'What about Whitmore?'

'He's not on salary. He takes a percentage of the picture.'

I nodded. 'I'm beginning to see the strategy. And to be a British company, I suppose you set one up specially in London?'

'Nassau. The Bahamas count as British.'

'So this is why you didn't bring in an American pilot. I suppose I'm really quite a help to you: if you find you're running under the eighty per cent, you can put up my pay and balance it out again.'

'Don't hope too hard. If we run under eighty, I'll be fired the next day.'

'Are you really going to cart everybody across the Atlantic to do the studio stuff?'

She shook her head. 'Pictures like this you don't do studio work if you can help it. You script it so most of it's outdoors, and when you got to have an interior you do that on location, too: with fast colour film you can do it with the lights you bring along anyway. We're only doing inside a couple of native huts and a hacienda: we'll build that in the hangar up on the airstrip.'

A larger-than-usual lizard with a light-green body, blue hips, and a bronze tail scuttled out from under the car, nodded several times, belched and puffed out his throat in a bright orange sac.

J.B. frowned at him. 'Whatever he's doing, I wish he wouldn't.'

'Mating call. They call them Croakers. Belch back and you'll have a new boy-friend.'

'Another Method actor in blue jeans. Them, I can do without.'

I got out my pipe and started to pack it. 'Which reminds me -1 didn't notice the feminine interest in the picture.'

'Boss Man did all her scenes first and sent her back to the States to get her picture in the papers. They didn't hit it off.'

'Don't tell me he prefers horses.'

She shrugged. 'Horses, guns, dogs, whisky, men. He's not against women; he just thinks sex and thirst are itches you scratch. You buy a whisky in a bar, a woman in a cat-house. In his time off he goes hunting with the boys – and I mean in the mountains.' She frowned down at her beer can. 'I don't know what damn business it is of yours.'

I put a match to the pipe and breathed smoke away from her. 'But he's been married, hasn't he?'

'Three times. I got him out of the last one a few months ago. He didn't exactly notice any of them; it was just the fashion. In those days it didn't matter who you laid as long as you were married. Does movie gossip really interest you?'

'He's the man I'm working for. Same as you.'

She nodded anddiensaid slowly and thoughtfully: 'Don't get him wrong, Carr. He's a pro: he doesn't act much, but he doesn't need to. He's never got an Oscar and never will and he honestly doesn't give a damn. He knows what he's selling and he doesn't sell short: if he wasn't in pictures he'd be busting horses in rodeos and going hunting and whoring and…' She took a deep breath, 'Christ, I don'tapprove of the big sonofabitch, but I like him.'

I said softly: 'Perhaps just enough to want to save him from those long dull evenings in the cat-house?'

Her head came round with a snap and her face was a hard, glittering glare. For a moment it looked as if I was going to be smoking my pipe from somewhere around my tonsils.

Then she suddenly flashed a wide grin. 'Maybe. Maybe – once. Women are suckers for wanting to save men from a man's world. Never works. I'm not too particular about wedding rings, but I'm damned if I'll settle for a brand on the backside.'

'I'm encouraged to hear it.'

Her voice got a little colder. 'Don't puff out your throat at me, Carr.'

We ate at the stars' table, which meant that the food got brought to us instead of queueing up for it. It was the same food; peas and rice with chicken, which is about as close to a Jamaican national dish as you'll get, apart from salt cod and ackee. Whitmore, Luiz, the director, J.B., four others, and me.

Whitmore said. 'We got to get somebody in to do the Spanish for us. You heard what that slob of a writer asked the boys to shout about just now? -"Viva el liberador", for Chrissake.' He looked at Luiz. 'You heard that?'

Luiz shrugged elegantly. 'To me, it seemed reasonably appropriate. Those of Spanish blood who rush across rivers under fire often shout the mostnaïvethings.'

Whitmore grunted. 'Well, we got to get somebody.' He turned to me. 'Anybody you know speak Spanish, fella?'

'I know one man. I don't know if he'd be free, though.'

'We can try him. Tell J.B.'

So I gave her Diego Ingles' name and a telephone number where you could sometimes catch him between beds.

Another man, who seemed to be head of the camera team, suddenly asked me: 'Have you ever flown a camera plane before?' His accent was English English, so I seemed to have struck another part of the eighty per cent.

I shook my head. 'I haven't agreed to fly this one, yet.'

J.B. said: 'He's worried about what we might get for him.'

The cameraman looked a little contemptuous. 'It'll be my neck up there, too, you know. So if I don't mind-'

'That's splendid,' I said, 'as long as your neck's as good as mine at recognising a crackedmainspar.'

Whitmore said calmly: 'What kind of plane d'you want, fella?'

'I'd've thought a helicopter was the most versatile. But I'm no helicopter pilot.'

J.B. said: 'Choppers are out. You know what they cost an hour?'

The cameraman said: 'Vibration.'

The director pushed away his plate and started fitting a cigarette into a stubby holder. 'We can do without the aerials, Walt.'

'Sure – you can cut any picture at the bone. So who pays to see dry bones?'

I said: 'There's a Harvard – what you'd call a Texan – on the Boscobel strip. A film company used it as a Jap bomber last year.'

The cameraman said impatiently: 'We're not looking for Jap bombers. And you can't do good aerials from a single-engined plane: it has to be hand-held stuff and you don't get the down-ahead tracking shots.'

Whitmore nodded, planted his elbows solidly on the table, and started to peel an orange in big tearing, sweeping strokes. 'Okay, fella. So what do you figure we should get?'

I said carefully: 'If you want to shoot down and ahead you need twin engines – and a glass nose. That wipes out my Dove. You'd better try and pick up an old bomber – B-25 or a B-26 – with a bomb-aimer's position in the nose. There's still a lot of them around, in Central and South America.'

Whitmore cocked an eyebrow at the cameraman, then the director. Then said: 'Sounds good. Can you find one, J.B.?'

'I can start people looking.'

'Fine, fine.' He ate a strip of orange. 'Hell, maybe we could write it into the picture. Say instead of where the government sends a patrol on horses, they send a bomber. That's where we're walking up the river. So I have a Browning or a Thompson and I'm standing in these goddamn rapids up to my knees and shooting hell out of this bomber overhead. Could make a great scene.'

The table went very quiet. The director slowly put both hands to his head and started muttering.

But itwould make a great scene – for Whitmore. Him standing to his knees in foaming white water, blazing defiance at the sky with a tommy-gun.

Just to be technical, a bomber doing 200 mph would be 100 yards ahead one moment and 100 yards behind two seconds later. Perhaps that's why so few bombers ever get shot downwith Browning automatic rifles and Thompson submachine guns.

It would still be a great scene – and everybody round the table knew it.

Luiz said: 'I think I see where we all get our feet wet once more.'

Whitmore ate another piece of orange. 'Fine. Tell the dialogue boys what we want.' He looked back at me. 'Now we got another problem. We need a location. We can do all the jungle, river, tin-roof village stuff here. But justa couplascenes, we need some real Spanish architecture. Something like those big two-peak churches you get in Mexico – you know?'