Devil May Care

by Sebastian Faulks

  Hashim looked like thousands of young Algerians who had come to a bad end. And yet…

  ‘Cause of death?’ said Mathis.

  ‘Single bullet, fired up through the roof of the mouth.’

  ‘But why the damage to the nose?’

  ‘He must have been beaten up first,’said Dumont. ‘But it’s not just the nose. Look at his right hand.’

  Mathis lifted Hashim’s clenched fist. There was a bloody piece of meat sticking out of it. ‘What the –’

  ‘It’s his tongue,’ said Dumont.

  Mathis lowered Hashim’s arm. ‘Why mutilate him when he’s dead? Some code or signal, do you think?’

  ‘They didn’t do it when he was dead,’ said Dumont. ‘I’m almost certain they did it when he was alive. Must have ripped it out with pliers or something.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ said Mathis. ‘I have. It rings a bell. I’ve come across it somewhere … Somewhere. Anyway, thank you, Doctor. You can put him back now. I have work to do.’

  He strode down the corridor, through the lobby of the building and out into the rain. ‘Turn that awful Piaf racket off,’ he said, as he climbed into the car, ‘and take me to the office.’

  The driver said nothing, but switched off the radio, pushed the gear lever up into first and moved off with the inevitable squeal. It was just past two a.m.

  2. A Voice from the Past

  It was a bright Sunday morning, and the pilgrims had gathered in their thousands in St Peter’s Square to hear the Pope address them from an upstairs window.

  James Bond dallied for a moment among the faithful. He watched their credulous faces crane towards the distant balcony and the light of joy that came into them when the old man spoke a few words in their own language. He almost envied them their simple faith. He shook his head and moved off through the pigeons.

  Not even the supposedly universal tongue of Latin had been able to make an impression on Bond, a disconsolate figure as he walked off past the squat Castel Sant’ Angelo and crossed the Tiber into the via Zanardelli, where he stopped at a bar and ordered an americano – a pungent espresso that lasted two sips instead of the single one of the regular caffé. The place was filled with people taking a leisurely late breakfast, talking animatedly, and of waiters cheerily calling out their orders to the bar. One or two middle-aged women had brought their pet dogs and fed them morsels of pastry beneath the table. Bond stood at the bar to drink his coffee, left a few coins and wandered off again into the street.

  His three-month sabbatical, enforced by the medical people back in London, still had two weeks to run. It had been pleasant enough to begin with. An old friend of M’s had fixed him up with a cottage in Barbados where he’d been able to swim and snorkel most of the day before eating dinner on the terrace, cooked and served by a plump female islander called Charity. She did marvellous grilled fish and rice dishes, with home-made ice-creams and piles of sliced mango and papaya to follow. At the medics’ insistence, Bond had drunk no alcohol and retired to bed no later than ten o’clock with only a paperback book and a powerful barbiturate for company.

  He kept up a fitness regimen to no more than 75 per cent of his potential. In addition to the swimming, he ran three miles a day, did pull-ups on a metal bar on the beach and fifty press-ups before his second shower of the day. It was enough to stop him going stale, but little more than that.

  However, he had also been given honorary membership of the local tennis club, and in the early evenings, instead of drinking cocktails, he walked down to play with Wayland, an impressively quick youngster from the local police service. Bond, who, since his schooldays, had played tennis only a dozen times, and then without great enthusiasm, found his competitive instinct aroused by Wayland’s booming serve-and-volley game. Tennis was not, it turned out, a game of cucumber sandwiches and sporting pleas to ‘take two more’ – not how Wayland played. It was a lung-searing, shoulder-wrenching battle of wills. Bond was horribly out of practice, but his co-ordination was exceptional and his will to win even more so. It wasn’t until the fifth encounter that he managed to take a set from the younger man, but as his own game improved he began to exploit the mental weaknesses in Wayland’s play. It became an encounter neither wished to lose, and they generally stopped at two sets all for a long drink on the veranda.

