James Bond Anthology (350 page)

She frowned. ‘I suppose so. He went up to his hammock on the boat-deck. I’ve no idea what time. I took a sleeping-pill and went straight off.’

Fidele Barbey had a line out for amberjack. Without looking round he said: ‘He’s probably in the pilot-house.’

Bond said: ‘If he’s still asleep on the boat-deck, he’ll be getting the hell of a sunburn.’

Liz Krest said: ‘Oh, poor Milt! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll go and see.’

She climbed the ladder. When her head was above the level of the boat-deck she stopped. She called down, anxiously: ‘Jim. He’s not here. And the hammock’s broken.’

Bond said: ‘Fidele’s probably right. I’ll have a look forrard.’

He went to the pilot-house. Fritz, the mate and the engineer were there. Bond said: ‘Anyone seen Mr Krest?’

Fritz looked puzzled. ‘No, sir. Why? Is anything wrong?’

Bond flooded his face with anxiety. ‘He’s not aft. Here, come on! Look round everywhere. He was sleeping on the boat-deck. He’s not there and his hammock’s broken. He was rather the worse for wear last night. Come on! Get cracking!’

When the inevitable conclusion had been reached, Liz Krest had a short but credible fit of hysterics. Bond took her to her cabin and left her there in tears. ‘It’s all right, Liz,’ he said. ‘You stay out of this. I’ll look after everything. We’ll have to radio Port Victoria and so on. I’ll tell Fritz to put on speed. I’m afraid it’s hopeless turning back to look. There’ve been six hours of daylight when he couldn’t have fallen overboard without being heard or seen. It must have been in the night. I’m afraid anything like six hours in these seas is just not on.’

She stared at him, her eyes wide. ‘You mean – you mean sharks and things?’

Bond nodded.

‘Oh Milt! Poor darling Milt! Oh, why did this have to happen?’

Bond went out and softly shut the door.The yacht rounded Cannon Point and reduced speed. Keeping well away from the broken reef, it slid quietly across the broad bay, now lemon and gunmetal in the last light, towards the anchorage. The small township beneath the mountains was already dark with indigo shadow in which a sprinkling of yellow lights showed. Bond saw the Customs and Immigration launch move off from Long Pier to meet them. The little community would already be buzzing with the news that would have quickly leaked from the radio station to the Seychelles Club and then, through the members’ chauffeurs and staffs, into the town.

Liz Krest turned to him. ‘I’m beginning to get nervous. Will you help me through the rest of this – these awful formalities and things?’

‘Of course.’

Fidele Barbey said: ‘Don’t worry too much. All these people are my friends. And the Chief Justice is my uncle. We shall all have to make a statement. They’ll probably have the inquest tomorrow. You’ll be able to leave the day after.’

‘You really think so?’ A dew of sweat had sprung below her eyes. ‘The trouble is, I don’t really know where to leave for, or what to do next. I suppose,’ she hesitated, not looking at Bond. ‘I suppose, James, you wouldn’t like to come on to Mombasa? I mean, you’re going there, anyway, and I’d be able to get you there a day earlier than this ship of yours, this Camp something.’

‘
Kampala
.’ Bond lit a cigarette to cover his hesitation. Four days in a beautiful yacht with this girl! But the tail of that fish sticking out of the mouth! Had she done it? Or had Fidele, who would know that his uncles and cousins on Mahe would somehow see that he came to no harm? If only one of them would make a slip. Bond said easily: ‘That’s terribly nice of you, Liz. Of course I’d love to come.’

Fidele Barbey chuckled. ‘Bravo, my friend. And I would love to be in your shoes, but for one thing. That damned fish. It is a great responsibility. I like to think of you both being deluged with cables from the Smithsonian about it. Don’t forget that you are now both trustees of a scientific Koh-i-noor. And you know what these Americans are. They’ll worry the life out of you until they’ve got their hands on it.’

