In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [63]
Caravaggio looked over the body of water as if it were human now, a creature on whose back he shifted. He did not think of approaches or exits, suddenly there could be only descent or companionship.
* * *
The first time Caravaggio had noticed Patrick Lewis gazing down from the opposite cell, he had simply waved and looked elsewhere. Most of Caravaggio’s time in prison was spent in restless sleep. The night light of cells, the constant noise, made him nervous. The prisoner opposite who had tried to burn down the Muskoka Hotel was worse. He always sat up erect on the bed watching the movements below him. When Caravaggio returned from the hospital, his throat sewn up after the attack, Patrick was waiting for him. And when Caravaggio woke in pain suddenly the next afternoon, he turned to find the man’s gaze reassuring him. Patrick had sat up there smoking precisely, moving his hand and cigarette fully away from his face when he blew the smoke out.
– Do you have a red dog? he asked Caravaggio a few days later.
– Russet, he whispered back.
– You’re the thief, right?
– The best there is, that’s why, as you can see, I’m here.
– Someone let you down, I suppose.
– Yes. The red dog.
He had trained as a thief in unlit rooms, dismantling the legs of a kitchen table, unscrewing the backs of radios and the bottoms of toasters. He would draw the curtains to block out any hint of streetlight and empty the kitchen cupboards then put everything back, having to remember as he worked where all the objects were on the floor. Such pelmanism. While his wife slept he moved the furniture out of her bedroom and brought in the sofa, changed the pictures on the wall, the doilies on the bedside table.
In daylight he moved slowly as if conserving remnants of energy – a bat in post-coital flight. He would step into an upholstery shop to pick up a parcel for his wife and read the furniture, displacing in his mind the chairs through that window, the harvest table through the door at a thirty-degree angle veering right.
As a thief he had a sense of the world which was limited to what existed for twenty feet around him.
During his first robbery Caravaggio injured himself leaping from a second-storey window. He lay on his back with a cracked ankle on the Whitevale lawn, a Jeffreys drawing in his arms. He lay there as the family walked into the house and shrieked when they came upon the chloroformed dog. All the porch lights went on, the shadow of a tree luckily falling across him.
Two hours later he stumbled on a settlement of long barns, not certain what they were till he was gathered in the smell. A mushroom factory. Only the hallways and offices were lit, the long dormitories where the mushrooms were grown were in permanent darkness. He knew what he needed. In the main lobby were the helmets with battery lamps attached to them. Now it was almost dawn. A Sunday. He had a day without being disturbed. Later in the sunlight he cut open his boot and sock. He made a splint and strapped it with electrical tape. Worse than the pain was his hunger. He looked at his stolen drawing in the sunlight, the clean lines, the shaky signature.
Around dusk he hobbled across the road to a vegetable garden, pulled up a few carrots and dropped them into his shirt. He tried to catch a chicken but it sped up its walk and left him behind. He returned to the minimal light in the halls of the mushroom factory. He read the punch cards of the workers. Salvatorelli, Mascardelli, Daquila, Pereira, De Francesca. Most of them Italian, some Portuguese. Shifts from eight to four. He felt safer. In the office he looked through the drawers and cabinets.
He knew people who took shits on desks whenever they broke into office buildings but he wasn’t one of them. It was, he was told, a formal act. Most amateur thieves could not control themselves. With all their discipline focused on the idea of robbery, there was no governor of the body. The act implied grossness, but the professional