The whisky came. “I shall miss you out there, Felix,” said Bond, glad to get away from his thoughts. “No one to teach me the American way of life. And by the way, I thought you did the hell of a fine job over Shy Smile. Wish you could come along and tackle Spang senior with me. Together, I believe we could take him.”
Leiter looked affectionately at his friend. “That sort of rough stuff’s no good if you’re working for Pinkertons,” he said. “I’m after the guy too, but I’ve got to get him legitimate. If I can find out where the remains of the horse are buried, that hoodlum’s going to have an ugly time. It’s all right for you coming over here and tangling with him and getting away quick back to England. The gang has no idea who you are. From what you tell me they can never find out. But I’ve got to live here. If I had a shooting match or anything of that sort with Spang, his pals would get after me and after my family and after my friends. And they wouldn’t rest until they’d hurt me more than I ever hurt their pal. Even if I killed him. It’s not so funny to come home and find your sister’s house burned down with her inside it. And I’m afraid that could still happen in this country today. The gangs didn’t go out with Capone. Look at Murder Inc. Look at the Kefauver Report. Now the hoodlums don’t run liquor. They run governments. State governments like Nevada. Articles get written about it. And books and speeches. Sermons. But what the hell.” Leiter laughed abruptly. “Maybe you can strike a blow for Freedom, Home and Beauty with that old rusty equalizer of yours. Is it still the Beretta?”
“Yes,” said Bond, “still the Beretta.”
“You still got that double O number that means you’re allowed to kill?”
“Yes,” said Bond dryly. “I have.”
“Well then,” said Leiter, getting up. “Let’s go home to bed and give your shooting eye a rest. My guess is you’re going to need it.”
15
RUE DE LA PAY
THE plane made a big curve out over the sparkling blue Pacific and then swept round across Hollywood and gained height so as to make the Cajon Pass through the great golden cliff of the High Sierras.
Bond caught a glimpse of endless miles of palm-lined avenues, of sprinklers whirling over emerald lawns in front of gracious homes, of sprawling aircraft factories, of the outside lots of film studios with their jumble of gimcrack sets-city streets, Western ranches, what looked like a miniature motor-racing track, a full-size four-masted schooner planted in the ground-and then they were in the mountains and through them and over the interminable red desert that is the backstage of Los Angeles.
They flew over Barstow, the junction from which the single track of the Santa Fe strides off into the desert on its long run across the Colorado Plateau, skirting on their right the Calico Mountains, once the borax centre of the world, and leaving far away to the left the bone-strewn wastes of Death Valley. Then came more mountains, streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth, and then a glimpse of green in the midst of the blasted, Martian landscape, and then a slow- descent and ‘please fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarettes’.
The heat hit Bond’s face like a fist, and he had begun to sweat in the fifty yards between his cool plane and the blessed relief of the air-conditioned terminal building. The glass doors, operated by seeing-eye photo-electric cells, hissed open as he approached and slowly closed behind him, and already the slot-machines, four banks of them, were right in his path. It was natural to bring out the small change and jerk the handles and watch the lemons and the oranges and the cherries and the bell-fruits whirl round to their final click-pause-ting, followed by a soft mechanical sigh. Five cents, ten cents, a quarter. Bond gave them all a try, and only once two cherries and a bell fruit coughed back three coins for the one he had played.