The Ian Fleming Files (39 page)

Why should she be scared after what she had just endured in that English
hell? Those limey bastards wouldn’t let her sleep for three days. Every time
she dropped off they turned the music on full blast. The lights never went out.
They made her clean stairs and lavatories with a toothbrush while throwing
buckets of water over her. Whatever Krupp or his minions had in store couldn’t
possibly be worse, she told herself.

It was a lie. She knew it even as the thought was formed. They could and
would do a lot worse if they discovered she was assisting the NID of which
death would be the merciful part.

The Maybach slowed at the gate and rolled under the portcullis into the
motor court. Maria wondered if her legs would be able to move when she stepped
out of the car. Wouldn’t they see how petrified she was? Wasn’t it obvious? The
clink of metal startled her. It was Boris’s hook tapping against the door as he
opened it and helped her out.

Maria flicked her eyes skyward. It was blustery and the sky was rumbling
but there was no precipitation yet. The sea boomed at the base of the cliffs.
There was no view of the ocean from the courtyard, no view of anything except
of the sky and the rainclouds above the twelve-foot wall. The light in the
grandiose porch came on and the huge front door pulled inward. A servant held
the door for Frau Krupp. Maria shriveled. She was aware that Frau Krupp could
smell fear like a bloodhound and the more fear she inhaled the more ferocious
and aggressive she would become.

Maria boldly decided to pre-empt the conversation. “Guten tag, Frau
Krupp,” she croaked.

“Good evening, Maria. Thank you, Boris.” She dismissed him with a regal
wave.

Maria shivered, a little from the night air, but more from the fact that
she was now alone with the woman with the ice-cold stare. It didn’t help her
nerves that Frau Krupp’s hair was a rat’s maze of silver tresses that
conceivably concealed snakes. On more than one occasion Maria had heard a
servant refer to her as Medusa.

“My poor dear, what did they do to you?” The gorgon opened her pincer-like
arms and pulled Maria in close, patting the back of her head with her bony
hands. “I expect you have had quite a journey, my dear,” she said with a
claw-like grasp around Maria’s shoulder.

“Yes…” began Maria.

“And quite a story to tell,” cut in Frau Krupp. “I know what you are
thinking,” said the imperious fifty-two year old woman with the cobra curls.

Maria was certain that either her stomach’s growling or her teeth’s
chattering would give her away. “Oh?” she squeaked.

The elder woman thrust her scaly hand out and pressed it against Maria’s
bosom. “I can feel your heart galloping,” she said.

Her heart! Not her teeth or stomach. Her heart had betrayed her.

“You are anxious to see your beloved, my son, after being torn from his
arms by that snake in the grass. Naturally you are concerned about the pain you
have caused your fiancé and are anxious if he will forgive you. I was in love
once too. I remember how I hung on my husband’s every word and gesture. Come,
let me show you to your room. Everything is being prepared.”

Maria smiled uneasily and followed her into the main house. A man in
doctor’s scrubs flanked by a nervous young nurse approached.

“This shouldn’t take long,” Frau Krupp said with a thin smile.

“I don’t understand,” said Maria quivering.

“Doctor Schenk will conduct a full physical. In case that British agent
you escaped from corrupted you with any slow acting toxins.”

“I’m fine,” said Maria, her skin crawling.

“How do you know? We must let a trained physician examine you. There may
be fractures you don’t know about, internal problems.”

“I just need a good night’s rest.”

Frau Krupp’s hand lurched out and grasped her arm firmly. Boris appeared
and grabbed her other arm.

“Get off me!” she protested.

Doctor Schenk squirted air out of a hypodermic syringe then pressed down
the plunger and plugged it into her arm.

Wolfgang Krupp was eating dinner on the opposite end of a long dining
table from his mother.

“One considers her timing, of course,” he said, swilling a goblet of red
wine. “A week to go and she appears. It could very well be a desperate Allied
plot to learn our intentions. I will watch her closely.”

