“I see,” said Bond respectfully, wondering how the hell he could get the ABC telephone number out of her. “They certainly seem to think of everything.”
“Bet your life,” said the girl flatly. The subject was now boring. She gazed moodily into her Stinger, and then drank it down.
Bond sensed the beginning of a vin triste. “Care to go somewhere else?” he said, knowing that it had,been he who had killed the evening.
“Hell no,” she said dully. “Take me home. I’m getting tight. Why’n hell couldn’t you dream up something else to talk about except these goddam hoodlums?”
Bond paid the check and in silence they went down and out of the cool envelope of the restaurant into the sultry night that stank of petrol and hot asphalt.
“Staying at the Astor too,” she said as they got into a cab. She pressed into the far corner of the back seat and sat hunched up with her chin in her hand, looking out at the hideous deadly nightshade of the neon.
Bond said nothing. He looked out of the window and cursed his job. All he wanted to say to this girl was: “Listen. Come with me. I like you. Don’t be afraid. It can’t be worse than alone.” But if she said yes he would have been smart. And he didn’t want to be smart with this girl. It was his job to use her, but, whatever the job dictated, there was one way he would never ‘use’ this particular girl. Through the heart.
In front of the Astor, he helped her out on to the sidewalk and she stood with her back to him while he paid the driver. They walked up the steps in the stiff silence of a married couple after a bad evening ending in a row.
They got their keys at the deck and she said “five” to the boy on the elevator. She stood with her face to the door as they rode up. Bond saw that the knuckles of the hand that held her evening bag were white. At the fifth she walked quickly out and made no protest when Bond followed her. They walked round several corners until they came to her door. She bent down and fitted the key into the lock and pushed the door open. Then she turned in the entrance and faced him.
“Listen, you Bond person…”
It had started as the beginning of an angry speech, but then she paused and looked straight into his eyes, and Bond saw that her eyelashes were wet. And suddenly she had flung an arm round his neck and her face was against his and she was saying “Look after yourself, James. I don’t want to lose you.” And then she pulled his face against hers and kissed him once, hard and long on the lips, with a fierce tenderness that was almost without sex.
But, as Bond’s arms went round her and he started to return her kiss, she suddenly stiffened and fought her way free, and the moment was over.
With her hand on the knob of the open door, she turned and looked at him, and the sultry glow was back in her eyes.
“Now get away from me,” she said fiercely, and slammed the door and locked it.
10
STUDILLAC TO SARATOGA
JAMES BOND spent most of Saturday in his air-conditioned room at the Astor, avoiding the heat, sleeping, and composing a hundred-group cable addressed to the Chairman, Universal Export, London, He used a simple transposition code based on the fact that it was the sixth day of the week and that the date was the fourth of the eighth month.
The report concluded that the diamond pipeline began somewhere near Jack Spang, in the shape of Rufus B. Saye, and ended with Seraffimo Spang, and that the main junction in the pipe was the office of Shady Tree from which, presumably, the stones were fed into the House of Diamonds for cutting and marketing.
Bond requested London to put a close tail on Rufus B. Saye, but he warned that an individual known as ‘ABC’ seemed to be in direct command of the actual smuggling on behalf of the Spangled Mob, and that Bond had no clue to this individual’s identity except that he appeared to be located in London. Presumably only this man would provide a lead back to the actual source of the smuggled diamonds somewhere on the continent of Africa.