The James Bond Anthology

19 | THE MOUTH OF MARILYN MONROE

The car sped through the deserted streets, past shadowy mosques from which dazzling minarets lanced up towards the three-quarter moon, under the ruined Aqueduct and across the Ataturk Boulevard and north of the barred entrances to the Grand Bazaar. At the Column of Constantine the car turned right, through mean twisting streets that smelled of garbage, and finally debouched into a long ornamental square in which three stone columns fired themselves like a battery of space-rockets into the spangled sky.

‘Slow,’ said Kerim softly. They crept round the square under the shadow of the lime trees. Down a street on the east side, the lighthouse below the Seraglio Palace gave them a great yellow wink.

‘Stop.’

The car pulled up in the darkness under the limes. Kerim reached for the door handle. ‘We shan’t be long, James. You sit up front in the driver’s seat and if a policeman comes along just say “Ben Bey Kerim’in ortagiyim”. Can you remember that? It means “I am Kerim Bey’s partner”. They’ll leave you alone.’

Bond snorted. ‘Thanks very much. But you’ll be surprised to hear I’m coming with you. You’re bound to get into trouble without me. Anyway I’m damned if I’m going to sit here trying to bluff policemen. The worst of learning one good phrase is that it sounds as if one knew the language. The policeman will come back with a barrage of Turkish and when I can’t answer he’ll smell a rat. Don’t argue, Darko.’

‘Well, don’t blame me if you don’t like this.’ Kerim’s voice was embarrassed. ‘It’s going to be a straight killing in cold blood. In my country you let sleeping dogs lie, but when they wake up and bite, you shoot them. You don’t offer them a duel. All right?’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Bond. ‘I’ve got one bullet left in case you miss.’

‘Come on then,’ said Kerim reluctantly. ‘We’ve got quite a walk. The other two will be going another way.’

Kerim took a long walking-stick from the chauffeur, and a leather case. He slung them over his shoulder and they started off down the street into the yellow wink of the lighthouse. Their footsteps echoed hollowly back at them from the iron-shuttered shop frontages. There was not a soul in sight, not a cat, and Bond was glad he was not walking alone down this long street towards the distant baleful eye.

From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population. His instinct told him, as it has told other travellers, that Istanbul was a town he would be glad to get out of alive.

They came to a narrow stinking alley that dived steeply down the hill to their right. Kerim turned into it and started gingerly down its cobbled surface. ‘Watch your feet,’ he said softly. ‘Garbage is a polite word for what my charming people throw into their streets.’

The moon shone whitely down the moist river of cobbles. Bond kept his mouth shut and breathed through his nose. He put his feet down one after the other, flat-footedly, and with his knees bent, as if he was walking down a snow-slope. He thought of his bed in the hotel and of the comfortable cushions of the car under the sweetly smelling lime trees, and he wondered how many more kinds of dreadful stench he was going to run into during his present assignment.

They stopped at the bottom of the alley. Kerim turned to him with a broad white grin. He pointed upwards at a towering block of black shadow. ‘Mosque of Sultan Ahmet. Famous Byzantine frescoes. Sorry I haven’t got time to show you more of the beauties of my country.’ Without waiting for Bond’s reply, he cut off to the right and along a dusty boulevard, lined with cheap shops, that sloped down towards the distant glint that was the Sea of Marmara. For ten minutes they walked in silence. Then Kerim slowed and beckoned Bond into the shadows.

‘This will be a simple operation,’ he said softly. ‘Krilencu lives down there, beside the railway line.’ He gestured vaguely towards a cluster of red and green lights at the end of the boulevard. ‘He hides out in a shack behind a bill-hoarding. There is a front door to the shack. Also a trap-door to the street through the hoarding. He thinks no one knows of this. My two men will go in at the front door. He will slip out through the hoarding. Then I shoot him. All right?’

‘If you say so.’

