The Ian Fleming Files (32 page)

Fleming knocked back the bourbon, winced at the sting and said, “How
about five thousand and you arrange a meeting?”

Munson balked. “It will be the last meeting he ever attends. How much is
thirty pieces of silver in English pounds?”

Fleming paused. He could see Godfrey blowing a gasket if he splurged and
failed to return with Ugarte. But his success at cards - he certainly had not
cheated, thank you very much - steeled his nerves and he decided to double
down. “Ten thousand for Ugarte in the flesh.”

Munson toppled sugar boulders into his coffee and stirred thoughtfully.
“Meet me tomorrow at the Museum of Antiquities. Nine A.M.”

Fleming grimaced. “Tomorrow?”

“I need to make some inquiries,” said Munson, waving his hand dismissively.
“I think this a reasonable time frame. In the Hittite period section.”

“I’m not here to see the sights,” said Fleming.

“No one goes to the museum. It is a good meeting place. Tomorrow you will
have Ugarte in the flesh.”

Fleming eyeballed him, paused long enough not to seem too eager and then
reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrew his check book.

A taxi dropped Fleming off at the hotel. Moonlight splashed the black
shadows of palms across the forecourt as he scrunched across the tan gravel now
cooling in welcome shadow and contemplated the deal he had just made with
Munson. Ten thousand pounds exceeded his budget for baksheesh by about nine
thousand but if the bribe paid dividends Godfrey shouldn’t kvetch too much
about it.

He slowly unlocked the door to his room and crept in. It was a full moon
and the panorama of the Nile appeared in haunting chiaroscuro.

Using the soft lunar glow he bent down and inspected one of his own black
hairs which still lay undisturbed where he had left it earlier wedged into the
drawer of the writing-desk. He flipped the light switch and examined a faint
trace of talcum powder on the inner rim of the handle of the clothes cupboard.
It appeared immaculate.

He suddenly felt a draft. The window in the bathroom was open. He went to
it and closed it and felt foolish. For all his burglar alarms he neglected the
fact that the window latch was the easy release type and could be opened from
the outside. He silently berated himself for being so careless. And yet his
desk had not been disturbed.

He slowly opened the desk drawer and removed his NID dockets and papers
to verify that they had not been tampered with. It was possible someone had
seen the hair and returned it but it was also possible he was being paranoid.
The window could very well have blown open with the evening breeze. But if
someone had entered and not taken anything, what had they wanted in here?
Unease gnawed at him.

The thought was still bothering him at midnight when he tossed and turned
in restless sleep. He felt slightly drunk for the first time in a while.
Rationing had killed his tobacco consumption by ninety percent and his head was
spinning with the combined nicotine-alcohol infusion from his hour of cards in
the smoky club. When he slept vivid dreams unspooled at a furious pace like a
movie projector with a broken sprocket casting random flickering images onto a
screen.

He saw Ann from five years ago looking skinny and pretty. Dilly in his
aviator get-up. Godo’s ugly face. His Browning 9mm collapsing in his hands. A
purple-faced Godfrey bellowing at him in front of the Treasury Secretary.
Ugarte and Maria Lustbaden enveloped in each other’s arms. Ann in a hospital
gown about to undergo a procedure. Lewis Blake saying, “A Fourth Reich.”

Fleming stirred and felt the room swirling, staggered to the bathroom,
shaking off the wild subconscious eruptions. As he urinated, unseen behind him
the scorpion continued its slow crawl across the cool tiles toward his bed.

The wind sighed sadly outside in the velvet night, lending his room still
more warmth and luxury. He drew the curtains and turned off the soft lights
over his bed. Then he took off his clothes and climbed between the fine satin
sheets. He thought of the bitter weather in the London streets, the grudging
warmth of the weak radiators in his office at Headquarters, the chalked-up menu
on the pub he had passed on his last day in the West End: ‘Lunch Special - Toad
In The Hole.’

He stretched languidly. Very soon he was asleep on his back with his bare
chest above the fold to meet the air from the ceiling fan. The venomous
intruder crawled up under the eight hundred count sheets appearing first as a
large moving lump. Had his intended victim not had the previous nightmare jolt
he would have been too deep into his sleep cycle to feel the eight slimy legs
crawling up his abdomen.

