Gardner, John (6 page)

Late one afternoon Bond found himself down in the empty gunsmith's room, with the run of the place, plus the underground range, while he went through the exacting chore upon which his life might depend.

He was, therefore, surprised when, just as he started to clean the grease from the Browning, the door opened to reveal Q'ute, dressed in brown velvet and looking exceptionally desirable. Major Boothroyd, she told Bond, had suggested that she come down to watch the cleaning and preparation of the weapon.

'Why should he do that?' Bond hardly glanced up at the girl, conscious for the first time that her cool manner constituted a direct challenge. He had worked hard over the past days: now a sensual snake stirred in the back of his mind. Q'ute would make a relaxing partner for the evening.

Q'ute swung herself on to the workbench, after making certain she had chosen a clean patch of wood. 'The Armourer's giving me a weapons' course, when I'm off duty,' she told him. For the first time, Bond noticed Q'ute's voice had a throaty quality to it. 'I'm not very good with hand guns, and he says you are. He mentioned that the weapon was of an old type as well. Just thought it would be a good idea, if you didn't mind.'

Bond's strong, firm hands moved expertly, even lovingly, over the pistol as he silently chanted the stripping routine.

'Well, do you?' Q'ute asked.

'Do I what?'

'Mind me watching?'

'Not at all.' He glanced up at the girl, whose pretty face, behind the large spectacles, remained impassive. 'Always best to handle weapons with care and gentleness,' he smiled, as the movements of his hands over the mechanism became increasingly erotic.

'With care, of course,' Q'ute's voice took on a slight edge of sarcasm. Now she repeated, parrot-fashion, from the Service training manual, ' "Weapons of all description should be treated with great care and respect." Don't you carry it a bit too far, Commander Bond?'

Hell, he thought. Q'ute was a good nickname for her. Bond even slowed down the movements of his hands, allowing the process of stripping to become more obvious as he silently repeated the instructions:

Grasp head of recoil spring guide; push towards muzzle to release the head of the guide from the barrel. Draw out barrel from breech end. Remove stocks, giving access to lockwork. Dismount slide assembly, starting with firing pin and continue normally . . .

'Oh come on, Commander Bond. I do know something about weapons. Anyway, nobody believes all that stuff about guns being phallic symbols any more.' She tossed her head, giving a little laugh. 'Stop playing strip the lady with that piece of hardware, if you're doing it for my benefit. I don't go for those paperback books with pictures of girls sitting on large guns, or even astride them.'

'What do you go for then, Q'ute?' Bond chuckled.

'My name's Ann Reilly,' she snapped, 'not that damn silly nickname they all use around here.' She looked at him, straight in the eyes, for a full twenty seconds. 'As for what I like and dislike —go for, as you put it-maybe one day you'll find out.' She did not smile. 'I'm more interested in the way that automatic works, why you chose it, and how you got that white mark on your hand.'

Bond glanced up sharply, his eyes suddenly losing their humour and turning to ice in a way that almost frightened Q'ute. 'Someone tried to be clever a long time ago,' he said slowly. In the back of his mind, he remembered, quite clearly, all the circumstances which had led to the plastic surgery, that showed now only as a white blemish, after the Cyrillic letter Щ—standing for SH-had been carved into the back of his hand in an attempt by SMERSH to brand him as a spy. It was long ago, and very far away now; but clear as yesterday. He detected the break he had made in Q'ute's guard with his sharp cruelty. So long ago, he thought: the business with Le Chiffre at Royale-les-Eaux, and a woman called Vesper - about the same age as this girl sitting on the workbench, showing off her shapely knees and calves — lying dead from an overdose, her body under the sheets like a stone effigy in a tomb.

The coldness in Bond's mien faded. He smiled at Q'ute, again looking down at his hand. 'A small accident — carelessness on my part. Needed a bit of surgery, that's all.' Then he went back to removing the packing grease from the Browning. All thoughts of dallying with the Q Branch executive called Ann Reilly were gone. She was relatively young and still learning the ways of the secret world, in spite of her electronic efficiency, he decided.

As though to break the mood, she asked, in a small voice, 'What's it like to kill somebody? They say you've had to kill a lot of people during your time in the Service.'

'Then they shouldn't talk so much.' It was Bond's turn to snap. He was reassembling the gun now. 'The need-toknow system operates in the Service. You, of all people, should know better than to ask questions like that.'

