The Take(55)

“I can’t,” said Simon.

“But you know?”

“Yes. I know.”

“And so?”

“He’s for me.”

In parting, Paul said: “Two paces from the back wall. Five fingers above the floor. Dig.”

And then he was gone.

Simon dug, using the handle of his spoon. He didn’t fear being discovered. The guard came morning and night to pass his meal through a slat in the steel door. Never more. Once, a long time ago, the wall had been impenetrable. Time and damp had weakened it, had softened hardest concrete to malleable mush. His small metal pick made easy headway through the rotting concrete and plaster. In a few days, he had fashioned a hole the width of his fist that extended nearly to his shoulder. At times he could hear Paul digging, too, and his spirits soared. It was not a question of escape but of communication. Of human interaction. Of grasping on to his only chance of maintaining his sanity.

One day the two inconsequential tunnels met.

Simon was saved.



His name was Paul Deschutes. He had been educated in Belgium and taken the vows of priesthood. For a time, he was a servant of Christ, a soldier of Ignatius Loyola. A Jesuit. But no longer. More he would not say, except that he deserved his punishment.

It was his wish to help Simon. He proposed to give him the education he had chosen to forgo, if Simon was willing. He would be the Abbé Faria to Simon’s Edmond Dantès. They were in Marseille, after all. Life would imitate fiction.

Simon had no idea who Faria was or, for that matter, Edmond Dantès. The only Dumas he knew was a goalie who’d played with Bordeaux ten years earlier. His knowledge of literature, math, and science was an eighth grader’s. The last book he’d read was about Lucky Luke and Black Bart. It was a comic book.

He told Paul this. He said he had no use for book learning, that he knew how to hot-wire a car in thirty seconds and how to cover an armored car’s vents with wet towels to force the guards to open the doors. He knew how to drive fast and to reload a pistol before the empty magazine hit the ground. He knew how to touch a woman so she’d never want to leave him and to kiss her like he loved her. That was enough.

To which Paul laughed. But then he grew serious and asked a simple question: “Do you want to come back to this place?”

Simon said no. He could not return. To come back would be to die.

“Well, then,” said Paul.

And so they began.

Every morning after eating his breakfast and making his ablutions (a word he only learned in the course of that tumultuous year), Simon would lie on the floor and listen as Paul lectured. For three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, Paul would cover a dizzying range of subjects. He would speak about Picasso, the Second World War, and the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. About Napoleon and Bauhaus and Max Planck and Albert Einstein. About the Meiji Restoration and Arthur Rubinstein. A wildly random survey course on the learnings of Paul Deschutes in his seventy-three years on planet Earth.

There was also instruction in language. Simon was already trilingual. While English was his mother tongue, he was also fluent in French and Italian. To which Paul added Spanish and Russian.

But the area where Simon shined brightest was mathematics, and his abilities were all the more impressive as he had no materials with which to write the multitude of equations and concepts Paul discussed. His mind possessed the rare ability to hold abstract figures and apply sophisticated numerical concepts to them. When Paul talked about “the x and y axis,” Simon saw them effortlessly. When Paul recited the value of pi to the twentieth digit, Simon could repeat it instantly, and remember it the next day. And the next. When Paul explained the theory of prime numbers, Simon grasped it immediately and, without prompting, could list primes in order until you asked him to stop.

And so they worked. Day in, day out.

In time, Paul revealed more about himself. He’d lived all over the world. He’d taught at prestigious universities. He’d risen in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. For five years he’d served as the monsignor of Lyon. And then came the fall. A love of alcohol that he could no longer keep hidden. A greater love for women that he could no longer suppress. An affair. A child out of wedlock. Separation from the Church. Worse, an estrangement from God. An abandonment of principles. A descent into debauchery. Drugs. Crime. He gave details sparingly. His regrets were many. Over and over, he said he deserved his punishment. That he had sinned and fallen from God’s grace.

But now, here, with Simon, he could begin his penance. He could try to atone. Teaching brought him closer to his God, even if his God chose to keep his distance.

Simon called him “Monsignor Paul.”



A warm spring morning in the yard, the air buzzing with keen, fresh scents of awakening, the earth damp, sprigs of grass pushing through the mud. Beyond the walls, the chirping of happy children walking with their parents to church, the chatter of families on a sunny, promising Sunday morning. And inside the walls, an hour of respite from the damning isolation.

“Why are you here?” asked the monsignor.

“You know why,” said Simon, and he began to explain about the morning so many months before when he and his crew had been betrayed.

“I don’t mean that. I mean here. In the hole.”

The question took Simon by surprise. Surely they had discussed the circumstances of their segregation at some point during the past months.