Bond felt the room growing colder. ‘And the people in Cairo. Just what are they selling? Is Ranger ... what's happened to her?’
‘We don’t know,’ said M briskly. ‘We only know that someone in Cairo is offering to sell us a blueprint of the reputed tracking system. The whole thing may be a hoax. That’s for you to find out.’ The plumbing work restarted on the pipe. ‘The Chief-of-Staff will fill in the details. As regards the disappearance of Ranger, you can imagine who the first suspects are?’
Bond could. ‘Redland.’
‘And don’t forget, James’ - M broke off to strike a match - ‘Sixteen Polaris missiles have a greater destructive potential than all the explosives used in the last war including the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They could blast this country into the earth so that the North Sea and the Atlantic met at Birmingham.’
As if in awe of M’s speech, the rain subsided to a steady drumming. Bond looked at the grey sky and thought of the England that he loved with an intensity that was almost painful.
‘I’ll get right on to it, sir,’ he said.
Introducing Sigmund Stromberg
The room was large and splendidly furnished. The chairs in which the three men sat were deep and luxurious, and the cheerful gleam of the highly polished leather complemented the mirror sheen of the silver bowl tastefully arranged with dew-anointed red roses on the small glass-and-steel table between them. A heavy silver box lay unopened in the middle of the table and contained a mixture of Virginia and Turkish cigarettes both tipped and untipped. Thick glass carafes rested upon circular green mats. At one end of the room was a charming Romney of two small, rosy-cheeked children in Regency dress playing with a kitten.
Two of the three men were dressed in conventional suits, and there was about them an air of respectful unease. The man before them, on the other side of the table, was different, what could be seen of him was enclosed in a loose-fitting black tunic that rose to his neck like a priest’s surplice without the collar. Although he was of more than average height his features were small, and his mouth exceptionally so. It was like a child’s mouth, with the fat Cupid’s bow of the upper lip grotesquely dominating the lower. Had it been possible to turn the feature upside down it would have looked better in the long, thin face although its extreme narrowness would always have seemed incongruous. The short nose barely broke away from the bulbous upper lip and one had to peer closely to see a pallid streak of near-white hairs above the watery blue eyes. The head was not prematurely bald but had never grown hair and the small ears clung to the head like sucker fish to the side of a shark.
‘Doctor Bechmann. Professor Markovitz.’ There was no trace of warmth in the voice. ‘We come to the parting of the ways..
The two men looked at each other nervously and then studied the impassive face before them.
Sigmund Stromberg had been conceived on mid-summer’s day in Apvorst, a small village in northern Sweden. There, the arrival of the longest day is still celebrated with dancing round the maypole and much drinking and fornication. Sigmund Stromberg was conceived as an indirect result of the second of these pursuits and a direct result of the third. His father was a fisherman, which may have had some hereditary influence on his eventual choice of career; not an immediate one, though, because his father never married his mother and as soon as the young Stromberg found himself anywhere it was with an aunt of his mother’s who lived a respectful distance from Apvorst. She was a kindly woman with no children of her own and she and her husband lavished all the love and care that they could muster on young Sigmund - neither name was his by birth but bestowed by his new ‘parents’. Sigmund Stromberg was not a warm-natured child but he worked conscientiously at school and became passionately interested in the sea. Not in ships and naval battles, like other boys, but in life below the surface. He was fascinated by fish and Frun Strom- bcrg bccame disturbed by the long periods of time that the boy spent watching a fish tank in the window of a restaurant in the nearby small town of Magmo. Even on the coldest winter days young Sigmund would be staring through the condensation at the speckled trout living out their last days, a look of rapt concentration on his face, his skin pinched to an onion pallor by the cold. When he was older, he obtained a piranha fish from somewhere, which he kept in a small tank in his bedroom. Frun Stromberg had no idea where the fish came from and did not ask. She was already rather in awe of her adopted son as she chose to think of him.
At night, Sigmund would take a flashlight and go out to seek food for his pet. Frogs, toads, mice and shrews. These were its summer fare.
One night, as she was passing his room, Frun Stromberg heard the agonized squeaks of a mouse and asked if it was necessary for the food to be fed to the fish while it was still alive. Sigmund assured her that it was. She did not believe him but she did not argue, because, when crossed, her ‘son' underwent a strange and disturbing metamorphosis. He would suck in his lips so that his mouth disappeared into his face to be replaced by a tiny dimple like a baby’s umbilicus. His skin would turn a deathly white and his eyes suddenly fill with red as if the blood drained from his cheeks had rushed to fill their sockets. At the same time he would wrap his arms round himself and shake in silent, inchoate rage.
Frun Stromberg was frightened, the more so when she discovered Sigmund having one of his strange shaking fits before the fish tank. She wondered if he was working too hard at school. Reports were coming in that the boy was academically brilliant, with a natural bent towards the sciences. His IQ was so high as to be unmeasurable.
Herr Stromberg was an undertaker. Sigmund would stand in his father's workroom much as he had stood before the fish tank and observe the skills of the trade. The construction of the coffins, the linings, the woods that could be used, the styles and range of handles and accessories, the methods of presentation to the prospective customer.
