The James Bond Anthology

12 | TO SLEEP – PERCHANCE TO DIE!

While Sluggsy made for the back door and went out into the night, the thin man came slowly over to us. He leaned against the edge of the counter. ‘Okay, folks. Break it up. It’s midnight. We’re turning off the electricity. My friend’s getting emergency oil-lamps from the storehouse. No sense wasting juice. Mr Sanguinetti’s orders.’ The words were friendly and reasonable. Had they decided to give up their plans, whatever they were, because of this man Bond? I doubted it. The thoughts that listening to James Bond’s story had driven away came flooding back. I was going to have to sleep with these two men in the adjoining cabins on both sides of me. I must make my room impregnable. But they had the pass-key! I must get this man Bond to help me.

James Bond yawned hugely. ‘Well, I’ll certainly be glad of some sleep. Came a long way today and I’ve got plenty more to cover tomorrow. And you must be ready for bed, too, with all your worries.’

‘Come again, mister?’ The thin man’s eyes had sharpened.

‘It’s a pretty responsible job you’ve got.’

‘What job’s that?’

‘Oh, being an insurance assessor. On a valuable property like this. Must be worth half a million dollars, I’d say. By the way, are either of you bonded?’

‘No, we ain’t. Mr Sanguinetti don’t need to bond no one what works for him.’

‘That’s a great compliment to his staff. Must have good men. Quite right to put a lot of trust in them. Incidentally, what’s the name of his insurance company?’

‘Metro Accident and Home.’ The thin man still leaned relaxed against the counter, but the grey face was now tense. ‘Why? What’s it to you, mister? Suppose you quit with the double-talk and say what’s on your mind.’

Bond said carelessly, ‘Miss Michel here was telling me the motel hadn’t been doing so well. I gather the place hasn’t been accepted for membership in Quality Courts or Holiday Inns or Congress. Difficult to do much trade without one of those affiliations. And all this trouble to send up you fellows to count the spoons and turn off the electric light and so on.’ James Bond looked sympathetic. ‘Just crossed my mind that the business might be on the rocks. Too bad if it is. Nice set-up here, and a fine site.’

The red fleck that I had seen once, terribly, before was now in the thin man’s eyes. He said softly, ‘Just suppose you bag your lip, mister. I ain’t standin’ for no more limey cracks, get me? You suggestin’ this ain’t legit? Mebbe you think we set one up, huh?’

‘Now don’t burn yourself up, Mr Horowitz. No need to sing the weeps.’ James Bond smiled broadly. ‘You see I know the lingo, too.’ His smile suddenly went. ‘And I also know where it comes from. Now, do you get me?’

I suppose he meant this was gangster, jailbird language. The thin man certainly thought so. He looked startled, but now he had conquered his anger and he just said, ‘Okay, wise guy. I’ve got the photo. You gumshoes are all the same – looking for dirt where there ain’t none. Now, where in hell’s that pal of mine? C’mon. Let’s hit the pad.’

As we filed out through the back door, the lights went out. James Bond and I stopped, but the thin man went on along the covered way as if he could see in the dark. Sluggsy appeared round the corner of the building carrying two oil-lamps. He handed one to each of us. His naked face, yellow in the light, split into a grin. ‘Happy dreams, folks!’

James Bond followed me over to my cabin and came inside. He shut the door. ‘Damned if I know what they’re up to, but the first thing to do is see that you’re properly closed down for the night. Now then, let’s see.’ He prowled round the room, examining the window fastenings, inspecting the hinges on the door, estimating the size of the ventilator louvres. He seemed satisfied. He said, ‘There’s only the door. You say they’ve got the master key. We’ll wedge the door, and when I’ve gone just move the desk over as an extra barricade.’ He went into the bathroom, tore off strips of lavatory paper, moistened them and made them into firm wedges. He rammed several under the door, turned the handle and pulled. They held, but could have been shaken loose by ramming. He took the wedges out again and gave them to me. Then he put his hand to the belt of his trousers and took out a short, stumpy revolver. ‘Ever fired one of these things?’

I said I’d shot at rabbits with a long-barrelled .22 target pistol when I was young.

‘Well, this is a Smith and Wesson Police Positive. A real stopper. Remember to aim low. Hold your arm out straight like this.’ He showed me. ‘And try to squeeze the trigger and not snatch at it. But it won’t really matter. I’ll hear it and I’ll come running. Now remember. You’ve got absolute protection. The windows are good solid stuff and there’s no way of getting in between the glass slats, short of smashing them.’ He smiled. ‘Trust these motel designers. They know all there is to know about break-ins. These hoodlums won’t take a shot at you through them in the dark, but, just in case, leave your bed where it is and make up a camp bed with some cushions and bedding in that far corner on the floor. Put the gun under your pillow. Pull the desk in front of the door and balance the television set on the edge of it so that if anyone barges the door they knock it off. That’ll wake you and then you just fire a shot through the door, close to the handle, where the man will be standing, and listen for the squawk. Got it?’

