John Matthews - Ascension Day

October, 2004. Libreville, Louisiana.

At first, Larry wasn’t sure why the sound had awoken him.

He’d become familiar with all the usual night-time sounds: the clunk of the cell doors and the rattle of keys whenever anyone had to be let in or out unexpectedly after last shut-down; the steady, ominous clump of boots along the steel walkways with the regular cell patrols every hour, punctuated by the impromptu sliding back of two or three inspection hatches along the line; the mumble of the guards at the end and the occasional peal of laughter; the jibes and taunts of new prisoners or regulars who’d suddenly fallen from grace; the gentle sobbing of some of those same new inmates that might take up to a week to finally abate; and the klaxon blare of the Amtrak from Baton Rouge to Jackson seven miles away across the Bayou plain, a siren call to the prisoners from the world outside, elusive freedom — only one of eight attempted break-outs over the past thirty years had got even that far, and they’d all been rounded up within the week between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Over the past eleven long years, these sounds had been Lawrence Tyler Durrant’s nightly companions. But this sound was different.

He could recognize the voices of two of the guards, but they were fighting not to be heard: little more than muted whispers along with the soft sliding back of the bolts on a cell door. Normally, their boot-steps would be heavy and purposeful, cell-door bolts would be slammed back like gunshots, whatever the time of night, and the prisoner’s name shouted out, as if by some miracle the clamour of the guards’ approach might not have awoken him along with everyone else on the cell-block row.

This time they didn’t want anyone to hear them.

Larry kept his breathing low and shallow, trying to pick out more. But suddenly his heart was drumming fast and strong, threatening to drown everything out. And when he finally tuned in beyond his own heartbeat, everything was still and silent, as if they somehow knew he was listening in. Then a sudden flurry of shuffling footsteps from five or six cells along.

‘ What ?… What the ffffmmm!’

Even from that muffled exclamation, before a hand was clamped across to completely strangle it, Larry clearly recognized the clipped Latino intonation: Rodriguez. ‘Roddy’, who’d managed to make him smile and laugh on even the darkest of days; a rare spark of light and life in this pit of gloom he’d called home for over a decade, and one of the closest friends he’d ever had, inside or out. He couldn’t just close his mind and shut his eyes, as he had to so much over the years.

Maybe he could have turned away if he thought they were just going to give Roddy a beating, but he’d seen that look fired across the canteen earlier by Tally Shavell. It was only a fleeting stare, but in Libreville that was often all you got as warning. The last two on the end of that same look from Tally had both been killed; one with a shiv through the neck in the showers, the other garrotted with a guitar string. There was no reason to believe that with Roddy it would be any different, especially after the beating Tally had given him five months back. Tally didn’t issue second warnings.

Larry looked towards his cell’s makeshift altar with its array of photos for inspiration: his mother who’d died after a stroke on year five of his sentence, ten months after his appeal failed; his father who’d died when he was only fourteen, mercifully before he’d started to slip into bad ways; his wife, Francine, who hadn’t visited him for the first five years and after that only infrequently, depending on her current-partner-situation, though they still hadn’t divorced yet; his son, Joshua, now twelve, who, except for some recent e-mail contact, he’d seen at most half-a-dozen times over the years — occasional birthdays and at Christmas-time. The only one not represented from his family was his elder sister, who’d disowned him the day of his incarceration, told his mother — as if she didn’t already have enough heartbreak that day — that as far as she was concerned ‘he no longer exists’.

But swamping his family photos were religious prints: Dali’s Christ on the Cross, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Da Vinci’s Last Supper, Caravaggio’s St Francis, Raphael’s Madonna and Child.

When word had first got around that Larry had found religion, one of the other inmates, Sal Peretti, had his aunt, who still lived in her native Umbria, send a collection of prints and cards, eleven in all, from the gift shop at Perugia Cathedral, to complete the array on his makeshift altar.

Upon sight of the finished display, given a misty, eerie glow from fifteen interspersed candles, Roddy had commented simply, ‘Christ!’

‘ Exactly .’ Larry smiled back drolly.

Now Larry wasn’t looking just at the altar for inspiration, but beyond — his eyes boring through to the hole they’d dug in the wall behind, along the ventilation shaft, then the twists and dog-legs through three hundred yards of ducting barely enough to squeeze through and two more walls before arriving at the vents by the boiler room; then the final sixty-foot waste-pipe slide to the Achalaya river. The passage that the five of them — himself, Roddy, BC, Sal Peretti and Theo Mellor — knew every inch of, had consumed every spare minute they could steal away over the past ten months.

That’s where they’d be taking Roddy, for sure: the boiler room deep in the prison’s bowels, where the clank and hiss of the boilers and pipes and two-foot thick walls would prevent even the loudest screams reaching the cells above.

Larry also knew that if he used their escape passage to get to the boiler room, it would be uncovered, their last hope gone and four of them condemned to die. Those were the odds at Libreville: twenty per cent reprieved, pardoned or commuted to life imprisonment, eighty per cent executed.

That was the choice right there: Roddy’s life saved for four others lost, including his own. And with two or three of them now with Roddy, what chance did he have in any case of being able to save him? Another muted mumble from Roddy, fading quickly with the rapid shuffle of footsteps along the outside walkway, gave him a sharp prompt. He had to decide quickly.

But Larry Durrant stayed staring at his makeshift altar, frozen with indecision. Just when he needed guidance the most, there was nothing.

‘That’s the original trial preparation file. That’s the trial transcript and notes. Appeal preparation…. and appeal transcript and notes.’ John Langfranc piled each file on the desk before him, some of them four inches thick, with an appropriate pause. ‘Finally, any case notes since.’ The last file was thinnest of all. ‘Though to be honest, not much has happened over the last seven years. Lawrence Durrant has been all but forgotten. Until now.’

‘Now that they’re about to kill him,’ Jac said, though his disdain could equally have been aimed at the mountain of paperwork he’d have to plough through over the coming days.

Langfranc raised an eyebrow and smiled smugly. ‘First thing to get clear, Jac, is that the State of Louisiana never kills anyone. They execute, process, fulfil sentencing, lethally inject, expedite and terminate… but they never kill . If you’re going to use a word like kill, you’ll have to get used to putting legally in front. Presumably, that one word differentiates the State’s actions from those of the people they’re killing. Sorry, processing .’

‘Why me?’ Jac asked.

Fair question, thought Langfranc. He shrugged. ‘Time for you to prove yourself, I guess.’ No point in embellishing beyond that, trying to kid Jac that this might be a landmark glory case. They knew each other too well for that now, and with Jac only passing his criminal law bar exams ten months ago, he’d be aware that he was a long way from being handed the firm’s prize cases. ‘You and I both know that if there was a good angle left in all of this,’ Langfranc waved one hand across the files, ‘Beaton would have taken it himself.’