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 Lariboisiere 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.
The commissaire asked Goldstein, 'Do you know Papillon?'
'Yes, a little. I've met him now and then. He knew Lepetit; _that's all I can tell you_.'
So what of it? What does this Papillon mean? There were five or six of them in Montmartre!
Dorm's statement: Goldstein asked him to go along to the Lariboisiere to inquire after a friend _whose name he did not mention_. Dorm went into the hospital with him; and Goldstein asked if the Lepetit who had been brought in was seriously wounded.
'Do you know Lepetit? Do you remember Papillon Roger?' the commissaire asked.
'I don't know Lepetit, either by name or by sight. I do know a man called Papillon, having seen him in the street. He is very well known and they say he is a terror. I know nothing more.'
The third man to be questioned, Jourmar, said that when Goldstein came out of the hospital, having gone in alone with Dorm, he said, 'It's certainly my buddy.'
So before he went in, he was not sure about it, right?
The commissaire: 'Do you know Papillon Roger and a man called Lepetit?'
'I know a man called Papillon who hangs around Pigalle. The last time I saw him was about three months ago.'
The same with the fourth thief. He didn't know Legrand. A Papillon, yes, but only by sight.
In her first statement the mother also confirmed that her son had said Papillon _Roger_.
So far, everything was plain, clear-cut and exact. All the chief witnesses gave their evidence in complete freedom before a local commissaire without being prompted, threatened, or guided.
In short, Roland was in the Clichy Bar before the tragedy, and all the people present were unknown. They may have been playing cards or dice, which meant they were acquaintances of Roland's, but still they were unknown. What was odd, and indeed disturbing, was that they remained unknown until the very end.
Second point: Roland Lepetit was _the last to leave the bar, and he left it by himself_; his own girl said so. Nobody came to fetch him. A very little while after he went out, he was wounded by a man whom he positively identified on his deathbed as Papillon Roger. The man who came to tell Nini was another unknown; and he, too, was to remain so. Yet he was the one who helped Lepetit into the taxi immediately after the shooting- an unknown man who walked along with the cab as far as the bar where he was going to warn Nini. And this essential witness was to remain unknown, although everything he had just done proved he belonged to the underworld, to Montmartre, and that he was therefore known to the pigs. Strange.
Third point: Goldstein, who was to be the prosecution's chief witness, _did not know_ who had been wounded and went to the Lariboisiere hospital to find out whether it was his friend Lepetit.
The only clues as to this Papillon were that he was called Roger and that he was said to be a terror.
Was I a terror at twenty-four? Was I dangerous? No, but maybe I was on the way to becoming both. It's certain that I was a tough guy, an 'undesirable' then; but it's also certain that at only twenty-four I could not have become set forever as one particular type of man. It's also certain that at that age, having been only two years in Montmartre, I could not have been either the head of a gang or the terror of Pigalle. Certainly I disturbed public order; and certainly I was suspected of having taken part in big jobs, but nothing had ever been proved against me. Sure, they had pulled me in several times and grilled me pretty hard at 36, quai des Orfevres, but without ever getting anything out of me, either a confession or a name. Sure, after the tragedy of my childhood, and after my time in the navy, and after the government had refused me a steady career, I had made up my mind to live outside that society of clowns and to let them know it. Sure, every time I was picked up and grilled at the Quai des Orfevres for an important job they thought I was mixed up in, I insulted my torturers and humiliated them in every possible way, even telling them that one day I'd be in their place, the shits, and they would be in my power. So of course the pigs, humiliated through and through, might have said to themselves, 'This Papillon, we'll have to clip his wings the first chance we have.'
But still, I was only twenty-four! My life wasn't just a matter of resentment and rancor against society and the squares who obeyed its damn-fool rules: it was also _life itself_, continually on the move, sending off showers of sparks. It's true I'd pulled some serious nonsense; yes, but it was not wicked nonsense. Besides, when I was taken in there was only one conviction on my file: four months' suspended sentence for receiving stolen goods. Did I deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth just for having humiliated the pigs and just because I might turn dangerous one day?
