James Bond: The Authorised Biography (38 page)

The Arlberg Express left Vienna at 8.45 next morning. Bond was still wary of the girl. She was a little too intelligent and beautiful for comfort. But they got on together. By the time they reached the station he had finally persuaded her to call him ‘James’.

‘What did you do about that devil, Heinkel?’ she asked.

‘Not much I could do,’ he replied. ‘Except to get Head of Station to send round a general warning to the Austrians. They'll stop him at the frontier if he tries to get through.’

The train was crowded, but the excitement of the long train journey affected Bond as usual. They spent the day enjoying one another's company. After the hell of the last few days, it was wonderful to be alive and to enjoy the scenery of Austria. In the evening they dined – expensively. (Bond decided that the British Government owed a girl like this a good dinner in the first-class eating waggon. It was delicious. So was the champagne.) And after the champagne, the coffee, the Courvoisier, there was the long nostalgic journey through the night. Poor 009 was quietly forgotten, as Bond proved (to his silent satisfaction) that he had been right about her mouth. As they fell asleep to the busy rhythm of the wheels Bond told his conscience that he was following M.'s orders to the letter.

It was still dark outside when he awoke. The train was inside Germany and in their small compartment there was a faint light from the ceiling. The girl was sleeping quietly beside him. But Bond knew that something definite had woken him. His gun was in its holster. He drew it softly, eased back the safety catch and waited. And then he saw the handle moving on the door. Someone was trying to get in.

For Bond it was almost a matter of routine to make sure his bedroom door was locked when on assignment. Before he went to sleep he had placed wooden wedges under it. The handle turned again, and someone in the corridor outside began to push. The door stayed shut. Then the handle was rattled angrily.

‘Passport control – open up please,’ said a voice. Bond recognized it – from the zoo in Budapest.

The girl was now awake. Bond signalled to her silently to dress, and at the same time started pulling on his trousers and his shoes.

‘We've had our passports checked,’ he shouted.

‘This is a special check,’ the voice shouted back. ‘Open up please, right away. Police.’

By now Bond and the girl were fully dressed.

The handle rattled once again, and Bond felt someone pushing at the door. It opened half an inch.

‘All right then, Mr Bond,’ said Heinkel. ‘No tricks now if you please. I want the girl. She's valuable, so open up.’

‘And if I don't?’ said Bond.

‘Mr Bond, you are being very irritating and my patience is exhausted.’

The voice was satin smooth but ugly with menace.

‘You and the girl are supposed to be dead. I left the Budapest zoo last night happy with the thought that you were both dead. I dined out on your death, Mr Bond. I ate well, I slept well. I returned to my temporary base at the zoo only to discover that you had been impertinent enough to stay alive, and that furthermore you had allowed a very valuable specimen to escape, to say nothing of the valuable specimen you have in the carriage with you. Fortunately, through my contacts in your Vienna office I had little difficulty in tracing you. But now no more of your tricks, Mr Bond. I am beginning to find them irksome. I have five men out here; all of them are armed. We have gone to considerable trouble to join you on this train. Kindly don't spoil our journey. Now, open the door!’

Bond knew that Heinkel wasn't bluffing, and so he withdrew the wedges and pulled back the door. Heinkel was outside, smoking a cigar. In his right hand he negligently held the small sub-machine gun he had in Budapest. Bond handed him his gun.

‘How very touching,’ Heinkel said when he saw the girl. ‘Comforting a dead comrade's girl-friend, Mr Bond? This way, if you please.’

Heinkel had a compartment further down the train, and Bond and the girl were pushed along the swaying corridor.

‘No hurry, Mr Bond,’ said Heinkel softly. ‘You know your Service's security in Vienna could be so much better. We understand from our contact there that the young lady has the information we require, but we can take our time to get it. It's two more hours to the border. I'm sure that we can make her talk by then.’

