by John Pearson
It was Sunday. His instinct was to take the day easy, but he could not relax on an assignment. Despite all Stephenson's doubts about the villa, there was something to be said for seeing it. As a gambler, Bond had often benefited from outside chances; one never knew one's luck. Besides he had never seen Long Island at this time of year and could think of no better way of spending an empty Sunday in New York.
He took his dark blue Burberry and the small attaché case and called a cab to Penn Station.
There was a sense of holiday about the trip – the all but empty Sunday morning train of the Long Island Railroad, the glimpses of the tenements of the Bronx (what Fleming called ‘the backside of New York’), and then the potato fields and duck farms of Long Island. It was all very different from Fifth Avenue. The villa was at the far end of the island – the name of the station immediately appealed to Bond. It was Sag Harbor. Here he descended.
Sag Harbor is a summer place – a few big old houses out towards the Sound, but otherwise a lot of summer property. Bond found its October melancholy appealing. He asked a porter for a cab.
Here Bond had his first real piece of luck.
‘Where you going, mister?’ said the porter.
‘Lansdown Boulevard,’ said Bond.
There was one cab, an old black Chevrolet. The porter waved to it.
‘Another customer for Lansdown,’ he shouted. ‘You'll have to share,’ he said to Bond. ‘That's the only cab around this morning.’
Bond thanked him.
The driver was an old man in a cap. He drove a leisurely cab.
‘All right for Lansdown Boulevard?’ said Bond. The old man nodded. Bond gave him the number.
‘Lady in the back going to the same house,’ said the cabbie, opening the door. In the car was sitting a small middle-aged Japanese woman, dressed in black. Bond nodded to her; she nodded back. The journey passed in silence.
There are moments in an agent's life when he must accept whatever chance comes up. This was one of them. The journey took some fifteen minutes, and finally the cab drew up at the entrance to a private drive. There was a large, green painted steel door – each side of it a high brick wall. Beside the door a notice warned trespassers that there were ‘electric methods to repel them’.
But the cab was evidently expected. There was an answering device beside the door. The cabbie gave his name. One of the doors swung open.
‘No one around this morning,’ said the cabbie.
The drive wound between trees and shrubbery towards the house. Bond tapped the driver on the shoulder.
‘Here. This will do for me,’ he said and gave a twenty dollar bill.
As Bond got out the woman took no notice. In her world whatever men did was strictly their own male business.
There was a bank of rhododendrons – a shrub which Bond detests, but which provided cover. He hid and waited twenty minutes. He saw the cab return, there was no outcry from the house. Now was his chance to reconnoitre.
The shrubbery continued to the right. Bond followed it. The ground rose slightly and from here he could see the house. It was like a fortress, a two-storeyed, concrete affair, the windows shuttered, the doors protected with iron grilles. It would be madness to try entering but Bond still had the feel that luck was on his side. He was content to wait, settling himself within the dank protection of the bushes. Here he took out the rifle, assembled it, fitted the telescopic sight and pressed ten silver rounds into the magazine.
The house puzzled him. There was no light within, no sign of life. Bond lay very still; the rifle was becoming part of him. Then the rain started, a cold drizzle from the Sound: the hours ticked by. Twice he thought he heard a car, but still saw nothing. It was early afternoon before anything occurred. The rain had stopped by now, and suddenly the grille was pulled back from the big French windows facing the lawn. A white-coated servant stepped out, shouted something and a dog bounded out, barking and bounding off across the lawn. The servant called again and a small girl appeared, an ugly little girl of seven or eight in a bright pink dress. Bond watched her through the telescopic sight. She was laughing at the dog, and Bond could see that she had lost her two front teeth. She threw a ball and the dog went bounding after it. It was a mud-brown mongrel bitch with a tail like a feather duster.
Then a third person appeared. There was no mistaking him. There was the same large head and dumpy body that Bond had seen in the photographs, except that now the man was laughing. Bond moved the cross hairs of the sight to just below the grey breast-pocket of Shingushi's suit and squeezed to first pressure on the trigger. At that moment there was a gust of wind, bringing some leaves down from the lime trees on the far side of the garden. The dog chased them. The girl laughed, clapped her hands. Shingushi picked her up.
