Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 176
Bond was beat, utterly defeated by exhaustion. Now there was nothing for him but to get away and somehow stay alive. The bomb was immobilized, the Chariot gone, careering in circles over the sea. Largo was finished. Bond summoned the remains of his strength and sluggishly dived down towards his last hope, a refuge among the coral.
Almost lazily, Largo, his strength unimpaired, came down after him, swimming in a giant, easy crawl. Bond swerved in among the coral heads. A white sand passage showed up and he followed it, then there was a fork. Bond, trusting to the small extra protection of his rubber suit, followed the narrower lane between the sharp clumps. But now a black shadow was above him, following him. Largo had not bothered to get into the channel. He was swimming above the coral, looking down, watching Bond, biding his time. Bond looked up. There was a gleam of teeth round the mouthpiece. Largo knew he had got him. Bond flexed his fingers to get more life into them. How could he hope to defeat those great hands, those hands that were machine-tools?
And now the narrow passage was widening. There was the glint of a sandy channel ahead. There was no room for Bond to turn round. He could only swim on into the open trap. Bond stopped and stood. It was the only thing to do. Largo had him like a rat in a trap. But at least Largo would have to come in and get him. Bond looked upwards. Yes, the great gleaming body, followed by its string of silver bubbles, was foraging carefully on into the open water. Now, swiftly, like a pale seal, he dived down to the firm sand and stood facing Bond. Slowly he advanced between the walls of coral, the big hands held forward for the first hold. At ten paces he stopped. His eyes swivelled sideways to a coral clump. His right hand shot out at something and gave a quick yank. When the hand pulled back, it was writhing, writhing with eight more fingers. Largo held the baby octopus in front of him like a small, waving flower. His teeth drew away from the rubber mouthpiece and the clefts of a smile appeared in his cheeks. He put up one hand and significantly tapped his mask. Bond bent down and picked up a rock covered with seaweed. Largo was being melodramatic. A rock in Largo’s mask would be more efficient than having an octopus slapped across his. Bond wasn’t worried by the octopus. Only a day before he had been in company with a hundred of them. It was Largo’s longer reach that worried him.
Largo took a pace forward and then another. Bond crouched, backing carefully, so as not to cut his rubber skin, into the narrow passage. Largo came on, slowly, deliberately. In two more paces he would attack.
Bond caught a glint of movement out in the open behind Largo. Someone to the rescue? But the glint was white, not black. It was one of theirs!
Largo leaped forward.
Bond kicked off the coral and dived down for Largo’s groin, the jagged rock in his hand. But Largo was ready. His knee came up hard against Bond’s head and at the same time his right hand came swiftly down and clamped the small octopus across Bond’s mask. Then from above, both his hands came down and got Bond by the neck, lifted him up like a child and held him at arm’s length, pressing.
Bond could see nothing. Vaguely he felt the slimy tentacles groping over his face, getting a grip of the mouthpiece between his teeth, pulling. But the blood was roaring in his head and he knew he was gone.
Slowly he sank to his knees. But how, why was he sinking? What had happened to the hands at his throat? His eyes, squeezed tight in agony, opened and there was light. The octopus, now at his chest, let go and shot away among the coral. In front of him Largo, Largo with a spear sticking horribly through his neck, lay kicking feebly on the sand. Behind him and looking down at the body, stood a small, pale figure fitting another spear into an underwater gun. The long hair flowed round her head like a veil in the luminous sea.
Bond got slowly to his feet. He took a step forward. Suddenly he felt his knees beginning to give. A wave of blackness began to creep up over his vision. He leant against the coral, his mouth slackening round the oxygen tube. Water seeped into his mouth. No! he said to himself. No! Don’t let that happen!
A hand took one of his. But Domino’s eyes behind her mask were somewhere else. They were blank, lost. She was ill! What was the matter with her? Bond was suddenly awake again. His eyes took in the blood patches on her bathing dress, the angry red marks on her body between the scraps of bikini. They would both die, standing there, unless he did something about it. Slowly his leaden legs began to stir the black fins. They were moving up. It wasn’t so difficult after all. And now, vaguely, her own fins were helping.
