They called themselves rather pretentiously Marchand de Biens, or translated into English; Property Merchants. The expression was a little out of date; it had been popular in the late eighties during the last property boom in Metropolitan France. In effect they were Real Estate Agents and had their head offices in downtown Pointe-à-Pitre, in an uninteresting modern, but poorly maintained and out of place multi-storey building, the Tour Cede.
Serge Amadis with Guy Courtauld were partners and owners of Caribbean Property Development SA, the name had sounded grander to them in English. They did not spend that much time in their dreary head office, preferring the luxurious sales office situated on the main square of the town.
Gilles Michel managed the administrative and legal aspects of the business in Tour Cede. He was what could be described as a minority partner in the business, holding a five percent share, on whom they totally depended for his professionalism, which gave an air of respectability to some of the more distasteful aspects of their business.
Besides their real estate business, they represented two timeshare promoters, Prestige, a Paris based company that had built two complexes on the island, and Worldwide Leisure Homes, a Canadian promoter and timeshare exchange organisation.
They were not specialised in any particular sector of the real estate business, the island was too small for that. They took what came, mainly buying and selling property, but made a good regular business in managing the time-share properties. In addition they took on property development with Metropolitan companies, handling one or two projects a year, depending on the general economic situation.
Their business was good, but they wanted to broaden their activities and get into property development for themselves, whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself, such as the planned hotel club in Basse Terre.
Property business was a cutthroat affair and they were hard-nosed wheeler-dealers, they had to be to survive and survive they did, living in great style. They owned large villas, with swimming pools, surrounded by tropical gardens nearby Deshaies, known as the Emerald Island, at the edge of the natural park on the flank of the mountains that ran from north to south, dominated by the active volcano, la Soufrière.
They shared a company boat, a large high-powered Guy Gouache, anchored in the Marina at Gosier. They used the boat freely to entertain selected customers or friends, trips around Basse Terre to the Cousteau Park, where they anchored overnight, or sunbathing on Parrot Island, drinking rum maracudja and lambi.
They enjoyed their private lives, well away from the main tourist areas, where luckless tourists were confronted with indifferent restaurants and scowling waiters, charging extravagant prices for fresh fish. The two realtors fished from their boat or bought fresh lobster directly from the local fishermen on the small beaches on the west side of the island.
The tourist districts were their hunting grounds. There, they employed salesmen for miserable salaries, the likes of Jean Cristophe, a young man left over from a package tour, whose job was to pull in tourists with smooth talk, inviting them to a free cocktail in the show apartments, where their experienced staff extolled the virtues of investing in a holiday home under the palms of the Caribbean.
They looked at the tourist with a professional interest, at the same time despising them. The profile of the typical tourist was according to Serge Amadis – ‘Des cons, middle-managers, small business people and shopkeepers, who arrived on charter flights with the wife and two kids for ten days in paradise, who, when they returned to their suburban monotony, would bore their friends and neighbours talking of their holiday for the rest of the year or even longer.’ They were the gogos who dreamt of a life of leisure in the tropical sunshine, but ended up paying for the extravagant life style of the two ‘Marchand de Biens’.
The trouble was that tourism had become democratic, any secretary from Birmingham, Frankfurt or Lyon could spend eight days in Bali or Cancun on a trip subsidised by the works committee.
Caribbean Property Development had their sales office in a splendidly restored Colonial two story house, built in wood with ornate iron work balconies, the roof bordered by zinc plate cut into delicate forms, like fine lace. The house faced the main square of Pointe-à-Pitre, Place de la Victoire. At pavement level was the real estate office with the sales and reception for visitors. Serge and Guy had their luxuriously appointed offices on the first floor with a view onto the coconut palm and thick trunked tropical trees in the square. On the second floor was a luxurious apartment, which they often used on weekdays, avoiding the thirty-kilometre trip home or loaned it occasionally to their privileged friends.
Their most recent project was to build an exclusive and expensive hotel club in Basse Terre. They planned the publicity launch in grand style with the arrival of the transatlantic yacht race, ‘La Route du Rhum’, and all the television and media publicity that went with it.
For the event they had rented a penthouse on fifth floor of a stylish apartment building, almost three hundred square metres of luxury, overlooking the Gosier marina, facing the yacht club.
Chapter 30
A Cargo