James Bond: The Authorised Biography (13 page)

Inside there was a sandwich, a Turkish paperback, some bills and an identity card. Bond examined it. The photograph was certainly exactly like the pictures of Azom he had seen in Paris; but, as he now realized, Azom possessed a very typical Turkish face. The card was made out in the name of Yusuf Rhazid. Azom must have missed the ferry. Bond had swapped cases with a total stranger.

For the remainder of the journey, Bond wondered what on earth to do. Should he go back to Istanbul and try finding Azom and Herr Yusuf Rhazid? It was too late for that. Should he tell Maddox? What could Maddox do? After a sleepless night, he decided to await events: events, for once, were on his side. In Paris, Maddox was in the best of spirits and praised him for a successful mission. Early next morning, Bond drove the Bentley back to Geneva. During the drive he was mentally preparing his explanations for when the inevitable complaints arrived from Turkey. They never did. Station N reassumed control of the Turkish network. Maddox was thanked for his assistance, and Bond decided to let sleeping Turks lie. Just the same he often wondered what did become of the £20,000 he had given to the stranger with the moustache aboard the Bosphorus Ferry. Eighteen years later he found out.

Bond was in Istanbul again for the events described by Fleming in
From Russia With Love
. He had a friend called Nazim Kalkavan, a generous host and a great good liver who was anxious to take him out for what he called ‘a genuine
diner à la Turque’
. There was one place in Istanbul they had to visit. It was near the Sokullu Mehmet Paşa mosque. The owner was an old friend and according to Kalkavan he served the only really worthwhile food in Istanbul. Bond enjoyed Kalkavan's enthusiasm. He was a genuine gourmet and knew his city.

The restaurant was by the water, a beautiful old Turkish-style house, and Kalkavan was at his most effusive. As they entered he insisted on introducing Bond to the proprietor.

‘James Bond – meet Yusuf Rhazid. He is a great friend and he owns the one good restaurant in Istanbul.’

The face had hardly changed. There was the same cropped hair, the same magnificent moustache that Bond had last seen eighteen years before on the Bosphorus Ferry. For a moment the sharp currant eyes caught Bond's – then, unmistakably, Herr Rhazid winked.

‘Nazim Pasha,’ he said quietly, ‘Mr Bond and I have met – a long time ago – but we were never introduced. I have a lot to thank him for and now I must thank you for bringing him. Tonight you will be my guests. And Mr Bond, I hope that you will come again whenever you are in Istanbul.’

The dinner was one of the most memorable of Bond's entire career – he describes it as a ‘banquet’. It began with caviare and vodka – Turkish government monopoly vodka – and heavy-grained grey caviare which, as Kalkavan explained, had come from Samsun on the Black Sea. This was followed by a Turkish speciality – Lufer fish, which exists only in the Bosphorus. The main dish consisted of small chickens, roasted whole and stuffed with
Pilav
(rice cooked with pine-nuts, raisins and diced chicken livers). And afterwards there were Turkish dishes with names that amused Bond so much that he can still remember them. One was called ‘Vizir's finger’, and the other ‘lady's navel’.

Rhazid refused to produce a bill. This annoyed Kalkavan who tried to insist on paying, but as Bond said to him, ‘I think the British government has already settled it.’

*

Throughout the long splendid European summer of 1938, Bond was busy. Apart from a snatched few days in Kent visiting Aunt Charmian, he had no real holiday.

He found his few days at Pett Bottom disturbing. The house was quite unchanged – so was his aunt. She was still growing dahlias, apparently untouched by time. But Bond felt he had aged a hundred years since last he slept in the little room beneath the eaves. His aunt was as gentle and uncritical as ever. She asked no questions but he knew her well enough to tell what she was thinking. Who was this hard young man? Were all those fears she had for him becoming true? He would have liked to reassure her but she was too intelligent for that. He left her, promising to come back quickly, but both knew that he wouldn't.

And yet the past still followed him. Within a few days he was sent to Russia; it was like a return to those hateful months at Perlovska during the Russian Terror. It was a routine trip – by rail through Negoreloye to make contact with a man in Moscow. There was no real danger this time. Bond was officially a King's Messenger, travelling on a diplomatic passport and covered by the British Embassy. But when he passed the final station on the Polish frontier he felt that strange oppression he had known in Russia as a boy. It never lifted for the whole time he was there, and, for the first time since childhood, Bond was afraid.

