Authors: Sebastian Faulks
Bond could find no reserves of strength. This was one struggle too many for a body that had been starved, beaten and tortured. In the heel of his own shoes was a blade he might have used to help himself, but he was wearing the useless slip-ons of a dead airline pilot. The air was draining from his lungs. Then he felt a slim hand move to the back of
his waistband, and a discreet tug as the Luger was withdrawn.
With a roar of anger, Chagrin turned and swung his arm across Scarlett’s wrist, causing the gun to clatter to the floor. It gave Bond enough time to move. He wrenched the little finger of Chagrin’s left hand from his throat and, using both his own hands in a sudden downward snap, he broke it.
Chagrin stepped back, his noise now of pain as much as anger, and aimed a punch at Bond’s face with his right hand. Bond ducked, and the blow glanced off his shoulder. Scarlett picked up the Luger.
‘Don’t fire,’ gasped Bond. ‘It’ll bring the guard.’
As the two men stood grappling on the rolling, swaying floor of the train, Scarlett climbed on to the seat. With the butt of the Luger, she knocked off
Chagrin’s kepi to reveal the shaved skull where the butcher-surgeons of Omsk had been to work. She had found his point of shame. As Chagrin put both hands to his head to cover the botched osteoplastic flap, Bond drove his head into the man’s solar plexus. Chagrin doubled forward and Bond snapped his knee up into the chin, hearing the jaw crack.
‘Pull down the window, Scarlett,’ he gasped. ‘Help me lift him.’
Bond thought of the tame missionaries of the Vietnamese jungle – priests and spinsters from the Loire valley whose tongues this monster had ripped out with pliers for reading Bible stories to the children
– and grabbed the gun from Scarlett. He stood on the seat and drove the muzzle with all his might deep into the concave dip in Chagrin’s skull, feeling it pierce the unknitted bone and membranes beneath. The torturer let out a terrible moan and fell against the bunk. Each taking a leg, Bond and Scarlett levered him bit by bit through the gaping window. They had got him half-way out and were holding on to his weakly kicking calves when the front of the train entered a narrow brick tunnel. When the entrance was opposite their compartment, the clearance was tight enough for the brick pier to whip off Chagrin’s head, which ricocheted into the embankment. Once they were through the tunnel, Bond shovelled the rest of the wretched body out and fell back on to the seat.
Scarlett put her face into her hands and wept. Bond awoke in daylight, with Scarlett’s arms round him, lying on the bottom bunk. She had covered them both with a grey blanket and the garage woman’s cardigan.
Scarlett’s hair lay over his face like a dark shawl as she stroked his aching back and whispered in his ear,
‘We’re nearly there, we’re nearly there, my darling. Breakfast in Leningrad at the Literaturnaya Cafe´ on the Nevsky Prospekt. My father used to tell me about it. We’ll have eggs with smoked salmon and coffee. Then a boat. Helsinki. And then Paris.’
Bond smiled, rolled on to his back and kissed her on the lips. The sleep had partly restored him.
‘Why is it that every time I’m about to make love to you,’ he said, ‘we get interrupted? Is it still
‘‘destiny’’?’
‘No,’ said Scarlett, ‘it’s so that when it finally happens it will be more wonderful.’
Scarlett disappeared down the corridor with the Volga driver’s spongebag and Bond prepared himself for one more day. When they reached Helsinki, he would telephone M and find out what had happened to the Caspian Sea Monster. He smiled to himself at the prospect. The old man could never quite disguise the pleasure he had in hearing Bond’s voice after a long radio silence.
When each had done what they could with Soviet toothpaste and brackish water, they settled back to watch the approach of Leningrad.
‘As soon as we get to the docks,’ said Bond, ‘you’ll
have to find an adventurous boat owner, Scarlett. Somewhere out in the Gulf of Finland there’s a watery border between the Communists and the free world. I think we can be reasonably certain that it will be patrolled by armed frontier guards.’
‘You want me to find a pirate,’ said Scarlett.
‘Yes,’ said Bond. ‘With a very fast boat.’
‘I shall need money.’
‘You’re turning me into a cheap thief.’
‘You have such a flair for it, my love.’
Bond sighed and checked the magazine of the Luger.
