by Ian Fleming
Opposite him, the banker’s chair was vacant. He glanced round the table. He knew most of the players by sight, but few of their names. At Number 7, on his right, there was a Monsieur Sixte, a wealthy Belgian with metal interests in the Congo. At Number 9 there was Lord Danvers, a distinguished but weak-looking man whose francs were presumably provided by his rich American wife, a middle-aged woman with the predatory mouth of a barracuda, who sat at Number 3. Bond reflected that they would probably play a pawky and nervous game and be amongst the early casualties. At Number 1, to the right of the bank was a well-known Greek gambler who owned, as in Bond’s experience apparently everyone does in the Eastern Mediterranean, a profitable shipping line. He would play coldly and well and would be a stayer.
Bond asked the huissier for a card and wrote on it, under a neat question mark, the remaining numbers, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, and asked the huissier to give it to the chef de partie.
Soon it came back with the names filled in.
Number 2, still empty, was to be Carmel Delane, the American film star with alimony from three husbands to burn and, Bond assumed, a call on still more from whoever her present companion at Royale might be. With her sanguine temperament she would play gaily and with panache and might run into a vein of luck.
Then came Lady Danvers at Number 3 and Numbers 4 and 5 were a Mr and Mrs Du Pont, rich-looking and might or might not have some of the real Du Pont money behind them. Bond guessed they would be stayers. They both had a business-like look about them and were talking together easily and cheerfully as if they felt very much at home at the big game. Bond was quite happy to have them next to him — Mrs Du Pont sat at Number 5 — and he felt prepared to share with them or with Monsieur Sixte on his right, if they found themselves faced with too big a bank.
At Number 8 was the Maharajah of a small Indian state, probably with all his wartime sterling balances to play with. Bond’s experience told him that few of the Asiatic races were courageous gamblers, even the much-vaunted Chinese being inclined to lose heart if the going was bad. But the Maharajah would probably stay in the game and stand some heavy losses if they were gradual.
Number 10 was a prosperous-looking young Italian, Signor Tomelli, who possibly had plenty of money from rackrents in Milan and would probably play a dashing and foolish game. He might lose his temper and make a scene.
Bond had just finished his sketchy summing-up of the players when Le Chiffre, with the silence and economy of movement of a big fish, came through the opening in the brass rail and, with a cold smile of welcome for the table, took his place directly opposite Bond in the banker’s chair.
With the same economy of movement, he cut the thick slab of cards which the croupier had placed on the table squarely between his blunt relaxed hands. Then, as the croupier fitted the six packs with one swift exact motion into the metal and wooden shoe, Le Chiffre said something quietly to him.
‘Messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits. Un banco de cinq cent mille’ and as the Greek at Number 1 tapped the table in front of his fat pile of hundred-mille plaques, ‘Le banco est fait.’
Le Chiffre crouched over the shoe. He gave it a short deliberate slap to settle the cards, the first of which showed its semicircular pale pink tongue through the slanting aluminium mouth of the shoe. Then, with a thick white fore-finger he pressed gently on the pink tongue and slipped out the first card six inches or a foot towards the Greek on his right hand. Then he slipped out a card for himself, then another for the Greek, then one more for himself.
He sat immobile, not touching his own cards.
He looked at the Greek’s face.
With his flat wooden spatula, like a long bricklayer’s trowel, the croupier delicately lifted up the Greek’s two cards and dropped them with a quick movement an extra few inches to the right so that they lay just before the Greek’s pale hairy hands which lay inert like two watchful pink crabs on the table.
The two pink crabs scuttled out together and the Greek gathered the cards into his wide left hand and cautiously bent his head so that he could see, in the shadow made by his cupped hand, the value of the bottom of the two cards. Then he slowly inserted the forefinger of his right hand and slipped the bottom card slightly sideways so that the value of the top card was also just perceptible.
His face was quite impassive. He flattened out his left hand on the table and then withdrew it, leaving the two pink cards face down before him, their secret unrevealed.