It was Bond's chance. Shingushi was squarely in his sights, but all that Bond could see was the girl's pink dress.
His finger failed to move, and the chance was over. Shingushi turned again, put the girl down and went back inside the house. The child followed, then the dog, wagging its stupid tail.
Bond waited but his luck had left him. Not until dusk did he risk scaling the wall and then he had to walk back to the station. It was nearly midnight before he was back at the Volney. Monday morning there was a telegram from London.
‘Goods overdue. What news?’ signed Fleming.
Bond skipped breakfast – always a bad sign – and spent most of the morning sitting on a bench in Central Park. Here he went over the whole affair. He thought about Shingushi and the child – why did the wretched little man have to involve himself in such a dirty business? He also forced himself to think of sailors drowning in the North Atlantic, sailors perhaps from his own destroyer. Quite calmly then Bond made his decision. He no longer had the luxury of following straightforward orders aboard ship. He was a solitary man doing his best to fight a war. There was no point in being squeamish.
It was a bright autumn day; the Park was crowded, but Bond had never felt so much alone. He strolled out and down Fifth Avenue. New York no longer seemed exciting, but he ate a good lunch at Flanagan's Restaurant in Lower Manhattan and then rang Stephenson. There were still certain things he had to know.
That afternoon James Bond got down to work. First he met a man called Dolan, a fat Southerner with bright blue eyes. Dolan showed no surprise at what Bond wanted. All that he seemed concerned with was to double the $500 a day which Bond was offering. Rather than argue, Bond agreed.
Then Bond took a taxi to the building on Third Avenue, where Stephenson had hired him an empty office on the fortieth floor. Here he made sure of the view from the windows. Some sixty yards away stood the building containing the Consulate-General of Japan – almost directly opposite were the windows of the thirty-sixth floor.
That evening Bond and Dolan took possession of their office: the long wait started.
It was a very simple operation. The main requisite was patience and Bond remembered how, as a boy in Kent, he had waited all afternoon with his air rifle for a rat to emerge from its hole in a barn. Now he and Dolan both had snipers' rifles and were waiting for Shingushi.
It was an endless business and Bond began to wonder whether it would work. Not that Dolan minded; every day that passed earned him another thousand dollars. He rarely spoke, drank endless cans of beer and belched in place of conversation. Bond soon detested him, but he was said to know his job. Bond hoped he did.
It was surprising how soon Bond picked up the routine in the Consulate – also the faces in that office opposite.
Only on two occasions did he see Shingushi – both around nine o'clock at night when he suddenly walked in to the main office, chatted with someone at a desk, then walked away. Bond understood how difficult he would be to kill. There could be no mistakes – only one shot, one chance. Another problem was that the windows of the building were all double-glazed and strong enough to deflect a bullet. This had to be allowed for.
Wednesday, a second telegram arrived f
rom London – less polite this time. Thursday, Shingushi failed to appear. And by Friday even Bond's young nerves were beginning to fray. As usual, he and Dolan took their places in the room with the window open and the lights off. Bond had worked out that they were quite invisible to the Japanese. And, as usual, the two men sat in silence. Afternoon merged into evening. The lights went on in all the sky-scrapers and soon New York was shimmering around them like a phosphorescent anthill. It was nearly nine, and the traffic below was thinning down Third Avenue when Dolan nudged him.
‘Here he comes, the little bastard. Here comes our boy.’
Shingushi had come waddling in. Through his telescopic sight, Bond could see him blinking as he turned to a filing cabinet. This was the moment.
‘Now,’ barked Bond.
It was an eerie noise within the darkened room – Bond's voice and then the strangled thud of two silenced rifles firing almost simultaneously. Dolan fired first as arranged, for his shot had to break the double glass in the Consulate window. A split second later, Bond's shot sped through the hole straight to its target. Bond paused to watch the little Japanese keel over, then collapse. At this distance he barely seemed a man at all – more like a target on a range.
