God's Formula (11 page)

“Ms. Chanel…” said Marlene Jaeger.

“Why are you speaking?” Ian Fleming said, reaching for his belt buckle.

“I—”

“What have I said, over and over again?”

“I—”

Fleming, sitting comfortably in a plush chair in Marlene Jaeger’s room at the Ritz, had been interrupted while watching Marlene undress—slowly and timidly, the way he had trained her to do it—anticipating the moment, somewhere before she was quite naked, when she would hesitate, ashamed to be disrobing in front of her dear friend and mentor, the handsome wine merchant who had been so generous in tutoring her in the ways of the boudoir.

“What about Ms. Chanel?” Fleming was really angry now, not playing.

“Ian…she has abandoned us.”

Now Fleming took his hand off of his belt buckle. Was she serious? His anger had brought on a massive erection. He looked at Marlene carefully and smiled. Still in her stockings and garter belt, she was covering her large and lovely breasts with her slip. “I should whip you now for talking,” he said. “But I’ll wait.”

“Do it now,” Marlene said. “Then fuck me. Please, Ian.”

“Ian?”

“Yes?”

“My father and I are leaving tomorrow morning.”

“With Ms. Chanel?”

“No, she really has abandoned us, but we have arranged to leave with a Jewish family we know. They are picking us up at eight am.”

“You’re cutting it close, I daresay.”

“Miss Chanel has…her lover is German. He said the German Army is scheduled to enter Paris on June 15. He seemed to know…”

Fleming lay on his back in the room’s opulent bed, propped against an oversized pillow. Marlene was on her side in the crook of his right arm. The room’s tall windows were wide open to a beautiful late spring day. A breeze wafted over them. “We can have one last dinner tonight,” he said.

“I cannot leave my father now. He is very worried. I must help him pack, and stay with him.”

“Then it is adieu,” said the Englishman, stroking the welts on her buttocks where he had stuck her with his belt a few minutes ago.

“I have something for you, before I go,” Marlene said.

“Well,” Fleming replied, smiling. “Hand it over.”

“I don’t have it with me,” Marlene replied. “In fact, I am still arranging to get it.”

“How intriguing. I’m flattered.”

“Can I call you later?” the dark-haired German beauty asked, propping herself on an elbow. “Will you be in your room?”

“I will stay in the hotel. They’ll find me.”

“Good. Thank you.”

Fleming patted her rear end again.

“Ian?”

“Yes?”

“I will miss you.”

“You will have plenty of adventures.”

“I’m serious.”

“As am I.”

“We are a good fit.”

“In bed, you mean.
La boudoir
.”

“Yes. You are so selfish. I love that about you.”

“I’m serious about my pleasure, you have me there.”

“You have taught me obedience.”

“I don’t believe in sparing the rod.”

Marlene, murmuring something unintelligible, licked Fleming’s nipple, then took it gently in her teeth.

“You don’t want me to leave this minute, do you?” Fleming asked.

“No,” Marlene replied. “We have time.”

The Englishman nodded. “Good,” he said. “Do you remember our training sessions last week? Your responses to the leash?”

“Of course. Are we…?”

“Yes, we are. We will see how well the poodle, Miss Fifi, has learned her lessons.”

Marlene, frowning, casting her eyes down like a cowed dog, got on her hands and knees and bit Fleming lightly on his inner thigh, nuzzling her mouth between his legs to gain access. “I will be a good Fifi, you will see,” she said.

Ian Fleming, in gabardine slacks, a collarless shirt and a short-waisted leather jacket, looked eastward, over Paris’ 18th arrondissement, toward central Europe’s dense heartland, where the sun’s first hazy light was clashing silently with the night sky at the horizon, a battle which Fleming had never known the rising sun to lose. This reminder that he was after all just a speck on a star orbiting another much larger star, comforted him when he thought of what he was going to do in a moment or two.

Marlene Jaeger, her lustrous, long brown hair undone and wafting in the gentle breeze, stood next to him. She had on a knee-length flower-print cotton sweater over a casual white dress with a blue bow-collar. They both had empty wine glasses in their hands. An empty bottle of 1922 Romanee Conti rested on the ledge of the perimeter wall of the dome of the Sacre-Coeur Basilica at the top of Montmartre hill. Paris, dark and eerily silent, spread itself out some eight hundred feet below them.

