James Bond Anthology (201 page)

Bond said, ‘Thanks C for Charlie add a cup of tea to that order would you I’ve got a pretty girl on board this is Speedbird saying over and out.’

Bond released the switch and handed the microphone to the radio officer. He said, ‘Pilot, they’re putting down flares and keeping constant watch on our wavelength. Wind force two, long smooth swell with no broken crests. Now take it easy and let’s try and get out of this alive. As soon as we hit the water I’ll get the hatch open. Until then if anyone comes through the cockpit door he gets shot. Right?’

The girl’s voice sounded from the door behind Bond. ‘I was just coming to join the party but I won’t now. Getting shot doesn’t agree with me. But you might call that man back and make it two whiskies. Tea makes me hiccup.’

Bond said, ‘Pussy, get back to your basket.’ He gave a last glance round the cockpit and backed out of the door.

Two hours, two years, later Bond was lying in the warm cabin in Weathership Charlie listening dreamily to an early morning radio programme from Canada. Various parts of his body ached. He had got to the tail of the plane and made the girl kneel down with her head cradled in her arms on the seat of a chair. Then he had wedged himself in behind and over her and had held her life-jacketed body tightly in his arms and braced his back against the back of the seat behind him.

She had been nervously making facetious remarks about the indelicacy of this position when the belly of the Stratocruiser had thudded into the first mountain of swell at a hundred miles an hour. The huge plane skipped once and then crashed nose first into a wall of water. The impact had broken the back of the plane. The leaden weight of the bullion in the baggage compartment had torn the plane in half, spewing Bond and the girl out into the icy swell, lit red by the line of flares. There they had floated, half stunned, in their yellow life-jackets until the lifeboat got to them. By then there were only a few chunks of wreckage on the surface and the crew, with three tons of gold round their necks, were on their way down to the bed of the Atlantic. The boat hunted for ten minutes but when no bodies came to the surface they gave up the search and chugged back up the searchlight beam to the blessed wall of iron of the old frigate.

They had been treated like a mixture of royalty and people from Mars. Bond had answered the first, most urgent questions and then it had all suddenly seemed to be too much for his tired mind to cope with. Now he was lying luxuriating in the peace and the heat of the whisky and wondering about Pussy Galore and why she had chosen shelter under his wing rather than under Goldfinger’s.

The connecting door with the next cabin opened and the girl came in. She was wearing nothing but a grey fisherman’s jersey that was decent by half an inch. The sleeves were rolled up. She looked like a painting by Vertes. She said, ‘People keep on asking if I’d like an alcohol rub and I keep on saying that if anyone’s going to rub me it’s you, and if I’m going to be rubbed with anything it’s you I’d like to be rubbed with.’ She ended lamely, ‘So here I am.’

Bond said firmly, ‘Lock that door, Pussy, take off that sweater and come into bed. You’ll catch cold.’

She did as she was told, like an obedient child.

She lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a Lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, ‘Will you write to me in Sing Sing?’

Bond looked down into the deep blue-violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, ‘They told me you only liked women.’

She said, ‘I never met a man before.’ The toughness came back into her voice. ‘I come from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case I couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve. That’s not so good, James. You ought to be able to guess that.’

Bond smiled down into the pale, beautiful face. He said, ‘All you need is a course of T.L.C.’

‘What’s T.L.C.?’

‘Short for Tender Loving Care treatment. It’s what they write on most papers when a waif gets brought in to a children’s clinic.’

‘I’d like that.’ She looked at the passionate, rather cruel mouth waiting above hers. She reached up and brushed back the comma of black hair that had fallen over his right eyebrow. She looked into the fiercely slitted grey eyes. ‘When’s it going to start?’

Bond’s right hand came slowly up the firm, muscled thighs, over the flat soft plain of the stomach to the right breast. Its point was hard with desire. He said softly, ‘Now.’ His mouth came ruthlessly down on hers.