“How can you be so cavalier?” said his mother. “It is not enough she
eloped with an underling, you suspect she might be an enemy agent yet still it
is acceptable to welcome her into our house?”

“I don’t like it when you question my judgment, mother. I may not know
why she’s here, but I’m willing to take the risk. Suppose she is some sort of
double-agent sent to spy on us, why should I deny myself the pleasure of her
company? Or don’t you think that I can learn more from her than she can from
me?”

“You are allowing your weakness for her to cloud your judgment.”

“What is wrong with giving her the benefit of the doubt?”

“The doubt will vanish once she has shared your bed.”

“There is no need to be vulgar, mother. Until I am satisfied that I know
the truth about what befell her these past two weeks, I will reserve judgment.
Rest assured, I have reason enough to place a question mark over her. As long
as no one speaks or hints at anything in front of her, she will not learn
anything. I want her to tell me what happened many, many times until I am
convinced of its infallibility.”

“What if you are not convinced? What if she is lying?”

Krupp polished off his wine, dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a
napkin. “If she is lying, I will kill her.”

The door opened and a guard entered with Doctor Schenk, the nurse and
Maria who was walking unsteadily and had been made up in a long black evening
gown with glittering diamond earrings and a necklace that held one exquisite
blue rock the size of a peach pit.

“Darling,” said Krupp as he stood to kiss her hand and pull out her
chair, “we were just talking about you.”  

“She’s clean,” Doctor Schenk said emphatically.

Maria gnawed her lower lip.

Later, after a strange dinner which Maria could barely recall, she found
herself on the upper landing with Wolfgang outside the door leading to his
suite of rooms.

“I’m sorry I am so tired, Wolfgang,” she said with as much feeling as she
could marshal. “I will be more fun tomorrow. I know I have been a bad girl. It
is very generous of you to take me back. I promise to make it up to you.”

“Boris has just informed me that the window in your chamber was broken by
an albatross,” he said, his eyes roving over her body.

“An albatross?” she slurred, feeling the weight of her eyelids.

“He has patched the pane but your room is far too drafty and needs the
skill of a glazer. Tonight the bird is a good omen, bringing us together. Come,
my dear…” He cracked the door and beckoned her toward a sprawling four-poster
bed with velvet trimmings and billowing silk shrouds.

“I can barely keep my eyes open,” she said, trembling slightly. “I would
be no fun. I’m so tired.”

“I understand,” he said softly. “But I must ask you to remain awake for a
few moments longer. There is something I’d like to show you.”

“What is it?”

“A surprise.” He stooped and curled his powerful arms around her, lifted
her up and carried her into his room, kicked the door shut behind them.

Frau Krupp materialized from the shadows, paused outside her son’s room.

Beyond the door, Krupp set Maria gently down on the bed.

“I can’t accept any more jewels from you, Wolfgang. You have spoiled me
too much already.”

“It’s not a jewel,” he said going to a wall. His bulk obscured her view
as he slid a panel along its grooves and revealed a cavity beyond inlaid with
velvet. A display recess.

Maria’s curiosity had boosted her energy a little and she was now more
alert and interested in what was located within the wall.

Krupp stepped aside revealing the contents of the hidden recess. What
Maria saw caused her to faint but not before she emitted a bloodcurdling scream
that echoed forth through the stone chambers and long passageways of Fortress
Alderney and was heard by several of its inhabitants including the sentries at
the front gate. What she saw was the formaldehyde-filled head of Peter Ugarte,
his features twisted grotesquely, his eyes lifeless and bulging, waxed and
mounted on a pedestal spike and discreetly backlit like a priceless objet
d’art.

In the hallway, Frau Krupp heard the piercing cry and continued on her
way.

ANN O’NEILL had spent most of the last week smoking cigarettes and
downing gin, listening to the radio and staring into space as she pondered the
vicissitudes of life, the latest news from the home front and the game of
musical chairs she had been playing for the past four years with her husband
Shane O’Neill, boss Teddy Rothermere and boyfriend Ian Fleming. Now the husband
was dead, the boss preoccupied with a new mistress and the boyfriend
potentially the one she was going to settle down with and raise a child. She
knew thirty-two was on the older side for a mother and she had the nagging
feeling that it was probably now or never.