Fleming’s eyes opened to see the creature pause inches from his face with
its last segment of tail curved over parallel with its back, the sharp tip of
its stinger visible and aimed at his eye. He sweated out the arachnid's
agonizingly slow crawl closer and darted his eyes about for a weapon. Could he
just swipe it away?

The scorpion paused. The sting slid home into its sheath and the nerves
in the poison sac at its base relaxed.

Fleming saw his chance and in one swift blur smacked the ugly creature
off his chest onto the ground where it scuttled to the corner shadows.
Adrenaline surged through him as he leapt up, hit the light and found his
frightened foe bunched into a defensive ball in the corner. As he stepped
closer it unfurled, snapped its tail forward and darted its deadly tip at
Fleming who brought the handle of his Browning crashing down into the raised
ridges of flesh bursting them into black pulp. He finished the job, crushing
the two pincers and shattering the bulbous toxic tail sac which popped like a
balloon and spilt green puss onto the tiles.

Traumatized, Fleming staggered into the bathroom and shut the door,
nauseated by the experience. He vomited, splashed his face in cold water, came
out and tottered to the sideboard, put a handful of wilted ice cubes into a
tall glass, poured in three inches of bourbon and swilled the mixture round in
the glass to dilute it. Then he drank down half the glass in one long swallow.

THE MUSEUM of Antiquities was a tall brooding edifice overlooking a small
square cramped with vendors hawking fine cloth, pottery, baskets, jewelry and
fresh bread.

Fleming, wearing a tan safari suit, sun cap and loafers, approached the kiosk
where a tall, skinny Arab sat reading an American spy novel. The dust-jacket
featured a lurid image of a bodacious femme fatale’s heavily rouged lips
pressed against the barrel of a TT-33 automatic pistol.

Fleming jangled change to get his attention. “Excuse-me, old boy. Is this
where Tutankhamen’s tomb is?”

The lazy-eyed clerk kept his eyes on his book and grunted, “Valley of the
Kings.” He took Fleming’s money and issued him a ducat. Fleming negotiated the
turnstile and entered the marbled foyer.

It wasn’t hard for Fleming to fake being an awe-inspired tourist when he
spied the various examples of treasure from the Middle Kingdom on display. Gold
incense jars with ruby pommels, fragile papyrus scrolls, enameled sarcophagus
lids and emerald make-up pots, intricate faience necklaces and tomb bric-a-brac
from Horus amulets to wonderfully preserved funerary figurines or
ushabti
.

The Hittite section was empty save for a snoozing curator slouched in his
chair, his mustached face half buried by a fez. Fleming stole a few glances at
the modest collection of Anatolian artifacts, mostly terracotta heads and large
Syro-Hittite ceramic Astarte statues. There was something oddly compelling
about the primitive female-shaped forms that gave Fleming pause and cost him to
lose his concentration as he pursued some vague unconscious connection to the
art.

The tap on his shoulder made him spin round with a look of hostility,
instinctively reaching into his jacket when he saw that it was Munson, clean
shaven and in a tailored suit with a monocle and silk cravat, barely
recognizable from the shabby proprietor with the cigarette eyes from the night
before.

Fleming regained his composure and looked at Munson coldly.

“Sorry,” said the Frenchman with a smirk. “Did I scare you?”

“Do I look frightened?” said Fleming sharply. “You owe me a fugitive.”

“There’s been a slight … hiccup.”

Fleming stiffened. “I thought you were a man of your word.”

“Relax. In a few hours, you will be with the man you seek and your
business in this infernal city will be over.” He handed Fleming a piece of
paper with Arabic writing on it.

Fleming read the cursive text and looked at Munson quizzically. “Sakkara?
That’s the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing there except ruins.”

“Did you expect a man wanted by the Gestapo, not to mention independent
agents such as yourself, to be renting a villa by the Sphinx? You will find him
there. It may interest you to know that two other men were making similar
inquiries. Your competition I expect.”

Fleming paused. No doubt the same people who dropped the scorpion through
his bathroom window. “How much does this information cost me?”

“On the house,” said the Frenchman.

“What did these characters look like?”

Munson shrugged. “Like Laurel and Hardy. One tall and thin, the other
big.”

