Unsatisfied in their search and impromptu interrogations, the armed men led the writers out into the chilly courtyard—sans shoes—and proceeded to search them all for a second time as they stood in the cold night air, shivering.
Still frustrated, the armed men were about to search the restaurant again when a scrappy and fairly drunk Japanese novelist lost his temper and charged one of the armed men, setting off a bloody brawl resulting in most of the participants—Hector and Ian included—being hauled off for still more questioning, first by Japanese police, and then by American occupation authorities.
When Hector and Ian were at last free and returned to the restaurant, they found it was shuttered.
Undeterred, they broke into the establishment in the early morning hours, only to find all of its antique Japanese weaponry that served as décor—including that particular samurai sword—had been removed under standing U.S. orders, confiscated as a by-product of the evening’s earlier raid and all of it presumed destroyed immediately upon discovery.
At that moment, the microfilm, along with their secret mission to Japan, became a frustrating but firmly-closed chapter in their secret intelligence lives, at least so far as Hector, Ian and their respective governments were concerned.
***
Haven took it all in then said, “So you maintain the microfilm absolutely was lost with the sword? You didn’t even try to make further inquiries?”
Ian, his back clearly up, said, “Oh, we and others tried, do trust in that. But we weren’t exactly katana aficionados, dear.” He smiled and said, “That is, of course, the real name for—”
“For a Japanese samurai sword, yes I know,” Haven finished for him.
“Well then perhaps you also know the occupying government nearly immediately banned such swords and even the art of crafting them for many years,” Ian said. “The swords—some of them quite precious and valuable—were collected and destroyed in vast numbers in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender. It was simply very bad timing for our side. So yes, we presumed and I think most probably rightly so, that the microfilm—perhaps blessedly for this sad old world—perished along with the sword in question.”
Haven sat back in her chair, glowering. “What do you two really think happened?”
Hector and Ian exchanged a look. “Just what I’ve finished telling you,” the British novelist said, sounding ever-so-slightly exasperated. “The sword was confiscated and, with the microfilm, was most probably lost to all. When we soon return to Japan, if others hope to find it otherwise, I can all but promise you they’ll be doomed to bitter disappointment.”
Hector rose and stretched. He presumed to mix himself another martini, this one on the rocks and made without a single drop of gin—three plump and skewered olives would have made it perfect.
His back still to Ian and Haven, he said, “I’ve decided I will stay the night. Haven, if you could see to having your people with their special expertise have my bags collected and brought round—hopefully without anyone following—it would be more than a boon.” Boon? As he said it, Hector realized the more he was here in England, the more he found himself falling into a temptation to lapse into some Texas version of English idiom. That somehow reminded him of something else:
He turned and said to Ian, “This next Bond of yours, do you have some galleys around here, a proof copy I might read this evening?”
Ian blushed a bit and said, “Bear in mind it is indeed a proof copy. And on that note, do please let me know if you see any typos or other issues. There’s still some barest fraction of time to fix them, you see.” Ian covered a sudden yawn that wasn’t to be denied, then said, a tad redundantly, “And I’m frankly exhausted. Time for bed, at least for me. You can see to answering the door to claim your things when they arrive, I trust?”
“Certainly,” Hector said. “Get some rest, buddy.”
With Ian safely away, he rose to escort Haven to the door. They kissed at the threshold, passionately. “That’s so you’ll think hard on what you’re denying yourself tonight,” she said, eyes glistening. “We could have had this night in that grand hotel bed. Don’t you two go out wandering the streets for tarts—at least grant me that.”
Hector just smiled. “You pack, prepare. . .because that’s just what I’ll be doing. It’ll be an early evening trip to the airport tomorrow and then a long bit of travel. Those facts, alone, assure there’ll be no debauchery, not for me tonight.”
He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “I’m as shocked as you to be alone down here for the next few hours, by the way. His health is clearly terrible. Ian would never abandon me like this in the hard-charging old days.”
“So what do you really do alone tonight?” Her palm drifted to his cheek. He turned a bit to lightly kiss the pulse at her wrist.
