Solo
Page 17
Bond had once enjoyed a short affair with an actress who’d told him that every theatrical, televisual and cinematic door opened when the word ‘Equity’ was pronounced, such was the power and sway of the actors’ trade union. Bond was pleased he’d remembered and curious to see if it actually worked.
‘Bloody Astrid!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘So sorry. Typical. Jesus Christ!’ She carried on muttering swear words to herself as she walked Bond around sound stage number two to where a row of caravans was parked.
‘Third on the right,’ she said. Then, adding nervously, ‘There’s not going to be a problem, is there? With Astrid, I mean. We’re already five days behind.’
‘I can’t guarantee anything,’ Bond said with a thin apparatchik’s smile. ‘She has to pay her dues.’
The woman left, still muttering, and Bond approached the caravan, designated by a scrawled sign stuck to the side with ‘Astrid Ostergard/Vampiria’ written on it.
Bond knocked on the door and uttered the magic word: ‘Equity.’
Seconds later Bryce Fitzjohn flung open her door. She was wearing fishnet stockings and a red satin bustier that pushed her breasts up and together to form an impressive cleavage. She looked at Bond blankly for a moment and then laughed – loudly, delightedly.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘James bloody Bond.’
‘Hello, Vampiria,’ Bond said. ‘I’m here to apologise.’
‘Come into my parlour,’ she said.
Bryce pulled on a silk dressing gown and Bond sat on a bench seat opposite a make-up table and mirror. He took out his cigarette case and offered it, Bryce selecting a cigarette and lighting it herself. She stared at him as she blew smoke sideways, eyes narrowing.
‘I still don’t know how you got into my house.’
Bond lit a cigarette. ‘It was wrong of me, I admit. I turned up for your party and there was no one there. I thought you were playing some kind of a game, winding me up. So I left you a note.’ Bond smiled. ‘You should get a better lock on your kitchen door. It was child’s play.’
‘So what are you? A professional burglar?’
‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ Bond continued, ignoring the question, ‘so I’ve come to say sorry and invite you to dinner. At the Dorchester,’ he added. ‘Tonight, if you’re free.’
Bryce crossed her long legs and Bond took her in. She was wearing a dense blonde wig with red stripes in it and he found her powerfully alluring. Nothing had changed, he thought, remembering their first encounters.
‘Well, it’s tempting, but I can’t go up to town,’ she said. ‘I’ve an early call tomorrow morning.’
There was a knock on the door. ‘We need you now, Miss Ostergard,’ a voice said.
Bryce stood up. Bond did so as well, and for a moment in the confined space of the caravan they were close. Bond sensed her interest in him, renewed. They were each other’s type, he realised, it was as simple as that. The attraction was very mutual, it had been from the beginning, from those first moments in the lift at the Dorchester.
‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she said. ‘You know where my house is in Richmond, don’t you? There’s a nice little place nearby we can go to. See you at eight.’
5
IMPORT–EXPORT
Bond slid very quietly out of Bryce’s bed and stood there for a moment, looking down on her as she slept deeply, lying on her side, one breast innocently exposed. She was a beautiful mature woman, Bond thought, pulling on his trousers and remembering the last time he’d made love – weeks and weeks ago – and how different in almost every degree his partner had been then. He moved to the door in bare feet and turned the handle slowly, thinking about the rest-house on the edge of the Zanza River Delta with Blessing Ogilvy-Grant in his arms. He smiled with a certain bitterness – that was when all his misfortunes had begun.
He left the bedroom door ajar by an inch and padded downstairs to Bryce’s study. He switched on the light and sat at her desk, sliding open the top drawer and taking out her passport. The date of birth pretty much fitted – and he was more than happy to shed a few years. The name was both masculine and feminine. All he needed to do was have the photograph and the gender designation changed – and he had exactly the man in mind who could do that. He would become Bryce Fitzjohn, ‘professional actor’. ‘Actress’ could be easily tampered with. He slipped the passport into the back pocket of his trousers and went through to the sitting room, where he poured himself an inch of brandy into a tumbler and sipped at it, turning his back to the warm embers still glowing in the grate of the fireplace, thinking back agreeably over their evening together.