From the racket of the wheels, Bond knew the train was going fast. Heinkel was just behind him in the narrow corridor. Nashda was following. As usual at the point of crisis Bond's mind was suddenly quite clear, and, almost effortlessly, he found himself working out the odds. If he obeyed Heinkel, he knew that neither he nor Nashda had a chance. Once Heinkel and his gang had tortured her, they wouldn't want witnesses. Bond and the girl were doomed.

But there was just one chance. The hazards were enormous, but it was better than torture and certain death. As they passed the train door at the end of the compartment Bond seemed to stumble. As he turned, his shoulder cannoned into Heinkel's stomach, and at the same time he reached out and grabbed the handle of the door. It moved. The door swung open, and for one frightful moment Bond and Heinkel were hanging over the abyss. Luckily Bond kept his balance. Heinkel didn't. Bond heaved, and, like an overloaded mail sack, Heinkel's great body was sent thudding out.

Bond grabbed the girl. He was still unarmed, but with Heinkel gone the other gunmen paused. But Bond knew that any moment one of them would fire. He had to take a chance. As far as he could tell the train was on the top of an embankment.

‘Now,’ he shouted to the girl. And clutching her, he jumped. At that moment he remembered night-time parachute descents over the pitch-black countryside of wartime France. Instinctively he hunched his shoulders, tucked in his head and raised his knees. And luckily the earth was soft. They landed heavily, then rolled, tumbling together to the bottom of the embankment. The first thing Bond remembers is of the girl bending over him and tearfully asking him if he were dead.

The spot where they had landed was ten miles from Innsbruck. Somehow they limped into a village. By the time they reached it, it was nearly morning. Bond's back was hurting badly, and it took most of that day to sort things out. At first the police wanted to arrest them. Heinkel's body had been found a few miles back. It had hit a bridge. Bond identified it from its size and from the leather jacket. And finally, after a call to Head of Station in Vienna, Bond and the girl were driven into Innsbruck, then flown home. Just for once, Bond was grateful for a plane.

14

The Truth about M.

I
FELT SORRY for Bond by now. Headquarters had obviously been treating him abominably. He had been here six weeks and he was patently quite fit for duty. He was also desperately anxious for a word from someone in Headquarters. To my certain knowledge he had tried ringing through to M. five times at least during the last two days, and once he had even packed and booked himself aboard a scheduled plane to London. Cynically, I thought at first that he was simply running out on Honeychile, but now I realized it wasn't that. He longed to work. The Secret Service was his life and he felt a compulsive loyalty to all his colleagues in Headquarters. It clearly troubled him to think that they had quietly forgotten him.

He had to break off his account of the Heinkel business to take a cable. It was the answer he was waiting for. He read it, pulled a face, and threw the telegram across to me. It was an uptight little message, making me feel the Secret Service still had a lot to learn on personal relations.

‘Imperative you stay and await orders stop desist attempts at telephonic contact.’

It was signed, M.

Bond shrugged his shoulders.

‘Typical,’ he said. ‘M. is impossible these days. He seems to think he can go on for ever – just like old Herbert Hoover in the F.B.I. I was hoping to get through to Bill Tanner. Clearly I'm not permitted to.’

There was a tinge of bitterness now as he spoke and I was surprised to hear him finally talk like this of M. Until now he had always carefully defended him. Now the pretence was over.

‘I didn't realize that M. was quite that bad,’ I said.

‘Few people do,’ said Bond and smiled. ‘He's a smart old monster – wonderful at public relations and great skill at making himself indispensable to a succession of Prime Ministers, but really the old boy's become a menace. Mark you, as I said, he used to be extremely good. He was a splendid leader and had great flair once, but I noticed him beginning to lose touch around the time of the Hungarian affair. It all began to get too much for him. I even saved him once you know. It's a strange story.’

Bond leaned back, lit a cigarette, and stretched himself luxuriously. He grinned as if the memory still amused him.

