James Bond Anthology (129 page)

‘Karolin Siomerset,’ the girl turned the name over in her mind. ‘It is a pretty name. And you are Mister Siomerset.’ She laughed happily. ‘That is fun. Do not worry about me. I will come to the train just before it leaves. It is the Sirkeci Station. I know where it is. So that is all. And we do not worry any more. Yes?’

‘Suppose you lose your nerve? Suppose they catch you?’ Suddenly Bond was worried at the girl’s confidence. How could she be so certain? A sharp tingle of suspicion ran down his spine.

‘Before I saw you, I was frightened. Now I am not. ’ Tatiana tried to tell herself that this was the truth. Somehow it nearly was. ‘Now I shall not lose my nerve, as you call it. And they cannot catch me. I shall leave my things in the hotel and take my usual bag to the office. I cannot leave my fur coat behind. I love it too dearly. But today is Sunday and that will be an excuse to come to the office in it. Tonight at half-past eight I shall walk out and take a taxi to the station. And now you must stop looking so worried. ’ Impulsively, because she had to, she stretched out a hand towards him. ‘Say that you are pleased. ’

Bond moved to the edge of the bed. He took her hand and looked down into her eyes. God, he thought. I hope it’s all right. I hope this crazy plan will work. Is this wonderful girl a cheat? Is she true? Is she real? The eyes told him nothing except that the girl was happy, and that she wanted him to love her, and that she was surprised at what was happening to her. Tatiana’s other hand came up and round his neck and pulled him fiercely down to her. At first the mouth trembled under his and then, as passion took her, the mouth yielded into a kiss without end.

Bond lifted his legs on to the bed. While his mouth went on kissing her, his hand went to her left breast and held it, feeling the peak hard with desire under his fingers. His hand strayed on down across her flat stomach. Her legs shifted languidly. She moaned softly and her mouth slid away from his. Below the closed eyes the long lashes quivered like humming birds’ wings.

Bond reached up and took the edge of the sheet and pulled it right down and threw it off the end of the huge bed. She was wearing nothing but the black ribbon round her neck and black silk stockings rolled above her knees. Her arms groped up for him.Above them, and unknown to both of them, behind the gold-framed false mirror on the wall over the bed, the two photographers from SMERSH sat close together in the cramped
cabinet de voyeur
, as, before them, so many friends of the proprietor had sat on a honeymoon night in the stateroom of the Kristal Palas.

And the view-finders gazed coldly down on the passionate arabesques the two bodies formed and broke and formed again, and the clockwork mechanism of the cine-cameras whirred softly on and on as the breath rasped out of the open mouths of the two men and the sweat of excitement trickled down their bulging faces into their cheap collars.

21 | ORIENT EXPRESS

The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.

Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the laboured breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another. Wisps of steam rose from the couplings between the carriages and died quickly in the warm August air. The Orient Express was the only live train in the ugly, cheaply architectured burrow that is Istanbul’s main station. The trains on the other lines were engineless and unattended – waiting for tomorrow. Only Track No. 3, and its platform, throbbed with the tragic poetry of departure.

The heavy bronze cipher on the side of the dark blue coach said, COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGON-LITS ET DES GRANDS EXPRESS EUROPÉENS. Above the cipher, fitted into metal slots, was a flat iron sign that announced, in black capitals on white, ORIENT EXPRESS, and underneath, in three lines:

ISTANBUL—THESSALONIKI—BEOGRAD
VENEZIA—MILAN
LAUSANNE—PARIS

James Bond gazed vaguely at one of the most romantic signs in the world. For the tenth time he looked at his watch. 8.51. His eyes went back to the sign. All the towns were spelled in the language of the country except MILAN. Why not MILANO? Bond took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Where the hell was the girl? Had she been caught? Had she had second thoughts? Had he been too rough with her last night, or rather this morning, in the great bed?

