by John Pearson
Bond took no notice as he sipped his coffee and began describing the conclusion of that frustrating year he spent trailing his vanished enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Although Bond had saved M. from the threat of blackmail, the atmosphere within headquarters still seemed distinctly fraught. M. was as difficult as ever – particularly with Bond. (Indeed, Bond wondered if M. knew what he had done for him. Far from feeling grateful, he may have secretly resented him knowing what had happened. It seemed likely.) As summer ended Bond was still stuck behind his desk in London. This seemed ridiculous. Boredom enhanced his discontent, and he suspected that behind all this inaction, he was being quietly forgotten. By September 1961, when Fleming showed him at the start of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond was about to kick. As Fleming revealed (Bond was to wish he hadn't) he was actually composing his letter of resignation from the Secret Service when the book began. It was against this background that one of the key episodes in James Bond's life suddenly occurred.
It all started with his visit to the grave of Vesper Lynd at the small French seaside town of Royale-les-Eaux. It was ten years since the Casino-Royale affair, and during this time he'd scarcely given her a thought. But when he found himself suddenly back at Royale, her memory began to haunt him. He had been on one more fruitless European trip to track down Blofeld and the soft September weather, the melancholy nostalgia of the time of year, caught him off guard. He had a private sense of failure – in his life as well as his career – and now he was indulging in remorse. The dead Vesper Lynd reminded him of all the women he had loved and who had died.
As he described her Bond made it clear that these deaths still troubled him, for as he said, ‘when it's too late you realize what you've done’. As he said this the sardonic mouth relaxed, the cruel eyes softened and I began to understand something of the tragedy that had occurred that autumn.
Fleming has described the way Bond met the girl he was to marry – the Countess Teresa di Vicenzo. Her father was a man called Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Deadly ‘Union Corse’ which still controls most of the organized crime in France and her ex-colonies. Her husband had conveniently vanished. She drove a white two-seater Zagato-bodied Lancia Flaminia – very fast. This was a favourite car of Bond's and when he first encountered her along the N.1 between Abbeville and Montreuil she seemed like just another rich, disposable young woman for Bond to pursue, sleep with, and forget. But in the sentimental atmosphere of Royale-les-Eaux that autumn, she became something more. He was soon calling her not ‘Countess di Vicenzo’ but plain ‘Tracy’ and saved her from the ‘Coup de Déshonneur’ in the casino by paying her gambling debts. He made love to her that night, and as she gave herself to him she cynically remarked that this would be ‘the most expensive piece of love of your life.’
But Bond wasn't feeling cynical and after that one night found himself in love with this vulnerable young blonde. In retrospect this must have been inevitable. For Tracy was the sort of girl Bond could never quite resist, part waif, part wanton and in constant need of his protection. There was a touch of Vesper Lynd about her, and by marrying her Bond felt that he could save her, and redeem himself.
This love affair took place against the events which Fleming has described in On Her Majesty's Secret Service – events which ironically proved M.'s hunch about Blofeld to have been correct. Blofeld was alive and still as dangerous and threatening as ever. Under the unusual cover of an official from the London College of Arms, Bond tracked him down to his mountain hideaway above Geneva and found Blofeld, his face restructured through skilful plastic surgery and his eyes hidden behind dark contact lenses. And it was here too that he met the unappetising Fraulein Irma Bunt of the yellow eyes, fought his great battle with the Spectre killers, and finally destroyed the Blofeld plan to bring Britain to her knees by waging biological warfare on her agriculture.
But Bond clearly felt that Fleming had failed to do justice to his love for Tracy. ‘When I decided I would marry her it wasn't quite the spur-of-the-moment thing he makes it seem. We had it all carefully planned out. Both of us realized that we had to settle down and that this was suddenly our chance. I was still debating whether to leave the Secret Service. I hadn't quite decided, but I would certainly have moved out of the 00 section – it wouldn't have been fair to her to have stayed. We also planned to give up the flat and move out of London – probably to Kent. I even found a house for sale that would have suited us – on the cliffs above St Margaret's Bay. You could see France from the bedroom windows.’
