Smokescreen

by Dick Francis

  He was wearing another pair of pasted-on trousers, and a blue ruffled close-fitting shirt with lacing instead of buttons. As casual clothes, they were as deliberate as signposts: the rugged male in his sexual finery. I supposed my own clothes too made a statement, as indeed everyone’s did, always.

  Katya’s statement was as clear as a trumpet, and said ‘look at me’.

  She arrived like a gust of bright and breezy show-biz, wearing an eye-stunning yellow catsuit which flared widely from the knees in black-edged ruffles. She looked like a flamenco dancer split up the middle, and she topped up the impression with a high tortoise-shell mantilla comb pegged like a tiara into her mop of hair.

  Stretching out her arms she advanced on me with life positively spurting from every pore, as if instead of harming her the input of electric current had doubled her vitality.

  ‘Link, darling, how marvellous,’ she said extravagantly. And she had brought someone with her.

  The barriers in my mind rose immediately like a hedge and prickled away all evening. Roderick and Katya had planted a bombshell to lead me astray, and were betraying their intention through the heightened mischief in Katya’s manner. I didn’t like the game, but I was an old hand at it, and nowadays I never lost. I sighed regretfully for the quiet no-fuss dinner which Roderick had promised. Too much ever to hope for, I supposed.

  The girl was ravishing, with cloudy dark hair and enormous slightly myopic-looking eyes. She wore a soft floaty garment, floor length and green, which swirled and lay against her as she moved, outlining now a hip, now a breast, and all parts in quite clearly good shape.

  Roderick was watching my reactions sideways, while pretending to pour out more Camparis.

  ‘This is Melanie,’ Katya said as if inventing Venus from the waves; and there was perhaps a touch of the Botticellis in the graceful neck.

  Christened Mabel, no doubt, I said to myself uncharitably, and greeted her with a lukewarm smile and a conventional handshake. Melanie was not a girl to be put off by a cool reception. She gave me a gentle flutter of lengthy lashes, a sweet curve of soft pink lips, and a smouldering promise in the smoky eyes. I thought: she’s done this sort of thing before, and she is as aware of her power as I am when I act.

  Melanie just happened to sit beside me on the tiger skin sofa, stretching out languorously so that the green material revealed the whole slender shape. Just happened to have no lighter of her own, so that I had to help her with Roderick’s orange globe table model. Just happened to have to cup my hand in both of her own to guide the flame to the end of her cigarette. Just happened to steady herself with a hand on my arm as she leant forward to flick off ash.

  Katya gaily sparkled and Roderick filled my glass with gin when he thought I wasn’t looking, and I began to wonder where he had hidden the tape-recorder. If this little lot was to be off the record, I was a plumber’s mate.

  Dinner was laid with candles on a square black table in a mustard-painted dining alcove. The food was great and the talk provocative, but mostly the three of them tossed the ball among themselves while I replied when essential with murmurs and smiles, which couldn’t be picked on as quotes.

  Melanie’s scent was as subtle as Joy, and Roderick had laced my wine with brandy. He watched and spoke and attended to me with friendly eyes, and waited for me to deliver myself up. Go stuff the Rand Daily Star, I thought: my friend Roderick is a bastard and my tongue is my own.

  Something of my awareness must have shown in my eyes, for a thoughtful look suddenly crossed his forehead and he changed his tack in two sentences from sexual innuendo to meaningful social comment.

  He said, ‘What do you think of apartheid, now that you’ve been here a week?’

  ‘What do you?’ I replied. ‘Tell me about it. You three who live here… you tell me.’

  Roderick shook his head and Katya said it was what visitors thought that mattered, and only Melanie, who was playing different rules, came across with the goods.

  ‘Apartheid,’ she said earnestly, ‘is necessary.’

  Roderick made a negative movement, and I asked, ‘In what way?’

  ‘It means living separately,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t mean that one race is better than the other, just that they are different, and should remain so. All the world seems to think that white South Africans hate the blacks and try to repress them, but it is not true. We care for them… and the phrase, “black is beautiful” was thought up by white Africans to give black Africans a sense of being important as individuals.’

