gentlemen have made a very serious mistake.”
Gaston slapped me, a sharp, stinging blow. “Most of the mistakes I make, monsieur, are serious mistakes, but I have not made a mistake in this instance. You are Frank Abagnale.”
“I am Robert Monjo,” I said doggedly, searching their faces for a hint of doubt.
One of the other Surety agents stepped forward, his hand balled into a fist, but Gaston put out an arm and stopped him, without releasing me from his fixed stare. Then he shrugged.
“We could beat it out of you, but that isn’t necessary,” he said. “I have all the time in the world, Abagnale, but I don’t intend to waste too much of it on you. We can hold you until doomsday, or at least until we have located witnesses to identify you. Until then, unless you choose to cooperate, I am going to place you in the cell for common drunks and petty criminals. You can stay there for a week, two weeks, a month, it makes no difference to me. However, you will not be fed and you will have no water until you decide to confess. Why don’t you just tell us what we want to know right now? We know who you are. We know what you have done. You will only inconvenience yourself.
“One other thing, Abagnale. If you force us to go to a lot of trouble to get the information you could give us at this moment, I will not forget it. And you will always remember the consequences, I promise you.”
I looked at Gaston and knew he meant every word he had spoken. Marcel Gaston was one tough bastard.
“I’m Frank Abagnale,” I said.
I never really gave them the kind of confession they wanted. I never volunteered any details on any of the offenses I’d committed in France. But if they knew of a particular caper and outlined it for me, I’d nod and say, “That’s about the way it happened, all right,” or, “Yes, that was me.”
Gaston made up a document, setting down a lot of my crimes, the circumstances of my arrest and my interrogation, and let me read it. “If that is essentially correct, you will help yourself by signing it,” he said.
I couldn’t quarrel with the instrument. He’d even included the fact that he’d slapped me. I signed it.
The affidavit also disclosed how I’d been caught. Major airlines didn’t serve Montpellier, but it was visited frequently by stewardesses and other flight personnel. An Air France flight attendant, visiting relatives in Montpellier, had spotted me shopping a couple of weeks past and had recognized me. She had seen me get into my car and had jotted down the license number. On her return to Paris, she had sought out her captain and told him of her suspicions. She was positive enough about her identification that her captain called the police.
“I’m positive it’s him. I dated him,” she insisted.
I never learned which Air France stewardess put the finger on me. No one would tell me. I had dallied with several, over the years. I hoped it wasn’t Monique, but to this day I still don’t know the informant’s identity. I don’t think it was Monique, however. Had she seen me in Montpellier, she would have confronted me.
I was kept six days in Montpellier, during which time several lawyers appeared to offer their services. I selected a middle-aged man whose mannerisms and appearance reminded me of Armand, although he frankly stated he didn’t think he could win me my freedom. “I have gone over all the police documents, and they have you dead to rights,” he commented. “The best we can hope for is a light sentence.”
I told him I’d settle for that.
Scarcely a week after my arrest, to my astonishment, I was removed to Perpignan and the day after my arrival there I was brought to trial in a court of assizes, made up of a judge, two assessors (prosecutors) and nine citizen jurors, all of whom would jointly decide my guilt or innocence.
It wasn’t much of a trial, really, lasting less than two days. Gaston listed the charges against me and the evidence he’d gathered to support the accusations. There were ample witnesses available to appear against me.
“How does the defendant plead?” inquired the judge of my attorney.
“My client will offer no defense against these charges,” replied the lawyer. “In the interest of time, we would like to sum up our position now.”
He then launched into an eloquent and impassioned plea for leniency in my behalf. He cited my youth-I was still not twenty-one-and portrayed me as an unfortunate and confused young man, the product of a broken home “and still more of a delinquent than a criminal.” He pointed out that a dozen other European nations where I had perpetrated similar crimes had placed formal demands for extradition, once my debt to France was paid.
“This young man will, in all probability, never see his native land for many, many years, and even when he does return home, he will return in chains and only to face prison there,” argued the lawyer. “I need not point out to this court the harshness of the prison life this young man will have to endure here. I ask the court to take that into account in setting a penalty.”
I was adjudged guilty. But at the time I thought jubilantly that my attorney, if he’d lost a battle, had won the war. The judge sentenced me to only one year in prison.
I was remanded to Perpignan ’s prison, the “House of Arrest,” a gloomy, forbidding stone fortress constructed in the seventeenth century, and not until I had been there for a few days did I realize just how lenient the judge had been.
I was received by two guards who brusquely ordered me to strip and who then escorted me, still naked, to an upper floor where I was marched down a narrow corridor devoid of cells as such. On either side were only stone walls set with solid steel doors. The guards halted before one of the metal portals and one unlocked and opened the door. It screeched open with a sound reminiscent of a horror movie, and the other guard shoved me inside the dark cubicle. I stumbled and fell forward, striking my head against the back of the cell, for the cell was a sunken one. I had not noted the two steps leading to the floor. I was never actually to see the steps.
I was in total darkness. A damp, chilling, breath-stifling, frightening darkness. I stood up to grope around for the light switch and cracked my head against the steel ceiling.
There was no light switch. There was no light in the cell. There was, in fact, nothing in the cell but a bucket. No bed, no toilet, no wash basin, no drain, nothing. Just the bucket. The cell was not a cell, actually, it was a hole, a raised dungeon perhaps five feet wide, five feet high and five feet deep, with a ceiling and door of steel and a floor and walls of stone. The ceiling and door were chill to the touch. The walls wept chilly tears constantly.
I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. No light filtered into the cell from any source. There were no cracks in the overhead or walls. The ancient door to my steel and stone box seemed to blend itself into its aperture like a hermetic seal. My eyes did not adjust. The eyes do not adjust to total darkness.
There was air entering the cell. Periodically a cold draft explored my skin like clammy fingers, raising goose bumps as much from the eerie sensation as from the chill. I wondered whence it came. Whatever its channels, they also were dark.
I slumped on the floor, shivering and feeling like I’d been entombed alive. Panic added to my shaking. I sought to calm myself by rationalizing my situation. Surely, I told myself, this was not to be the cell I would occupy during the entire year. Probably I was in here for observation. I discarded the theory immediately. Anyone observing me in this cell would have to have X-ray eyes. All right, then, I was being given a taste of what could happen to me if I misbehaved. I clung to the second supposition. Yes, this treatment was calculated to ensure my good behavior once I was released among the general prison population. After all, only unruly prisoners were confined in solitary under such harsh conditions, weren’t they? Certainly no civilized country would permit such cruel and inhumane punishment to be meted out by its prison warders without cause.
France does. Or did.
I was not fed my first day in Perpignan ’s prison. I had been placed in my grim cell late in the afternoon. Several hours later, exhausted, cold, hungry, bewildered, frightened and desolate, I laid down on the hard floor and fell asleep. I slept curled in a ball, for I am six feet tall.
The screeching of the door awakened me. I sat up, wincing from the soreness and cramps caused by my uncomfortable sleeping position. The dim form of a guard loomed in the doorway. He was placing something on the steps inside my crypt. I was galvanized into action as he straightened and started to close the door.
“Wait! Wait!” I shouted, scrambling forward and placing my hands against the inside of the door, trying to restrain its closing.
“Why am I being kept in here? How long will I stay in here?”
“Until you have completed your sentence,” he said, and shoved shut the door. The words clanked on my ears with the metallic finalness of the door slamming against the stone jamb.
I fell back, stunned by the ghastly truth. A year? I was to live in this black coffin a year? Without light? Without bedding? Without clothing? Without toilet facilities? And without God knows what else? It was impossible, I told
