J.B.rang ME ATthe Myrtle Bank two evenings later: the Mitchell had reached Barranquilla, so would I stay sober enough to catch a West Indian flight the next morning to connect with a Pan Am flight in San Juan to connect with… Barranquilla isn't a main-line station. I told her to forget it, then rang a friend and bought two very unofficial seats on a Venezuelan cargo plane that was going out to Maracaibo in the morning. From there to Barranquilla is just 200 miles across the frontier.
We ended up hiring a small plane for the last leg, but we reached Barranquilla at four in the afternoon, about twelve hours ahead of her schedule. And there, waiting for us outside the end hangar, was the Mitchell.
Nowadays military aeroplanes have the same sleek good looks as civil aircraft; it wasn't always so, and the Mitchell came from that time. She was thin, box-sided, square-cut, with a long sneering transparent nose, high cranked wings, huge engines and propellers, fat over-sized main wheels like big boots. Just sitting there, she had the hunched, cluttered look of an old soldier loaded with all his equipment.
But this one was a very old soldier indeed.
J.B. was staring with an expression of sick disbelief. After a while she said quietly: 'Jesus Christ.'
'Right – now name me the co-pilot.' Then I shook my head. 'If she really flew in from Buenaventura, she must work better than she looks.'
I was trying to persuade myself. The transparent nose had gone smoky and crackled with tiny veins, like the nose of a hardened boozer; the bare aluminium parts, even the props, were covered with the gritty white lichens of oxidisation; the painted parts – some idiot had painted the engines black to hide oil leaks, but also the one colour to over-heat them in this climate – were dulled and flaking. And the hydraulic system must have been leaking like an old shoe because the flaps were drooping half down, the bomb-bay doors half open.
I knew exactly what had happened. She hadn't been in the air for six months, and then somebody who knew a lot about aeroplanes but even more about money, had made her fit for just the 500-mile ride up from Buenaventura. In two ways, I had to take it from here.
I took a deep breath. 'All right. Now you find whoever's in charge. I want a Certificate of Airworthiness, the log-books -there's three of them – and any pilot's notes and engineering manuals he's got. Anddon't pay him a peso until I've checked them and her.'
She looked at me rather doubtfully, then nodded and went off towards the offices built into the side of the hangar. I started a slow clockwise circuit of the Mitchell, kicking the tyres, squinting into the engines – rust on the cylinder head bolts, of course – banging the inspection panels.
Just below the cockpit there was a piece of over-fancy script, mostly washed and faded away by now. After a bit of twisting my head and puzzling, I made it out:Beautiful Dreamer, with a 1940's-style reclining nude to match. So she'd actually seen squadron service in the war, twenty years ago.
Well, whatever had happened, they'd brought her back -and walked away. And now they were Air Force generals or farmers or just your Friendly Home-Town Used-Car Dealer. And probably it would take them a lot of thinking even to remember the name they'd given her.
But think, boys, try and remember. Just what made her that little bit different from the thousands of other Mitchells they built? How did she fly better than the book says, and how worse? What systems never went wrong – and which never wentright?
Just as man to man, boys – what's she like in bed? She's my girl now.
Then I shook my head and reached and slapped the metal below the cockpit – and nearly burned my hand off at the wrist. She'd been sitting in the sun all day. I took a pair of wash-leather flying gloves out of my hip pocket and pulled them on before I tried anything new.
J.B. came out of the hangar with a small, tubby man wearing sunglasses, a black moustache and a grease-stained whitepanamahat. She was carrying a handful of papers and not looking I-feel-like-singing about them.
'The certificate of airworthiness,' she recited tonelessly, 'was issued in Colombia two years ago and says it'slimitado. Limited – what does that mean?'
'Mustn't ply for hire or reward. I'd expected that. If you own it, you can have it flown how you like. What about the logs?'
She handed them over, three unimpressive little mock-leather volumes like autograph books.
The aircraft one had a chit pinned in the front headed 'as removed from military records' which showed the Mitchell had done about six thousand hours before getting a US Air Force overhaul in 1951 which, it claimed, brought her back to the perfection of having done zero hours. But they'd sold her off to Colombia before they could prove themselves wrong.
In Colombia she'd flown another 1,500 hours as a bomber and been given another overhaul which – surprise, surprise -had once more restored her to zero hours condition. However, again she'd been sold off fast – for 900 hours as a freight transport, and then 300 as a private passenger plane. But apart from the delivery flight, carefully entered up as exactly two hours fifty minutes – she hadn't flown this year.
J.B. said sombrely: 'How does it look?'
I shrugged. 'About as I expected. These things might be honest, might not-'
'Could we sue on them?'