Bond had arrived on time (in a taxi from Richmond station) and when Bryce opened the door to him she kissed him on the cheek – a good sign, Bond thought – and he smelled the scent of ‘Shalimar’ on her. She was wearing a black velvet dress to just above the knee with a low scoop neck. Two diamonds glittered at her ears and her thick blonde hair was brushed casually back from her brow. There was a bottle of Taittinger champagne waiting in an ice bucket on a table in the sitting room that she asked Bond to open. They toasted each other as they had done that evening across the dining room in the Dorchester.
‘Here’s to breaking and entering,’ she said.
‘Where’s this little restaurant of yours?’ Bond said. ‘We don’t want to be late.’
‘It’s about ten yards away. I thought it’d be nicer to eat at home.’
They both knew exactly what was going to happen later and that knowledge provided a satisfying sensual undercurrent to their conversation as they ate the meal she cooked for him – a rare sirloin steak with a tomato and shallot salad, the wine a light and fruity Chianti, with a thin slice of lemony torta della nonna to follow.
They were both worldly and sophisticated people of a certain age, Bond reasoned, and no doubt her sexual history was as varied and interesting as his. Well, maybe not quite . . . Still, the point was, Bond thought as he looked at her clearing away the plates, that there was no pretence involved here. No artificial wooing or effortful foreplay. They both candidly wanted each other, in the way that men and women know this instinctively, and they were going to bring this state of affairs about with as much fun and seductive expediency as they chose.
They went back through to the sitting room, where Bond lit the fire. They drank a brandy, smoked a cigarette and talked to each other – deliciously postponing the moment they were waiting for. In fact Bond sensed the timbre of her voice change, dropping, growing huskier, as she told him of the disaster of her last marriage – there had been two – to an American film producer with, it turned out, a significant drug problem. He thought it was remembered emotion, but he quickly sensed that the huskiness in her voice was desire: it was a signal, and when Bond stood up and crossed the floor to her and kissed her she responded with an ardency that surprised him.
They made careful love in her wide bed, Bond relishing the smooth ripeness of her body. Afterwards, she sent him down to the kitchen for another bottle of champagne and they lay in bed drinking and talking.
‘You say you’re a “businessman”,’ she said, studying his lean form as he lay there beside her. ‘Import – export, whatever that means. Yet you’ve more scars on your body than a gladiator.’
‘I had a difficult and dangerous war,’ Bond said.
She reached over, her full breasts shifting, and touched the new puckered rosy coin below his right collarbone.
‘You’re still fighting it, so it seems.’
He kissed her to stop her speculating further.
‘I’ll tell you all about it one day,’ he said. And they began to make love again.
Bryce’s alarm clock rang at five in the morning and she slipped out of bed, washed and dressed. Bond dressed also and the unit car that came to pick her up for the studio detoured to the station so he could catch an early train back to London.
She stepped out of the car so they could say their goodbyes discreetly.
‘I’ve got to go to America,’ Bond said. ‘Just for a week or two. When your film’s finished I’ll come and take you away somewhere very, very special that only I know.’
They kissed goodbye and Bond whispered in her ear, ‘Thank you for last night. Unforgettable.’
‘For me too,’ she said and squeezed his hand. Then they parted and Bond, with a full heart and a smile on his face, joined the jaded commuters on the platform at Richmond station. As he waited for the train he took Bryce’s passport from his pocket and felt a twinge of guilt. But if she was working for another three weeks she wouldn’t be going anywhere and wouldn’t miss it. When he came back he’d replace it in her desk drawer – she’d never know. His conscience was assuaged somewhat by the fact that he hadn’t made love to her just to steal her passport. He had every intention of seeing his Vampiria, Queen of Darkness, again. He had been stirred and affected by her in a way he had almost forgotten was possible. He’d be back – as soon as he’d administered swift and rough justice to the people who had so nearly killed him. Bryce had no idea how inadvertently important she had been to his plans – he’d find a way to show her his gratitude.
