‘Suddenly, he was travelling more. He’d often been away for days at a time but after the baby was born – it was a boy – it became weeks. Danny loved being a father. He was so proud. But maybe there was a side of him that was afraid of responsibility, who didn’t want to be tied down. I never complained. I tried to make things easy for him. That’s how much of a fool I was. I had been married to him for five years before I discovered the truth.
‘I should have known from the start. Perhaps I had known and all along I’d just been pretending that I didn’t. There were the three passports, for a start, the different names. There had been telephone calls in the middle of the night, strange men who never announced their names arriving at the flat. And the money! Envelopes full of banknotes with no real explanation about where it was all coming from. I’d never met his parents or any of his relatives and the friends that he introduced me to seemed to change from season to season so that there was never anyone who was actually close. You know the mistake I’d made, James? I made Danny my whole world. I’ll never do that again with another man.
‘He wasn’t a business adviser. He was a crook – plain and simple. I learned the truth from a Scotland Yard detective called Jack Travers who came looking for him and who took pity on me. Or maybe he wanted to use me to hurt Danny. I don’t know. Anyway, Danny had started his career as a confidence trickster. No surprises there. He was what was called “the roper” for a well-organised gang who worked in London and sometimes on transatlantic crossings. The roper is the one who pulls in the mark, which was exactly what he had done with me. All it takes is a lot of charm and plausibility. They had a series of scams with fanciful names: the Huge Duke, the Last Turn, the Hot Seat, the Tear-up … you wouldn’t believe how much practice went into it all. There were half a dozen of them pretending they didn’t know each other when in fact they were working together. I’d met some of them but I never knew their real names.
‘Recently, he’d branched out. He’d set up a racket forging National Health and Unemployment stamps. They were being printed in Poland and he was selling them through gangs that he was meeting in different parts of London … the Hoxton Mob and the Elephant Boys. He was a familiar figure, hanging out at clubs and racecourses. It seems that everyone knew him. Except me.
‘And I suppose it goes without saying that I wasn’t the only woman in his life. Far from it. DI Travers made sure I got all the details. Danny had girlfriends all over London. I got the impression that he must have been laughing about me when he was with them because I was the only one who didn’t know the truth. I’d constructed this little dream of being a wife and a mother when actually I was just a convenience. I’m not even sure why he married me, although later on I found out that Salgado wasn’t his real name so it didn’t matter anyway because the whole marriage was null and void, part of the pretence.’
The evening air was getting cooler. Sixtine drew the robe closer around her. Bond lit another cigarette.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to talk all night. You said you wanted to know everything about me. Well, I’ll spare you that. This is the edited version. Do you want me to go on?’
‘You can talk as long as you like,’ Bond said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I hope not, James. At least, I hope not tonight.’
She drank the rest of her wine and pushed the glass away.
‘I left Danny. We never had a row. We didn’t have any confrontation. I simply took my son and went back to Aunt Lucy. She’d been expecting me. My old room was ready for me and there was another room up in the attic for Julian. I’ll say one thing for Danny. He still sent me money every week. I don’t know whether it was for me, for his son or just for his conscience but I didn’t have to go back to work. I never saw him again. The truth is, in a way, we really had loved each other and we didn’t want to see each other now that everything had changed. It was better just to live with the memories.
‘When the money stopped, I knew it could only mean one thing. Danny had disappeared and nobody would give me any information about him so I went back to Travers and he told me exactly what I expected to hear. Danny had been shot dead by one of his gangster friends. It turned out that in the last few years of his life, despite everything he’d said, he’d allowed gambling to consume him – not just cards but craps and roulette – and in just a short time he’d been cleaned out by the casinos. It was all gone: the flat in Piccadilly, the cars, the nice clothes. I wondered how he’d found the money to send to me. Travers smiled when I asked him that. It seems he’d been dipping his hand in the till, stealing from his associates. That was what got him killed. I would have liked to have taken Julian to visit his grave but that wasn’t going to happen. Danny was probably weighed down at the bottom of the Thames. He didn’t leave anything behind. Not even a memory.’
Sixtine shivered.
‘Let’s go back inside. I’m getting cold.’
They went into the living room. Sixtine sat on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her. Bond sat opposite, waiting to hear the end of the story.
‘Another war was on the way and part of me was glad,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that terrible? But I needed my life to be shaken up. I wanted a new world to explore. I was thirty years old when war was finally declared and I thought about joining the Women’s Land Army or the ATS, but Aunt Lucy had a friend who taught at Imperial College and, knowing that I spoke fluent French, he suggested I apply for a job at somewhere called Bletchley Park. It was all top secret and I shouldn’t be talking to you about it even now. I went for an interview at a little office near Green Park and the next thing I knew, I’d signed the Official Secrets Act and I was on my way to Buckinghamshire with a job that would pay me thirty-six shillings a week – although I’d have to lose a guinea out of that for digs. Julian stayed in London with Aunt Lucy.