The two bodies reached the surface together and lay, face downwards, in the shallow troughs of the waves.
The oyster light of dawn slowly turned pink. It was going to be a beautiful day.
Chapter 24. ‘TAKE IT EASY, MR BOND’
FELIX LEITER CAME into the white, antiseptic room and closed the door conspiratorially behind him. He came and stood beside the bed where Bond lay on the edge of drugged sleep. ‘How’s it going, feller?’
‘Not bad. Just doped.’
‘Doctor said I wasn’t to see you. But I thought you might care to hear the score. Okay?’
‘Sure.’ Bond struggled to concentrate. He didn’t really care. All he could think about was the girl.
‘Well, I’ll make it quick. Doctor’s just doing his rounds and I’ll get hell if he finds me here. They’ve recovered both bombs, and Kotze – the physicist chap – is singing like a bird. Seems SPECTRE’s a bunch of really big-time hoodlums – ex-operators of SMERSH, the Mafia, the Gestapo – all the big outfits. Headquarters in Paris. Top man’s called Blofeld, but the bastard got away – or anyway they haven’t caught up with him yet, according to C.I.A. Probably Largo’s radio silence warned him. Must be quite a Mister Genius. Kotze says SPECTRE’s banked millions of dollars since they got going five or six years ago. This job was going to be the final haul. We were right about Miami. It was going to be Target No. 2. Same sort of operation. They were going to plant the second bomb in the yacht basin.’
Bond smiled weakly. ‘So now everybody’s happy.’
‘Oh sure. Except me. Haven’t been able to get away from my damned radio until now. Valves were almost blowing. And there’s a pile of cipher stuff from M. just longing for you to get around to it. Thank God the top brass from C.I.A. and a team from your outfit are flying in this evening to take charge. Then we can hand over and watch our two Governments getting snarled up over the epilogue – what to tell the public, what to do with these SPECTRE guys, whether to make you a lord or a duke, how to persuade me to run for President – tricky little details like that. And then we’ll damned well get away and have ourselves a ball some place. Maybe you’d care to take that girl along? Hell, she’s the one that rates the medals! The guts! They cottoned on to her Geiger counter. God knows what that bastard Largo did to her. But she didn’t sing – not a damned word! Then, when the team was under way, she somehow got herself out of the cabin porthole, with her gun and aqualung, and went to get him. Got him, and saved your life into the bargain! I swear I’ll never call a girl “frail” again – not an Italian girl anyway.’ Leiter cocked an ear. He moved swiftly to the door. ‘Hell, there’s that damned medic gumshoeing down the corridor! Be seeing you, James.’ He quickly turned the door handle, listened for a moment, and slipped out of the room.
Feebly, desperately, Bond called, ‘Wait! Felix! Felix!’ But the door had closed. Bond sank back and lay staring at the ceiling. Slowly anger boiled up inside him – and panic. Why in hell didn’t someone tell him about the girl? What the hell did he care about all the rest? Was she all right? Where was she? Was she...
The door opened. Bond jerked himself upright. He shouted furiously at the white-coated figure. ‘The girl. How is she? Quick! Tell me!’
Dr Stengel, the fashionable doctor of Nassau, was not only fashionable but a good doctor. He was one of the Jewish refugee doctors who, but for Hitler, would have been looking after some big hospital in a town the size of Düsseldorf. Instead, rich and grateful patients had built a modern clinic for him in Nassau where he treated the natives for shillings and the millionaires and their wives for ten guineas a visit. He was more used to handling overdoses of sleeping pills and the ailments of the rich and old than multiple abrasions, curare poisoning and odd wounds that looked more as if they belonged to the days of the pirates. But these were Government orders, and under the Official Secrets Act at that. Dr Stengel hadn’t asked any questions about his patients, nor about the sixteen autopsies he had had to perform, six for Americans from the big submarine, and ten, including the corpse of the owner, from the fine yacht that had been in harbour for so long.
