James Bond: The Authorised Biography (26 page)

Bond ducked instinctively and swam off under water, but when he surfaced and looked back he realized that none of this hullabaloo was meant for him. The shouting continued. Gomez was shooting to the right and when Bond looked he could see why. Several hundred yards away there was the girl from the terrace. She was splashing frantically and circling her was the swiftly moving black fin of a shark.

Bond swam faster than ever in his life before. At least he had a knife – he had Gutteridge to thank for that – and as he reached the girl the shark was already turning in for the attack. Bond could see its pallid underbelly glinting below them in the water and as the great fish shot up towards them, Bond struck at it. As always at the point of greatest danger, his mind was curiously clear. He shielded the girl with his body and kicked hard – the shark veered off, trailing brown clouds of blood behind it. Before it could return to the attack, Bond heard more shouting. Gomez and several of his men had launched a rubber dinghy from the terrace. Within seconds they were hauling Bond and the girl aboard and heading back towards the house.

If Bond was expecting gratitude, he was mistaken. Gomez's first words were to ask him what he had been doing.

‘Saving your girl-friend from a shark,’ he said.

For just a moment the small pig-like eyes glared through enormous pebble lenses. Then he appeared to realize what Bond had done. The big face relaxed.

‘Excuse me – the shock. I have to thank you – and on her behalf as well.’

Bond turned towards the girl. Her eyes met his.

‘Glad to have been of service,’ he said softly. ‘Perhaps some time …’

‘I am afraid it's useless talking to the girl,’ said Gomez sharply. ‘She's deaf and dumb. Totally. But I am sure she's grateful.’

‘Not a great deal of use,’ said Bond to Gutteridge. He had walked back along the beach. ‘He wasn't having me inside the house, nor was he letting me near the girl. They whisked her inside very fast, and somehow I don't think we'll be seeing much of her.’

‘A pity,’ said Gutteridge, and smiled, ‘she might have been quite useful.’ Bond nodded ruefully.

‘Perhaps we should see about her later. For the moment we must think about the problem of Da Silva and his appointment with the Goddess Kull tomorrow night.’

Da Silva was 5ft 8in and Bond was 6ft 2in. Their colouring was different, so were their profiles. Despite this, Gutteridge and the make-up expert from Police Headquarters somehow succeeded in turning Bond into a reasonable facsimile of the Jamaican.

‘Try keeping in the shadow,’ said the make-up man. ‘You've got his accent pretty well, and with those spectacles of his you should get by.’

Bond hoped that he was right, especially when he found himself driving Da Silva's Chevrolet into Kingston late that Friday night. The police had been alerted now, and Gutteridge was working with them. But the whole plan depended upon Bond's being able to penetrate Gomez's defences without rousing his suspicions. It was essential now to find the Goddess Kull.

He had no difficulty in finding Tarleton Street. This part of Kingston was awake – the remainder of the city slept. There was a throbbing rhythm to the night. Pleasure was cheap here. Eyes seemed to watch from every doorway and, as he parked the car, Bond thought he saw faces in every shadow.

He did his best to hunch his shoulders and disguise his height.

‘Mr Da Silva,’ said a voice. ‘Glad you could come along.’

The girl was young, her bottom waggled in its sequined dress. In easier circumstances Bond might have been tempted. But as she took his arm, he was grateful for the reassuring bulk of his Beretta in its shoulder holster.

‘We're having quite a night,’ the girl said in her best comehither voice, ‘hope you're all ready to enjoy yourself.’

There was a small bar crammed with people. Somewhere behind, a steel band dinned to a frenzy. She led him through the dancers and down a corridor.

‘Hold it,’ said somebody and Bond was blindfolded. Strong arms gripped him now and he was being dragged down stone steps and then along a tunnel. He could feel water dripping on his head. Then there were more steps and Bond felt himself entering a room. The arms released him.

‘O.K.,’ said a voice, ‘take his blindfold off.’