Hector said, “I suppose I’m going to spend the evening with a single glass of wine I will heroically endeavor to stretch out, and, I hope, in the company of a good book by a friend who, I’m afraid, has me very worried about him.”
***
It was Hector’s long habit to awaken in the early morning to write.
But upon this English dawn, he instead rose to resume reading Ian’s next Bond thriller, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
He completed his reading about ten a.m., terribly shaken by the novel’s startling end that stirred old ghosts and Hector’s memory of the piercing loss of his beloved Brinke Devlin.
Given the circumstances of Brinke’s death and that of a particular character in Ian’s forthcoming book—all of that coupled with Fleming’s shameless raiding of the purpose of their clandestine trip to Japan in 1945—Hector was left wondering if Ian had consciously dared to evoke Brinke’s death to inform the tragic, startling climax to his new Bond novel.
It would constitute a kind of bitter—even unforgivable—betrayal in Hector’s mind if ever proven true.
Starving, bedeviled with such questions and terrible memories, Hector showered, dressed, and then went in search of Ian.
7/ The Last Mission?
Hector grudgingly offered to make breakfast to Ian’s usual, heart-mauling specifications.
As he did that, Ian—looking a bit stronger if florid-faced and stiffly formal in another of his endless wardrobe of pale blue cotton shirts and spotted black bowties—sipped his coffee and said, “Did you have a chance to sample the next Bond? Do feel free to lie and say you’ve not gotten to it yet, even if you in fact did, assuming you might indeed have read it in full and found that you loathed it.”
“I finished it this morning,” Hector said. “It cost me sleep, buddy—I mean that in the best sense.” Ian was clearly elated. He stirred the eggs with a spatula and continued, “I’ve not read them all, so I’m a little outside the overall continuity, but it was quite wonderful Ian, along with From Russia, a favorite. The bit where he escapes the villain’s lair and skies down that mountainside into the little sporting village—that part I loved the best, I think.”
Ian said, “I sense an implied except lurking in there.”
Hector shrugged. “I loved it all except for that ending. The climax absolutely shredded me, buddy. Left me gutted. That was very, very tough for me to read, you know.” One word—actually a name—hung unsaid between them: “Brinke.”
A deep and pained sigh. “Ah, yes. I was terribly thoughtless in that sense, Hector, Lord knows that’s so. Should bloody well have warned you. I’d forgotten how terribly close to home that ending would strike for you, of all readers. It was an absolutely necessary plot development, one I knew I had to undertake even before I put down the first sentence introducing my girl—or rather Bond’s. . .his latest, bird-with-a-wing-down inamorata. But clearly I’d forgotten some particular, painful aspects of your biography, old friend. Things that even you didn’t put down on the page yourself until many years after the fact, evidently because they clearly pained you so. I’m so dreadfully sorry I didn’t think of that before allowing you to read tha
t damned galley. It was an appalling lapse on my part. Can you ever forgive me?”
Given the way Ian smoothly put all of that, Hector decided Brinke’s terrible fate in 1925 quite possibly hadn’t informed the dark and wrenching ending Fleming had chosen for the climax of his next Bond thriller. And, either way, it was an ending the artist in Hector recognized as the right and necessary one for Ian’s novel.
Hector scraped scrambled eggs onto two plates and then sat down across from Ian. After freshening his cup of coffee from a stainless steel flask, Hector said, “The overall plot, is of course, precisely what Haven said—a clear reach-back to Operation Flea. Sorry to say, but I agree with the lady. I’d frankly be shocked if your government doesn’t suppress your novel.”
A diffident hand wave. “My health is obviously quite poor,” Ian said. “I’m not much longer for this world, and we both know that’s true.” Ian now held up a pre-empting hand this time.
He said, not looking Hector in the eye, “Cleaner living might add scant time, but not an iota to the quality of this wretched half-life I now endure, Hector. You know me probably as well as it’s possible for another man to pierce the infernal veil. So it will not come as news to you when I say I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes a rather painful splits of one’s life.”
