Published in 1977 by Triad/PantherBooks
Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, AL2 2NF
First published in Great Britainby Jonathan Cape Ltd 1977
Copyright © Gildrose Publications as Trustee 1977
To Lewis Gilbert. Without whom...
Love in the Afternoon
The girl lay back against the pillow and looked out on to the balcony. The man was still leaning against the balustrade, his hands spread wide and his head tilted forward as he examined something that was happening on the beach. He was naked except for a light-blue towel hitched round his waist. Although in repose, there was a quality of tension about him, like a baited trap. His body was not conspicuously muscled, but lean and hard. The girl knew that.
She pulled the sheet up about her own naked body and willed the man to turn round. He did not move. She turned and looked at the mans watch beside the bed. It was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The slim antennae hands showed four o'clock; an afternoon when the heat still clung persistently, sulkily refusing to give way to the inevitability of evening. The girl dabbed her cheek with the sheet and changed her position against the pillow. She wanted him to come back to her, but she was a proud girl and she did not want to ask. Nothing that she could think of saying sounded anything more than an attempt to make conversation. And conversation was a way of asking.
The girl looked down at the innocent swelling of her breasts beneath the sheet and blushed. Was it obvious? Could anybody tell at a glance that she had been making love, wild, beautiful love? She pulled her fingers through her hair trying to find how tangled it was. There had been a Greta Garbo film about a queen who was trapped in a wayside inn with a man. He did not know that she was a queen and as the snow separated them from the outside world they had stayed in a room and made love. And the queen had wandered round the room touching the now familiar objects and consigning them to her memory. For she would never come back to this room and nothing with the man would ever be the same again.
What in this room was to be stored away? It was a sad room the furniture heavy and ill-matched as so often in hotels, and the lining of the tall curtains beginning to drift away at the seams. No paintings hung on the heavy wood panelling and the carpet was an unlovely grey.
A cry from the beach distracted her and she looked out once more towards the man on the balcony. A shiver of wind, the first of the day, tugged at the curtains and he turned and approached her. She gazed at the face as if seeing it for the first time. It was dark and clean-cut, and the eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn mouth. The eyes were harsh and the mouth was cruel, the line of the jaw was straight and firm.
The girl felt herself becoming hot and moist and was ashamed, because she was not a promiscuous girl. She lowered her gaze. The man took her chin in his hand and forced it up so that he could look into her eyes. ‘You know that I'm going this evening. I have a job to do.’
She nodded. ‘You told me.’ Why was he telling her again? Was it his way of saying firmly that the pleasant interlude was over? Or was he in a way excusing himself? Apologizing for making love to her and then leaving her? Whatever it was, she wanted him to kiss her. To kiss her and press her back into the pillows and hold her tight and make her forget everything except the marvellous feeling that had spilled over her the last time.
The man leaned forward again. ‘You are probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.' He looked into her eyes for several seconds and then abruptly kissed her with such passion that she expected to taste blood on her lips. His hard, blunt shoulders bore her down and the sheet was contemptuously torn aside like a leaf from a calendar. The girl closed her eyes.
The jangle of the telephone was obscene. There were three lights in its base - red, yellow and green - and the red light was flashing. The man cursed, rolled to the edge of the bed and snatched up the receiver. The voice on the other end of the line sounded very far away and was difficult to pick out through the static.
The girl watched the man’s face as he talked, and her last hopes disappeared. Eventually, he held the receiver over the rest like a bomb waiting to be dropped.
‘A change of plan?’
The man nodded glumly. ‘Apparently. You are to report to Moscow at once.’
The girl smiled a brief, sad smile of farewell and then swung her long legs from the bed. ‘Tell them that I am leaving immediately, Sergei,’ she said.
Piste Dangereuse!
James Bond was angry with himself. He had committed a number of elementary blunders which a man of his training and experience should not have committed. He had been guilty of hubris and complacency. To put it in more direct terms, he had been a damn fool.
