The James Bond Anthology

8 | PASS THE CANAPÉS!

The cars began rolling up. Scaramanga was in evidence. He switched a careful smile of welcome on and off. No hands were shaken. The host was greeted either as ‘Pistol’ or ‘Mr S’ except by Mr Hendriks, who called him nothing.

Bond stood within earshot of the desk and fitted the names to the men. In general appearance they were all much of a muchness. Dark-faced, clean-shaven, around five feet six, hard-eyed above thinly smiling mouths, curt of speech to the manager. They all held firmly on to their brief-cases when the bell boys tried to add them to the luggage on the rubber-tyred barrows. They dispersed to their rooms along the East Wing. Bond took out his list and added hat-check notations to each one except Hendriks who was clearly etched in Bond’s memory. Gengerella became ‘Italian origin, mean, pursed mouth’; Rotkopf, ‘Thick neck, totally bald, Jew’; Binion, ‘bat ears, scar down left cheek, limp’; Garfinkel, ‘the toughest. Bad teeth, gun under right armpit’; and, finally, Paradise, ‘Showman type, cocky, false smile, diamond ring’ .

Scaramanga came up. ‘What you writing?’

‘Just notes to remember them by.’

‘Gimme.’ Scaramanga held out a demanding hand.

Bond gave him the list.

Scaramanga ran his eyes down it. He handed it back. ‘Fair enough. But you needn’t have mentioned the only gun you noticed. They’ll all be protected. Except Hendriks, I guess. These kinda guys are nervous when they move abroad.’

‘What of?’

Scaramanga shrugged. ‘Mebbe the natives.’

‘The last people who worried about the natives were the redcoats, perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘Who cares? See you in the bar around twelve. I’ll be introducing you as my Personal Assistant.’

‘That’ll be fine.’

Scaramanga’s brows came together. Bond strolled off in the direction of his bedroom. He proposed to needle this man, and go on needling until it came to a fight. For the time being the other man would probably take it because it seemed he needed Bond. But there would come a moment, probably on an occasion when there were witnesses, when his vanity would be so sharply pricked that he would draw. Then Bond would have a small edge, for it would be he who had thrown down the glove. The tactic was a crude one, but Bond could think of no other.

Bond verified that his room had been searched at some time during the morning – and by an expert. He always used a Hoffritz safety razor patterned on the old-fashioned heavy-toothed Gillette type. His American friend Felix Leiter had once bought him one in New York to prove that they were the best, and Bond had stayed with them. The handle of a safety razor is a reasonably sophisticated hideout for the minor tools of espionage – codes, microdot developers, cyanide and other pills. That morning Bond had set a minute nick on the screw base of the handle in line with the ‘Z’ of the maker’s name engraved on the shaft. The nick was now a millimetre to the right of the ‘Z’. None of his other little traps, handkerchiefs with indelible dots in particular places arranged in a certain order, the angle of his suitcase with the wall of the wardrobe, the semi-extracted lining of the breast pocket of his spare suit, the particular symmetry of certain dents in his tube of Maclean’s toothpaste, had been bungled or disturbed. They all might have been by a meticulous servant, a trained valet. But Jamaican servants, for all their charm and willingness, are not of this calibre. No. Between nine and ten, when Bond was doing his rounds and was well away from the hotel, his room had received a thorough going-over by someone who knew his business.

Bond was pleased. It was good to know that the fight was well and truly joined. If he found a chance of making a foray into No. 20, he hoped that he would do better. He took a shower. Afterwards, as he brushed his hair, he looked at himself in the mirror with inquiry. He was feeling a hundred per cent fit, but he remembered the dull, lacklustre eyes that had looked back at him when he shaved after first entering The Park – the tense, preoccupied expression on his face. Now the grey-blue eyes looked back at him from the tanned face with the brilliant glint of suppressed excitement and accurate focus of the old days. He smiled ironically back at the introspective scrutiny that so many people make of themselves before a race, a contest of wits, a trial of some sort. He had no excuses. He was ready to go.