'But I
do
need to know.' Calmer now, but showing a streak of stubbornness that Bond had detected in her eyes before this. 'After all, I deal with some of the important "gee-whizz" stuff. You must also know what that covers secret death: undetectable. People die in this business. I should know about the end product.'

Bond completed the reassembly, ran the mechanism back and forth a couple of times, then picked up one of the magazines containing seven Browning Long 9mm. rounds that would shatter a piece of five-inch pine board at twenty feet.

Looking at the slim magazine, he thought of its lethal purpose, and what each of the little jacketed pieces of metal within would do to a man or woman. Yes, he thought, Q'ute-Ann Reilly-had a right to know. 'Give me a hand;' he nodded towards a box on the workbench. 'Bring along a couple of spare magazines. We have to test this little toy on the range, then work's over for the night.'

She picked up the magazines and slid down from her perch as she repeated the question. 'How does it feel to kill a person?'

'While it's happening, you don't think much about it,' Bond answered flatly. 'It's a reflex. You do it and you don't hesitate. If you're wise, and want to go on living, you don't think about it afterwards either. I've known men who've had breakdowns - go for early retirement on half pension — for thinking about it afterwards. There's nothing to tell, my dear Q'u . . . Ann. I try not to remember. That way I remain detached from its reality.'

'And is that why you clean off your pistol in front of someone like me - stripping it as though it were a woman?' He did not reply to that, and she followed Bond quietly through the corridor that led to the range.

It took Bond nearly an hour, and six extra magazines, before he was completely happy with the Browning. When they finished on the range, he went back to the gunsmith's room, with Q'ute in his wake, and stripped the gun down for cleaning after firing. As he completed this last chore, Bond looked up at her. 'Well, you've seen all there is to see. Show's over. You can go home now.'

'You no longer require my services then?'

She was smiling. Bond had not expected that. 'Well,' he said cautiously. 'If you'd care for dinner . . .' 'I'd love it,' she grinned. Bond took her in the Saab. They went into Kensington, to the Trattoo in Abingdon Road, where Carlo was pleased to see his old customer. Bond had not been there for some time and was treated with great respect, ordering for the pair of them—a simple meal: the
z.uppa di verdura
followed by
fegato Bacchus,
washed down with a light, young, Bardolino (a '79, for Bardolino should always be drunk young and cool, even though it is red, rather as the French imbibe their rose wines young, Bond explained). Afterwards, Carlo made them plain crepes with lemon and sugar, and they had coffee up in the bar, where Alan Clare was at the small piano.

Ann Reilly was enchanted, saying that she could sit and listen to the liquid ease of Clare's playing for ever. But the restaurant soon started to fill up. A couple of actors came in, a well-known movie director with crinkled grey hair, and a famous zany comedian. For Ann, Alan played one last piece - her request, the sentimental oldie from
Casablanca:
'As Time Goes By'.

Bond headed the Saab back towards Chelsea, at Ann Reilly's bidding. Between giving him directions, she laughed a lot, and said she had not enjoyed an evening like this for a long time. Finally they pulled up in front of the Georgian terraced house where Q'ute said she had the whole of the second floor as her apartment.

'Like to come in and see my gadgets?' she asked. Bond could not see the smile in the darkness of the car, but knew it was there.

'Well, that's different,' he chuckled. 'I still stick to the etchings.'

She had the passenger door open. 'Oh, but I have gadgets,' she laughed again. 'I'm a senior executive of Q Branch, remember. I like to take my work home with me.'

Bond locked the doors, followed her up the steps and into the small elevator which had been installed during what estate agents call 'extensive modernisation'.

From the small entrance hall of Q'ute's apartment Bond could see the kitchen and bathroom. She opened the main door and they passed into the remainder of the apartment - one huge room - the walls hung with two large matching gilt-framed mirrors, a genuine Hockney and an equally genuine Bratby, of a well-known composer whose musicals had been at their peak fifteen to twenty years ago. The furnishings were mainly late 1960s Biba, and the lighting was to match - Swedish in design, and mounted on battens angled into the corners of the room.

'Ah, period décor,' said Bond with a grin.

Ann Reilly smiled back. 'All is not as it seems,' she giggled, and for a moment Bond wondered if she was not used to drinking: perhaps the wine had gone to her head. Then he saw her hand move to a small console of buttons by the light switches. Her fingers stabbed at the buttons, and in the next few seconds Bond could only think of transformation scenes at childhood pantomimes.