Everything went smoothly then, for Bond had rehearsed it many times – the swift dismantling and packing of the rifles, the locking of the office door, and in the street the car was waiting where Bond had left it. They drove towards the Park, then stopped the car. Bond had Dolan's money ready in assorted bills, and as he paid him, Dolan's blue eyes smiled.
‘Good shooting, Mr Bond. It's been a pleasure working with you.’
As he opened the car door he belched, then ambled off towards the Park. Bond drove away. He didn't feel like celebrating. Instead he sent a telegram to London, then dined alone, got moderately drunk, then bought himself a hundred-dollar whore. Her name was Rosemary. It was a pity she was wearing pink.
*
The Shingushi killing gave Bond a reputation that he didn't want. He was a fighting man – and not a murderer. Where there was any choice he always settled for assignments which involved direct confrontation with the enemy. This generally seemed possible, and 1942 was a busy year for Bond. He was behind the destruction of the big refinery at Brest in February. Two months later he was in France again, this time in Vichy where he posed as a commercial traveller and engineered the release of three Allied agents held in the local gaol. A few weeks later he was flown to Alexandria to take charge of countermeasures against the Italian one-man submarines which had already taken heavy toll of the Allied shipping in the harbour. This was a complex operation, for which Bond had been partly trained in Oshawa. But it was hideously dangerous. Bond organized and trained an offensive task force of naval frogmen who could work at night against the submarines, and several times they fought hand-to-hand combats with the Italian frogmen in the harbour. Casualties were heavy but the one-man submarines were beaten.
Bond was proud of his success – at the end of 1942 he was promoted Lieutenant-Commander and brought back to London – but he always feared that his reputation would involve him in a repetition of the Shingushi business. Early in 1943 it looked like happening. By a coincidence, Fleming was once again involved.
For some time Naval Intelligence had been having trouble with its Baltic circuit. This whole area was of great importance since it also covered the British convoys to Murmansk. Russia was now our ally – Germany was battling towards Leningrad and trying hard to close the Northern ports. But we were getting faulty information; agents were being caught, four in the last two months. With so much at stake, such wastage could not continue.
Fleming explained all this to Bond, but, as he talked, something about his manner made Bond uneasy.
‘It looks as if you'll have to take a little trip,’ he said. ‘Sweden. You'll find it chilly after Egypt, but I'm sure you'll make the best of things. I'm told the Swedish girls are ravishing.’
‘Whereabouts in Sweden?’
‘Stockholm. Lovely city. There's a man called Svenson. I'm afraid we need him dealt with – rather your line of country.’
Bond raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
‘He's one of ours – in theory. We trained him over here – you may have met him. He's a Norwegian – big, good-looking chap – ex-sailor. I had him set up in a Stockholm shipping agency for cover, but he's doubled on us.’
‘You're sure?’ said Bond.
‘No question. It's the usual story – good work to start with, then too many women. We've had reports of heavy spending. Now we're having all this trouble with the circuit and it must be Svenson. The opposition got two of our best men last week and we know that Svenson was the only person who could possibly have betrayed them. He must be fixed – for good.’
‘Couldn't you find someone else?’ said Bond. ‘I knew him.’
‘Did you now? So much the better.’
Despite himself, Bond was impressed by the thoroughness of Fleming's preparations. During the next few days they spent a lot of time together and Bond could see that nothing had been left to chance. Fleming had assembled a complete biography of Svenson. He even had some clips of film taken during training. The two men ran them through in the private cinema behind the Admiralty. Bond recognized at once the ready smile, the lumbering good-nature of the big Norwegian.
‘I'd have trusted Svenson anywhere.’
‘That's been the trouble,’ said Fleming grimly.
Finally Bond realized that he knew too much about this man he had to kill. It would have been better to have known nothing for knowledge causes pity and a sense of guilt. It is much simpler to destroy a traitor than a human being.
