Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,50
again nothing happened. She tried a third time, now putting the force of her body behind her attempt to open the door. It gave slightly, and Jackie pushed her shoulder up against the door and tried to force it open. It gave a little more, and a little more, and finally she was able to open up a big enough wedge for her to squeeze through.
Immediately upon entering the room, Jackie almost tripped over the door’s obstruction. It was the projectionist, and he was lying unconscious on the floor.
Looking up, Jackie’s instincts told her to move her head to the right, preventing something from smashing into it from the left. That something was an empty film can, and it had been flung at her by the man in the Dracula cape. He was now crouched down over his toolbox, which lay in the middle of the floor. To Jackie’s horror, she could see that the toolbox was packed to the rim with sticks of dynamite. Why, there must have been enough sticks there to blow up the entire theatre. He obviously wanted to assassinate Batista and didn’t care how many innocent people went up along with El Presidente.
The man in the Dracula cape unrolled a length of fuse from the toolbox and was about to light it with a cigarette lighter when he was jumped by Jackie, who couldn’t think of any other way to stop him. It was very close quarters inside the booth, which was crammed with three giant movie projectors and tables piled high with cans of thirty-five-millimeter film. There was also a chair for the projectionist to sit on between reel changes. And it was this chair that Jackie met with now as the man in the Dracula cape threw her off him and sent her hurtling across the room.
She hit her head, losing consciousness momentarily. When she came to, she saw, through hazy vision, the man in the Dracula cape leaving the room. She leaped across the floor and made a grab for him, but all she could latch on to was the cape, which came away in her hands. She let it fall to the floor and heard the clatter of footsteps as the man made his escape down the stairway, leaving her and the unconscious man alone in the room.
Jackie quickly looked at the toolbox. The quick-acting fuse was almost at the end of its run. The dynamite would ignite in about ten seconds if Jackie didn’t do something about it—and fast. She shook her head to clear her vision, then spit on two of her fingers and rubbed the fuse right ahead of where the spark was sputtering. Jackie felt a brief hot stinging in her fingers as the spark went out. She collapsed on the floor, realizing how narrowly disaster had been averted.
But a smell in the room told her subliminally that the threat was not yet over. Because when Jackie had thrown herself at the man in the Dracula cape, she had sent his cigarette lighter flying. It must have landed in an open can of highly flammable nitrate film stock, which, to her shock, she now saw was on fire. In his rush to retrieve the lighter and ignite the fuse, the man in the Dracula cape had obviously ignored the incendiary potential of this situation.
Jackie looked around for something to put out the blaze but saw no fire extinguisher, no bucket of sand or water, nothing. Apparently some short cuts had been taken in the restoration of the Teatro de Cinema to get it ready in time for its opening, clearly in violation of the city’s fire codes.
Before her eyes, the entire projection room began to go up in flames. Jackie ran over to the nearest projection port and shouted out, “Fire! Help! Fire!” hoping that she could be heard above the movie’s dialogue. “Fire! Help! Fire!”
Turning back to the room, she knew that she had two things to do. The first was to look for reel three of Dracula. There was no way she was going to leave without it.
She looked over at the projectionist and saw that he was just coming to, rubbing the back of his head. Good, because that was the second thing she had to do—get him out of here.
“Are you all right?” Jackie asked him in her Berlitz crash-course Spanish.
The man looked too confused to respond.
Despite this, Jackie continued, “Reel three—I need it. Do you know where it is?”