“Je m’appelle Sabine,” she said, introducing herself. Just Sabine. I’d heard the guards didn’t give out their last names, a security measure. “Je suis le chef. Vous me comprenez?”
She was the leader, she was saying. The one I had to answer to.
“Dis-le,” Sabine said. Say it.
I didn’t answer. She could call herself whatever she wanted, but that didn’t mean I had to acknowledge it.
“Vous ferez tout ce que je dis,” she said. You will do whatever I say.
I didn’t answer.
“Dis-le,” she insisted, but before I could speak, the butt of her baton stabbed my stomach, whisking the wind from me. I doubled forward, though of course I was physically unable to do so. The pipe scorched both wrists and I struggled to get back into position. I couldn’t stand much longer. My legs were on the verge of collapse.
“Dis-le,” she said again. “You do…whatever I say.”
It was a time before I could recover my breath. She gave me that time. She wanted to hear me acknowledge her power over me. That was the point. Finally, I got a good breath and cleared my throat. I thought of Linette’s advice not to argue with the guards.
So I didn’t argue with Sabine. I just spat in her face.
She showed her disapproval with her baton, swinging the club into my left ribs three times in succession. It was all I could take. My legs gave out and my head fell backward. I was dangling from the thick pipe by my wrists, bloody now from the cuts made by the handcuffs and gravity. Sabine said something and another guard, with some effort, unlocked one cuff—dangling me sideways—then the other, and I fell hard on my shoulder to the damp concrete.
“Quelqu’un at-il de vous donner la nourriture?” Sabine said to me.
I shook my head. “Nobody…gave me…food,” I managed.
“Vous voulez une nourriture?” she asked.
“Oui,” I said. I wanted food.
“Et une douche?”
“Oui.” A shower, too.
Sabine called out to somebody, something about food and a shower, and I heard more footsteps. I raised my head and considered the possibility of lifting myself to a sitting position. My arms were useless and every inch of my body was in excruciating pain. No matter. Before I could even get up on my elbows, I was forced down by a gush of liquid, dousing my hair and my shirt.
It wasn’t water. After a moment, I recognized the smell.
Soup. It was the chicken soup I smelled this morning.
“No!” I cried, as guards lifted me from either side, the handcuffs slapping over one bloody wrist, around the thick pipe, and then around the other. “No!”
“Bonne nuit, Elliot,” Sabine said to me. Good night.
My muscles were completely useless. I dangled from the pipe, the flies and mosquitoes and other assorted insects instantly recognizing the scent of my bloody wrists and the soup broth soaking my clothes and hair. My protests echoed throughout the enclosure.
I am Abbie Elliot, and I am in hell.
CHAPTER 68
THERE WAS NO WAY for me to know how long I was there. I couldn’t process information—such as how much time had passed—and the basement was shut off from any daylight there might have been. My head was ringing from having been furiously shaken from side to side, my best defense against the insects that swarmed around me. At least I kept them off my face. My body was another story. My muscles were paralyzed, my arms entirely numb, and the insects feasted on my limbs and torso without impediment. I was like a human piñata, immobile and helpless, hanging from the thick steam pipe by my arms.
I was awake when they came for me. I might have been awake the whole time. I wasn’t sure. A waking nightmare, at some point, becomes indistinguishable from a sleeping one.
They had to carry me back to my cell, where my mates were eating breakfast on the tin plates we were provided. There is no mess hall in a French prison; they bring the food cart around from cell to cell and dish out the food and you eat it right there in your cell.
Everyone recoiled when they got a glimpse—or, more accurately, a whiff—of me.
“Permettez-lui de prendre une douche!” Josette, she of the butch haircut, complained to the guards. She was telling them to let me take a shower, but it was more out of self-interest than kindness. I wouldn’t want me in here looking and smelling like this, either.