  I was intensely surprised, but Roderick reluctantly nodded. ‘That’s true. The Black Power Movement have adopted it as their own, but they didn’t invent it. You might say, I suppose, that the phrase has achieved everything it was intended to, and a bit more besides.’

  ‘To read foreign papers,’ said Melanie indignantly, warming to her subject, ‘you would think the blacks are a lot of illiterate cheap labour. And it isn’t true. Schooling is compulsory for both races, and factories pay the rate for the job, regardless of skin colour. And that,’ she added, ‘was negotiated by the white trade unionists.’

  I liked her a lot better since she’d forgotten the sexpot role. The dark eyes held fire as well as smoke, and it was a change to hear someone passionately defending her country.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said flippantly.

  ‘Oh…’ She looked confused for a moment, then took a fresh hold on enthusiasm, like a horse getting its second wind. ‘Black people have everything the same as white people. Everything that they want to have. Only a minority have big houses because the majority don’t like them: they like to live out of doors, and only go into shelters to sleep. But they have cars and businesses and holidays and hospitals and hotels and cinemas… everything like that.’

  The white people on the whole had more money, I thought; and undoubtedly more freedom of action. I opened my mouth to make some innocuous remark about the many entrance doors marked ‘non-whites’ and ‘whites only’, but Melanie jumped right in to forestall any adverse comment, which was not in the least what Roderick wanted. He frowned at her. She was too busy to notice.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said inaccurately. ‘You’re going to talk about injustice. Everyone from England always does. Well, certainly, of course, there are injustices. There are in every country in the world, including yours. Injustices make the headlines. Justice is not news. People come here purposely seeking for injustice, and of course they find it. But they never report on the good things, they just shut their eyes and pretend there aren’t any.’

  I looked at her thoughtfully. There was truth in what she said.

  ‘Every time a country like England attacks our way of life,’ she said, ‘they do more harm than good. You can feel the people here close their ranks and harden their attitude. It is stupid. It slows down the progress our country is gradually making towards partnership between the races. The old rigid type of apartheid is dying out, you know… and in five or ten years time it will only be the militants and extremists on both sides who take it seriously. They shout and thump, and the foreign press listens and pays attention, like they always do to crackpots, and they don’t see, or at any rate they never mention, the slow quiet change for the better which is going on here.’

  I wondered how she would feel about it if she were black: even if things were changing, there was still no overall equality of opportunity. Blacks could be teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests. They couldn’t be jockeys. Unfair, unfair.

  Roderick, waiting in vain for me to jump in with both feet, was driven again to a direct question.

  ‘What are your views, Link?’

  I smiled at him.

  ‘I belong to a profession,’ I said, ‘which never discriminates against blacks or Jews or women or Catholics or Protestants or bug-eyed monsters, but only against non-members of Equity.’

  Melanie looked blank about Equity but she had a word to say about Jews.

  ‘Whatever white South Af
ricans may be accused of,’ she contended, ‘we have never sent six million blacks to the gas chamber.’

  Which was rather like saying, I thought frivolously, that one might have measles, but had never infected anyone with whooping-cough.

  Roderick gave up angling for a quotable political commitment and tried to bounce Melanie back into sultry seduction. Her own instincts were telling her she would get further with me if she laid off the sex, because the doubt showed clearly in her manner as she attempted to do as he wanted. But evidently it was important to them both that she should persevere, and she refused to be discouraged by my lack of answering spark. She smiled a meek feminine smile to deprecate every opinion she had uttered, and bashfully lowered the thick black lashes.

  Katya and Roderick exchanged eye-signals as blinding as lighthouses on a dark night, and Katya said she was going to make coffee. Roderick said he would help: and why didn’t Melanie and Link move over to the sofa, it was more comfortable than sitting round the table.

  Melanie smiled shyly. I admired the achievement: she was as shy underneath as a sergeant-major. She draped herself beautifully over the sofa with the green material swirling closely across the perfect bosom which rose and fell gently with every breath. She noted the direction of my eyes and smiled with pussy-cat satisfaction.

