Shooting Script

by Gavin Lyall

  A knobbly, tanned face, cropped greying hair, milky-coffee-coloured suit. It took a moment to place him, he was so far out of place.

  Then I had it. ‘Agent Ellis, I believe? Aren’t you on CIA territory?’

  He smiled easily. ‘I’m on holiday. But you know – the Bureau once had a sort of responsibility out this way. The Caribbean, South America. Counterespionage, in the war. Before they invented the CIA.’

  FBI small talk again.

  My beer arrived and I said: ‘Here’s to yourholiday. Hope you don’t get troubled by work.’

  ‘No trouble.’ He drank. ‘Heard I might find you here, these days. Remembered I’d promised you something.’ He felt in a side pocket and handed over a small rectangle of brass.

  On it, engraved in neat capitals, wasit’d screw me up all over the caribbean. Then I remembered the phrase, back in the bar of the Sheraton at San Juan.

  I grinned, turning the plate in my hands. A small hole at each corner, ready to be pinned to an instrument panel. And a lot neater than any of the notices I’d met pinned to panels in any aeroplane before. It was a professional job and it must have cost him money.

  ‘Why the hell did you do this?’ I asked.

  He looked down at his glass and frowned thoughtfully. ‘You’re a trained fighting man, Carr. You did a good job in Korea and I happen to think that’s important. But it isn’t a very saleable talent. Well, we taught it you – so maybe we owe you something.’ He nodded at the plate. ‘That, anyway.’

  ‘You’re wrong, of course,’ I said softly. ‘A good fighter pilot’s never working for anybody but himself.’

  ‘Maybe. You still did a good job. And I diink that about covers it. Unless it’s too late, of course.’

  I twisted my eyebrows at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I hear you lost your plane in the Repúblicaa couple of weeks back.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And now you have an old bombing plane.’

  ‘Walt Whitmore has it.’

  ‘And you fly it.’

  I nodded. But if news of die Mitchell was spreading so far and so wide, perhaps it was time to put my cards on the table. I mean pretend to. I said: ‘So? You think Whitmore wants to get mixed up in Repúblicapolitics?’

  He sipped bis beer, frowned, and sipped again. ‘No-o,’ he said finally. ‘That’s what I can’t figure. Nothing in his filesuggests he’d do anything so altruistic. Hell, nothing in his file suggests he knows any words that long. And I can’t see why else he’d get involved. But-‘

  ‘You’ve got a file on Whitmore?’

  ‘Sure. We’ve got a file on everybody with that much money – if we know they’ve got it. There’s two things make a crook: one’s wanting a million, the other’s having it.’

  ‘I’d settle for less.’

  ‘And your plane back, perhaps? You wouldn’t have done a deal with Jiminez, would you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know Jiminez from the cat’s grandmother.’

  ‘You knew his son.’

  ‘I didn’tknow I knew his son – not until after he got shot. By the people you seem so fond of back in the República.’

  He eyed me thoughtfully. ‘Now there’s a funny thing. Because political assassination’s mostly an amateur business. Tends to make a man a martyr. You know people have been writing Diego on the walls in Santo Bartolomeo this last week? Me, I wouldn’t have thought he rated it, from what I’d heard.’

  I just shrugged.

  He ploughed on regardless. ‘Particularly dictators don’t like assassination. Not since Trujillo got his, anyway. Could plant an idea, you know.’ He stood up from his bar stool. ‘I better get on with my holiday.’

  The little brass plaque was lying on the counter. I pushed it towards him. ‘You forgot something.’

  He looked down at it and sighed. ‘I thought it might be too late.’ • ‘No – just that I already have a souvenir. ‘ I tossed the pair of dice on the bar-top. ‘These were pinched off General Bosco. I’ll roll you for the next beer – if I do the rolling.’

  The barman materialised at my elbow. ‘No dicing allowed, sir – nowyou know that,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘We’re not playing. These are joke dice; my friend’s buying into the company that makes them.’

  That got me looks from both Ellis and the barman. But after a moment the barman faded suspiciously away again.

  Ellis juggled the dice in his hand. ‘Dictator’s dice, huh?

