Authors: Sebastian Faulks
The head of his section would require a written report, so he had better at least get a feel for the Arc en Ciel and what went on there. Back in the office, he would look up the files on similar killings, check with Immigration and see if there was a pattern, or a reason for disquiet. An entire section of the Deuxie`me was devoted to the fallout of the French colonial wars. The eight-year struggle for Algerian independence had brutally divided not only Algeria but France itself and caused one political upheaval after another, finding a resolution only with the astonishing return to power of the wartime leader, General de Gaulle. Mathis smiled for a moment as he thought of Sylvie’s reverent look when she mentioned the great man’s name. And at the same time, even more shaming in an international sense, had been the defeat of the French army in Indo-China – or what now called itself Vietnam. The humiliation of the battle of Dien Bien Phu had burned itself into the soul of France, leaving a scar that had been hastily covered over.
The only consolation, thought Mathis, was that the Americans now seemed hell-bent on meeting the same catastrophe. For him and his colleagues, however, Algeria and Indo-China had meant uncountable thousands of immigrants, embittered, violent and excluded, many of them criminals and some of them committed enemies of the Republic.
Mathis methodically noted the layout of the block and the angle at which the killer might have approached the stairwell. He made other rudimentary observations more suited in his mind to the procedure of a local gendarme. He lit another cigarette, and went back down the stairs. He thanked the policeman and walked across the wasteground to where the Citroe¨n’s engine was still idling. ‘ Take me to the morgue.’
As the big car turned slowly, its headlights for a moment picked out a single figure in a ground-floor doorway. He wore a Foreign Legion kepi, and as the Citroe¨n rejoined the road, he moved off swiftly, as though he’d now seen all he needed.
At the morgue, Mathis waited for the attendant to gain authorization to show him in. He told the impassive driver to wait.
‘Monsieur,’ the man grunted, and returned to the car.
The attendant came back with a pathologist, a senior-looking man with gold glasses and a neat black moustache. He shook hands with Mathis and introduced himself as Dumont. Checking and rechecking the numbers on the attendant’s sheet against those on the fridge drawers, Dumont eventually found what he wanted and hauled with both hands on the thick metal handle. It was a moment that had never ceased to give Mathis a frisson of excitement. The cadaver was already greyish, cold, and although it had been cleaned up, the face was a mess.
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
caffe`
. 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 middleaged 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 coordination 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 presse´
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 com
panion, 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 cafe´s, 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 Coˆte 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 cafe´ 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 twostroke 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 –