To start with, he should never have trusted the girl. Women you pick up in casinos are either straightforward whores or have run out of money playing some ridiculous system. Either way they are going to be very expensive and probably very neurotic. Bond loved gambling because to him tension was a form of relaxation, but he should have been more wary of the lynx-eyed redhead spilling five-hundred-franc plaques round his ankles and receiving his offer of a drink with an alacrity considerably less discreet than the scent she was wearing - Fracas by Piguet. Anybody knowing that he was in town would have expected him to make an appearance at the casino and could have organized the assignation accordingly. Mea culpa.
Bond was in Chamonix. M had suggested that he needed a few days’ ‘holiday’ and that the mountain air - a little skiing, a little walking - would do him good. In the summer you have to go high to ski. Through the Mont Blanc tunnel and up the Italian side of the Monte Blanco - somehow it did not seem to be the same mountain in Italian. Bond was not feeling charitable towards Italians. They had descended like a cloud of black corbeaux on the casino at Chamonix, wandering from table to table casting plaques upon the water and making too much noise. In an attempt to parlay large numbers of inflated lira into deflated francs they played everything badly and impeded Bond’s concentration with their nudging badinage.
The girl said that she came to Chamonix every summer though in winter she skied at Courchevel. Yes, the skiing at Tignes was excellent but it was bleak and there were too many Germans. The Germans were not sympathique. She hoped Bond did not mind? Bond did not mind.
The girl also had a friend who worked for Heliski. He would be able to lift them high into the mountains by helicopter where they could find the best snow conditions. There were huts with bunks up there. They could spend the night.
It was when they were going up the face of the Aiguille du Mon that Bond first began to have doubts. The Aiguille du Mort drops sheer for two thousand feet and even in the severest winter conditions never more than a thin powdering of snow clings to the shallow contours of its bleak, granite physique. But it was not the physical danger that Bond feared. He was aware of the isolation towards which he was heading. Over the lip of the peak and it was a lunar landscape clad in unending snow. The neat pattern of Chamonix disappearing below him was a child’s toy town. Above his head, the rotor droned and his breath froze against the reinforced perspex of the cabin. The wind was streaming the snow off the peaks like smoke, and the Gyrafrance lurched in the treacherous air- currents. Outside the cabin the refracted image of the pilot peered back at him as if projected against the cliff face. Butterfly-wing mirror sunglasses slanting away beside the nose; a brutal smudge of a moustache. The man had hardly touched his hand when they greeted each other. It was if Bond was something not to be touched. Something that was to be moved quickly from one place to the other and then dropped.
The helicopter hit an air-po
cket and fell ten feet. Bond felt his stomach tighten like a fist. He looked towards the girl. She looked tense and he could see the whites of her knuckles as she gripped the pilot’s frameback seat. Was it just the flight? ‘When are we going to go down?'
‘Soon, darleeng. The snow will be good. Wait and see.'
Do I have an alternative? thought Bond. He wished he could feel his Walther PPK 7.65 mm nestling inside his trouser band. But like a damn fool he had left it behind, hidden in the recess of the hideous cuckoo clock that guarded the exterior of his room in the Hotel Dahu.
Bond tapped the glass of his Rod 88 goggles and examined the girl more closely. She had, he supposed, a typically French face. A dark gypsy slutishness tamed into sophistication. Her green almond eyes seldom seemed to be more than half open, and sheltered between a foliage of long untidy lashes which looked as if she had just washed them and found them impossible to manage. Her nose was short and tilted up at the end and her lips thrust out, permanently pert and premeditated as if she was just about to blow a kiss. Her hair, now tucked under a close-fitting, knitted woollen cap, was cut casually to fall across her forehead and hang in inverted question marks about her shoulders.
‘Why do you bring this?’ She pointed to the small red haversack that Bond had taken from his shoulders when he climbed into the Gyrafrance.
‘It’s my mountain survival kit.’
‘There is everything we need to survive in the ’ut. You will see.’