Then he lifted his head and looked Le Chiffre in the eye.
‘Non,’ said the Greek flatly.
From the decision to stand on his two cards and not ask for another, it was clear that the Greek had a five, or a six, or a seven. To be certain of winning, the banker had to reveal an eight or a nine. If the banker failed to show either figure, he also had the right to take another card which might or might not improve his count.
Le Chiffre’s hands were clasped in front of him, his two cards three or four inches away. With his right hand he picked up the two cards and turned them face upwards on the table with a faint snap.
They were a four and a five, an undefeatable natural nine.
He had won.
‘Neuf à la banque,’ quietly said the croupier. With his spatula he faced the Greek’s two cards, ‘Et le sept,’ he said unemotionally, lifting up gently the corpses of the seven and queen and slipping them through the wide slot in the table near his chair which leads into the gib metal canister to which all dead cards are consigned. Le Chiffre’s two cards followed them with a faint rattle which comes from the canister at the beginning of each session before the discards have made a cushion over the metal floor of their oubliette.
The Greek pushed forward five plaques of one hundred thousand and the croupier added these to Le Chiffre’s half-million plaque which lay in the centre of the table. From each bet the Casino takes a tiny percentage, the cagnotte, but it is usual at a big game for the banker to subscribe this himself either in a prearranged lump or by contributions at the end of each hand, so that the amount of the bank’s stake can always be a round figure. Le Chiffre had chosen the second course.
The croupier slipped some counters through the slot in the table which receives the cagnotte and announced quietly:
‘Un banco d’un million.’
‘Suivi,’ murmured the Greek, meaning that he exercised his right to follow up his lost bet.
Bond lit a cigarette and settled himself in his chair. The long game was launched and the sequence of these gestures and the reiteration of this subdued litany would continue until the end came and the players dispersed. Then the enigmatic cards would be burnt or defaced, a shroud would be draped over the table and the grass-green baize battlefield would soak up the blood of its victims and refresh itself.
The Greek, after taking a third card, could achieve no better than a four to the bank’s seven.
‘Un banco de deux millions,’ said the croupier.
The players on Bond’s left remained silent.
‘Banco,’ said Bond.
Chapter 11
Moment of Truth
Le Chiffre looked incuriously at him, the whites of his eyes, which showed all round the irises, lending something impassive and doll-like to his gaze.
He slowly removed one thick hand from the table and slipped it into the pocket of his dinner-jacket. The hand came out holding a small metal cylinder with a cap which Le Chiffre unscrewed. He inserted the nozzle of the cylinder, with an obscene deliberation, twice into each black nostril in turn, and luxuriously inhaled the benzedrine vapour.
Unhurriedly he pocketed the inhaler, then his hand came quickly back above the level of the table and gave the shoe its usual hard, sharp slap.
During this offensive pantomime Bond had coldly held the banker’s gaze, taking in the wide expanse of white face surmounted by the short abrupt cliff of reddish-brown hair, the unsmiling wet red mouth and the impressive width of the shoulders, loosely draped in a massively cut dinner-jacket.
/> But for the high-lights on the satin of the shawl-cut lapels, he might have been faced by the thick bust of a black-fleeced Minotaur rising out of a green grass field.
Bond slipped a packet of notes on to the table without counting them. If he lost, the croupier would extract what was necessary to cover the bet, but the easy gesture conveyed that Bond didn’t expect to lose and that this was only a token display from the deep funds at Bond’s disposal.
The other players sensed a tension between the two gamblers and there was silence as Le Chiffre fingered the four cards out of the shoe.
The croupier slipped Bond’s two cards across to him with the tip of his spatula. Bond, still with his eyes holding Le Chiffre’s, reached his right hand out a few inches, glanced down very swiftly, then as he looked up again impassively at Le Chiffre, with a disdainful gesture he tossed the cards face upwards on the table.