They walked on down the boulevard, keeping close to the wall. After ten minutes, they came in sight of the twenty-foot-high hoarding that formed a facing wall to the T intersection at the bottom of the street. The moon was behind the hoarding and its face in the shadow. Now Kerim walked even more carefully, putting each foot softly in front of him. About a hundred yards from the hoarding the shadows ended and the moon blazed whitely down on the intersection. Kerim stopped in the last dark doorway and stationed Bond in front of him, up against his chest. ‘Now we must wait,’ he whispered. Bond heard Kerim fiddling behind him. There came a soft plop as the lid of the leather case came off. A thin, heavy steel tube, about two feet long, with a bulge at each end, was pressed into Bond’s hand. ‘Sniperscope. German model,’ whispered Kerim. ‘Infra-red lens. Sees in the dark. Have a look at that big film advertisement over there. That face. Just below the nose. You’ll see the outline of a trap-door. In direct line down from the signal box.’

Bond rested his forearm against the door jamb and raised the tube to his right eye. He focused it on the patch of black shadow opposite. Slowly the black dissolved into grey. The outline of a huge woman’s face and some lettering appeared. Now Bond could read the lettering. It said: NIYAGARA. MARILYN MONROE VE JOSEPH COTTEN and underneath, the cartoon feature, BONZO FUTBOLOU. Bond inched the glass down the vast pile of Marilyn Monroe’s hair, and the cliff of forehead, and down the two feet of nose to the cavernous nostrils. A faint square showed in the poster. It ran from below the nose into the great alluring curve of the lips. It was about three feet deep. From it, there would be a longish drop to the ground.

Behind Bond there sounded a series of soft clicks. Kerim held forward his walking-stick. As Bond had supposed, it was a gun, a rifle, with a skeleton butt which was also a twist breech. The squat bulge of a silencer had taken the place of the rubber tip.

‘Barrel from the new 88 Winchester,’ whispered Kerim proudly. ‘Put together for me by a man in Ankara. Takes the .308 cartridge. The short one. Three of them. Give me the glass. I want to get that trap-door lined up before my men go in at the front. Mind if I use your shoulder as a rest?’

‘All right.’ Bond handed Kerim the Sniperscope. Kerim clipped it to the top of the barrel and slid the gun along Bond’s shoulder.

‘Got it,’ whispered Kerim. ‘Where Vavra said. He’s a good man that.’ He lowered his gun just as two policemen appeared at the right-hand corner of the intersection. Bond stiffened.

‘It’s all right,’ whispered Kerim. ‘That’s my boy and the chauffeur.’ He put two fingers in his mouth. A very quick, very low-pitched whistle sounded for a fraction of a second. One of the policemen lifted his hand to the back of his neck. The two policemen turned and walked away, their boots ringing loudly on the paving stones.

‘Few minutes more,’ whispered Kerim. ‘They’ve got to get round the back of that hoarding.’ Bond felt the heavy barrel of the gun slip into place along his right shoulder.

The moonstruck silence was broken by a loud iron clang from the signal box behind the hoarding. One of the signal arms dropped. A green pinpoint of light showed among the cluster of reds. There was a soft slow rumble in the distance, away to the left by Seraglio Point. It came closer and sorted itself into the heavy pant of an engine and the grinding clangour of a string of badly coupled goods trucks. A faint yellow glimmer shone along the embankment to the left. The engine came labouring into view above the hoarding.

The train slowly clanked by on its hundred-mile journey to the Greek frontier, a broken black silhouette against the silver sea, and the heavy cloud of smoke from its cheap fuel drifted towards them on the still air. As the red light on the brake van glimmered briefly and disappeared, there came the deeper rumble as the engine entered a cutting, and then two harsh, mournful whoops as it whistled its approach to the little station of Buyuk, a mile further down the line.

The rumble of the train died away. Bond felt the gun press deeper into his shoulder. He strained his eyes into the target of shadow. In the centre of it, a deeper square of blackness showed.

Bond cautiously lifted his left hand to shade his eyes from the moon. There came a hiss of breath from behind his right ear. ‘He’s coming.’

Out of the mouth of the huge, shadowed poster, between the great violet lips, half-open in ecstasy, the dark shape of a man emerged and hung down like a worm from the mouth of a corpse.

The man dropped. A ship going up towards the Bosphorus growled in the night like a sleepless animal in a zoo. Bond felt a prickle of sweat on his forehead. The barrel of the rifle depressed as the man stepped softly off the pavement towards them.

When he’s at the edge of the shadow, he’ll start to run, thought Bond. You damn fool, get the sights further down.