  After four weeks M’s friends inconveniently required their house back, and Bond, more or less banned by his boss from re-entering Britain, took himself off to the South of France. His plane landed in Marseille one hot evening in May, and he thought that, with time so heavy on his hands, he would take dinner in the port and stay the night rather than head straight off down the coast. He asked the taxi driver to take him to a place where they did the best bouillabaisse, and half an hour later found himself beneath an orange awning, sipping a chaste citron pressé and looking over at the ships that lay at anchor in the port.

  A man who travels alone has time to reflect and observe. A man, furthermore, who has been trained by the most rigorous and secret organization in his country and whose instincts have been honed by years of self-discipline will see things other travellers barely register.

  So it was that Bond, perhaps alone of all the diners on the quai that night, asked himself why the two men in the black Mercedes 300D Cabriolet did not fit in – even here, in a port loud with commerce and people of all nationalities.

  The car pulled up beside the dock, where the smaller of the two men, who wore a short-sleeved bush shirt with a kind of French military kepi, climbed out and began to inspect some of the vessels. Eventually, he went up the gangway of one and disappeared on board.

  Bond found himself looking at the man’s companion, who remained in the open-topped car. He was about Bond’s own age, of possibly Slavic or East European origin, he judged, from the high cheekbones and narrow eyes. His straw-coloured hair was oiled and driven back straight from his forehead without a parting. He was dressed in a beige tropical suit, probably from Airey and Wheeler, with a pale blue shirt and scarlet tie such as one sees in the windows of Jermyn Street. The carriagework of the car shone with a deep black gleam and the burgundy leather seats had been buffed to a factory finish. But what held Bond’s eye was the fact that the man affected a single driving glove.

  Even when he took a silver case from his pocket, manoeuvred a cigarette out and lit it, he kept the glove on. Was it Bond’s imagination, or did the glove seem remarkably large, as though the hand it encased was bigger than the other?

  More interesting than any physical peculiarity was something the man gave off – a kind of aura. He exuded arrogance. The attitude of his thrown-back head, the set of his lips and the movement of his wrist as he flicked ash on to the cobbles conveyed contempt for all around him. But there was something else – a sense of burning, zealous concentration. This was a man with a mission of such consuming urgency that he would trample anything before him. Perhaps, Bond thought, that was why he held himself so aloof – because he feared that being exposed to the demands of other people might corrupt the purity of his purpose. But how many years, and what bitterness or reverses, must it have taken to create such a creature?

  His colleague returned to the car, carrying a bag, his face in shadow beneath his strange kepi. In the boutiques of the King’s Road, Chelsea, near his flat, Bond had seen the new fashion for military uniforms among the young, who sported coats and tunics with coloured braid. But this man was no ‘hippie’ or ‘child of peace’. Though short of stature, he walked with the speed and agility of an army scout or tracker. There was a functional brutality about his movements as he climbed into the driver’s seat, threw the small canvas bag into the back and started the engine. This was a man of action, the NCO fanatically loyal to the overbearing officer beside him.

  He turned the big cabriolet round in a single sweep and accelerated hard. A small dog ran out from one of the cafés, barking at a seagull on the dock.
It was caught by the front wheel of the car, and flattened. While the animal lay squealing in its death throes, the Mercedes drove off without stopping.

  Bond travelled listlessly along the Côte d’Azur. He spent a couple of nights at the Eden Roc on the Cap d’Antibes, but rapidly grew tired of the clientele. Although his work had often forced him to mingle with the rich and he’d developed expensive tastes of his own in liquor, cars and women, he found it enervating to be always in the company of men who’d made a paper fortune by sitting on their backsides in a bourse, and women whose looks were kept precariously alive by the surgeon’s knife and the resources of the hotel beautician.

  At Monte Carlo he made a modest killing at the chemin de fer table, but lost at poker. Neither game excited him as once it might have done. Did he need an opponent of the calibre of Le Chiffre or Hugo Drax, he wondered, to make the game worth the candle?

