Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon Read Online Free PDF

and its enchanting people. I was an adventurer, but an adventurer with a shift of gear--I must get my money honestly, or at least without hurting anyone. Paris, that was my aim: Paris one day, to present my bill to the people who put me through so much suffering.
    I was calmer now, and my eyes took in the setting moon as it dipped toward the virgin forest, a sea of black treetops with waves of different heights--but waves that never stirred. I went back to my room and stretched out on the bed.
    Paris was still a great way off, but not so far that I wouldn’t be there again one day, walking the asphalt of her streets.

 
     
     
     
    2
     
     
The Mine
     
     
    A week later, thanks to the letter that Prospéri, the Corsican grocer, wrote for me, I was taken on at the Mocupia mine. There I was, looking after the working of the pumps that sucked up the water from the shafts.
    The mine looked like a coal pit, with its underground galleries. There were no veins of gold and very few nuggets. The gold was found in very hard rock; they blasted this rock with dynamite and then broke the oversized lumps with a sledgehammer. The pieces were put into trucks, and the trucks brought to the surface in elevators; then crushers reduced the rock to a powder finer than sand. This was mixed with water, making a liquid mud that was pumped up into tanks as big as the reservoirs in an oil refinery. These tanks had cyanide in them. The gold dissolved into a liquid heavier than the rest and sank to the bottom. Under heat, the cyanide evaporated, carrying off the particles of gold; they solidified and were caught by filters very like combs as they went past. Then the gold was collected, melted into bars, carefully checked for 24-carat purity and put into a strictly guarded store. But who did the guarding? I still can’t get over it. Simon, no less, the crook who had made his break from the penal colony with Big Charlot.
    When my work was over, I went to gaze at the sight. I went to the store and stared at the huge pile of gold ingots neatly lined up by Simon, the ex-convict. Not even a strongroom, just a concrete storehouse with walls no thicker than usual, and a wooden door.
    “Everything okay, Simon?”
    “Okay. And what about you, Papi? Happy at Charlot’s?”
    “Yes, I’m fine.”
    “I never knew you were in El Dorado. Otherwise I’d have come to get you Out.”
    “That’s a good guy. Are you happy here?”
    “Well, you know, I have a house: it’s not as big as Charlot’s, but it’s made of bricks and mortar. I built it myself. And I’ve got a young wife, very sweet. And two little girls. Come and see me whenever you like--my house is yours. Charlot tells me your friend is sick; my wife knows how to give injections, so if you need her don’t hesitate.”
    We talked. He, too, was thoroughly happy. He, too, never spoke of France, of Montmartre, though he had lived there. Just like Charlot. The only thing that mattered was the present--wife, children, the house. He told me he earned twenty bolIvars a day. Fortunately their hens gave them eggs for their omelettes, and the chickens were on the house; otherwise they wouldn’t have gone far on twenty bolivars, Simon and his brood.
    I gazed at that mass of gold lying there, so carelessly stored behind a wooden door, and the four walls only a foot thick. A door that two heaves on a jimmy would open without a sound. This heap of gold, at three boilvars fifty a gram or thirty-five dollars an ounce, would easily add up to three million five hundred thousand boilvars, or almost a million dollars. And this unbelievable fortune was within hand’s reach! Knocking it off would be almost child’s play.
    “Elegant, my neat pile of ingots? Eh, Papillon?”
    “It’d be more elegant still well salted away. Christ, what a fortune!”
    “Maybe, but it’s not ours. It’s holy, on account of they’ve entrusted it to me.”
    “Entrusted it to you, sure; but not to me. You must admit it’s