The bar was through a brass-studded leather door opposite the lobby to the conference room. It was – in the fashion – a mock-English public-house saloon bar with luxury accessories. The scrubbed wooden chairs and benches had foam-rubber squabs in red leather. Behind the bar, the tankards were of silver, or simulated silver, instead of pewter. The hunting prints, copper and brass hunting horns, muskets and powder horns, on the walls could have come from the Parker Galleries in London. Instead of tankards of beer, bottles of champagne in antique coolers stood on the tables and, instead of yokels, the hoods stood around in what looked like Brooks Brothers ‘tropical’ attire and carefully sipped their drinks while ‘Mine Host’ leant against the polished mahogany bar and twirled his golden gun round and round on the first finger of his right hand like the snide poker cheat out of an old Western.

As the door closed behind Bond with a pressurised sigh, the golden gun halted in mid-whirl and sighted on Bond’s stomach. ‘Fellers,’ said Scaramanga, mock boisterous, ‘meet my Personal Assistant, Mr Mark Hazard, from London, England. He’s come along to make things run smoothly over this week-end. Mark, come over and meet the gang and pass round the canapés.’ He lowered the gun and shoved it into his waistband.

James Bond stitched a Personal Assistant smile on his face and walked up to the bar. Perhaps because he was an Englishman, there was a round of handshaking. The red-coated barman asked him what he would have and he said, ‘Some pink gin. Plenty of bitters. Beefeater’s.’ There was desultory talk about the relative merits of gins. Everyone else seemed to be drinking champagne except Mr Hendriks who stood away from the group and nursed a Schweppes Bitter Lemon. Bond moved among the men. He made small talk about their flight, the weather in the States, the beauties of Jamaica. He wanted to fit the voices to the names. He gravitated towards Mr Hendriks. ‘Seems we’re the only two Europeans here. Gather you’re from Holland. Often passed through. Never stayed there long. Beautiful country.’

The very pale blue eyes regarded Bond unenthusiastically. ‘Sank you.’

‘What part do you come from?’

‘Den Haag.’

‘Have you lived there long?’

‘Many, many years.’

‘Beautiful town.’

‘Sank you.’

‘Is this your first visit to Jamaica?’

‘No.’

‘How do you like it?’

‘It is a beautiful place.’

Bond nearly said, ‘Sank you.’ He smiled encouragingly at Mr Hendriks as much as to say, ‘I’ve made all the running so far. Now you say something.’

Mr Hendriks looked past Bond’s right ear at nothing. The pressure of the silence built up. Mr Hendriks shifted his weight from one foot to the other and finally broke down. His eyes shifted and looked thoughtfully at Bond. ‘And you. You are from London, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Do you know it?’

‘I have been there, yes.’

‘Where do you usually stay?’

There was hesitation. ‘With friends.’

‘That must be convenient.’

‘Pliss?’

‘I mean it’s pleasant to have friends in a foreign town. Hotels are so much alike.’

‘I have not found this. Excuse pliss.’ With a Germanic bob of the head Mr Hendriks moved decisively away from Bond and went up to Scaramanga, who was still lounging in solitary splendour at the bar. Mr Hendriks said something. His words acted like a command on the other man. Mr Scaramanga straightened himself and followed Mr Hendriks into a far corner of the room. He stood and listened with deference as Mr Hendriks talked rapidly in a low tone.

Bond, joining the other men, was interested. It was his guess that no other man in the room could have buttonholed Scaramanga with so much authority. He noticed that many fleeting glances were cast in the direction of the couple apart. For Bond’s money, this was either the Mafia or K.G.B. Probably even the other five wouldn’t know which, but they would certainly recognize the secret smell of ‘The Machine’ which Mr Hendriks exuded so strongly.

Luncheon was announced. The Jamaican head waiter hovered between two richly prepared tables. There were place cards. Bond found that, while Scaramanga was host at one of them, he himself was at the head of the other table between Mr Paradise and Mr Rotkopf. As he expected, Mr Paradise was the better value of the two and, as they went through the conventional shrimp cocktail, steak, fruit salad of the Americanized hotel abroad, Bond cheerfully got himself involved in an argument about the odds at roulette when there are one zero or two. Mr Rotkopf’s only contribution was to say, through a mouthful of steak and French fries, that he had once tried three zeros at the Black Cat Casino in Miami but that the experiment had failed. Mr Paradise said that so it should have. ‘You got to let the suckers win sometimes, Ruby, or they won’t come back. Sure, you can squeeze the juice out of them, but you oughta leave them the pips. Like with my slots. I tell the customers, don’t be too greedy. Don’t set’ em at thirty per cent for the house. Set’ em at twenty. You ever heard of Mr J. B. Morgan turning down a net profit of twenty per cent? Hell, no! So why try and be smarter than guys like that?’