In the mornings she would scribble baby names in the margins of the
newspaper but by afternoon pessimism took over and all she could dwell on was
the pain of childbirth and the finality of parenthood. By nightfall she detested
Ian and wanted an abortion.

It was the morning of Saturday, January 18th and she had just received
word that Commander Ian Fleming had returned from his naval conference in the
Azores and would be home around noon. She had alerted the housekeeping crew and
granted them rare entrance into her pity pit. The place was spruced and the
larder stocked with black market items. She had her hair set and was wearing a
new plain weave paisley print rayon dress, a more feminine look than she had
been favoring of late which she knew Ian would appreciate. At exactly
two-thirty there was a gentle rat-a-tat at the door and she went running to
open it then paused and tried to look nonchalant.

The hotel manager smiled back at her. “Admiralty headquarters telephoned
to say Mister Fleming has been detained at the office and will be by later this
evening.”

She said nothing, shut the door, slouched back to her pink boudoir of
despair and unscrewed a bottle of Beefeater’s.

It was past midnight when she heard the key enter the latch and someone
creep in and slip into the bed beside her. She couldn’t decide whether to turn
or play possum. He put his hand gently on her stomach and kissed her throat.
She shuddered lightly, inhaling his musky scent. She pressed her mouth against
his and felt the coolness of his lips. He stroked her leg. She covered his
chest with kisses and they began to breathe heavily.

Afterwards they lay on the bed smoking cigarettes in the moonlight.

She was biting her nails. “How was the conference?”

“Boring as usual,” he said.

“Was it all work?”

“I met someone, a German woman, young and gorgeous,” he thought of saying
but instead he stumbled in the half-light to the other side of the room,
crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, searched about for another one and said,
“Working and sleeping. How was your week? Was it productive?”

“Peggy,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Peggy. If it’s a girl. Curtis if it’s a boy.”

“Curtis?”

“It’s in vogue. From English and Old French, means ‘courteous,’ like the
Spanish
Cortez
.”

“We’re going to have this conversation now?”

“What conversation?”

“Discussing names.”

“I thought you meant a different conversation,” she said. “You know,
the
conversation.”

“Have you made a decision?” he said indifferently.

She threw the sheets aside, tied her gown on and shuffled in her slippers
to the corner of the room, fixed herself a stiff drink. “It’s not my decision,
Ian. It’s a decision we both have to make. Did you give it any thought at all?”

“Of course I did,” he said feigning outrage.

She swirled her drink. The ice cubes crackled in the liquid. “You’re the
father. What do you want to do?”

“If you want to keep it, I’m prepared to do the right thing.”

“How romantic,” she said and gulped down her poison.

“This isn’t a romantic situation,” he riposted.

“No it bloody isn’t!” Her voice cracked. She poured more gin.

“Why are you drinking so much, Ann?”

“Why do you think?”

Neither of them said anything for a while.

“I don’t want to be married to someone because it was the right thing for
them to do,” she said. “But I’m going to have this baby.”

Fleming felt a peculiar sensation, a simultaneous feeling of dread and
excitement. He didn’t know whether to smash her face in or get down on one
knee. Was she his jailer or savior or both? Woman: man’s last stand. In the
end, he neither struck her nor proposed but slinked over to the bar and filled
a small square tumbler with bourbon and water, plunked some ice in and hoisted
it with a smile.

“To Curtis,” he said and took a big gulp.

A few days later it was another typically grey flinty morning in war-torn
London. Fleming’s stomach tightened as he strode down the Strand and rehearsed
in his head the lies he had prepared for his mother. He was wearing a dark blue
suit and his Eton Rambler’s tie with a brand new pair of gleaming loafers.

