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46
MEETING RUSTY

Even with Roberto to keep me company, I got very lonely during that period without the tourists coming in to see me. Sometimes, when Fantasma was locked in La Muralla or La Grulla, the guards would call me to take a tour group. However, almost none of the tourists were allowed to stay the night. One of the only people who did stay during my fifth year in San Pedro was Rusty, a 25-year-old backpacker from Australia. He boasted to me that he had a law degree, although I didn't believe him at first. He didn't seem like a proper lawyer to me. For a start, he had hair down to his shoulders and dressed badly in dirty jeans and a T-shirt. Also, he laughed a lot and didn't seem to care that any of us were criminals.

Rusty thought he was pretty clever because he spoke more Spanish than the other tourists, but I knew straight away that he was genuine. During the official tour, I told the whole group about a Brazilian prisoner who had been bashed and brutally stabbed for being a suspected informant. The Brazilian's injuries were so severe that the guards sent him to a hospital outside the prison, but after the doctors stitched him up, he couldn't afford more treatment and his wounds became infected. Every one of the tourists that day promised to come back to San Pedro to drop off some medicine for me to send to the Brazilian, but Rusty was the only one who kept his word. In fact, he went directly to the hospital where the Brazilian was supposedly being kept, only to discover that he had been transferred to a cheaper hospital. Then he went to find the new hospital. When the police guarding the Brazilian told him he wasn't allowed to visit, Rusty bluffed them that he was an international human rights lawyer and therefore had the legal right to take some antibiotics to the patient.