Shooting Script

I was in a narrow, hot, dark cabin about as high as I could stand and not as wide as I could reach with both arms outspread. Ahead of me, up a high step, was a blaze of light coming in through the greenhouse roof on to the side-by-side pilots' seats. I stayed where I was, straddling the hatch, and looked slowly all around.

The dark green plastic sound-proofing on the metal skin was hanging loose by now, only kept in place by the criss-cross of pipes and cables and mess of switchboxes and boards of contact-breakers. Above me there was a filled-in circle in the roof where there had once been a gun-turret. Behind me, the metal box of the bomb-bay blocked off the aft end of the fuselage except for a small space at the top. And around my left knee, a small, square dark tunnel led forward under the pilots' seats to the bomb-aimer's position in the transparent nose.

Distant growls and hums off the airfield came up from the hatch at my feet. They annoyed me; I wanted to be alone with this bitch. I found a folding top hatch and slid it shut. The noise stopped.

I took a slow, deep breath. The Mitchell smelled. Of petrol and oil and hydraulic fluid and plastic and leather and sweat, but all adding up to some new, strange smell that would be the way all Mitchells smelled, because every type has its own smell. It was somehow interesting, but for some reason worrying, too.

I took a high step forward and, hunching myself up, eased into the left-hand pilot's seat, being very careful not to touch any lever or switch that might drop the whole plane on its backside. No switch should, of course, but who repairs safety locks after twenty years?

Under the transparent roof, the cockpit was like a furnace. The leather seat singed my bottom and I felt sweat start to trickle down my ribs. But I got myself as comfortable as I could, and started a careful look around.

It was as bad as I'd expected, or worse. How I'd ever make any sense of it or find any control in it…that airspeed indicator reads up to 700 mph – must have come out of a crashed jet; no Mitchell ever did half that speed… and what instrument should be in that empty socket?…Then I knew why the smell had worried me.

She was a woman I'd been warned off by everybody and my own common sense. And now I'd come close enough to get the smell of her in my nostrils.

Slowly, gently, I reached out my hands to touch her.

I was lying on my hotel bed reading a loose page of the Mitchell handbook that illustrated seven different types of smoke and flame that might be met coming out of its engines, and wondering which of them I'd meet coming out of the room's air-conditioner, when somebody knocked at the door.

I yelled'Animo!' and J.B. walked in, wearing a skirt, a bra, and an expression as if her best-rehearsed witness hadn't turned up in court.

'A spider the size of a horse came up the plug hole in my washbasin,' she announced coldly, 'and the telephone doesn't work.'

I smiled reassuringly. 'It's nice to know Barranquilla hasn't changed. The trick is to hit them both with your shoe.'

'Listen, chum: that spider wears the same size boots as I do, only eight of them.'

'Use my washbasin, then.'

She looked at me, then it, suspiciously. But the first thing I'd done when I found there wasn't a spider in it at that particular moment was shove the plug in. When I'd found a plug, of course.

She discovered which tap worked and started splashing tepid water around herself. I put down my Smoke and Flame Identification Chart and watched. She had a slim, firm body and small sharp breasts more or less inside the thin bra. She caught my eye, but it didn't seem to bother her. She didn't flaunt her body, but maybe she used it a little defiantly, so as to sneer at people who thought it was the true J.B. Penrose.

When she'd finished drying herself on my towel, she just stood there and said: 'Well?'

'Sit down and talk it over.'

'I was just wondering,' she said heavily, 'if I had to spend the night with that damn tarantula or whatever. And what a brave fighter pilot might do about it.'

'That's what I'm prepared to talk about. Anyhow, what about the brave Hollywood lawyer? Why don't you slap a court order on him?'

'The hell with you, Carr.' But she grinned suddenly, vividly, and sat down on the end of the bed. I reached for the half-bottle of Scotch in my bag. 'Drink?'

She nodded, picked up the page of the Handbook, and started reading. 'Puffs of black smoke… thin wisps of bluish-grey smoke… variable grey smoke and bright flame… heavy black smoke – Christ, it sounds like the penalty clauses I write in contracts. Do these thingshappen to that aeroplane?'

I winced; the flight handbooks have a certain realism you don't get from the manufacturer's brochures. 'Not all at once, I hope.' I passed her a fairly clean glass of neat Scotch.

'Thanks.' Then she turned suddenly serious. 'Look, Carr -youdon't have to take on flying this old ship.'

'We'll manage.'

She eyed me carefully. 'You aren't trying to… to prove anything to the Boss Man, are you?'

'No. Flying aeroplanes is my trade.'

She nodded and we sipped silently for a while. Then I said: 'So – tell me about your early Me and struggles.'

She smiled again. 'Early life spent in San Francisco. First struggle with a kid named Benny Zimmerman.'

'Who won?'

'Me. He's probably still walking around doubled up holding his… where I got him with my knee.'

'Mistake. It could become a habit.'

She looked at me. 'It has, chum. You don't win law-suits on your back.'

I gave her what was intended to be an encouraging and friendly smile. 'How did you get into the law-suit business?'

'Usual way: four years college – at Los Angeles. Couple of years law school.'

'Perhaps I meant "Why?" '

She considered, then said thoughtfully: 'I guess… I justlike the law. I don't mean I'm a great crusader for justice, anything like that. I just like it as sort of machinery: a way of doing things exactly, of getting them just right.' She looked up and grinned. 'Maybe I just mean I like writing watertight contracts. Doesn't sound very noble, does it?'

'You're talking to a man whose first job was shooting down other pilots. Go on.'

'I don't mean squeezing anybody on the fine print, either -1 just mean getting itright; so it's what everybody wanted and nobody wastes time breaking it or dodging it or fighting it. Maybe like a good aeroplane engine: so all the wheels really fit. Hollywood's built on contracts – well, so's any business, but pictures more than most. Nobody in pictures can remember what he promised five minutes back, even if he wants to. So -somebody's got to make the wheels fit. I try.'

I nodded slowly. 'Sounds worth doing… And I can vouch you're good at it.'

'Funny. I was expecting you to say something else.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'I like to think I'm a professional, too.'

'I don't mean that. I guess I was braced for you to ask "Wouldn't I be better off with a Man and a House and chasing a flock of kids around the backyard".' She frowned. 'Or maybe why wasn't I lying on my back shouting "Come and get it"? A girl doesn't get much room for manoeuvre between those two ideas.'

'Or, "If she won't hop intomy bed, shemust be Lesbian." Right?'

'Yes, I've heard the bastards say that, too.'

I spun the Scotch bottle along the bed to her. 'Well, it was you who chose to live in that stronghold of Victorian morality called Hollywood.'

'I did that,' she said grimly. 'Thank God for smog and Communism. They broaden the conversation there, anyway.'

I eyed her nearly bare upper half thoughtfully. 'Actually, I wasn't trying to broaden the conversation.'

She looked up quickly. 'You don't have to make a pass at me just because we're stuck in the same hotel.'

'That wasn't why. I've just got a feeling about you… And me. It scares me, a bit.'