Bond’s eyes were hard as flint as he watched the girl. Surely that put the finger on her. Now he would make some excuse – get out of the trip. There had been something about that particular way of killing a man…

But the beautiful, candid eyes did not flicker. She looked up into Fidele Barbey’s face and said, easily, charmingly: ‘That won’t be a problem. I’ve decided to give it to the British Museum.’

James Bond noticed that the sweat dew had now gathered at her temples. But, after all, it was a desperately hot evening…

The thud of the engines stopped and the anchor chain roared down into the quiet bay.

THE END

OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

A Collection of Short Stories

1 | OCTOPUSSY

‘You know what?’ said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. ‘You’re going to have a real treat today if I can manage it.’

He had spoken aloud and his breath had steamed up the glass of his Pirelli mask. He put his feet down to the sand beside the nigger-head and stood up. The water reached to his armpits. He took off the mask and spat into it, rubbed the spit round the glass, rinsed it clean and pulled the rubber band of the mask back over his head. He bent down again.

The eye in the mottled brown sack was still watching him carefully from the hole in the coral, but now the tip of a single small tentacle wavered hesitatingly an inch or two out of the shadows and quested vaguely with its pink suckers uppermost. Dexter Smythe smiled with satisfaction. Given time, perhaps one more month on top of the two during which he had been chumming up with the octopus, and he would have tamed the darling. But he wasn’t going to have that month. Should he take a chance today and reach down and offer his hand, instead of the expected lump of raw meat on the end of his spear, to the tentacle – shake it by the hand, so to speak? No, Pussy, he thought. I can’t quite trust you yet. Almost certainly other tentacles would whip out of the hole and up his arm. He only needed to be dragged down less than two feet, the cork valve on his mask would automatically close and he would be suffocated inside it or, if he tore it off, drowned. He might get in a quick lucky jab with his spear, but it would take more than that to kill Pussy. No. Perhaps later in the day. It would be rather like playing Russian roulette, and at about the same five-to-one-odds. It might be a quick, a whimsical way out of his troubles! But not now. It would leave the interesting question unsolved. And he had promised that nice Professor Bengry at the Institute. Dexter Smythe swam leisurely off towards the reef, his eyes questing for one shape only, the squat sinister wedge of a scorpion fish, or, as Bengry would put it,
Scorpaena Plumieri.

Major Dexter Smythe, O.B.E., Royal Marines (Retd), was the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man who had made easy sexual conquests all his military life and particularly among the Wrens and Wracs and A.T.S. who manned the communications and secretariat of the very special task force to which he had been attached at the end of his service career. Now he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks. And he had had two coronary thromboses. His doctor, Jimmy Greaves (who had been one of their high poker game at Queen’s Club when Dexter Smythe had first come to Jamaica), had half-jocularly described the later one, only a month before, as ‘the second warning’. But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore, and it was a mystery to his friends and neighbours why, in defiance of the two ounces of whisky and ten cigarettes a day to which his doctor had rationed him, he persisted in smoking like a chimney and going to bed drunk, if amiably drunk, every night.

The truth of the matter was that Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death-wish. The origins of this state of mind were many and not all that complex. He was irretrievably tied to Jamaica, and tropical sloth had gradually riddled him so that while outwardly he appeared a piece of fairly solid hardwood, under the varnished surface the termites of sloth, self-indulgence, guilt over an ancient sin and general disgust with himself had eroded his once hard core into dust. Since the death of Mary two years before, he had loved no one. He wasn’t even sure that he had really loved her, but he knew that, every hour of the day, he missed her love of him and her gay, untidy, chiding and often irritating presence, and though he ate their canapés and drank their martinis, he had nothing but contempt for the international riff-raff with whom he consorted on the North Shore. He could perhaps have made friends with the soldier elements, the gentleman-farmers inland, or the plantation owners on the coast, the professional men and the politicians, but that would mean regaining some serious purpose in life which his sloth, his spiritual accidie, prevented, and cutting down on the bottle, which he was definitely unwilling to do. So Major Smythe was bored, bored to death, and, but for one factor in his life, he would long ago have swallowed the bottle of barbiturates he had easily acquired from a local doctor. The lifeline that kept him clinging to the edge of the cliff was a tenuous one. Heavy drinkers veer towards an exaggeration of their basic temperaments, the classic four – Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Melancholic. The Sanguine drunk goes gay to the point of hysteria and idiocy. The Phlegmatic sinks into a morass of sullen gloom. The Choleric is the fighting drunk of the cartoonists who spends much of his life in prison for smashing people and things, and the Melancholic succumbs to self-pity, mawkishness and tears. Major Smythe was a Melancholic who had slid into a drooling fantasy woven around the birds and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of Wavelets (the name he had given his small villa is symptomatic), its beach and the coral reef beyond. The fish were his particular favourites. He referred to them as ‘people’ and, since reef fish stick to their territories as closely as do most small birds, after two years he knew them all intimately, ‘loved’ them and believed that they loved him in return.

