Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

In such an atmosphere Venezuela, too, though blessed by the gods, began to be attacked by the virus of political passion. There were cops everywhere, and among the officials, there were some who made evil use of their political connections.

Officials belonging to different ministries came and badgered me many times. Inspectors of every kind appeared: inspectors of drinks, of municipal taxes, of this and of that. Most of them had had no training and held the job only because they belonged to some political party or other.

What's more, since the government knew about my past, and since I was inevitably in contact with various crooks who passed through even though I had nothing to do with them in the way of business, and since on top of that I had been granted asylum here while proceedings against me were still in force in France, the pigs took advantage of my position to carry out a kind of blackmail. For example, they dug up the case of a Frenchman murdered two years back, in which the killer had never been found. Did I know anything about it? I knew nothing? Wasn't it in my interest, considering my position, to know a little?

Oh, this was beginning to be a splendid party, this was. I had had about enough of these bastards. It might not be very serious for the moment, but if it went on and I blew up, God only knew what would happen. No, I couldn't blow my stack here, not in this country that had given me my chance of being a free man once more and of making a home for myself.

There was no point in going round and round the mulberry bush: I sold the Grand Café and the other joints, and Rita and I went off to Spain. Maybe I'd be able to start some kind of business there.

But I couldn't get going. The European countries are too well organized. In Madrid, when I had obtained the first thirteen permits to open a business, they kindly told me I needed a fourteenth. It seemed to me that that was just one too many. And Rita, seeing that I was literally incapable of living far from Venezuela and that I missed even the jackasses who badgered me, agreed that although we had sold everything, we should go back there.

Caracas once more. This was 1961, and sixteen years had passed since El Dorado. Nightlife had changed a great deal in Caracas, and finding a joint as clean, attractive and important as the Grand Café was impossible. A ridiculous new law held that the people who had bars and sold alcoholic drinks corrupted public morals- which meant all kinds of abuses and exploitation on the part of certain officials, and I didn't want to get back into that racket at all.

Something else was needed. I discovered not a mine of diamonds but a mine of very big shrimp, the kind called _camarones_ and even bigger ones called _langostinos_. And all this was back at Maracaibo once again.

We settled down in an elegant apartment: I bought a stretch of shore and founded a company called the Capitan Chico, after the district that included my beach. Sole shareholder, Henri Charrière; manager, Henri Charrière; director of operations, Henri Charrière; chief assistant, Rita.

And here we were, launched into an extraordinary adventure. I bought eighteen fishing boats. They were big craft, each with a fifty-horsepower outboard and a net five hundred yards long. A crew of five to each boat. As one fully equipped boat cost twelve thousand five hundred bolIvars, eighteen meant a lot of money.

We transformed the little villages around the lake, doing away with poverty and the dislike for work (since the work I gave was well paid) and bringing a new life in place of the old listlessness.

These poor people owned nothing, so without any guarantee from them we gave one full set of fishing gear for each crew of five. They fished as they chose, and their only obligation was to sell me the _langostinos_ and _camarones_ at the market price less half a bolIvar, because I paid for all the equipment and its upkeep.

The business ran at a tremendous pace, and it fascinated me. We had three refrigerated trucks that never stopped hurrying about the beaches to pick up my boats' catch.

I built a pier on the lake about a hundred feet long, and a big covered platform. Here Rita managed a team of between a hundred twenty and a hundred forty women who took off the heads of the _camanones_ and _langostinos_. Then, washed and washed again in ice-cold water, the shrimp were sorted for size, according to how many would go to one American pound. There might be ten to fifteen, or twenty to twenty-five, or twenty-five to thirty. The bigger they were, the more they brought. Every week the Americans sent me a green sheet which gave the market price for _camarones_ each Tuesday. Every day at least one DC-8 took off for Miami, carrying 24,800 pounds of _camarones_.

I would have made a lot of money, if I had not been such a fool as to take a Yankee partner one day. He had a moon face, and looked worthy, stupid and straight. He spoke neither Spanish nor French, and as I spoke no English we couldn't quarrel.

This Yankee brought in no capital, but he had rented the freezers of a well-known brand of ice that was sold all over Maracaibo and in the neighborhood. As a result, our _camarones_ and _langostinos_ were perfectly frozen.

I had to oversee the fishing, the boats, the loading of each day's catch into my three refrigerated trucks and the payment of the fishermen: and I had to provide these considerable sums out of my own pocket. Some days I would go down to the beach with thirty thousand bolIvars and come home withoui a cent.

We were well organized, but nothing tuns itself without a hitch, and I had a continual war with pirate buyers. As I've said, the fishermen who used my equipment had agreed that I should buy their catch at the market price less half a boilvar a kilo, which was fair. But the pirate buyers risked nothing. They had no boats, just a refrigerated truck. So they could afford to turn up on the beaches and buy _camarones_ at the market price from no matter who. A boat carrying eight hundred kilos of _camarones_ gained four hundred bolivars by selling a day's catch to the pirate buyers. You would have to be a saint to resist a temptation like that. So whenever they could, my fishermen took the pirates' money. That meant I had to protect my interests almost day and night; but I liked the battle-it gave me intense satisfaction.

When we sent our _camarones_ and _langostinos_ to the States, the payment was made in the form of a letter of credit, once the bank had seen the shipping papers and a certificate indicating that the quality of the goods and their perfect deepfreezing had been checked. The bank paid 85 percent of the total, and we then received the remaining 15 percent when Miami told Maracaibo that the consignment had arrived and had been found satisfactory.

It often happened that on Saturdays, when there were two planeloads of _camarones_, my partner would go along on one plane to accompany the consignment. On those days the freight cost five hundred dollars more, and as the Miami cargo handlers did not work on Saturdays, someone had to be on the spot to get the consignment out, loaded onto a refrigerated trailer and taken, to the buyer's works, either in Miami itself or at Tampa or Jacksonville. As the banks were closed on Saturday there was no way of using the letters of credit; nor was there any way of insuring. But on Monday morning, in the States, the shipment sold for 10 or 15 percent more. It was a sound venture.

Things were running smoothly, and I was delighted with my partner's elegant strokes of business when he flew off at the weekend. Until the day he did not come back.

By stinking bad luck, this happened at the season when there were few _camarones_ in the lake. I had hired a big boat at the seaport of Punto Fijo to fetch a whole cargo of splendid crayfish from Los Roques. I'd come back loaded to the gunwales with extra-prime-quality goods; and I'd had their heads taken off right there. So I had a very valuable shipment, made up entirely of best crayfish tails, weighing from a pound and a half to a pound and three-quarters each.