I wasn’t welcome on anyone’s bed so I just lay on the floor. My arms were limp noodles. I thought there might be nerve damage. My wrists bore bloody rings where the handcuffs, aided by my body weight, had torn severe gashes. The rest of my body was so terribly sore that I couldn’t find a comfortable position. My skin was red and swollen, having been ravaged with bites of various kinds. I itched in every conceivable part of my body but I just tried to put it out of my mind, because I couldn’t scratch anything with arms and hands that didn’t function.
Without a word, following a consenting nod from Josette, two of the women came over to me. One was Linette, who had thus far been the only one to address me and seemed to be the only one who spoke English. The other, I knew from what Linette had shared with me last night, was Lexie, the diminutive one who had stolen my toothpaste. Lexie had set fire to a bookstore in the Latin Quarter of Paris and had five years left on a seven-year sentence. Apparently, Lexie hadn’t left cell 413 for the last eighteen months, couldn’t speak comprehensible French, and by all accounts was certifiably insane.
Lexie didn’t speak to me, but she bunched up my blanket and sheets and managed to make a comfortable cushion for me to lean against. She smiled at me and I almost burst into tears at the small gesture. Linette offered me apple juice and poured it into my mouth as though I were an infant.
“Tienes hambre?” asked a woman on the bottom bunk. Her name was Penelope—a dark-complected young woman, originally from Seville, Spain, who had killed her boyfriend three years ago in their apartment in Lyon. As Linette had explained it, Penelope claimed that her boyfriend was abusing her but apparently got nowhere with that defense. She was serving twenty-two years.
She was speaking Spanish, which I knew far better than French, having double-majored in it in college. She was asking me if I was hungry. Same thing Sabine asked me last night, and it turned out to be a trick question. Besides, I didn’t think I could hold anything down beyond a little juice.
Josette jumped down from the top bunk and washed her tin plate in the water basin. When she was done, she walked over to me, which in this place took all of six or seven steps. Josette’s expression and tense posture were as severe as her butch hairstyle; everything about her was angry. Four years ago, according to Linette, she had killed a woman in a bar fight. If I had the story right, she had beaten the victim with a beer bottle and when the bottle shattered, she took a jagged piece and slit the woman’s throat. That’s what you got, apparently, for flirting with Josette’s girlfriend.
Mental note: if Josette has a girlfriend in here, don’t flirt with her.
She eyed me now. It felt like some kind of a test. I’d taken a few sips of apple juice and was resting in relative comfort—the operative word being relative—and now the unofficial leader of the cell was sizing me up.
“Comment aimez-vous la prison jusqu’ici?” she asked me. How do you like prison so far?
It was a taunt, delivered with cold eyes and a flat tone. The others retreated. When Josette spoke, everyone else went quiet.
“La soupe de poulet est délicieuse,” I answered.
The chicken soup is delicious.
Josette blinked twice, thought a moment, then turned to Linette. For a moment, I figured this could go either way.
Then Josette burst into laughter. The rest of them, the tension now broken, followed suit. Everyone had a good chuckle. Even I managed to crack a smile. Josette’s eyes made their way back to mine. She nodded at me with grudging approval.
I had earned something with her. It was a start.
CHAPTER 69
THE GUARDS CAME for me a
fter breakfast. I didn’t know why. They marched me to the showers, which were otherwise empty. They ordered me to strip, and my darkest fears quickly surfaced.
But sexual assault wasn’t on the agenda this morning. I disrobed and got two whole minutes under the weak spray with soap they tossed me. I dried off with a towel the size of a bath mat and put on a new, clean set of prison garb. I was eager to scrub the soup broth off my body—as best I could with arms that were just regaining function.
They marched me down one of the prison hallways, apart from the four cell blocks, through lots of security—hydraulic gates and doors requiring key cards. I saw a metal sign that said LE GARDIEN and I finally realized I was going to visit the warden of the prison.
Inside, the office was spacious and orderly, the walls filled with photos that displayed the warden’s ego to the hilt, awards and citations and diplomas and photos of the warden with various dignitaries—including one with the fallen president, Henri Devereux.