They certainly knew him, as the denizens of zoos know their keepers, because he was a daily and a regular provider, scraping off algae and stirring up the sand and rocks for the bottom-feeders, breaking up sea eggs and urchins for the small carnivores and bringing out scraps of offal for the larger ones, and now, as he swam slowly and heavily up and down the reef and through the channels that led out to deep water, his ‘people’ swarmed around him fearlessly and expectantly, darting at the tip of the three-pronged spear they knew only as a prodigal spoon, flirting right up to the glass of the Pirelli and even, in the case of the fearless, pugnacious demoiselles, nipping softly at his feet and legs.

Part of Major Smythe’s mind took in all these brilliantly coloured little ‘people’, but today he had a job to do and while he greeted them in unspoken words –‘Morning, Beau Gregory’ to the dark-blue demoiselle sprinkled with bright-blue spots, the ‘jewel fish’ that exactly resembles the starlit fashioning of a bottle of Worth’s ‘Vol de Nuit’; ‘Sorry. Not today, sweetheart’ to a fluttering butterfly fish with false black ‘eyes’ on its tail and, ‘You’re too fat anyway, Blue Boy’ to an indigo parrot fish that must have weighed a good ten pounds – his eyes were searching for only one of his ‘people’ – his only enemy on the reef, the only one he killed on sight, a scorpion fish.

Scorpion fish inhabit most of the southern waters of the world, and the ‘rascasse’ that is the foundation of
bouillabaisse
belongs to the family. The West Indian variety runs up to only about twelve inches long and perhaps a pound in weight. It is by far the ugliest fish in the sea, as if nature were giving warning. It is a mottled brownish grey with a heavy, wedge-shaped shaggy head. It has fleshy pendulous ‘eyebrows’ that droop over angry red eyes and a coloration and broken silhouette that are perfect camouflage on the reef. Though a small fish, its heavily toothed mouth is so wide that it can swallow whole most of the smaller reef fishes, but its supreme weapon lies in its erectile dorsal fins, the first few of which, acting on contact like hypodermic needles, are fed by poison glands containing enough tetrodotoxin to kill a man if they merely graze him in a vulnerable spot – in an artery, for instance, or over the heart or in the groin. They constitute the only real danger to the reef swimmer, far more dangerous than barracuda or shark, because, supremely confident in their camouflage and armoury, they flee before nothing except the very close approach of a foot or actual contact. Then they flit only a few yards on wide and bizarrely striped pectorals and settle again watchfully either on the sand, where they look like a lump of overgrown coral, or amongst the rocks and seaweed, where they virtually disappear. And Major Smythe was determined to find one, spear it and give it to his octopus to see if it would take or spurn it, see if one of the ocean’s great predators would recognize the deadliness of another, know of its poison. Would the octopus consume the belly and leave the spines? Would it eat the lot and, if so, would it suffer from the poison? These were the questions Bengry at the Institute wanted answered and today, since it was going to be the beginning of the end of Major Smythe’s life at Wavelets and though it might mean the end of his darling Octopussy, Major Smythe had decided to find out the answers and leave one tiny memorial to his now futile life in some dusty corner of the Institute’s marine biological files.