by Gavin Lyall
‘Ah, now I know, Señor.‘He ducked his head gracefully. ‘So I should catch the weather by surprise and shoot it in the back. And also I see why the unromantic English make such good pilots.’
He was laughing at me, but as long as he remembered… I said: ‘So what about a licence test?’
‘I will talk to Caracas about it. But the important thing is thatyou believe I am good enough. That is my true examination.’ It takes generations of high Spanish blood to laugh at a man so courteously.
I put my pipe in my mouth and said: ‘You may still find a licence is useful. In fact, licences are useful in all walks oflife.’
‘Señor?’
‘Just an old saying the unromantic RAF had: only birds can fornicateand fly. And birds don’t booze.’
The thunderclouds had finally, mercifully, split and drenched Kingston for half an hour by the time we got back over Palisadoes. Steam was rising gently off the suburbs behind the town: even the air in the cockpit felt fresh and green.
We tried three landings, including one with an engine stopped and abandoning the approach at 200 feet and going round again. He handled it pretty well; he wasn’t going to get killed in an emergency – that was his best time. It would be the small things that killed him: a bit of fluff in a carburettor and a slipped connection in a radio and a twenty-degree shiftin wind – incredible coincidences of bad luck like that, in a time when the millions of flights every year make a million-to-one chance a tenfold statistical certainty.
He would die in a clear, still blue sky – because he still believed he had aright to be there. Because he wouldn’t believe he was a trespasser who had to keep awake and alert every single damn minute.
I was wrong, of course, as I usually am about people. But only in a way.
We landed finally around half-past four and I charged him for two hours – and he paid me cash on the nail, which was a Spanish courtesy I appreciated. He also offered to drive me back to Kingston in his Jaguar E-type, which was a Spanish courtesy I turned down fast. Anyway, it was about time I filled in my logbooks.
I parked myself in the rearmost passenger seat, closest to the open door, and started the paperwork. It should have been easy; just as the San Juan trip, the St Kitt’s trip, and today’s nights. Easy – except for that check four, creeping closer flying hour by flying hour.
Well, that was easy, too: clip ten minutes in the hour off the San Juan flight – would the Air Registration Board ever cross-check Kingston tower’s times against San Juan’s? Would they even get to hear of the St Kitts’side-trip at all? Hell, I could save nearly four hours, in all.
In all three logs: one for the aeroplane, one for each engine, because an engine can move around in its lifetime. You hand in an engine for overhaul and get a reconditioned one in exchange – and the logbook with it. And you just hope the previous pilot hasn’t done something that doesn’t show in the log: pushed the throttle through the gate too often, run at high boost and low revs… faked the hours.
Reluctantly, I wrote down both the San Juan and St Kitts’trips – clipping just ten minutes in the hour off each.
Then I counted the day’s takings. It came exactly to £75 – three hours’ work. Leaving a profit of £8 8s. – until you counted my East Street rent, a little food and booze, and keeping the jeep in near-running order. And remembered the otherdays with the Dove grounded through lack of spares, weather, or just work.
It was still a normal day in the gay, glamorouslifeof a freelance pilot roaming the blue skies of the sun-kissed Caribbean. Or of a shoestring operator selling a luxury product that most people didn’t need, didn’t even want, and certainly couldn’t afford. A street-corner match-seller with a tray full of diamond-studded matchboxes.
It depends on your point of view. Right now, my view was that it was the cocktail hour.
I was in the bar of the Myrtle Bank Hotel just before six. It’s an old hotel – by Jamaican standards – and planted right down in the business quarters on the waterfront, so that freighters dock on either side of the back garden. And with the bar an open-sided affair out there in the garden instead of inside and sunk in total gloom as per the New York ideals of the latest hotels.
The barman handed me a Red Stripe beer and a message without being asked for either. This year, the Myrtle Bank bar was as close to an office as I could afford, and him as close to a secretary. The beer was cold and the message wasn’t much warmer: I was to call on J.B. Penrose the next morning at eleven am sharp.