Fleming eyed him warily. “Thanks.” He shook Munson’s hand and traipsed
toward the exit.

A sinister shadow fell across Munson’s face as he watched the Englishman
go.

The hot desert sun hung in the molten sky like a massive yolk blasting
its gamma rays into an endless rippling sea of sparkling silicon.

A blot on the scintillating landscape swelled in size as it crested the
high shelf of a jutting dune. The plodding shape was half-man half-beast with
an antenna-like extension protruding over its crown. As it galumphed down the
baking berm it became apparent that the life form - the only sign of life for
miles - was a man atop a dromedary. The article projecting skyward was a
parasol.

It was Ian Fleming looking like Lawrence of Arabia in a checkered
head-dress and flowing white gown, a rifle slung over his shoulder and two
ammunition belts crisscrossed over his chest.

As he descended from the shelf-like berm to traverse a broad plain of
baking red rock he reminded himself that Colonel Lawrence crossed the Sinai
Peninsula from Aqaba to the Suez Canal in just 49 hours. Aqaba to Suez was four
times longer than the path Fleming had vectored for himself on the map in his
hotel room. He consulted his compass, took out his Russian high-powered
binoculars and scanned the oscillating horizon. What he saw was a desolate,
godforsaken spot with no trees or vegetation of any kind just white
sun-blanched sand.

He continued on until he came to an Old Testament-style valley of
tortured red rock forms. Yonder on a distant hillside lay a swath of greenery
where the jagged remnants of crumbled structures could be made out.

Fleming paused to sip water from his canteen as the animal whinnied beneath
him. Little eddies of wind sent swirls of grit whirling. Dust-clouds plumed
into small cyclones, gusts swelled and suddenly Fleming was in the middle of a
sandstorm. He whipped his head cloth around his mouth and urged the camel into
a gallop through the caustic wall of grit but the beast was too frightened.
Fleming pulled on the reins, kicked out of the stirrups and dismounted. He
fixed his rifle to the harness and with visibility at near zero led the
ungulate on foot through the howling air toward a clump of juniper bushes and
high sheltering rocks which framed a secluded hollow.

The storm sent clumps of sand against the shelter entombing them. Fleming
tussled with the screeching beast but it was too determined. It bucked and
brayed and hurtled free into the roaring vortex, vanishing along with the rifle
and supplies.

Sand steadily piled high against the hollow entrance forcing Fleming to
brave it. He stepped out of the rock shelter and fumbled his way on foot
through the haze. The texture of the ground shifted as the sands gave way to a
honeycombed mudflat. A tall shape appeared through the fog. It was the figure
of a man with a spear hoisted in his hands. Fleming reached into the folds of
his abaiya for the reassuring feel of steel. He hollered in Arabic, doing his
best to maintain eyes on the stranger through the blinding swirl.

He stepped closer to the dark shape and startled. It was the statue of a
warrior, a sentinel marking the threshold to an entrance of a once splendid
building, a sultan’s palace or an important government office possibly, that
had long since vanished in the winds. The stone face had been sand-blasted into
a hideous mask. Its proud bearing made Fleming think of
Ozymandias
.

Unnerved, he continued on following the remnants of a narrow mountain
road that flattened out into straggly pastures where the outlines of ancient
plots in the arid soil could be discerned. He tripped over some unseen object
and fell his length in the sand. His foot had caught the rutted grooves of an ancient
irrigation ditch. He looked up to see huge hand-cut limestone blocks lying
scattered about in a vague circle suggestive of a henge.

The whirlwind dissipated as rapidly as it had begun. Fleming removed his
face-shield and sputtered out sand. He staggered on, scaled a hill and tumbled
down the other side, landing at the lip of a freshwater lake which he lapped at
like a thirsty dog. Two startled bush-shrikes shrieked as he drank his fill.

When he looked up, the ruins of Sakkara rushed up all at once like a
landscape in a dream. An ancient necropolis lay rotting amidst the oasis. Vast
burial chambers had been exposed, sifted through and abandoned, the foundations
and passageways of crypts unearthed and left to be reclaimed by nature. Vivid
bursts of desert blooms sprouted from smashed vaults. Looted sarcophagi lay
scattered about amongst the tall blades of grass.