Now. The man bent for a quick sprint across the dazzling white street. He was coming out of the shadow. His right leg was bent forward and his shoulder was twisted to give him momentum.

At Bond’s ear there was the clunk of an axe hitting into a tree-trunk. The man dived forward, his arms outstretched. There was a sharp ‘tok’ as his chin or his forehead hit the ground.

An empty cartridge tinkled down at Bond’s feet. He heard the click of the next round going into the chamber.

The man’s fingers scrabbled briefly at the cobbles. His shoes knocked on the road. Then he lay absolutely still.

Kerim grunted. The rifle came down off Bond’s shoulder, Bond listened to the noises of Kerim folding up the gun and putting away the Sniperscope in its leather case.

Bond looked away from the sprawling figure in the road, the figure of the man who had been, but was no more. He had a moment of resentment against the life that made him witness these things. The resentment was not against Kerim. Kerim had twice been this man’s target. In a way it had been a long duel, in which the man had fired twice to Kerim’s once. But Kerim was the cleverer, cooler man, and the luckier, and that had been that. But Bond had never killed in cold blood, and he hadn’t liked watching, and helping, someone else do it.

Kerim silently took his arm. They walked slowly away from the scene and back the way they had come.

Kerim seemed to sense Bond’s thoughts. ‘Life is full of death, my friend,’ he said philosophically. ‘And sometimes one is made the instrument of death. I do not regret killing that man. Nor would I regret killing any of those Russians we saw in that office today. They are hard people. With them, what you don’t get from strength, you won’t get from mercy. They are all the same, the Russians. I wish your government would realize it and be strong with them. Just an occasional little lesson in manners like I have taught them tonight.’

‘In power politics, one doesn’t often have the chance of being as quick and neat as you were tonight, Darko. And don’t forget it’s only one of their satellites you’ve punished, one of the men they always find to do their dirty work. Mark you,’ said Bond, ‘I quite agree about the Russians. They simply don’t understand the carrot. Only the stick has any effect. Basically they’re masochists. They love the knout. That’s why they were so happy under Stalin. He gave it them. I’m not sure how they’re going to react to the scraps of carrot they’re being fed by Khrushchev and Co. As for England, the trouble today is that carrots for all are the fashion. At home and abroad. We don’t show teeth any more – only gums.’

Kerim laughed harshly, but made no comment. They were climbing back up the stinking alley and there was no breath for talk. They rested at the top and then walked slowly towards the trees of the Hippodrome Square.

‘So you forgive me for today?’ It was odd to hear the longing for reassurance in the big man’s usually boisterous voice.

‘Forgive you? Forgive what? Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was affection in Bond’s voice. ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re doing it. I’ve been very impressed. You’ve got a wonderful set-up here. I’m the one who ought to apologize. I seem to have brought a great deal of trouble down on your head. And you’ve dealt with it. I’ve just tagged along behind. And I’ve got absolutely nowhere with my main job. M. will be getting pretty impatient. Perhaps there’ll be some sort of message at the hotel.’

But when Kerim took Bond back to the hotel and went with him to the desk there was nothing for Bond. Kerim clapped him on the back. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it. I will send the car in the morning and if nothing has happened I will think of some more little adventures to pass the time. Clean your gun and sleep on it. You both deserve a rest.’

Bond climbed the few stairs and unlocked his door and locked and bolted it behind him. Moonlight filtered through the curtains. He walked across and turned on the pink-shaded lights on the dressing-table. He stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom and stood for a few minutes under the shower. He thought how much more eventful Saturday the fourteenth had been than Friday the thirteenth. He cleaned his teeth and gargled with a sharp mouthwash to get rid of the taste of the day and turned off the bathroom light and went back into the bedroom.

Bond drew aside one curtain and opened wide the tall windows and stood, holding the curtains open and looking out across the great boomerang curve of water under the riding moon. The night breeze felt wonderfully cool on his naked body. He looked at his watch. It said two o’clock.

Bond gave a shuddering yawn. He let the curtains drop back into place. He bent to switch off the lights on the dressing-table. Suddenly he stiffened and his heart missed a beat.

There had been a nervous giggle from the shadows at the back of the room. A girl’s voice said, ‘Poor Mister Bond. You must be tired. Come to bed.’