They were a four and a five — an unbeatable nine.
There was a little gasp of envy from the table and the players to the left of Bond exchanged rueful glances at their failure to accept the two million franc bet.
With a hint of a shrug, Le Chiffre slowly faced his own two cards and flicked them away with his fingernail. They were two valueless knaves.
‘Le baccarat,’ intoned the croupier as he spaded the thick chips over the table to Bond.
Bond slipped them into his right-hand pocket with the unused packet of notes. His face showed no emotion, but he was pleased with the success of his first coup and with the outcome of the silent clash of wills across the table.
The woman on his left, the American Mrs Du Pont, turned to him with a wry smile.
‘I shouldn’t have let it come to you,’ she said. ‘Directly the cards were dealt I kicked myself.’
‘It’s only the beginning of the game,’ said Bond. ‘You may be right the next time you pass it.’
Mr Du Pont leant forward from the other side of his wife: ‘If one could be right every hand, none of us would be here,’ he said philosophically.
‘I would be,’ his wife laughed. ‘You don’t think I do this for pleasure.’
As the game went on, Bond looked over the spectators leaning on the high brass rail round the table. He soon saw Le Chiffre’s two gunmen. They stood behind and to either side of the banker. They looked respectable enough, but not sufficiently a part of the game to be unobtrusive.
The one more or less behind Le Chiffre’s right arm was tall and funereal in his dinner-jacket. His face was wooden and grey, but his eyes flickered and gleamed like a conjurer’s. His whole long body was restless and his hands shifted often on the brass rail. Bond guessed that he would kill without interest or concern for what he killed and that he would prefer strangling. He had something of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but his inhumanity would not come from infantilism but from drugs. Marihuana, decided Bond.
The other man looked like a Corsican shopkeeper. He was short and very dark with a flat head covered with thickly greased hair. He seemed to be a cripple. A chunky malacca cane with a rubber tip hung on the rail beside him. He must have had permission to bring the cane into the Casino with him, reflected Bond, who knew that neither sticks nor any other objects were allowed in the rooms as a precaution against acts of violence. He looked sleek and well fed. His mouth hung vacantly half-open and revealed very bad teeth. He wore a heavy black moustache and the backs of his hands on the rail were matted with black hair. Bond guessed that hair covered most of his squat body. Naked, Bond supposed, he would be an obscene object.
The game continued uneventfully, but with a slight bias against the bank.
The third coup is the ‘sound barrier’ at chemin-de-fer and baccarat. Your luck can defeat the first and second tests, but when the third deal comes along it most often spells disaster. Again and again at this point you find yourself being bounced back to earth. It was like that now. Neither the bank nor any of the players seemed to be able to get hot. But there was a steady and inexorable seepage against the bank, amounting after about two hours’ play to ten million francs. Bond had no idea what profits Le Chiffre had made over the past two days. He estimated them at five million and guessed that now the banker’s capital could not be more than twenty million.
In fact, Le Chiffre had lost heavily all that afternoon. At this moment he only had ten million left.
Bond, on the other hand, by one o’clock in the morning, had won four million, bringing his resources up to twenty-eight million.
Bond was cautiously pleased. Le Chiffre showed no trace of emotion. He continued to play like an automaton, never speaking except when he gave instructions in a low aside to the croupier at the opening of each new bank.
Outside the pool of silence round the high table, there was the constant hum of the other tables, chemin-de-fer, roulette and trente-et-quarante, interspersed with the clear calls of the croupiers and occasional bursts of laughter or gasps of excitement from different corners of the huge salle.
In the background there thudded always the hidden metronome of the Casino, ticking up its little treasure of one-per-cents with each spin of a wheel and each turn of a card — a pulsing fat-cat with a zero for a heart.
It was at ten minutes past one by Bond’s watch when, at the high table, the whole pattern of play suddenly altered.