  One evening in the early-summer twilight, he sat at a café overlooking the Mediterranean at Cannes, hearing the chatter of the tree frogs in the pines. How wonderful this little fishing town must have seemed to its first English visitors, with the softness of its air, the fragrance of the breeze and the simplicity of life exemplified in its food – grilled fish, salads and chilled wine. It was turning into a version of Blackpool now, Bond thought, with the cheap hotels, the crowds, the youths on noisy scooters and two-stroke motorcycles. Soon they’d put a ferris wheel on the promenade.

  Bond caught himself thinking in this way too often.

  In his hotel room he took a vigorous shower, first as hot as he could bear it, then freezing cold, letting the icy needles pierce his shoulders. He stood naked in front of the mirror and looked into his face, with a distaste he made no attempt to soften.

  ‘You’re tired,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re played out. Finished.’

  His torso and arms bore a network of scars, small and large, that traced a history of his violent life. There was the slight displacement of his spine to the left where he had fallen from a train in Hungary, the skin graft on the back of the left hand. Every square inch of trunk and limb seemed to contribute to the story. But he knew that it was what was in his head that counted.

  That was what M had told him. ‘You’ve been through a lot, James. Much more than any human being should. If you were a normal man – even if you were another double-O – I’d just move you on. Put you on a desk job. But because it’s you, James, I’m going to let that decision come from you. Take three months’ sabbatical, full pay, then come and tell me what you’ve decided.’

  Bond put on clean underwear, dress shirt and white dinner jacket with a black cummerbund. At least everything fitted. For all Charity’s home cooking and the occasional delights of the restaurants along the Riviera, he hadn’t run to fat. Tennis and not drinking alcohol must have helped. But his mind … Had his mind run to fat?

  ∗

  Tired of the South of France, wishing the days would pass more quickly, Bond had come to Rome and searched out a hotel on the via Veneto of which Felix Leiter, his old friend in the CIA, had spoken warmly when he called him from Pinkerton’s, where he now worked. Felix was a good man, and he’d picked the best. Bond was able to sit on his balcony with a cigarette and a glass of fresh blood-orange juice while he watched the film stars – the real and would-be – parade up and down between the cafés in their evening passeggiata. ‘It’s a bit close to the US embassy for my taste,’ Leiter had warned him. ‘All those Yalies with their button-down shirts and cocktail parties. But I’m sure it’d be fine for a stuck-up Limey like you, James.’

  On the Sunday evening after he’d been in St Peter’s Square, Bond, in a simple woollen jacket, charcoal trousers and black loafers, decided to walk down to a traditional Roman restaurant in the via Carrozze near the Spanish Steps. As he crossed the lobby, a young woman wearing an expensive Dior suit brushed past him. Her evening bag fell noisily to the floor and Bond bent to pick it up, noticing the slim ankles, sheer nylons and elegant court shoes as he did so.

  ‘How clumsy of me,’ she said.

  ‘It was my fault,’ said Bond.

  ‘No, no, I wasn’t looking where –’

  ‘All right,’ said Bond, ‘I shall let you take the blame, but only if you allow me to buy you a drink.’

  The woman glanced at her watch. She had black hair, cut short, and wide-set brown eyes. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just one. My name is Larissa Rossi.’

  ‘Bond. James Bond.’ He held out his hand and she took it gently. ‘I knew another Larissa once.’

  ‘Did you?’ Her tone was noncommittal.

  They were crossing the marble-floored lobby. ‘Yes,’ said Bond. ‘But she was a blonde. A Russian blonde.’

  Larissa smiled as they entered the bar. ‘And I suppose she was a business connection. A translator, perhaps?’

  ‘No. She was a professional seductress.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Larissa laughed, but she seemed amused more than shocked, Bond thought. Good.

  ‘It’s not a story I’ve ever told,’ he said. ‘Now, what can I get you?’

  ‘A dry martini, please. They do a very good one here. You should try it.’

  Bond smiled grimly and ordered tomato juice for himself. The trouble with not drinking alcohol was that all soft drinks were more or less repellent.

