James Bond Anthology (53 page)

Bond pushed through the swing doors and walked up to the old-fashioned porter’s lodge ruled over by Brevett, the guardian of Blades and the counsellor and family friend of half the members.

‘Evening, Brevett. Is the Admiral in?’

‘Good evening, sir,’ said Brevett, who knew Bond as an occasional guest at the club. ‘The Admiral’s waiting for you in the card room. Page, take Commander Bond up to the Admiral.
Lively now!’

As Bond followed the uniformed page boy across the worn black and white marble floor of the hall and up the wide staircase with its fine mahogany balustrade, he remembered the story of how, at one election, nine blackballs had been found in the box when there were only eight members of the Committee present. Brevett, who had handed the box from member to member, was said to have confessed to the Chairman that he was so afraid the candidate would be elected that he had put in a blackball himself. No one had objected. The Committee would rather have lost its chairman than the porter whose family had held the same post at Blades for a hundred years.

The page pushed open one wing of the tall doors at the top of the stairs and held it for Bond to go through. The long room was not crowded and Bond saw M. sitting by himself playing patience in the alcove formed by the left hand of the three bow windows. He dismissed the page and walked across the heavy carpet, noticing the rich background smell of cigar-smoke, the quiet voices that came from the three tables of bridge, and the sharp rattle of dice across an unseen backgammon board.

‘There you are,’ said M. as Bond came up. He waved to the chair that faced him across the card table. ‘Just let me finish this. I haven’t cracked this man Canfield for months. Drink?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Bond. He sat down and lit a cigarette and watched with amusement the concentration M. was putting into his game.

‘Admiral Sir M*** M******* – something at the Ministry of Defence.’ M. looked like any member of any of the clubs in St. James’s Street. Dark grey suit, stiff white collar, the favourite dark blue bow-tie with spots, rather loosely tied, the thin black cord of the rimless eyeglass that M. seemed only to use to read menus, the keen sailor’s face, with the clear, sharp sailor’s eyes. It was difficult to believe that an hour before he had been playing with a thousand live chessmen against the enemies of England; that there might be, this evening, fresh blood on his hands, or a successful burglary, or the hideous knowledge of a disgusting blackmail case.

And what could the casual observer think of him, ‘Commander James Bond, G.M.G., R.N.V.S.R.’, also ‘something at the Ministry of Defence’, the rather saturnine young man in his middle thirties sitting opposite the Admiral? Something a bit cold and dangerous in that face. Looks pretty fit. May have been attached to Templer in Malaya. Or Nairobi. Mau Mau work. Tough-looking customer. Doesn’t look the sort of chap one usually sees in Blades.

Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England. He shrugged his shoulders. Abroad was what mattered. He would never have a job to do in England. Outside the jurisdiction of the Service. Anyway, he didn’t need a cover this evening. This was recreation.

M. snorted and threw his cards down. Bond automatically gathered in the pack and as automatically gave it the Scarne shuffle, marrying the two halves with the quick downward riffle that never brings the cards off the table. He squared off the pack and pushed it away.

M. beckoned to a passing waiter. ‘Piquet cards, please, Tanner,’ he said.

The waiter went away and came back a moment later with the two thin packs. He stripped off the wrapping and placed them, with two markers, on the table. He stood waiting.

‘Bring me a whisky and soda,’ said M. ‘Sure you won’t have anything?’

Bond looked at his watch. It was half past six. ‘Could I have a dry Martini?’ he said. ‘Made with Vodka. Large slice of lemon peel.’

‘Rot-gut,’ commented M. briefly as the waiter went away. ‘Now I’ll just take a pound or two off you and then we’ll go and have a look at the bridge. Our friend hasn’t turned up yet.’

For half an hour they played the game at which the expert player can nearly always win even with the cards running slightly against him. At the end of the game Bond laughed and counted out three pound-notes.

‘One of these days I’m going to take some trouble and really learn piquet,’ he said. ‘I’ve never won against you yet.’