8.55. The quiet pant of the engine had stopped. There came an echoing whoosh as the automatic safety-valve let off the excess steam. A hundred yards away, through the milling crowd, Bond watched the station-master raise a hand to the engine driver and fireman and start walking slowly back down the train, banging the doors of the third-class carriages up front. Passengers, mostly peasants going back into Greece after a week-end with their relatives in Turkey, hung out of the windows and jabbered at the grinning crowd below.

Beyond, where the faded arc-lights stopped and the dark blue night and the stars showed through the crescent mouth of the station, Bond saw a red pinpoint turn to green.

The station-master came nearer. The brown uniformed wagon-lit attendant tapped Bond on the arm. ‘
En voiture, s’il vous plaît
.’ The two rich-looking Turks kissed their mistresses – they were too pretty to be wives – and, with a barrage of laughing injunctions, stepped on to the little iron pedestal and up the two tall steps into the carriage. There were no other wagon-lit travellers on the platform. The conductor, with an impatient glance at the tall Englishman, picked up the iron pedestal and climbed with it into the train.

The station-master strode purposefully by. Two more compartments, the first- and second-class carriages, and then, when he reached the guard’s van, he would lift the dirty green flag.

There was no hurrying figure coming up the platform from the
guichet
. High up above the
guichet
, near the ceiling of the station, the minute hand of the big illuminated clock jumped forward an inch and said ‘Nine’.

A window banged down above Bond’s head. Bond looked up. His immediate reaction was that the black veil was too wide-meshed. The intention to disguise the luxurious mouth and the excited blue eyes was amateurish.

‘Quick.’

The train had begun to move. Bond reached for the passing hand-rail and swung up on to the step. The attendant was still holding open the door. Bond stepped unhurriedly through.

‘Madam was late,’ said the attendant. ‘She came along the corridor. She must have entered by the last carriage.’

Bond went down the carpeted corridor to the centre coupé. A black 7 stood above a black 8 on the white metal lozenge. The door was ajar. Bond walked in and shut it behind him. The girl had taken off her veil and her black straw hat. She was sitting in the corner by the window. A long, sleek sable coat was thrown open to show a natural coloured shantung dress with a pleated skirt, honey-coloured nylons and a black crocodile belt and shoes. She looked composed.

‘You have no faith, James.’

Bond sat down beside her. ‘Tania,’ he said, ‘if there was a bit more room I’d put you across my knee and spank you. You nearly gave me heart failure. What happened?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tatiana innocently. ‘What could happen? I said I would be here, and I am here. You have no faith. Since I am sure you are more interested in my dowry than in me, it is up there.’

Bond looked casually up. Two small cases were on the rack beside his suitcase. He took her hand. He said, ‘Thank God you’re safe.’

Something in his eyes, perhaps the flash of guilt, as he admitted to himself that he had been more interested in the girl than the machine, reassured her. She kept his hand in hers and sank contentedly back in her corner.

The train screeched slowly round Seraglio Point. The lighthouse lit up the roofs of the dreary shacks along the railway line. With his free hand Bond took out a cigarette and lit it. He reflected that they would soon be passing the back of the great bill-board where Krilencu had lived–until less than twenty-four hours ago. Bond saw again the scene in every detail. The white cross roads, the two men in the shadows, the doomed man slipping out through the purple lips.

The girl watched his face with tenderness. What was this man thinking? What was going on behind those cold level grey-blue eyes that sometimes turned soft and sometimes, as they had done last night before his passion had burned out in her arms, blazed like diamonds. Now they were veiled in thought. Was he worrying about them both? Worrying about their safety? If only she could tell him that there was nothing to fear, that he was only her passport to England – him and the heavy case the Resident Director had given her that evening in the office. The Director had said the same thing. ‘Here is your passport to England, Corporal,’ he had said cheerfully. ‘Look.’ He had unzipped the bag: ‘A brand new Spektor. Be certain not to open the bag again or let it out of your compartment until you get to the other end. Or this Englishman will take it away from you and throw you on the dust-heap. It is this machine they want. Do not let them take it from you, or you will have failed in your duty. Understood?’

