James Bond - For Your Eyes Only, James Bond by Ian Fleming
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FROM A VIEW TO A KILL
The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint. In the
howling speed-turmoil of a BSA M20 doing seventy, they were the only
quiet things in the hurtling flesh and metal. Protected by the glass of the
goggles, they stared fixedly ahead from just above the centre of the
handlebars, and their dark unwavering focus was that of gun muzzles.
Below the goggles, the wind had got into the face through the mouth and
had wrenched the lips back into a square grin that showed big tombstone
teeth and strips of whitish gum. On both sides of the grin the cheeks had
been blown out by the wind into pouches that fluttered slightly. To right
and left of the hurtling face under the crash helmet, the black gauntlets,
broken-wristed at the controls, looked like the attacking paws of a big
animal.
The man was dressed in the uniform of a dispatch-rider in the Royal
Corps of Signals, and his machine, painted olive green, was, with certain
modifications to the valves and the carburettor and the removal of some of
the silencer baffles to give more speed, identical with a standard British
Army machine. There was nothing in the man or his equipment to suggest
that he was not what he appeared to be, except a fully loaded Luger held by
a clip to the top of the petrol tank.
It was seven o'clock on a May morning and the dead straight road through
the forest glittered with the tiny luminous mist of spring. On both sides of
the road the moss- and flower-carpeted depths between the great oak trees
held the theatrical enchantment of the royal forests of Versailles and St
Germain. The road was D98, a secondary road serving local traffic in the St
Germain area, and the motor-cyclist had just passed beneath the Paris-
Mantes autoroute already thundering with commuter traffic for Paris. He
was heading north towards St Germain and there was no one else in sight in
either direction, except, perhaps half a mile ahead, an almost identical
figure — another Royal Corps dispatch-rider. He was a younger, slimmer
man and he sat comfortably back on his machine, enjoying the morning and
keeping his speed to around forty. He was well on time and it was a
beautiful day. He wondered whether to have his eggs fried or scrambled
when he got back to HQ around eight.
Five hundred yards, four hundred, three, two, one. The man coming up
from behind slowed to fifty. He put his right gauntlet up to his teeth and
pulled it off. He stuffed the gauntlet between the buttons of his tunic and
reached down and unclipped the gun.
By now he must have been big in the driving-mirror of the young man
ahead, for suddenly the young man jerked his head round, surprised to find
another dispatch-rider on his run at that time of the morning. He expected
that it would be an American or perhaps French military police. It might be
anyone from the eight NATO nations that made up the staff of SHAPE, but
when he recognized the uniform of the Corps he was astonished and
delighted. Who the hell could it be? He raised a cheerful right thumb in
recognition and cut his speed to thirty, waiting for the other man to drift up
alongside. With one eye on the road ahead and the other on the approaching
silhouette in the mirror, he ran through the names of the British riders in
the Special Service Transportation Unit at Headquarters Command. Albert,
Sid, Wally — might be Wally, same thick build. Good show! He'd be able
to pull his leg about that little frog bit in the canteen — Louise, Elise, Lise
— what the hell was her name.
The man with the gun had slowed. Now he was fifty yards away. His face,
undistorted by the wind, had set into blunt, hard, perhaps Slav lines. A red
spark burned behind the black, aimed muzzles of the eyes. Forty yards,
thirty. A single magpie flew out of the forest ahead of the young dispatch-
rider. It fled clumsily across the road into the bushes behind a Michelin sign
that said that St Germain was one kilometre to go. The young man grinned
and raised an ironical finger in salute and self-protection — 'One magpie is
sorrow'.
Twenty yards behind him the man with the gun took both hands off the
handlebars, lifted the Luger, rested it carefully on his left forearm and fired
one shot.
The young man's hands whipped off his controls and met across the centre
of his backward-arching spine. His machine veered across the road, jumped
a narrow ditch and ploughed into a patch of grass and lilies of the valley.
There it rose up on its screaming back wheel and slowly crashed backwards
on top of its dead rider. The BSA coughed and kicked and tore at the young
man's clothes and at the flowers, and then lay quiet.
The killer executed a narrow turn and stopped with his machine pointing
back the way he had come. He stamped down the wheel-rest, pulled his
machine up on to it and walked in among the wild flowers under the trees.
He knelt down beside the dead man and brusquely pulled back an eyelid.
Just as roughly he tore the black leather dispatch-case off the corpse and
ripped open the buttons of the tunic and removed a battered leather wallet.
He wrenched a cheap wrist-watch so sharply off the left wrist that the
chrome expanding bracelet snapped in half. He stood up and slung the
dispatch-case over his shoulder. While he stowed the wallet and the watch
away in his tunic pocket he listened. There were only forest sounds and the
slow tick of hot metal from the crashed BSA. The killer retraced his steps
to the road. He walked slowly, scuffing leaves over the tyre marks in the
soft earth and moss. He took extra trouble over the deep scars in the ditch
and the grass verge, and then stood beside his motor-cycle and looked back
towards the lily of the valley patch. Not bad! Probably only the police dogs
would get it, and, with ten miles of road to cover, they would be hours,
perhaps days — plenty long enough. The main thing in these jobs was to
have enough safety margin. He could have shot the man at forty yards, but
he had preferred to get to twenty. And taking the watch and the wallet had
been nice touches — pro touches.
Pleased with himself, the man heaved his machine off its rest, vaulted
smartly into the saddle and kicked down on the starter. Slowly, so as not to
show skid marks, he accelerated away back down the road and in a minute
or so he was doing seventy again and the wind had redrawn the empty
turnip grin across his face.
Around the scene of the killing, the forest, which had held its breath while
it was done, slowly began to breathe again.
