Smokescreen

Chapter Seventeen

The hardest thing I ever did was to get back into that car.

We reached it at half past ten, and Evan and Conrad busily rigged up various bits and pieces, including a warning buzzer which would tell me when Danilo was approaching.

Half an hour later, when they had finished, the day was stoking up to another roaster. I drank the whole of the bottle of water we had brought from Satara and ate another banana.

Evan danced up and down. ‘Come on. Come on. We haven’t got all day. We’ve got to hurry to Skukuza to meet van Huren.’

I left the station wagon, hobbled across to the car, sat in the front seat, and fastened the seat belts.

The dying aches flared up at once.

Conrad approached with the handcuffs, and my throat closed. I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at Evan... at anything. Couldn’t do it... all my nerves and muscles revolted.

Couldn’t.

Conrad, watching me, said practically, ‘You haven’t got to, Link. It’s your own idea, dear boy. He will come, whether you are here or not.’

‘Don’t try and dissuade him,’ Evan said crossly. ‘Not now we’ve gone to all this trouble. And as Link pointed out himself, if he isn’t in the car when Danilo comes, nothing will be conclusive.’

Conrad still hesitated. My fault.

‘Get on with it,’ Evan said.

I put my arm through the steering wheel. It was trembling.

Conrad clicked the handcuffs shut first on one wrist and then the other, and I shuddered from head to foot.

‘Dear boy...’ Conrad said doubtfully.

‘Come on,’ Evan urged.

I didn’t say anything. I thought that whatever I might start to say, it would come out as a screaming plea that they wouldn’t leave me. Leave me, however, they must.

Evan shut the car door brusquely, and jerked his head for Conrad to follow him into the estate car. Conrad went with his head turned backwards, looking to see if I were calling him.

They climbed into the front seat, reversed, turned, drove away. The silence of the tinder-dry park settled around me.

I wished I had never suggested this plan. The car seemed hotter than ever, the heat more intolerable. Within an hour, and in spite of the quantities of water I had drunk that morning, fierce thirst returned.

Cramps began again in my legs. My spine protested. My shoulders pulled with strain.

I cursed myself.

Supposing he took all day, I thought. Supposing he didn’t fly down, but drove. Eight o’clock, when Evan telephoned him. At least five hours’ drive to Numbi, another hour and a half to reach me... He might not come until three or four... which meant five hours in the car...

I tucked my hands into my shirt sleeves and rolled my head back out of the sun.

There was no water vapour, no plastic bag, to keep my mind occupied. The pencil-written sheets lay on my knees, with Conrad’s gold pencil, companion to his pen, clipping them together. There was no leaping from hope to despair and back again, which was certainly a blessed relief, but unexpectedly left too much time free for pure feeling.

Every minute dragged.

The premiere, I thought, was due to be held the following night. I wondered who would be arranging everything, with poor Clifford Wenkins in his watery grave. I wondered if I would get to the Klipspringer Heights Hotel on time. In another twenty-four hours, shaved, bathed, rested, watered and fed, perhaps I might just make it. All those people paying twenty rand for a seat... unfair not to turn up, if I could...

Time crawled. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t trying.

One o’clock came. One o’clock went.

Conrad had fixed a radio transmitter with a button for me to press if I simply could not stand any more. But if I pressed it, the whole of today’s effort would be wasted. If I pressed it, the cohorts would rush to my rescue, but Danilo would see the activity, and would never come near.

I wished Conrad hadn’t insisted on that button. Evan said it was necessary, so that he and van Huren and the police would know for certain that Danilo had come, if they should by some mischance miss him on the road.

One buzz was to mean that Danilo had come.

Two buzzes that he had left again.

A series of short buzzes would bring them instantly at any time to set me free.

I would wait another ten minutes before I gave up, I thought.

Then another ten.

Then another.

Ten minutes was always possible.

Conrad’s warning buzzer sounded like a wasp in my ear and jerked me into action.

Danilo drove up beside me and stopped where the station wagon had been.

I pressed the buttons taped within reach on the steering column.

I put all the actor’s art I had into looking not far from death: and didn’t have to elaborate all that much on what I knew of the real thing. A couple of vultures had conveniently flapped and spiralled down, and now perched on a nearby tree like brooding anarchists awaiting the revolution. I eyed them sourly, but Danilo was reassured.

