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.
And that Saturday two DC-8s loaded with my crayfish tails took off with this choirboy and vanished into the clouds.
Monday, no news; none on Tuesday, either. I went to the bank: nothing from Miami. I didn't want to believe it, but I knew already: I had been taken. As it was my partner who dealt with the letters of credit, and as there was no insurance on Saturday, he had sold the whole consignment the moment he got there, and walked quietly away with the dough.
I flew into a terrible rage and went off to look for Moonface fn America, with a souvenir for him in my pocket. I had no trouble picking up his trail, but at each address I found a woman who said that, though he was her lawful wedded husband, she didn't know where he was. And this three times, in three different towns! I never did find my worthy partner.
There I was, flat broke. We had lost a hundred and fifty thou. sand dollars. We still had the boats, of course; but they were in poor condition, and so were the outboards. And as this was a business in which you had to have a lot of ready cash to carry on day by day, we could not stand the loss, nor get on our feet again. We were pretty well ruined, and we sold everything. Rita never complained or blamed me for having been so trusting. Our capital, the savings of fourteen years of hard work, more than two years of useless sacrifice and continual effort-everything was lost; or very nearly everything.
With our eyes filled with tears, we left the great family of fishermen and workers we had brought into being. They were appalled, too; they told us how it grieved them to see us go and how grateful they were to us for having brought them a prosperity they had never known before.