  Premature, dearest Melanie, premature, I thought.

  Roderick carried in a tray of coffee cups and Katya went out on to the balcony. When she came in, she shook her head. Roderick poured out the coffee and Katya handed it round: the suppressed inner excitement, absent during dinner, was fizzing away again in the corners of her smile.

  I looked at my watch. A quarter past ten.

  I said, ‘I must be going soon. Early start tomorrow morning, I’m afraid.’

  Katya said quickly, ‘Oh no, you can’t go yet, Link,’ and Roderick handed me a bulbous glass with enough brandy to sink a battleship. I took a sip but made it look like a swallow, and reflected that if I’d drunk everything he’d given me I would have been in no state to drive away.

  Melanie kicked off her golden slippers and flexed her toes. On them she wore pearly pink nail varnish and nothing else: and with a quick flash of bare ankle and calf she managed to plant the idea in my mind that under the green shift there were no other clothes.

  The coffee was as good as the dinner: Katya was more expert a cook than conspirator. Within twenty minutes she again strolled out on to the balcony, and this time, when she came back, the message was a nod.

  I looked at all three of them, wondering. Roderick with his old-young face, Katya yellow-frilly and irresponsible, Melanie conscientiously weaving her web. They had laid some sort of a trap. The only thing was… what?

  Twenty to eleven. I finished my coffee, stood up, and said, ‘I really must go now…’

  This time there was no resistance. They all three uncurled themselves to their feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for a great evening.’

  They smiled.

  ‘Marvellous food,’ I said to Katya.

  She smiled.

  ‘Splendid drinks,’ I said to Roderick.

  He smiled.

  ‘Superb company,’ I said to Melanie.

  She smiled.

  Not a really genuine smile among them. They had watchful, expectant eyes. My mouth, for all the available liquid, felt dry.

  We moved towards the lobby, which was an extension of the sitting-room.

  Melanie said, ‘Time I was going too… Roderick, would you order me a taxi?’

  ‘Sure, love,’ he said easily, and then, as if the thought was just striking, ‘but you go the same way as Link… I’m sure he would give you a lift.’

  They all looked at me, smiling.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. What else. What else could I say?

  The smiles went on and on.

  Melanie scooped up a tiny wrap from beside the front door, and Roderick and Katya saw us down the hall and into the lift, and were still waving farewell as the doors closed between us. The lift sank. One of those automatic lifts which stopped at every floor one had pre-selected. I pressed G for ground, and at G for ground it stopped.

  Politely I let Melanie out first. Then I said, ‘I say… terribly sorry… I’ve left my signet ring on the wash basin in Roderick’s bathroom. I’ll just dash back for it. You wait there, I won’t be a second.’

  The doors were closing before she could demur. I pressed the buttons for floors 2 and 6. Got out at 2. Watched the pointer begin to slide towards Roderick’s floor at 6, and skipped quickly through the doors of the service stairs, at the back of the hall.

  The unadorned concrete and ironwork steps wound down round a small steep well and let me out into an area full of stacked laundry baskets, central-heating boilers, and rows of garbage cans. Out in the narrow street behind the covered yard I turned left, skirted the whole of the next door block at a fast pace, and finally, more slowly, inconspicuously walked in the shadows back towards Roderick’s.

  I stopped in a doorway a hundred yards away, and watched.

  There were four men in the street, waiting. Two opposite the front entrance of Roderick’s apartment block. Two others patiently standing near my hired car. All of them carried objects which gleamed in the street lamps, and whose shapes I knew all too well.

  Melanie came out of the apartment block and hurried across the road to talk to two of the men. The green dress clung to her body and appeared diaphanous to the point of transparency in the quality of light in the street. She and the men conferred agitatedly, and there was a great deal of shaking of heads.

  All three of them suddenly looked up, and I followed the direction of their gaze. Roderick and Katya were standing out on the balcony, calling down. I was too far away to hear the exact words, but the gist was entirely guessable. The quarry had got away, and none of them was pleased.