At Waterloo station Bond had his photograph taken in a booth, then he made a telephone call – to one of the numbers he’d retrieved from his flat – and took a taxi to Pimlico, to a shabby street of dirty peeling stucco houses aptly named Turpentine Lane. He rang the door of a basement flat and an elderly man in his sixties, wearing a flat tweed cap and smoking a moist roll-up cigarette, answered the door.
‘Mr Bond, sir, always a royal pleasure.’
‘Morning, Dennis,’ Bond said, stepping past him into the flat to be greeted by a noisome smell of cooking.
‘Good God, what’s that?’
‘Cow-heel stew. Bugger to cook – takes three days – but it tastes something marvellous.’
Dennis Fieldfare was a forger de luxe, occasionally called upon by Q Branch when they felt their own expertise wasn’t sufficient. Bond had first met Dennis when he’d needed a post-dated visa to Cuba that would have to pass microscopic inspection. It had raised not the slightest suspicion and had been so good that he’d decided to add Dennis’s name to his personal pantheon of experts to be called on, as and when.
Bond showed him Bryce’s passport and his photograph.
‘Swap the picture, change the sex and tweak “actress” for “actor”.’
‘That’s a bloody insult, Mr Bond. A simple-minded child could do that,’ Dennis said, professionally aggrieved.
Bond gave him £50. ‘But I need it very fast – this evening – that’s why I came to you. Keep the original photo safe – I’ll want you to change it back in a couple of weeks. And this is strictly between you and me, Dennis.’
‘Doddle, Mr B. And I never seen you,’ Dennis said, enjoying the feel of the money in his hand. ‘Six o’clock all right?’
At six o’clock that evening Bond had his faultless new passport and was now irrefutably Bryce Connor Fitzjohn, actor, eight years younger than he actually was but he had no complaints there. In fact, he was rather pleased by the coincidence. He had used the name ‘Bryce’ as a pseudonym before, in the early 1950s as an alias for a long train journey he’d made from New York to St Petersburg, Florida. He’d been John Bryce then and it had worked very well. He hoped Bryce Fitzjohn would prove equally effective. He had a feeling the new name would bring him good luck.
From Dennis’s Pimlico flat he went directly to the BOAC terminal at Victoria and bought himself a first-class return ticket to Washington DC, leaving Heathrow airport at 11.30 the following day. It was perhaps an unnecessary expense to choose first class but Bond, despite being an exceptionally well-travelled man, was not the happiest of fliers. The more pampered and indulged he was on an aeroplane the less uneasy he felt when any turbulence or bad weather was encountered. Anyway, he thought, if you’d decided to ‘go solo’ you might as well do it in style.
PART FOUR
THE LAND OF THE FREE
1
BLOATER
Bond looked out of the oval window as the plane began its descent into Dulles airport, Washington DC. The sky was clear and as the plane banked steadily round he had a fine view of the capital of the United States of America. The city lay far below him – they were still thousands of feet high – but Bond could pick out the familiar buildings and landmarks: the cathedral, Georgetown University, the Capitol, the White House, the mighty obelisk of the Washington Monument, the Tidal Basin, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial – such was the clarity of the light and the angle of the sun. The umber Potomac wound lazily round the western edge of the District of Columbia, flowing down to Chesapeake Bay and, beyond it, the undulating hills and woods of Virginia stretched out towards the Blue Ridge Mountains. It all looked neat and ordered from this high altitude but Bond felt a tension building in him as he wondered what retribution was going to be meted out by him in those streets, busy with traffic. He would take his time, plan his campaign scrupulously and without emotion. Revenge is a dish best served cold, he reminded himself.
‘Welcome to the USA, Mr Fitzjohn,’ the immigration officer said, stamping his passport. ‘Business or pleasure?’
‘Bit of both,’ Bond said. ‘But it’s the pleasure I’m looking forward to.’
