I handed it back thoughtfully. J.B. said: 'I've told him to close the deal – subject to our inspection – and get the plane to Barranquilla. We'll fly down as soon as we hear it's there -okay?'
'A twelve thousand dollar aeroplane that must be at least twenty years old,' I said slowly. 'She won't be in one-careful-little-old-lady-owner condition.'
'Will she fly?' Whitmore asked.
I shrugged. 'If she flies from Buenaventura to Barranquilla – and that's five hundred miles – she could do anything. You're quite sure she is at Buenaventura and not sitting at the back of a hangar in Barranquilla the whole time?'
There was a crossfire of startled looks. These people must have done plenty of wheeling and dealing in then- time, but it seemed they hadn't tried buying an old aeroplane before.
Then Diego said carefully: 'I think, Señor Penrose, you have not met this man' – he nodded at the cable in her hand -rbut my family has done business with him many times. He is an honest agent.'
The suspicious tension faded. Whitmore stretched his legs again, scratched under his bush shirt, and said: 'So – okay. You can handle a B-25 okay, fella?'
Out behind him, on the edge of the patio, there was a humming-bird tree: a dead branch set in a block of concrete and carrying a dozen little narrow-necked jars of sugar-water. A few humming-birds were still around, whizzing in and hovering with nickering wings while they dipped their long beaks for the last snort of the evening. To them, flying was just flying, and no worry about what a new pair of wings might feel like… The hell with them; mere helicopter pilots.
I was trying to recall anything anybody had told me about the B-25, known also as the Mitchell. It wasn't much: except around South America nobody has flown them really seriously since the war, twenty years ago. All I could remember was that they were supposed to be good load-carriers, noisy as hell, and a little tricky until you knew them.
I said: 'I expect so.'
Whitmore said: 'Fine, fine. And we figured a new deal foryou – after what happened Saturday. Give him the contract, J.B.'
She gave it me. It was the same as before, except for the pay. Instead of the $20-a-day retainer plus $10 a flying hour and costs, I was now getting a flat $100 a day. It was a nice gesture, seeing it was hardly his fault I'd lost the Dove, but it wasn't as generous as he probably thought; it would just about let me keep up the mortgage payments I had to go on making on the Dove, confiscated or not, and a bit towards the check four if that day ever came now. He still didn't really owe me anything anyway.
I put on a cheerful grin and said: 'Can I call you J.B. – on a $100 a day?'
'Sign the damn thing.'
I signed.
Luiz sighed. 'Always signing contracts. I tell you, my friend, you are going to end up with wet feet.'
Whitmore gave him a sharp glance, then came back to me. 'When we get the ship, you'll be working off the airstrip up the road' – he nodded towards Boscobel – 'so we'll fix you a hotel room up here.'
I nodded. I had a feeling the Mitchell was going to be a lightish squeeze on that 3,000-foot Boscobel runway: along with the other American wartime medium bombers, it had been designed specifically for the 6,000-foot strips that the Dakota had made a standard all over the world by 1940.
Diego said politely: 'Now there is another aircraft, Señor, may I perhaps continue my lessons?'
About that, I wasn't so sure. I didn't know how die Mitchell would handle yet, but I knew its age and I knew it was a military aeroplane built for the comfort of its bombs and not its pilots.
Whitmore chipped in: 'Hell, why not? Let the kid have a go – long as he pays his own fuel bills. Maybe you could use him as a co-pilot on the camera work.'
That wasn't a bad idea. If I was going to be flying around a load of cameramen and directors, all shouting for the impossible, it could be useful to have anorner pilot, however inexperienced, on board.
I shrugged, 'You're the Boss Man.'
'Okay. So the kid can fly. ' The way he said it, the phrase went in capitals: The Kid. Diego had obviously joined the club – but I couldn't see quite why. He was a nice enough boy, but hardly a drink-from-the-bottle type, and certainly not a professional – at anything. And Whitmore obviously liked pros. That was why I was there: I'd once been a pro fighter pilot. It was why J.B. was allowed into what was a man's world – she was a pro lawyer. And Luiz, however much he bitched about getting his feet wet, stepped in andgot them wet whenever the script said so.
But Diego? I couldn't see it.
I finished my beer and Whitmore and Luiz went through their routine and a fresh bottle arrived in my hands. The last light faded from the sky – Jamaican dawns and sunsets are fast, tropical affairs. A couple of lizards came out on the edge of the patio and took up what would be their regular sentry positions and froze there, waiting for a careless night insect.
'How's the film coming?' I asked conversationally. 'Rewritten any good scripts recently?'
Luiz smiled; Whitmore bent an eyebrow at me. 'Fella, the only script matters is the shooting script, the one you actually shoot from. And even that don't matter compared to the picture itself. You can't go handing out copies of the script and say, "We maybe made a lousy picture, but you'll like the script." '
J.B. said: 'We're three days behind schedule: that's nearly fifteen thousand dollars on the budget.'
Whitmore waved a bottle. 'So you're always behind on location shooting. You tell me a location picture that's been brought in on time. Hell' – he turned to Luiz – 'remember down in Durango?'
Luiz chuckled and started to tell the story – about a film they'd made down in Mexico, five years before, where Whitmore hadn't been the producer. And the producer had sent in a popular singer to play the young cowboy part. After a couple of weeks, it turned out that the singer didn't know which side of a horse was up and which end of a gun was front.
Whitmore stopped the whole production dead for four days- with the producer and everybody back to the New York bankers having a coronary every hour on the hour – while he taught the boy to ride and how to pull a gun. At the end of it all, the singer had a broken guitar finger and the critics had hailed him as the man who'd acted rings around old One-Expression. And the film made a vast profit.
Diego laughed politely at the end, but I wasn't sure he saw the point. I wasn't sure I saw it myself, unless Whitmore was offering to him a short coarse in riding and twirling Colts in parallel with my flying lessons.
Soon after that, Diego remembered he had an eleven o'clock date in Kingston and did I want a ride back in his E-type? I didn't, of course, but it seemed the only way I'd stand even a chance of getting home that night, so I went with him.
As we blasted up into the hills out of Port Maria, he said: 'The new aeroplane, Señor- it is most exciting, no?'
'I hope not.'
He grinned. 'Ah, I forgot: you do not approve of risks. But for me, an aeroplane that was once an aeroplane of war – it has, one should say, areality.'
Not to me, it didn't. I didn't know much about Mitchells and even less about this particular one, but if it was like anywarplane I'd met before it would be a lot more temperamental and liable to bust than any civilian aeroplane. A military plane is a racehorse: you spend most of your time working on it, getting it ready for Race Day. But if an airliner isn't plodding around like a carthorse it just isn't earning its keep.
'It'll be different from the Dove,' I said. 'And the experience won't be much use; you'll be flying planes that handle more like the Dove – unless your company goes crazy.'
. 'Perhaps. But to me, it is a challenge. To say – I flewthis aeroplane.'
'It isn't likely to become all that famous. Just a few minutes in a film, that's all.'