A frosty smile, then he amended, “It’s also not easy on one’s dearest friends, I fear. But rest assured, I by no means intend to leave this life the so-called easy way. I’ll not do it all at a bloody sitting, with a rope, or with a firearm like our friend Hemingway. There’s a line from your countryman, Jack London, which I’m adopting as my life’s last new motto: ‘I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I will use my time.’”
Hector had no good response to any of that so he said—and he knew he did so rather lamely—“How are your eggs?”
“Same as perfect,” Ian said. “You’ve nearly mastered the recipe.” For his friend’s dying heart’s sake, he had skimped on some stipulated butter.
“All of that aside,” Hector said, “the shadow of censorship of your new novel under your country’s Official Secrets Act still stands, at least from my perspective. Your villain Blofeld in the book, his scheme, it really is Operation Flea, writ large.”
Ian waved a hand. “But still, to the common man on the street, it would be seen as almost a science fiction conceit, as far-fetched as all those loathsome critics said my plot was for Moonraker,” Ian said. “My God, my editor of this next book insisted I spend paragraphs explaining what the term ‘biological warfare’ even means for the benefit of the ‘general reader’ whatever sorry creature that is. And, anyway, the government needs me for this last little mission of Red Indians and I’m risking what’s left of my health playing ball with MI6. I’m not precisely yearning to exhaust myself, grinning, gripping and bowing my way across Japan and doing so mostly in stocking feet, you know.”
“Then why go at all, Ian?”
“On the one hand, because I mean to reward some old friends in this novel I’m going over to research. Also to punish some enemies, via print. You see, my very dear Hector, I’ve learned my lessons from the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives. What’s that line you deployed recently in The Times interview announcing our coming, shared travel? Oh yes, ‘Roman à clef: Just a sexier way of saying revenge.’ That was really quite wonderful.”
Ian then lowered his voice and said sadly, “On the other hand, I’m going back, indeed, to try and make a last effort to recover the microfilm for my government. It’s why I really want you along with me. I think we both need to complete that mission at which we failed so calamitously seventeen years ago. In the old days, of course, you know I had my own commando team, 30 Assault Unit—my own ‘Red Indians’—who existed precisely to go into the enemy’s camp and seize such documents and intelligence as those festering from the Unit 761 project. Maybe it was hubris to think I could do much the same myself in 1945. Either way, it’s unfinished business, and I would loathe to live long enough to see that infertility pest unleashed against England or America. I’m sure you feel just the same.” A thin smile. “You know how I adore my eggs and bacon, and they quite require an inexhaustible crop of chickens and pigs.”
Certainly, Hector wouldn’t want to see his homeland rendered a wasteland by some Frankenstein’s flea. He dashed a little more salt and pepper on his eggs and said, “You were in Japan for your travel pieces, when, about 1960?”
“In fifty-nine,” Ian corrected. “I was there for the same purpose, secretly. And, again, it proved abortive. You see, I purposely adjusted my Thrilling City’s itinerary expressly to get some time in Japan to renew the hunt. I was led to believe the singular samurai sword had been located, and so, perhaps with it, the microfilm. I’d rather hoped you’d accompany me that time, but you demurred for some reason I still can’t fathom.”
Hector almost lost his temper at that. He took a breath, then said, “Maybe I didn’t adequately explain at the time. I had loose ends of my own to attend to. Other old, bad business needed handling. It, too, was real life and death stuff. I had to go to Cuba and patch things up with Hem, while also closing out old poisonous business that threatened Ernest and I in that year. Just after all that, an old friend of sorts surfaced. She was terminally ill. I saw her through to her end, and after that, I candidly just wasn’t good for much of anything for a few months. All of that also undid some other, more pleasant life plans I’d just begun to set in motion with a young woman in Los Angeles. So, yes, my time and efforts were spoken for. I’m sorry I couldn’t come along to play Red Indians again with you that round, buddy. Just no time for spies, not in that sorry goddamn year.”
Ian nodded slowly, clearly attuned to Hector’s mounting anger. “I am sorry. I didn’t know the particulars, of course. Anyway, the 1959 trip was an absolute bust. Just a result of hopeful intelligence, in the end—the most treacherous kind of dope, of course.”
“Always the case,” Hector said neutrally.