‘I was at Bletchley for most of the war. I started in the indexing hut … naval intelligence. My job was to look out for any words or phrases in French and German that might be of interest and put them down on cards for cross-referencing. It was a rather grim place with terrible food and I worked long hours, six days a week, but I was very happy there. I had a lot of friends, even though most of the girls were younger than me. We had to be close to each other because we weren’t allowed to talk about anything to anyone else. I remember swimming in the local reservoir during the summer, dances at Woburn Abbey, the Odeon at Fenny Stratford. I used to meet RAF pilots from Cranfield at a pub on the Grand Union Canal and there was a Polish airman I was close to for a time. In a way, I was protected, in a sort of cocoon. The work I was doing was important. We all knew that. I didn’t have to think about the rest of my life, about Danny, about any of it.
‘And then, in the summer of 1943, the same professor who had recommended me to Bletchley came calling a second time – only now he wanted me to join an organisation I’d never heard of and which, he said, would put my life in great danger. I knew at once that he wanted me to become a spy and I was right. He was talking about the SOE.’
Sixtine shivered again but this time Bond knew it wasn’t because of the cold.
‘I was recruited and sent to Scotland for training in field craft, weapons, demolition, night-and-day navigation and all the rest of it. I was thirty-four by then and I found it completely exhausting. Then it was off to Beaulieu for cryptography, weapons, escape and evasion techniques, Morse … I know you were in naval intelligence, James, so this is all probably very familiar to you.’
‘How do you know?’ Bond interrupted. ‘When we first met, you knew my name and everything about me. How did you get that information?’
She looked him in the eyes. ‘You think I’ve been spying on you?’
‘It’s what I assumed.’
‘Well, you’re wrong.’ She paused. ‘Irwin Wolfe told me about you. He even showed me your photograph and warned me to keep away from you.’
Bond considered what she had said. He still wasn’t sure if h
e should believe her. ‘That’s very interesting. But you were telling me about your work with the SOE …’
‘Actually, I don’t want to talk about it very much. It ended badly, very badly.’
‘You’re still alive.’
‘They used to say that a wireless operator with the SOE had a life expectancy of six weeks, so I suppose I was lucky.’ She took the cigarette that Bond was smoking, used it to light her own, then handed it back. ‘I was given the code name of Sixtine and I was sent out for the first time at the end of 1943. My job was to join the Stockbroker Circuit as a courier, relaying messages in and out. There was a strange irony. Stockbroker had launched a successful attack on the railway workshop at Fives-Lille and they’d also developed an interesting method of sabotage which they called “Phantom Train”. They’d hijack a locomotive and send it rushing down the tracks. Eventually it would crash into another locomotive or a building without any need of explosives. I was with them for three months and it always struck me as funny. When I was a little girl, my father had been creating the French railway system and here I was with the people who were destroying it. It made me wonder what he would have thought.
‘I was sent into France three times and on the third time my luck ran out. I’m not going to tell you what happened. I never talk about it. I don’t even think about it. I was arrested by the Gestapo one day after I parachuted into northern France and a week before D-Day. Of course, I’d been betrayed. They knew I was coming.’
Bond could see the memories tearing through her and reached out to hold onto her – but she shrugged him away.
‘I’m all right. A lot of people were hurt in the war and I was just one of them. But there was something that hurt a lot more, although I only found out about it later and maybe it will explain to you everything you want to know.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I say that I was betrayed and it was true. When I parachuted into France that third time, the Germans knew I was on my way and they were waiting for me. I fell right into their arms. But it was only later I discovered that the SOE had been aware of this all along. They knew that I would be arrested, interrogated and probably killed. There were whole networks – Stockbroker, Prosper and many others – that had been infiltrated by the Germans. But the SOE were playing a double game. They didn’t want the Germans to know that they knew. They wanted to distract their attention from the Normandy landings and if that meant sacrificing people like me, then so be it. And believe me, I wasn’t the only one.
‘Yes, James, I’m still alive. But when I got back to England from Ravensbrück, which is where I had been kept prisoner, and when I understood what had been done to me, how I had been manipulated, a large part of me died. It’s still dead now.’
She didn’t want to smoke any more of her cigarette and stubbed it out, the sparks rising around her fingertips.
‘That was when I decided I would never allow a man to tell me what to do again,’ she went on. ‘I would have no allegiance to anyone – and not to any country. I would go into business for myself. I would get rich and I wouldn’t care how I did it. I kept the name, Sixtine, because it was also a number and it seemed right that I should deliberately set aside part of my humanity. It’s something you and I have in common. They call you 007 because they know it will make it easier for you to kill brutally and without remorse. It matters to them that you should be a double zero. They have taken part of your humanity too.’
