Meanwhile, in Barcelona, the man in black …
Punch-drunk after a restless night, Max was locked up in a little squalid interrogation room in the cellar of the Guardia Civil barracks. An unshaven detective flashed a gilded star pinned to a leather wallet. His breath smelled of garlic. POLICÍA, it said on the star. The detective pulled a drawer and dropped a loaded .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson on the tabletop. The grip of a Star pistol stuck out of a leather holster on his hip.
‘Did you see L.A.Confidential?’ the detective asked.
‘That movie? Starring Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey?’
‘Right. What a wonderful film! Fifties policía negra. Police officers in white shirts and dark suits. You can almost smell their aftershave and of course they’re holding shotguns. Do I look like Kevin Spacey?’ He chuckled. ‘Rubbish, of course. It’s only a film. Reality is quite different, as you’ll soon find out.’
Given the chance, he’ll shoot a horse in half, Max thought.
He hammered on a computer and the screen jumped to life.
‘Huh-huh.’ The detective whistled through gritted teeth. ‘Busca y captura,’ he read aloud. ‘Find the suspect, arrest him and lock him up. An extradition warrant issued through Interpol. You’re ‘red notice status’ which means you’re in the highest risk category.’
The warrant silently rolled out of the printer.
The detective pulled a pair of silver handcuffs from the drawer full of pistols and revolvers. Max couldn’t help it, he was shitting his pants while the detective fastened the metal grippers around his wrists. His limbs went numb.
‘You know where you’re going to?’ Kevin Spacey asked.
‘No.’
The detective chuckled. ‘If I may give you some advice, leave your brain at the gate,’
Max didn’t even know the detective had a brain.
Two uniformed Guardia Civil officers pushed him on the back seat of a grey unmarked Seat car, behind a scratched screen of bullet proof Perspex, and drove their package to La Modelo prison, the old top-security penitentiary of brick and steel in the suburbs. Under the constant pulling and paring of the handcuffs, blood was dripping from his wrists. He was confined to a small holding cell in the basement. A concrete slab, no mattress, no blankets, nothing. A ringing telephone at the end of a corridor, then someone started laughing. Darkness all around.
There were six cellblocks in La Modelo. Block Five was home to psychopaths. Serial killers were in Block Four. Max was led through high, hollow corridors. Metal walls opened and closed without anyone interfering. The pungent stink everywhere of too many Spanish cigarettes. Clusters of barbed wire on the prison walls. He was ushered into a small and incredibly hot cell in Block Three. A metal bunk bed on either side. Two prisoners or presos as they are called in Spanish were sitting on the lower bunk, holding hands. A poster pin-up was glued to an open toilet door. The playmate on the poster displayed a pussy as endless and as droopy as a freshwater mussel. The stench of bleach and detergent was overwhelming. A plastic shopping bag marked ‘Personal Hygiene No 1’ was lying on the empty bunk. The bag contained a pair of underpants, white cotton socks, a white T-shirt, one sponge, foul-smelling soap, shaving cream, surgical gloves, one roll-on deodorant, three Bic disposable razors, a toothbrush, three rolls of toilet paper and three sealed up condoms.
What were the surgical gloves for?
And the condoms?
‘Electronically tested’, it said on the wrappers.
A thin man in pyjama trousers had been sleeping on the upper half of a bunk, a greasy film of cold sweat on his forehead. He yawned, looked at Max and said: ‘Don’t you worry about me, I will be here de larga, fifteen years at least, for manslaughter. My girlfriend opened her purse and said: “Antonio, look what I’ve got!” A mountain of heroin. I flipped, of course. After four days of shooting up, all the stuff was gone and she slashed my fingers with a kitchen knife. Sangre, blood everywhere, sangre sangre sangre, and again I flipped. I wrestled the knife from her and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, fifteen times straight into her heart. Then I started sawing her into pieces, using a toothed bread knife from the kitchen. I stacked the remains of my girlfriend in a dustbin liner, put the bag in my car on the passenger seat, and drove all the way down to Gibraltar. I every village we came into, I threw a limb out of the car window, an arm here, a hand or a leg there. I gave my girl a farewell kiss in Malaga and threw her head in the Mediterranean. My clothes were drenched in blood but no one seemed to notice. When I was arrested, my dustbin liner was empty.’
