James Bond Anthology (215 page)

The girl was standing at a counter arguing with one of the assistants. ‘But I tell you I don’t want Senior Service. I tell you I want a cigarette that’s so disgusting that I shan’t want to smoke it. Haven’t you got a cigarette that stops people smoking? Look at all that.’ She waved a hand towards the stacked shelves. ‘Don’t tell me some of those don’t taste horrible.’

The man was used to crazy tourists and anyway the Nassavian doesn’t get excited. He said, ‘Well, Mam …’ and turned and languidly looked along the shelves.

Bond said sternly to the girl, ‘You can choose between two kinds of cigarette if you want to smoke less.’

She looked sharply up at him. ‘And who might you be?’

‘My name’s Bond, James Bond. I’m the world’s authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly. You’re lucky I happen to be handy.’

The girl looked him up and down. He was a man she hadn’t seen before in Nassau. He was about six feet tall and somewhere in his middle thirties. He had dark, rather cruel good looks and very clear blue-grey eyes that were now observing her inspection sardonically. A scar down his right cheek showed pale against a tan so mild that he must have only recently come to the island. He was wearing a very dark blue lightweight single-breasted suit over a cream silk shirt and a black knitted silk tie. Despite the heat, he looked cool and clean, and his only concession to the tropics appeared to be the black saddle-stitched sandals on his bare feet.

It was an obvious attempt at a pick-up. He had an exciting face, and authority. She decided to go along. But she wasn’t going to make it easy. She said coldly, ‘All right. Tell me.’

‘The only way to stop smoking is to stop it and not start again. If you want to
pretend
to stop for a week or two, it’s no good trying to ration yourself. You’ll become a bore and think about nothing else. And you’ll snatch at a cigarette every time the hour strikes or whatever the intervals may be. You’ll behave greedily. That’s unattractive. The other way is to have cigarettes that are either too mild or too strong. The mild ones are probably the best for you.’ Bond said to the attendant, ‘A carton of Dukes, king-size with filter.’ Bond handed them to the girl. ‘Here, try these. With the compliments of Faust.’

‘Oh, but I can’t. I mean …’

But Bond had already paid for the carton and for a packet of Chesterfields for himself. He took the change and followed her out of the shop. They stood together under the striped awning. The heat was terrific. The white light on the dusty street, the glare reflected back off the shop fronts opposite and off the dazzling limestone of the houses made them both screw up their eyes. Bond said, ‘I’m afraid smoking goes with drinking. Are you going to give them both up or one by one?’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘This is very sudden, Mr – er – Bond. Well, all right. But somewhere out of the town. It’s too hot here. Do you know The Wharf out beyond the Fort Montague?’ Bond noticed that she looked quickly up and down the street. ‘It’s not bad. Come on. I’ll take you there. Mind the metal. It’ll raise blisters on you.’

Even the white leather of the upholstery burned through to Bond’s thighs. But he wouldn’t have minded if his suit had caught fire. This was his first sniff at the town and already he had got hold of the girl. And she was a fine girl at that. Bond caught hold of the leather-bound safety grip on the dashboard as the girl did a sharp turn up Frederick Street and another one on to Shirley.

