The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (29 page)

Carlos turned the small floor area into a gym when it was finished. He had a ripped physique; you could drop a penny into the grooves of his six-pack. He put in a proper treadmill, a couple of exercise bikes, free weights and a bench press. Eddy got the job of managing it. A Lithuanian lad who was a graffiti artist gave the place a bit of colour. He got to work with his aerosol cans and streaked the walls with urban-style painting of skyscrapers and yellow New York-style cabs.

It wasn’t Eddy’s only job. He started up a little business as a tattoo artist. One of the lags smuggled in a proper batch of needles for him. His work was popular, and between that and the job in the gym, it gave him a way to focus himself since he had started to ease off the crack cocaine. Inmates came down from other wings for a bit of his artwork on their skin, from flaming dragons to Chinese characters.

I started working out for two hours over four mornings a week. I was thin, but in weeks I was fit and hard. I was lifting the weights with the determination of a man on a mission. Fitness was part of my escape plan. I stood there sweating, doing bench presses and bar-bell curls with visions of the National Guard chasing me through the jungle as I bolted for freedom over the border into Colombia. One more rep, one more, I was saying in my head. I wanted to be mentally and physically fit for the journey ahead. I was doing very little coke and I was eating extra
avena
(porridge) in the morning, buying packets of it from the kitchen and making it in the wing with cold water.

* * *

I was on my march around the roof again. Bruce’s head popped up from the stairway and he emerged wearing a yellow T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. ‘Dressed for the barbie, mate?’ I said, laughing. He didn’t smile.

‘Paul: the lawyer, he’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes, the lawyer, the guy getting us out on cancer – he’s gone.’ Bruce looked like he was about to cry . . . but it wasn’t due to grief.

‘How’d you find out?’

‘We didn’t hear from him for weeks and we called his secretary. She said, “Sorry, but he passed away with cancer.” He died from cancer. Can you believe it? He tries to get us out on cancer and he gets it himself. Old bastard.’

‘And you paid him all your money?’

‘All the down payment.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say 10,000 dollars.

‘Bad score,’ I said.

‘That muthafucker, can you believe it?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He took my money and did nothing.’

‘Terrible, Bruce.’ There wasn’t much I could do to console him. However, I was curious whether others had got out on the cancer diagnosis and asked Bruce.

‘A German, and the secretary says the cases are on the go for two others to get out on humanitarian grounds because their papers were already on the way to the judge. But they can’t put any more through.’ He turned his eyes away from me.

‘Sorry to hear that, Bruce. Really am.’ I reckoned the old lawyer knew he was dying of cancer when he got the scam going to get inmates out on humanitarian grounds. He got one or two out to make it look real, and the rest, I’d say he was using their cash to leave a nest egg for whoever he was leaving behind. I just thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t paid the old guy a cent. Anyway, that he died of cancer while trying to get prisoners out on it to me was poetic justice.

As for my other plan to get out after faking a stroke, it was all down to Roberto first getting me the false passport. Months had passed since I’d paid Roberto for it. I’d been on to him all the time. ‘
Mañana seguro
’ was the answer. After a while I’d given up chasing him for it. I liked Roberto, and he had been in the click with myself and Silvio, his fellow Itie. But he had since been made up into a lucero and kept his distance a bit. I suppose he had to. You couldn’t push lags around the wing and be their mate at the same time.

My plan to fake a stroke after falling unconscious with an overdose of sleeping tablets turned out the same. Nada. I couldn’t get hold of any. In Los Teques you could get crack, cocaine, hash, guns, weapons and hookers. Anything under the sun, really, if you had the cash. For some reason, though, no one could get me half a dozen sleeping tablets. I figured that’d be enough to knock me out for a few hours and get carted off to hospital. In there I’d come through and disappear out a window on my way to Colombia with a new passport.

It looked like I could scratch off getting out of Los Teques with a stroke. I got a bit down about it all, but there was nothing I could do.

* * *

A cop walked into the yard with la lista. The lags huddled around, wondering if they were going to the courts or, better, getting out. The agua then said something about Silvio I couldn’t make out.

‘Silvio, he will go free,’ said Vito, smiling, sitting on his bucket next to me wearing an Italian football top.

‘Wow.’ I stood up, went over and clapped Silvio on the back. ‘Great news.’