I didn’t know J.B. Penrose from the cat’s stepmother and my first idea was that I didn’t want to. Even in the barman’s thick, laboured scrawl the tone came over as clear as across a frosty parade ground: call on – not just call – J.B. Penrose in Apartment C, the Shaw Park Beach Club, at eleven.
Only fifty miles off, right across the island on the north coast.
I drank my beer and thought about ringing Penrose and telling him to spend the morning swimming outside the reef with the other sharks. Then I started on my second beer and thought about Shaw Park.
The ‘Club’ bit is deceptive. It started life that way, when the north coast was strictly for winter residents, with no hotels or tourist trash like bank presidents. But when the tourists started coming anyway, the Shaw Park remembered it ownedthe best beach on the island, and ran up a couple of blocks of rooms and two more of thedeluxe apartments. I’d visited one of these apartments before: if J.B. Penrose was staying in one of them, he liked diamond-studded matchboxes.
SEVEN
I landed on the north coast at a quarter to eleven the next morning.
Some pretty inventive writers have lived within a few miles of Boscobel airstrip, Ian Fleming and Noel Coward among them, but none of them in the same class as the man who thought up the sign on the Jamaican Air Service hut there. Itsays: WELCOME TOOCHO RÍOSAIRPORT.
Point one: it isn’t at Ochoríos,which is where most of the big hotels are, but twelve miles east at Oracabessa. Point two: it isn’t an airport. It’s a 3,000-foot tarmac strip wedged in between the sea and the hills, and you couldn’t even operate a Dakota off that. Mostly it’s used by the crop-spray planes working over the banana plantations on the slopes.
I was standing there admiring the sign while the clerk in the hut phoned various millionaires who drive taxis in those parts, when one of the crop-spray pilots walked up and thumped me on the back. He’d probably just finished his day’s work: they fly from first light until the sun starts up too many updrafts off the plantation slopes.
‘What’s the big twin-engined boy doing down in the jungle – slumming?’
‘Clients at Shaw Park. I hope.’
‘The film people?’
I looked puzzled. ‘Not another film?’
‘Of course. Don’t you read your Daily Gleaner? Ruddy Hollywood up here, boy.’ And he was about right; they were always shooting some Technicolor epic on this part of the north coast. It was great film country: sun, palm trees, hills, beaches – and half a dozen luxury hotels just up the road. Sometimes they turned it into a Pacific island, sometimes Darkest Africa; twice they forgot where they were and shot films about Jamaica, but probably somebody got fired for that.
‘Where are we this time?’ I asked.
‘Headwaters of the Amazon, I think. South America, anyway. Makes a change from the Congo.’ He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a long streak of oil in its place. ‘So when are you going to drop this fancy air-taxi stuff and come and do some real work with us?’
‘Tomorrow, if they keep pushing on my fuel bill.’
‘See you at five in the morning, then.’
‘Make it nine; I’m getting old.’
He grinned. ‘You’ll get used to it. The only trouble is getting a whole evening’s drinking done at lunchtime. Think of it as a dawn patrol – you should know all about that, after fighters.’
I said slowly: ‘Everybody keeps remembering I flew fighters. These days I’m a Dove driver
.’
He grinned, thumped my shoulder again, and started towards the hut. ‘Still, must be nice to know you’ve got something to fall back on.’
‘Like the Blue Mountains?’ I called after him. He laughed over his shoulder and went on out.
To me, it wasn’t all that funny. He was making money -probably £7,000 a year – but he was earning it, too. I knew he’d smashed up once already, spraying from twenty feet up and finding himself flying up a blind gully with a sheer slope ahead. They wrote off a plane a year, on average.
Perhaps I reallywas getting old.
I reached Shaw Park just after eleven and saved a couple of minutes by taking a short cut through the walled car park instead of going round through the lobby. That put me right opposite the front door to Apartment C.
The apartments were built in two-storey blocks – two up, two down – that looked oddly like English suburban houses, transplanted 4,000 miles and slightly overgrown under the tropical sun. I pressed the doorbell and waited.