Although she was wary of mentioning it to her husband for fear of hurting his feelings, Frun Stromberg was worried that her son’s obvious talents might be wasted if he went into the family business.
She did not worry for long. Shortly after Sigmund’s seventeenth birthday, the Saab in which she and her husband were travelling went out of control on a notoriously dangerous comer and plunged into a lake. Both passengers were drowned. Apparently, the brakes on the normally reliable Saab had failed.
Sigmund Stromberg was phlegmatic in the face of the tragedy that had for a second time robbed him of parents, and won the respect of the neighbourhood by undertaking the funeral arrangements himself. His schoolmasters urged him to sell the business, or take on a manager, so that he could continue his studies at university and proceed to the brilliant future that seemed his by right. He disappointed them by saying that he was going to devote himself to running the business.
This he immediately began to do with great vigour, and for a young man he showed a remarkable conversance with death, and what he described as its ‘packaging*. Cremation was what he advocated as the cleanest, purest and most ecologically satisfactory way to go and as business prospered he built his own private crematorium. He had to wait rather longer than anticipated for this because the firm contracted to do the business were at that time engaged in building similar, but rather larger, installations in Nazi Germany.
Stromberg became the man whose advice was always sought when there was a bereavement Any man or woman of consequence would expect to be cremated by him and would know that in the manner of their going, the world would see ample evidence of their means. Stromberg specialized in the production of very expensive coffins with very expensive fittings. He argued - though with most of his clientele it was never necessary to argue - that the consecration of so much wealth to the flames was a kind of absolution, a purification of the body physical from the taint of Mammon before it passed into the everlasting twilight. It was the equivalent of the old Norse heroes being burned in their long boats. It also showed the world that one had money to burn.
Most clients, racked by emotion,
pressed back a tear and nodded. It was only several weeks later, when the body of the loved one had been consigned to the flames and an enormous bill had arrived, that some of them thought again. But who could query, and who could quibble in such a situation? And anyway, what was there to discuss? Everything had passed into the furnace. In fact, only the corpse had been burnt - usually without any gold fillings that its teeth had contained. The same coffin, which was designed like a Japanese trick box to be capable of a number of subtle variations of shape, was used again and again with a variety of gold-plated handles. Stromberg realized that few people attended so many funeral ceremonies that they would recognize one coffin from another. Some wives even assisted him by expressing a wish to be cremated in the same style of coffin as their departed husband and this instruction he was able to fulfil to the letter.
Once the electrically controlled rollers had carried the coffin through the curtains and the hardened-steel shutter had slid shut, the record of a blast furnace in operation would be turned on and the corpse quickly tipped into a plywood box reinforced with struts. The coffin would be swiftly dismantled and the corpse examined for items of value. Any fingers containing rings that had become moulded into the flesh would be chopped off and the rigid mouth prised open. If it contained any teeth, and they in turn contained gold, these would be wrenched out with a pair of pliers. The ‘funeral assistants' would then withdraw and the true furnace sound would overlay the recorded roar preying on the minds of the mourners as they sped with restrained haste from the ghastly place of death.
It was on this grim fertilizer that the seeds of Stromberg’s fortune had flourished. With the end of the war he moved his business to Hamburg, where the opportunities for expansion were so much greater. But his mind was already on other things. Most of Europe’s merchant fleet had been sunk during the war and Stromberg was swift to see the possibilities as Marshall Aid began to pour in to help the stricken continent to its feet. He moved his money into shipping and was soon on smiling terms with Greeks as his first shabby cargo boats gave way to tankers. By his middle twenties Sigmund Strom- berg was a dollar millionaire.
But this was not enough. As he became richer and more successful and as his net of power and acquaintance extended, Stromberg realized that the world is not controlled by kings or presidents, but by criminals. Kings and presidents are ephemeral; organizations like Cosa Nostra and the Tongs go on for ever.
So Sigmund Stromberg decided that he had to become a criminal. The transition was not going to be too difficult; after all, he was already a swindler, a murderer and a corpse robber.
His opportunity arose when he learned that a number of established criminal interests had agreed a plan to sell ‘insurance’ - based on annual tonnage carried - to one of the richest Greek shipping magnates with whom Stromberg had a bare acquaintance. Stromberg exaggerated the extent of his connection with the Greek and committed himself to convene a meeting at which the proposition was to be discussed by all interested parties. The meeting to take place on the Ingemar, at that stage the largest tanker in the Stromberg fleet.
To keep a respectful distance, Stromberg arranged that the meeting should be under the chairmanship of one Bent Krogh, who had been his right-hand man in the early crematorium days and knew all his secrets.
The decision not to attend was, as it happened, the right one because an explosion ripped apart the stateroom in which the meeting was due to take place, seconds before the arrival of the Greek. Bent Krogh and the leaders of eight of the most important criminal groups in Europe were wiped out and the ship turned into a blazing inferno. It was fortunate for Stromberg that the vessel was well insured.