A signal box loomed up in the blue dusk outside the window. Tatiana watched Bond get up and pull down the window and crane out into the darkness. His body was close to her. She moved her knee so that it touched him. How extraordinary, this passionate tenderness that had filled her ever since she had seen him last night standing naked at the window, his arms up to hold the curtains back, his profile, under the tousled black hair, intent and pale in the moonlight. And then the extraordinary fusing of their eyes and their bodies. The flame that had suddenly lit between them – between the two secret agents, thrown together from enemy camps a whole world apart, each involved in his own plot against the country of the other, antagonists by profession, yet turned, and by the orders of their governments, into lovers.

Tatiana stretched out a hand and caught hold of the edge of the coat and tugged at it. Bond pulled up the window and turned. He smiled down at her. He read her eyes. He bent and put his hands on the fur over her breasts and kissed her hard on the lips. Tatiana leant back, dragging him with her.

There came a soft double knock on the door. Bond stood up. He pulled out his handkerchief and brusquely scrubbed the rouge off his lips. ‘That’ll be my friend Kerim,’ he said. ‘I must talk to him. I will tell the conductor to make up the beds. Stay here while he does it. I won’t be long. I shall be outside the door.’ He leant forward and touched her hand and looked at her wide eyes and at her rueful, half-open lips. ‘We shall have all the night to ourselves. First I must see that you are safe.’ He unlocked the door and slipped out.

Darko Kerim’s huge bulk was blocking the corridor. He was leaning on the brass guard-rail, smoking and gazing moodily out towards the Sea of Marmara that receded as the long train snaked away from the coast and turned inland and northwards. Bond leaned on the rail beside him. Kerim looked into the reflection of Bond’s face in the dark window. He said softly, ‘The news is not good. There are three of them on the train.’

‘Ah!’ An electric tingle ran up Bond’s spine.

‘It’s the three strangers we saw in that room. Obviously they’re on to you and the girl.’ Kerim glanced sharply sideways. ‘That makes her a double. Or doesn’t it?’

Bond’s mind was cool. So the girl had been bait. And yet, and yet. No, damn it. She couldn’t be acting. It wasn’t possible. The cipher machine? Perhaps after all it wasn’t in that bag. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. He turned and knocked softly on the door. He heard her unlock it and slip the chain. He went in and shut the door. She looked surprised. She had thought it was the conductor come to make up the beds.

She smiled radiantly. ‘You have finished?’

‘Sit down, Tatiana. I’ve got to talk to you.’

Now she saw the coldness in his face and her smile went out. She sat down obediently with her hands in her lap.

Bond stood over her. Was there guilt in her face, or fear? No, only surprise and a coolness to match his own expression.

‘Now listen, Tatiana,’ Bond’s voice was deadly. ‘Something’s come up. I must look into that bag and see if the machine is there.’

She said indifferently, ‘Take it down and look.’ She examined the hands in her lap. So now it was going to come. What the Director had said. They were going to take the machine and throw her aside, perhaps have her put off the train. Oh God! This man was going to do that to her.

Bond reached up and hauled down the heavy case and put it on the seat. He tore the zip sideways and looked in. Yes, a grey japanned metal case with three rows of squat keys, rather like a typewriter. He held the bag open towards her. ‘Is that a Spektor?’

She glanced casually into the gaping bag. ‘Yes.’

Bond zipped the bag shut and put it back on the rack. He sat down beside the girl. ‘There are three M.G.B. men on the train. We know they are the ones who arrived at your centre on Monday. What are they doing here, Tatiana?’ Bond’s voice was soft. He watched her, searched her with all his senses.

She looked up. There were tears in her eyes. Were they the tears of a child found out? But there was no trace of guilt in her face. She only looked terrified of something.