James Bond: The Authorised Biography (21 page)

Bond understands that he had to go, but the way he was dismissed still rankles. He was kept waiting nearly a fortnight. There were reports on him which he had no chance to see, let alone answer. After his years as one of the stars of the department, he felt himself an outcast. Even the C.M.G., for which he had been warmly recommended, was withheld.

Finally M. did see him; he was at his frostiest, and gave Bond no chance to argue or defend himself. After considering the case he had decided that a board of inquiry would not be in the interests of the Service. Commander Bond must not feel from this that he was in any way exonerated. Words could not express the disapproval that he felt at his behaviour whilst on a delicate and most important mission. The Commander would leave the Service. This would be best for everyone.

Even as M. spoke, Bond found it hard to credit what he was saying. But the verdict had been given – the case was closed. There was no word of thanks for all that Bond had done, still less of regret or consolation: only the noise of M. sucking his dead Dunhill. Bond said, ‘Thank you, sir.’

M. said nothing.

They did not shake hands.

It was an early summer morning; Bond walked down Baker Street after the axe had fallen, feeling a little dazed. The unthinkable had happened, but he was alive and still comparatively unscarred. According to the Paymaster he had £300 in his old account with Glyn Mills Bank. The sun was out, the first summer dresses in the shops. It was 1946, the first full year of peace.

Bond's spirits rose. By Marble Arch he noticed new leaves on the plane trees by the park. People were strolling past him, leading their ordinary, uncomplicated lives and suddenly Bond realized that he was one of them. He was no longer tied to a life behind a gun, no longer threatened with the fear of sudden death. M. had set him free and he could start a normal life at last. The idea was so exciting that he crossed Park Lane, entered the Dorchester and ordered a half-bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate.

Bond began looking for a job. He was quite optimistic now that the time had come to settle down. He reviewed his assets – youth, good looks, and skill with languages. He was single and without dependents. But as he soon found out, these were assets which he shared with several thousand other young ex-servicemen.

He took job-hunting seriously and wrote endless letters that began, ‘Dear Sir, I wonder whether …’ One in ten brought a reply. There were a few offers. A jute mill in Madras required a manager. A stock-broking firm in Mincing Lane required a clerk. A private eye in Marylebone needed investigators … ‘most of the work's divorce-court stuff. You'll find it stimulating.’ Bond thought otherwise.

A fortnight passed. Bond was rising late by now, skipping breakfast, then getting down to writing letters. He lunched alone, generally in a pub along the King's Road. The afternoons went on job-hunting. The rent on the flat in Lincoln Street was due. It was ten days since he had seen his current mistress, a snub-nosed secretary in the press department of the Ministry of Defence. Purely by chance he met a wartime colleague who was now working as chief security officer with Harrods: he offered Bond a job as store detective.

It was the last sad straw. That evening Bond decided to make money in the one sure way he knew – by gambling. Bond still enjoyed his wartime membership of Blades, although he hadn't been for several months. He put on his dark blue suit, arrived at nine, stayed clear of the bar (to avoid the embarrassment of having to buy drinks that he could not afford) and took his place in the great eighteenth-century gaming room. He had always played to win, but never before because he needed money. He was disturbed to find how much this spoiled the game: it even dictated his choice of an opponent. He found himself picking someone he would normally have avoided – Bunny Kendrick, a cantankerous old millionaire who was a bad but frequent loser. Bond played high. For more than half an hour he lost. Kendrick was delighted in the way that rich men are at such unnecessary strokes of fortune. When Bond was £200 down, he panicked – and it was then that he was tempted. He suddenly remembered an all but foolproof card-sharp's trick Esposito had taught him, a way of dealing himself a perfect run of cards. It would have been so very easy, and no one would have noticed – certainly not Kendrick. Bond was sweating, and this chance of cheating was so frightening that he almost left the table there and then. Instead he forced himself to finish playing and ended owing £80. It was the most wretched evening Bond has ever spent at a card table in his life. Next morning he decided he would ring the man at Harrods. But on that very day his fortune changed.