Those who were in the know believed that the Greek had caught wind of the plan and taken his own retaliatory measures to nip an incipient protection racket in the bud. It therefore came as no great surprise when two months later, his chauffeur started the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and saw his legs passing his eyes as an explosion carried the vehicle, his master and himself to a height of forty-five feet before depositing their mangled remains in a smoking crater half that depth.
Stromberg had sent a wreath to the funeral - his taste in such matters was, of necessity, exemplary - and three months later, by a series of very complicated but very logical deals, had taken over the dead Greek’s shipping interests.
Now, Stromberg’s cold, watery eyes flowed over the two uneasy men before him.
‘Gentlemen, there is a problem.’
Room 4c
Stromberg allowed his words to sink in and stroked a weblike fold of skin that stretched between the smallest finger of his left hand and its neighbour. He had been born with this, and Frun Stromberg had been eager to have it removed. However, even this simple operation had been beyond the family’s means when Sigmund was an infant, and as he grew older and more assertive he had resolutely refused to undergo surgery. He even affected the mannerism of dosing the finger and thumb of the right hand round the translucent curve of flesh and tugging at it ruminatively.
‘Sir, with respect, surely the technical Stromberg silenced Bechmann with a gesture. ‘The problem is not of a technical nature. I have nothing but admiration for the work you have both carried out on the Submarine Tracking System. The first stage of its exploitation has been conspicuously successful.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps too successful. Perhaps it has encouraged thoughts of covetousness and greed.’
Small beads of sweat appeared on Markovitz’s forehead. ‘To put the matter in a nutshell, gentlemen,’ Stromberg continued, ‘I have discovered that we have a traitor in this organization. Somebody who is even at this moment engaged in trying to sell the plans of your Tracking System to competing international governments.’
He raised an arm with a lazy, swimming motion and extended a long, bony finger behind his right shoulder. ‘My assistant will be able to throw more light on the matter. Fetch the evidence, Miss Chapman. From the safe in Room 4c.’
The girl who appeared from the shadows had been sitting, quietly taking notes since the meeting began. She was tall,
dark and slim, and by any standards beautiful; she wore that look of haughty disdain and scarcely veiled contempt which is the hallmark of all secretaries of the rich and successful. Her black dress with the little white collar was so simple that it had to come from one of the more discreet Paris fashion houses, and she moved with the casual, aristocratic grace of a pure-bred Saluki. As she left the room, Stromberg watched her approvingly.
Room 4c was long and narrow, and painted a brilliant, almost blinding white. The girl had never been in it before, and was surprised to find it empty. She had supposed that this was where Stromberg kept papers too secret even for her eyes. As she walked through the door she was startled by a high- pitched buzz and a red flashing light at the far end of the room. She stopped, then relaxed. It must be some kind of security device. Stromberg had sent her here, so presumably it was safe to proceed.
Drawn by the light, she strode down the room towards what looked like sliding doors. The safe must be behind them.
Suddenly there was a solid clunk behind her. She whirled. The door had shut. As she started towards it there was a whir of machinery and a partition fell from the ceiling like a guillotine blade, missing her by inches. The room had shrunk to a quarter of its original size.
The girl began to panic. She jabbed a finger against what she hoped desperately was an alarm button. Apart from breaking one of her long, beautifully manicured nails, she achieved nothing. There was no sound of a bell ringing.
Instead the doors slid gently aside. She was face to face with an expanse of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling. The girl shook her head, unable to believe what she was seeing. Behind the glass was water, hundreds and thousands of gallons of it. And fish, brightly coloured tropical fish, darting by singly or drifting in shoals. The girl shrank back against the far wall. It was eerie down here with that enormous pressure of water behind the glass.
What was happening? Had the
complex electrical system that powered Strombcrg’s headquarters finally broken down? Supposing the glass broke? She screamed and the noisereverberated round her prison and echoed in her ears.
‘Stay calm!' She said the words out loud and peered across the tank to see if she could make out where she was. In the murk something moved. The girl saw what it was and screamed again. The nose appeared first, like a streamlined shell. Then the small pig eyes. Then the whole fish. It was a great white shark. The girl shrank back in terror and the shark sped towards her. She caught a glimpse of the two rows of jagged teeth set back beneath the pointed snout and then the fish keeled away, its white belly nearly brushing against the glass. The girl sank to her knees and started to sob hysterically. What did this nightmare mean? What in God’s name was happening to her?
Crack! The sudden jolting noise was like someone freeing a window that has become frozen by frost. The glass before her lurched and water burst into the room at floor level like a sluice-gate being winched up. The water splashed against her knees and she screamed and scrambled to her feet. Her desperate hands thrust against the glass and tried to push it down but it was a pathetic, useless gesture. Her fingers slid down the glass as it remorselessly continued to force its way upwards and the rising tide of rushing water drove her skirt above her lovely legs and soft, unplundered thighs. She screamed words that had no meaning and offered no hope of salvation, and as the water rose above her shoulders and her bruised head beat like a cork against the roof, the light went out and a loudspeaker crackled into life.
James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me Page 4