The lights dimmed and the room became bathed in a soft red glow which came from the skirting boards. The large, circular, smoked glass table which formed a focal point at the centre of the room seemed to sink into the carpet, and from it there came the sound of splashing water as it gleamed with light to become a small pond with a fountain playing at its centre. The Hockney, Bratby, and both of the mirrors appeared to cloud over, then clear, changed into paintings of a nature that almost shocked Bond by their explicitness.

He sniffed the air: a musky scent had risen around him, while the sound of piano music gently rose in volume - a slow, sensual blues solo, so close and natural that Bond peered about him, thinking the girl was actually sitting at an instrument somewhere. The scent and music began to claw at his senses. Then he took a step back, his eyes moving to the wall on his right. The wall had started to open up, and, from behind it, a large, high, waterbed slid soundlessly into the room - above it a mirrored canopy hanging from crimson silk ropes.

Ann Reilly had disappeared. For a second, Bond was disorientated, his back to the wall, head and eyes moving over the extraordinary sight. Then he saw her, behind the fountain, a small light, dim but growing to illuminate her as she stood naked but for a thin, translucent nightdress; her hair undone and falling to her waist - hair and the thin material moving and blowing as though caught in a silent zephyr.

Then, as suddenly as it all happened, the room started to change again. The lighting returned to normal, the table rose from the fountain, the Hockney, Bratby, and mirrors were there once more, and Q'ute slowly faded from view. Only the bed stayed in place.

There was a chuckle from behind him, and Bond turned to find Q'ute, still in her brown velvet, and with her hair smooth and pleated, as she leaned against the wall laughing. 'You like it?' she asked.

Bond frowned. 'But . . .?'

'Oh come on, James. The transformation's easy: micro and electronics;
son et lumière.
I built it all myself.' 'But you . . .?' 'Yes,' she frowned, 'that's the most expensive bit, but I put most of that together as well; and the model
is
me. Hologram. Very effective, yes? Complete 3D. Come on, I'll show you the gubbins . . .'

She was about to move away when Bond caught hold of her, pulled her close and into a wild kiss. She slid her hands to his shoulders, gently pushing him away. 'Let's see.' She cocked an eyebrow at him. Т thought you'd have got the idea. You said the place was period décor— 1960s. All I've done - and I've spent many happy hours getting it right is add in a 1960s' fantasy: music, lights, the waterbed, scent, and an available bird with very few clothes on. I thought you of all people, James Bond, would have got the message. Fantasies should change with the times. Surely we're all more realistic these days. Particularly about relationships. The word is, I think, maturity.'

Yes, thought Bond, Q'ute
was
a good name for Ann Reilly, as she scurried around showing off the electronics of her fantasy room. 'It might be an illusion', he said, 'but it still has a lethal effect.'

She turned towards him, 'Well, James, the bed's still there. It usually is. Have some coffee and let's get to know one another.'

In his own flat the next morning, Bond was awake before six-thirty. The biter bit, he thought, with a wry smile. If ever a man's bluff had been called, it was by the ingenious Q'ute. In good humour he exercised, took a hot bath, followed by a cold shower; shaved, dressed and was in his dining room when the faithful May came in with his copy of
The Times
and his normal breakfast — the favourite meal: two large cups of black coffee, from De Bry, without sugar; a single 'perfectly boiled' brown egg (Bond still affected to dislike anything but brown eggs, and kept his opinion regarding three and one-third minutes constituting the perfect boiling time); then two slices of wholewheat toast with Jersey butter and Tiptree 'Little Scarlet' strawberry jam, Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade or Norwegian heather honey.

Governments could come and go; crises could erupt; inflation may spiral, but-when in London - Bond's breakfast routine rarely changed. In this he was the worst thing a man in his profession could be: a man of habit, who enjoyed the day starting in one particular manner, eating from the dark blue egg cup with a gold ring around the top, which matched the rest of his Minton china, and happy to see the Queen Anne silver coffee pot and accessories on his table. Faddish as this quirk certainly was, Bond would have been outraged if anyone told him it smacked of snobbery. For James Bond, snobbery was for others, in all walks of life. A man has a right to certain pleasurable idiosyncrasies - more than a right, if they settled his mind and stomach for the day ahead.