She tapped lightly on the panel.
“Come,” he drawled.
Bored already, she thought, and peered into the room.
He was propped up on his elbows, face downward, leafing through a book. A sort of tray arrangement had been erected over his buttocks and the sheet was drawn up over this, hiding the damage that had so horrified the delegation when he’d been carried, unconscious, from the compound gate up to the British Embassy. It was Grace who had insisted he be brought in, ordering the military police to find a stretcher. She had seen him thrown from the lorry seconds before it exploded and was not about to let Ian be trampled by hysterical goats and Persians.
They had doubled-timed it up to the embassy that morning, past the open car carrying Churchill bravely toward a doom that had already escaped him. It was Sarah who had whipped around in her seat and shouted at Grace, “Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Yes,” Grace had cried. “Go on to the airstrip. We’ll follow.”
It was another day before she and Ian flew out of Iran in Lord Leathers’s plane, Ian lying prone. The embassy doctor supplied Grace with several doses of morphia and told her on no account to disturb Ian’s dressings until he was in the hands of medical personnel in Giza. He ought to have been placed in the British garrison’s sick bay at the Old Citadel in Cairo—only Churchill wasn’t having any.
“Fleming is a hero,” he decreed, in the foghorn voice pneumonia had caused. “Chip off the old block. An Englishman to the core. Moran shall see to him.”
And so he had been brought to the villa in Giza, where Churchill hoped they would both convalesce.
“Ian,” she said.
He shot her his familiar quizzical look, one eyebrow raised, and slapped the covers of his book closed. “Gracie, by all that’s holy. Let me have a look at you. I understand you saved my life.”
“You saved your own,” she said roundly. “I saw you straddling that lorry. How you did it, in your condition—”
“Nerves. Wonderful things, when one’s about to die. Go into all sorts of gyrations one never anticipated.”
She came toward his bedside slowly and looked about for a chair. There was one in the corner of the room, near the window framing the Great Pyramid. She drew it close to him and sat, feeling suddenly awkward and tongue-tied.
“How are you?”
“I won’t say Never better. But better than yesterday. That’s my motto for the next few weeks. I’m to be here awhile, apparently.”
It was ludicrous talking to him like this, lying as much at ease as though he were on the shingle at Biarritz, attempting to brown his back. In reality he must be in constant pain, and the uncertainty about his prospects—
“I understand Lord Moran is pleased. You’re healing.”
His lips quirked. “The doctor views me as a valuable experiment. He’s dosing me with a laboratory bug that’s supposed to save lives when Overlord goes down. It’s called penicillin, if you can manage the mouthful, and they’re rushing production to have enough in hand by May. Doesn’t look good for the jolly lads on the French beaches, does it, if they’re already worried about torn flesh and infection? This war only gets better with each passing year.”
“I hate it,” she said. “I hate what it does to us all. Listen to you—nattering on like Bertie Wooster when you know—you must have heard—”
She came to a full stop. Ian’s gaze didn’t waver, but the humor had leached from his eyes. “That the bastard is dead?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“It’s what he was.”
“Yes.” She dropped her chin and studied her hands. “I’m sorry.”
There was a silence.
“I know I shall have to think about it,” he said. “All of it. Why a fellow I loved from a child became a man I never knew.”
“People grow apart, Ian.”
“We’ll say it was that,” he agreed. “We’ll say I refused to accept that we’d gone our separate ways in the years between Eton and Dunkirk. That I wanted to believe in him. Or what he represented.”
“Which was?”
“Immortality. That because both of us were rotters, we were doomed to live forever.”
“You’re not a rotter, Ian.”
He shrugged. “I’m no hero, either, Grace. I’m not sure they exist. Except in that most dangerous of places—their own minds.”
“Well, I hope you’ve satisfied that itch of yours. To do more than a desk job, I mean.” Her eyes skimmed hastily over his form. “I should think this result would cure you forever.”
He glanced at her evilly. “I have itches in places, my dear girl, I wouldn’t dream of mentioning.”
