Papillon Read Free Page A

trunk with all the explosives it would hold. I didn’t know exactly how much that would be: twenty, thirty, forty pounds? I tried to figure what I’d need for lots of victims.
    I kept my eyes closed, the handkerchief over them for protection, and I could see the trunk very clearly, looking very innocent but crammed with explosives, the trigger carefully primed to set them off. Wait a minute … It must explode at exactly ten in the morning, in the dispatch room on the second floor at Police Headquarters, 36 Quai des Orfèvres. At that hour there would be at least one hundred and fifty cops in the room, receiving their orders for the day and listening to reports. How many steps were there to climb? I had to get it right.
    I must figure exactly the time it would take to get the trunk from the street to its destination at the very second it was to explode. And who would carry the trunk? All right; be bold. I’d arrive in a taxi immediately in front of the entrance, and with an authoritative voice I’d tell the two guards: “Take this trunk up to the dispatch room. I’ll be right up. Tell Commissioner Dupont that Chief Inspector Dubois sent it and that I’ll be along in a minute.”
    But would they obey? What if it was my luck that, out of all those idiots, I picked the only two intelligent men in the force? Then I’d be finished. I must think of something else. And I thought and thought. I would not admit that nothing would ever be 100 percent sure.
    I got up for a drink of water. So much thinking had given me a headache.
    I lay down again without the blindfold. The minutes dragged. And that light, that goddamned light! I wet the handkerchief and put it back on. The cold water felt good and its weight made the cloth stick to my eyes. From then on I always did this.
    The long hours I spent piecing together my future revenge were so intense that I began to feel as if the project were already under way. Every night, and even parts of the day, I wandered through Paris as if my escape were already a fact: I would escape and I would return to Paris. And, naturally, I’d present my bill to Polein first, then to the informers. But what about the jury? Were those bastards to go on leading peaceful lives? Those old crocks must have gone home, smug and satisfied at having done their duty with a capital D—full of importance, puffed up with pride in front of their neighbors, and the wives waiting, hair uncombed, to guzzle soup with them.
    All right now. What should I do with the jury? Nothing—that was the answer. They were a pitiful bunch, really not responsible. I’d leave them alone.
    As I write down these thoughts I had so many years ago, thoughts that come back now to assail me with such terrible clarity, I am struck by how absolute silence and total isolation were able to lead a young man shut up in a cell into a true life of the imagination. He literally lived two lives. He took flight and wandered wherever he liked: to his home, his father, his mother, his family, his childhood, all the different stages of his life. And more important still, the castles in Spain that his fertile brain invented induced a kind of schizophrenia, and he began to believe he was living what he dreamed.
    Thirty-six years have passed and yet it taxes my memory scarcely at all to write what I actually thought at that point in my life.
    No, I wouldn’t harm the jurors. But what about the prosecutor? Ah, I wouldn’t botch that one! Moreover, thanks to Alexandre Dumas, I had just the right recipe. I’d do exactly as they did in The Count of Monte Cristo with that poor bugger they put in the cellar and left to die of hunger.
    Oh, that vulture decked out in red—he’d done everything to deserve the most horrible possible end. Yes, that was it. After Polein and the police, I’d concentrate exclusively on him. I’d rent a villa, one with a very deep cellar and thick walls and a very heavy door. If the door wasn’t thick enough, I’d pad it