It all began when the criminal police took the business over. The word went round Montmartre that they were looking for all the Papillons-Little Papillon, Pussini Papillon, Papillon Trompe-la-Mort, Papillon Roger, etc.
As for me, I was just plain Papillon; or sometimes, to avoid confusion, One-Thumb Papillon. But it was no part of my way of life to hobnob with the pigs, and I moved off fast: yes, that was true. I went on the run.
And why did you do that, Papi, since it wasn't you?
You ask that now? Have you forgotten that by the time you were twenty-four you had already been tortured several times at the Quai des Orfevres? You were never really fond of being knocked about, or of all those exquisite tortures: the way they shoved your head under the water until you were perishing for want of air and you didn't know whether you were dead or alive; the way the pigs would give your balls five or six twists and leave them so swollen you walked like an Argentine gaucho for weeks on end; the way they crushed your nails in a paper press till the blood spurted and the nails came off; the way they beat you with a rubber truncheon that wounded your lungs, so blood poured out of your mouth; and the way those two-hundred-pound bruisers would jump up and down on your belly as if it were a trampoline. Is it your age, Papi, or have you lost your memory? There were a hundred reasons for going on the run right away. It was a break that didn't carry you too far; since you weren't guilty, there was no need to go abroad; just a little hideout near Paris would be enough. Soon they'd pick up the Papillon Roger in question, or at least identify him; and then fine, you'd jump into a taxi and be back in Paris. No more danger for your balls or your nails or all the rest.
Only this Papillon Roger was never identified. There was no culprit.
Then all at once a wanted man was produced like magic. This Papillon Roger? Simple: you just wipe out the Roger and you pick up plain Papillon, the nickname of Henri Charriere. The trick's done: all that's left is to pile up the evidence. It's no longer an honest, impartial inquiry into the truth, but the total fabrication of _a culprit_.
Policemen, don't you see, need _to solve a murder case_ to deserve promotion in their very noble, very honest career. Now this Papillon has everything going for him as a culprit. He's young, and there is something of the procurer about him… We'll say his girl's a whore. He's a thief, and he's been in trouble with the police several times; but he's either got off on a dismissed charge or he's been acquitted.
And then into the bargain the guy is a difficult bastard; he curses us to hell when we arrest him, he sneers at us, humiliates us, names his dog after our chief of police, and sometimes he says, 'You'd be well advised to grill a little more gently, if you want to reach retirement age.' These threats of punishing us one day for our 'modern' and 'thoroughgoing' methods of interrogation worry us. So go right ahead, man. We're covered on all sides.
That was the sinister beginning of it all, Papi. Twenty-four you were, when those two lousy pigs flushed you out at SaintCloud on April 10, while you were eating snails.
Oh, they went right ahead, all right! What drive, what zeal, what steadiness, what passion, what diabolical cunning it took to get you into the dock one day, and for the court to deliver that blow that knocked you out for fourteen years!
It wasn't so easy to turn you into the guilty man, Papi. But the inspector in charge of the job, Mayzaud, a Montmartre specialist, was so eager to send you down that it was open war between him and your lawyers even in the court, with insults, complaints and foul blows; and right beside Mayzaud was the plump little Goldstein, one of those phony bastards who lick the underworld's feet in the hope of being accepted.
Very amenable, this Goldstein! Mayzaud said he met him maybe a hundred times _by chance_ during the inquiry. This precious witness stated _on the very day of the killing_ that in a crowd of people he had heard someone named Roland had got three bullets in the guts, and he had then gone to the hospital to ask the exact identity of the victim. More than three weeks later, on April 18, after many contacts with Mayzaud, this same Goldstein changed his story: On the night of March 25-26, before the killing, he had met me with two unknown men. I had asked him where Lepetit was. Goldstein: 'At the Clichy.' As soon as I left him, Goldstein went to warn