No answer. I tried again; still no answer. So? All right, I admit I was a few minutes late, but in Jamaican terms that’s early. But maybe J.B. Penrose hadn’t got fully acclimatised yet; maybe he still thought eleven meant eleven and at two minutes past he had a date to fly to New York and buy the Rockefeller Plaza.
Damn. I was beginning to think I’d wasted a morning and several gallons of fuel.
As a last chance, I tried the door and it opened. I thought about that for a moment, then decided the least I could do was find out if Penrose had packed and gone. I walked in down a shadowy corridor and out into the dining room.
From the inside, you forgot all about the English suburban look. It was a big, cool room with one wall of sliding glass doors looking out across a private walled patio to the glare of the beach and sea beyond. Almost everything in the room was white: the walls, the small coffee-table, the sideboards, the Spanish metalwork of the chairs and the round glass-topped table, the four desk lamps. It was a very nice room; the only thing wrong with it was that there was nobody there except a small dark lizard.
He was clinging to the wall by some private theory of anti-gravity, his head cocked and giving me a bright suspicious stare. I nodded to him and walked over to the open glass doors and looked out. The patio had a clutter of alloy and plastic beach chairs, but nothing else. A few people were swimming near the shore, and a couple of metal dinghies with bright sails were staggering around between the stone piers. But all very quietly. Shaw Park clients don’t laugh out loud.
I turned back into the room. The lizard had his head screwed round 180 degrees, still watching me, so I asked: ‘You don’t happen to know a J.B. Penrose who’s supposed to be staying here?’ He went on watching. ‘In fact, you don’t happen tobe J.B. Penrose, do you?’
That did it; he nickered across the wall and out of sight behind a hanging picture. Residents hate being mistaken for tourists. I shrugged and started for the bedroom door, then thought to check the sideboard first.
That was definitely progress. The sideboard held three near-full bottles of gin, white Cinzano and Canadian Club, a few clean glasses and two leather-bound volumes on American contract law. Penrose might have walked out on the bottles – from the amount in them he didn’t seem to be a serious drinking man – but if the law-books were worth bringing they were worth taking home again. For me, at ten past eleven in the morning, that wasn’t a bad bit of deduction.
I found that while I’d been deducing, I’d poured myself a glass of straight Canadian Club, which perhaps wasn’t so good for ten past eleven, but by then I couldn’t do much but drink it. I had the glass halfway to my face when a voice said: ‘And who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing?’
She was standing just outside the sliding doors, wearing a simple black-and-white bathing dress, big black sunglasses, dripping sea-water – and carrying an overstuffed black briefcase.
I said: ‘I’m Keith Carr, waiting for a Mr J.B. Penrose and availing myself of some of the hospitality he’d have lavished on me if he’d remembered to be here himself.’
She came in, tossed the case on the sofa and said: ‘You’re late, Carr.’ I just stood there with my mouth slightly open and looked at her. She was a bit short and a bit slim – not flat-chested, but it wouldn’t be insured for a million, either. She had long fine hair that might once have been mousy but now streaked with the sun and touched up with every colour from chestnut to silver blonde and tied up in a careful-casual knot around the back. Her legs were long, rather thin, and covered with golden sand broken by zigzag trickles of water. For some reason I like watching a girl’s legs covered with sand; psychologists probably have a long word for it. I have a short one.
I said slowly:‘I’m late? What happened to the well-known J.B. Penrose?’
‘I’m Penrose. Most people call me J.B. You call me Miss Penrose. I waiteduntilfive past eleven; then I went for a swim.’ She walked out into the bedroom. I finally took my first taste of the whisky.
But she was back in a few seconds, without the sunglasses and rubbing herself here and there with a small hand towel. ‘Aren’t you starting drinking a little early for a pilot?’
I nodded. ‘You might have a reasonable grievance there – once I’m on the payroll.’
She looked at me thoughtfully. Without the sunglasses, she had a sharpedged face, with a small pointed chin, a nose a bit too thin, a mouth a lot too wide, and quick-moving blue eyes. A flexible face; one that could go from a suspicious stare to megaton grin, and neither expression looking out of place and it all remaining the same face all the time.