I said yes, as happily as I could, and wished he would stay in the room with me. But I hadn’t the guts to ask him, and anyway he seemed to have his own plans.

He came up to me and kissed me gently on the lips. I was so surprised I just stood there. He said lightly, ‘I’m sorry, Viv, but you’re a beautiful girl. In those overalls you’re the prettiest garage-hand I’ve ever seen. Now don’t you worry. Get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on you.’

I threw my arms round his neck and kissed him back – hard, on the lips. I said, ‘You’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever met in my life. Thank you for being here. And please, James. Be careful! You haven’t seen them like I have. They’re really tough. Please don’t get hurt.’

He kissed me back, but only lightly, and I let go of him. He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve seen this sort before. Now you do all I told you and get off to sleep. ’Night, Viv.’

And then he had gone.

I stood for a moment looking at the closed door, and then I went and brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like hell – washed out, no make-up, and deep circles under my eyes. What a day! And now this! I mustn’t lose him! I mustn’t let him go! But I knew in my heart that I had to. He would go on alone and I would have to, too. No woman had ever held this man. None ever would. He was a solitary, a man who walked alone and kept his heart to himself. He would hate involvement. I sighed. All right. I would play it that way. I would let him go. I wouldn’t cry when he did. Not even afterwards. Wasn’t I the girl who had decided to operate without a heart?

Silly idiot! Silly, infatuated goose! This was a fine time to maunder like a girl in a woman’s magazine! I shook my head angrily and went into the bedroom and got on with what I had to do.

It was still blowing hard and the pine trees clashed fiercely outside my back window. The moon, filtering through high scudding clouds, lit up the two high squares of glass at each end of the room and shone eerily through the thin, red-patterned curtains. When the moon went behind the clouds, the blocks of blood-red photographer’s light went dark and there was only the meagre pool of yellow from the oil-lamp. Without the brightness of electricity, there was a nasty little movie-set feeling about the oblong room. The corners were dark and the room seemed to be waiting for a director to call people out of the shadows and tell them what to do.

I tried not to be nervous. I put my ears to the connecting walls to right and left, but across the space of the car-ports I could hear nothing. Before I had set up my barricade I had softly opened the door and gone out and looked round. There had been a glimmer of light from Numbers 8 and 10 and from James Bond’s Number 40 away down to the left. Everything had been peaceful, everything quiet. Now I stood in the middle of the room and had a last look round. I had done everything he had told me to do. I remembered the prayers I was going to say and I knelt down there and then on the carpet and said them. I thanked, but I also asked. Then I took two aspirin, turned down the light and blew across the glass chimney to put it out, and went over to my floor bed in the corner. After unzipping the front of my overalls and unlacing but not removing my shoes, I curled myself up in the blankets.

I never take aspirins or any other pills. These, after carefully reading the instructions, I had taken from the little first-aid kit my practical mind had told me to include in my scrap of luggage. I was anyway exhausted, beat to the wide, and the pills, to me as strong as morphia, soon sent me off into a delicious half-sleep in which there was no danger but only the dark, exciting face and the new-found knowledge that there really did exist such men. Soppier even than that, I remembered the first touch of his hand holding the lighter and thought carefully about each kiss separately, and then, but only after vaguely remembering the gun and slipping my hand under the pillow to make sure it was there, I went happily to sleep.

The next thing I knew I was wide awake. I lay for a moment remembering where I was. There was a lull in the wind and it was very quiet. I found I was lying on my back. That was what had awakened me! I lay for a moment looking across the room at the square of red high up on the opposite wall. The moon was out again. How deathly quiet it was! The silence was warm and embracing after the hours of storm. I began to feel drowsy and I turned over on my side so that I lay facing into the room. I closed my eyes. But, as sleep held out her hands to me again, something nagged at my mind. My eyes, before I had closed them, had noticed something unusual in the room. Unwillingly, I opened them again. It took minutes to recognize again what I had seen. The faintest chinks of light were shining from between the door frames of the clothes cupboard up against the opposite wall.

How stupid! I hadn’t closed the doors properly and the automatic ‘courtesy’ light inside hadn’t switched itself off. Reluctantly I got out of bed. What a bore! And then, after I had taken only two steps across the room, I suddenly remembered. But there wouldn’t be a light inside the cupboard! The electricity was switched off!

