CASINO ROYALE by Ian Fleming

Mathis laughed delightedly.

‘I suppose you think that’s paid me back for knowing what the Muntzes were up to. Well, I’ll call it quits. Incidentally, we’ve got them in the bag. They were just some minor fry hired for the occasion. We’ll see they get a few years.’

He rose hastily as the doctor stormed into the room and took one look at Bond.

‘Out,’ he said to Mathis. ‘Out and don’t come back.’

Mathis just had time to wave cheerfully to Bond and call some hasty words of farewell before he was hustled through the door. Bond heard a torrent of heated French diminishing; down the corridor. He lay back exhausted, but heartened by all he had heard. He found himself thinking of Vesper as he quickly drifted off into a troubled sleep.

There were still questions to be answered, but they could wait.

CHAPTER 20 – THE NATURE OF EVIL

Bond made good progress. When Mathis came to see him three days later he was propped up in bed and his arms were free. The lower half of his body was still shrouded in the oblong tent, but he looked cheerful and it was only occasionally that a twinge of pain narrowed his eyes.

Mathis looked crestfallen.

‘Here’s your cheque,’ he said to Bond. ‘I’ve rather enjoyed walking around with forty million francs in my pocket, but I suppose you’d better sign it and I’ll put it to your account with the Cr‚dit Lyonnais. There’s no sign of our friend from SMERSH. Not a damn trace. He must have got to the villa on foot or on a bicycle because you heard nothing of his arrival and the two gunmen obviously didn’t. It’s pretty exasperating. We’ve got precious little on this SMERSH organization and neither has London. Washington said they had, but it turned out to be the usual waffle from refugee interrogation, and you know that’s about as much good as interrogating an English man-in-the street about his own Secret Service, or a Frenchman about the DeuxiŠme.’

‘He probably came from Leningrad to Berlin via Warsaw,’ said Bond. ‘From Berlin they’ve got plenty of routes open to the rest of Europe. He’s back home by now being told off for not shooting me too. I fancy they’ve got quite a file on me in view of one or two of the jobs M’s given me since the war. He obviously thought he was being smart enough cutting his initial in my hand.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Mathis. ‘The doctor said the cuts looked like a square M with a tail to the top. He said they didn’t mean anything.’

‘Well, I only got a glimpse before I passed out, but I’ve seen the cuts several times while they were being dressed and I’m pretty certain they are the Russian letter for SH. It’s rather like an inverted M with a tail. That would make sense; SMERSH is short for SMYERT SHPIONAM – Death to Spies – and he thinks he’s labelled me as a SHPION. It’s a nuisance because M will probably say I’ve got to go to hospital again when I get back to London and have new skin grafted over the whole of the back of my hand. It doesn’t matter much. I’ve decided to resign.’

Mathis looked at him with his mouth open.

‘Resign?’ he asked incredulously. ‘What the hell for?’

Bond looked away from Mathis. He studied his bandaged hands.

‘When I was being beaten up,’ he said, ‘I suddenly liked the idea of being alive. Before Le Chiffre began, he used a phrase which stuck in my mind . . . “playing Red Indians”. He said that’s what I had been doing. Well, I suddenly thought he might be right.

‘You see,’ he said, still looking down at his bandages, ‘when one’s young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong, but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it’s easy to pick out one’s own villains and heroes and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains.’

He looked obstinately at Mathis.

‘Well, in the last few years I’ve killed two villains. The first was in New York – a Japanese cipher expert cracking our codes on the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA building in the Rockefeller centre, where the Japs had their consulate. I took a room on the fortieth floor of the next-door skyscraper and I could look across the street into his room and see him working. Then I got a colleague from our organization in New York and a couple of Remington thirty-thirty’s with telescopic sights and silencers. We smuggled them up to my room and sat for days waiting for our chance. He shot at the man a second before me. His job was only to blast a hole through the windows so that I could shoot the Jap through it. They have tough windows at the Rockefeller centre to keep the noise out. It worked very well. As I expected, his bullet got deflected by the glass and went God knows where. But I shot immediately after him, through the hole he had made. I got the Jap in the mouth as he turned to gape at the broken window.’

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