It was only a short walk from the Moscow station to the Nevsky Prospekt, and when they had breakfasted, Bond set about raising more money while Scarlett went to the docks. They had a rendezvous behind the Pushkin Theatre at one o’clock. Bond, rather to his shame, slipped a knitted balaclava from a market stall into his pocket and wore it while he removed a quantity of money at gunpoint from a van delivering cash before opening time to a bank on a quiet street off Moskovsky Prospekt. At least the security guard had been stupefied enough by the sight of the Luger to offer no struggle, and Bond had been able to put a good distance between himself and the scene before he heard a police siren. He threw the
balaclava into a bin, put on the ‘maths teacher’ straw hat from GUM and made himself as inconspicuous as he could in a municipal park near the Neva river. When he was reunited with Scarlett, her news was mixed. She looked anxious. ‘I found a man,’ she said.
‘He’s Finnish, in fact, and he speaks English, though not very well. He’s prepared to do it, but he can’t get us to Helsinki. It’s too far. If he takes a lot of extra fuel, he can get us over the border. Then we transfer to a boat belonging to his brother. They do the run quite regularly, he says. This second boat will take us to a large port called Hamina, which is about a hundred and fifty miles from here. It’s the best he can do. We can get a train from there, or there’s a good road.’
‘All right,’ said Bond. ‘At least it’s in Finland. A neutral country.’
‘ There are Russian navy boats on patrol and part of the sea is mined, but he knows the way through. We do it at night. We leave at eleven. It’ll take eight hours altogether. But he wants a hell of a lot of money.’
‘ That’s just what I have,’ said Bond.
‘How did you – ’
‘You said you wouldn’t ask.’
*
At ten forty-five, Bond and Scarlett arrived at the appointed place. The docks were heavily guarded by Customs and police requiring paperwork and passports, so Scarlett had been directed to one of the small islands on the west of the city. At the end of a narrow street, there was a flight of old lightermen’s brick steps going down into the sea.
At their foot, as he had promised, was Jaska, the man with whom Scarlett had made the deal. The boat was a converted fishing vessel with a sluggish inboard motor that was already turning over with a throaty, catarrhal sound. As they stepped aboard, Bond was relieved to see two 250-horsepower Evinrudes under canvas in the stern. There was a covered cabin of sorts in the bow, though most of the available deck space was taken up by fuel drums.
Jaska had about three days’ growth of grey stubble and a blue cap. Most of his teeth were missing and those that remained were yellow or brown.
Bond handed him the money, which he counted carefully.
‘He doesn’t like the Russians,’ Scarlett explained.
‘His father died fighting them when they invaded Finland in 1939.’
Jaska nodded to them, untied the single rope mooring, engaged the engine and began to move the
boat as quietly as he could into the Gulf of Finland. Bond and Scarlett sat together on a wooden bench on the port side.
‘ There’s one thing we didn’t think of,’ said Scarlett.
‘I know,’ said Bond. ‘White nights. It’s the worst time of year.’
‘Jaska says it will get a bit darker – like dusk. And at least it’s clouded over.’
Bond sat back against the side of the boat. ‘ There are some moments, Scarlett,’ he said, ‘when you just have to place your life in the hands of others. Trust them.’
‘I know. And I like the look of this one.’
‘Mercenary and embittered,’ said Bond. ‘A good man to have on your side at a time like this.’
Jaska steered the boat wherever he found shadows in the jagged archipelago, but after half an hour of creeping in the lee of the small islands, it was time to move into the open sea.
Scarlett had had time to prepare a basket of food, which she now unpacked. There was bread, sausage, cheese and vodka.
‘It was the best I could find,’ she said.
Jaska helped them get through it, chewing hungrily at the wheel, his eyes never leaving the horizon. An hour passed, then another, and the night grew
as dark as it could manage – the shade of an autumn dusk, as Jaska had predicted. When they were well clear of Leningrad but also far from the border, he lowered the twin Evinrudes over the stern. He spoke to Scarlett in Russian.
‘He says we’ll use the outboards to make up some time,’ she translated. ‘ They’re too noisy near the land or the frontier, but we can blast on for an hour or so now.’
Bond felt a welcome surge as the old fishing-boat began to part the water with more purpose. It was about a hundred and fifty miles to Hamina, and although they were now travelling at about twentyfive knots, they had previously been doing less than half that. He calculated that they must still be two hours short of the maritime border.
Jaska asked Bond to take the wheel while he decanted fuel from the drums into smaller cans with which he replenished the tanks.