  Well, I’m not surprised; anybody who shoots dice with a dictator deserves it. Don’t get me wrong, Carr: I don’t think Castillo and Bosco aresaints. But loaded dice don’t kill anybody; revolutions do. And never dictators. They’ve always got a bag of gold bars packed, a fast car to catch the last plane out. It’s the poor hungry bastards out on the street to buy a can of beans who get killed by revolutions.’ He leant a hand on the bar. ‘Itold you, Carr: 150 revolutions in the last ISO-years -and a lot more that didn’t work. And how many real democracies and stable economies have you got south of Mexico? But almost all of them killed somebody.”

  ‘A little softer on the violins,’ I said sourly, ‘and you’ll have it in the top ten next week.’

  His face got cold and tight. ‘All right, Carr; all right. I’m just a sort of cop. They give me a gun so I guess I’m allowed to kill people. But basically I’m supposed to bring them back alive. Now you tell me about fighter pilots.’

  ‘You missed out something about your job: it’s pensionable – if you keep your record nice and clean. You think you’restopping a revolution in the Repúblicaby running around Jamaica and Puerto Rico waving your little grey list? You’re just keeping your record clean.’

  For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me. But he’d been in the FBI too long for that. After a moment he said quietly: ‘It’s the professionals who do the real killing, Carr. Give the guy in the street a gun and he wouldn’t know if he was going to hit a barn door or next Tuesday.’ He reached and picked up the metal plaque. ‘I guess it was too late all along. Maybe it’ll be in time for someone else.’ He slipped it in his pocket.

  Just to needle him, I said: ‘You could be wrong, of course. If Jiminez ever took over, your State Department might suddenly decide he was a good thing and everybody who helped him was a hero.’

  ‘Sure. Or they might just be smart enough to guess that most of the people who helped were the people who turn up helping any revolution. And a Government Department never throws away a list, Carr. They get paid on the number of filing cabinets they can fill up.’

  There wasn’t anything to say to that, so I didn’t say it. He just looked at me a few moments longer and then walked quietly away, out into the high midday sun.

  By the time I got back to Boscobel, the scene-painters had finished and gone and the Mitchell stood glowing silver in the afternoon sun and looking, oddly, more shabby than ever. Maybe that the paint didn’t so much hide the wrinkles and dents as suggest somebody wanted them hidden. On film, she’d probably look clean and new; close up, on the ground, she was an honourable old lady with paint forced on her face by some young creep in a pink mesh shirt.

  The electricians were still working, so I just handed out a few ‘Jolly good show – you chaps reallydo know your business, what?’ remarks such as pilots use for ground crews who are doing something totally incomprehensible. And went away again.

  I hoped they did know their business, though. After sixteen years flying, the most important thing I’d learned about electricity in aeroplanes is that it’s the first thing to go wrong.

  I checked the weather again with a phone call to Palisadoes met office – tomorrow’s wind was forecast the same as today’s, but the circular disturbance was getting a little more circular and disturbing. Still, it hadn’t grown up enough to earn a name yet.

  But that night, it did: Hurricane Clara.

  TWENTY-ONE

  She was the third ugly sister of the season – Annette and Belinda having come an
d gone in the usual way: a couple of days snarling around outside Barbados and Martinique, then crawling off north-east to die in some uninhabited corner of the Atlantic.

  Clara had started the same way. But that night she came toa near-stop a couple of hundred miles north of Antigua, wound herself up into fury and headed westwards. By nine o’clock in the morning, when I first heard of her from die Palisadoes met office, she was already north of Puerto Rico and still coming.

  I had another cup of coffee while I thought about it, diengot the desk to call me a taxi – the art director had confiscated my jeep the day before – and went up to the church location, where they were supposed to be starting filming. They were -or at least, everybody wasdiereand well into me day’s snoozing and poker playing. It was as quiet as I’d learnt to expect it: the only sound was a monotonous drone that was half the generator truck, half the sound man swearing at his equipment.

  Roddie’s church was a pretty impressive affair: fifty feet tall, twin-towered, built of 400-hundred-year-old stone widi moss in die cracks. You had to get within a few feet to see the stone was rough-plastered boards, the moss plastic, and die whole thing justa façadepinned on scaffolding.