I stood for a moment, my hand up to my mouth, and then, as I turned to dive for the gun, the doors of the cupboard burst open and the crouching figure of Sluggsy darted out and, a flashlight in one hand and something swinging from the other, he was on top of me.

I think I gave a shrill scream, but perhaps it was only within me. The next moment something exploded against the side of my head and I felt myself crash to the floor. Then all was darkness.

My first sensations on coming round were of terrific heat and of being dragged along the ground. Then I smelled the burning and saw the flames and I tried to scream. I realized that nothing was coming out of my mouth but an animal whimpering, and I began to kick with my feet. But the hands held my ankles firmly and then suddenly, with painful bumps that added to the frightful pain in my head, I found myself being dragged into wet grass and tree branches. Suddenly my feet were laid down and there was a man on his knees beside me and his firm hand over my mouth. A voice close to my ear, James Bond’s voice, whispered urgently, ‘Don’t make a sound! Lie still! It’s all right. It’s me.’

I put a hand out to him and felt his shoulder. It was naked. I pressed it to reassure him and the hand came away from my mouth. He whispered, ‘Wait there! Don’t move! Be back in a second,’ and he slipped noiselessly away.

Noiselessly? It wouldn’t have mattered how much noise he made. There was a tremendous roar and crackle of flames behind me and orange light flickered against the trees. I got carefully to my knees and painfully turned my head. A great wall of flame extended down to my right all along the row of cabins. God, what he had saved me from! I felt my body and put my hands up to my hair. I was untouched. There was only the throbbing bruise at the back of my head. I found I could stand, and I got up and tried to think what had happened. But I could remember nothing after I had got hit. So they must have set fire to the place and James had somehow got to me in time and pulled me out into the trees at the back!

There was a rustle among the trees and he was beside me. He was wearing no shirt or coat, but there was some kind of harness across the sunburned, sweating chest that glistened in the light of the flames, and a heavy-looking automatic hung, butt down, below his left armpit. His eyes were bright with tension and excitement and his smoke-streaked face and tousled hair made him look piratical and rather frightening.

He smiled grimly. He nodded in the direction of the flames. ‘That’s the game. Burn the place down for the insurance. They’re just fixing the flames to reach the lobby building, sprinkling thermite dust along the covered way. I couldn’t care less. If I took them on now, I’d only be saving Mr Sanguinetti’s property for him. With us as witnesses, he won’t even smell the insurance. And he’ll be in jail. So we’ll just wait a bit and let him have a total loss on his books.’

I suddenly thought of my precious belongings. I said humbly, ‘Can we save the Vespa?’

‘It’s all right. You’ve only lost those glad-rags – if you left them in the bathroom. I got the gun when I got you, and I slung the saddle-bags out. I’ve just been salvaging the Vespa. It looks in good shape. I’ve made a cache of everything in the trees. Those car-ports will be the last things to go. They’ve got masonry on both sides. They’ve used thermite bombs in each of the cabins. Better than petrol. Less bulky and they leave no traces for the insurance sleuths.’

‘But you might have got burned!’

His smile flashed white in the shadows. ‘That’s why I took my coat off. I must look respectable in Washington.’

It didn’t seem funny to me. ‘But what about your shirt?’

There was a crash and a great shower of sparks way down the line of cabins. James Bond said, ‘There goes my shirt. Roof falling in on top of it.’ He paused and wiped his hand down his dirty sweating face so that the black smudged even worse. ‘I had a feeling something like this was going to happen. Perhaps I should have been more ready for it than I was. I could have gone and changed the wheel on my car, for instance. If I’d done that we could get out now. We could work our way round the end of the cabins and make a dash for it. Get to Lake George or Glens Falls and send the cops along. But I thought that if I fixed the car our friends would have an excuse to tell me to get moving. I could have refused, of course, or said that I wouldn’t go without you, but I thought that might lead to shooting. I’d be lucky to beat those two unless I shot first. And with me out of the picture, you’d have been back where we started. That would have been bad. You were a major part of their plan.’

‘I felt I was all along. I didn’t know why. I knew the way they were treating me meant that I didn’t matter, that I was expendable. What did they want to use me for?’