James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet's. It was not a
solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a
pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. A
fine à I'eau
is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A
quart de
champagne
or a
champagne à I'orange
is all right before luncheon, but in
the evening one
quart
leads to another
quart
and a bottle of indifferent
champagne is a bad foundation for the night. Pernod is possible, but it
should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff
because its liquorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafes you
have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with
them, and Bond always had the same thing — an Americano — Bitter
Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda he
always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the
cheapest way to improve a poor drink.
When Bond was in Paris he invariably stuck to the same addresses. He
stayed at the Terminus Nord, because he liked station hotels and because
this was the least pretentious and most anonymous of them. He had
luncheon at the Café de la Paix, the Rotonde or the Dôme, because the food
was good enough and it amused him to watch the people. If he wanted a
solid drink he had it at Harry's Bar, both because of the solidity of the
drinks and because, on his first ignorant visit to Paris at the age of sixteen,
he had done what Harry's advertisement in the
Continental Daily Mail
had
told him to do and had said to his taxi-driver 'Sank Roo Doe Noo'. That had
started one of the memorable evenings of his life, culminating in the loss,
almost simultaneous, of his virginity and his notecase. For dinner, Bond
went to one of the great restaurants — Véfour, the Caneton, Lucas-Carton
or the Cochon d'Or. These he considered, whatever Michelin might say
about the Tour d'Argent, Maxims and the like, to have somehow avoided
the tarnish of the expense account and the dollar. Anyway, he preferred
their cooking. After dinner he generally went to the Place Pigalle to see
what would happen to him. When, as usual, nothing did, he would walk
home across Paris to the Gare du Nord and go to bed.
Tonight Bond decided to tear up this dusty address-book and have himself
an old-fashioned ball. He was on his way through Paris after a dismally
failed assignment on the Austro-Hungarian border. It had been a question of
getting a certain Hungarian out. Bond had been sent from London specially
to direct the operation over the head of Station V. This had been unpopular
with the Vienna Station. There had been misunderstandings — wilful ones.
The man had been killed in the frontier minefield. There would have to be
a court of inquiry. Bond was due back at his London headquarters on the
following day to make his report, and the thought of it all depressed him.
Today had been so beautiful — one of those days when you almost believe
that Paris is beautiful and gay — and Bond had decided to give the town
just one more chance. He would somehow find himself a girl who was a
real girl, and he would take her to dinner at some make-believe place in the
Bois like the Armenonville. To clean the money-look out of her eyes — for
it would certainly be there — he would as soon as possible give her fifty
thousand francs. He would say to her: 'I propose to call you Donatienne, or
possibly Solange, because these are names that suit my mood and the
evening. We knew each other before and you lent me this money because I
was in a jam. Here it is, and now we will tell each other what we have been
doing since we last met in St Tropez just a year ago. In the meantime, here
is the menu and the wine list and you must choose what will make you
happy and fat.' And she would look relieved at not having to try any more,
and she would laugh and say: 'But, James, I do not want to be fat.' And
there they would be, started on the myth of 'Paris in the Spring', and Bond
would stay sober and be interested in her and everything she said. And, by
God, by the end of the evening it would not be his fault if it transpired that
there was in fact no shred of stuffing left in the hoary old fairytale of 'A
good time in Paris'.
Sitting in Fouquet's, waiting for his Americano, Bond smiled at his
vehemence. He knew that he was only playing at this fantasy for the
satisfaction of launching a last kick at a town he had cordially disliked since
the War. Since 1945, he had not had a happy day in Paris. It was not that
the town had sold its body. Many towns have done that. It was its heart that
was gone — pawned to the tourists, pawned to the Russians and
Roumanians and Bulgars, pawned to the scum of the world who had
gradually taken the town over. And, of course, pawned to the Germans.
You could see it in the people's eyes — sullen, envious, ashamed.
Architecture? Bond glanced across the pavement at the shiny black ribbons
of cars off which the sun glinted painfully. Everywhere it was the same as
in the Champs-Elysées. There were only two hours in which you could even
see the town — between five and seven in the morning. After seven it was
engulfed in a thundering stream of black metal with which no beautiful
buildings, no spacious, tree-lined boulevards, could compete.
The waiter's tray clattered down on the marble-topped table. With a slick
one-handed jerk that Bond had never been able to copy, the waiter's bottle-
opener prised the cap off the Perrier. The man slipped the tab under the ice-
bucket, said a mechanical "Voilà, M'sieur" and darted away. Bond put ice
into his drink, filled it to the top with soda and took a long pull at it. He sat
back and lit a Laurens jaune. Of course the evening would be a disaster.
Even supposing he found the girl in the next hour or so, the contents would
certainly not stand up to the wrapping. On closer examination she would
turn out to have the heavy, dank, wide-pored skin of the bourgeois French.
The blonde hair under the rakish velvet beret would be brown at the roots
and as coarse as piano wire. The peppermint on the breath would not
conceal the midday garlic. The alluring figure would be intricately
scaffolded with wire and rubber. She would be from Lille and she would
ask him if he was American. And, Bond smiled to himself, she or her
maquereau
would probably steal his notecase. La ronde! He would be back
where he came in. More or less, that was. Well, to hell with it!
A battered black Peugeot 403 broke out of the centre stream of traffic, cut
across the inside line of cars and pulled in to double park at the kerb. There
was the usual screaming of brakes, hooting and yelling. Quite unmoved, a
girl got out of the car and, leaving the traffic to sort itself out, walked
purposefully across the sidewalk. Bond sat up. She had everything, but
absolutely everything that belonged in his fantasy. She was tall and,
although her figure was hidden by a light raincoat, the way she moved and
the way she held herself promised that it would be beautiful. The face had
the gaiety and bravado that went with her driving, but now there was
impatience in the compressed lips and the eyes fretted as she pushed
diagonally through the moving crowd on the pavement.
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