Текст книги "The James Bond Anthology"

Автор книги: Ian Fleming

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 180 (всего у книги 190 страниц)

The man’s teeth cut through the rope. He wiped his mouth on a napkin already streaked with tomato sauce, belched sonorously and said: ‘Santos is never wrong about these things. He has a nose for spies. That is why I chose him as the permanent tail for that bastard Kristatos. And who else but a spy would think of spending an evening with the pig? But we will make sure.’ The man took out of his pocket one of those cheap tin snappers that are sometimes given out, with paper hats and whistles, on carnival nights. It gave one sharp click. The maî-tre d’hôtel, on the far side of the room, stopped whatever he was doing and hurried over.

‘Si, padrone.’

The man beckoned. The maître d’hôtel leant over and received the whispered instructions. He nodded briefly, walked over to a door near the kitchens marked UFFICIO, and went in and closed the door behind him.

Phase by phase, in a series of minute moves, an exercise that had long been perfected was then smoothly put into effect. The man near the caisse munched his spaghetti and critically observed each step in the operation as if it had been a fast game of chess.

The maître d’hôtel came out of the door marked UFFICIO, hurried across the restaurant and said loudly to his No. 2: ‘An extra table for four. Immediately.’ The No. 2 gave him a direct look and nodded. He followed the maître d’hôtel over to a space adjoining Bond’s table, clicked his fingers for help, borrowed a chair from one table, a chair from another table and, with a bow and an apology, the spare chair from Bond’s table. The fourth chair was being carried over from the direction of the door marked UFFICIO by the maître d’hôtel. He placed it square with the others, a table was lowered into the middle and glass and cutlery were deftly laid. The maître d’hôtel frowned. ‘But you have laid a table for four. I said three – for three people.’ He casually took the chair he had himself brought to the table and switched it to Bond’s table. He gave a wave of the hand to dismiss his helpers and everyone dispersed about their business.

The innocent little flurry of restaurant movement had taken about a minute. An innocuous trio of Italians came into the restaurant. The maître d’hôtel greeted them personally and bowed them to the new table, and the gambit was completed.

Bond had hardly been conscious of it. Kristatos returned from whatever business he had been about, their food came and they got on with the meal.

While they ate they talked about nothing – the election chances in Italy, the latest Alfa Romeo, Italian shoes compared with English. Kristatos talked well. He seemed to know the inside story of everything. He gave information so casually that it did not sound like bluff. He spoke his own kind of English with an occasional phrase borrowed from other languages. It made a lively mixture. Bond was interested and amused. Kristatos was a tough insider – a useful man. Bond was not surprised that the American Intelligence people found him good value.

Coffee came, Kristatos lit a thin black cigar and talked through it, the cigar jumping up and down between the thin straight lips. He put both hands flat on the table in front of him. He looked at the table-cloth between them and said softly: ‘This pizniss. I will play with you. To now I have only played with the Americans. I have not told them what I am about to tell you. There was no requirement. This machina does not operate with America. These things are closely regulated. This machina operates only with England. Yes? Capito?’

‘I understand. Everyone has his own territory. It’s the usual way in these things.’

‘Exact. Now, before I give you the informations, like good commercials we make the terms. Yes?’

‘Of course.’

Signor Kristatos examined the table-cloth more closely. ‘I wish for ten thousand dollars American, in paper of small sizes, by tomorrow lunch-time. When you have destroyed the machina I wish for a further twenty thousand.’ Signor Kristatos briefly raised his eyes and surveyed Bond’s face. ‘I am not greedy. I do not take all your funds, isn’t it?’

‘The price is satisfactory’

‘Bueno. Second term. There is no telling where you get these informations from. Even if you are beaten.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Third term. The head of this machina is a bad man.’ Signor Kristatos paused and looked up. The black eyes held a red glint. The clenched dry lips pulled away from the cigar to let the words out. ‘He is to be destrutto – killed.’