‘You'd have been happy there?’
Bond shrugged and smiled ruefully.
‘How can you ever tell? Certainly we both thought so. I'd learned a lot since my affair with Tiffany and neither of us was exactly innocent. She'd been married already and I'd had enough affairs to last a lifetime.’
‘But what about that old enemy of yours, the soft life as Fleming called it? Wouldn't the boredom of a settled married life have caught you in the end.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not with her. I honestly don't think it would. She wasn't in the least possessive and I think I'd – shall we say I'd mellowed since my time with Tiffany?’
He paused to light a cigarette. He was smoking heavily.
‘As you know, that madman Blofeld had to destroy it all. Even today I sometimes find myself unable to believe what happened. When the assignment finished I took my two weeks’ leave and we were married in Munich. We'd finally succeeded and we were very happy. That of course was the trouble. I still reproach myself for what occurred. Normally I'd have been on my guard and Blofeld wouldn't have been able to get away with it. For that matter, instead of marrying Tracy, I should still have been after him. Instead of which I let him go. Still, one pays for one's mistakes. Or rather, this time Tracy did.’
‘Fleming described it all. We were driving to Kitzbühel for our honeymoon – I hadn't been there since before the war, but for me it always had been one of those special places where I had once been very happy. I'd always promised that I'd take the woman that I married there.’ He paused. ‘You've no idea how many times I've been over those last few minutes in my mind. You see, it really was my fault. I think Fleming explained how we passed the filling station and saw a red Maserati standing there with two people in it. It was an open car, and the people were muffled up and wearing goggles. I didn't recognize them consciously, but you know how it is. There was something familiar about them, something that rang a warning at the back of my mind. Normally I'd have paid attention to that warning – you have to in a job like mine. That's how you stay alive. But I ignored it. I was happy and I ignored it. That was why she died. The man in the Maserati was Blofeld: the woman with him was Irma Bunt. When they overtook us and the Bunt woman fired at us, the shot was meant for me. Instead it caught Tracy. It went through the heart. She died immediately.’
Bond described this unemotionally, almost casually, as if it had all happened years ago to someone else.
‘Didn't you want revenge?’ I asked.
‘No, not particularly. There was no point in it – no point at all. People were very kind – even old M. in his funny way. Bill Tanner came out to help clear up the mess and Marc-Ange came and buried her. Not that it made the slightest difference. She was dead and that was that and of course I thought that I had killed her. You see, so many women I had loved had died, and suddenly it all came home to me. Aunt Charmian had always talked about the curse of the Bonds. It was a sort of joke, but now I honestly believed it. It was partly shock, of course, but I believed that I was damned – that I could never hope to get away from this one life I knew. I felt I was condemned to go on in the Secret Service.’ He smiled. ‘Stupid, wasn't it?’
He lit another cigarette and then the telephone rang in the room. I got up to answer it. The operator said, ‘London on the line.’ There was a pause, the line clicked, and another voice said crisply, ‘Universal Export for Commander Bond.’ I called him in. I heard him say, ‘Oh, hullo Bill. You at
last. Where have you been? Yes certainly – I've quite made up my mind.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, I see.’ And then, annoyingly, he shut the door.
He was on the telephone some time, twenty minutes or maybe more. When he came out onto the balcony he seemed preoccupied and sat smoking, saying nothing. Finally he said, ‘Sorry, but something’s just cropped up. May I use your telephone again?’ I heard him ask the operator for Sir William Stephenson.
‘I've just had London on the line. It seems they're serious. Could I come up and see you? Yes, straight away. Fine. Many thanks.’
Then he apologized to me, and said he would continue his story later that afternoon.
But he didn't. I lunched alone, then went to sleep beside the pool and woke just before five with a headache. The hotel suddenly seemed empty. When I rang Bond's room he wasn't there, nor was Sir William. I dined alone and was in bed by ten.