  J.B., Luiz, Whitmore, and Miss Jiminez were sitting around my jeep under die shade of a palm at the edge of the plaza and drinking coffee out of paper cups. Whitmore seemed pleased to see me; Miss Jiminez looked as if she could have managed without.

  ‘She all ready to go?’ Whitmore asked.

  ‘Getting on that way.”

  J.B. handed me a cup of coffee.

  ‘Thanks. ‘ I thought of telling diem about Agent Ellis popping up over here, but decided not. If I rnought he represented an extra risk, it was up to me to say so – and cancel die raid. I was still a free man – as J.B. would have pointed out.

  I said: ‘I need to see the bombs before I do the final work. Heard any more about them?’

  Whitmore grunted. ‘Supposed to be sailing yesterday. We should get ‘em maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘All good modern stuff, non-corroded, guaranteed to explode in die right time and place and not before. Am I right?’

  He shrugged. ‘Fella, we just got to wait and see.’

  I nodded, looked up at die church. ‘How long were you planning on shooting here?’

  ‘Today, maybea couplascenes tomorrow.’

  ‘I should try and get it finished today; there may be a hurricane heading this way.’

  The director called: ‘Walt: we’re ready to go.’

  He said to me: ‘Stick around,’ then climbed into the jeep. Several people shouted ‘Quiet’, the camera crew laid down their cards, and Whitmore drove the jeep upin front of the church, stopped, got out, looked around, lit a cigarette.

  The director shouted: ‘Cut!’ Then they did it three more times.

  Luiz passed me a script so that I could see what was going on. Bolivar Smith comes into the plaza with his load of guns (the back of the jeep was stacked with empty rifle boxes) to meet the rebel chief but can’t find anybody but a lovable old priest. However, the lovable old priest goes into a bit of useful dialogue which tells the audience that (a) Amazonia is a poor but lovable country run by a cruel dictator, and (b) Whitmore is a hard-hearted gun-runner who’s ready to sell his goods to the dictator if the rebels can’t find the pesos to pay for diem.

  This, of course, is before the love of a peasant girl (the girl whose scenes Whitmore had shot in a hurry a month before because he couldn’t stand her) converts him not only to handing over the guns for free but leading the rebellion for them as well.

  And they live happily ever after in a real democracy with a stable economy.

  He walked back, leaving the jeep in front of the church while the camera crew produced a burst of energy and shifted the camera a few yards forward.

  ‘So what’s about this hurricane?’

  ‘The eye can’t get here in less than two days even if it’s coming and it probably isn’t. But it sounds pretty wide, and you can get some rough stuff at the edges. You remember Hurricane Flora, a couple of years ago? It hit Cuba, two-three hundred miles north – but we got sixty-knot winds and several inches of rani down here. It washed out half the mountain roads, knocked out telephone Unes, and fouled the water supplies.’ I nodded at the church. ‘And I don’t thinkthat’ll take sixty knots.’

  ‘You’re damn right, fella.’ He frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘And I may want to get the Mitchell off the island. She won’t take sixty-knot winds, either.’

  ‘Yeah. Well – let us know if you’re going. Now – Anything more you want for the plane? Howsabout armament?’

  I shrugged. ‘If you can find a couple of Browning -50’s and a few hundred rounds, I’ll take them along.’

  ‘Pretty big order.’ He frowned. ‘I can geta couplatommy-guns or automatic rifles, but…’

  ‘Skip it, then. They’d be just a dead weight. I wasn’t counting on anything, anyhow.’

  J.B. said: ‘You’re going to do it unarmed?’

  ‘A Vampire carries four twenty-millimetre cannon. If they get one of them up, a tommy gun won’t make any odds. You don’t shoot down aeroplanes widi tommy-guns.’ Then I remembered Whitmore planned to do just diat – in the film. ‘Begging Mr Whitmore’s pardon, of course.’

  Luiz smiled and said: ‘In the air you need firepower. An aerial machine gun fires at about twice the normal rate of a ground gun.’ Then, seeing my expression, he explained: ‘I was a gunner in the Air Corps during the war.’

  Miss Jiminez jerked around to stare at him: this was something he hadn’t told her, eidier. She’d been thinking of him as an actor and -abracadabra – he was suddenly a warrior. A toad turned into a prince.