Now he said carefully, ‘Miss Vitali will be all right. For the moment she is suffering from shock. She needs rest.’
‘What else? What was the matter with her?’
‘She had swum a long way. She was not in a condition to undertake such a physical strain.’
‘Why not?’
The doctor moved towards the door. ‘And now you too must rest. You have been through much. You will take one of those hypnotics once every six hours. Yes? And plenty of sleep. You will soon be on your feet again. But for some time you must take it easy, Mr Bond.’
Take it easy. You must take it easy, Mr Bond. Where had he heard those idiotic words before? Suddenly Bond was raging with fury. He lurched out of bed. In spite of the sudden giddiness, he staggered towards the doctor. He shook a fist in the urbane face – urbane because the doctor was used to the emotional storms of patients, and because he knew that in minutes the strong soporific would put Bond out for hours. ‘Take it easy! God damn you! What do you know about taking it easy? Tell me what’s the matter with that girl! Where is she? What’s the number of her room?’ Bond’s hands fell limply to his sides. He said feebly, ‘For God’s sake tell me, Doctor. I, I need to know.’
Doctor Stengel said patiently, kindly, ‘Someone has ill-treated her. She is suffering from burns – many burns. She is still in great pain. But,’ he waved a reassuring hand, ‘inside she is well. She is in the next room, in No. 4. You may see her, but only for a minute. Then she will sleep. And so will you. Yes?’ He held open the door.
‘Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.’ Bond walked out of the room with faltering steps. His blasted legs were beginning to give again. The doctor watched him go to the door of No. 4, watched him open it and close it again behind him with the exaggerated care of a drunken man. The doctor went off along the corridor thinking: it won’t do him any harm and it may do her some good. It is what she needs – some tenderness.
Inside the small room, the jalousies threw bands of light and shadow over the bed. Bond staggered over to the bed and knelt down beside it. The small head on the pillow turned towards him. A hand came out and grasped his hair, pulling his head closer to her. Her voice said huskily, ‘You are to stay here. Do you understand? You are not to go away.’
When Bond didn’t answer, she feebly shook his head to and fro. ‘Do you hear me, James? Do you understand?’ She felt Bond’s body slipping to the floor. When she let go his hair, he slumped down on the rug beside her bed. She carefully shifted her position and looked down at him. He was already asleep with his head cradled on the inside of his forearm.
The girl watched the dark, rather cruel face for a moment. Then she gave a small sigh, pulled the pillow to the edge of the bed so that it was just above him, laid her head down so that she could see him whenever she wanted to, and closed her eyes.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
The Spy Who Loved Me first appeared in 1962 and is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming’s novels, as well as a clear departure from previous Bond novels in that the story is told in the first person by a young Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel. Bond himself does not appear until two thirds of the way through the book. Due to negative reactions from critics and fans, Fleming was unhappy with the novel and attempted to suppress elements of it where he could: he blocked a paperback edition in the United Kingdom and only gave permission for the title to be used when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, rather than any aspects of the plots. However, the character of Jaws is loosely based on one of the characters in the book. A British paperback edition was published after his death.
Fleming structured the novel in three sections— “Me”, “Them” and “Him” to describe the phases of the story. The opening section introduces Vivienne “Viv” Michel, who narrates her own story, detailing her past love affairs, the first being with Derek Mallaby, who took her virginity in a field after being thrown out of a cinema in Windsor for indecent exposure. Their physical relationship ends that night and Viv is subsequently rejected when Mallaby sends her a letter from Oxford University saying he was forcibly engaged to someone else by his parents. Viv’s second love affair is with her German boss, Kurt Rainer, by whom she would eventually become pregnant. She informs Rainer and he pays for her to go to Switzerland to have an abortion, telling her that their affair is over. After the procedure, Viv returns to her native Canada and starts her journey through North America, stopping to work at “The Dreamy Pines Motor Court” in the Adirondack Mountains for managers Jed and Mildred Phancey.