Bond sat back. He gazed quizzically at the other man who now leaned slightly forward over the table, waiting. So the wheels had now shown within the wheels! This was a private vendetta of some sort. Kristatos wanted to get himself a gunman. And he was not paying the gunman, the gunman was paying him for the privilege of disposing of an enemy. Not bad! The fixer was certainly working on a big fix this time – using the Secret Service to pay off his private scores. Bond said softly: ‘Why?’

Signor Kristatos said indifferently: ‘No questions catch no lies.’

Bond drank down his coffee. It was the usual story of big syndicate crime. You never saw more than the tip of the iceberg. But what did that matter to him? He had been sent to do one specific job. If his success benefited others, nobody, least of all M., could care less. Bond had been told to destroy the machine. If this unnamed man was the machine, it would be merely carrying out orders to destroy the man. Bond said: ‘I cannot promise that. You must see that. All I can say is that if the man tries to destroy me, I will destroy him.’

Signor Kristatos took a toothpick out of the holder, stripped off the paper and set about cleaning his finger-nails. When he had finished one hand he looked up. He said: ‘I do not often gamble on incertitudes. This time I will do so because it is you who are paying me, and not me you. Is all right? So now I will give you the informations. Then you are alone – solo. Tomorrow night I fly to Karachi. I have important pizniss there. I can only give you the informations. After that you run with the ball and –’ he threw the dirty toothpick down on the table – ‘Che sera, sera.’

‘All right.’

Signor Kristatos edged his chair nearer to Bond. He spoke softly and quickly. He gave specimen dates and names to document his narrative. He never hesitated for a fact and he did not waste time on irrelevant detail. It was a short story and a pithy one. There were two thousand American gangsters in the country – Italian-Americans who had been convicted and expelled from the United States. These men were in a bad way. They were on the blackest of all police lists and, because of their records, their own people were wary of employing them. A hundred of the toughest among them had pooled their funds and small groups from this elite had moved to Beirut, Istanbul, Tangier and Macao – the great smuggling centres of the world. A further large section acted as couriers, and the bosses had acquired, through nominees, a small and respectable pharmaceutical business in Milan. To this centre the outlying groups smuggled opium and its derivatives. They used small craft across the Mediterranean, a group of stewards in an Italian charter airline and, as a regular weekly source of supply, the through carriage of the Orient Express in which whole sections of bogus upholstery were fitted by bribed members of the train cleaners in Istanbul. The Milan firm – Pharmacia Colomba S.A. – acted as a clearing-house and as a convenient centre for breaking down the raw opium into heroin. Thence the couriers, using innocent motor-cars of various makes, ran a delivery service to the middlemen in England.

Bond interrupted. ‘Our Customs are pretty good at spotting that sort of traffic. There aren’t many hiding-places in a car they don’t know about. Where do these men carry the stuff?’

‘Always in the spare wheel. You can carry twenty thousand pounds worth of heroin in one spare wheel.’

‘Don’t they ever get caught – either bringing the stuff in to Milan or taking it on?’

‘Certainly. Many times. But these are well-trained men. And they are tough. They never talk. If they are convicted, they receive ten thousand dollars for each year spent in prison. If they have families, they are cared for. And when all goes well they make good money. It is a co-operative. Each man receives his tranche of the brutto. Only the chief gets a special tranche.’

‘All right. Well, who is this man?’

Signor Kristatos put his hand up to the cheroot in his mouth. He kept the hand there and spoke softly from behind it. ‘Is a man they call “The Dove”, Enrico Colombo. Is the padrone of this restaurant. That is why I bring you here, so that you may see him. Is the fat man who sits with a blonde woman. At the table by the cassa. She is from Vienna. Her name is Lisl Baum. A luxus whore.’

