When I walked into Elsa’s Café, though, conversations literally slammed to a halt. That’s what I was that first day: a conversation killer. I’m not a complete bonehead, I was more or less prepared for it, but it’s still weird when it actually happens. At Elsa’s they have these swinging doors, like a saloon in an old western. That’s the way it felt to me: as though I was coming through the swinging doors, six-guns drawn, to settle an old account. And in a certain sense I was, but not with the people who were there, not with anyone who was at Elsa’s right then.
I don’t know what I would have done, though, if he had been standing there, prattling at the bar with a beer in his hand. Then I wouldn’t have been fully accountable. In fact, I’ve never been accountable for my actions — not being accountable is the thin red line in my life that’s taken me everywhere, from the maximum-security facility to here again, now, in my old neighborhood.
There are about twenty of us in there, in what you’d probably call an “open block.” Open to the extent that we don’t have to stay in our cells between nine and six, but can just wander the corridors. In fact, it’s only one corridor, a broad one, sure, more than thirty feet across. Everyone on both sides of it has his door open, some of us hang our laundry out to dry on a rack in the corridor. When you look in, the cells are like you’d expect: girlie posters on the walls, a little desk with a couple of books, an outdated desktop computer. A few of the guys don’t have any photos or posters at all, so that’s clear enough: posters of half-naked men or boys would send the wrong signal on our block.
At one end of the corridor is the rec room, with Ping-Pong and foosball tables and a row of shelves with games: Risk, Monopoly, that kind of thing. And about five decks of playing cards, with a couple of cards missing from each deck.
At the other end of the corridor is the point where our open block stops, clearly marked with bars and the kind of massive wired glass you couldn’t bust through, not even with an ax. As though anyone here has an ax in his cell! No, but we do have other things, things I’m not going to talk about here, I’m not out to rat on anyone. What am I saying: I’m not out to rat on myself! Later, when I go back on Monday, maybe I’ll need those things again — I hope not, but you never know. It’s good to have them, the mere thought of those things and what you can do with them is what keeps you calm.
Sometimes, when they start bitching at me, I picture it in my mind: I’m lying on my bed and a guard says something about dirty laundry on the floor, making it sound like he’s my mother. Then I think about it. In my mind, I slide my hand under the mattress. He doesn’t have time to get away, maybe he starts screaming, maybe he doesn’t: I’m fast. Whatever the case, it’s too late. I’m finished before his colleagues can get there.
But I don’t do that. I won’t ever do it, either. As far as that goes, we’re all the same around here. Good behavior is the key thing we have in common. We do our little hand-washes, we borrow a book from the library, we play Ping-Pong and foosball like civilized individuals, pull some weeds in the herb garden. In any case, we never fight. We’re always conscious of the cameras, twenty-four hours a day. “Wasn’t that serve out?” we ask cautiously and, cool as can be of course, lay our paddles on the table. We look at each other. Staring down is what they call that. It’s about who has the steadiest eye, the most eloquent body language. But the security cameras don’t pick up a thing. “I think you’re right, it was out.” You make a mental note to do something later, in the showers or out in the yard, in a corner where there aren’t any cameras.
The serve wasn’t out, you know that — and he knows it too.
The first time he showed up at visiting hours was six months ago. A journalist, a big name in crime circles. Marc Verhoeven. He had a plan: a biography, the story of my life.
“We share the revenues,” Verhoeven told me then. “Everybody wants to read about you. I expect it’ll sell a quarter of a million copies.”
I was up for it. I didn’t have to tell him everything, nothing that would jeopardize my getting out of here three years from now.
“But I’ll need you to tell me a couple of things, of course,” he said. “Things people don’t know. Things they want to read about.” Then Verhoeven asked if I was okay with him interviewing my wife. “Ex-wife,” he corrected himself right away. “To get a complete picture, I want to interview Chiara too. But not without your permission, of course. Not behind your back.”
I sensed something at the time, I don’t know exactly how to describe it: a dark cloud, people say sometimes, as in, “dark clouds gathered.” But what I sensed wasn’t so much dark as compact and odorless. A poisonous cloud from a chemical plant, the neighbors are warned to keep their doors and windows shut.
“She’s not my ex-wife,” I told him. “We’re only separated.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Have it your way. I mean, if you’d rather not have me interview her, just say so.”
Later on, I couldn’t help but laugh about that Not behind your back. All you could really say was that I had been too trusting. Looking back on it, if I had known then what was going to happen, that visiting hour would have gone differently. Would have ended differently, I should probably say.
You have those animal habitats at the zoo that look a little like an open cellblock. In fact, there are no bars. Just a moat with a wall on one side that the visitors can lean on, and the habitat itself is on the other side. A lot of trouble has been taken to reconstruct the animals’ natural surroundings: a couple of boulders have been brought in, there’s some sand, one or two trees that obviously aren’t native to these parts.
At the back of the habitat is where the animals lie — let’s assume we’re talking about predators here, but it could just as easily be zebras or chimpanzees — dozing in the shade. There’s not much movement, a couple of sparrows are pecking around for leftovers between the rocks, but it’s not enough to wake the predators from their afternoon nap. They — for the sake of argument we’re still assuming that we’re talking about mammals here: lions, tigers, bears — blink their eyes occasionally, as though they’re dreaming: a nice dream, perhaps; they’re back where they came from, Yellowstone Park, the forests of Madagascar, the rolling savannas of Kenya or Tanzania.
Then, suddenly, there is tumult. Somebody — perhaps only a child, a child who has escaped its parents’ attention for a few seconds — has clambered up onto the wall and then fallen into the moat. There are screams, mostly from the parents, but then other bystanders get involved in the general panic: they shout instructions at the child, conflicting instructions, one of them shouts this, the other shouts that. Swim! Run! Don’t move! The water is shallow, it only comes up to the child’s chest. A rope! A keeper! A ladder!
Then one of the predators — now we can come out and say it: this is the lions’ habitat — one of the lions opens an eye. What’s all the noise? he wonders. Can’t a lion get a little sleep in this habitat? What’s all that splashing around in the moat?
It’s the biggest lion, the male, the kind of lion we imagine when we think of a lion: from The Lion King, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, a lion like the ones on a pouch of Samson rolling tobacco, with a huge mane around its head. Slowly it stretches, even more slowly it rises, one leg at a time, onto all fours; easy as can be, it wanders over to the moat to look at what all the fuss is about.