The second section, Them, tells how the Phanceys entrust Viv with looking after the motel for the night before the owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, can arrive to take inventory and close it up for the winter. Two mobsters that work for Sanguinetti arrive and say they are there to look over the motel for insurance purposes. The two have been hired by Sanguinetti to burn down the motel so that Sanguinetti can make a profit on the insurance. The blame for the fire would fall on Viv, who was to perish in the incident. The mobsters are cruel to her and when she refuses to dance with them, they attack her, holding her down and starting to remove her top. They are about to continue the attack with rape when the door buzzer stops them.
In the final section, Him, James Bond appears at the door asking for a room, having had a tyre puncture while passing. Bond quickly realises that the two men are mobsters and that Viv is in danger. He then sets to work to help the young woman.
The novel was written in Jamaica at Fleming’s Goldeneye estate in January and February 1961 and was the shortest manuscript Fleming had produced for a novel, being only 113 pages long. He found the book the easiest for him to write, borrowing from his surroundings, as he had done with all his writing up to that point, including places he had seen. One such location was a motel in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, which Fleming would drive past on the way to Ivar Bryce’s Black Hollow Farm, which would become the inspiration for Dreamy Pines Motel.
A heavily adapted version of The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in The Daily Express newspaper in daily comic strip format in 1967–1968. In 1977 the title was used for the tenth film in the Eon Productions series. It was the third to star Roger Moore as Bond and used no plot elements from the novel.
The first edition
CONTENTS
Part One. ME
Chapter 1. SCAREDY CAT
Chapter 2. DEAR DEAD DAYS
Chapter 3. SPRING’S AWAKENING
Chapter 4. ‘DEAR VIV’
Chapter 5. A BIRD WITH A WING DOWN
Chapter 6. GO WEST, YOUNG WOMAN
Part Two. THEM
Chapter 7. ‘COME INTO MY PARLOUR...’
Chapter 8. ‘DYNAMITE FROM NIGHTMARE-LAND...’
Chapter 9. THEN I BEGAN TO SCREAM
Part Three. HIM
Chapter 10. WHASSAT?
Chapter 11. BEDTIME STORY
Chapter 12. TO SLEEP — PERCHANCE TO DIE!
Chapter 13. THE CRASH OF GUNS
Chapter 14. BIMBO
Chapter 15. THE WRITING ON MY HEART
UK cinema poster for ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ (1977)
Part One. ME
Chapter 1. SCAREDY CAT
I was running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law.
And I had run a very long way indeed — almost, exaggerating a bit, halfway round the world. In fact, I had come all the way from London to The Dreamy Pines Motor Court which is ten miles west of Lake George, the famous American tourist resort in the Adirondacks — that vast expanse of mountains, lakes and pine forests which forms most of the northern territory of New York State. I had started on September 1st, and it was now Friday October 13th. When I had left, the grimy little row of domesticated maples in my square had been green, or as green as any tree can be in London in August. Now, in the billion-strong army of pine trees that marched away northwards towards the Canadian border, the real, wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts. And I felt that I, or at any rate my skin, had changed just as much — from the grimy sallowness that had been the badge of my London life to the snap and colour and sparkle of living out of doors and going to bed early and all those other dear dull things that had been part of my life in Quebec before it was decided that I must go to England and learn to be a ‘lady’. Very unfashionable, of course, this cherry-ripe, strength-through-joy complexion, and I had even stopped using lipstick and nail varnish, but to me it had been like sloughing off a borrowed skin and getting back into my own, and I was childishly happy and pleased with myself whenever I looked in the mirror (that’s another thing — I’ll never say ‘looking-glass’ again; I just don’t have to any more) and found myself not wanting to paint a different face over my own. I’m not being smug about this. I was just running away from the person I’d been for the past five years. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.