Bond didn’t believe what Sixtine was saying. He knew there had been double agents within the Special Operations Executive. He himself had spoken to Henri Déricourt, who had controlled air operations and who had been prosecuted for treason fourteen months after the end of the trial. Bond had taken a dislike to the French pilot but in the end Déricourt had been acquitted. He couldn’t believe that there had been some sort of conspiracy running through the upper echelons of the organisation and he was tempted to argue with Sixtine.
He decided to stay silent. He still needed information from her. He had to see this through to the end.
‘I don’t think of myself as a number,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you why I choose to do the work that I do. But there are two things I want to ask you. The first is – what happened to your son, Julian? You haven’t mentioned him.’
She made a vague gesture with one hand. ‘He’s in the Bahamas. I have a house there and he’s happier away from me. It’s easier for both of us that way.’
‘And you still haven’t told me what you’re doing in the south of France. What about Irwin Wolfe? I know you don’t love him. I imagine you don’t even like him. So what do you want from him?’
Bond waited. In a way the entire conversation had been leading up to this.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t want there to be any secrets between us and it may be that we can even help each other. I would have thought you’d have guessed anyway.’ She paused. ‘The first thing you should know is that Irwin is a sick man. I think he’s dying. He takes about a dozen pills every day but they’re not helping him any more. The strange thing is, his illness only makes him more determined. It’s driving him on. He’s developed a new product which could make him another fortune – even if it’s one he’ll never get to spend.’ She paused. ‘Do you know anything about Technicolor film?’
‘I know a little. I don’t often go to the cinema. I’ve always found more interesting things to do in the dark.’
She nodded. ‘I’m sure. Well, the basic process of Technicolor is very simple. The colours are divided into three basic components: red, green and blue. The trouble is, it demands three separate negatives and that causes complications.’
She was businesslike now, unemotional, as if everything she had been saying for the last hour had been forgotten. Bond observed her with a sense of admiration he had rarely felt for a woman. Child, orphan, wife, mother, widow, secret agent, prisoner and self-confessed criminal, she had managed to break down her life into separate compartments with a ruthlessness that had ensured not just her survival but her success. He remembered Reade Griffith, almost in awe of her. ‘I can tell you – she’s a piece of work!’ It was true. Bond had never met anyone quite like her.
‘Multiply the negatives and you divide the light,’ she went on. ‘So you have to use a lot more lighting when you’re shooting the film. And that makes it much more expensive.
‘But Irwin, or the people working for him, has invented a type of 35 mm colour negative stock that has a much wider latitude. It’s good for indoor and outdoor photography. He calls it G-Vision and it’s going to put Technicolor and all the rest of them out of business. Which is where I come in. There are certain people I know who want the formula. They’ve paid me a considerable amount of money to steal it.’
So that was it: industrial espionage, as simple as that. Bond couldn’t help smiling. At the same time, he wondered who the people were behind Sixtine and knew she wouldn’t tell him. ‘He produces this new film stock at his plant in Menton,’ he said.
‘That’s right. Or at least, that’s what I believe. I’ve been cosying up to him, trying to get him to give me a tour but Irwin has always been completely silent about what he gets up to in his secret compound in the middle of the woods. It’s been driving me crazy because, as you know, he’s leaving France on Tuesday morning and without him here I won’t get another chance. I even went out and took a sneaky look for myself and you’d think he was manufacturing nuclear bombs the amount of security he’s hired. There are two fences, the inner one electrified. He has armed guards on twenty-four-hour patrol and guard dogs. I can’t say I blame him. He’s sitting on something that could be worth millions of dollars.
‘Today was my last chance. I knew he was going to Menton this afternoon and when I met him on the Mirabelle, I really expected him to take me with him. It was more or less what he’d promised.’
‘And if he had taken you in – what then?’
‘I’m good at improvising. A few minutes on my own would have been al
l I needed. I know what I’m looking for and I’ve got a miniature camera. It’s just a question of meeting the right people and taking the right shots. Anyway, it looks as if I’m going to have to fall back on an alternative plan.’ She looked at Bond curiously. ‘And the funny thing is, meeting you could be exactly the break I need.’
‘You think I’m going to help you steal commercial secrets?’
‘Why not? Maybe I can help you find out what’s going on around here. You say this part of the world is poisoned. I agree. There’s definitely something nasty in the air. Scipio may look like he’s just walked out of a circus but he’s extremely dangerous. Trust me, you don’t want to go after him on your own.’
Bond was reminded of his confrontation with Jean-Paul Scipio and once again felt the liquid being thrown in his face. He still wondered why it had been water, not acid. Either way, describing him as dangerous was an understatement. He was a monster.
‘Why did you meet him at La Caravelle?’ Bond asked.
‘I already told you,’ Sixtine said. ‘Scipio heard I was in Marseilles. He knew who I was. He invited me to meet him except it wasn’t so much an invitation as a royal summons. There was no way I could refuse. He wanted to know that I wasn’t up to anything that might interfere with his business.’
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