Mr Rotkopf said sourly, ‘You got to make big profits to put against a bum steer like this.’ He waved a hand. ‘If you ask me,’ he held up a bit of steak on his fork, ‘you’re eating the only money you’re going to see out of this dump at this minute.’

Mr Paradise leaned across the table and said softly, ‘You know something?’

Mr Rotkopf said, ‘I always told my money that the bindweed would get this place. The dam’ fools wouldn’t listen. And look where we are in three years! Second mortgage nearly run out and we’ve only got one storey up. What I say is …’

The argument went off into the realms of high finance. At the next-door table there was not even this amount of animation. Scaramanga was a man of few words. There were clearly none available for social occasions. Opposite him, Mr Hendriks exuded a silence as thick as Gouda cheese. The three hoods addressed an occasional glum sentence to anyone who would listen. James Bond wondered how Scaramanga was going to electrify this unpromising company into ‘having a good time’.

Luncheon broke up and the company dispersed to their rooms. James Bond wandered round to the back of the hotel and found a discarded shingle on a rubbish dump. It was blazing hot under the afternoon sun, but the Doctor’s wind was blowing in from the sea. For all its air-conditioning, there was something grim about the impersonal grey and white of Bond’s bedroom. Bond walked along the shore, took off his coat and tie and sat in the shade of a bush of sea grapes and watched the fiddler crabs about their minuscule business in the sand while he whittled two chunky wedges out of the Jamaican cedar. Then he closed his eyes and thought about Mary Goodnight. She would now be having her siesta in some villa on the outskirts of Kingston. It would probably be high up in the Blue Mountains for the coolness. In Bond’s imagination, she would be lying on her bed under a mosquito net. Because of the heat, she would have nothing on, and one could see only an ivory and gold shape through the fabric of the net. But one would know that there were small beads of sweat on her upper lip and between her breasts and the fringes of the golden hair would be damp. Bond took off his clothes and lifted up the corner of the mosquito net, not wanting to wake her until he had fitted himself against her thighs. But she turned, in half sleep, towards him and held out her arms. ‘James …’

Under the sea-grape bush, a hundred and twenty miles away from the scene of the dream, James Bond’s head came up with a jerk. He looked quickly, guiltily, at his watch. 3.30. He went off to his room and had a cold shower, verified that his cedar wedges would do what they were meant to do, and strolled down the corridor to the lobby.

The manager with the neat suit and neat face came out from behind his desk. ‘Er, Mr Hazard.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think you’ve met my assistant, Mr Travis.’

‘No, I don’t think I have.’

‘Would you care to step into the office for a moment and shake him by the hand?’

‘Later perhaps. We’ve got this conference on in a few minutes.’

The neat man came a step closer. He said quietly, ‘He particularly wants to meet you, Mr – er – Bond.’

Bond cursed himself. This was always happening in his particular trade. You were looking in the dark for a beetle with red wings. Your eyes were focused for that particular pattern on the bark of the tree. You didn’t notice the moth with cryptic colouring that crouched quietly near by, itself like a piece of the bark, itself just as important to the collector. The focus of your eyes was too narrow. Your mind was too concentrated. You were using 1 x 100 magnification and your 1 x 10 was not in focus. Bond looked at the man with the recognition that exists between crooks, between homosexuals, between secret agents. It is the look common to men bound by secrecy – by common trouble. ‘Better make it quick.’

The neat man stepped behind his desk and opened a door. Bond went in and the neat man closed the door behind them. A tall, slim man was standing at a filing cabinet. He turned. He had a lean, bronzed Texan face under an unruly mop of straight, fair hair, and, instead of a right hand, a bright steel hook. Bond stopped in his tracks. His face split into a smile broader than he had smiled for what? Was it three years or four? He said, ‘You goddamned, lousy crook. What in hell are you doing here?’ He went up to the man and hit him hard on the biceps of the left arm.

The grin was slightly more creased than Bond remembered, but it was just as friendly and ironical. Mr Travis said, ‘The name is Leiter, Mr Felix Leiter. Temporary accountant on loan from Morgan Guarantee Trust to the Thunderbird Hotel. We’re just checking up on your credit rating, Mr Hazard. Would you kindly, in your royal parlance, extract your finger, and give me some evidence that you are who you claim to be?’