  They took their glasses to a table in the corner, away from the piano. Bond watched enviously as Larissa stirred the viscous fluid with the olive on its cocktail stick. She lit a Chesterfield and held out the packet to him. He shook his head and took out one of his own. He had long ago finished his supply from Morland’s, but had managed to find an enterprising tobacconist at the foot of the via Condotti who had made him up five hundred Turkish of passable quality.

  ‘What are you doing in Rome, Larissa?’

  ‘I’m with my husband. He’s a director of one of those large insurance companies whose offices you see on via Veneto.’ Her voice was interesting: low-pitched, educated English with a hint of something more cosmopolitan.

  ‘And has your husband abandoned you for the evening?’

  ‘I … Perhaps. And what are you doing here, Mr Bond?’

  ‘James, please. I’m on holiday. I’m in the export business.’

  ‘On holiday alone?’

  ‘Yes, I prefer it that way. I find one gets to see more sights.’

  Larissa raised an eyebrow and crossed her legs. It was a way of bringing them to his attention, Bond knew, and he couldn’t blame her. They were long, with a supple shapeliness and elegance: not the result of exercise or dieting, Bond thought, but of breeding, youth and expensive hosiery.

  An hour later they were at dinner in the via Carrozze. A telephone call from the hotel by Larissa had apparently secured her husband’s permission for the innocent date and one by Bond had added a second person to his reservation.

  The restaurant was wood-panelled and traditional. The waiters in their short white coats were all Romans of a certain age who had spent a lifetime in their chosen profession. They were swift and precise in their movements, polite without being deferential.

  Bond watched as Larissa chatted over ravioli, glistening with truffle oil. She told him her father was Russian, her mother English, and that she’d been educated in Paris and Geneva before going to work in Washington, where she’d met her husband. They had no children.

  ‘So of course my husband does a good deal of travelling,’ she said, sipping a glass of Orvieto. ‘Our base is in Paris, and I travel with him some of the time. To the better places.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Bond. ‘Rome, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong –’

  ‘No, I can’t bear Hong Kong. I stay at home when he goes there. I’m quite a home girl, really.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Bond.

  Early thirties, bored, he thought, part Jewish on her father’s side. She had a beautiful mouth whose upper lip occasionally stiffened into something almost like a pout.

  Her skin had a light honey glow
, but her air of innocent respectability was a front. There was an unrepentant wild-ness in her eyes. She would have to pretend that it was all an aberration, that she was ‘not like that’, but that would only make it more exciting for both of them.

  ‘You look distracted, James.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Do I? I blame the two Bs.’

  ‘And what are they?’

  ‘Brainwashing and bereavement.’

  ‘Goodness. Tell me more.’

  For a moment, Bond was tempted to confide in this animated and beautiful girl – to tell her about his wife of a few brief hours, Tracy di Vicenzo, and how Blofeld’s men had killed her, how he himself had fallen into their clutches, the whole Japanese nightmare and his part-redemption in Jamaica. But confidences were unprofessional. He had already allowed his strange, distracted mood to let him say more than he should.

  ‘Another time,’ he said. ‘When we know each other a little better.’

  He steered the conversation back to Larissa, noticing as he did that his evasiveness had made him more interesting to her. Reluctantly at first, but then with increasing self-absorption, Larissa took up the narrative of her life.

  When they arrived back at the hotel, she stopped outside the front door and placed her hand on Bond’s forearm.

  ‘My husband has had to go to Naples for the night,’ she said, looking down at her feet and licking her lips a little nervously as she spoke. ‘He told me when I called him earlier. You could come up to our suite for a drink if you like.’

  Bond looked down into the large brown eyes as the full lips parted in an expression of modest excitement. Then he heard himself utter three words that in all his adult life had never, in such a situation, left his mouth before. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘What?’ It seemed as though she truly hadn’t heard.

  ‘No, thanks, Larissa,’ said Bond. ‘It’s better this way. I –’

  ‘No explanations,’ she said. She stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’

  He watched her as she walked over to the desk, collected her key and made for the lift. As she stepped in, she hesitated, turned and waved.