‘You were to have been the cause of the fire. The evidence for Sanguinetti would have been that the managers, this Phancey couple, and of course they’re in it up to their necks,’ – I remembered the way their attitude to me had changed on the last day; the way they too had treated me with contempt, as rubbish, as something that was to be thrown away – ‘they would say that they had told you to turn off the electricity – perfectly reasonable as the place was closing down – and use an oil-lamp for the last night. The remains of the oil-lamp would have been found. You had gone to sleep with the light on and somehow upset it. The whole place blazed up and that was that. The buildings had a lot of timber in them and the wind did the rest. My turning-up was a nuisance, but not more than that. My remains would have been found too – or at any rate my car and wrist watch and the metal from my bag. I don’t know what they’d have done about my gun and the one under your pillow. Those might have got them into trouble. The police would have checked the car with Canada and then the numbers of the guns with England and that would have identified me. So why was my other gun under your pillow? That might have made the police think. If we were, well, sort of lovers, why was I sleeping so far away from you? Perhaps we had both been very proper and slept as far apart as possible and I had insisted that you have one of my guns to protect a lonely girl in the night. I don’t know how they would have worked it out. But my guess is that our friends, once I told them I was a policeman, may have thought about guns and other incriminating hardware that wouldn’t be destroyed in the fire and might have waited a few hours and then gone in and raked about in the ashes to take care of that sort of trouble. They’d have been careful about their raking, and of their footprints in the cinders, of course. But then these people are pros.’ His mouth turned down. ‘By their standards, that is.’

‘But why didn’t they kill you?’

‘They did, or rather they thought they had. When I left you and went along to my cabin, I reckoned that if anything was going to happen to you they would get rid of me first. So I rigged up a dummy in my bed. A good one. I’ve done it before and I’ve got the trick. You mustn’t only have something that looks like a body in the bed. You can do that with pillows and towels and bedding. You must also have something that looks like hair on the pillow. I did that with handfuls of pine needles, just enough to make a dark clump on the pillow with the sheets drawn up to it – very artistic. Then I hung my shirt over the back of a chair beside the bed – another useful prop that conveys the idea that the man belonging to the shirt is inside the bed – and I left the oil-lamp burning low, close to the bed to help their marksmanship – if any. I put amateurish wedges under the door and propped a chair-back under the door handle to show a natural sense of precaution. Then I took my bag round to the back and waited in the trees.’ James Bond gave a sour laugh. ‘They gave me an hour and then they came so softly that I didn’t hear a thing. Then there was the bang of the door being forced and a series of quick clonks – they were using a silencer – and then the whole interior of the cabin went bright with the thermite. I thought I had been very clever, but it turned out I very nearly wasn’t clever enough. It took me almost five minutes to work my way up to your cabin through the trees. I wasn’t worried. I thought it would take them all that to get into your cabin and I was ready to break out in the open if I heard your gun. But some time this evening, probably when Sluggsy was making the cabin inspection you told me about, he had pick-axed a hole in the wall behind your clothes cupboard, leaving only the plasterboard lining to be cut through with a sharp knife. He may or may not have put the stone loosely back. I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t need to. There was no occasion for either of us to go into the car-port of Number 8, and no reason to. If you had been here alone, they would have seen to it that you kept away from there. Anyway, the first thing I knew was seeing the light of the thermite from your cabin. Then I ran like hell, dodging across the open back of the car-ports as I heard them coming back down the line, opening the doors of the cabins and tossing bombs in and then carefully shutting the doors to make it look tidy.’

During all this while, James Bond had been glancing from time to time at the roof of the lobby building that we could just see over the tops of the flaming cabins. Now he said casually, ‘They’ve set it going. I’ll have to get after them. How are you feeling, Viv? Any stuffing left? How’s the head?’

I said impatiently, ‘Oh, I’m all right. But James, do you have to go after them? Let them get away. What do they matter? You might get hurt.’

He said firmly, ‘No, darling. They almost killed both of us. Any minute now they may come back and find the Vespa gone. Then we’ll have lost the surprise factor. And I can’t let them get away with it. These are killers. They’ll be off killing someone else tomorrow.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘Besides, they ruined my shirt!’

‘Well, then you must let me help.’ I put my hand out to him. ‘And you will take care, won’t you? I can’t do without you. I don’t want to be alone again.’

He ignored my hand. He said, almost coldly, ‘Now don’t hang on my gun arm, there’s a good girl. This is something I’ve got to do. It’s just a job. Now,’ he handed me the Smith and Wesson, ‘you move quietly up in the trees to the car-port of Number 3. That’s in the dark and the wind’s blowing the fire the other way. You can watch from there without being seen. If I need help, I’ll know where to find you, so don’t budge. If I call, come running fast. If anything happens to me, get moving along the shore of the lake and work your way as far as you can. After this fire, there’ll be plenty of police along tomorrow, and you can smuggle yourself back and contact one of them. They’ll believe you. If they argue, tell them to ring up C.I.A. in Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency, and you’ll see plenty of action. Just say who I was. I’ve got a number in my outfit – sort of recognition number. It’s 007. Try not to forget it.’