Bond settled himself sideways so that he could look at her. She wore a gondolier’s broadrimmed straw hat, tilted impudently down her nose. The pale blue tails of its ribbon streamed out behind. On the front of the ribbon was printed in gold ‘M/Y DISCO VOLANTE’. Her short-sleeved silk shirt was in half-inch vertical stripes of pale blue and white and, with the pleated cream skirt, the whole get-up reminded Bond vaguely of a sunny day at Henley Regatta. She wore no rings and no jewellery except for a rather masculine square gold wrist-watch with a black face. Her flat-heeled sandals were of white doeskin. They matched her broad white doeskin belt and the sensible handbag that lay, with a black and white striped silk scarf, on the seat between them. Bond knew a good deal about her from the immigration form, one among a hundred, which he had been studying that morning. Her name was Dominetta Vitali. She had been born in Bolzano in the Italian Tyrol and therefore probably had as much Austrian as Italian blood in her. She was twenty-nine and gave her profession as ‘actress’. She had arrived six months before in the Disco and it was entirely understood that she was mistress to the owner of the yacht, an Italian called Emilio Largo. ‘Whore’, ‘tart’, ‘prostitute’ were not words Bond used about women unless they were professional streetwalkers or the inmates of a brothel, and when Harling, the Commissioner of Police, and Pitman, Chief of Immigration and Customs, had described her as an ‘Italian tart’ Bond had reserved judgement. Now he knew he had been right. This was an independent, a girl of authority and character. She might like the rich, gay life, but so far as Bond was concerned, that was the right kind of girl. She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not on theirs.

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest danger potential, and two women as nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other’s faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person’s expression, perhaps in order to read behind the other’s words or to analyse the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other’s attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver not only has to hear, and see, what her companion is saying, but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.

But this girl drove like a man. She was entirely focused on the road ahead and on what was going on in her driving mirror, an accessory rarely used by women except for making up their faces. And, equally rare in a woman, she took a man’s pleasure in the feel of her machine, in the timing of her gear changes, and the use of her brakes.

She didn’t talk to Bond or seem to be aware of him, and this allowed him to continue his inspection without inhibition. She had a gay, to-hell-with-you face that, Bond thought, would become animal in passion. In bed she would fight and bite and then suddenly melt into hot surrender. He could almost see the proud, sensual mouth bare away from the even white teeth in a snarl of desire and then, afterwards, soften into a half-pout of loving slavery. In profile the eyes were soft charcoal slits such as you see on some birds, but in the shop Bond had seen them full face. Then they had been fierce and direct with a golden flicker in the dark brown that held much the same message as the mouth. The profile, the straight, small uptilted nose, the determined set of the chin, and the clean-cut sweep of the jawline were as decisive as a royal command, and the way the head was set on the neck had the same authority – the poise one associates with imaginary princesses. Two features modified the clean-cut purity of line – a soft, muddled Brigitte Bardot haircut that escaped from under the straw hat in endearing disarray, and two deeply cut but soft dimples which could only have been etched by a sweet if rather ironic smile that Bond had not yet seen. The sunburn was not overdone and her skin had none of that dried, exhausted sheen that can turn the texture of even the youngest skin into something more like parchment. Beneath the gold, there was an earthy warmth in the cheeks that suggested a good healthy peasant strain from the Italian Alps and her breasts, high-riding and deeply V-ed, were from the same stock. The general impression, Bond decided, was of a wilful, high-tempered, sensual girl – a beautiful Arab mare who would only allow herself to be ridden by a horseman with steel thighs and velvet hands, and then only with curb and saw-bit – and then only when he had broken her to bridle and saddle. Bond thought that he would like to try his strength against hers. But that must be for some other time. For the moment another man was in the saddle. He would first have to be unhorsed. And anyway, what the hell was he doing fooling with these things? There was a job to be done. The devil of a job.

The MG swept out of Shirley Street on to Eastern Road and followed the coast. Across the wide harbour entrance were the emerald and turquoise shoals of Athol Island. A deep-sea fishing boat was passing over them, the two tall antennae of her twelve-foot rods streaming their lines astern. A fast motorboat came hammering by close in shore, the water-skier on the line behind her executing tight slaloms across the waves of her wake. It was a sparkling, beautiful day and Bond’s heart lifted momentarily from the trough of indecision and despondency created by an assignment that, particularly since his arrival at dawn that day, seemed increasingly time-wasting and futile.