‘Yes, fantastic I tell you,’ he said.

‘When do you get out?’

‘Now.’

‘That quick?’ I said, my voice raised a notch.

‘Yes, I get my things and go.’ In his eyes I could see the sparkle of a free man. We embraced and shook hands. ‘Paul, I’ll see you, see you in London,’ he said, our hands still locked.

‘Yes, Silvio,’ I said, ‘and I want free tickets to the best movies in town.’

Billy shouted over. ‘Good luck,
mama huevo
,’ he said, laughing. Silvio then did the rounds, saying goodbye to all his
compañeros
. It was a strange feeling, saying goodbye to Silvio. He’d been a big part of my life in jail. Over the months we’d faced death twice in two shoot-outs, wondering whether we would get out alive to see our friends and family. Now he was leaving. I watched him walk off, then run to the wing door through a gauntlet of inmates lashing out with their legs, cheering and clapping. Even Carlos, Fidel and the other bosses came out to give him a boot. But it was all in good spirits. That was how they gave you a send-off in Los Teques – with a friendly kick up the arse.

Silvio stooped down to fit out the wing door and disappeared into the passageway. I watched the door close behind him, wanting to be in his shoes. But my thoughts became clearer. Watching Silvio go free was proof you could get out. Liberty wasn’t some far-flung hope – it was real. I was more resolved to get out of Los Teques as soon as I could. I had my eye on getting out in just two years, not four or five.

* * *

I shuffled the deck and dealt out a hand to Henrik and another South African, suitably named Capetown. The cards skimmed along the top of the stone bench over crumbs and bits of rice. It was Sunday morning, just a couple of hours after breakfast in the canteen.

Capetown suddenly opened his mouth like he was about to scream. Nothing came out. He just pointed behind me, his face frozen. I turned around and went to stand up. I put my arm up to defend myself. I could feel something was coming and felt a wallop on my head. The room started spinning. An inmate was standing over me with a big rusty knife like something used on a trawler to gut a fish. I touched the top of my head and felt wetness, then put my fingers in front of my face and saw the tips were red.

Henrik was around by my side in a flash with the other South African and they pushed the guy away. The boss of the kitchen jumped over the counter with a machete he used for chopping meat and ran over. The two of them dragged the inmate with the knife off and out into the passageway. A woman sitting at another bench with a Veno inmate put her hands over her daughter’s face and pulled her into her side.

I sat there dazed. ‘Paul, you’re OK, you’re OK, it’s only a scratch,’ said Henrik, standing over me and looking at my head. ‘He only broke the skin.’

‘Did you see the size of that knife? Tried to crack my head open like a melon.’

‘But he didn’t,’ he said. ‘Get that cleaned in the wing and you’ll be fine. But you’re one lucky man. If you hadn’t turned around when you did we’d be picking up your brains with our fingers.’

The boss of the kitchen was roaring and shouting, waving his machete. The guy who tried to knife me was gone now. Where, I didn’t know.

Henrik walked with me back to the wing. I was weak from the shock. We fished out the first-aid box under Mariano’s bed. He saw a trickle of blood on my forehead. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. Some bastard, I think from the Special, tried to cut my head open.’ Henrik started dabbing my head with some cotton swabs.

The word came back later that Fyodor the Russian had paid a lucero from the Special wing to do a hit on me. The Russky was trying to send out a message to me, and others, over the 20,000 bolos he believed I owed him: don’t fuck with me. The lucero got boozed up to give him Dutch courage, knowing anyone who started a fight in front of the visitors was a marked man. He was never seen again. We heard he was shot in both legs and transferred to another prison. I didn’t see Fyodor for weeks. When I did, I was up on the roof doing my laps around the wall. He started walking with me and chatting as if nothing had happened. He had his comeuppance, though: his face was all puffed up like the Elephant Man’s and he was cradling his right arm, and this was weeks after his botched ‘hit’. I could only imagine what he looked like straight after the beating.

The boss of his wing sent him a message: our country, our rules. An eye for an eye. Fyodor was actually lucky: the number of killings was going down in the jail and disputes were sorted with baseball bats and boots rather than bullets. Otherwise Fyodor would have been on his way back to Russia in a box, a message to his family: ‘From Venezuela with love.’ As for me, I’d survived my second attack. Like a cat with nine lives, I was hoping I’d seven left. A prison riot was looming. I’d need them.

