I AM BOND, JAMES BOND – The Books Behind The Movies: 20 Book Collection. Ian Fleming
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who does your nails. We must look our best for Doctor No.’ At the back of Bond’s mind was the urgent necessity to get his hands on some kind of weapon – a pair of scissors would be better than nothing. Anything would do.
He pressed two more bells. He let her go and looked round the room. Someone had come while they were asleep and taken away the breakfast things. There was a drink tray on a sideboard against the wall. Bond went over and examined it. It had everything. Propped among the bottles were two menus, huge double-folio pages covered with print. They might have been from the Savoy Grill, or the ‘21’, or the Tour d’Argent. Bond ran his eye down one of them. It began with Caviar double de Beluga and ended with Sorbet à la Champagne. In between was every dish whose constituents would not be ruined by a deep freeze. Bond tossed it down. One certainly couldn’t grumble about the quality of the cheese in the trap!
There was a knock on the door and the exquisite May came in. She was followed by two other twittering Chinese girls. Bond brushed aside their amiabilities, ordered tea and buttered toast for Honeychile and told them to look after her hair and nails. Then he went into the bathroom and had a couple of Aspirins and a cold shower. He put on his kimono again, reflected that he looked idiotic in it, and went back into the room. A beaming May asked if he would be good enough to select what he and Mrs Bryce could care to have for dinner. Without enthusiasm, Bond ordered caviar, grilled lamb cutlets and salad, and angels on horseback for himself. When Honeychile refused to make any suggestions, he chose melon, roast chicken à l’Anglaise and vanilla icecream with hot chocolate sauce for her.
May dimpled her enthusiasm and approval. ‘The Doctor asks if seven forty-five for eight would be convenient.’
Bond said curtly that it would.
‘Thank you so much, Mr Bryce. I will call for you at seven forty-four.’
Bond walked over to where Honeychile was being ministered to at the dressing table. He watched the busy delicate fingers at work on her hair and her nails. She smiled at him excitedly in the mirror. He said gruffly, ‘Don’t let them make too much of a monkey out of you,’ and went to the drink tray. He poured himself out a stiff Bourbon and soda and took it into his own room. So much for his idea of getting hold of a weapon. The scissors and files and probes were attached to the manicurist’s waist by a chain. So were the scissors of the hairdresser. Bond sat down on his rumpled bed and lost himself in drink and gloomy reflections.
The women went. The girl looked in at him. When he didn’t lift his head she went back into her room and left him alone. In due course Bond came into her room to get himself another drink. He said perfunctorily, ‘Honey, you look wonderful.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall and went back and drank his drink and put on another of the idiotic kimonos, a plain black one.
In due course there came the soft knock on the door and the two of them went silently out of the room and along the empty, gracious corridor. May stopped at the lift. Its doors were held open by another eager Chinese girl. They walked in and the doors shut. Bond noticed that the lift was made by Waygood Otis. Everything in the prison was de luxe. He gave an inward shudder of distaste. He noticed the reaction. He turned to the girl. ‘I’m sorry, Honey. Got a bit of a headache.’ He didn’t want to tell her that all this luxury play-acting was getting him down, that he hadn’t the smallest idea what it was all about, that he knew it was bad news, and that he hadn’t an inkling of a plan of how to get them out of whatever situation they were in. That was the worst of it. There was nothing that depressed Bond’s spirit so much as the knowledge that he hadn’t one line of either attack or defence.
The girl moved closer to him. She said, ‘I’m sorry, James. I hope it will go away. You’re not angry with me about anything?’
Bond dredged up a smile. He said, ‘No, darling. I’m only angry with myself.’ He lowered his voice: ‘Now, about this evening. Just leave the talking to me. Be natural and don’t be worried by Doctor No. He may be a bit mad.’
She nodded solemnly. ‘I’ll do my best.’
The lift sighed to a stop. Bond had no idea how far down they had gone – a hundred feet, two hundred? The automatic doors hissed back and Bond and the girl stepped out into a large room.
It was empty. It was a high-ceilinged room about sixty feet long, lined on three sides with books to the ceiling. At first glance, the fourth wall seemed to be made of solid blue-black glass. The room appeared to be a combined study and library. There was a big paper-strewn desk in one corner and a central table with periodicals and newspapers. Comfortable club chairs, upholstered in red leather, were dotted about. The carpet was dark green, and the lighting, from standard lamps, was subdued. The only odd feature was that the drink tray and sideboard were up against the middle of the long glass wall, and chairs and occasional tables with ashtrays were arranged in a semi-circle round it so that the room was centred in front of the empty wall.
Bond’s eye caught a swirl of movement in the dark glass. He walked across the room. A silvery spray of small fish with a bigger fish in pursuit fled across the dark blue. They disappeared, so to speak, off the edge of the screen. What was this? An aquarium? Bond looked upwards. A yard below the ceiling, small waves were lapping at the glass. Above the waves was a strip of greyer blue-black, dotted with sparks of light. The outlines of Orion were the clue. This was not an aquarium. This was the sea itself and the night sky. The whole of one side of the room was made of armoured glass. They were under the sea, looking straight into its heart, twenty feet down.
Bond and the girl stood transfixed. As they watched, there was the glimpse of two great goggling orbs. A golden sheen of head and deep flank showed for an instant and was gone. A big grouper? A silver swarm of anchovies stopped and hovered and sped away. The twenty-foot tendrils of a Portuguese man-o’-war drifted slowly across the window, glinting violet as they caught the light. Up above there was the dark mass of its underbelly and the outline of its inflated bladder, steering with the breeze.
Bond walked along the wall, fascinated by the idea of living with this slow, endlessly changing moving picture. A big tulip shell was progressing slowly up the window from the floor level, a frisk of demoiselles and angel fish and a ruby-red moonlight snapper were nudging and rubbing themselves against a corner of the glass and a sea centipede quested along, nibbling at the minute algae that must grow every day on the outside of the window. A long dark shadow paused in the centre of the window and then moved slowly away. If only one could see more!
Obediently, two great shafts of light, from off the ‘screen’, lanced out into the water. For an instant they searched independently. Then they converged on the departing shadow and the dull grey torpedo of a twelve-foot shark showed up in all its detail. Bond could even see the piglike pink eyes roll inquisitively in the light and the slow pulse of the slanting gill-rakers. For an instant the shark turned straight into the converged beam and the white half-moon mouth showed below the flat reptile’s head. It stood poised for a second and then, with an elegant, disdainful swirl, the great swept-back tail came round and with a lightning quiver the shark had gone.
The searchlights went out. Bond turned slowly. He expected to see Doctor No, but still the room was empty. It looked static and lifeless compared with the pulsing mysteries outside the window. Bond looked back. What must this be like in the colours of day, when one could see everything perhaps for twenty yards or more? What must it be like in a storm when the waves crashed noiselessly against the glass, delving almost to the floor and then sweeping up and out of sight. What must it be like in the evening when the last golden shafts of the sun shone into the upper half of the room and the waters below were full of dancing motes and tiny water insects? What an amazing man this must be who had thought of this fantastically beautiful conception, and what an extraordinary engineering feat to have carried it out! How had he done it? There could only be one way. He must have built the glass wall deep inside the cliff and then delicately removed layer after layer of the outside rock until the divers could prise off the last skin of coral. But how thick was the glass? Who had rolled it for him? How had he got it to the island? How many divers had he used? How much, God in heaven, could it have cost?
‘One million dollars.’
It was a cavernous, echoing voice,