When Jaska had resumed his position, Bond rejoined Scarlett on the bench. ‘How do you feel?’
She smiled. ‘Safe. And you?’
‘I’m enjoying it,’ said Bond. It was true. ‘ The strange light, the sea. The company.’
Eventually, Jaska turned off the outboard motors and lifted them back in.
‘He says we’ll be making the hand-over in forty minutes,’ said Scarlett. ‘We have to go quiet again.’
Jaska picked up a radio mouthpiece from next to the wheel and spoke into it. After a short pause there was a crackling reply.
The sailor’s face remained impassive as he replaced the radio. He spoke again to Scarlett.
‘ There are Soviet naval patrol vessels to the north and south,’ she translated, ‘but one of them’s been distracted by a tanker from Tallinn that’s gone off
course.’
In the dusk ahead, like a ghost vessel, Bond saw the outline of a fishing-boat similar to their own. He pointed to it and Jaska turned his head. For the first time, the lined, weatherbeaten face broke into a smile.
‘Yes,’ he said in English. ‘My brother.’
The two boats bore slowly down on one another in a light mist that rose from the sea. The night had grown cold, and Scarlett put on the garage woman’s cardigan as she slipped her arm through Bond’s. Jaska slowed the engine as the two boats came alongside, miles from land in the middle of the great empty sea. There was a jolt as the sides of the vessels touched and Jaska tossed a line over.
Scarlett stood up and crossed to the starboard side. Jaska held out his hand to steady her and she threw
her arms round him briefly. ‘
Spasibo
.
Ochen spasibo
. Thank you.’
Bond shook his hand. ‘ Thank you, Jaska.’
Jaska held Bond’s hand between both of his and for a moment the two men looked into each other’s eyes.
Then Bond was gone, over into the second boat, while Jaska had pushed off and was already preparing his fishing-nets so that he could show a legitimate purpose for his night-time excursion if anyone should stop him on the way home.
Scarlett and Bond waved briefly in the mist, then settled in for the final part of the journey. Jaska’s brother was called Veli and looked at least ten years younger. He moved vigorously about his small craft and smiled constantly.
He waited only a short time before engaging his outboard motor, and three hours later, after several refuellings from his onboard supply, they saw the port of Hamina, protected by its star-shaped fortress. By eight o’clock they were on Finnish soil and by ten they were on the express train to Helsinki.
.
20. A Wilderness of Mirrors
It was a rainy evening in Paris, and Rene´ Mathis was sitting at his desk, flicking through some police reports that had been forwarded to the Deuxie`me. Rumours were flying round his department of a spectacular development in the battle against drugs, but no details had yet been confirmed.
The green telephone rang, with its sharp, nagging note. There was a roar, an echo – then a familiar voice.
‘Where are you, James?’
‘I’m at the airport in Helsinki. I’m on my way to Paris. My flight leaves in half an hour. I wondered if you’d like dinner tomorrow night.’
‘ Tomorrow? Er . . . Friday? Fridays are . . . Fridays are always difficult for me, James. So much tidying up to be done at the end of a week. Maybe a drink?
There’s a nice bar I could show you. Or lunch one day? Are you here for the weekend?’
‘We’ll have to see what London says. And,
Rene´?’
‘What?’
‘Give her my love.’
At the airport in Paris, Bond put Scarlett into a taxi with a promise that he would telephone her at work the next day. They had decided to spend some time apart to recover from what they had been through, and Scarlett was anxious to speak to her employers and find out if there was news of Poppy. Bond had not demurred at the thought of some time to rest and sleep: he was exhausted, and the poor girl seemed to be on her last legs.
As she kissed him goodbye, she said, ‘I’ll be waiting for your call. Don’t let me down, James.’
‘Have I ever?’
She shook her head silently as the taxi moved off. Bond watched the car receding into the rainy night, the girl waving from the back seat, her large brown eyes fixed on him till she was out of sight. He took the next cab on the rank and ordered it to the Terminus Nord. He always stayed in railway hotels if he could, and the Nord was the least preten
tious. An earlier call from Helsinki to Regent’s Park had secured a wire transfer of funds to a bank in the place Vendoˆme, where he could collect it the following day. Moneypenny, unable to keep the elation from her voice at the sound of his, had also booked him a time to speak to M on the encrypted line in the late morning.