Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon

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 nor 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 the exact moment 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! Jojo 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 – coming it the boss, and coming it a trifle high. 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 I found Jojo at Miguel’s, eating a dish of macaroni and mince. ‘OK, 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 balls, 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 some place 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 paid Miguel for the rum and the tobacco of last night. 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 packet 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.

Last 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 any more 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 gaga, 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 jeweller’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 balata’d envelope – an envelope dipped in raw latex. They could not be cashed by anyone else nor endorsed in any other name. Every gallowsbird in the village knew what I was doing, and if there was any type who made me feel too uneasy or who 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 the last two days I’d had the feeling the atmosphere was getting tenser, more mistrustful. I’d learnt the smell in penal: 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 waves put out by the guys getting ready for the rough stuff? I don’t know. But I’ve never been wrong about things like that.

For example, yesterday 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 nor asked for them. Something else: not one of them had a weapon that could be seen. No machête, 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 this 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 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 today.

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 lavatory trick on them yesterday and I had not come back; so it was no good doing it now – if these four types 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 one from the butt of the other.

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-bolivar notes. I was so keyed up that as I took the dice I put my cigarette down on them and it burnt 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 any more. 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 types had stirred. So that meant they had one or two accomplices outside. They must have a system of signalling from where they were that a guy was coming out loaded with cash and diamonds.