His name was Boulez. He looked like a man of power. Dark hair slicked back. Expensive clothes, a vest over his crisply starched shirt and yellow satin tie—a three-piece suit with the jacket off. His manicured hand clutched a gold timepiece as he looked me over. It took me five seconds to dislike him.
“Welcome,” he said to me, as if they’d thrown a Hawaiian lei over my neck when I got off the bus. I thought it best not to respond.
“Ah, it is always difficult at first.” He waved a hand. “Most learn to adjust to this life. Some do not. It is all a choice, Ms. Elliot.”
He hadn’t offered me a seat, which I suppose was his attempt to establish superiority. Under the circumstances, he didn’t have to try very hard.
Boulez weighed the timepiece in his hand. “You have the choice to be cooperative. Your time can be…difficult if you do not.”
“Like last night? Would that be an example of difficult?”
He winked at me. This asshole actually winked at me.
“Your friends? They cooperated last night. They slept comfortably in their cells.”
I reverted to silence, unsure of what I might blurt out. I’d developed a defiance, a defense mechanism during my ten-month stay in the French penal system. It was how I was wired. Call it stubbornness. Call it pride. I wasn’t going to make it easy for these people to break me. Thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another wasn’t in my vocabulary.
“Your attitude, Ms. Elliot…did not lead to good results. Not for you. Not for your friends. I am correct? I am told your friends have you to thank for their harsh sentences.”
I didn’t need to be reminded of that. It was on my mind constantly. “They have your government to thank,” I said.
Serve and volley. He wasn’t going to debate me. He didn’t need to.
“Choices,” he said again. “You have a…unique opportunity, no? Another chance to…correct?…correct your mistake.”
The appeal, he meant. In France, every convict gets a second trial with new jurors or, in my case, judges. But nobody was holding out hope. My lawyer, Jules, had explained that the court would likely rely almost entirely on the investigating judge’s report and not call live witnesses. They wouldn’t want to reopen the nation’s wounds.
No chance, Jules had bluntly assessed. No chance of winning.
But Boulez was talking about the sentence. If I confessed, he was saying, perhaps the court might lighten my sentence.
“A written confession,” said Boulez. “That is your choice.”
“I’m innocent.”
He found that amusing and made sure I knew it. Then he grew serious.
“Confess,” he said, “and your conditions here will be…better.”
They could stick my head in a toilet and it would be better than last night.
“Safe,” he elaborated. “You will be protected. And a personal recommendation from me to the court for a less harsh sentence. You understand, this is a difficult thing for me personally.” Boulez got up and lifted the photo of himself standing next to President Devereux off the wall. He stared at it with reverence. “I considered Henri Devereux a personal friend.”
“But did he consider you one?”
Boulez looked at me as if I’d slapped him. “What is this you say?”
I pointed at the photograph. “It looks like this was some fancy event where everybody in the room wanted their picture taken with the president. He probably posed for a hundred photos that night. See how his shoulders are turned away from you? And his eyes are looking past you? It looks to me like he’d never met you before, and he wouldn’t care if he never saw you again.”
Nice one, Abbie. Way to make friends. But I’d hit my limit with this prick.
Boulez’s face colored. He didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of a reaction, but he gave me one regardless. His jaw clenched and his eyes bored into me. It was obvious to both of us that I had hit the nail on the head.
“Okay, suit yourself,” I said. “You guys were best friends.”
Boulez took a moment to reboot, to regain the upper hand in the room. He sat back down and formed a tent with his hands. A wry smile appeared on his lips. He nodded to the guards flanking me.
“Ms. Elliot needs some time to consider my offer,” he said as the guards escorted me out. “Make sure she has all the time she needs.”
CHAPTER 70
THE BLOOD IN my mouth was warm and bitter. Beads of sweat streamed down my face, into my eyes and mouth and ears, dripping off my chin. My thighs and lower back were in searing pain. I tried to keep my breathing even by exhaling in quick bursts. More than anything, I was trying not to pass out.