‘No, it was very rum,’ he said. ‘If you read carefully between the lines of the Fleming books in places you get a hint of what was happening. That incidentally was why M. and Fleming had their final bust-up, but that's another story.’

‘But what about the Fleming books,’ I asked. ‘Once the Russians had rumbled the deception, what was the point of letting them continue?’

‘As I said yesterday, at one stage it was planned to finish them with
From Russia With Love
. Frankly, I think Fleming had had enough of them by then. He was getting bored with being what he called “the faithful Boswell to the Secret Service”. He even used to moan to me about the way his friends blamed him for all my vices. No, it was M. entirely who was to blame for the books continuing. You see, the Dr No affair came up and M. saw, quite rightly, that this could provide wonderful publicity for his department.’

‘But why should the Secret Service need publicity?’

‘That,’ replied Bond, ‘is a naïve question. In 1956 everyone was criticizing us. There was the Crabbe affair – you remember, the frogman who was caught in Portsmouth harbour with the latest Russian cruiser during Bulganin's visit. Caused quite a diplomatic incident. Well, we were blamed for that – quite unjustly as it happens. And the Americans were getting difficult. Precious little help was coming from the C.I.A. Against all this, Ian's books seemed to drive home the point that our Secret Service was still the finest in the world. And the Dr No affair of course
did
tell the public of that little favour that we did the American space programme. That was the message M. wanted to get over loud and clear.’

‘Then why not let the truth come out completely, and have the fact of your identity made public?’

‘No. We couldn't have done that. To start with, Ian just wasn't that sort of writer. I think he could only write about this fictional James Bond he had created in the past. He had to have what he used to call his author's licence to play around with facts and characters a little when he felt inclined. And of course it suited M. to have this enormously successful publicity put out as so-called fiction. In any other form it would have been impossible.’

‘And you really didn't mind?’

‘Quite honestly I didn't – not by now. My few close friends were in the Service, and it amused me to find myself suddenly becoming a sort of popular hero. Remember it was only now – say 1956 and ’57 – that the books started catching on. Ian became suddenly excited at the idea of having a best-seller on his hands and I really couldn't tell him it had got to stop. We used to get on very well together.’

Another factor in the story of the books was that just about this time, Bond suddenly began to have the great successes of his career. Thanks to Sir James Molony he had avoided a recurrence of the trouble of the year before. Jamaica – and the fight with Dr No – had put him back on form. He was supremely confident, and fighting fit, and it was in this mood that he embarked upon the Goldfinger affair.

Again, one must be grateful to Ian Fleming for simply being there to describe this most extraordinary coup in
Goldfinger
. Perhaps he paid overmuch attention to the more bizarre aspects of that arch villain and capitalist extraordinary, Arno Goldfinger. His cheating habits at cards, the game of golf he played with Bond at Sandwich are of no great importance, when put against the real menace of the man. But they were the sort of personal details no writer can resist and Goldfinger's obsession – his Midas-like craving for gold – was at the heart of his whole criminal achievement. Had it not been for Bond, he would undoubtedly have robbed Fort Knox: and once that happened, once the gold reserves of the world's richest nation had disappeared, the whole financial structure of the West would have been at risk. By beating Goldfinger, Bond became the man who saved the world's economy.

But when he returned to London something distinctly odd occurred. He was expecting if not congratulations at least a certain warmth from M. There was no sign of it – rather the reverse. M.'s reception was distinctly frosty. The Prime Minister was anxious to offer Bond a knighthood, and the Americans had suggested the Congressional Medal of Honour. M. forbade both, and in a way that made it seem as if James Bond had actually been seeking honours.

It was then that Bond got the first inkling of the truth – M. was jealous. This was Bill Tanner's theory too. Bond said he really didn't mind about the knighthood.

‘And didn't you?’ I asked.

Bond smiled ruefully.

‘Sir
James Bond? It isn't really me – but May would have liked it, and of course Aunt Charmian. If it had been offered I'd probably have accepted. But it wasn't.’