She gave him a strained smile. ‘I’m afraid I don’t feel very good company this evening. It’s been rather a nerve-racking day. I’m so sorry.’
Bond made a perfunctory reply and rose, pushing back the table. ‘I’ll get the bill,’ he said, and watched her take the few steps to the entrance.
He sat down and lit a cigarette. He felt flat. He suddenly realized that he was tired. The stuffiness of the room hit him as it had hit him in the Casino in the early hours of the previous day. He called for the bill and took a last mouthful of champagne. It tasted bitter, as the first glass too many always does. He would have liked to have seen Mathis’s cheerful face and heard his news, perhaps even a word of congratulation.
Suddenly the note to Vesper seemed odd to him. It was not the way Mathis would do things. He would have asked them both to join him at the bar of the Casino or he would have joined them in the night-club, whatever his clothes. They would have laughed together and Mathis would have been excited. He had much to tell Bond, more than Bond had to tell him. The arrest of the Bulgarian, who had probably talked some more; the chase after the man with the stick; Le Chiffre’s movements when he left the Casino.
Bond shook himself. He hastily paid the bill, not waiting for the change. He pushed back his table and walked quickly through the entrance without acknowledging the good-nights of the maŒtre d’h“tel and the doorman.
He hurried through the gaming-room and looked carefully up and down the long entrance hall. He cursed and quickened his step. There were only one or two officials and two or three men and women in evening clothes getting their things at the vestiaire.
No Vesper. No Mathis.
He was almost running. He got to the entrance and looked along the steps to left and right down and amongst the few remaining cars.
The commissionaire came towards him.
‘A taxi, monsieur?’
Bond waved him aside and started down the steps, his eyes staring into the shadows, the night air cold on his sweating temples.
He was half-way down when he heard a faint cry, then the slam of a door way to the right. With a harsh growl and stutter from the exhaust a beetle-browed Citro‰n shot out of the shadows into the light of the moon, its front wheel drive dry-skidding through the loose pebbles of the forecourt.
Its tail rocked on its soft springs as if a violent struggle was taking place on the back seat.
With a snarl it raced out to the wide entrance gate in a spray of gravel. A small black object shot out of an open rear window and thudded into a flower-bed. There was a scream of tortured rubber as the tyres caught the boulevard in a harsh left-handed turn, the deafening echo of a Citro‰n’s exhaust in second gear, a crash into top, then a swiftly diminishing crackle as the car hared off between the shops on the main street towards the coast road.
Bond knew he would find Vesper’s evening bag among the flowers.
He ran back with it across the gravel to the brightly-lit steps and scrabbled through its contents while the commissionaire hovered round him.
The crumpled note was there amongst the usual feminine baggage.
Can you come out to the entrance hall for a moment? I have news for your companion.
REN? MATHIS
CHAPTER 15 – BLACK HARE AND GREY HOUND
It was the crudest possible forgery.
Bond leapt for the Bentley, blessing the impulse which had made him drive it over after dinner. With the choke full out, the engine answered at once to the starter and the roar drowned the faltering words of the commissionaire who jumped aside as the rear wheels whipped gravel at his piped trouser-legs.
As the car rocked to the left outside the gate, Bond ruefully longed for the front-wheel drive and low chassis of the Citroen. Then he went fast through the gears and settled himself for the pursuit, briefly savoring the echo of the huge exhaust as it came back at him from either side of the short main street through the town.