The Greek at Number 1 was still having a bad time. He had lost the first coup of half a million francs and the second. He passed the third time, leaving a bank of two millions. Carmel Delane at Number 2 refused it. So did Lady Danvers at Number 3.
The Du Ponts looked at each other.
‘Banco,’ said Mrs Du Pont, and promptly lost to the banker’s natural eight.
‘Un banco de quatre millions,’ said the croupier.
‘Banco,’ said Bond, pushing out a wad of notes.
Again he fixed Le Chiffre with his eye. Again he gave only a cursory look at his two cards.
‘No,’ he said. He held a marginal five. The position was dangerous.
Le Chiffre turned up a knave and a four. He gave the shoe another slap. He drew a three.
‘Sept à la banque,’ said the croupier, ‘et cinq,’ he added as he tipped Bond’s losing cards face upwards. He raked over Bond’s money, extracted four million francs and returned the remainder to Bond.
‘Un banco de huit millions.’
‘Suivi,’ said Bond.
And lost again, to a natural nine.
In two coups he had lost twelve million francs. By scraping the barrel, he had just sixteen million francs left, exactly the amount of the next banco.
Suddenly Bond felt the sweat on his palms. Like snow in sunshine his capital had melted. With the covetous deliberation of the winning gambler, Le Chiffre was tapping a light tattoo on the table with his right hand. Bond looked across into the eyes of murky basalt. They held an ironical question. ‘Do you want the full treatment?’ they seemed to ask.
‘Suivi,’ Bond said softly.
He took some notes and plaques out of his right hand pocket and the entire stack of notes out of his left and pushed them forward. There was no hint in his movements that this would be his last stake.
His mouth felt suddenly as dry as flock wall-paper. He looked up and saw Vesper and Felix Leiter standing where the gunman with the stick had stood. He did not know how long they had been standing there. Leiter looked faintly worried, but Vesper smiled encouragement at him.
He heard a faint rattle on the rail behind him and turned his head. The battery of bad teeth under the black moustache gaped vacantly back at him.
‘Le jeu est fait,’ said the croupier, and the two cards came slithering towards him over the green baize — a green baize which was no longer smooth, but thick now, and furry and almost choking, its colour as livid as the grass on a fresh tomb.
The light from the broad satin-lined shades which had seemed so welcoming now seemed to take the colour out of his hand as he glanced at the cards. Then he looked again.
It was nearly as bad as it
could have been — the king of hearts and an ace, the ace of spades. It squinted up at him like a black widow spider.
‘A card.’ He still kept all emotion out of his voice.
Le Chiffre faced his own two cards. He had a queen and a black five. He looked at Bond and pressed out another card with a wide forefinger. The table was absolutely silent. He faced it and flicked it away. The croupier lifted it delicately with his spatula and slipped it over to Bond. It was a good card, the five of hearts, but to Bond it was a difficult fingerprint in dried blood. He now had a count of six and Le Chiffre a count of five, but the banker having a five and giving a five, would and must draw another card and try and improve with a one, two, three or four. Drawing any other card he would be defeated.
The odds were on Bond’s side, but now it was Le Chiffre who looked across into Bond’s eyes and hardly glanced at the card as he flicked it face upwards on the table.
It was, unnecessarily, the best, a four, giving the bank a count of nine. He had won, almost slowing up.
Bond was beaten and cleaned out.
Chapter 12
The Deadly Tube
Bond sat silent, frozen with defeat. He opened his wide black case and took out a cigarette. He snapped open the tiny jaws of the Ronson and lit the cigarette and put the lighter back on the table. He took a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it between his teeth with a faint hiss.
What now? Back to the hotel and bed, avoiding the commiserating eyes of Mathis and Leiter and Vesper. Back to the telephone call to London, and then tomorrow the plane home, the taxi up to Regent’s Park, the walk up the stairs and along the corridor, and M’s cold face across the table, his forced sympathy, his ‘better luck next time’ and, of course, there couldn’t be one, not another chance like this.