Turner House in Chelsea was three Thames-side cottages knocked into one
complex. The interior was festooned with gold wallpaper, peacock feathers in
urns, tall French cigarette posters and original Toulouse-Lautrec prints.

Fleming let himself in, shouting out as he went. “M! Halloo! I say, M!”

He shot upstairs clutching a gift following the source of classical music
booming through the house. Emerging from a small curling staircase, he entered
a vast sunlit avant garde workshop in the spacious octagonal loft which stood
in stark contrast to the musty old-world decor of downstairs.

Lady Fleming was focused on a large abstract expressionist canvass
composed of swaths of yellow shades from amber through saffron and gold. She
was wearing a white pinafore over a black mourning dress.

“Good morning, mother,” he said lowering the loud music.

“What’s good about it? Leave my gramophone alone!” She turned it back up.

He kissed her cheek. “Well it’s not raining for one.”

She grabbed a crowbar and jimmied open an industrial sized paint tub.
 She filled jars, mixed colors. Her expression was wan.

“I brought you something, M. Take a look, you’ll like it.”

“Stand back!” she cried. “Darling you really should notify Felicity next
time before calling.” She sent several rolls of paper crashing onto the floor
from a piled-up stack, sorted through them noisily.

“I didn’t realize I needed an appointment,” he said sourly.

“Don’t be moody. You can’t just come and go. My fault for letting you
live at home till you were thirty.”

“Twenty-eight,” he unwisely corrected her, drawing a sharp glance.

He took the gift back. “I’ll open it for you.” He tore the wrapping off
revealing a framed newspaper article. He read the text aloud: “Valentine
Fleming, an appreciation by Winston Churchill, October, 1916.”

His mother scowled. “Oh, Ian! That old thing?! Who cares?” She unfurled a
six-by-six canvas, smoothed it, began treating it.

“Thought it might look nice here in your new studio.”

“I keep these walls bare on purpose,” she snapped.

“Why?”

She paused. “I need a place where I’m not reminded of death. Careful!”
She started drip-splashing paint.

He looked at her in puzzlement. “What are you doing, mother?”

“Working. What’s it look like?”

Fleming studied the canvas. “But it’s all the same color?”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“I don’t have time to explain the last two thousand years of art to you,
Ian,” she said.

“I didn’t know art needed to be explained to be appreciated,” he said
smugly.

“Don’t be a clever clogs. Are you going to tell me where you vanished to
last week or did you stomp all this way to give me an old newspaper article?”

He sighed. “I told Peter over the telephone. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Why would he talk to me? I’m just his mother. He has the world fawning
at his feet. Well at least he’ll have something to do after the war. Unlike
some. I’ve given up on Richard but I expect more from you. Have you asked
Godfrey for a job yet?”

“You don’t ask for a job at the NID, mother. Either you are offered one
or not.”

“It might help if you volunteered to do more. Six years later and you’re
still a pen-pusher. Let me guess, Godfrey dispatched you to another shipping
conference? Is that where you were?”

“I’m in the middle of a mission that could alter the course of the war,”
he thought of telling her. But instead he said: “Actually, it was a conference
in Cairo on the Suez Canal. They sent me in the
Tantalus
.”

“What is a Tantalus? A hot-air balloon?”

“A very important diesel-electric submarine.”

His mother stopped what she was doing and looked at him curiously. “You
traveled to Cairo on a submarine?”

He smiled proudly.

Lady Fleming burst into high-pitched laughter. “Did you find Atlantis,
dear?”   

There was a polite tap at the door. A pretty servant girl meekly peered
in bearing a tea tray.

“Not now, Felicity!” barked Lady Fleming causing the girl to shrivel.

Fleming got a quick eyeful before she left and decided to head off in
pursuit. “I’ll go hang this downstairs,” he said, indicating to the framed
article.

“No, you won’t!” his mother snarled. “I don’t want that thing hanging
anywhere in my house. Got enough reminders around here of the men taken from
me. First your father now your brother Michael. Have some compassion for your
long suffering mother.”