  I asked: ‘What’d you fly in?’

  ‘Some B-20s – once or twice even the Mitchell.’

  ‘Where’d you get to?’

  He gave Miss Jiminez the sad apologetic smile of a prince about to turn back into a toad and said, to me: ‘Texas. They made me an instructor. Possibly they decided actors were too valuable to risk in combat. Or just possibly they were keeping back the best men to defend Texas. After all – Texas neverdid get invaded. Can I be sure that was not my doing?’

  I grinned sympathetically. Like most fighter pilots, I had a low opinion of air gunners’ usefulness – and a high regard for their problems. A fighter pilot just has to point his aeroplane and press the trigger – and damn few are even much good at that. An air gunner is shooting sideways, upwards, and downwards from a moving platform at a moving target – and with usually only a quarter of the firepower of the fighter he’s shooting at.

  But Miss Jiminez had missed one point: Luiz must have been good. They might have kept him off operations because he was Hollywood, but that wasn’t why they’d made him an instructor: they didn’t want the gunners whowere going operational trained half-heartedly.

  Under his Beverly Hills-Spanish manners, I was beginning to see Luiz as a tough, competent character.

  The director called: ‘Walt – we’re ready.’

  An elderly actor whom I hadn’t met but recognised from several other Whitmore films was standing by the church doorway, dressed in a dusty set of priest’s robes. Whitmore walked over and stood near him; somebody put a part-smoked cigarette in his hand; the director moved him a couple of inches and then scurried back behind the camera and started the scene going.

  The priest said politely: ‘You are looking for someone, Señor?’

  Whitmore: ‘Just a guy, Father.’

  ‘On business, Señor?’

  ‘He ordered some… merchandise. I just hauled it in over thehüls.’

  The priest nodded. “That is your hoss in the – goddamn it, I meanjeep?

  The director howled: ‘Cut!’

  The priest shook his head and spat sadly. ‘Hell, Boss, Iknew I’d forget this one ain’t a Western.’

  Behind me, J.B. said softly: ‘Don’t we ah1?’

  I got to Boscobel soon after eleven, and for
once the joint was jumping. Mechanics and pilots were shoving the crop-spray planes into the single hangar; other pilots and a couple of local farmers who owned light planes were crowding the counter of the terminal hut, studying a weather chart, listening to a transistor radio, yelling at the clerk to ring Palisadoes met office yet again.

  I asked the latest news and five people told me. Clara wasstillmoving along roughly in our direction – slightly south of westwards, and had last been seen about two hundred and fifty miles north-east of the República.

  ‘She’s big,’ a spray pilot added. ‘Fifty-knot gusts reported 300 miles ahead of the eye.’

  ‘But what d’you bet we learn from the Repúblicaand Haiti and Cuba?’ the man at the radio asked sourly.

  That was a snag – three snags. Clara would be affecting the Repúblicanow, probably Haiti and Cuba by midnight. But all three were notoriously bad at broadcasting useful weather reports. Cuba and the Repúblicabecause they were just naturally secretive, Haiti because it’s just Haití.

  And while American weather flights would track the eye of the hurricane well enough they wouldn’t necessarily check all its edges – and it was the edges, particularly the leading edge, that interested me.

  The spray pilot said cheerfully: ‘Sorry there’s no room in the hangar, Keith.’

  Til send you a postcard from Caracas,’ I said. ‘Sun shining, light sea breeze, wish you were here.’

  The man with the radio chuckled. ‘Just after he’d got the girl from Caracas installed at Shaw Park. Man, have youseen her?’ He took his hands off the radio long enough to make Miss Jiminez-shaped gestures in the air.

  Tveseen her,’ the spray pilot said. ‘You know, Keith – I’d say God was watching you. You bring in a girl and He sends a hurricane to test you: if it’s really love you wouldn’t let a little wind stop you.’

  ‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ the radio man added.

  I stepped to the door and looked up at the sky. So, super-stitiously, did every other pilot in the group. But it was still clear and blue except for the fluffy white cumulus building up on the Blue Mountains; the wind was the normal gentle easterly. Nothing to see – yet.