Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (10 page)

“It’s odd,” he said, “in my own country I hated the French, and here I like them. Have you known any Arabs?”

“Plenty. Some were very good and others were very bad.”

“It’s the same with all nations. I class myself among the good ones. I’m sixty, and I might be your father. I had a son of thirty who was killed two years ago--shot. He was good-looking; he was kind.” His eyes brimmed with tears.

I put my hand on his shoulder; this unhappy father so moved by the memory of his son reminded me of my own--he, too, retired in his little house in the Ardèche, must have his eyes fill with tears when he thought of me. Poor old Dad. Who could tell where he was, or what he was doing? I was sure he was still alive--I could feel it. Let’s hope the war had not knocked him about too much.

Mustafa told me to come to his place whenever I felt like it-- for a meal or if I ever needed anything: I’d be doing a kindness if I asked him a favor.

Evening was coming on: I said thank you for everything and set off for our shack. The game would be beginning soon.

I was not at all on edge about my first game. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Jojo had said, and he was quite right. If I wanted to deliver my trunk filled with dynamite at 36, quai des Orfèvres and to deal with the others, I needed dough, plenty of dough. I’d be getting my hands on it precious soon; that was a certainty.

As it was a Saturday, and as the miners religiously took their Sundays off, the game was not to begin before nine, because it would last until sunrise. The men came crowding to the shack, too many of them to get inside. It was impossible to find room for them all, so Jojo sorted out the ones who could play high. There were twenty-four of them: the rest would play outside. I went to Mustafa’s, and he very kindly lent me a big carpet and a carbide lamp. As the big-time gamblers dropped out, they could be replaced from outside.

Banco, and banco again! On and on: every time Jojo rolled the dice, so I kept covering the stakes. “Two to one he won’t shoot six with double threes . - . ten with double fives...” The men’s eyes were ablaze. Every time one of them lifted his cup an eleven-year-old boy filled it with rum. I’d asked Jojo to let Miguel supply the rum and the cigars.

Very soon the game heated up to boiling point. Without asking his permission, I changed Jojo’s tactics. I laid odds not only on him but also on the others, and that made him look sour. Lighting a cigar, he muttered angrily, “Quit it, man. Don’t squander the jack.” By about four in the morning I had a pile of bolivars, cruzeiros, American and West Indian dollars, diamonds and even some little gold nuggets in front of me.

Jojo took the dice. He staked five hundred boll vars. I went in with a thousand.

And he threw the seven!

I left the lot, making two thousand bolIvars. Jojo took out the five he had won. And threw the seven again! Once more he pulled out his stake. And seven again!

“What are you going to do, Enrique?” Chino asked.

“I leave the four thousand.”

“Banco alone!” I looked at the guy who had just spoken. A little thickset man, as black as boot polish, his eyes bloodshot with drink. A Brazilian for sure.

“Put down your four thousand bolos.”

“This stone’s worth more.” And he dropped a diamond on the blanket, just in front of him. He squatted there in his pink shorts, bare to the waist. The Chinese picked up the diamond, put it on his scales and said, “It’s only worth three and a half.”

“Okay for three and a half,” said the Brazilian.

“Shoot, Jojo.”

Jojo shot the dice, but the Brazilian grabbed them as they roiled. I wondered what was going to happen; he scarcely looked at the dice but spat on them and tossed them back to Jojo. “Shoot them like that, all wet,” he said.

“Okay, Enrique?” asked Jojo, looking at me.

“If that’s the way you want it,
hombre
.”

Jojo hitched the fold in the blanket deeper with his left hand, and without wiping the dice he shot them--a long, long roll. And up came the seven again.

As if he was jerked by a spring, the Brazilian leapt to his feet, his hand on his gun. Then quietly he said, “It’s not my night yet.” And he went out.

The moment he shot up like a jack-in-the-box my hand darted to my gun--it had a round in the breech. Jojo never stirred or made a move to defend himself. And yet it was him the black man was aiming at. I saw I still had a lot to learn before I knew exactly when to draw and fire.