*
Perhaps it was his mood, but Bond found Stockholm an uneasy city. Behind its palaces and quays and calm good sense lurked a hygienic pallor that depressed him. It was a city of cold eyes and painless dentists. Any excess was possible in such a place.
Bond had officially his prewar role of diplomatic courier to the British Embassy. He had made a complicated journey to the north by British warship, then across the border and by train to Stockholm. He had no doubts about his mission. It was necessary, but it was no adventure. Instead of the usual excitement of a fresh assignment, he felt a dreadful heaviness. He was the visiting executioner.
Bond didn't want to meet his victim face to face. Stockholm was an impersonal city – the place for an impersonal death; the quicker now the better.
He had no difficulty finding Svenson. His house was in the old city, a gabled, yellow-painted house straight from the pages of Hans Christian Andersen. Svenson had his office here and private flat. From the caf opposite Bond spent some time watching it. Business did not appear to be too good. During the morning he saw two people entering the house, both of them well-dressed Swedes in heavy overcoats. There was no sign of Svenson. Just before lunch the front door opened and a girl came out. From behind his copy of Svenska Dagblat, Bond watched her as she crossed the street and walked towards the caf where he sat. She was tall, slender with the palest coloured hair that Bond had ever seen, a Hans Christian Andersen princess. He saw her enter the café, walk to the counter where she bought some smörgäsbord. Then Bond sensed that she was looking at him. Lowering his paper he looked back. The girl had violet eyes. Bond recognized the look she gave him – it was a look of fear and unmistakable suspicion. For just a moment he thought she would speak. Instead she turned away, collected her neatly tied package from the counter, and Bond watched her cross the street and enter the house again. She used a latch-key of her own.
Bond was still hoping Svenson would show himself. It was all he needed. But although Bond kept the house under watch most of the afternoon, there was no sign of him. Bond cursed the girl. She must have warned Svenson of the man watching from the caf opposite. That hygienic operation Bond was hoping for began to seem unlikely. It looked as if he could not avoid personal contact with Svenson after all. He waited hopefully till nearly six. Then he tele
phoned.
A woman answered. She spoke Swedish. It was a young attractive voice and Bond imagined it must be the girl. He replied in German, asking for Herr Svenson. She said he was out, and had no idea when he was returning. Who was speaking?
‘An old friend of his – James Bond. I'm staying at the Carlton Hotel on Kungsgatan. Perhaps he'd ring me. I'll be there tonight at eight.’
But Svenson didn't ring, and finally Bond tried again. This time the telephone was answered by Svenson.
At the first sound of that booming voice with its fragmented English, Bond was reminded of the man that he had known. Happy-go-lucky Svenson, great drinker, womanizer, and Norwegian patriot. He always had enormous warmth of personality – even now Bond felt it in the voice.
‘James, this is wonderful, just wonderful. You of all people here in bloody Stockholm. I can't wait to see you.’
‘I'm not staying long, and tomorrow looks impossible. Any chance of seeing you tonight? It's been a long time.’
‘So it has – too long. But yes, of course. We must meet and have a drink or two at least. I can't have you leaving Stockholm without seeing you.’
Svenson suggested a café, Olafson's on Skeppsbron – two minutes from the royal palace. Bond promised to be there.
He was, but Svenson wasn't. Once again Bond was armed and ready to complete his mission. But although he waited until gone eleven there was no sign of Svenson. Bond was almost relieved when it was clear that he would not come. It would have been a wretched business to have drunk with a man and reminisced about the past, then gunned him down. On the other hand it meant that Bond would now need to involve himself still deeper with his old friend to get a chance to kill him.
Bond didn't feel like food, but forced himself to eat some smrgsbord and drink sufficient schnapps to numb his feelings. Then he set out again for the yellow gabled house in the old city. This time Bond walked. It was a freezing night, and Bond recalled that Stockholm was as far north as Alaska. But the stars were bright, the spires and roofs of the old city still glittering like some Arctic city in a fairytale. Bond cursed the city for its beauty.