Bond said reflectively: ‘She is, is she?’ He did not need to look. He had noticed the girl, as soon as he had sat down at the table. Every man in the restaurant would have noticed her. She had the gay, bold, forthcoming looks the Viennese are supposed to have and seldom do. There was a vivacity and a charm about her that lit up her corner of the room. She had the wildest possible urchin cut in ash blonde, a pert nose, a wide laughing mouth and a black ribbon round her throat. James Bond knew that her eyes had been on him at intervals throughout the evening. Her companion had seemed just the type of rich, cheerful, good-living man she would be glad to have as her lover for a while. He would give her a good time. He would be generous. There would be no regrets on either side. On the whole, Bond had vaguely approved of him. He liked cheerful, expansive people with a zest for life. Since he, Bond, could not have the girl, it was at least something that she was in good hands. But now? Bond glanced across the room. The couple were laughing about something. The man patted her cheek and got up and went to the door marked UFFICIO and went through and shut the door. So this was the man who ran the great pipeline into England. The man with M.’s price of a hundred thousand pounds on his head. The man Kristatos wanted Bond to kill. Well, he had better get on with the job. Bond stared rudely across the room at the girl. When she lifted her head and looked at him, he smiled at her. Her eyes swept past him, but there was a half smile, as if for herself, on her lips, and when she took a cigarette out of her case and lit it and blew the smoke straight up towards the ceiling there was an offering of the throat and the profile that Bond knew were for him.

It was nearing the time for the after-cinema trade. The maître d’hôtel was supervising the clearing of the unoccupied tables and the setting up of new ones. There was the usual bustle and slapping of napkins across chair-seats and tinkle of glass and cutlery being laid.Vaguely Bond noticed the spare chair at his table being whisked away to help build up a nearby table for six. He began asking Kristatos specific questions – the personal habits of Enrico Colombo, where he lived, the address of his firm in Milan, what other business interests he had. He did not notice the casual progress of the spare chair from its fresh table to another, and then to another, and finally through the door marked UFFICIO. There was no reason why he should.When the chair was brought into his office, Enrico Colombo waved the maître d’hôtel away and locked the door behind him. Then he went to the chair and lifted off the squab cushion and put it on his desk. He unzipped one side of the cushion and withdrew a Grundig tape-recorder, stopped the machine, ran the tape back, took it off the recorder and put it on a play-back and adjusted the speed and volume. Then he sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette and listened, occasionally making further adjustments and occasionally repeating passages. At the end, when Bond’s tinny voice said ‘She is, is she?’ and there was a long silence interspersed with background noises from the restaurant, Enrico Colombo switched off the machine and sat looking at it. He looked at it for a full minute. His face showed nothing but acute concentration on his thoughts. Then he looked away from the machine and into nothing and said softly, out loud: ‘Son-a-beech.’ He got slowly to his feet and went to the door and unlocked it. He looked back once more at the Grundig, said ‘Son-a-beech’ again with more emphasis and went out and back to his table.

Enrico Colombo spoke swiftly and urgently to the girl. She nodded and glanced across the room at Bond. He and Kristatos were getting up from the table. She said to Colombo in a low, angry voice: ‘You are a disgusting man. Everybody said so and warned me against you. They were right. Just because you give me dinner in your lousy restaurant you think you have the right to insult me with your filthy propositions’ – the girl’s voice had got louder. Now she had snatched up her handbag and had got to her feet. She stood beside the table directly in the line of Bond’s approach on his way to the exit.

Enrico Colombo’s face was black with rage. Now he, too, was on his feet. ‘You goddam Austrian beech –’

‘Don’t dare insult my country, you Italian toad.’ She reached for a half-full glass of wine and hurled it accurately in the man’s face. When he came at her it was easy for her to back the few steps into Bond who was standing with Kristatos politely waiting to get by.

Enrico Colombo stood panting, wiping the wine off his face with a napkin. He said furiously to the girl: ‘Don’t ever show your face inside my restaurant again.’ He made the gesture of spitting on the floor between them, turned and strode off through the door marked UFFICIO.