The Bahamas, the string of a thousand islands that straggle five hundred miles south-east from just east of the coast of Florida to just north of Cuba, from latitude 27° down to latitude 21°, were, for most of three hundred years, the haunt of every famous pirate of the Western Atlantic, and today tourism makes full use of the romantic mythology. A road-sign said ‘
Blackbeard’s Tower 1 mile’
and another ‘
Gunpowder Wharf. Sea Food. Native Drinks. Shady Garden. First Left’.

A sand track showed on their left. The girl took it and pulled up in front of a ruined stone warehouse against which leant a pink clapboard house with white window-frames and a white Adam style doorway over which hung a brightly painted inn sign of a powder keg with a skull and crossbones on it. The girl drove the MG into the shade of a clump of casuarinas and they got out and went through the door and through a small dining-room with red and white checked covers and out on to a terrace built on the remains of a stone wharf. The terrace was shaded by sea-almond trees trimmed into umbrellas. Trailed by a shuffling coloured waiter with soup stains down his white coat, they chose a cool table on the edge of the terrace looking over the water. Bond glanced at his watch. He said to the girl, ‘It’s exactly midday. Do you want to drink solid or soft?’

The girl said, ‘Soft. I’ll have a double Bloody Mary with plenty of Worcester sauce.’

Bond said, ‘What do you call hard? I’ll have a vodka and tonic with a dash of bitters.’

The waiter said, ‘Yassuh,’ and mooched away.

‘I call vodka-on-the-rocks hard. All that tomato juice makes it soft.’ She hooked a chair towards her with one foot and stretched out her legs on it so that they were in the sun. The position wasn’t comfortable enough. She kicked off her sandals and sat back, satisfied. She said, ‘When did you arrive? I haven’t seen you about. When it’s like this, at the end of the season, one expects to know most of the faces.’

‘I got in this morning. From New York. I’ve come to look for a property. It struck me that now would be better than in the season. When all the millionaires are here the prices are hopeless. They may come down a bit now they’re gone. How long have you been here?’

‘About six months. I came out in a yacht, the
Disco Volante
. You may have seen her. She’s anchored up the coast. You probably flew right over her coming in to land at Windsor Field.’

‘A long low streamlined affair? Is she yours? She’s got beautiful lines.’

‘She belongs to a relative of mine.’ The eyes watched Bond’s face.

‘Do you stay on board?’

‘Oh no. We’ve got a beach property. Or rather we’ve taken it. It’s a place called Palmyra. Just opposite where the yacht is. It belongs to an Englishman. I believe he wants to sell it. It’s very beautiful. And it’s a long way away from the tourists. It’s at a place called Lyford Key.’

‘That sounds the sort of place I’m looking for.’

‘Well, we’ll be gone in about a week.’

‘Oh.’ Bond looked into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘If you’ve got to flirt, don’t be obvious.’ Suddenly the girl laughed. She looked contrite. The dimples remained. ‘I mean, I didn’t really mean that – not the way it sounded. But I’ve spent six months listening to that kind of thing from these silly old rich goats and the only way to shut them up is to be rude. I’m not being conceited. There’s no one under sixty in this place. Young people can’t afford it. So any woman who hasn’t got a harelip or a moustache – well not even a moustache would put them off. They’d probably like it. Well I mean absolutely any girl makes these old goats get their bifocals all steamed up.’ She laughed again. She was getting friendly. ‘I expect you’ll have just the same effect on the old women with pince-nez and blue rinses.’

‘Do they eat boiled vegetables for lunch?’

‘Yes, and they drink carrot juice and prune juice.’

‘We won’t get on then. I won’t sink lower than conch chowder.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘You seem to know a lot about Nassau.’

‘You mean about conch being an aphrodisiac ? That’s not only a Nassau idea. It’s all over the world where there are conchs.’

‘Is it true?’

‘Island people have it on their wedding night. I haven’t found it has any effect on me.’

‘Why?’ She looked mischievous. ‘Are you married?’

‘No.’ Bond smiled across into her eyes. ‘Are you?’

‘No.’

‘Then we might both try some conch soup some time and see what happens.’