At sunrise we stopped. What with the smoke of the damp grass and the cigars and cigarettes, my eyes stung so much they ran. My legs were completely numb from having squatted like a tailor more than nine hours on end. But there was one thing that pleased me: I hadn’t had to get up and piss, not once, and that meant I was entirely in control of my nerves and of my life.

We slept until two in the afternoon. When I woke up, Jojo wasn’t there. I put on my trousers--nothing in the pockets! Shit! J ojo must have swiped the lot. But we hadn’t settled our accounts yet: he shouldn’t have done that. He was taking too much upon himself--assuming that as the boss he was beyond all question. I wasn’t, and never had been, a boss; but I couldn’t bear people who thought themselves superior--who thought they could get away with anything. I went out and found Jojo at Miguel’s, eating a dish of macaroni. “Okay, buddy?” he said to me.

“Yes and no.”

“How come, no?”

“Because you never ought to have emptied my pockets when I wasn’t there.”

“Don’t talk bulishit, boy. I know how to behave and the reason why I did that is on account of everything depends on mutual trust. Don’t you see, during a game you might very well stuff the diamonds or the liquid someplace else besides your pockets, for example? Then again, you don’t know what I won either. So whether we empty our pockets together or not, it’s all one. A matter of confidence.”

He was right; let’s say no more. Jojo had paid Miguel for the rum and the tobacco of the night before. I asked whether the guys wouldn’t think it odd that he paid for them to drink and smoke.

“But I’m not the one who pays! Each man who wins a bundle leaves something on the table. Everyone knows that.”

And night after night this life went on. We’d been here two weeks, two weeks in which every night we played high and wild, gambling with the dice and gambling with our lives too.

One night an appalling rain came hurtling down. Black as ink. A gambler got up after winning a fair pile. He went out at the same time as a huge guy who’d been just sitting there for some time, not playing anymore for want of the wherewithal. Twenty minutes later the big guy who had been so unlucky came back and started gambling like crazy. I thought the winner must have lent him the dough, but still it seemed queer he should have lent him so much. When daylight came they found the winner dead, stabbed less than fifty yards from our place. I talked to Jojo about it, telling him what I thought.

“It’s nothing to do with us,” he said. “Next time, he’ll watch out.”

“You’re crazy, Jojo. There’ll be no next time for him, on account of he’s dead.”

“True enough: but what can we do about it?”

I was following José’s advice, of course. Every day I sold my foreign notes, the diamonds and the gold to a Lebanese buyer, the owner of a jeweler’s shop in Ciudad Bolivar. Over the front of his hut there was a notice, “Gold and diamonds bought here: highest prices given.” And underneath it, “Honesty is my greatest treasure.”

Carefully I packed the credit notes payable on sight to my order in a balataed envelope--an envelope dipped in raw latex. They couldn’t be cashed by anyone else or endorsed in any other name. Every jailbird in the village knew what I was doing, and if any buster made me feel too uneasy or didn’t speak French or Spanish, I showed him. So the only time I was in danger was during the game or when it ended. Sometimes that good guy Miguel came and fetched me when we stopped for the night.

For two days I’d had the feeling the atmosphere was getting tenser, more mistrustful. I’d learned the smell in the clink: when trouble was brewing in our barrack on the islands, you realized it without being able to tell how. When you’re always on the alert, do you pick up vibes from the guys getting ready for the rough stuff? I don’t know. But I’ve never been wrong about things like that.

For example, one time four Brazilians spent the whole night propped up in the corners of the room, in the darkness. Very occasionally one of them would come out of the shadows into the hard light that shone on the blanket and lay a few ridiculous little bets. They never took the dice or asked for them. Something else:
not one of them had a weapon that could be seen
. No machete, no knife, no gun. And that just didn’t go with their killers’ faces. It was on purpose, no doubt of it.