The maître d’hôtel had hurried up. Everyone in the restaurant had stopped eating. Bond took the girl by the elbow. ‘May I help you find a taxi?’

She jerked herself free. She said, still angry: ‘All men are pigs.’ She remembered her manners. She said stiffly: ‘You are very kind.’ She moved haughtily towards the door with the men in her wake.

There was a buzz in the restaurant and a renewed clatter of knives and forks. Everyone was delighted with the scene. The maître d’hôtel, looking solemn, held open the door. He said to Bond: ‘I apologize, Monsieur. And you are very kind to be of assistance.’ A cruising taxi slowed. He beckoned it to the pavement and held open the door.

The girl got in. Bond firmly followed and closed the door. He said to Kristatos through the window: ‘I’ll telephone you in the morning. All right?’ Without waiting for the man’s reply he sat back in the seat. The girl had drawn herself away into the farthest corner. Bond said: ‘Where shall I tell him?’

‘Hotel Ambassadori.’

They drove a short way in silence. Bond said: ‘Would you like to go somewhere first for a drink?’

‘No thank you.’ She hesitated. ‘You are very kind, but tonight I am tired.’

‘Perhaps another night.’

‘Perhaps, but I go to Venice tomorrow.’

‘I shall also be there. Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?’

The girl smiled. She said: ‘I thought Englishmen were supposed to be shy. You are English, aren’t you? What is your name? What do you do?’

‘Yes, I’m English – My name’s Bond – James Bond. I write books – adventure stories. I’m writing one now about drug smuggling. It’s set in Rome and Venice. The trouble is that I don’t know enough about the trade. I am going round picking up stories about it. Do you know any?’

‘So that is why you were having dinner with that Kristatos. I know of him. He has a bad reputation. No. I don’t know any stories. I only know what everybody knows.’

Bond said enthusiastically: ‘But that’s exactly what I want. When I said “stories” I didn’t mean fiction. I meant the sort of high-level gossip that’s probably pretty near the truth. That sort of thing’s worth diamonds to a writer.’

She laughed. ‘You mean that … diamonds?’

Bond said: ‘Well, I don’t earn all that as a writer, but I’ve already sold an option on this story for a film, and if I can make it authentic enough I dare say they’ll actually buy the film.’ He reached out and put his hand over hers in her lap. She did not take her hand away. ‘Yes, diamonds. A diamond clip from Van Cleef. Is it a deal?’

Now she took her hand away. They were arriving at the Ambassadori. She picked up her bag from the seat beside her. She turned on the seat so that she faced him. The commissionaire opened the door and the light from the street turned her eyes into stars. She examined his face with a certain seriousness. She said: ‘All men are pigs, but some are lesser pigs than others. All right. I will meet you. But not for dinner. What I may tell you is not for public places. I bathe every afternoon at the Lido. But not at the fashionable plage. I bathe at the Bagni Alberoni, where the English poet Byron used to ride his horse. It is at the tip of the peninsula. The vaporetto will take you there. You will find me there the day after tomorrow – at three in the afternoon. I shall be getting my last sunburn before the winter. Among the sand-dunes. You will see a pale yellow umbrella. Underneath it will be me.’ She smiled. ‘Knock on the umbrella and ask for Fräulein Lisl Baum.’

She got out of the taxi. Bond followed. She held out her hand. ‘Thank you for coming to my rescue. Goodnight.’

Bond said: ‘Three o’clock then. I shall be there. Goodnight.’