Next morning Bond was back again soon after breakfast. He seemed quite jaunty but he made no reference to his telephone call from London nor to what was going on. Instead he took out the gun-metal cigarette case, stretched himself out in the bamboo chair, and continued his story. That mask-like face was adept at concealing what he was thinking. He described the aftermath of Tracy's death. When he got back to London, May was waiting for him in the flat. Winter had started. Nothing had really changed. Even Bond's old arch-enemy Blofeld was still at large and still as menacing as ever. Fortunately M. did have sufficient tact not to give Bond the thankless task of trailing him again.
It took some time for the real shock of Tracy's death to hit him. He had such self-control that his grief remained inside him. Few people realized what he was suffering. Probably the only one who did was Sir James Molony, and his advice was simple. ‘Work!’ Bond did his best to follow it. But something indefinable had gone.
Everything he did was a disaster – he says that he's not certain why. ‘I can't believe that I was any less efficient or aggressive than in the old days but my luck had gone. Gamblers run out of luck. So do agents in the Secret Service. With Tracy's death all my luck turned. None of my 1962 assignments seemed to go right.’
The worst was the Prenderghast Affair and once again Bond's luck let him down; this time, however, with results that shook the whole structure of the Secret Service. Prenderghast was Station Head in Rome. Bond had known him for years and liked him. He had a distinguished record as a Fleet Air Arm pilot during the war and later served with Bond for some years in the 00 section. For the past five years he had been in Rome, and Bond never failed to see him when he was in the city. For Prenderghast was fun. He knew all the gossip and his apartment just behind the Via dei Coronari was a splendid place for lunch. Bond also found him a good friend and a sympathetic listener. He was intelligent, efficient and he knew his job.
It was Bill Tanner who gave Bond the first hint of trouble about Prenderghast, when he mentioned that a man called Croxson had been sending in unfavourable reports about him. Croxson was one of his subordinates and currently was acting Station Head in Milan. He was young and inexperienced – Italy was his first posting after his transfer from the army barely a year before. For this reason Tanner had been treating these reports with what he called ‘a fairly generous pinch of salt’. Croxson and Prenderghast had clearly failed to hit it off, and Croxson had taken to complaining of him at every opportunity. Tanner had tried to smooth things over, but recently the complaints had started up again.
‘What sort of complaints?’ Bond had asked.
‘Oh, quite incredible accusations. Corruption and inefficiency; he even says he's homosexual and that he's working as a double agent for the enemy. If one didn't know old Prenderghast one might be really worried.’
‘This Croxson fellow must be off his head,’ said Bond. ‘It's Italy. They're all mad there.’
Tanner had agreed but added that something would have to be done – probably a transfer for young Croxson at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime it might be useful for someone experienced from Headquarters to go out to Italy and have a quiet word with Croxson and with Prenderghast. Quite unofficially of course, but often a tactful word or two could prevent a nasty scandal. Bond agreed. Tanner suggested that a trip to Italy at that time of year could be enjoyable. And a few days later, Bond found himself aboard an early morning flight to Milan.
He didn't take to Croxson. He found him arrogant and earnest and lacking in all sense of humour. More to the point, he soon found out that he had not one shred of proof to back his accusations against Prenderghast. As far as Bond could see he was suffering from an outsize persecution complex and he tried suggesting that it was best not to go making wild accusations against a head of station without fairly solid proof.