THE LETTERS PAINTED IN BLOOD WERE STREAKED ACROSS THE WALL IN the passageway. Jaggedy and scrawled, a bit like the way ‘Red Rum’ was written in the movie
The Shining
. On the ground outside the infirmary office there was a small pool of dark blood, like burgundy. It was a ghoulish sight to take in as we walked past on our way to breakfast in the canteen, slowing down our pace to look while the chitchat between us faded. When I got closer I saw the writing spelled out ‘Antonio’, probably the name of a prisoner.

Earlier, lying in bed, I had heard a lucero do the wake-up call then shouting ‘
mira, mira
’ (‘look, look’) and running over to the jefe. I got up a few minutes later, not sure what the commotion was all about. I saw a few spots of blood on the floor next to one of the colchonetas near the toilet at the back of the cell.

It turned out Antonio was an inmate. He had cut his throat during the night and slowly bled to death lying on the ground on his colchoneta. If they’d written his name on the wall in the passageway as a joke or out of respect in a ritual way I didn’t know.

It wasn’t hard to see why someone would take their life in Los Teques, so it wasn’t much talked about. But if cutting your own throat was one way to end your life, there were also the perils of getting hit by a stray bullet or being knifed out in the passageways. Falling ill was another way you might go out in a box. And many did.

Another morning an inmate looked like he was being stubborn and not getting up off his colchoneta while the rest of us got to our feet. A few of the lags went over to look. His body lay there lifeless. One of the luceros felt the veins in his wrist. ‘
Nada.
’ Four of us lifted him up, each grabbing an arm and a leg, and carried him out to the hallway. We left him there for the cops to collect like he was a bag of rubbish. When the troops marched in for the número the headcount was down by one. ‘
Muerto,
’ (‘Dead’) the cop shouted. The National Guard scribbled onto a paper on his clipboard, and the cop went on with the count. There was no minute’s silence. We felt sorry for him. A few said he was a ‘nice guy’ and ‘what a pity’, but after five minutes I’d forgotten about it. I wasn’t shedding any tears. Nobody was. To me, he’d just escaped – but in a box.

He’d been withering away in front of our eyes for weeks, so we weren’t surprised he had died in his sleep in the middle of the night. But what rattled me was that when the Venezuelan guy had arrived in Maxima a couple of months back he was a tall, fit guy in his early 30s – a good ten to fifteen years younger than me.

A few months later he started having spasms. He’d fall down and his body would start shaking violently, like he was possessed by a demon. His face and eyes then started puffing up. Then the weight started falling off him, making him gaunt, with a skeletal frame. He was in and out of hospital over a period of about two months. Eventually he couldn’t walk and was put in a wheelchair. He ended up back sleeping on the floor. It turned out he had some infection of the nervous system. He was gay and often chatted with the kiddy fiddlers – one of the few who did. The rumour was he’d had Aids, but I never knew for sure.

There were rounds of jabs given out against serious infections, doled out by a team of nurses and doctors armed with needles the length of bicycle spokes. From time to time the army of white coats came in, cops in tow. On the first morning I went there was a nurse at the front holding a long, thin needle like a small javelin. ‘Good Jesus,’ I thought. Some of the lags were trying to get out of the queue at the sight of it, the luceros shoving them back into line. We stood with our sleeves pulled up above one shoulder. One lad, Porto (from Portugal, naturally), was panicking. He had a bit of English. ‘Needles, I don’t like, not for me.’ Some of the inmates started laughing. He got more jittery as he moved up the queue, getting closer to where the three nurses were standing and his turn.

I watched the nurse slam the needle into his shoulder like she was jabbing an ice pick into a bag of cubes. Porto turned his head away, grinning and bearing it. On the fourth jab, he crumpled to the floor. The nurses carried him over to a bench and he came through with the lags laughing and hollering maricón at him.

I got my jabs and walked away. Four pinpricks soon swelled up into a mound on my arm. I was given a little card that showed what I’d been immunised against – all in Spanish. I thought it was for malaria or some other tropical disease; I didn’t understand or care and threw it in the bin. If I died in here it’d be from a bullet or a knife, not the plague.