by Ian Fleming
Page 17
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 tablecloth 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. Its 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 tablecloth more closely. “I wish for ten thousand dollars American, in paper of small sizes, by tomorrow lunchtime. When you have destroyed the machina I wish for a further twenty thousand. ” Signor Kristatos briefly raised his eyes and surveyed Bonds face. “I am not greedy. I do not take all your funds, isnt 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 fingernails. 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 SA - 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 arent many hiding places in a car they dont 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. ”
“Dont 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 Ms 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 maŒtre dh“tel 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 bein
g 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 maŒtre dh“tel 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 playback 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 Bonds 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 girls 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 Bonds approach on his way to the exit.
Enrico Colombos face was black with rage. Now he, too, was on his feet. “You goddam Austrian beech --”
“Dont dare insult my country, you Italian toad. ” She reached for a half-full glass of wine and hurled it accurately in the mans 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: “Dont 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 maŒtre dh“tel 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.