From Milan Bond flew to Rome where he called on Prenderghast. He was glad to see him, especially after all the rumours he had heard. For Prenderghast was looking splendid and clearly was in great form. After the wretched Croxson with all his moanings and complaints, it was good to be with someone who enjoyed himself. It was also good to see an old friend who was doing well. They walked through Rome and Bond enjoyed hearing what was going on. After Americanos at the ‘Tre Scaline’ they strolled up the hill of the Pincio and dined at the Casa Valadier – that is to say, they dined extremely well. They were drinking their sambucas when Bond brought up the subject of Croxson and his reports: Prenderghast appeared to understand the problem. Croxson was young, his wife was difficult, and possibly he had been a little tactless with him in the past. As for the accusations – Prenderghast grinned at Bond. They had both been within the Secret Service long enough to know how easy it could be to make accusations without proof. There was of course no proof? Of course not, Bond replied. And there the conversation ended. Bond returned to London, and a few days later Tanner told him that Croxson was about to be recalled. He had been in Italy on probation and was obviously unsuited for the Secret Service. Perhaps it was hard on him but in the circumstances … Two days later Croxson shot himself.
Then all hell broke loose. The Italian press seized on the case. Prenderghast was accused by Croxson's widow as the man responsible for her husband's death. That same evening he was named as the organizer of a homosexual diplomatic network in Rome. More accusations followed and in the midst of this furore, Prenderghast lost his nerve. Two officers of British security caught him as he was about to board a Czech aircraft at Fiumicino. He was brought back to London, and at the Old Bailey, some months later, Prenderghast was sentenced to a total of thirty years for treason. The trial was held in camera, but Bond read a transcript of the evidence. It proved every word of Croxson's accusations.
Luckily for Bond, not a breath of his meeting with the two men came out in court. (Bond is still grateful to Prenderghast for not mentioning it.) But the whole case received so much publicity that M. offered his resignation to the Prime Minister in person. It was refused – but the whole sordid case had clearly cast little credit on the British Secret Service. As for Bond, he felt that it was the final proof that he had lost his touch and that luck had turned decisively against him. M. evidently thought so too (he lacked the P.M.'s generosity towards erring servants) and by this time had virtually decided to dismiss him, not just from the 00 section, but from the Service as a whole. As he put it to Sir James Molony, he had no room in Headquarters for ‘a lamebrain’. Bond was drinking and gambling too much. According to M. this made him ‘dangerous to others’, and once again it was Sir James who really saved him, by suggesting that M. should send him off on some all but hopeless assignment to redeem himself, forget about Tracy and restore his luck. The result was the Japanese assignment described by Fleming in his book, You Only Live Twice.
*
Bond was somewhat vague about the Japanese affair, although he did confirm in outline Fleming's version of this most bizarre of all assignments. He went originally to make a deal of sorts with the Japanese Secret Service; they had a cyphering machine which could decode the very top classified Soviet information, and, thank
s to Bond, we got it. But in the process he became involved with his old enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who had moved here from Switzerland and set up a suicide establishment in an old castle near Kyoto. Because of this the mission ultimately turned into a journey of revenge.
‘From here,’ he said, ‘my life became very odd indeed. Japan's a funny country and in many ways it suited Blofeld. That poisoned garden that he built – Fleming called it his “Disneyland of Death” – was very Japanese.’
‘But wasn't it satisfying to kill him finally – after all he'd done to you?’
Bond slowly shook his head.
‘Not really. I'd dreamed of killing him almost every night since Tracy died, but when it came to it he was so mad that it was like putting down a lunatic; and everything was happening so quickly that I didn't have much time to savour the finer points of killing him. It was all very odd, what happened then, Blofeld's castle going up in flames, my escape in the balloon and then my plunge into the sea off Kuro island. I owe my life, of course, to that girl that Fleming wrote about, Kissy Suzuki. She pulled me out of the sea and fed me and looked after me, and although my memory had gone, we were very happy.’
‘Was she your ideal woman then?’
‘In some ways I suppose she was. I'd always said that I'd wanted to live with a Japanese – they seemed so restful and obedient – and at a time like that I was lucky to find her. She did everything for me, fed me, bathed me, clothed me – even made love to me, which was very pleasant. But no – I think one would be deceiving oneself if one thought of living with a girl like that for ever. Kissy was sweet – but we hadn't really much in common, and once my memory started to return I left. Somehow I felt I had to find my own country and my own people. Instead, of course, I ended up in Russia.’