My back was against the wall and my thighs were at right angles to it, parallel to the floor. It was exactly like sitting in a chair, but minus the chair. I was steeling myself against the wall, trying not to let myself slide down to the floor.
The guard monitoring me was named Lucy. She was, by all accounts, the only guard nastier than the head guard, Sabine. To my horror, she actually looked like me, if you added an inch of height, twenty pounds of muscle, and a creepy smile. My cell mates called her my belle-soeur laide—my ugly stepsister.
“Voulez-vous cesser?” she asked me as she lit a cigarette.
Did I want to stop? She knew I did. I’d been in this position for almost a half hour. My legs were trembling. My face was twisted in agony. But I wasn’t going to give Lucy the satisfaction of an answer, because sure as sunrise, she would respond with a cruel direction to remain in this position for another half hour.
It had been six nights like this, each of them with Lucy. At first she went back to the steam pipe, handcuffing me over my head. One night, she just made me stand all night, twelve hours straight, with my arms out, something they called l’épouvantail, or the scarecrow. My ankles were so swollen I couldn’t walk the next day. Another night, she let me fall asleep on a hard floor but woke me up every thirty minutes by splashing water in my face.
I started to slip down the wall. My thighs felt like they’d been set on fire.
Lucy patted the baton against her leg, watching me.
I collapsed, my butt landing hard on the concrete floor. I stretched out my legs. I panted and moaned and spit blood.
“I did not tell you…you could stop,” she said, holding the baton against her side.
I braced myself for what was coming next. So far, they hadn’t hit me in the face; they’d limited the abuse to the torso, back, and legs.
“Get…up,” said Lucy. She knew I wouldn’t. She knew I couldn’t.
“Just give me a minute,” I pleaded. “Just one—”
The spray hit me on the left cheek, just below my eye. But pepper spray, I had come to learn the hard way, didn’t need to make direct contact with the eye to cause serious disability and pain.
Within seconds my face felt like it was on fire. My eyes shut involuntarily. I gasped for air and broke out into convulsive coughing. I was on my hands and knees, fighting for whatever air I could take in, my face ra
vaged with fiery heat.
I panted and gagged and shrieked. It would be a half hour or forty-five minutes before the effects would completely wear off. At which time Lucy would demand that I reassume my position on the wall. Or she’d pull out the OC spray once more.
“Ce va être une longue nuit,” my ugly stepsister called out to me.
She was right. It was going to be another long night.
CHAPTER 71
LINETTE MOREAU TOOK Giorgio’s hand in hers and stroked it. Most of the time during these two-hour visits, which took place every other Sunday in an airy room filled with other prison visitors, they just gazed into each other’s eyes and held hands and touched foreheads from across the table separating them. This day, they’d killed the first hour on gossip: Linette’s best friend, Sophie, had broken up with her boyfriend; Linette’s mother was trying to quit smoking for the twentieth time; Giorgio’s rock band, Noise Pollution, was this close to getting a gig at the Élysée Montmartre, a big break if they could pull it off.
Oh, how she loved this boy. Two years her junior, which made him twenty-eight, a tall Italian with soulful eyes and a smile that leveled her. And he was clean now. They both were. It was the cocaine that had made them do stupid things like steal cars and boost stereos and pick pockets. That chapter of their lives was closed. Giorgio had two legitimate jobs—a courier for a law firm and a bartender at Baxo—while he pursued his dream of making music at night and on the weekends, always carrying that ratty notebook where he penned his lyrics or toting around his prized Les Paul, strumming chords and humming to himself.
She loved him so furiously it made her eyes water, her throat constrict. Just two hundred and six days now until they could be together forever. They would be married on a hillside overlooking a vineyard in Bordeaux.
“So?” he said to her in French. Giorgio was learning English with audio recordings, but he had nowhere near Linette’s knowledge of the language. Occasionally they tried to speak in English, but he always defaulted to French. “Tell me about her.”