‘I was brought up never to take chances.’ Was it his imagination or did the pilot’s mouth tighten into a faint smile?
Now they were over the lip of the Aiguille and the turbulence ceased. Chamonix had disappeared but at least he was spared that nerve-fraying view down the cliff face.
'On va descendre toute suite,’ said the pilot without turning his head. ‘Two minute,’ he repeated, presumably for Bond’s benefit, and jerked a thumb towards the snow.
The helicopter skimmed over a ridge and Bond looked down on a wide undulating expanse of snow broken by occasional rock formations. Far, far to his right was the line of squat télécabines, etched against the sky like a string of pack ponies, that made their way from the Aiguille du Midi to the Italian side of the frontier. To the far left of his vision must be the Swiss frontier. Three countries interlocking in a vast white wilderness. It must be easy to move from one to the other if you knew the mountains. What country were they in now? The helicopter came down to hover above the snow, the blades stirring up a blizzard. The pilot said something to the girl which Bond did not catch because of the noise, and pushed back the hatch cover. The rush of cold air stung Bonds cheek.
‘I take it we’re being left here?’ shouted Bond.
The girl nodded and gestured towards the settling snow. This was not deep powder but layers of snow beaten down by successive falls. At this altitude there were probably frequent snowfalls even in the middle of summer. It was early enough in the day for the surface still to be frozen and the helicopter skis had pressed out their shape to the depth of a couple of inches. Bond took a deep breath and felt his lungs protest. At thirteen thousand feet the lack of oxygen can have a fit man wondering why he is suddenly breathing like a grampus.
Bond kept a wary eye on the pilot and indicated with a courteous extension of the hand that the girl should descend first. He did not want to step in the snow, receive a bullet in the stomach and live just long enough to see the helicopter spiralling away into the sun. To his relief the girl acknowledged the gesture with a smile and swung her legs out of the cabin. He dropped down beside her and removed his Rossignol ST Competition skis from the outside of the Gyrafrance. The pilot was looking back impatiently as if eager to be off.
‘Is he picking us up?
‘No. We will ski down.’ The girl took her skis and moved away from the helicopter. Bond pulled on his gloves, adjusted his goggles against the glare and followed her.
‘Why are you looking at me?’ said the girl.
‘I was just thinking how pretty you were,’ said Bond, examining the outline of her suit for any sign of a concealed weapon.
The girl was called Martine Blanchaud and had said that she lived in Lyon where her father owned a business. She had been unhappily married and stayed with friends when she came to Chamonix. Bond had never seen any of the friends. She was always alone when he had seen her at the Casino.
The helicopter sprayed up more snow and then slid away over the ridge. Bond felt a sense of challenge and excitement unrelated to his possible predicament. The mountains about him set the pulse racing. Peaks sharpened as if with a knife falling behind each other in a march to a perfect egg-shell blue sky; a view which embraced three countries and probably extended a hundred miles. The vapour trail of an aeroplane cut a line through the sky, and hundreds of feet below a hawk plucked at the wind with its wings, hovered and then glided out of sight.
‘Do you not want to ski?’
‘I was looking at the mountains,’ said Bond.
The girl rested her hand lightly on his shoulder so that she could brush the snow from her boot. ‘When you see them all the time you get used to them.’
‘Perhaps.’ Bond felt a sense of unreality. He had been dropped on to the roof of the world and he had done nothing to earn these spirit-enriching vistas, the reward of those who had bravely scaled the face of a mountain. Bond preferred his pleasures hard-won. He stamped hard into his skis, hunched his shoulders and stabbed at the snow with his sticks. Some expiation was dearly necessary.
‘You ’ave old fashioned batons,’ said the girl. ‘You should get the new ones. See ’ow they curve round be’ind your back when you schuss? There is less wind resistance.’
Bond looked at the girl’s sticks, which looked like alloy pigs’ tails. He shook his head. ‘They’re not going to make any difference to my skiing. I’ll stick to these, thanks.’
