“Yes, I know the outlines,” said Bond. “But I’d be glad for you to fill them in some time. And now what?”
“Whatever ya say, Mister.”
Bond suddenly felt he had had enough of the ghastly glitter of The Strip. He only wanted to get indoors and out of the heat, have some lunch and perhaps a swim and take things easy until the night. He said so.
“Suits me,” said Cureo. “Guess ya shouldn’t get into much trouble ya first night. Take it easy though and act kmda natural. If ya got work to do in Vegas ya better wait till ya know ya way around. And watch the gambling, friend.” He chuckled. “Y’ever hear of those Silence Towers they have in India? They say it takes those vultures only twenty minutes to strip a guy to the bones. Guess they take a bit longer at The Tiara. Mebbe the Unions slow ’em down.” The driver banged the gear lever into first. “All ‘a same,” he said, watching the traffic in his driving mirror, “there was one guy left Vegas with a hundred Grand.” He paused, waiting for a chance to cross the parkway. “Only thing, he had half a million when he started to play.”
The car swung across the traffic and under the pillared portico in front of the wide glass doors of the sprawling, pink stucco building. The bell captain, in a sky blue uniform, opened the cab door and reached in for Bond’s bag. Bond stepped out into the heat.
As he shouldered his way through the glass doors he heard Ernie Cureo say to the captain: “Some crazy Limey. Hired me for fifty bucks a day! Whaddya know about that?”
And then the door swung to behind him and the beautiful cold . air welcomed him with a chill kiss into the glittering palace of the man called Seraffimo Spang.
16
THE TIARA
BOND had lunch in the air-conditioned ‘Sunburst Room’ beside the big kidney-shaped swimming pool (LIFESAVER: BOBBY BILBO-POOL SCOURED DAILY BY HYDRO JET, said a sign) and having decided that only about one per cent of the customers were fit to wear bathing suits, walked very slowly through the heat across the twenty yards of baked lawn that separated his building from the central establishment, took off his clothes and threw himself naked on his bed.
There were six buildings containing the bedrooms of The Tiara and they were named after jewels. Bond was on the ground floor of ‘The Turquoise’. Its motif was egg-shell blue with furnishing materials of dark blue and white. His room was extremely comfortable and equipped with expensive and well-designed modern furniture of a silvery wood that might have been birch. There was a radio beside his bed and a television set with a seventeen-inch screen beside the broad window. Outside the window there was a small enclosed breakfast patio. It was very quiet and there was no sound from the thermostat-controlled air-conditioning and Bond was almost instantly asleep.
He slept for four hours, and during this time the wire-recorder, concealed in the base of the bedside table, wasted several hundred feet of wire on dead silence.
When he awoke it was seven. The wire-recorder noted that he picked up the telephone and asked for Miss Tiffany Case and after a pause said, “Would you please tell her that Mr James Bond called” and put back the receiver. It then picked up the noise of Bond moving about the room, the hiss of the shower and, at 7.30, the click of his key in the lock as he went out and shut the door.
Half an hour later the recorder heard a knock on his door and then, after a pause, the noise of the door opening. A man dressed like a waiter, with a basket of fruit bearing a note saying, ‘With the Compliments of the Management’, came into the room and walked quickly over to the bedside table. He undid two screws, removed the reel o£ fine wire on the recorder’s turntable, replaced it with a fresh reel, put the basket of fruit on the dressing table and went out and closed the door.
And then for several hours the recorder whirred silently on, recording nothing.