‘All right.’ She dipped her head quickly. ‘I’ll have a Cinzano and ice – there should be some ice in the refrigerator in the kitchen.’
I went back down the hall, found the kitchen and refrigerator and the ice and hauled it back, stopping only long enough to finish my own glassen route. I had a feeling I was going to need something in my blood besides blood.
She was sitting on the sofa beside her briefcase, scratching herself idly between her thighs with the towel and staring at a piece of paper. I poured her drink, my second one, and handed hers across. Then I got out my pipe and sat down at the table.
After a while she said: ‘They say you’re the best multi-engined independent pilot on the island – that right?’
I liked her use of ‘on the island’; she’d picked up the local phraseology quickly. ‘Since there isn’t anybody else, I imagine I’m the best.’
‘Hmm.’ She handed across the piece of paper. ‘Is that an accurate breakdown of your costs?’
It was. It had even got the insurance and depreciation figures right, which meant she must have known how much I’d paid for the Dove in the first place. Still, that wouldn’t be much of a secret around Palisadoes.
‘It’s near enough,’ I admitted.
‘Good. Ever done any film work before?’
‘I’veflown a few film people around. The place is crawling with them every summer. They pay promptly, but always in the wrong currency.”
That didn’t advance my cause much. She said coldly: ‘I meanreal film work. We may want you to fly a camera plane for us.’
I frowned and puffed a tired bit of smoke that had managed to crawl down the pipe-stem into my mouth and said: ‘Let’s go back to the beginning: who is “we”?’
She started. ‘My God, I thought you’d knowthat.’
‘I’m an unworldly character, Miss Penrose. Just start at the beginning.’
‘Well, you’ve heard of Walt Whitmore?’
At least I had that. He must have been a little younger than me John Wayne-Gary Cooper generation, but he’d started in Hollywood when half the actors were still horses. And he’d stayed in the saddle come the time when a lot of old-timers had climbed down to act bedroom scenes – and been professionally dead before they’d had time to change the sheets. The critics had tried nicknaming him everything from One-Expression Whitmore to The Original Council Bluff, but
they’d gone on getting him twice a year for the past thirty. In a country where they elect politicians for looking good on horses, a man whose whole profession is looking good on a horse can’t lose.
I nodded. ‘I know who you mean.’
‘He’s independent these days. He runs his own company, puts his own money into his pictures, takes his pay as a percentage of the profit. He’s down here shooting a film called Bolivar Smith. Haveyou heard of that?’
‘No, but don’t tell me the story; let me guess. He’s an American gun-for-hire in this country called – say, Amazonia – and the dictator’s tough guys push him around and he gets impressed with the nobility of an honest peasant maid and he helps them revolt and doesn’t take any pay for it-‘
‘Allright.’ I saw from the look on her face that I’d just scripted the film for them. She growled: ‘You’d go great in the movie business. We may not fit you in as a third assistant clapper boy just yet, but you’d go big as a critic.’
‘Miss Penrose,’ I spread my hands, ‘don’t get me wrong. I like Walt Whitmore. I’ve just seen him do this same story in Mexico, Texas, and New Orleans. But it won’t stop me paying to watch him do it in Amazonia.’
She looked at me, running through a silent-movie expressions catalogue of suspicion, mistrust, loathing, surprise, appreciation, delight, and a few I couldn’t name. ‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I withdraw that word “critic”.’
‘You haven’t yet told me where you fit in,’ I reminded her. ‘I don’t quite see you as the Amazon maid who brings him mangoes in jail nor as the fiery village dancer who-‘
‘I’m not anactress!’ You couldn’t mistake the expression that time: disgust. ‘I’m Whitmore’s lawyer; I fix the contracts for his company. If you’d quiet down for a few seconds, I might fix one for you.’
I shut up, except for the pipe which was making plumbing noises. After a while she said: ‘Do you accept those figures?’
I nodded.
‘Okay. I’m prepared to offer you a retainer of $20 a day for the next four weeks, just to be available on twenty-four hours’ notice. When you fly for us, you get costs on this scale and $10 an hour with a minimum of $20 a day over the retainer. Do you agree?’