Bond was walking past the Ritz Hotel (he tended to walk everywhere these days) when he saw a small, familiar bald figure entering the large swing doors. It was a good three years since Bond had last seen Maddox. After the fall of France he had made his way to London, picked up a colonel's job with Military Intelligence and spent most of the war in the Middle East. Later he joined the Free French in Algiers and returned to Paris with the ending of the war. He was delighted to see Bond, and insisted that they had a drink together. Maddox showed all the signs of obvious prosperity – expensive highly polished shoes, a tightly cut check suit, the rosette of the
Legion d'Honneur
in his buttonhole.

‘Consultant work,’ he said when Bond asked what he did, ‘at, shall we say, a somewhat elevated level. I work with various big French commercial houses, chiefly with connections throughout Africa.’

‘And you enjoy yourself?’

‘Have you ever known me not to? I have a family you know – two boys. We live just outside Paris at Vincennes. You must meet my wife.’

But Maddox was a wary husband. When his wife appeared – she had been shopping and returned earlier than expected – Maddox treated her with care. Bond could see why. She was lovely – a blonde, Parisienne with that particular sheen of beautiful French women who take their menfolk and their wealth for granted. Bond was amused to see that Maddox was careful
not
to press her to stay. Only when she had gone did he invite Bond to lunch.

Bond loved the grill room of the Ritz. It was like old times to be eating here with Maddox. He remembered the evening long ago, in Fontainebleau when Maddox had recruited him. Soon he was telling Maddox everything – the ups-and-downs of his career, the scandal out in Washington, and M.'s behaviour. Maddox sat in silence, staring at the park.

‘James,’ he said finally, ‘I will be frank with you. I don't believe you'll ever change. When I recruited you I warned you that you'd never get away. The life you've led has made you what you are.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Bond, ‘but what do I do now?’

Maddox relit his large cigar and wreathed himself in smoke.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you should come and work for me.’

*

Bond would have hated to admit how good it felt to be aboard the morning plane to Paris. He had his battered pig-skin case that had been with him on so many old assignments. Even to pack it had brought back a touch of the excitement of the old days: pyjamas, light blue shirts, and black hide washing-case. He wore the dark blue lightweight suit, the hand-stitched moccasins, the heavy knitted-silk black tie that virtually comprised his private uniform. He stretched his legs and watched the Staines reservoirs recede below the Viscount's wing-tip. Early though it was, he broke his usual rule and ordered a long cool vodka tonic. Maddox was paying for the trip. He could afford it.

He thought of Maddox. That wily little man wasn't befriending him again for fun although Bond had told him that his days of dangerous living were over. Bond wasn't giving up his dream of normal life as easily as that.

He had forgotten how much he loved Paris. It was his first time back since just before the war, but nothing had really changed – the same stale smell of Gauloises at Le Bourget, the drumming of the taxi on the cobbled roads, the barges on the river. He was remembering things that seemed forgotten. From the Place d’Italie the driver took the Boulevard St Germain. Bond was earlier than he expected and paid him off at the corner of the Rue Jacob. This was where he had lived with Marthe de Brandt – the little flat beside the Place Furstenburg; it seemed so long ago that he could not believe that this was the same scarred brown front door, the same trees in the courtyard.

Bond's nostalgia deepened as he walked down the narrow street towards the river, then crossed the Pont des Arts. How sensible of Maddox to have settled here in Paris, and how typical of him to have chosen an office on the Ile de la Cité with a fine view of the river and one of Bond's own favourite restaurants, the Restaurant Jules, just round the corner. At Bond's suggestion this was where they ate, although Maddox had a table booked at the Tour d'Argent. Bond felt at home at last as he sat down at the marble-topped table in that crowded restaurant. They had
quenelles
and
boeuf gros sel
, apricot tart and camembert and splendid coffee. They had the faintly sour house wine in a heavy glass decanter, then drank their cognac afterwards in the little square beneath the mulberries. It was Bond's first day of positive enjoyment since he had left the Secret Service.

