Gavin Lyall - Shooting Script

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.

She was the third ugly sister of the season – Annette and Belinda having come and 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.