She turned and walked up the curved steps of the hotel. Bond looked after her thoughtfully, and then turned and got back into the taxi and told the man to take him to the Nazionale. He sat back and watched the neon signs ribbon past the window. Things, including the taxi, were going almost too fast for comfort. The only one over which he had any control was the taxi. He leant forward and told the man to drive more slowly.The best train from Rome to Venice is the Laguna express that leaves every day at midday. Bond, after a morning that was chiefly occupied with difficult talks with his London Headquarters on Station I’s scrambler, caught it by the skin of his teeth. The Laguna is a smart, streamlined affair that looks and sounds more luxurious than it is. The seats are made for small Italians and the restaurant car staff suffer from the disease that afflicts their brethren in the great trains all over the world – a genuine loathing for the modern traveller and particularly for the foreigner. Bond had a gangway seat over the axle in the rear aluminium coach. If the seven heavens had been flowing by outside the window he would not have cared. He kept his eyes inside the train, read a jerking book, spilled Chianti over the table-cloth and shifted his long, aching legs and cursed the Ferrovie Italiane dello Stato.

But at last there was Mestre and the dead straight finger of rail across the eighteenth-century aquatint into Venice. Then came the unfailing shock of the beauty that never betrays and the soft swaying progress down the Grand Canal into a blood-red sunset, and the extreme pleasure – so it seemed – of the Gritti Palace that Bond should have ordered the best double room on the first floor.

That evening, scattering thousand-lira notes like leaves in Vallombrosa, James Bond sought, at Harry’s Bar, at Florian’s, and finally upstairs in the admirable Quadri, to establish to anyone who might be interested that he was what he had wished to appear to the girl – a prosperous writer who lived high and well. Then, in the temporary state of euphoria that a first night in Venice engenders, however high and serious the purpose of the visitor, James Bond walked back to the Gritti and had eight hours dreamless sleep.

May and October are the best months in Venice. The sun is soft and the nights are cool. The glittering scene is kinder to the eyes and there is a freshness in the air that helps one to hammer out those long miles of stone and terrazza and marble that are intolerable to the feet in summer. And there are fewer people. Although Venice is the one town in the world that can swallow up a hundred thousand tourists as easily as it can a thousand – hiding them down its side-streets, using them for crowd scenes on the piazzas, stuffing them into the vaporetti – it is still better to share Venice with the minimum number of packaged tours and Lederhosen.

Bond spent the next morning strolling the back-streets in the hope that he would be able to uncover a tail. He visited a couple of churches – not to admire their interiors but to discover if anyone came in after him through the main entrance before he left by the side door. No one was following him. Bond went to Florian’s and had an Americano and listened to a couple of French culture-snobs discussing the imbalance of the containing façade of St Mark’s Square. On an impulse, he bought a postcard and sent it off to his secretary who had once been with the Georgian Group to Italy and had never allowed Bond to forget it. He wrote: ‘Venice is wonderful. Have so far inspected the railway station and the Stock Exchange. Very aesthetically satisfying. To the Municipal Waterworks this afternoon and then an old Brigitte Bardot at the Scala Cinema. Do you know a wonderful tune called “O Sole Mio?” It’s v. romantic like everything here. JB.’

Pleased with his inspiration, Bond had an early luncheon and went back to his hotel. He locked the door of his room and took off his coat and ran over the Walther PPK. He put up the safe and practised one or two quick draws and put the gun back in the holster. It was time to go. He went along to the landing-stage and boarded the twelve-forty vaporetto to Alberoni, out of sight across the mirrored lagoons. Then he settled down in a seat in the bows and wondered what was going to happen to him.From the jetty at Alberoni, on the Venice side of the Lido peninsula, there is a half-mile dusty walk across the neck of land to the Bagni Alberoni facing the Adriatic. It is a curiously deserted world, this tip of the famous peninsula. A mile down the thin neck of land the luxury real estate development has petered out in a scattering of cracked stucco villas and bankrupt housing projects, and here there is nothing but the tiny fishing village of Alberoni, a sanatorium for students, a derelict experimental station belonging to the Italian Navy and some massive weed-choked gun emplacements from the last war. In the no man’s land in the centre of this thin tongue of land is the Golf du Lido, whose brownish undulating fairways meander around the ruins of ancient fortifications. Not many people come to Venice to play golf, and the project is kept alive for its snob appeal by the grand hotels of the Lido. The golf course is surrounded by a high wire fence hung at intervals, as if it protected something of great value or secrecy, with threatening Vietatos and Prohibitos. Around this wired enclave, the scrub and sand-hills have not even been cleared of mines, and amongst the rusting barbed wire are signs saying MINAS. PERICOLO DI MORTE beneath a roughly stencilled skull and cross-bones. The whole area is strange and melancholy and in extraordinary contrast to the gay carnival world of Venice less than an hour away across the lagoons.

