I couldn’t help saying anxiously, “Oh, but you shouldn’t have taken the risk. Supposing they’d changed the plan. Supposing they’d decided to do it as you walked down the street, or with a time bomb or something!”
He shrugged. “We thought of all that. It was a calculated risk, and it’s those I’m paid for taking.” He smiled. “Anyway, here I am. But it wasn’t nice walking down that street, and I was glad to get inside. The Mounties had taken over the flat opposite to Boris, and I knew I was all right and simply had to play the tethered goat while the sportsmen shot the wild game. I could have stayed out of the flat, hidden somewhere in the building until it was all over, but I had a hunch that the goat must be a real goat, and I was right, because at eleven o’clock the telephone rang and a man’s voice said. ‘Is that Mr. Boris?’ giving his assumed name. I said, ‘Yes. Who is dat?’ trying to sound foreign, and the man said, ‘Thank you. Telephone Directory here. We’re just checking the subscribers in your district. Night.’ I said good night and thanked my stars I had been there to take the bogus call that was to make sure Boris was at home.
“The last hour was nervous work. There was going to be a lot of gunfire and probably a lot of death, and no one likes the prospect of those things, even if they don’t expect to be hit. I had a couple of guns, heavy ones that really stop people, and at ten to twelve I took up my position to the right of the door in an angle of solid masonry and got ready just in case Uhlmann or one of the hoodlums managed to bust through the Mounties across the passage. To tell you the truth, as the minutes went by and I could imagine the killer car coming down the street and the men piling out and running softly up the stairs, I wished 1 had accepted the Mounties’ offer that one of their men should share this vigil, as they called it, with me. But it would have been a five-hour tête-à-tête and, apart from not knowing what we would talk about during all that time, I’ve always had a preference for operating alone. It’s just the way I’m made. Well, the minutes and the seconds ticked by, and then, bang on time, at five minutes to midnight, I heard a rush of rubber soles on the stairs and then all hell broke loose.”
James Bond paused. He rubbed a hand down over his face. It was a gesture that was either to clear his mind’s eye or to try and wipe some memory away from it. Then he lit another cigarette and went on.
“I heard the lieutenant in charge of the Mountie party shout, ‘It’s the law! Get ’em up!’ And then there was a mixture of single shots and bursts from the chopper”— he grinned—”sorry, sub-machine-gun, and, somebody screamed. Then the lieutenant shouted, ‘Get that man!’ and the next moment the lock blew off the door beside me and a man charged in. He held a smoking machine-gun tight against the hip, which is the way to use them, and he whirled from right to left in the bed-sitter, looking for Boris. I knew it was Uhlmann, the ex-Gestapo man. One’s had to get to know the smell of a German, and of a Russian for the matter of that, in my line of work, and I had him in my sights. I shot at his gun and blasted it out of his hands. But he was quick. He jumped behind the open door. The door was only a thin bit of wood. I couldn’t take a chance on him having another gun and firing first, so I sprayed a wide Z of bullets through the wood, bending my knees lower as I did so. Just as well I did this, because he fired a quick burst that nearly parted my hair when I was almost on my knees. But two of my bullets had got him, in the left shoulder and right hip as it turned out, and he crashed down behind the door and lay quiet.