THE END

THUNDERBALL

Book 8

1 |
‘
TAKE IT EASY, MR BOND
’

It was one of those days when it seemed to James Bond that all life, as someone put it, was nothing but a heap of six to four against.

To begin with he was ashamed of himself! – a rare state of mind. He had a hangover, a bad one, with an aching head and stiff joints. When he coughed – smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover – a cloud of small luminous black spots swam across his vision like amoebae in pond water. The one drink too many signals itself unmistakably. His final whisky and soda in the luxurious flat in Park Lane had been no different from the ten preceding ones, but it had gone down reluctantly and had left a bitter taste and an ugly sensation of surfeit. And, although he had taken in the message, he had agreed to play just one more rubber. Five pounds a hundred as it’s the last one? He had agreed. And he had played the rubber like a fool. Even now he could see the queen of spades, with that stupid Mona Lisa smile on her fat face, slapping triumphantly down on his knave – the queen, as his partner had so sharply reminded him, that had been so infallibly marked with South, and that had made the difference between a grand slam redoubled (drunkenly) for him, and four hundred points above the line for the opposition. In the end it had been a twenty-point rubber, £100 against him – important money.

Again Bond dabbed with the bloodstained styptic pencil at the cut on his chin and despised the face that stared sullenly back at him from the mirror above the washbasin. Stupid, ignorant bastard! It all came from having nothing to do. More than a month of paper-work – ticking off his number on stupid dockets, scribbling minutes that got spikier as the weeks passed, and snapping back down the telephone when some harmless section officer tried to argue with him. And then his secretary had gone down with the flu and he had been given a silly, and, worse, ugly bitch from the pool who called him ‘sir’ and spoke to him primly through a mouth full of fruit stones. And now it was another Monday morning. Another week was beginning. The May rain thrashed at the windows. Bond swallowed down two Phensics and reached for the Enos. The telephone in his bedroom rang. It was the loud ring of the direct line with Headquarters.

James Bond, his heart thumping faster than it should have done, despite the race across London and a fretful wait for the lift to the eighth floor, pulled out the chair and sat down and looked across into the calm, grey, damnably clear eyes he knew so well. What could he read in them?

‘Good morning, James. Sorry to pull you along a bit early in the morning. Got a very full day ahead. Wanted to fit you in before the rush.’

Bond’s excitement waned minutely. It was never a good sign when M. addressed him by his Christian name instead of by his number. This didn’t look like a job – more like something personal. There was none of the tension in M.’s voice that heralded big, exciting news. M.’s expression was interested, friendly, almost benign. Bond said something noncommittal.

‘Haven’t seen much of you lately, James. How have you been? Your health, I mean.’ M. picked up a sheet of paper, a form of some kind, from his desk, and held it as if preparing to read.

Suspiciously, trying to guess what the paper said, what all this was about, Bond said, ‘I’m all right, sir.’

M. said mildly, ‘That’s not what the M.O. thinks, James. Just had your last Medical. I think you ought to hear what he has to say.’

Bond looked angrily at the back of the paper. Now what the hell! He said with control, ‘Just as you say, sir.’

M. gave Bond a careful, appraising glance. He held the paper closer to his eyes. ‘“This officer”,’ he read, ‘“remains basically physically sound. Unfortunately his mode of life is not such as is likely to allow him to remain in this happy state. Despite many previous warnings, he admits to smoking sixty cigarettes a day. These are of a Balkan mixture with a higher nicotine content than the cheaper varieties. When not engaged upon strenuous duty, the officer’s average daily consumption of alcohol is in the region of half a bottle of spirits of between sixty and seventy proof. On examination, there continues to be little definite sign of deterioration. The tongue is furred. The blood pressure a little raised at 160/90. The liver is not palpable. On the other hand, when pressed, the officer admits to frequent occipital headaches and there is spasm in the trapezius muscles and so-called ‘fibrositis’ nodules can be felt. I believe these symptoms to be due to this officer’s mode of life. He is not responsive to the suggestion that over-indulgence is no remedy for the tensions inherent in his professional calling and can only result in the creation of a toxic state which could finally have the effect of reducing his fitness as an officer. I recommend that No. 007 should take it easy for two to three weeks on a more abstemious regime, when I believe he would make a complete return to his previous exceptionally high state of physical fitness.’ ”

M. reached over and slid the report into his out tray. He put his hands flat down on the desk in front of him and looked sternly across at Bond. He said, ‘Not very satisfactory is it, James?’