Bond was sweating slightly by the time he had walked the half mile across the peninsula to the plage, and he stood for a moment under the last of the acacia trees that had bordered the dusty road to cool off while he got his bearings. In front of him was a rickety wooden archway whose central span said BAGNI ALBERONI in faded blue paint. Beyond were the lines of equally dilapidated wooden cabins, and then a hundred yards of sand and then the quiet blue glass of the sea. There were no bathers and the place seemed to be closed, but when he walked through the archway he heard the tinny sound of a radio playing Neapolitan music. It came from a ramshackle hut that advertised Coca-Cola and various Italian soft drinks. Deck-chairs were stacked against its walls and there were two pedallos and a child’s half-inflated sea-horse. The whole establishment looked so derelict that Bond could not imagine it doing business even at the height of the summer season. He stepped off the narrow duck-boards into the soft, burned sand and moved round behind the huts to the beach. He walked down to the edge of the sea. To the left, until it disappeared in the autumn heat haze, the wide empty sand swept away in a slight curve towards the Lido proper. To the right was half a mile of beach terminating in the sea-wall at the tip of the peninsula. The sea-wall stretched like a finger out into the silent mirrored sea, and at intervals along its top were the flimsy derricks of the octopus fishermen. Behind the beach were the sand-hills and a section of the wire fence surrounding the golf course. On the edge of the sand-hills, perhaps five hundred yards away, there was a speck of bright yellow.

Bond set off towards it along the tide-line.

‘Ahem.’

The hands flew to the top scrap of bikini and pulled it up. Bond walked into her line of vision and stood looking down. The bright shadow of the umbrella covered only her face. The rest of her – a burned cream body in a black bikini on a black and white striped bath-towel – lay offered to the sun.

She looked up at him through half-closed eye-lashes. ‘You are five minutes early and I told you to knock.’

Bond sat down close to her in the shade of the big umbrella. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘You happen to own the only palm tree in the whole of this desert. I had to get underneath it as soon as I could. This is the hell of a place for a rendezvous.’

She laughed. ‘I am like Greta Garbo. I like to be alone.’

‘Are we alone?’

She opened her eyes wide. ‘Why not? You think I have brought a chaperone?’

‘Since you think all men are pigs …’

‘Ah, but you are a gentleman pig,’ she giggled. ‘A milord pig. And anyway, it is too hot for that kind of thing. And there is too much sand. And besides this is a business meeting, no? I tell you stories about drugs and you give me a diamond clip. From Van Cleef. Or have you changed your mind?’

‘No. That’s how it is. Where shall we begin?’

‘You ask the questions. What is it you want to know?’ She sat up and pulled her knees to her between her arms. Flirtation had gone out of her eyes and they had become attentive, and perhaps a little careful.

Bond noticed the change. He said casually, watching her: ‘They say your friend Colombo is a big man in the game. Tell me about him. He would make a good character for my book – disguised, of course. But it’s the detail I need. How does he operate, and so on? That’s not the sort of thing a writer can invent.’

She veiled her eyes. She said: ‘Enrico would be very angry if he knew that I had told any of his secrets. I don’t know what he would do to me.’

‘He will never know.’

She looked at him seriously. ‘Lieber Mr Bond, there is very little that he does not know. And he is also quite capable of acting on a guess. I would not be surprised’ – Bond caught her quick glance at his watch – ‘if it had crossed his mind to have me followed here. He is a very suspicious man.’ She put her hand out and touched his sleeve. Now she looked nervous. She said urgently: ‘I think you had better go now. This has been a great mistake.’