He was cleared in customs and picked up his suitcase, moving into the main arrivals concourse. He had changed all his money into dollars in London and felt the comforting flat brick of notes in his breast pocket, snug against his heart. He had left his Walther PPK in London, deciding that it was both safer and more efficient to arm himself in America, and besides, he had no idea what or how much firepower he’d require on this particular mission.
He wandered through the concourse looking for the car-rental agencies. He wasn’t particularly enamoured of American cars but decided that he’d—
‘Bond?’
Bond heard his name called out but deliberately didn’t turn round – he was Fitzjohn, now. But it came again.
‘Bond. James Bond, surely—’
The voice was closer and the accent was patrician Scottish and not aggressive or hostile. Bond stopped and turned, feeling angry and frustrated. Barely minutes on American soil and already his elaborate cover seemed blown – somebody had recognised him.
The man who was approaching him – beaming incredulity written on his face – was very stout, mid-forties, Bond estimated, with thinning blond hair above a round pink face, wearing a light-grey flannel suit with an extravagant, oversized Garrick Club bow tie. Bond had no idea who he was. There was something immediately dissolute about his plump features, the bags under his eyes and the unnatural roseate flush to his cheeks. This was a man who lived slightly too well. The stranger stood in front of him, arms spread imploringly.
‘Bond – it’s me, Bloater.’
Bloater. Bond thought, but nothing came.
‘I think you may be confusing me with somebody else,’ Bond said, politely.
‘I’m Bloater McHarg,’ the man said.
And now the name conjured up some dim resonance. Bond had indeed known someone called ‘Bloater’ McHarg, about thirty years before, at his boarding school in Edinburgh – Fettes College. The fat man’s features began to assume the configuration of a familiar. Yes – Bloater McHarg, last seen in 1941, Bond calculated.
Bloater offered his hand and Bond shook it.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘Bloater McHarg. How extraordinary.’
At the beginning of World War Two fat boys were rare in Scottish public schools. ‘Bloater’ McHarg, undeniably heavily plump – hence the nickname – had become something of a pariah, routinely mocked for his perceived obesity. Then Bond had persuaded him to try out for the heavyweight class in his newly founded Judo Society, the first ever at Fettes. Bloater
learned fast and seemed to have a talent for the sport and the other boys soon stopped teasing him once they were subject to some of his Judo holds and painful clinches. Bond had left Fettes at seventeen and had lied about his age to join the navy. All connections with his school had been cut and he’d never seen a fellow pupil or a teacher since. Until today, he thought, ruefully, here in Dulles airport, Washington DC.
‘It is James, isn’t it?’ McHarg said. ‘You know, I was just thinking about you the other day – not that I think about you a lot – but you saved me, Bond. Though you probably don’t remember.’
‘I do seem to remember you throwing an eighteen-stone man on his back when we won the South of Scotland Judo League.’
‘Leith Judo Club. We won seven – six.’ Bloater McHarg beamed. ‘My finest hour. You showed me how to fight.’ He put his hands on his hips and stared at Bond, shaking his head in happy bemusement.
‘I recognised you at once,’ McHarg said. ‘You’ve hardly changed. Scar on your face – that’s new. Always a handsome devil. What’re you doing in DC?’
‘Bit of business.’
‘We have to get together, have a drink. Allow me to show you an exceptionally good time. I’m a second secretary here at the embassy. I know all the places to go.’ McHarg searched his pockets for a card and found one. Bond took it. Bloater’s first name was Turnbull. Turnbull McHarg.
‘I don’t think I ever knew your first name, Turnbull.’
McHarg took a pen from his pocket and scribbled a phone number on the back of the card.
‘That’s my home number,’ he said. ‘Call me when you’re settled and have an hour free – we’ll have a few jars et cetera, et cetera.’ He winked. ‘Do you ever see anything of the old crowd? Bowen major, Cromarty, Simpson, MacGregor-Smith, Martens, Tweedie, Mostyn, and whatsisname, you know, the earl’s son, Lord David White of—’