This prodigious landing made such a stir that the government bought Carotte's plane and made him a civilian instructor at the Carlotta camp.

My life as an airman was over. Sad. I'd had a few hours of lessons and I was coming on well. Never mind. The only one who came out of this business a loser was Coriat. The extraordinary thing was he never sued me. Some years later I paid him back every penny; and here I should like to thank him for the generosity of his attitude.

But at that particular moment, not only had I lost the plane, and not only had my job with the Hungarian woman been taken by someone else, but I also had to avoid the central parts of Caracas, because Coriat's shop was there and I had no wish to bump into him. So once more the position was far from brilliant. But I didn't care: those few weeks with Carotte had been too marvelous for me to regret anything at all.

Carotte and I often saw one another after that; we used to meet in a quiet little joint run by an old Frenchman who had retired from the Compagnie Transatlantique. One night when we were playing dominoes in a corner with a Spanish republican and an ex-con who now made a peaceful living by selling perfume on credit, two men wearing sunglasses came in-we didn't know them-and asked if it was true that a Frenchman often came here, a pilot.

Carotte stood up and said, "That's me."

I examined these strangers from head to foot and right away, in spite of his dark glasses, I recognized one of them. I felt a sudden wave of emotion. I went up to him. Before I could speak he knew me. "Papi!"

It was Big Leon, one of my best friends in the penal colony. A tall guy with a thin face; a real man, openhearted. This was not the moment to seem too friendly and he just introduced me to his sidekick Pedro the Chilean and said no more. We had a drink in a corner, and Leon said he was looking for a light plane with a pilot, and he had been told about this Frenchman.

"The pilot's here," said Carotte, "and I'm him. But the plane is not. It belongs to other people now."

"That's sad," Leon said laconically.

Carotte returned to his game of dominoes; someone else took my place. Pedro the Chilean went and stood at the bar, so we could talk quietly.

"Well, Papi?"

"Well, Leon?"

"The last time we met was more than ten years ago."

"Yes. You were coming out of solitary just as I was going in. How are you doing, Leon?"

"Not bad, not bad at all. And you, Papi?"

Since it was Leon, I felt I could talk. "I'll tell you plain, Leon: I'm a little pissed off. It's not so easy to climb up the hill. It's all very well coming out of stir filled with the best intentions: life's so tough when you have no trade that all you think of is hustling again. Leon, you're older than me and you aren't the ordinary bum. I can tell you what's on my mind. Speaking dead serious and dead straight, as far as I'm concerned I owe this country everything. I came back to life here and I've promised myself to respect this great community-to do the least possible number of things that could be criticized. It's not easy, but I'm perfectly certain that even with my love for pulling things off I could set myself up here, starting from nothing and going straight, if only I hadn't a long bill to present to some people in Paris, _and I can't wait, in case those assholes should die before I get there_.

"When I see the young people of this country, utterly carefree and full of the joy of life, then in spite of myself I look back at the best years of my life. And I see the black holes of the Réclusion, and the three years of waiting before the trial and after it, and that stinking clink where I was treated far worse than a mad dog. And then for hours, sometimes for whole days on end, I walk about the streets of Caracas turning it all over in my mind. I feel I'm back in those places where I was buried alive; I keep seeing them, and I go back to my _one, two, three, four, five, turn_, just as I did when I was buried there and walked to and fro like a bear in a cage. It's beyond my control; it's a real obsession. I can't tolerate the idea that those who unjustly put me through that hell should die in peace, without having paid.

"So when I'm walking along the streets like that, I don't look around like an ordinary man. Every jeweler's shop, every place that is sure to hold the money I need-I can't help casing it and working out just how I could get my hands on everything it contains. It's not because I don't feel like it that I haven't yet pulled anything off; there are jobs here so dead easy they almost cry out to be done.

"Up until now I've managed to keep a hold on myself; I've done nothing serious against this country that trusts me. That would be vile, as odious as raping the daughters of a house that had taken you in. But I'm afraid one day I may not be able to resist the temptation of pulling off a big job. Because I'll never, never be able to scrape together the huge sum I need for my revenge, not by working honestly. Between you and me, Leon, I'm at the end of my rope."

Big Leon listened to me in silence, gazing at me attentively. We had a last drink, hardly exchanging another word. He got up and gave me a time to come and have lunch with him and Pedro the Chilean the next day.

We met in a quiet restaurant with an arbor. The sun was shining.

"I've been thinking about what you said to me, Papi. So listen, and I'll tell you why we're in Caracas."

They were only passing through, on their way to another South American country. There they were going to pay serious attention to a pawnshop, where, according to their own inquiries and information supplied by one of the chief employees, there was enough jewelry for each of them to come out with a very elegant fortune, once the jewels were turned into dollars. That was why they were looking for Carotte. They had meant to make him a proposition for his plane and himself; but now there was no point in talking about it.

"You can come in with us, if you like, Papi," Leon concluded.

"I've no passport and nothing much in the way of savings either."

"We'll look after the passport. Isn't that right, Pedro?"

"It's just as if you had it already," said Pedro. "In a phony name: that way you'll officially neither have gone out of Venezuela nor come back."

"What'll it cost, roughly?"

"About a thousand dollars. Have you got that much dough?"

"Yes."

"Well then, considering how you're placed, you shouldn't hesitate."

Two weeks later I was some miles from a South American capital, having hired a car the day after the job, busy burying a cookie tin with my share of the jewels in it.

The carefully programmed operation had been simple. We went in through a tie shop next door to the pawnbroker's. Leon and Pedro had been there to buy ties several times so as to get a good look at the lock and settle on the exact spot where they would make the hole in the wall. These were no safes, only locked cupboards all around. We went in at ten on Saturday evening, and we came out at eleven on Sunday night.

A smooth, well-run job. So there I was, a dozen miles from the town, burying my tin at the foot of a huge tree. I knew I would find the place again without any difficulty, because even without the mark I'd cut with my knife, the tree was easy to spot: the forest began just after a bridge, and the first tree of this forest, right by the road, was mine. Driving back, I threw the pick away some five miles along the road.

That evening we all met in a classy restaurant. We walked in separately and behaved as if we'd met by chance at the bar and then decided to have dinner together. Each of us had hidden his share, Leon with a friend and Pedro in the forest, like me.

"It's much better for each to have his own private hole," Leon said. "That way, no one of us knows what the others have done with theirs. It's a precaution they often take in South America, because if the pigs pull you in, what they put you through is no fun at all. Then if a poor guy starts to talk, why, he can only rat on himself. So that's sewn up: tell me, Papi, are you satisfied with the shares?"