Bond was spending his last week in the Barbey house, and after calling there to pick up their bags, they drove out to the end of Long Pier and left the car in the Customs shed. The gleaming white yacht lay half a mile out in the roadstead. They took a pirogue with an outboard motor across the glassy bay and through the opening in the reef. The Wawekrest was not beautiful – the breadth of beam and cluttered superstructure stunted her lines – but Bond could see at once that she was a real ship, built to cruise the world and not just the Florida Keys. She seemed deserted, but as they came alongside two smart-looking sailors in white shorts and singlets appeared and stood by the ladder with boat-hooks ready to fend the shabby pirogue off the yacht’s gleaming paint. They took the two bags and one of them slid back an aluminium hatch and gestured for them to go down. A breath of what seemed to Bond to be almost freezing air struck him as he went through and down a few steps into the lounge.
The lounge was empty. It was not a cabin. It was a room of solid richness and comfort with nothing to associate it with the interior of a ship. The windows behind the half-closed venetian blinds were full size, as were the deep armchairs round the low central table. The carpet was the deepest pile in pale blue. The walls were panelled in a silvery wood and the ceiling was off-white. There was a desk with the usual writing-materials and a telephone. Next to the big gramophone was a sideboard laden with drinks. Above the sideboard was what looked like an extremely good Renoir – the head and shoulders of a pretty dark-haired girl in a black and white striped blouse. The impression of a luxurious living-room in a town house was completed by a large bowl of white and blue hyacinths on the central table and by the tidy range of magazines to one side of the desk.
“What did I tell you, James?”
Bond shook his head admiringly. “This is certainly the way to treat the sea – as if it damned well didn’t exist.” He breathed in deeply. “What a relief to get a mouthful of fresh air. I’d almost forgotten what it tastes like.”
“It’s the stuff outside that’s fresh, feller. This is canned.” Mr Milton Krest had come quietly into the room and was standing looking at them. He was a tough, leathery man in his early fifties. He looked hard and fit, and the faded blue jeans, military-cut shirt and wide leather belt suggested that he made a fetish of doing so – looking tough. The pale brown eyes in the weather-beaten face were slightly hooded and their gaze was sleepy and contemptuous. The mouth had a downward twist that might be humorous or disdainful – probably the latter – and the words he had tossed into the room, innocuous in themselves except for the patronizing ‘feller’ had been tossed like small coin to a couple of coolies. To Bond the oddest thing about Mr Krest was his voice. It was a soft, most attractive lisping through the teeth. It was exactly the voice of the late Humphrey Bogart. Bond ran his eyes down the man from the sparse close-cropped black and grey hair, like iron filings sprinkled over the bullet head, to the tattooed eagle above a fouled anchor on the right forearm, and then down to the naked leathery feet that stood nautically square on the carpet. He thought: this man likes to be thought a Hemingway hero. I’m not going to get on with him.
Mr Krest came across the carpet and held out his hand. “You Bond? Glad to have you aboard, sir.”
Bond was expecting the bone-crushing grip and parried it with stiffened muscles.
“Free-diving or aqualung?”
“Free, and I don’t go deep. It’s only a hobby.”
“Whadya do the rest of the time?”
“Civil Servant.”
Mr Krest gave a short barking laugh. “Civility and Servitude. You English make the best goddam butlers and valets in the world. Civil Servant, you say? I reckon we’re likely to get along fine. Civil Servants are just what I like to have around me.”