There was no difficulty making contact with the man he wanted. He was a scientist – a bio-chemist with an international reputation living with his wife and children in a two-roomed flat in the Leninskie Gory quarter near the university. London had heard through academic channels that he was frustrated with his work in Moscow and anxious to take up research in Cambridge. Cambridge was keen to have him. Bond had to tell him so and see what could be done.

Leninskie Gory was the new Moscow of the Russian Revolution – monstrous and unrelieved and grey with its cliff-like blocks of workers' flats. Fedyeov, the scientist, lived on the eighth floor of one of these. He was a small man with a three-day growth of stubble and bright scared eyes. Bond recognized the air of hopelessness within the flat. Fedyeov had given up. Bond was reminded of a bird with a broken wing he had once tried to nurse – Fedyeov had the same uncomplaining stillness. The man's eyes seemed to know exactly what was coming.

Bond was touched by his courtesy. His wife, a motherly plump woman, brought tea. Bond drank it dutifully and gave him his message. There was something quite pathetic about how the man received it. Tears filled his eyes, he stammered out his thanks, but said that it was quite impossible – the government would never let him leave. In that case, Bond replied, there might be other ways to get him safely to the West. Bond had never seen such terror as appeared on Fedyeov's face. He begged Bond to say no more. He was being watched – nothing was possible. He thanked him, but good-day.

Bond had not expected much success – even so he was disappointed. He spent a somewhat melancholy evening with an official from the Embassy, and since he was due to leave next day, went to bed early. He was staying in the annexe to the Embassy. This suited him. He didn't care for diplomats, but the Embassy had two advantages – he was saved trouble with the Russian state police and he was guaranteed a decent breakfast. While he was eating it the Head of Chancery came in. He was a plump, tweedy man in his middle thirties, who chatted for a while about life in Moscow.

‘Nasty business about that scientist of theirs,’ he said.

‘What scientist?’ said Bond.

‘Haven't you heard? A man called Fedyeov – terribly distinguished. News came through from Pravda early this morning. Supposed to have thrown himself out of an eighth-floor window – typical of these bloody Russians. They're all mad, the lot of them.’

Bond was no longer very hungry.

‘When did it happen?’

‘Early last night.’

‘D'you think it was really suicide?’ Bond asked.

The diplomat shrugged his shoulders. ‘You never know in this God-awful country. It seems a dreadful bloody waste whatever happened.’

It was a haunted journey back. Bond tried to tell himself that Fedyeov was virtually a dead man when he saw him, but he could not stop thinking that were it not for James Bond, he would still be alive. At the same time Bond was troubled by his mother's memory. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody round him now was doomed – a melancholy, cold and grey as the Russian plains around him, gripped his soul.

He hoped that with his return to Paris all would be well. It wasn't. Something was hideously wrong. He couldn't sleep and when he did there was a recurrence of those nightmares which had troubled him after his parents' death. He drank. He went on sleeping pills. Neither did much good. And, as always in the past, Bond had no way of telling anybody what was wrong. Luckily Maddox noticed.

Maddox was sympathetic. Bond had been working much too hard. He needed fresh air, exercise, a holiday. He suggested Kitzbühel. And so began that curious series of coincidences through which Bond renewed his brief acquaintance with Ian Fleming. Without that trip to Kitzbühel, there would have been no James Bond books; nor, for that matter, would I have heard that Bond existed. For, of course, it was at Kitzbühel that James Bond met Maria Künzler.

In 1938, Kitzbühel was still a sleepy little Tyrolean market town beneath the jagged mass of the great Kitzbüheler Horn. For years now it had been a favourite haunt of Fleming's who had been coming here since the 1920s. He was there late that autumn when Bond arrived at the Hirzingerhof Hotel. It was inevitable that they should meet in that closed circle of rich winter visitors. Most of them in those days were Austrian. Englishmen – and particularly good-looking Englishmen – were a rarity. It was also inevitable that they should clash. Fleming was something of a prima donna with a considerable following of adoring maidens. Bond, despite the difference in their age, was competition. They were both tough, both Scottish, both powerful characters. But whereas Bond was somewhat dour, Fleming was an inveterate deflater of other people's egos. He was a mocking, highly cynical Old Etonian. James Bond, another Old Etonian, was quite capable of taking care of himself against such opposition. In their different ways, both of them seem to have enjoyed it.