After the darkness, Bond's eyes blinked. There was an unimaginable scene before him. He was in a cellar with a high vaulted roof. It was lit by burning torches and at first sight Bond thought he was in some sort of church. More than a hundred men and women were standing before him like a congregation, and at the far end of the cellar was a raised platform with candles burning. The air was heavy with the scent of burning joss sticks and of marijuana. Along the platform was a row of skulls.

‘Welcome,’ said a voice. Bond recognized the owner as the tall bearded negro he had seen with Gomez at the house on Montego Bay. He still wore his circular dark spectacles, but was now dressed in priestlike robes.

‘Welcome,’ the others in the room responded.

‘We are all here to worship Kull, the great Destroyer,’ chanted the negro.

‘Indeed we are,’ the audience replied.

‘The brotherhood of Kull demands obedience. Those who deny her must make love to her.’

At this a shudder seemed to pass through the congregation. Some of the women moaned.

‘Kull, Kull,’ they cried.

‘And you, Da Silva, will become one of us. You will not oppose us. You will swear homage to the Goddess Kull, or share her bed with her.’

As the man said this his voice had risen to a crescendo, and suddenly Bond saw the wall behind him opening. A throbbing wail of music started. The congregation sank on its knees. As the wall slid back it revealed a room behind with an enormous golden bed. On it lay a naked woman.

‘Kull,’ moaned the congregation. ‘Hail to thee Kull, thou great destroyer.’

Suddenly the music ceased.

‘What is your answer?’ shouted the priest of Kull. And Bond stepped forward.

‘I will make love to her,’ he said.

There was a hideous silence as Bond walked towards the Goddess. As he stepped across the platform he took off Da Silva's spectacles and revealed his full height. He and the girl recognized each other and the wall slid to behind him.

Gomez was in the room and several of his henchmen. One held a long machete. Two of them were armed. But Bond's gun was faster. It thudded twice and then the man with the machete was on him. Bond leapt at him, the butt of his Beretta smashing against his hand. The machete clattered on the floor; the man lay whimpering in the corner of the room. Then Gomez grabbed at the machete. He had the strange agility of many fat men, but as he lunged Bond aimed a blow at him that caught his spectacles. Bond ground them underfoot, leaving the Cuban to thresh blindly at him with the machete. Bond hit him once behind the ear and all was over.

Gomez, that ruthless killer, had died as he lived – violently. The man who had attempted to control the Caribbean through his black reign of terror would terrorize no longer. The fat, myopic master of the Goddess Kull was dead.

But Kull still lived. So did her followers. Bond could hear them chanting in a frenzy in the room outside as they waited for the sliding doors to open. This was the moment that they longed for – the moment they would witness the appalling sacrifice of one more victim to her lust.

Bond looked towards the girl. She was still lying on the bed. To Bond she appeared more beautiful now than when he saw her through the telescope, and he wondered how much she understood of what was going on. How much had she ever known? She smiled. He moved towards her and as he touched the bed some hidden mechanism made the doors start to open. Bond took her in his arms.

There was a hush outside. Kull's congregation waited and the doors drew back. Then somebody cried out. It was a cry of fear. A miracle had happened, for Bond had moved. He had embraced the Goddess Kull and lived. The cry was taken up, and for a moment Bond feared the worshippers would lynch him but the Goddess had her arms around him. She smiled at him. Kull the insatiable had been satisfied. The congregation started to applaud.

At this point there was a great commotion at the rear of the hall. Gutteridge and several policemen from the Jamaican special branch had suddenly arrived – following the small homing ‘bleeper’ Bond had hidden in the heel of his shoe. Despite the sudden change of heart of Kull's worshippers, Bond was relieved to see them. Kull's reign was over.

But this was not the last that Bond saw of the girl. As Gutteridge explained, her legend still lived in the fears of many of the people who had feared her for so long. To show that it was over, Bond spent several days with her, touring the island, and although she was deaf and dumb this hardly seemed to matter. She had loved Bond ever since he saved her from the shark and to this day his memories of the Goddess Kull are over a gentle, silent girl with golden skin and the few days he spent with her beside Montego Bay.

