DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER BY IAN FLEMING

“Make me your partner,” Lucky informed him and the conversation was repeated for me by a man who was present. “No one would stick up a partner of Lucky “s.”

Kid Tatters thought of himself as an honourable guy in business sanctioned by the state, but he gave in and Lucky was his partner until he died. I asked a guy if Lucky put up any money or worked for his end of the bookmaker’s profit.

“All Lucky did was collect,” the fellow said. “But in those days, Kid Tatters made himself a good bargain. He was never bothered again.”

It was a stinking town, but all gambling towns arc.

Bond folded the cutting and put it in his pocket.

“It certainly sounds a long way from Lily Langtry,” he said after a pause.

“Sure,” said Leiter indifferently. “And Jimmy Cannon doesn’t let on he knows the big boys are back again, or their successors. But nowadays they’re owners, like our friends the Spangs, running their horses against the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts and x

the Woodwards, and now and again putting over a fast fix like Shy Smile. They aim to net fifty Grand on that job, and that’s better than knocking off a bookie for a few C’s. Sure, some of the names have changed around Saratoga. So’s the mud in the mud baths there.” A big road sign loomed up on the right. It said :

STOP AT THE SAGAMORE.

AIR-CONDITIONED. SLUMBERITE BEDS. TELEVISION.

FIVE MILES TO SARATOGA SPRINGS,

AND THE SAGAMORE-FOR GRACIOUS LIVING

“That means we get our tooth glasses wrapped in individual paper bags and the lavatory seat sealed with a strip of sanitized paper,” commented Leiter sourly. “And don’t think you can steal those Slumberite beds. Motels used to lose one most weeks. Now they screw them down.”

11

SHY SMILE

THE first thing that struck Bond about Saratoga was the green majesty of the elms, which gave the discreet avenues of Colonial-type clapboard houses some of the peace and serenity of a European watering place. And there were horses everywhere, being walked across the streets, with a policeman holding up the traffic, being coaxed out of horse-boxes around the sprawling groups of stables, cantering along the cinder borders of the roads, and being led to work on the exercise track alongside the race-course near the centre of the town. Stableboys and jockeys, white, negro and Mexican, hung about at the street corners and there was the whinny and the occasional trumpeting scream of horses in the air.

It was a mixture of Newmarket and Vichy, and it suddenly occurred to Bond that although he wasn’t in the least interested in horses, he rather liked the life that went with them.

Leiter dropped him at the Sagamore, which was on the edge of the town and only half a mile from the race-track, and went off about his business. They agreed to contact each other only at night or casually in. the crowds at the races, but to pay a dawn visit to the exercise track if Shy Smile was being given a last workout at sunrise the next day. Leiter said he would know about this, and much mare, after an evening around the stables and at The Tether, the all-night restaurant and bar that was the home of the racing underworld when they came up for the August meeting.

Bond checked himself in at the central office of the Sagamore, signed ‘James Bond, Hotel Astor, New York’, before a hatchet-faced woman whose steel-rimmed eyes assumed that Bond, like most of her other seekers after ‘gracious living’, intended to steal the towels and possibly the sheets, paid thirty dollars for three days and was given a key to Room 49.

He carried his bag across the parched lawn, between the beds of Beauty Bush and forced gladioli, and let himself into the neat spare double room with the armchair, the bedside table, the Currier and Ives print, the chest of drawers and the brown plastic ash-tray that are standard motel equipment all over America. The lavatory and shower were immaculate and neatly designed and, as Leiter had prophesied, the tooth glasses were contained in paper bags ‘fox your protection’ and the lavatory seat was barred by a strip of paper which said ‘sanitized’.

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