Dick Francis
Smokescreen
With thanks to
Jane and Christopher Coldrey
Chapter One
Sweating, thirsty, hot, uncomfortable, and tired to the point of explosion.
Cynically, I counted my woes.
Considerable, they were. Considerable, one way and another.
I sat in the driving seat of a custom-built aerodynamic sports car, the cast-off toy of an oil sheik’s son. I had been sitting there for the best part of three days. Ahead, the sun dried plain spread gently away to some distant brown and purple hills, and hour by hour their hunched shapes remained exactly where they were on the horizon, because the 150 m.p.h. Special was not moving.
Nor was I. I looked morosely at the solid untarnishable handcuffs locked round my wrists. One of my arms led through the steering wheel, and the other was outside it, so that in total effect I was locked on to the wheel, and in consequence firmly attached to the car.
There was also the small matter of seat belts. The Special would not start until the safety harness was fastened. Despite the fact that the key was missing from the ignition, the harness was securely fastened: one strap over my stomach, one diagonally across my chest.
I could not bring my legs up from their stretched forward sports car position in order to break the steering wheel with my feet. I had tried it. I was too tall, and couldn’t bend my knees far enough. And apart from that, the steering wheel was not of possibly breakable plastic. People who built spectacularly expensive cars like the Special didn’t mess around with plastic steering wheels. This one was of the small diameter leather-covered metal type, as durable as Mont Blanc.
I was thoroughly fed up with sitting in the car. Every muscle in my legs, up my spine and down my arms protested energetically against the constraint. A hard band of heaviness behind my eyes was tightening into a perceptible ache.
It was time to make another determined effort to get free, though I knew from countless similar attempts that it couldn’t be done.
I tugged, strained, used all my strength against the straps and the handcuffs: struggled until fresh sweat rolled down my face; and couldn’t, as before, progress even a millimetre towards freedom.
I put my head back against the padded headrest, and rolled my face around towards the open window beside me, on my right.
I shut my eyes. I could feel the slash of sunlight cut across my cheek and neck and shoulder with all the vigour of 15.00 hours in July at 37° North. I could feel the heat on my left eyelid. I let lines of frustration and pain develop across my forehead, put a certain grimness into my mouth, twitched a muscle along my jaw, and swallowed with an abandonment of hope.
After that I sat still, and waited.
The desert plain was very quiet.
I waited.
Then Evan Pentelow shouted ‘Cut’ with detectable reluctance, and the cameramen removed their eyes from the view-finders. No whisper of wind fluttered the large bright-coloured umbrellas which shielded them and their apparatus. Evan fanned himself vigorously with his shooting schedule, creating the breeze that nature had neglected, and others in the small group in the shade of portable green polystyrene sun-shelters came languidly to life, the relentless heat having hours ago drained their energy. The sound mixer took off his ear-phones, hung them over the back of his chair, and fiddled slowly with the knobs on his Nagra recorder, and the electricians kindly switched off the clutch of minibrute lamps which had been ruthlessly reinforcing the sun.
I looked into the lens of the Arriflex which had been recording every sweating pore at a distance of six feet from my right shoulder. Terry, behind his camera, mopped his neck with a dusty handkerchief, and Simon added to his Picture Negative Report for the processing laboratory.
Further back, from a different angle, the Mitchell with its thousand feet magazine had shot the same scene. Lucky, who operated it, was busily not meeting my eye, as he had been since breakfast. He believed I was angry with him, because, although he swore it was not his fault, the last lot of film he had shot the day before had turned out to be fogged. I had asked him quite mildly in the circumstances just to be sure that today there should be no more mishaps, as I reckoned I couldn’t stand many more retakes of Scene 623.
Since then, we had retaken it six times. With, I grant you, a short break for lunch.
Evan Pentelow had apologised to everyone, loudly and often, that we would just have to go on and on shooting the scene until I got it right. He changed his mind about how it should go after every second take, and although I followed a good many of his minutely detailed directions, he had not yet once pronounced himself satisfied.
Every single member of the team who had come to southern Spain to complete the location shots was aware of the animosity behind the tight-reined politeness with which he spoke to me, and behind that with which I answered him. The unit, I had heard, had opened a book on how long I would hang on to my temper.
The girl who carried the precious key to the handcuffs walked slowly over from the furthest green shelter, where the continuity, make-up, and wardrobe girls sat exhaustedly on spread out towels. Tendrils of damp hair clung to the girl’s neck as she opened the door of the car and fitted the key into the hole. They were regulation British police handcuffs, fastening with a stiffish screw instead of a ratchet, and she always had some difficulty in pushing the key round its last few all-important turns.
She looked at me apprehensively, knowing that I couldn’t be far from erupting. I achieved at least the muscle movements of a smile, and relief at not being bawled at gave her impetus to finish taking off the handcuffs smoothly and quickly.
I unfastened the seat harness and stood up stiffly outside in the sun. It was a good ten degrees cooler than inside the Special.
‘Get back in,’ Evan said. ‘We’ll have to take it again.’
I inhaled a lungful straight from the Sahara, and counted five in my mind. Then I said, ‘I’m going over to the caravan for a beer and a pee, and we’ll shoot it again when I come back.’
They wouldn’t pay out the pool on that, I thought in amusement. That might be a crack in the volcano, but it wasn’t Krakatoa. I wondered if they would let me take a bet on the flashpoint myself.
No one had bothered to put the canvas over the Minimoke, to shield it from the sun. I climbed into the little buggy where it was parked behind the largest shelter, and swore as the seat leather scorched through my thin cotton trousers. The steering wheel was hot enough to fry eggs.
The legs of my trousers were rolled up to the knee, and on my feet were flip-flops. They contrasted oddly with the formal white shirt and dark tie which I wore above, but then the Arriflex angle cut me off at the knee, and the Mitchell higher still, above the waist.
I drove the Moke without haste to where the semicircle of caravans was parked, two hundred yards away in a hollow. An apology for a tree cast a patch of thinnish shade that was better than nothing for the Moke, so I stopped it there and walked over to the caravan assigned to me as a dressing-room.
The air-conditioning inside hit like a cold shower, and felt marvellous. I loosened my tie, undid the top button of my shirt, fetched a can of beer from the refrigerator, and sat wearily down on the divan to drink it.
Evan Pentelow was busy paying off an old resentment, and unfortunately there was no way I could stop him. I had worked with him only once before, on his first major film and my seventh, and by the end of it we had detested each other. Nothing had improved by my subsequently refusing to sign for films if he were to direct, a circumstance which had cut him off from at least two smash hits he might otherwise have collared.