Bond openly looked at his watch. It was three-thirty. He moved his head so that he could look behind the umbrella and back down the beach. Far down by the bathing huts, their outlines dancing slightly in the heat haze, were three men in dark clothes. They were walking purposefully up the beach, their feet keeping step as if they were a squad.

Bond got to his feet. He looked down at the bent head. He said drily: ‘I see what you mean. Just tell Colombo that from now on I’m writing his life-story. And I’m a very persistent writer. So long.’ Bond started running up the sand towards the tip of the peninsula. From there he could double back down the other shore to the village and the safety of people.

Down the beach the three men broke into a fast jog-trot, elbows and legs pounding in time with each other as if they were long-distance runners out for a training spin. As they jogged past the girl, one of the men raised a hand. She raised hers in answer and then lay down on the sand and turned over – perhaps so that her back could now get its toasting, or perhaps because she did not want to watch the man-hunt.

Bond took off his tie as he ran and put it in his pocket. It was very hot and he was already sweating profusely. But so would the three men be. It was a question who was in better training. At the tip of the peninsula, Bond clambered up on to the sea-wall and looked back. The men had hardly gained, but now two of them were fanning out to cut round the edge of the golf course boundary. They did not seem to mind the danger notices with the skull and crossbones. Bond, running fast down the wide sea-wall, measured angles and distances. The two men were cutting across the base of the triangle. It was going to be a close call.

Bond’s shirt was already soaked and his feet were beginning to hurt. He had run perhaps a mile. How much farther to safety? At intervals along the sea-wall the breeches of antique cannon had been sunk in the concrete. They would be mooring posts for the fishing fleets sheltering in the protection of the lagoons before taking to the Adriatic. Bond counted his steps between two of them. Fifty yards. How many black knobs to the end of the wall – to the first houses of the village? Bond counted up to thirty before the line vanished into the heat haze. Probably another mile to go. Could he do it, and fast enough to beat the two flankers? Bond’s breath was already rasping in his throat. Now even his suit was soaked with sweat and the cloth of his trousers was chafing his legs. Behind him, three hundred yards back, was one pursuer. To his right, dodging among the sand-dunes and converging fast, were the other two. To his left was a twenty-foot slope of masonry to the green tide ripping out into the Adriatic.

Bond was planning to slow down to a walk and keep enough breath to try and shoot it out with the three men, when two things happened in quick succession. First he saw through the haze ahead a group of spear-fishermen. There were about half a dozen of them, some in the water and some sunning themselves on the sea-wall. Then, from the sand-dunes came the deep roar of an explosion. Earth and scrub and what might have been bits of a man fountained briefly into the air, and a small shock-wave hit him. Bond slowed. The other man in the dunes had stopped. He was standing stock-still. His mouth was open and a frightened jabber came from it. Suddenly he collapsed on the ground with his arms wrapped round his head. Bond knew the signs. He would not move again until someone came and carried him away from there. Bond’s heart lifted. Now he had only about two hundred yards to go to the fishermen. They were already gathering into a group, looking towards him. Bond summoned a few words of Italian and rehearsed them. ‘Mi Ingles. Prego, dove il carabinieri.’ Bond glanced over his shoulder. Odd, but despite the witnessing spear-fishers, the man was still coming on. He had gained and was only about a hundred yards behind. There was a gun in his hand. Now, ahead, the fishermen had fanned out across Bond’s path. They had harpoon guns held at the ready. In the centre was a big man with a tiny red bathing-slip hanging beneath his stomach. A green mask was slipped back on to the crown of his head. He stood with his blue swim-fins pointing out and his arms akimbo. He looked like Mr Toad of Toad Hall in Technicolor. Bond’s amused thought died in him stillborn. Panting, he slowed to a walk. Automatically his sweaty hand felt under his coat for the gun and drew it out. The man in the centre of the arc of pointing harpoons was Enrico Colombo.