Certainly for Bond the presence of Fleming was a godsend. As he admits he ‘stopped me brooding’. He also introduced him to a lot of girls – Miss Künzler among them. According to James Bond she was ‘a cheerily amoral little thing, a sort of doll who slept with everyone’. He was upset to hear about her death.

Somehow Fleming knew of Bond's connection with the Secret Service. Bond confirms that he pulled his leg about it. ‘It was wrong of him of course, but I imagine I must have been a little pompous about it all. Ian couldn't stand pomposity.’

Fleming apart, the most important person Bond met at Kitzbühel was a man called Oberhauser. Fleming, who knew him, wrote of his tragic death in
Octopussy
, and quotes Bond's words to his murderer, the pathetic Major Smythe – ‘Oberhauser was a friend of mine. He taught me to ski before the war, when I was in my teens. He was a wonderful man. He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one.’

As Bond says, the idea of Oberhauser teaching him to ski is a typical piece of Fleming exaggeration. As Fleming knew quite well, Bond could already ski – in his own rough and ready but effective way. But it was Oberhauser, an Olympic medallist and by far the soundest ski instructor in the town, who taught James Bond a little of the style he lacked. Also, as Fleming says, this Tyrolean succeeded in doing what no one else had done for Bond. He got through to him, persuaded him to talk and acted as a sort of father with advice. Bond believes he all but saved his life.

Oberhauser was a realist. Like Bond, he had often found himself face to face with death as he climbed the mountains. He had lost comrades, friends and those he loved; and yet his zest for life was undefeated. Bond talked to him of Fedyeov, of Marthe de Brandt and finally about his parents. The Austrian was sympathetic, but, as he said to Bond, ‘so what?’ Did he intend to live his life out with a load of guilt? Would he continually blame himself whenever things went wrong? If he went on like this, the past would finally destroy him.

What did he suggest, asked Bond, and Oberhauser pointed to the mountains.

‘Climb them,’ he said, ‘and don't look back.’

During those weeks in Kitzbühel, Bond took his advice, and once again he felt the joy and the renewal of a whole day's climbing. By the time he returned to Paris, the mountains and Oberhauser's words had done their work. Bond had evolved a conscious plan for living. His aim was now to live entirely for the moment and to enjoy the pleasures of his calling to the uttermost. There would be no more remorse and no regret. He would turn himself into what Fleming called ‘a lethal instrument’.

With Maddox's consent he left Geneva, and took a flat in Paris. It was a strange life he was making for himself. Three times a week he used to shoot on the revolver range of the Garde Mobile on the Boulevarde Lans. He swam in the Olympic pool at Vincennes. Kiebermann, the European judo champion, taught him unarmed combat at the Montparnasse Gymnasium. And twice a week he played expensive bridge with Maddox at the fashionable Club Fevrier. He rarely lost. His sexual needs were satisfied by several wealthy married women. It was an iron-clad routine.

Behind it all, Bond was attempting to destroy the softness and weaknesses that were in him. Usually it worked, but he was always conscious of his private enemies. Fleming described him getting sentimental when he heard
La Vie en Rose
, and there were similar occasions that Fleming never heard of. Sometimes, however hard he tried, his memory and his imagination tortured him. And always in the night there was the hideous fear of cracking. He describes himself as ‘old before my time’. He was cynical and bored, and always in the background lurked something worse than any enemy – world weariness.

But nobody knew anything of this. Outwardly Bond was a young man to be envied – rich, handsome and invulnerable, living a life which would apparently go on for ever. It continued through 1939 like this – then in August, as the German armies massed on the Polish frontiers, he took his favourite married woman off on what he knew would be their final holiday. Cramming the Bentley with champagne, he drove her south. They ended at the Eden Roc at Antibes. Jean Cocteau had just left – the hotel was nearly empty. They had a memorable two weeks. The girl was beautiful, the weather perfect. Bond felt his youth was almost over. When the month ended, she had to join her husband and her children. Bond returned to Paris where he found a movement order from Headquarters to return to London. The big building overlooking Regent's Park was claiming him.