Devil May Care (9 page)

She came back and lightly took his arm. ‘ That’s

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your culture for today, James. Now you can take me to La Cigale Verte. It’s only five minutes away. We can leave the car here and walk along the river.’

The restaurant she’d chosen on the Iˆle St Louis had a long terrace overlooking the Seine with only a footpath between the tables and the river.

‘I was rather presumptuous, I’m afraid,’ said Scarlett, as the maıˆtre d’ greeted them. ‘When I saw which way the game was going I telephoned to book a table. It’s very popular at the weekend.’

The maıˆtre d’, who seemed unable to take his eyes off Scarlett, ushered them to a table directly overlooking the river and the Left Bank beyond.

‘Do you like shellfish?’ said Scarlett. ‘ They do a spectacular selection. Langoustines, crab, little flatfaced spiky things that look like Chagrin . . . And they make this wonderful mayonnaise. It’s the best in Paris. Shall I order for you, too? Will you trust me?’

‘ Trust you? Why ever not? Then we’ll talk business,’ said Bond.

‘But of course.’

Bond felt elated by the tennis, and hungry too. The waiter brought a bottle of Dom Pe´rignon and some olives. The cold bubbles fizzed on Bond’s dry throat.

‘Now, Scarlett, I want to hear all about Dr Julius Gorner.’

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‘I first heard of him through my father, Alexandr,’

said Scarlett, pulling the tail of a langoustine from its shell. ‘My grandfather came to England during the Revolution. He had estates near St Petersburg and a house in Moscow. My grandfather was an engineer by training, but he managed to get some of the family money out of Russia and he bought a house near Cambridge. My father was only about seven years old when they fled and he hardly remembers Russia. He became bilingual in English and went to very good schools and eventually became a fellow of a college in Cambridge, where he taught economics. During the war he worked for British Army Intelligence, and afterwards he was offered a senior post at Oxford, where he encountered Gorner, who’d gone there as a mature student.’

‘So your father taught Gorner?’

‘Yes, though he said he was an unreceptive student and loath to admit there was anything he didn’t already know.’

‘But he was clever?’

‘My father said that with more humility he could have been the best economist in Oxford. But the trouble was, he blamed my father when things started to go wrong.’

‘What happened?’

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‘According to my father, his manner alienated people.’

‘So he was like that even then.’

‘He had this Baltic or Lithuanian accent and of course . . . the hand. But that was all right. I think people felt sorry for him. But he was crooked. He cheated in exams – though according to my father he didn’t need to. He was contemptuous of the undergraduates, because he was a bit older and had fought in the war.’

‘For both sides, I gather,’ said Bond.

‘Perhaps he wanted to be on the winning side,’

said Scarlett. ‘And he had undoubtedly seen things at Stalingrad – or Volgograd as they’re trying to call it again now – that made him feel older, or more worldly . . . But quite a few of the British students had broken off their studies to go and fight.’

Scarlett was interrupted by the waiter, who had come to clear the remains of the shellfish.

‘You’re going to have fried sole now,’ said Scarlett.

‘Can I order some wine?’

‘Be my guest. Or Gorner’s,’ said Bond, tapping the thick envelope in his breast pocket.

Scarlett lit a cigarette, pulled her feet up under her on the red-cushioned seat and wrapped her arms round her ankles. As the sun disappeared behind a

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tall building, she pushed her dark glasses on to the top of her head and, Bond thought, looked suddenly younger. Her dark brown eyes engaged his.

‘Gorner became obsessed by the fact that people didn’t like him and he put it all down to xenophobia. He viewed Oxford as an e´lite English club that wouldn’t let him join. I imagine one or two of the rowing types probably did tease him, but my father reassured me that most of them were perfectly polite and kind. I think it was this experience that somehow put the iron in his soul and he determined to take his revenge on what he saw as the stuck-up English. He became obsessed by English culture and all that rather dreary stuff about cricket and fair play and tea-time. He thought it was all a gigantic fraud. He took it far more seriously than any English person. He made a fetish of British foreign policy and the Empire and thought he could show how brutal and unfair it had all been. I suppose the whole process must have taken some years to come to fruition but, to cut a long story short, he hated England because he felt it had laughed at him, and he decided to devote his life to destroying it.’

