‘Now get a drink and some lunch and a rest,’ he ordered Bond. ‘For me, I must get my nose quickly into this affair before the police have muddied the trail with their big black boots.’
Mathis turned off the radio and waved an affectionate farewell. The door slammed and silence settled on the room. Bond sat for a while by the window and enjoyed being alive.
Later, as Bond was finishing his first straight whisky ‘on the rocks’ and was contemplating the pat‚ de foie gras and cold langouste which the waiter had just laid out for him, the telephone rang.
‘This is Mademoiselle Lynd.’
The voice was low and anxious.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, quite.’
‘I’m glad. Please take care of yourself.’
She rang off.
Bond shook himself, then he picked up his knife and selected the thickest of the pieces of hot toast.
He suddenly thought: two of them are dead, and I have got one more on my side. It’s a start.
He dipped the knife into the glass of very hot water which stood beside the pot of Strasbourg porcelain and reminded himself to tip the waiter doubly for this particular meal.
CHAPTER 7 – ROUGE ET NOIR
Bond was determined to be completely fit and relaxed for a gambling session which might last most of the night. He ordered a masseur for three o’clock. After the remains of his luncheon had been removed, he sat at his window gazing out to sea until there came a knock on the door as the masseur, a Swede, presented himself
Silently he got to work on Bond from his feet to his neck, melting the tensions in his body and calming his still twanging nerves. Even the long purpling bruises down Bond’s left shoulder and side ceased to throb, and when the Swede had gone Bond fell into a dreamless sleep.
He awoke in the evening completely refreshed.
After a cold shower, Bond walked over to the Casino. Since the night before he had lost the mood of the tables. He needed to re-establish that focus which is half mathematical and half intuitive and which, with a slow pulse and a sanguine temperament, Bond knew to be the essential equipment of any gambler who was set on winning.
Bond had always been a gambler. He loved the dry riffle of the cards and the constant unemphatic drama of the quiet figures round the green tables. He liked the solid, studied comfort of card-rooms and casinos, the well-padded arms of the chairs, the glass of champagne or whisky at the elbow, the quiet unhurried attention of good servants. He was amused by the impartiality of the roulette ball and of the playing-cards – and their eternal bias. He liked being an actor and a spectator and from his chair to take part in other men’s dramas and decisions, until it came to his own turn to say that vital ‘yes’ or ‘no’, generally on a fifty-fifty chance.
Above all, he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued. But he was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck. When that happened he knew that he too would be branded with the deadly question-mark he recognized so often in others, the promise to pay before you have lost: the acceptance of fallibility.
But on this June evening when Bond walked through the ‘kitchen’ into the salle priv‚e, it was with a sensation of confidence and cheerful anticipation that he changed a million francs into plaques of fifty mille and took a seat next to the chef de partie at Roulette Table Number 1.