The girl shrugged and poked at one of her ski bindings. ‘Follow me. There are some crevasses here.’ Are there indeed, thought Bond. A man can lay for a long time in the bottom of a crevasse. He cursed himself again for his folly.
The girl started to ski, carving out a zig-zag pattern in the deep snow. She skied very upright, like most women, but she was graceful and had perfect balance. Bond watched her with grudging admiration. As a rule he admired women practising any sport as much as Dr Johnson admired them preaching, but he made an exception in the cases of fencing and skiing. These were two pursuits that could enhance their feminity rather than grotesquely diminish it.
Bond tightened the clasp on his haversack and felt the steel frame bite into his shouderblades. There was a touch of condensation in his goggles and he pulled them away from his face a couple of times and adjusted the visor to clear the mist. The leather-buckled straps of his Kerma Zicral sticks sat lightly on the tops of his hands and as a gust of wind cuffed snow into the air so he shifted his weight and sent the two-metre Rossignol STs sliding down the slope.
As always with any sport not constantly practised, there was a moment of doubt. Would the skill return when summoned? As he gathered speed and prepared for the first turn, Bond told himself to relax. No one skis well when they are contract6. Ahead, the wide expanse of snow lay unbroken save for the graceful tracery of the girl’s track. Bond’s skis rattled and he moved them an extra inch apart before picking his spot with his stick. His body rose and he pressed down hard, carving the pattern of the turn with his knees. The skis hissed through the snow and Bond felt himself secure in the perfect arc of movement that makes a good turn. He sank down and then rose again effortlessly into the next. A glance behind told him that it was better than the first, more crisply etched and with less powder thrown out at the edge. Satisfied, Bond skied fast to where the girl was waiting.
She looked at him admiringly. ‘You are a very good skier.’ There was a slight note of surprise in her voice.
‘I try,’ said Bond.
They skied for another hour before they came to the chalet- refuge. Bond ha
d kept careful watch but had seen no sign that there was anyone in this part of the mountains but themselves. He had noticed chamois tracks, but that was all. Perhaps his instinct had been wrong for once. The helicopter pilot had been disgruntled because he was having problems with his wife or mistress - or both - and Martine Blanchaud was like himself; merely looking for congenial company and not part of some sinister plot. Maybe M’s surmise that he was run down and needed a few days’ holiday had been correct. M’s surmises usually were.
The hut was of typical alpine construction - wide and low and backed into the mountain as if prepared to sell its life dearly against any avalanche that rolled down from above. The logs from which it was made criss-crossed and stuck out at two corners and the tiny windows were sunk back in the walls like old man’s eyes. Six feet of snow on the roof gave it the appearance of some exotic gateau.
Bond was glad to see that the snow around the door was undisturbed. He took off his skis and tried the door. At first he thought it was locked, but it was merely frozen. He put his shoulder against it and it gave with a sound like a pistol shot Some snow fell on his head and the girl laughed. ‘Careful/ said Bond. ‘I might put you across my knee.’
The girl raised an intrigued eyebrow and Bond wondered if she understood the exact meaning of the expression. She was very pretty and the mornings skiing had rekindled a number of his appetites. Perhaps it had been the Italians and the losing streak at the casino that had made him liverish.
As was his habit when playing roulette, Bond had borrowed the chef’s card and studied the run of the ball since the session opened at three o’clock. He knew that mathematically it meant nothing, but it was his convention to take carcful note of any peculiarities in the run of the wheel and to act upon them. In this instance the card had told him nothing of interest except that five of the last six numbers to come up had been lower than twenty-five. It was Bond’s practice to play always with the wheel and only start on a new tack when zero came up. On this night he had decided to follow the wheel and back the first two dozens. The dozens pay odds of two to one, which meant that for every thousand francs Bond bet he would make a profit of five hundred francs provided that neither zero nor a number higher than twenty-four came up.
James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me Page 1