“I used to do it a bit. I’ve brought my gear. Will you show me some good bits of reef sometime?”
The girl looked pointedly at her watch. “I might do. It’s time I went.” She got up. “Thanks for the drink. I’m afraid I can’t take you back. I’m going the other way. They’ll get you a taxi here.” She shuffled her feet into her sandals.
Bond followed the girl through the restaurant to her car. She got in and pressed the starter. Bond decided to risk another snub. He said, “Perhaps I’ll see you at the Casino tonight, Dominetta.”
“Praps.” She put the car pointedly into gear. She took another look at him. She decided that she did want to see him again. She said, “But for God’s sake don’t call me Dominetta. I’m never called that. People call me Domino.” She gave him a brief smile, but it was a smile into the eyes. She raised a hand. The rear wheels spat sand and gravel and the little blue car whirled out along the driveway to the main road. It paused at the intersection and then, as Bond watched, turned righthanded toward Nassau.
Bond smiled. He said, “Bitch,” and walked back into the restaurant to pay his bill and have a taxi called.
12.
The Man from the C.I.A.
The taxi took Bond out to the airport at the other end of the island by the Interfield Road. The man from the Central Intelligence Agency Was due in by Pan American at one-fifteen. His name was Larkin, F. Larkin. Bond hoped he wouldn’t be a muscle-bound ex-college man With a crew-cut and a desire to show up the incompetence of the British, the backwardness of their little Colony, and the clumsy ineptitude of Bond, in order to gain credit with his chief in Washington. Bond hoped that at any rate he would bring the equipment he had asked for before he left London through Section A, who looked after the liaison with C.I.A. This was the latest transmitter and receiver for agents in the field, so that the two of them could be independent of cable offices, and have instant communication with London and Washington, and the most modern portable Geiger counters for operating both on land and under water. One of the chief virtues of C.I.A., in Bond’s estimation, was the excellence of their equipment, and he had no false pride about borrowing from them.
New Providence, the island containing Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, is a drab sandy slab of land fringed with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. But the interior is nothing but a waste of low-lying scrub, casuarinas, mastic, and poison-wood with a large brackish lake at the western end. There are birds and tropical flowers and palm trees, imported fully grown from Florida, in the beautiful gardens of the millionaires round the coast, but in the middle of the island there is nothing to attract the eye but the skeleton fingers of spidery windmill pumps sticking up above the pine barrens, and Bond spent the ride to the airport reviewing the morning.
He had arrived at seven a.m. to be met by the Governor’s A.D.C. —a mild error of security—and taken to the Royal Bahamian, a large old-fashioned hotel to which had recently been applied a thin veneer of American efficiency and tourist gimmicks—ice water in his room, a Cellophane-wrapped basket of dingy fruit “with the compliments of the Manager,” and a strip of “sanitized” paper across the lavatory seat. After a shower and a tepid, touristy breakfast on his balcony overlooking the beautiful beach, he had gone up to Government House at nine o’clock for a meeting with the Commissioner of Police, the Chief of Immigration and Customs, and the Deputy Governor. It was exactly as he had imagined it would be. The MOST IMMEDIATES and the TOP SECRETS had made a superficial impact and he was promised full cooperation in every aspect of his assignment, but the whole business was clearly put down as a ridiculous flap and something that must not be allowed to interfere with the normal routine of running a small, sleepy colony, nor with the comfort and happiness of the tourists. Roddick, the Deputy Governor, careful, middle-of-the-way man with a ginger mustache and gleaming pince-nez, had put the whole affair in a most sensible light. “You see, Commander Bond, in our opinion—and we have most carefully debated all the possibilities, all the, er, angles, as our American friends would say—it is inconceivable that a large four-engined plane could have been hidden anywhere within the confines of the Colony. The only airstrip cable of taking such a plane—am I right, Harling?— is here in Nassau. So far as a landing on the sea is concerned, a, er, ditching I think they call it, we have been in radio contact with the Administrators on all the larger outer islands and the replies are all negative. The radar people at the meteorological station . . .”