‘It’s all memory and knowing the odds,’ said M. with satisfaction. He finished his whisky and soda. ‘Let’s go over and see what’s going on at the bridge. Our man’s playing at Basildon’s table. Came in about ten minutes ago. If you notice anything, just give me a nod and we’ll go downstairs and talk about it.’

He stood up and Bond followed suit.

The far end of the room had begun to fill up and half a dozen tables of bridge were going. At the round poker table under the centre chandelier three players were counting out chips into five stacks, waiting for two more players to come in. The kidney-shaped baccarat table was still shrouded and would probably remain so until after dinner, when it would be used for chemin-de-fer.

Bond followed M. out of their alcove, relishing the scene down the long room, the oases of green, the tinkle of glasses as the waiters moved amongst the tables, the hum of talk punctuated by sudden exclamations and warm laughter, the haze of blue smoke rising up through the dark red lamp-shades that hung over the centre of each table. His pulses quickened with the smell of it all and his nostrils flared slightly as the two men came down the long room and joined the company.

M., with Bond beside him, wandered casually from table to table, exchanging greetings with the players until they reached the last table beneath the fine Lawrence of Beau Brummel over the wide Adam fireplace.

‘Double, damn you,’ said the loud, cheerful voice of the player with his back to Bond. Bond thoughtfully noted the head of tight reddish hair that was all he could see of the speaker, then he looked to the left at the rather studious profile of Lord Basildon. The Chairman of Blades was leaning back, looking critically down his nose at the hand of cards which he held out and away from him as if it were a rare object.

‘My hand is so exquisite that I am forced to redouble, my dear Drax,’ he said. He looked across at his partner. ‘Tommy,’ he said. ‘Charge this to me if it goes wrong.’

‘Rot,’ said his partner. ‘Meyer? Better take Drax out.’

‘Too frightened,’ said the middle-aged florid man who was playing with Drax. ‘No bid.’ He picked up his cigar from the brass ashtray and put it carefully into the middle of his mouth.

‘No bid here,’ said Basildon’s partner.

‘And nothing here,’ came Drax’s voice.

‘Five clubs redoubled,’ said Basildon. ‘Your lead, Meyer.’

Bond looked over Drax’s shoulder. Drax had the ace of spades and the ace of hearts. He promptly made them both and led another heart which Basildon took on the table with the king.

‘Well,’ said Basildon. ‘There are four trumps against me including the queen. I shall play Drax to have her.’ He finessed against Drax. Meyer took the trick with the queen.

‘Hell and damnation,’ said Basildon. ‘What’s the queen doing in Meyer’s hand? Well I’m damned. Anyway the rest are mine.’ He fanned his cards down on the table. He looked defensively at his partner. ‘Can you beat it, Tommy? Drax doubles and Meyer has the queen.’ There was not more than a natural exasperation in his voice.

Drax chuckled. ‘Didn’t expect my partner to have a Yarborough did you?’ he said cheerfully to Basildon. ‘Well, that’s just the four hundred above the line. Your deal.’ He cut the cards to Basildon and the game went on.

So it had been Drax’s deal the hand before. That might be important. Bond lit a cigarette and reflectively examined the back of Drax’s head.

M.’s voice cut in on Bond’s thoughts. ‘You remember my friend Commander Bond, Basil? Thought we’d come along and play some bridge this evening.’

Basildon smiled up at Bond. ‘Evening,’ he said. He waved a hand round the table from the left to right. ‘Meyer, Dangerfield, Drax.’ The three men looked up briefly and Bond nodded a greeting to the table in general. ‘You all know the Admiral,’ added the Chairman, starting to deal.

Drax half turned in his chair. ‘Ah, the Admiral,’ he said boisterously. ‘Glad to have you aboard, Admiral. Drink?’

‘No, thanks,’ said M. with a thin smile. ‘Just had one.’

Drax turned and glanced up at Bond, who caught a glimpse of a tuft of reddish moustache and a rather chilly blue eye. ‘What about you?’ asked Drax perfunctorily.

‘No, thanks,’ said Bond.

Drax swivelled back to the table and picked up his cards. Bond watched the big blunt hands sort them.

Then he moved round the table with a second clue to ponder.