“I have something for you.” Grace drew a packet from her purse and placed it on the bed beside him. “A girl from the Soviet Embassy called at our legation, the day you were brought in. Nobody knew who she wanted at first, because she asked for Bond. But I remembered what that meant. She said she’d met you in the bazaar. You were delirious and the girl had a plane to catch, so she trusted me with this.”
“Was she blond?”
Grace nodded. “Rather a stunner.”
His fingers curled around the envelope, but his eyes were on her face. “What happened to Stalin, that day?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Churchill drove through the gate first, you know.”
“He would.” Ian attempted a smile, but his expression was suddenly tragic. As though he were looking backward at hideous things Grace could not ask him about.
“Can I get you anything?” she said hurriedly. “Tea—or . . . or . . . some of your Laphroaig?”
“Is there any vodka in the place?”
She looked blank. “I’ve never been asked for that before. Vodka. How do you drink it?”
“In a martini. Shaken, not stirred.”
“I’ll hunt down a barman.”
She kissed him lightly on the cheek and left.
When he was alone, Ian’s fingers fumbled at the packet. It was too light to contain much. A few words of farewell, perhaps?
He tore open the envelope and drew out its contents.
A glorious length of saffron silk.
He held the softness to his face and breathed deep.
Do svidaniya, Siranoush.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As someone who loves a good spy story, I’ve been reading deep in the history of World War Two for years. It is impossible to thread one’s way through that wilderness of mirrors without bumping headlong into Ian Lancaster Fleming—arrogant, athletic, ridiculously compelling, with his dark blue eyes and broken nose. As the assistant to the director of British Naval Intelligence in wartime London, Fleming was up to his eyeballs in secret plots. His shadow falls across many of the most daring and ingenious deception operations of the war, particularly disinformation campaigns against the Axis. A great number of myths have grown up around him as well—from the outset, he was a character meant for fiction. In an effort to pin down his elusive figure, I tore through Andrew Lycett’s biography, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (Turner Publishing, 1995). I recognized a fellow traveler. Fleming spent so many hours making up stories because in some ways he found invented lives preferable to his own.
But Fleming’s history left me with questions. He was a caustic and a callous individual who was capable of brilliant insights and profound loyalties. A man who desperately needed the affection and support of women, he was inveterately misogynistic. Uncomfortable in his own skin, he invented an icon of male suavity: 007, James Bond. Genteel, privileged, and sheltered by family wealth, Fleming was fascinated by violence and the underworld. A complex and fundamentally lonely man, he looked at least seventy when he drank himself to death; he was fifty-six.
I began to explore him as a character in his own spy story—one who’d lost his father too young and sp
ent the rest of his life attempting to live up to his myth. In the 1943 Tehran conference, which Fleming planned (but did not actually attend—he came down with bronchitis and was left behind in Giza), I found the kernel of my plot.
A good deal of research later, I can recommend the following sources for those interested in the events and people of this novel: The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster, 2008); You Only Live Once: Memories of Ian Fleming, by Ivar Bryce (Foreign Intelligence Book Series, 1975); Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit, by Nicholas Rankin (Oxford, 2011); Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010); Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another, by Jonathan Fenby (Simon & Schuster, 2006); Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought, by Herbert Feis (Princeton, 1957); Hitler’s Plot to Kill the Big Three, by Laslo Havas (Cowles, 1967); Beria—My Father: Life Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, by Sergo Beria and Françoise Thom (Duckworth, 2001); SMERSH: Stalin’s Secret Weapon, by Vadim Birstein (Biteback Publishing, 2012); Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour, by Lynne Olson (Random House, 2010); Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, by Sally Bedell Smith (Simon & Schuster, 1996); and, last but not least, Cairo in the War: 1939–1945, by Artemis Cooper (Hamish Hamilton, 1989).
I am indebted to my editor at Riverhead Books, Jake Morrissey, for his sensitive and thorough treatment of this story in manuscript; to assistant editor Ali Cardia for her shepherding of my words through the book process; and to my agent, Raphael Sagalyn, who is always an inspired critic and collaborator. This is, of course, a work of fiction—and all errors in the facts underpinning it are my own.
—Francine Mathews
Denver, Colorado
2014
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