“I don’t understand you. Father was a member of parliament, a war hero, a
friend of Churchill’s and you act ashamed! Like you married a gypsy. Or a
criminal!”

“You think too much that’s your problem. Try to channel that mental
energy into formulating a post-war employment plan. Gallivanting about playing
Captain Nemo, really, Ian. Isn’t it time you knuckled down and focused on some
kind of end game here as the war draws to a close?”

Fleming bit his tongue, flashed his famous smile and pecked her on the
cheek. “Always a pleasure,” he said warmly. “Sorry I can’t stay, have to see a
man about a dog. I love you.” He looked at her expectantly.

“Don’t say that Ian. You know it’s hard for me to say back.”

“I know. You don’t have to. Good luck with the painting.”

Lady Fleming stared thoughtfully at her son and for a moment it looked
like the brittle shell might crack. She stepped forward and widened her arms
tentatively to hug him when the paint brush in her hand dribbled yellow paint
all over his shiny new shoes. Fleming looked down at his feet and then back at
up at her. They both laughed.

Later that afternoon, Fleming was in a recording booth deep in the bowels
of The Citadel, his skull clamped by huge headphones as he stood before a
microphone gargling salt water. He swished, soaked his larynx and spat into a
spittoon. Behind him visible through a glass wall in the control room sat his
perky but efficient secretary, the flame-haired filing machine June Hayes,
poised in her customary position - hunched over a notepad with a sharpened
number two pencil at the ready.

June was handsome without being beautiful, with a flat chest, glasses
that did nothing for her and wide mannish shoulders. Her red locks were held
back with pins in the popular Victory style and she was wearing an all-encompassing
gabardine body suit dress of pale blue light woolen with double-breasted bodice
and pleats in the skirt. She stared lovingly at Ian Fleming through the heavy
glass of the soundproofed booth as he tapped the end of the microphone and
leant in as if to kiss it, saying “Testing, testing.”

The needles on the volume controls spiked.

June said “I love you” into the bulletproof glass puzzling Fleming who
mouthed back “What?”

She smiled impishly, raised her hand so he could see and counted down
with three fingers.

On cue he began to speak rapid idiomatic German into the mic while June
commenced an instantaneous transcript of the broadcast.

“It is only a matter of time,” Fleming said authoritatively, “before the
Russians march through Berlin. People of Germany flee now! Hitler doesn’t have
the fuel to fight a war on two fronts. There is not enough petrol in the world
to feed his rusting Panzers.”

One floor up, phone operators furiously plugged and unplugged cables as
Fleming’s voice came over on a small speaker.

Fleming imagined the effect his words were having as he spoke over the
European airwaves — pissed-off Volkswagen drivers fiddling with radio dials;
preoccupied Hausfraus kneading dough in the kitchen with no choice but to
listen; school kids giggling at the broadcast interruption causing chaos for
their teachers.

The door to the control room silently opened and Godfrey entered in a
bluster, approached the glass with a scowl and wound his finger in a circle at
Fleming, urging him to wrap it up. Fleming garbled a rather trite “Auf
Wiedersehn,” unplugged himself from the headphones and followed Godfrey out and
upstairs. June looked on with a concerned expression, watched the back of her
boss depart and sighed.

Fleming entered the Operations Room which was heavily barricaded and
impenetrable to natural light. He flinched at the harsh stabs of the overhead
fluorescent strips and feared his photosensitivity signaled the onset of
another head-rattler. His anxiety heightened the instant he saw Churchill’s Boys
sans Dilly Knox standing, not sitting mind you, standing in wait for him.
  

Fleming stood with an erect carriage and focused on Godfrey acknowledging
Hargreaves, Quacker and Blake vaguely but zeroing in on the one hardnosed face
of the gang which at least held some potential for sympathy.

“In case you haven’t heard,” said Godfrey, “Dilly Knox is in St.
Joseph’s.”

“St. Joseph’s in the East End, sir?”

“That’s right,” said Godfrey in a hurry.