He opened the door and through slit eyes I saw him draw back when the unmitigated heat-stoked stench met his nostrils. It had been worth not washing, not changing my clothes. There was nothing about me to show I hadn’t sat in that spot continuously since he had left me there, and a great deal to prove I had.

He looked at my lolling head, my flaccid hands, my bare swollen feet. He showed no remorse whatever. The sun blazed on the bright blond head, giving him a halo. The clean-featured all-American boy, as shiny, cold and ruthless as ice.

He bent down and practically snatched the papers off my lap. Unclipped the pencil and threw it on the back seat of the car. Read what I had written, right to the end.

‘So you did guess... you did write...’ he said. ‘Clever Ed Lincoln, too clever by half. Too bad no one will ever read this...’ He peered down into my half shut eyes to make sure I could hear him, could see him. Then he took out a cigarette lighter, flicked the flint, and set the corners of the papers into the flame.

I shook feebly in my seat, in mute protest. It pleased him.

He smiled.

He turned the papers, burning them all up, and then ground the ashes into just more dust in the dusty grass.

‘There,’ he said cheerfully.

I made a small croak. He paid attention.

I said, ‘Let... me... go.’

‘Not a chance.’ He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bunch of keys. ‘Keys to the car.’ He held them up, jingling. ‘Key to the handcuffs.’ He waved it in front of my eyes.

‘Please...’ I said.

‘You’re worth too much to me dead, pal. Sorry and all that. But there it is.’

He put the keys in his pocket, shut the door on me, and without another glance, drove heartlessly away.

Poor Nerissa, I thought. I hoped she would die before she found out about Danilo; but life was not always kind.

In time, four cars rolled back into the reflection in the driving mirror, and stopped in a cluster round my car. Evan and Conrad’s estate wagon. A chauffeur-driven car with van Huren. Two police cars; the first containing, I later discovered, their photographer and their surgeon; the second, three senior police officers... and Danilo Cavesey.

They all stood up outside the cars; a meal and a half for any passing pride of lion. Wild animals, however, kept decently out of sight. Danilo outdid them all for savagery.

Conrad bustled over and pulled open the door.

‘You all right, dear boy?’ he said anxiously.

I nodded.

Danilo was saying loudly and virtuously, ‘I told you, I’d just found him, and I was driving away to get help.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Conrad muttered, digging out his bits of wire.

‘He has the key of the handcuffs in his pocket,’ I said.

‘You don’t mean it, dear boy?’ He saw I did mean it. He went over and told the police, and after a short scuffle they found the key. Also the car keys. And now, perhaps Mr Cavesey would explain why he was driving away, when he had in his pocket the means of freeing Mr Lincoln?

Mr Cavesey glowered and declined. He had been going for help, he said.

Evan, enjoying himself immensely, walked over to the tree the elephant had uprooted, and from its withering foliage disentangled the Arriflex on its tripod.

‘Everything you did here, we filmed,’ he told Danilo. Link had a cable to the car. He started the camera when you arrived.’

Conrad fished his best tape-recorder out from under the car and unhitched the sensitive microphone from just inside the door frame.

‘Everything you said here,’ he echoed, with equal satisfaction, ‘we recorded. Link switched on the recorder, when you came.’

The police produced a pair of handcuffs of their own, and put them on Danilo, who had gone blue-white under the sun-tan.

Quentin van Huren walked over to the car and looked down at me. Conrad had forgotten the small detail of bringing back the key to free me. I still sat, locked and helpless, where I had begun.

‘For God’s sake...’ van Huren looked appalled.

I smiled lop-sidedly and shook my head. ‘For gold’s sake,’ I said.

His mouth moved, but no words came out.

Gold, greed and gilded boys... a thoroughly bad mixture.

Evan was strutting around looking important, intense, and satisfied, as if he had stage-managed and directed the entire performance. But he saw that I was still tethered, and for once some twitch of compassion reached him. He went to fetch the handcuffs’ key and brought it over.

He stood beside van Huren for a second, staring down at me as if seeing something new. For the first time ever he smiled with a hint of friendship.

‘Cut,’ he said. ‘No re-takes, today.’