'If things go wrong, we and the plane'll be at the bottom of the Caribbean. Tell him you'll pay him when I've checked it over.'
She gave me a very steady look and said, deliberately toneless: 'He doesn't speak English – he says. He also says he has another customer, and he wants his money right now.'
I grinned at the fat face under the greasypanama. I knew the 'another customer' line. 'Tell him,' I said, speaking slowly and carefully, 'that according to the log, this aeroplane has, like his sister, been a virgin three times already. I will sleep with her tonight and give my decision tomorrow.'
Our Friendly Home-Town Used-Aeroplane Dealer had gone as rigid as a girder. I knew the don't-speak-English line, too. Everyone connected with aeroplaneshas to speak English.
J.B. glanced sideways, saw interpretation was unnecessary, and asked me: 'Why tomorrow?'
'I won't do an air test until I've run up the engines properly, and I don't want to do that until this evening when the air's cooler. Tomorrow.'
She nodded, then handed me the last of the papers: a collection of stained, loose pages about the size of a science-fiction magazine. 'That's all he had.'
The top sheet was headed Flight Handbook, B-25N;USAP; revised to 15 August 1951.Applied to this old lady, science-fiction was about what it would be. I sighed.
J.B. said quickly. 'If you want to say the hell with this and go back to Jamaica, I won't be part of any suit against you for breaking your contract.'
'Thanks. But…' I looked up at the Mitchell again. Ever since I'd learned to fly, I'd had one dream every few months: that I was sitting in a plane I didn't trust, and hadn't any proper instruction about – and I had to fly her. Now I was looking at my bad dream.
There's always a way to walk away: to walk away first.
'Thanks,' I said again. 'But I'm a pilot – and I don't have any other plane to fly. I'll tell you tomorrow.'
She looked at me hard for a moment, then turned to the man in thepanamaand started talking fast, fluent Spanish. I walked away, ducked under the belly of the Mitchell, and 95 climbed up through the open hatch just forward of the bomb-bay.
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.'
For a long time, we looked at each other down the length of the bed. And the room was very still – except for the air-conditioner wheezing like an old lecher peering through the key-hole.
Then she said, in a small, shivery voice: 'I know, Keith.' Then shook her head. 'I told you I wasn't settling for just a brand on the backside. Nor a one-night stand in some flyblown hotel-'
'Spider-blown, please.'
She grinned exasperatedly. 'Okay. But I still mean it: get tangled up with me and you'll have one hell of a job getting clear again. I'm not one of your North-Coast tourists looking for a quick tumble under the mango trees with the hired help, no strings attached, bacatomummy in two weeks.'
'You're pretty clear about what you think I think, aren't you?'
After a moment she said quietly: 'I'm sorry. I guess being a lawyerand Hollywood – it makes you too suspicious. I like you, Keith. You're an independent sort of character…'
'Come up this end.'
She hesitated, stood up, walked three paces, and sat down beside me. A deliberate, but perhaps wary, movement.
I reached and put my hands on her bare shoulders. 'You're a pretty independent character yourself. I'm not trying to spoil that, nor take advantage of it. And I'm not kidding myself I could own it – or want to. I just like it.'
She ran a finger down my forehead, my nose, across my chin, splitting my face neatly in two. 'You know,' she said thoughtfully, 'if you cut your hair more often and shaved a bit closer, you'd be quite a handsome guy.'
I pulled her down – or she leant – and kissed her.
Then she pulled back and there was a flicker of worry in her eyes. 'It scares me, too, Keith. And you've got a plane to fly tomorrow.'
'I always have.' But she held back against my pull.
'You don'thave to fly this one. I'll back you right up if youwant to go back and say it just won't do.'
'If she won't fly with me shemust be a Lesbian.'
She grinned quickly. 'And you don't even know my name -what the J.B. stands for. I thought Englishmen never seducedgirls without being properly introduced.'
'You're thinking of two Englishmen in a railway carriage.'
'Fact? I didn't realise your railways were so exciting.' After a while, I said: 'You could always tell me yourname.'
She smiled again – but then stood up. 'Keith – if it's what Iwant, it'll wait. A bit, anyway.' And again, the flicker of worrythat I couldn't quite understand.
But gradually the mood dwindled and died like smoke on alight wind. I said: 'There'll come a day.'
'I hope so, Keith.' She stooped quickly, kissed me, and wasgone.
A couple of seconds later she was back.'What about thatspider?'
I sighed and handed over the remains of the Scotch.
'Sprinkle that on him. He'll curl up like Benny Zimmerman.' She grinned, touched my nose with one finger, and was goneagain.
One of these days I'll remember to bring a cheaper spider-killer than Scotch to South America.