“I thought it fitting,” she said, “to come here.”

“Yes,” Fleming replied, “the French do keep losing wars with the Germans.” He knew, from speaking earlier with Professor Tolkien, that the basilica was built to dedicate the city to a moral rebirth after years of debauchery culminating in the War of 1870, the fall of Paris in 1871, and the relinquishment of Alsace-Lorraine in humiliating “peace” talks with the Germans.

“I’m glad you agreed to drink the wine,” Marlene said.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They watched silently as the false dawn gave way to a streak of red light at the earth’s dark rim.

“I’m not really a wine merchant,” Fleming said after a few seconds, turning to her. “You know that.”

“I do,” said Marlene. “And I’m not really a Jew escaping the Nazis with my father. You know that.”

“You are looking for a boy named Conrad Friedeman,” said Fleming.

“We both are.”

“It always ends,” Marlene said. The morning breeze had stiffened and was blowing Marlene’s hair back, exposing her face, so that she looked to Fleming like Diana racing her chariot across the sky. No virgin this one, he thought.

“Yes,” Fleming replied. “It does.”

They had left their sadomasochist toys in their toy box when they met in Marlene’s room a few hours ago, making love the old-fashioned way, once in a great rush and the second time slowly, the way real lovers do. When Marlene had fallen asleep at three a.m., with the aid of a mild sleeping powder Fleming had put in her Champagne, he had found her compact Walther revolver and emptied it of its bullets. He reached now and touched to make sure they were still where he had put them, in his jacket pocket, next to his Navy Beretta.

“I am sorry, Ian,” Marlene said. She was pointing the Walther at him.

“I am, too,” Fleming said, reaching for his pistol. Before he could pull it out, he saw Marlene pull hesitantly on her gun’s trigger, as if it was something she really didn’t want to do. He heard the click of the hammer striking the firing pin, and then he heard a gunshot and saw a red blotch appear on the front of Marlene’s white dress, where her heart was. Turning, he saw a raven-haired woman, his age or a bit younger, pointing a nine millimeter Luger at him.

“She was going to kill you,” the woman said.

“Who are you?” Fleming asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman replied.

“You don’t know?” She had stepped closer to him, to within ten feet or so. In the lightening dawn, he could see her face, smooth like porcelain, her full lips, and slightly flaring nostrils—and her eyes, a startling, amazingly beautiful violet.

“I thought I worked for Deuxieme Bureau,” the woman said. “But now we seem to have no government.”

“Assigned to following me?”

“Yes. For a man who has wandered aimlessly over Paris these past two weeks, you have drawn quite a crowd.”

“Who else?”

“Two German cells.”

“Where are they now?”

“Eliminated.”

“I will put my gun away if you will do the same.”

The violet-eyed woman looked at the pistol in her hand and smiled. “Of course,” she said, putting the gun into an inside pocket of the lightweight duster she was wearing.

“What shall we do with her?” Fleming asked, putting his Beretta back into his pocket and nodding toward Marlene Jaeger lying dead on the dome’s stone pavers.

“Leave her.”

They both raised their heads as they heard a rumbling noise in the distance. The basilica, made of white stone that never discolored, would now be an easy target as it caught the slanting rays of the sun. There was nothing to be seen in the skies above them.

“There,” the former French intelligence agent with the purple eyes said, pointing to the other side of the dome.

They circled the walkway. On the opposite side, they could see the entire city. On the major boulevards heading east-west and north-south, thousands of German soldiers were marching into Paris. At the head of each column, was a trooper at point, carrying a red, black and white swastika flag. At regular intervals, tanks, hundreds of them, their engines churning loudly, were interspersed among the soldiers. Sunlight flooded the city now, the Seine shone like a silver ribbon, the white of the swastikas sparkled as they flapped in the freshening breeze. Paris had fallen without a fight. Its long night of German-occupied darkness had begun.

“I have a car,” the woman said.

“I have a colleague,” said Fleming.

“Where?”

“At the Meurice.”

“We’ll pick him up, but we must hurry. We will be instantly killed if we are caught.”

“What is this place?” Professor Tolkien asked.

“A safehouse of sorts, according to Madame A,” Ian Fleming replied. “An old tile farm. That’s Sèvres on the left.”

“Where is she?”

“Getting us papers.”