The prison courtyard was littered with plastic coffee cups and empty Pepsi cans. Prisoners playing football rammed a shapeless old leather ball dating back to the heyday of Alfredo di Stefano in the goal. An Englishman wore a red Manchester United shirt with the name BECKHAM and the number 7 on the back. Lots of laughter and swearing and shouting. A gypsy from Andalusia sang a dramatic song, in a high-pitched falsetto, sad and romantic and of a heartbreaking melancholy.
There were three telephone booths in the recreation area. Agitated presos were shouting into the handset as if they were in conversation with the other end of the world. A game of backgammon was played on a handmade triplex board. One of the players rattled the dice in an empty Pepsi can cut in half, pushed his index finger against his left nostril and blew a poisonous phlegm of snot in the can, on top of the dice.
‘Snake eyes!’ he shouted enthusiastically.
A siren wailed.
Lunch was served on a metal tray. Each prisoner was given a metal fork, a metal spoon, a metal butter knife and a paper napkin. Cold gaspacho soup, three grilled sausages, one hardboiled egg and some salad per person. The egg yolk had the colour of black pudding. These sausages taste awful, Max thought. He spat the morsels on his salad and from in between the lumps of fat wriggled a whole family of slimy, greyish green maggots that slowly crept to the rim of his tray.
‘French cuisine,’ Jim said.
The saltcellars on the table were made of roll-on deodorant flasks.
A medical assistant distributed daily rations of prescription drugs and tiny Styrofoam cups of bitter, syrupy methadone to a long line of glassy-eyed junkies. A preso in an all-red tracksuit slowly succumbed and slipped to the floor. ‘Red tracksuits mean: drogadictos. Don’t touch!’ the medical assistant warned.
Antonio fumbled with the small paper bag from the prison pharmacy and carefully removed the staples. Using the handle of his toothbrush, he crushed his daily ration of painkillers and sleeping tablets to a multicoloured grind that looked exactly like washing powder and mixed it and rolled it into some black tobacco. When he lit his homemade crack cigarette, inhaling deeply, the prescription drugs crackled and flickered like fireworks. ‘I loved to jab both arms,’ Antonio said. ‘Sometimes I had so many syringes sticking out of my body—liquid cocaine, heroin, hashish oil—that I must have looked like a voodoo doll. I wasn’t longing for the fix in itself but for thrill of cruising the streets and trying to outsmart the police, high on adrenalin. I loved the paranoia that came as a result of the heroin fix.’ He fell silent and listened to his Walkman.
Time for mass.
No windows in the prison chapel and as there were no windows, there were no iron bars either.
The priest said: ‘In silence we ask for remission of our sins.’ He wore stonewashed jeans under his clerical garb and was barefoot in brown sandals. He hadn’t shaved for days and looked like a prisoner himself.
A Colombian drugs baron and a Sylvester Stallone look-alike acted as altar boys.
‘Who is responsible for depriving us of our freedom?’ the priest asked, rolling his eyes.
‘The judge, that son-of-a-bitch mother-fucker!’ a choir of prisoners shouted.
A single candle was flickering on the altar. Accompanied by two classic guitars, the congregation sang: ‘Por Cristo, con El y en El, a Ti Diós Padre Omnipotente, en la unidad del Esperitu Santo, todo Honor y todo Gloria, por los siglos de los siglos, AMEN.’ Instead of wine as the universal symbol for the blood of Christ, there was half a can of Pepsi. The bread was a leftover turd from the breakfast table. Mass was over and even before the last hymn had died out, the churchgoers dashed to the familiarity of the patio, as if they were a bunch of schoolchildren, relieved that class was finally over.