Maddox outlined the work he had in mind for him. Since the Liberation he had been working for a syndicate of big French bankers as ‘security director’, A title which appeared to cover top-level planning to protect the group's massive interests throughout the world.

Maddox was much concerned with anti-subversion and the control of sabotage. He wanted Bond to join him, ‘as an adviser, nothing more. You'll have your base right here in Paris, and the job can be what you care to make it. You can travel, and I'll promise that you won't be bored. At the same time you can settle down a bit, make some money and decide what you really want to do with life. We might even find you a good-looking rich French wife. You could do worse.’

On that bright spring day in Paris, the offer seemed irresistible and, for the next four years, James Bond became an exile. He was a sort of mercenary, a soldier of fortune. With his command of languages he was at home in France, and anywhere else he happened to be sent. He had been well trained by the British Secret Service; as a non-Frenchman working for the French, he could be quite objective over their interests. He liked to think himself completely apolitical. Neither the demands of local nationalists, nor the antics of French politicians remotely interested him. He affected to despise them all. To him all politicians were quite simply ‘clowns’, some more ridiculous or more corrupt than others. He had a job to do. As he said to Maddox, it wasn't all that different from the store detective's job with Harrods, but it did have more scope.

There were great journeys which he loved, weeks spent travelling rough across Morocco or over the Sahara. He got to know Dakar, that scorching, fascinating melting-pot of France and black Africa. In Conakry, the capital of Guinea, he found a night club where the black hostesses wore nothing but full-length ball-dress skirts and long blonde wigs. In Timbuktu he bought himself a ‘wife’ for fifteen sheep. He caught the spell of Africa – its size, its paradox, its mystery. He travelled up the Niger river, and got to know the tribes of Senegal. Here it seemed that he could live a cleaner life than he had known in Europe.

When he did come back, it was to Paris, to confer with Maddox in his elegant small office by the river. He never seemed to visit London now. He had given up the flat in Lincoln Street and finally arranged to have the Bentley repainted and restored and brought over from Pett Bottom. Resplendent in its polished brass and ‘elephant's breath grey’ paint, it now lived in a lock-up garage off the Rue Jacob. Bond lived nearby. He had a tiny roof-top flat behind the Place Furstenburg, ‘more like the cabin of a ship than a gentleman's apartment’ as Maddox used to say. So far the rich wife Maddox had promised had not materialized.

Professionally, Bond pulled off several coups which more than justified his salary. In Bamako he stopped the blowing up of the great barrage recently built by the French across the Niger. At Algiers airport he scotched an attempt to hijack a consignment of gold to the Bank of France. In Paris itself he had the task of handling a kidnapping. The son of one of Maddox's wealthy colleagues had been taken from his house near the Bois de Boulogne. Bond was convinced he knew the kidnappers, and on his own initiative set out to find them. There was a risk of the child being killed. Bond knew that if that happened he would be blamed. Despite this he went ahead and bluffed the gang into believing that he was bringing them the ransom. They were holed up inside a block of municipal flats in Belfort. Thanks to his instant marksmanship, Bond shot two of them before they could harm the boy. The rest surrendered and Bond drove the child home in safety.

Through acts like these, Bond was becoming something of a legend. But it was a strange uneasy life he led. France was not his country. At times he felt as if life were uncannily repeating a perpetual pattern which had started with the wanderings of his family when he was a boy. He was becoming like his father, always on the move and always fighting other people's battles.

He was approaching thirty and knew quite well that he had settled nothing. He was still rootless and, despite a succession of fairly clinical
affaires
, still without lasting emotional attachment. He had begun to doubt if he were capable of one.

Like most compulsive bachelors, Bond was scared of women. Not physically – he was a vigorous and virile lover, and he enjoyed the routine of a seduction. It was an all-absorbing game that satisfied his vanity. His fear began when that other head was firmly on the pillow – worse still the morning after. Like all romantics, he was genuinely shocked when his women were revealed as human beings. Smeared morning make-up quite upset him and he disliked it if his women used the lavatory. Any demands, except overtly sexual ones, made him impatient.