9

Casino

T
HERE WAS ONE point which I had been avoiding – Bond's relationship with M. The time had come to ask about it. Had M. really been, as Fleming wrote, the one man Bond had ‘loved, honoured and obeyed’?

I chose my moment carefully before I asked him. I wanted no more outbursts like the other day's. But after dinner he was in a mellow mood, and when I broached the subject he started laughing.

‘Let's be quite honest about all this,’ he said. ‘The truth is that old Ian always liked to make me look something of an idiot. As I'll tell you later, there was a reason for this, and a good one. But he also liked to pull my leg and it amused him to describe my dog-like devotion to steely-eyed old M. Of course, he overdoes it dreadfully. Sometimes I think he makes me sound just like some bloody spaniel wagging my tail whenever M. appears.’

‘Didn't you?’

‘Did I hell! As I'm trying to explain to you, it wasn't like that at all. Back in 1951 we were all working very hard indeed and M. just happened to be the man in charge. He also happened to be extremely good at a hideously demanding job.’

‘And did you ever argue with him?’

He paused to light a cigarette. I had noticed that he often did this when he wanted time to think of his reply.

‘Sometimes. Of course I argued. But the trouble with arguing with M. was that he was usually right. Particularly back in the early fifties. You must understand that we were really fighting for our lives and M. was the one man who could save us. Kidding apart, he was incredible. He's never had the credit he deserves; during those few years he brought us from rock bottom to considerable success. He was a very tough effective little man. In my book, nobody can ever equal him.’

Now that James Bond had started talking I realized that we were in for another of his late-night sessions. It was extraordinary how much his talk depended on his mood. Tonight he was obviously relaxed. The morose, heavy look had gone entirely. He leaned back, called to Augustus for his customary bottle of Jack Daniel's bourbon, and cheerfully began explaining the situation M. had had to face in 1951.

This was the year that Bond returned from Jamaica, and as he says, he found himself ‘quite suddenly in the front line of the secret war’. Things were hotting up. Smersh had moved onto the offensive and the British Secret Service was doing its best to meet the challenge. There had been losses, even in the 00 section. In January 1951 008 was found dead in a parked car fifty yards inside the Western zone of Berlin; three weeks later 0011, passing through China on the so-called ‘Blue Route’, failed to make contact in Hong Kong; and in the last few days 003, one of the most experienced agents in the section, had been dragged from a blazing car outside Belgrade. He would live – for a while at least – but his days of usefulness to the Secret Service (or to anybody else) were over.

For M. these losses would have been acceptable had they been matched by firm achievements: these were lacking, and M. was jealously aware of the activities of those hard brains directing Smersh from their drab headquarters on the Sretenka Ulitsa. Smersh was a contraction of two Russian words meaning ‘Death to Spies’; for M. it had been living up to its forbidding name too well for comfort. Hardly any of the West's attempts to penetrate the security of the Soviet had worked.

The British network inside Russia was something of a joke, whilst the two major secret war campaigns launched by the West in the last few months – against Albania and the Ukraine – had foundered ignominiously. M. was under pressure. He was directly accountable to the Prime Minister and, as one recent writer put it, that wily politician ‘was not disposed to be too impressed by the denizens of the secret-service world.’ Not surprisingly, the lines on M.'s weather-beaten face were rapidly becoming something of a battlechart of the secret war. Fortunately he knew better than to lose heart at incidental setbacks. He knew that whilst in ordinary war it is the last battle that counts, in the secret war there could never be a final battle, only the ceaseless ebb and flow of murder and betrayal. M. had no illusions about the trade he followed. But it was a necessary trade. As long as he was in command, he would make certain it continued.

Bond was the sort of man he needed. M. realized this for certain after the Jamaica business, just as James Bond accepted that his life from now on lay with ‘Universal Export’. For the Secret Service gave him an all-demanding cause to which to dedicate his life. It gave him a pattern and a purpose. Without them he would founder.