Drax didn’t sort his cards into suits as most players do, but only into reds and blacks, ungraded, making his hand very difficult to kibitz and almost impossible for one of his neighbours, if they were so inclined, to decipher.

Bond knew it for the way people hold their hands who are very careful card-players indeed.

Bond went and stood beside the chimneypiece. He took out a cigarette and lit it at the flame from a small gas-jet enclosed in a silver grille – a relic of the days before the use of matches – that protruded from the wall beside him.

From where he stood he could see the hand of Meyer, and by moving a pace to the right, of Basildon. His view of Sir Hugo Drax was uninterrupted and he inspected him carefully while appearing to interest himself only in the game.

Drax gave the impression of being a little larger than life. He was physically big – about six foot tall, Bond guessed – and his shoulders were exceptionally broad. He had a big square head and the tight reddish hair was parted in the middle. On either side of the parting the hair dipped down in a curve towards the temples with the object, Bond assumed, of hiding as much as possible of the tissue of shining puckered skin that covered most of the right half of his face. Other relics of plastic surgery could be detected in the man’s right ear, which was not a perfect match with its companion on the left, and the right eye, which had been a surgical failure. It was considerably larger than the left eye, because of a contraction of the borrowed skin used to rebuild the upper and lower eyelids, and it looked painfully bloodshot. Bond doubted if it was capable of closing completely and he guessed that Drax covered it with a patch at night.

To conceal as much as possible of the unsightly taut skin that covered half his face, Drax had grown a bushy reddish moustache and had allowed his whiskers to grow down to the level of the lobes of his ears. He also had patches of hair on his cheek-bones.

The heavy moustache served another purpose. It helped to hide a naturally prognathous upper jaw and a marked protrusion of the upper row of teeth. Bond reflected that this was probably due to sucking his thumb as a child, and it had resulted in an ugly splaying, or diastema, of what Bond had heard his dentist call ‘the centrals’. The moustache helped to hide these ‘ogre’s teeth’ and it was only when Drax uttered, as he frequently did, his short braying laugh that the splay could be seen.

The general effect of the face – the riot of red-brown hair, the powerful nose and jaw, the florid skin – was flamboyant. It put Bond in mind of a ring-master at a circus. The contrasting sharpness and coldness of the left eye supported the likeness.

A bullying, boorish, loud-mouthed vulgarian. That would have been Bond’s verdict if he had not known something of Drax’s abilities. As it was, it crossed his mind that much of the effect might be Drax’s idea of a latter-day Regency buck – the harmless disguise of a man with a smashed face who was also a snob.

Looking for further clues, Bond noticed that Drax was sweating rather freely. Despite the occasional growl of thunder outside it was a cool evening, and yet Drax was constantly mopping his face and neck with a huge bandana handkerchief. He smoked incessantly, stubbing out the cork-tipped Virginia cigarettes after a dozen lungfuls of smoke and almost immediately lighting another from a box of fifty in his coat pocket. His big hands, their backs thickly covered with reddish hair, were always on the move, fiddling with his cards, handling the cigarette lighter that stood beside a plain flat silver cigarette-case in front of him, twisting a lock of hair on the side of his head, using the handkerchief on his face and neck. Occasionally he put a finger greedily to his mouth and worried a nail. Even at a distance Bond could see that every fingernail was bitten down to the quick.

The hands themselves were strong and capable but the thumbs had something ungainly about them which it took Bond a moment or two to define. He finally detected that they were unnaturally long and reached level with the top joint of the index finger.

Bond concluded his inspection with Drax’s clothes which were expensive and in excellent taste – a dark blue pin-stripe in lightweight flannel, double-breasted with turn-back cuffs, a heavy white silk shirt with a stiff collar, an unobtrusive tie with a small grey and white check, modest cuff-links, which looked like Cartier, and a plain gold Patek Philippe watch with a black leather strap.

Bond lit another cigarette and concentrated on the game, leaving his subconscious to digest the details of Drax’s appearance and manner that had seemed to him significant and that might help to explain the riddle of his cheating, the nature of which had still to be discovered.