‘Perhaps he’d already had feelings like that,’ said Bond.

‘What do you mean?’

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‘When he changed sides in the war. Perhaps, when it became clear that the Nazis couldn’t beat the British, he thought the Russians were the next best bet.’

‘ That’s clever of you, James. I didn’t know you were such a psychologist.’

‘ The waiter wants you to try the wine.’

Scarlett gave the Baˆtard Montrachet a quick sniff.

‘
Tre`s bien
. Where was I?’

‘Being flattering.’

‘Ah, yes. Well, my father got wind of the fact that Gorner was unhappy and he tried to sympathize. He was only a tutor that Gorner went to see occasionally, he had no responsibility for his welfare, but my father’s a kind man. He asked him to dinner at our house. Poppy and I must have been there, as little girls, but I don’t remember. He sympathized with him about being an outsider and told him his own father had found it hard, coming from Russia, but that England had a good reputation with immigrants. Half the science faculty at Cambridge were Jewish
e´migre´s
, for heaven’s sake. Then my father made his big mistake. He asked him about his hand.’

Bond put down his knife and fork. ‘What did he say?’

‘My father said he’d known someone in Cambridge

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before the war – in Sidney Sussex College, I don’t know why I remember that – who had the same thing. He was trying to be reassuring, to let Gorner know he wasn’t the only one with this peculiarity, but I suppose it was something Gorner’d never spoken about before. I suppose he was very ashamed of it. As though he or his family hadn’t properly evolved.’

Bond nodded and filled their glasses.

‘Anyway,’ said Scarlett, ‘as a result, far from being his friend, a fellow exile, Gorner viewed my father as even worse than the English – as a kind of successful traitor, a turncoat who’d become one of the enemy. From that day onwards he wore a glove over his hand. And he had a new burning hatred to add to his list. At joint number one with England and its culture were Alexandr Papav and his family.’

‘A list I feel I’ve joined this morning,’ said Bond. Scarlett clinked her glass against his. ‘ To the enemies of Julius Gorner. Anyway, many years later, he came across Poppy. And that was when he saw his chance.’

As the waiter brought a cheeseboard and fresh bread, Bond looked down the Seine to where the pleasure boats stopped to deposit their passengers. The most popular tourist boat, he noticed, was a

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Mississippi paddle steamer – the
Huckleberry Finn
–with a banner on the hull that said she was on loan to the city of Paris for one month only.

Bond brought his eyes back to the table. ‘You’d better tell me about Poppy.’

‘Poppy . . .’ Scarlett cut a slice of Camembert and put it on Bond’s plate. ‘ Try that. Poppy . . . Well, Poppy’s not that much like me . . . She’s a bit younger and . . . She never took her studies very seriously.’

‘Unlike you,’ said Bond.

‘ That’s right.’

‘And where did you go to school?’

‘Roedean. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Then I went to Oxford, to Somerville.’

‘Where you were doubtless awarded a first-class degree, like Gorner.’

Scarlett coloured a little. ‘My father said that boasting of exam results was the height of vulgarity. Poppy didn’t go to university. She went to live in London and moved with rather a fast set of people. She went to a lot of parties. For some reason I don’t understand, she decided she wanted to be an air hostess. I suppose it just seemed glamorous to her. Jet travel was still quite a novelty. And I suppose she was rebelling against her academic family. My mother was a consultant at the Radcliffe hospital and she also

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had high expectations of us. Anyway, Poppy worked for BOACfor three years. She fell in love with one of the pilots. He was married and he kept saying he’d leave his wife, but he didn’t. Poppy was very unhappy. In the course of a layover in Morocco, she tried taking drugs. Just a little. But soon she was taking more. Partly for fun, I suppose, but also because she was miserable. Then, at some point, her lover went to see Gorner in Paris because he was fed up with the BOACroutes and he’d seen an advertisement Gorner had placed. He needed a pilot for his private planes. In the course of following up his references, Gorner got to hear about Poppy and, of course, recognized the name. He pounced. He told the pilot he wasn’t interested in him, but offered Poppy a huge amount of money to go and work for him. And a lot of flying and perks and holidays. Clothes. Shoes.’