They came back the next evening. They wore their shirts outside their pants, so they must have their guns up against their bellies. They settled into the shadows, of course, but still I could make them out. Their eyes never left the players’ movements. I had to watch them without their noticing it; and that meant I must not stare straight at them. I managed by coughing and leaning back, covering my mouth with my hand. Unfortunately there were only two in front of me. The others were behind, and I could only get quick glances of them by turning round to blow my nose.

Jojo’s coolness was something extraordinary. He remained perfectly unmoved. Still, from time to time he did bet on other men’s throws, which meant the risk of winning or losing by mere unaided chance. I knew that this kind of gambling set him all on edge, because it forced him to win the same money two or three times before keeping it for good. The disadvantage was when the game grew red-hot he became too eager to win and passed me over great wads of dough too fast.

As I knew these guys were watching me, I left my pile there in front of me for everyone to see. I didn’t want to behave like a living safe deposit.

Two or three times I told Jojo, in quick crook’s slang, that he was making me win too often. He looked as if he didn’t understand. I had worked the outhouse trick on them the day before and I had not come back; so it was no good doing it now--if these four guys meant to move in tonight, they were not going to wait for me to return: they’d get me between the shack and the shit house.

I felt the tension mount: the four images in each corner were more on edge than ever. Particularly one who kept smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting each from the butt of the last.

So now I started making bancos right and left, in spite of Jojo’s ugly looks. To crown it all I won instead of losing and, far from shrinking, my pile kept on piling up. It was all there in front of me, mostly in five-hundred-boilvar notes. I was so keyed up that as I took the dice I put my cigarette down on them, and it burned two holes in a folded five hundred. I played and lost this note together with three others in a two-thousand-bolo banco. The winner got up, said, “See you tomorrow,” and went out.

In the heat of the game I took no notice of how the time passed, and then all at once, to my amazement, I saw the note there on the blanket again. I knew perfectly well who’d won it, a very thin, bearded white man of about forty, with a pale mark on the lobe of his left ear, standing out against the sunburn. But he was not here anymore. In a couple of seconds I had put the scene together again: he’d gone out alone, I was certain of that. Yet not one of those four guys had stirred. So they must have one or two accomplices outside. They must have a system of signaling from where they were that a guy was coming out loaded with cash and diamonds.

There were a good many gamblers standing up, so I couldn’t make out who had come in since the thin guy left. As for the ones sitting down, they had been the same for hours, and the place of the thin guy with the burned note had been filled the moment he left.

But who had played the note? I felt like picking it up and asking. But that would be very risky.

I was in danger: no doubt about that. There before my eyes was proof that the thin guy had got himself killed. My nerves were tense but they were under control; I had to think very fast. It was four in the morning; there’d he no daylight before six-fifteen, because in the tropics the sun comes up all at once, some time after six. If something was going to happen, it would happen between four and five. Outside it was as dark as hell: I knew, because I had just got up, saying I wanted a breath of fresh air in the doorway. I’d left my pile there where I sat, neatly stacked. I saw nothing unusual outside.

I came back and sat down calmly, but all my senses were on the alert. The back of my neck told me there were two pairs of eyes drilling into it.

Jojo rolled the dice, and I let other people cover his stakes. And now he began to have a fair-sized pile in front of him--something he hated.

The temperature was rising, rising; I felt that for sure, and in a very natural voice, not as if I were taking precautions, I said to Jojo in French, “I’m dead certain there’s trouble in the air, man; I can smell it. Get up at the same time as me and let’s cover the lot with our guns.”

Jojo smiled as though I were saying something pleasant: he no more bothered about me than about someone else understanding French, and he said, “My good friend, what’s the sense of this damn-fool attitude? And just who’s to be covered in particular?”

True enough. Cover who? And what reason could you give? But the situation was explosive, that was certain. The guy with the everlasting cigarette had two full cups of rum and he tossed them straight off one after the other.