James Bond Anthology (138 page)

The woman hissed something in Russian. She spat at him over the chair. Bond bent his head and wiped his face against his sleeve. He looked up and into the mottled face.

‘That’s all, Rosa,’ he said. ‘The Deuxième will be here in a minute. In an hour or so you’ll be in London. You won’t be seen leaving the hotel. You won’t be seen going into England. In fact very few people will see you again. From now on you’re just a number on a secret file. By the time we’ve finished with you you’ll be ready for the lunatic asylum.’

The face, a few feet away, was changing. Now the blood had drained out of it, and it was yellow. But not, thought Bond, with fear. The pale eyes looked levelly into his. They were not defeated.

The wet, shapeless mouth lengthened in a grin.

‘And where will you be when I am in the asylum, Mister Bond?’

‘Oh, getting on with my life.’

‘I think not,
Angliski spion
.’

Bond hardly noticed the words. He had heard the click of the door opening. A burst of laughter came from the room behind him.

‘
Eh bien
,’ it was the voice of delight that Bond remembered so well. ‘The 70th position! Now, at last, I have seen everything. And invented by an Englishman! James, this really is an insult to my countrymen.’

‘I don’t recommend it,’ said Bond over his shoulder. ‘It’s too strenuous. Anyway, you can take over now. I’ll introduce you. Her name’s Rosa. You’ll like her. She’s a big noise in SMERSH – she looks after the murdering, as a matter of fact.’

Mathis came up. There were two laundry-men with him. The three of them stood and looked respectfully into the dreadful face.

‘Rosa,’ said Mathis thoughtfully. ‘But, this time, a Rosa Malheur. Well, well! But I am sure she is uncomfortable in that position. You two, bring along the
panier de fleurs
– she will be more comfortable lying down.’

The two men walked to the door. Bond heard the creak of the laundry basket.

The woman’s eyes were still locked in Bond’s. She moved a little, shifting her weight. Out of Bond’s sight, and not noticed by Mathis, who was still examining her face, the toe of one shiny buttoned boot pressed under the instep of the other. From the point of its toe there slid forward half an inch of thin knife blade. Like the knitting needles, the steel had a dirty bluish tinge.

The two men came up and put the big square basket down beside Mathis.

‘Take her,’ said Mathis. He bowed slightly to the woman. ‘It has been an honour.’

‘
Au revoir
, Rosa,’ said Bond.

The yellow eyes blazed briefly.

‘Farewell, Mister Bond.’

The boot, with its tiny steel tongue, flashed out.

Bond felt a sharp pain in his right calf. It was only the sort of pain you would get from a kick. He flinched and stepped back. The two men seized Rosa Klebb by the arms.

Mathis laughed. ‘My poor James,’ he said. ‘Count on SMERSH to have the last word.’

The tongue of dirty steel had withdrawn into the leather. Now it was only a harmless bundle of old woman that was being lifted into the basket.

Mathis watched the lid being secured. He turned to Bond. ‘It is a good day’s work you have done, my friend,’ he said. ‘But you look tired. Go back to the Embassy and have a rest because this evening we must have dinner together. The best dinner in Paris. And I will find the loveliest girl to go with it.’

Numbness was creeping up Bond’s body. He felt very cold. He lifted his hand to brush back the comma of hair over his right eyebrow. There was no feeling in his fingers. They seemed as big as cucumbers. His hand fell heavily to his side.

Breathing became difficult. Bond sighed to the depth of his lungs. He clenched his jaws and half closed his eyes, as people do when they want to hide their drunkenness.

Through his eyelashes he watched the basket being carried to the door. He prised his eyes open. Desperately he focused on Mathis.

‘I shan’t need a girl, René,’ he said thickly.

Now he had to gasp for breath. Again his hand moved up towards his cold face. He had an impression of Mathis starting towards him.

Bond felt his knees begin to buckle.

He said, or thought he said, ‘I’ve already got the loveliest …’

Bond pivoted slowly on his heel and crashed headlong to the wine-red floor.

THE END

DOCTOR NO

Book 6

1 | HEAR YOU LOUD AND CLEAR

Punctually at six o’clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.

Apart from the background noise of the insects, the wide empty street was quiet. The wealthy owners of the big, withdrawn houses – the bank managers, company directors and top civil servants – had been home since five o’clock and they would be discussing the day with their wives or taking a shower and changing their clothes. In half an hour the street would come to life again with the cocktail traffic, but now this very superior half mile of ‘Rich Road’, as it was known to the tradesmen of Kingston, held nothing but the suspense of an empty stage and the heavy perfume of night-scented jasmine.

Richmond Road is the ‘best’ road in all Jamaica. It is Jamaica’s Park Avenue, its Kensington Palace Gardens, its Avenue D’Iéna. The ‘best’ people live in its big old-fashioned houses, each in an acre or two of beautiful lawn set, too trimly, with the finest trees and flowers from the Botanical Gardens at Hope. The long, straight road is cool and quiet and withdrawn from the hot, vulgar sprawl of Kingston where its residents earn their money, and, on the other side of the T-intersection at its top, lie the grounds of King’s House, where the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Jamaica lives with his family. In Jamaica, no road could have a finer ending.

On the eastern corner of the top intersection stands No. 1 Richmond Road, a substantial two-storey house with broad white-painted verandas running round both floors. From the road a gravel path leads up to the pillared entrance through wide lawns marked out with tennis courts on which this evening, as on all evenings, the sprinklers are at work. This mansion is the social Mecca of Kingston. It is Queen’s Club, which, for fifty years, has boasted the power and frequency of its blackballs.

Such stubborn retreats will not long survive in modern Jamaica. One day Queen’s Club will have its windows smashed and perhaps be burned to the ground, but for the time being it is a useful place to find in a sub-tropical island – well run, well staffed and with the finest cuisine and cellar in the Caribbean.

