Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

There wasn't even what there had always been in my timetables with groups of poets, painters or actors, with their long hair that reeked of Bohemia and an avant-garde intellectuality. Now every silly little jerk had long hair.

I wandered from bar to bar like a sleepwalker, and I climbed stairs to see if the pool tables of my youth were still on the second floor, and I civilly refused a guide's offer to show me Montparnasse. But I did ask him, "Do you think that since 1930 Montmartre has lost the soul it had in those days?"

I felt like slapping him down for an answer that insulted my own personal Montmartre: "Oh, but Monsieur, Montmartre is immortal. I've lived here forty years, seeing I came when I was ten, and believe me, Place Pigalle, Place Blanche, Place Clichy and all the streets running off them are just the same and always will be the same forever."

I fled from the dreary bastard and walked along under the trees on the raised part in the middle of the avenue. From here, yes- as long as you didn't see the people clearly, as long as you saw only their shapes-from here, yes, Montmartre was still the same. I went slowly toward the very spot where I was alleged to have shot Roland Lepetit on the night of March 25-26, 1930.

The bench, probably the same bench repainted every year (a public bench might perfectly well last thirty-seven years with wood that thick), the bench was there, and the lamppost, and the bar over the way, and the half-closed shutters on the house opposite, they were still there. They were the first, the only, the true witnesses of the tragedy; they knew very well the man who fired that night was not me. Why didn't they say so?

People went by, unconcerned, never noticing this sixty-year-old man leaning against a tree, the same tree that had been there when the shot was fired.

Twenty-four I was in 1930, when I used to run down the Rue Lepic, that street I can still walk up pretty briskly. The ghost has come back in spite of you all; he's pushed back the gravestone under which you buried him alive. Stop, stop, you half-blind creatures passing by! Stop and have a look at an innocent man who was condemned for a murder on this very ground, before these same trees and these same stones-stop and ask these dumb witnesses, ask them to speak out today. And if you lean close, you will hear them whispering faintly, "No, this man was not here at half past three on the night of twenty-fifth to twenty-sixth March thirty-seven years ago."

"Where was he, then?" the doubters will ask. Simple: I was in the Iris Bar, maybe a hundred yards from here. In the Iris Bar, when a taxi driver burst in, crying, "There was a shot outside just now."

"It wasn't true," said the pigs. "It wasn't true," said the boss and the waiter of the Iris, prompted by the pigs.

Once again I saw the inquiry; I saw the trial: I could not avoid being brought face to face with the past. You want to live through it again, man? Nearly forty years have passed, and you still want to go through that nightmare again? You're not afraid this going back will make you long for a revenge you gave up ages ago?

Sit down there, on this same green bench, the one that saw the killing just opposite the Rue Germain-Pilon, right here on the Boulevard de Clichy, by the Clichy Bar-Tabac, where the tragedy began after the inquiry.

It's the night of March 25-26: half past three in the morning. A man comes into the Clichy and asks for Madame Nini.

"That's me," a tart says.

"Your man's just been shot in the guts. Come on; he's in a taxi."

Nini runs after the unknown guy, together with a girl friend. They get into the taxi, where Roland Lepetit is sitting on the back seat. Nini asks the unknown guy who told her to come, too. He says, "I can't," and disappears.

"Quick, the Lariboisière hospital!"

It was only during the drive that the taxi driver, a Russian, learned that his passenger was wounded: he had not noticed anything before. The moment his fare was unloaded at the hospital he hurried off to tell the police what he knew: he had been hailed by two men arm in arm outside 17, boulevard de Clichy: only one of them got in-Roland Lepetit. The other told him to drive to the Clichy Bar and followed on foot. This man went into the bar and came out with two women; then he vanished. The two women told him to drive to the Lariboisière hospital: "It was during the trip that I learned the man was wounded."

The police carefully wrote all this down; they also wrote down Nini's declaration that her boyfriend had played cards all that night in that same bar where she plied her trade, had played cards with an unknown man; he'd played dice and had a drink at the bar with some men, still _all of them unknown_; and Roland had left after the others, _alone_. There was nothing in Nini's statement to indicate that anyone had come to fetch him. He'd gone out by himself, after the others, the unknowns, had left.

A commissaire and a cop, Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi, questioned the dying Roland Lepetit in the presence of his mother. The nurses had told them his condition was hopeless. I quote their report; it's been published in a book written to pull me to pieces, with a preface and therefore a guarantee by a _commissaire divisionnaire_, Paul Romain. Here it is. The two pigs are questioning Legrand:

"Here beside you you have the police commissaire and your mother, the holiest relationship in the world. Tell the truth. Who shot you?"

He replied, "It was Papillon Roger."

We asked him to swear that he had really told the truth. "Yes, Monsieur, I have told you the truth."

We withdrew, leaving the mother beside her son.

So what happened on the night of March 25, 1930, was clear and straightforward: the man who fired was Papillon _Roger_.

This Roland Lepetit was a pork butcher and a pimp, who put his girl friend Nini out to work for him: he lived with her at 4, rue Elysee des Beaux-Arts. He was not really a member of the underworld, but, like all those who hung around Montmartre and all the genuine crooks, he knew several Papillons. And because he was afraid they might arrest another Papillon instead of the one who had killed him, he was exact about the Christian name. For although he was fond of living outside the law, like all squares he also wanted the police to punish his enemy. A Papillon, sure, but Papillon _Roger_.

Everything came flooding back to me in this accursed place. I must have run through this file in my head a thousand times; I'd learned it by heart in my cell, like a Bible, because my lawyers had given it to me and I'd had time to engrave it on my mind before the trial.

So there was Lepetit's statement before he died; and the declaration of Nini, his girl. Neither of them named me as the killer.

Now four men come upon the stage. On the night of this job they went to the Lariboisière hospital to ask:

(1) if the wounded man was in fact Roland Lepetit;

(2) what condition he was in.

The pigs were told at once, and they began a search. Since these men did not belong to the underworld and were not concealing themselves, they had come on foot and they left on foot. They were picked up as they were walking down the Avenue Rochechouart and kept in custody at the station in the XVIII arrondissement.

They were:

Georges Goldstein, 24; Roger Dorm, 24; Roger Jourmar, 21; Emile Cape, 18.

All the statements they made to the commissaire of the XVIII arrondissement station on the very day of the killing were cut and dried. Goldstein stated that in a gathering of people he had been told that a man called Lepetit had been wounded-shot _three times_ with a revolver. Thinking it might be his friend Roland Lepetit, who was often in that district, he walked to the hospital to find out. On the way he met Dorin and then the two others and asked them to go with him. The others knew nothing about the business, and they did not know the victim.