“Like you, I had. . .plans. . . Thought I’d go back in the next year to renew the search, but then my goddamn heart blew, and after. . .?” A desolate shrug.
Hector relented a bit, his voice going easier. “So tell me, what makes this time different from the last one, buddy? You really think we have some shot at recovery?”
“I really think we do this time,” Ian said, rallying a shade. “My source this round—unlike in fifty-nine—is none other than our old friend the poet, Mitsuharu Kaneko. I therefore trust we have a real opportunity here, Hector. Based on all the interest and intrigue—not to mention the mounting body count we’ve amassed before we’ve even left for Japan—I gather others think that to be true, too.”
Hector said, “You come by the spy trade honestly enough I suppose, but writers as spies in general? I frankly don’t see it.”
Ian wasn’t having that. “You have formidable and proven skills in the area of espionage, Hector,” he said, “as do I. And, anyway, as writers, we’re hardly unusual in being recruited for this sort of thing. Authors and journalists are paid to ask questions, to observe. We travel widely and do so often to gather information for our books. We’re publicly identified as snoops from the get-go, to resort to an Americanism. Hemingway, Dahl, Graham Greene, Le Carré and Maugham—all spies, if of varying strips. And I could go on. The fact is, writers have been spies for as long as there have been writers.”
Brinke Devlin, too, had done a bit of intelligence work in her travels in the early 1920s, by all accounts.
Hector confided then to Ian about Brinke’s supposedly recovered writings awaiting him in Japan. “I’ll likely have to split off from you to check on all that when we’re over there,” Hector said. “I know you have your own must-do itinerary for the next Bond.”
Ian said, “We’ll see if we can’t work it out so we stay together, and for the distance. And anyway, this business of Brinke’s writings
has the scent of a trap or a trick, if you ask me. How better to entice you to Japan than by dangling such a dandy carrot as Miss Devlin’s allegedly lost writings? Simply wouldn’t do for you to go into the lion’s den alone. So we’ll see if we can’t manage to do that one together, too—work it in our travel planning. We should do that right now, don’t you think? Work out our schedule to the nth-detail? After all, we must be at the airport at Heathrow by eight tonight.”
“What about your other tagalongs? Your other writer friends?”
“Already there, and firmly in situ,” Ian said. “Japan is their home and workplace. I simply had to delay my original departure for movie promotion reasons.” Ian made a funny face. “I had my doubts about the film, particularly its star, who is not the Bond I saw in my mind’s eye, but that is changing now. The film came out well enough in the end. For better or worse, that strapping Glaswegian is now the public’s image of Bond.”
“One thing I don’t quite understand, Ian. If Haven is working for MI5, and you’re acting on behalf of your intelligence services, how is it you haven’t been working in concert with her from the start? Seems to me you’d already be partnered.”
“This is old business, at least as it started for me,” Ian said. “Some chums I worked with in our original, 1945 escapade are still firmly in saddle at MI6—men grown gray in service to Her Majesty. I’m indeed operating under that organization’s auspices, this time. Your present lady friend is MI5. They’re not the same thing, you see, not at all. While MI5 has certain farther-reaching powers, they are, in the end, mostly domestic. When it comes to MI6, well, the entire bloody world is our—I mean their—devil’s playground. I gather the reason for our not being in concert is just the usual left-hand right-hand nonsense.”
Wincing, Hector said, “Then this has all the hallmarks of a potential civil war when it comes time to lay claim to the microfilm, as only one can actually have it. I know it’s all Britain in the end from your perspective, but you know how these things go when turf is tested. I know how it would go to pieces if the FBI and CIA were attempting to work hand-in-glove toward receivership of some single intelligence scrap, let alone something as volatile as this alleged doomsday weapon. It would explode bureaucratically, then it would descend into some sort of petty but lethal inter-agency bloodbath, I reckon. On that note, remember the CIA is indeed keyed into this, as well. If we should lay claim to this strip of film, and if we should have three parties demanding personal possession of this goddamn scourge?” Hector raised his eyebrows as if to say, Well, what then, Ian?
Death in the Face Page 7