Bond tried to keep impatience out of his voice. He said, ‘I’m perfectly fit, sir. every-one has occasional headaches. Most weekend golfers have fibrositis. You get it from sweating and then sitting in a draught. Aspirin and embrocation get rid of them. Nothing to it really, sir.’

M. said severely, ‘That’s just where you’re making a big mistake, James. Taking medicine only suppresses these symptoms of yours. Medicine doesn’t get to the root of the trouble. It only conceals it. The result is a more highly poisoned condition which may become chronic disease. All drugs are harmful to the system. They are contrary to nature. The same applies to most of the food we eat – white bread with all the roughage removed, refined sugar with all the goodness machined out of it, pasteurized milk which has had most of the vitamins boiled away, everything overcooked and denaturized. Why,’ M. reached into his pocket for his notebook and consulted it, ‘do you know what our bread contains apart from a bit of overground flour?’ M. looked accusingly at Bond. ‘It contains large quantities of chalk, also benzol peroxide powder, chlorine gas, sal ammoniac, and alum.’ M. put the notebook back in his pocket. ‘What do you think of that?’

Bond, mystified by all this, said defensively, ‘I don’t eat all that much bread, sir.’

‘Maybe not,’ said M. impatiently. ‘But how much stone-ground whole wheat do you eat? How much yoghurt? Uncooked vegetables, nuts, fresh fruit?’

Bond smiled. ‘Practically none at all, sir.’

‘It’s no laughing matter.’ M. tapped his forefinger on the desk for emphasis. ‘Mark my words. There is no way to health except the natural way. All your troubles’ – Bond opened his mouth to protest, but M. held up his hand – ‘the deep-seated toxaemia revealed by your Medical, are the result of a basically unnatural way of life. Ever heard of Bircher-Brenner, for instance? Or Kneipp, Preissnitz, Rikli, Schroth, Gossman, Bilz?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Just so. Well those are the men you would be wise to study. Those are the great naturopaths – the men whose teaching we have foolishly ignored. Fortunately,’ M.’s eyes gleamed enthusiastically, ‘there are a number of disciples of these men practising in England. Nature cure is not beyond our reach.’

James Bond looked curiously at M. What the hell had got into the old man? Was all this the first sign of senile decay? But M. looked fitter than Bond had ever seen him. The cold grey eyes were clear as crystal and the skin of the hard, lined face was luminous with health. Even the iron-grey hair seemed to have new life. Then what was all this lunacy?

M. reached for his in tray and placed it in front of him in a preliminary gesture of dismissal. He said cheerfully, ‘Well, that’s all, James. Miss Moneypenny has made the reservation. Two weeks will be quite enough to put you right. You won’t know yourself when you come out. New man.’

Bond looked across at M., aghast. He said in a strangled voice, ‘Out of where, sir?’

‘Place called “Shrublands ”. Run by quite a famous man in his line – Wain, Joshua Wain. Remarkable chap. Sixty-five. Doesn’t look a day over forty. He’ll take good care of you. Very up-to-date equipment, and he’s even got his own herb garden. Nice stretch of country. Near Washington in Sussex. And don’t worry about your work here. Put it right out of your mind for a couple of weeks. I’ll tell 009 to take care of the Section.’

Bond couldn’t believe his ears. He said, ‘But, sir. I mean, I’m perfectly all right. Are you sure? I mean, is this really necessary?’