At that time of day, on most evenings of the year, you would find the same four motor cars standing in the road outside the club. They were the cars belonging to the high bridge game that assembled punctually at five and played until around midnight. You could almost set your watch by these cars. They belonged, reading from the order in which they now stood against the kerb, to the Brigadier in command of the Caribbean Defence Force, to Kingston’s leading criminal lawyer, and to the Mathematics Professor from Kingston University. At the tail of the line stood the black Sunbeam Alpine of Commander John Strangways, r.n. (Ret.), Regional Control Officer for the Caribbean – or, less discreetly, the local representative of the British Secret Service.Just before six-fifteen, the silence of Richmond Road was softly broken. Three blind beggars came round the corner of the intersection and moved slowly down the pavement towards the four cars. They were Chigroes – Chinese negroes – bulky men, but bowed as they shuffled along, tapping at the kerb with their white sticks. They walked in file. The first man, who wore blue glasses and could presumably see better than the others, walked in front holding a tin cup against the crook of the stick in his left hand. The right hand of the second man rested on his shoulder and the right hand of the third on the shoulder of the second. The eyes of the second and third men were shut. The three men were dressed in rags and wore dirty jippa-jappa baseball caps with long peaks. They said nothing and no noise came from them except the soft tapping of their sticks as they came slowly down the shadowed pavement towards the group of cars.

The three blind men would not have been incongruous in Kingston, where there are many diseased people on the streets, but, in this quiet rich empty street, they made an unpleasant impression. And it was odd that they should all be Chinese negroes. This is not a common mixture of bloods.

In the cardroom, the sunburned hand reached out into the green pool of the centre table and gathered up the four cards. There was a quiet snap as the trick went to join the rest. ‘Hundred honours,’ said Strangways, ‘and ninety below!’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Back in twenty minutes. Your deal, Bill. Order some drinks. Usual for me. Don’t bother to cook a hand for me while I’m gone. I always spot them.’

Bill Templar, the Brigadier, laughed shortly. He pinged the bell by his side and raked the cards in towards him. He said, ‘Hurry up, blast you. You always let the cards go cold just as your partner’s in the money.’

Strangways was already out of the door. The three men sat back resignedly in their chairs. The coloured steward came in and they ordered drinks for themselves and a whisky and water for Strangways.

There was this maddening interruption every evening at six-fifteen, about halfway through their second rubber. At this time precisely, even if they were in the middle of a hand, Strangways had to go to his ‘office’ and ‘make a call’. It was a damned nuisance. But Strangways was a vital part of their four and they put up with it. It was never explained what ‘the call’ was, and no one asked. Strangways’s job was ‘hush’ and that was that. He was rarely away for more than twenty minutes and it was understood that he paid for his absence with a round of drinks.

The drinks came and the three men began to talk racing.In fact, this was the most important moment in Strangways’s day – the time of his duty radio contact with the powerful transmitter on the roof of the building in Regent’s Park that is the headquarters of the Secret Service. Every day, at eighteen-thirty local time, unless he gave warning the day before that he would not be on the air – when he had business on one of the other islands in his territory, for instance, or was seriously ill – he would transmit his daily report and receive his orders. If he failed to come on the air precisely at six-thirty, there would be a second call, the ‘Blue’ call, at seven, and, finally, the ‘Red’ call at seven-thirty. After this, if his transmitter remained silent, it was ‘Emergency’, and Section III, his controlling authority in London, would urgently get on the job of finding out what had happened to him.

Even a ‘Blue’ call means a bad mark for an agent unless his ‘Reasons in Writing’ are unanswerable. London’s radio schedules round the world are desperately tight and their minute disruption by even one extra call is a dangerous nuisance. Strangways had never suffered the ignominy of a ‘Blue’ call, let alone a ‘Red’, and was as certain as could be that he never would do so. Every evening, at precisely six-fifteen, he left Queen’s Club, got into his car and drove for ten minutes up into the foothills of the Blue Mountains to his neat bungalow with the fabulous view over Kingston harbour. At six twenty-five he walked through the hall to the office at the back. He unlocked the door and locked it again behind him. Miss Trueblood, who passed as his secretary, but was in fact his No. 2 and a former Chief Officer W.R.N.S., would already be sitting in front of the dials inside the dummy filing cabinet. She would have the earphones on and would be making first contact, tapping out his call-sign, WXN, on 14 megacycles. There would be a shorthand pad on her elegant knees. Strangways would drop into the chair beside her and pick up the other pair of headphones and, at exactly six twenty-eight, he would take over from her and wait for the sudden hollowness in the ether that meant that WWW in London was coming in to acknowledge.

It was an iron routine. Strangways was a man of iron routine. Unfortunately, strict patterns of behaviour can be deadly if they are read by an enemy.

Strangways, a tall lean man with a black patch over the right eye and the sort of aquiline good looks you associate with the bridge of a destroyer, walked quickly across the mahogany panelled hallway of Queen’s Club and pushed through the light mosquito-wired doors and ran down the three steps to the path.

There was nothing very much on his mind except the sensual pleasure of the clean fresh evening air and the memory of the finesse that had given him his three spades. There was this case, of course, the case he was working on, a curious and complicated affair that M. had rather nonchalantly tossed over the air at him two weeks earlier. But it was going well. A chance lead into the Chinese community had paid off. Some odd angles had come to light – for the present the merest shadows of angles – but if they jelled, thought Strangways as he strode down the gravel path and into Richmond Road, he might find himself involved in something very odd indeed.

Strangways shrugged his shoulders. Of course it wouldn’t turn out like that. The fantastic never materialized in his line of business. There would be some drab solution that had been embroidered by overheated imaginations and the usual hysteria of the Chinese.