was the uneasy back and forth movement of caged men. Two prisoners squabbled over a cigarette butt picked up in the yard. In the end they reached a compromise. One man smoked his portion of the cigarette end and passed it to the other. Some prisoner, a Corsican, started to sing a mournful song. The men who had been fighting over the cigarette stub threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up.
One by one they fell asleep or lay quietly in their bunks. A match flared and Boulanger lit the candle in the cut-away tin can. Gendron put his feet on the floor and sat up. Boulanger beckoned to Giroux, the one-eyed man, and four others. They came over to Gendron’s bunk.
The bunks on both sides of the American were empty, and Boulanger smiled. “One thing about smelling bad, you get privacy,” he said.
They all smelled of shit. Giroux didn’t have the fat rapist’s twisted sense of humor. “If we get out, I’ll make the Frog pay for every bucket we dipped today.”
Gendron knew two of the men with Boulanger. Revel and LaMarc: they had been there the night before. Revel was a wife-killer and LaMarc, a professional burglar, had killed a night watchman during a robbery.
Jerking his thumb at the other two men, Boulanger said they were all right. He’d vouch for them. “Gagne and Martin,” he said. “Good men.”
“They’d better be,” Gendron said.
Boulanger said there were others.
“No more,” Gendron said. “Seven is enough. Every extra man makes it that much riskier.”
Boulanger’s face looked as if his stomach bothered him. “Seven men against thirty guards, two officers, a machine gun?”
“Better than having it leak out. If it gets out it won’t just be the pits. You heard the Colonel. He’ll put us under the big knife.”
LaMarc, the burglar, felt his neck. “Just so you know,” Gendron said.
Quickly, he explained about Boudreau. They had to know there was a good chance of making it.
Giroux lunged at Gendron. Boulanger, without moving much, grabbed the little man and clamped his hand over his mouth. Giroux continued to struggle, to slobber wild curses, until Boulanger cuffed him along the side of the head like a fat uncle disciplining an unruly child. Giroux continued to tremble with rage after the fat man let him go.
Boulanger didn’t like it either. “You told a guard, American, that’s bad.” The jolly fat man’s face was sad for a change. He didn’t move, but he said, “I think we’d better kill you now.”
“Will you listen? You don’t know what’s going on. Boudreau is in trouble with the Colonel. Ducharme and the Colonel are like that. Ducharme is after Boudreau’s job, and he knows it. He’ll be finished when the Germans get here.”
Boulanger still wasn’t convinced. “It sounds good. It always does when they say it. A guard is still a guard, American. Boudreau is in bad, so he has to make himself look good for the Colonel. So he rigs a beautiful trap, and we walk into it. We get one step outside the barracks, and the machine gun stops us dead. We’re dead and the Captain is praised for a job well done. The Frog is asleep, maybe drunk when it happens, so now he looks bad. It could be that way.”
Gendron was angry because he knew Boulanger might be right. He didn’t think Boudreau was setting a trap, but there was something undecided about the man that bothered him. At the last minute he might go to pieces; try to crawl back into his safe little hole. Things like that happened all the time, especially to men like Boudreau.
“What do you want to do? Run to the Colonel?” That’s what they could do. Maybe it was one way to get Ducharme off his back. But he knew he wouldn’t do it.
“Which is it, Boulanger? You want to turn informer—or listen?”
It didn’t take long for the fat man to make up his mind. A quick look around the dark, foul-smelling barracks helped him to decide. He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We’d stay alive but we’d still be here. When I think of all the women out there in the world. Go on—talk.”
Getting out of the barracks would be easy enough with Boudreau’s help, Gendron explained. The hard part came after that. Some of them might get killed, maybe not, but there was still a good chance. He hadn’t said anything about how they’d get off the island. Boulanger was smart and slow at the same time, and with men like that you had to build up to it.
“We take the torpedo boat that brings the Germans,” Gendron said, “Shut up and listen. One German anyway, maybe more. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow and if it works, we’ll be waiting for him. For the boat. We take the boat and...”
“So simple.” Boulanger’s voice was sarcastic.
“Not simple—practical. You stay and build a raft if you like. Tomorrow I fix the other details with Boudreau. That’s it, pal.”
Giroux, the bloodthirsty little bastard, had changed his mind. “A real boat!” he marveled. “A torpedo boat—the bastards would never catch us.” The little man did his best to imitate the deep roar of a torpedo boat.
A sleepy, angry voice called out from the darkness beyond the dim circle of light. “Cut it out, you crazy son of a bitch.”
Giroux, tense with excitement, told the complaining convict to do something dirty to his mother.
“Shut up, clown,” Gendron rasped. “How about it, Boulanger? The Captain doesn’t have the names, so you’re safe if you decide to stay. We’ll send you a postcard when we get north to Trinidad. A dirty postcard with naked women.”
Sweat glistened on the fat convict’s face. Giroux winked at Gendron with his one good eye. Gendron ignored him: Finally, the fat man said, “All right, American. No postcard—I’m in. Now you listen. Lead us into a trap, and I’ll see you dead.”
Gendron said, “I’ll be dead anyway. So will everybody.”
The candle guttered and died, and they crept back to their bunks, some to sleep, some to lie awake and sweat. Gendron wasn’t joking about the Colonel and the big knife. The Colonel would order them under the knife, those still alive, and the Frog would be grinning when it fell. One more day and then they’d know. Boudreau had a lot to say about how they’d do it. That was fair enough. As soon as the door opened, the Captain would have nothing more to say. Not to Gendron.
The Captain wanted to drag out the details of his plan. Maybe he thought that would keep them in line, but Gendron was way ahead of him. He knew they couldn’t do it at night in the glare of the lights. At night the compound glared bright and shadowless; so bright that a man in the tower could see a mouse running. They would have to do it just before dawn, just after the lights went off and the sky turned a dark red. At that hour the guards were sleepy and, for about twenty minutes, the light was thick, making it hard to see unless you looked hard. Maybe they’d be looking hard. Gendron didn’t give a damn. Now that the escape was starting to move, he was ready to try anything, no matter how long the odds.
The Frog? He wanted to kill the Frog, but he couldn’t let his hate get in the way. The world was full of Frogs and you couldn’t kill them all. But he knew that if he didn’t kill this particular Frog, he would think about it all his life.
Among other things.