An impossibly yellow sun blasted like a furnace and the hazy sickle of the moon hung motionless in the clear blue sky. The patio was sticky with sputum, ripped condoms and orange peel. Discarded rolls of toilet paper everywhere. The gypsy had a Planet Hollywood baseball cap on his shaven head and wore a swastika T-shirt. The Englishman looked like Pete Postlethwaite, with a face like a bag of spanners. He was immersed in a crossword puzzle in an English tabloid.
‘Famous catwalk model. Was engaged to Spanish superstar dancer.’
‘Naomi Campbell!’ Antonio shouted. ‘Una chica negra.’
‘Princes Diana’s lover. Begins with D.’
‘Dracula!’
‘Donald Duck!’ Max laughed.
‘Begins and ends with D.’
A prison warden in a dark suit wandered the exercise yard. He had a shiny toupee on top of his head and looked like Sean Connery in an early James Bond movie. Antonio ran around in a TelePizza T-shirt but instead of TelePizza there was stewed offal for dinner.
‘Fucking horrible,’ the Englishman said.’
‘Fuck is jao in Chinese,’ a Cuban replied.
‘The only solid food in La Modelo is your own shit,’ Antonio said.
‘After a while, even boiled shit tastes like vanilla fudge,’ Max said.
The night warden made his rounds. Antonio was smoking a crack cigarette, his ashtray an empty pilchards tin tied with some string to his bunk bed. Night fell hesitantly, like a stage curtain faltering in the wings. Pink searchlights flooded the empty patio. Max listened to a tiny pocket radio and polished his toenails with a lump of concrete or cement from the yard. The presenter rounded off his programme with a Willie Nelson song he dedicated to all prisoners all over the world. Come and lie down by my side, ‘Till the early morning light, Well I don’t want to be alone, Help me make it through the night. Lights out. Toothpaste tubes covered in toilet paper were set on fire and thrown through the prison bars, as if they were Molotov cocktails.
‘Eviva España!’ a dark voice shouted from a cell nearby.
Back in Antwerp…
Flooded meadows, wet and cheerless, with stark images of mud and reed and the shadow of a ship under a grey and misty sky. The first of many cold autumn winds to come was blowing over the Scheldt River. The other river bank was nowhere to bee seen. It looked as if the mist was glued to the water. Clouds were smooth and slippery and overlapped each other, like the scales of a fish, and when a bleary sun finally paid its respects, the clouds suddenly were adorned with a crown of molten gold.
Summer is over, Marie-Thérèse thought.
A tug boat hooted in the foggy mist.
Two seagulls nuzzled each other on the decaying pier, like lovers. The Chief Constable looked up at the birds and the sky and the clouds and smiled. He liked the slightly sulphurous smell of the mist and the muddy river. Marie-Thérèse was admiring their treasured collection of 78’s LP albums when the telephone started ringing. Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker and that black nigger piano player from Sweden, what was his name again… Oscar Peterson! She shook an album from the sleeve, without her fingers touching the grooves, and carefully placed it on the red velvet turntable of their old-timer His Master’s Voice gramophone. It was an early Louis Armstrong recording. The Chief Constable plucked his lower lip with his thumb and his index finger, in the familiar gesture, and leaned a little closer to the instrument. Jazz from the early fifties, soft, simple music with all the hoolahoop of the All Stars and the vocal backing of Mister Satchmo himself. What more can a man want? There was some scratching on the album but that didn’t bother him.
Again, the telephone rang.
‘Don’t answer it,’ Marie-Thérèse whispered.
And kept ringing.
Sighing, his body still swaying, the Chief Constable picked up the phone.
Immediately he recognized the voice at the other end. It was police detective Desmet, who was on holiday in Spain. ‘Max has escaped, Chief!’ he shouted. ‘Escaped from prison. It’s in the Spanish newspapers. De nuestro corresponsal it says, which means: from our correspondent, I gather. El asesino belga vista por ultima vez en el aeropuerto de El Prat, the Belgian murderer was last seen at Barcelona airport. Max is on his way to America, Chief!’
‘Funny, sharp, packed with action, hardboiled. A surprising finale.’
‘Thrilling. Should become an international bestseller.’
» Next...
|