  Melanie and the two men turned and walked in my direction, but only as far as the other two beside my car. They all five went into a huddle which could produce no happiness, and in the end Melanie walked back alone and disappeared into the flats.

  I sighed wryly. Roderick was no murderer. He was a newspaperman. The four men had come armed with cameras. Not knives. Not guns.

  Not my life they were after; just my picture.

  Just my picture outside a block of flats at night alone with a beautiful girl in a totally revealing dress.

  I looked thoughtfully at the four men beside my car, decided the odds were against it, turned on my heel, and quietly walked away.

  Back at the Iguana Rock (by taxi), I telephoned Roderick.

  He sounded subdued.

  I said, ‘Damn your bloody eyes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you got this telephone bugged?’

  A pause. Then on a sigh again he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Too late for honesty, my friend.’

  ‘Link…’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Just tell me why.’

  ‘My paper…’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Newspapers don’t get up to such tricks. That was a spot of private enterprise.’

  A longer pause.

  ‘I guess I owe it to you,’ he said slowly. ‘We did it for Clifford Wenkins. The little runt is scared silly by Worldic, and he begged us, in return for favours he has done us from time to time, to set you up for him. He said Worldic would sack him if he couldn’t persuade you to do a girly session to sell their twenty-rand seats, and he had asked you, and you had absolutely refused. Melanie is our top model girl, and he got her to help in a good cause.’

  ‘That Wenkins,’ I said bitterly, ‘would sell his soul for publicity stunts.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Link…’

  ‘Not as sorry as he will be,’ I said ominously.

  ‘I promised him I wouldn’t tell you…’

  ‘Stuff both of you,’ I said violently, and rattled the receiver into its cradle.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, the
Iguana management having kindly sent someone with the keys to fetch my hired car from outside Roderick’s flat, I packed what little I would need for the Kruger Park, and chuntered round to Evan and Conrad’s hotel.

  The loading of their station wagon was in process of being directed by Evan as if it were the key scene in a prestige production, and performed by Conrad at his most eccentric. Boxes, bags, and black zipped equipment littered the ground for a radius of ten yards.

  ‘Dear boy,’ Conrad said as I approached, ‘for God’s sake get some ice.’

  ‘Ice?’ I echoed vaguely.

  ‘Ice.’ He pointed to a yellow plastic box about two feet by one. ‘In there. For the film.’

  ‘What about beer?’

  He gave me a sorrowful, withering glance. ‘Beer in the red one, dear boy.’

  The red thermal box had had priority; had already been clipped tight shut and lifted on to the car. Smiling, I went into the hotel on the errand and returned with a large plastic bagful. Conrad laid the ice-pack in the yellow box and carefully stacked his raw stock on top. The yellow box joined the red one and Evan said that at this rate we wouldn’t reach the Kruger by nightfall.

  At eleven the station wagon was full to the gunnels but the ground was still littered with that extraordinary collection of wires, boxes, tripods and clips which seem to accompany cameramen everywhere.

  Evan waved his arms as if by magic wand the whole lot would leap into order. Conrad pulled his moustache dubiously. I opened the boot of my saloon, shovelled the whole lot in unceremoniously, and told him he could sort it all out when we arrived.

  After that we adjourned for thirst quenchers, and finally got the wheels on the road at noon. We drove east by north for about five hours and descended from the high Johannesburg plateau down to a few hundred feet above sea level. The air grew noticeably warmer on every long downhill stretch, which gave rise to three or four more stops for sustenance. Conrad’s cubic capacity rivalled the Bantus’.

  By five we arrived at the Numbi gate, the nearest way into the park. The Kruger itself stretched a further two hundred miles north and fifty east with nothing to keep the animals in except their own wish to stay. The Numbi gate consisted of a simple swinging barrier guarded by two khaki-uniformed black Africans and a small office. Evan produced passes for two cars and reservations for staying in the camps, and with grins and salutes the passes were stamped and the gates swung open.