Tolkien and Fleming were sitting on a bench looking out of a turret window in a circular stone tower that rose some thirty feet above a group of squat, one-story buildings on a small hilltop. The tower and outbuildings were all made of the same dusty blond stone. Wild grasses reached nearly to the roofs of some of the outbuildings, in one of which the violet-eyed beauty who called herself Adrienne Archambeau had promised was a small lorry they could use to head south when night fell. Through the high grass could be seen a dozen or so crumbling brick kilns of various sizes. All was in decay.

Below them, less than a kilometer away, the Seine shone in the morning sun. In the middle of the Pont de Sèvres, the bridge that connected Sevres and its sister city, Boulogne-Billancourt, stood a makeshift barricade—two old Renaults with dozens of children’s school desks piled on and around them.

“I thought I heard gunshots,” said Tolkien.

“You did,” Fleming replied, nodding toward a tank that sat haunched, like a large feral cat, on a wide paved road perhaps two hundred meters from the bridge. “Someone was shooting at it from behind the barricade.”

“A Panzer I,” said Tolkien. “Machine-gun only.”

Fleming shook his head. The professor never ceased to amaze him.

“War machines,” Tolkien said. “A new specialty.”

“Sleep well?” Fleming asked. The scene below—bathed in the hot sun of what promised to be another in a long string of beautiful spring days—could have been a staged tableau, it was so still and silent, the occasional swaying of a few leaves from a group of trees near the roadway the only detectable movement.

“Topping.”

“Refreshed?”

“Ready for my fry up.”

Fleming smiled but kept his eyes on the scene below. Tolkien, now forty-seven, desk-bound for the past twenty years, never formally trained for field work, had had the worst of it on the trek south from the Meurice to the outskirts of the ceramic-manufacturing city of Sevres. Squeezed into Archambeau’s Baby Austin, the first leg of the twelve kilometer journey had taken two hours to negotiate—through a deathly silent central Paris, then along secondary avenues and back streets to avoid the advancing Wehrmacht. The southern bridge on the Ile Saint-Germaine had been blown, forcing them to abandon the car and swim across the river, which was thankfully quite narrow at that point. Then the walk through wooded side roads and silent farmland to their current location. On arrival, the professor had fallen immediately asleep on a straw pallet along the tower’s opposite wall.

“More tanks,” said Fleming.

“I see,” Tolkien replied. “Panzer II’s. Those are 50 millimeter guns.”

The two new tanks took positions on either side of the Panzer I, leaving twenty-foot spaces between them.

“They won’t want to blow the bridge,” Fleming said. “It’s a good one, well built, good location for points southwest.”

“Troops,” said Tolkien.

They watched as some two-hundred German regular army soldiers emerged from side streets and gathered in columns of two behind the tanks. They were led by a major, an obvious veteran in traditional gray Wehrmacht field fatigues, blond, handsome, unshaven for several days. At his command, the tanks pushed forward for perhaps fifty meters, then stopped. When they started again, they drew fire from the barricades, rifle rounds that pinged harmlessly off the tanks’ thickly armored fronts and sides.

“It’s hopeless,” said Tolkien.

“Paris is supposed to be open,” said Fleming.

“It appears Boulogne-Billancourt feels otherwise,” said the professor. “Madness.”

The tanks plodded to within twenty meters of the bridge, then stopped.

“This is not good,” said Fleming, who had grabbed his binoculars from his knapsack and trained them on the scene below. “The major is smiling.”

Now the major nodded to the lieutenants at the head of the three columns, who nodded to NCO’s at their sides, who raised their right hands, held them up for a second, and then swiftly brought them down. At this command the troopers, crouching, swarmed from behind the tanks and attacked the bridge en masse. Perhaps a dozen of them were mowed down before others could get close enough to hurl hand grenades at the barricades. Within minutes, it was over. German privates were pushing the cars to the other end of the bridge, while other soldiers were throwing the desks over the guardrails and still others tended to the dead and wounded.

On the ground where the barricade had been were the bodies of four men in potholes gouged out by the hand grenades. They could have been sleeping, so composed and comfortable did they appear to be, except that one was missing an arm, another half of his head.

A movement to his left caught Fleming’s eye. Turning his binoculars, he saw the major pointing to the other side of the bridge toward a black Citroen touring car that had emerged from the woods next to the road and was speeding away.

“Fly,” Fleming said, knowing that the Germans would be giving chase.