‘Anything else?’ said Bond.

‘Yes. One other thing.’ Scarlett bit her lip. ‘He offered her drugs.’

‘And that was a lure for her?’

‘Undoubtedly.’ There were tears on the lower lids of Scarlett’s eyes. ‘He was able to promise her an unlimited supply of anything she wanted, and it would be good quality, not mixed with poison or anything,

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as it can be if you buy on the street. And I suppose it looked like a way in which she could control her habit and always have the money for it. Although, in fact, the drugs were free.’ Scarlett wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘She was such a gentle girl. She always was.’

The waiter brought fresh pineapple and cream. With the dark espresso that followed, Bond lit a cigarette and offered one to Scarlett. ‘So, Scarlett, if I find her, will she come? Or is she a willing slave?’

‘I haven’t seen her for two years, so I don’t really know. I’ve occasionally managed to speak to her on the telephone. The last time was just the other day. She was in Tehran and had managed to get to the post office.’

‘ Tehran?’

‘Yes, Gorner has a big business interest there. It may be a front. I don’t know. But Poppy told me she was making efforts to come off the drugs. It’s very difficult. But I think she would come if you were able to find her. Then we could get her into a clinic. The trouble is, Gorner won’t let her go. He’s slowly killing her, and he’s loving every moment of it.’

Bond swore succinctly. Then he said, ‘Don’t cry, Scarlett. I’ll find her.’

*

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After one more coffee, Scarlett drove Bond back to his hotel, keeping the Sunbeam rather closer to the speed limit than she had on the way to the Bois.

‘You’ll call me with any news, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Bond. ‘If I’m near a telephone.’

She leaned over from her seat and kissed his cheek. She had put on her sunglasses to conceal her swollen eyes. Bond’s hand lingered for a second on the red linen dress. Something about this girl had got right under his defences, and he felt profoundly uneasy. He was tempted to turn and wave from the door of the hotel, as Mrs Larissa Rossi had waved from the lift in Rome, but forced himself to push straight through and into the gloom of the lobby.

‘Monsieur Bond,’ said the receptionist. ‘A cable for you.’

Up in his room Bond ripped the cable open. It was marked  at the beginning and 

at the end, to show that M had cleared it.

       

       

      

He began to pack at once and asked Reception to call the airport. ‘Pistachio’, in the latest codes, was

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Persia, and ‘Caviar’ the Soviet Union. The US office was the CIA, and if they were feeling edgy about Gorner it could be that the Russian connection M

had spoken of in London was further advanced than had been thought.

Gorner and the Russians, thought Bond. It was a marriage made in hell.

.

7. ‘ Trust Me, James’

The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation: it may or it may not come out.

 ,
The Road to Oxiana

As the plane began its descent, Bond looked out of the window and lit a cigarette. Away to his left, he could see the tops of the Elburz mountains and, beyond them, a faint blue smudge that must be the southern waters of the Caspian Sea. Work had never previously taken him to the Middle East, and for this he was thankful. He regarded the lands between Cyprus and India as the thieving centre of the world. He’d visited Egypt as a child, when he was too young to remember, and had once spent a few days’ leave in Beirut, but had found it little more than a smugglers’ den – of diamonds from Sierra Leone,

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arms from Arabia and gold from Aleppo. It was true that the Lebanese women had been far more modern in their attitudes than he’d expected, but he’d been pleased to get back to London.

He drained the last of the bourbon from his glass as the plane banked for its final approach. There’d been no time for any briefing on Persia and he would be relying on the local head of station, Darius Alizadeh, for guidance. He heard the thump as the landing gear was dropped from the belly of the plane, and the hydraulic whine as the brake flaps slid out of the leading edge of the wings. Then, beneath them, Bond could see what he’d seen a hundred times before in different continents, the telephone wires, the small cars on the airport ring road, the low terminal buildings, then the sudden rushing strip of concrete with its black skidmarks as the plane thumped twice in a perfect landing and the pilot switched the engines to reverse.

As soon as he stepped from the plane, Bond felt the intense heat of the desert country. There was no air-conditioning inside the arrivals building, and he was already sweating by the time the customs official had chalked his bags. When going through US