Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 274
‘Certainly. If you’ll tell me how I can help.’ He waved a hand. ‘If it’s secrets you’re worried about, please don’t worry. Jewellers are used to them. Scotland Yard will probably give my firm a clean bill in that respect. Heaven knows we’ve had enough to do with them over the years.’
‘And if I told you that I’m from the Ministry of Defence?’
‘Same thing,’ said Mr Snowman. ‘You can naturally rely absolutely on my discretion!’
Bond made up his mind. ‘All right. Well, all this comes under the Official Secrets Act, of course. We suspect that the underbidder, presumably to you, will be a Soviet agent. My job is to establish his identity. Can’t tell you any more, I’m afraid. And you don’t actually need to know any more. All I want is to go with you to Sotheby’s tomorrow night and for you to help me spot the man. No medals, I’m afraid, but we’d be extremely grateful.’
Mr Kenneth Snowman’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm. ‘Of course. Delighted to help in any way. But,’ he looked doubtful, ‘you know it’s not necessarily going to be all that easy. Peter Wilson, the head of Sotheby’s, who’ll be taking the sale, would be the only person who could tell us for sure – that is, if the bidder wants to stay secret. There are dozens of ways of bidding without making any movement at all. But if the bidder fixes his method, his code so to speak, with Peter Wilson before the sale, Peter wouldn’t think of letting anyone in on the code. It would give the bidder’s game away to reveal his limit. And that’s a close secret, as you can imagine, in the rooms. And a thousand times not if you come with me. I shall probably be setting the pace. I already know how far I’m going to go – for a client by the way – but it would make my job vastly easier if I could tell how far the underbidder’s going to go. As it is, what you’ve told me has been a great help. I shall warn my man to put his sights even higher. If this chap of yours has got a strong nerve, he may push me very hard indeed. And there will be others in the field of course. It sounds as if this is going to be quite a night. They’re putting it on television and asking all the millionaires and dukes and duchesses for the sort of gala performance Sotheby’s do rather well. Wonderful publicity of course. By jove, if they knew there was cloak-and-dagger stuff mixed up with the sale, there’d be a riot! Now then, is there anything else to go into? Just spot this man and that’s all?’
‘That’s all. How much do you think this thing will go for?’
Mr Snowman tapped his teeth with a gold pencil. ‘Well now, you see that’s where I have to keep quiet. I know how high I’m going to go, but that’s my client’s secret.’ He paused and looked thoughtful, ‘Let’s say that if it goes for less than £100,000 we’ll be surprised.’
‘I see,’ said Bond. ‘Now then, how do I get into the sale?’
Mr Snowman produced an elegant alligator-skin note-case and extracted two engraved bits of paste-board. He handed one over. ‘That’s my wife’s. I’ll get her one somewhere else in the rooms. B5 – well placed in the centre front. I’m B6.’ Bond took the ticket. It said:
SOTHEBY & CO.
SALE OF
A CASKET OF MAGNIFICENT JEWELS
AND
A UNIQUE OBJECT OF VERTU BY CARL FABERGÉ
THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
ADMIT ONE TO THE MAIN SALE ROOM
TUESDAY, 20 JUNE, AT 9.30 P.M. PRECISELY
ENTRANCE IN ST GEORGE STREET
‘It’s not the old Georgian entrance in Bond Street,’ commented Mr Snowman. ‘They have an awning and red carpet out from their back door now that Bond Street’s one-way. Now,’ he got up from his chair, ‘would you care to see some Fabergé? We’ve got some pieces here my father bought from the Kremlin around 1927. It’ll give you some idea what all the fuss is about, though of course the Emerald Sphere’s incomparably finer than anything I can show you by Fabergé apart from the Imperial Easter Eggs.’
Later, dazzled by the diamonds, the multi-coloured gold, the silken sheen of translucent enamels, James Bond walked up and out of the Aladdin’s Cave under Regent Street and went off to spend the rest of the day in drab offices around Whitehall planning drearily minute arrangements for the identification and photographing of a man in a crowded room who did not yet possess a face or an identity but who was certainly the top Soviet spy in London.
Through the next day, Bond’s excitement mounted. He found an excuse to go into the Communications Section and wander into the little room where Miss Maria Freudenstein and two assistants were working the cipher machines that handled the Purple Cipher dispatches. He picked up an en clair file – he had freedom of access to most material at headquarters – and ran his eye down the carefully edited paragraphs that, in half an hour or so, would be spiked, unread, by some junior C.I.A. clerk in Washington and, in Moscow, be handed, with reverence, to a top-ranking officer of the K.G.B. He joked with the two junior girls, but Maria Freudenstein only looked up from her machine to give him a polite smile and Bond’s skin crawled minutely at this proximity to treachery and at the black and deadly secret locked up beneath the frilly white blouse. She was an unattractive girl with a pale, rather pimply skin, black hair and a vaguely unwashed appearance. Such a girl would be unloved, make few friends, have chips on her shoulder – more particularly in view of her illegitimacy – and a grouse against society. Perhaps her only pleasure in life was the triumphant secret she harboured in that flattish bosom – the knowledge that she was cleverer than all those around her, that she was, every day, hitting back against the world – the world that despised, or just ignored her, because of her plainness – with all her might. One day they’d be sorry! It was a common neurotic pattern – the revenge of the ugly duckling on society.
Bond wandered off down the corridor to his own office. By tonight that girl would have made a fortune, been paid her thirty pieces of silver a thousandfold. Perhaps the money would change her character, bring her happiness. She would be able to afford the best beauty specialists, the best clothes, a pretty flat. But M. had said he was now going to hot up the Purple Cipher Operation, try a more dangerous level of deception. This would be dicey work. One false step, one incautious lie, an ascertainable falsehood in a message, and K.G.B. would smell a rat. One more, and they would know they were being hoaxed and probably had been ignominiously hoaxed for three years. Such a shameful revelation would bring quick revenge. It would be assumed that Maria Freudenstein had been acting as a double agent, working for the British as well as the Russians. She would inevitably and quickly be liquidated – perhaps with a cyanide pistol Bond had been reading about only the day before.
James Bond, looking out of the window across the trees in Regent’s Park, shrugged. Thank God it was none of his business. The girl’s fate wasn’t in his hands. She was caught in the grimy machine of espionage and she would be lucky if she lived to spend a tenth of the fortune she was going to gain in a few hours in the auction rooms.
There was a line of cars and taxis blocking George Street behind Sotheby’s. Bond paid off his taxi and joined the crowd filtering under the awning and up the steps. He was handed a catalogue by the uniformed commissionaire who inspected his ticket, and went up the broad stairs with the fashionable, excited crowd and along a gallery and into the main auction room that was already thronged. He found his seat next to Mr Snowman, who was writing figures on a pad on his knee, and looked round him.
The lofty room was perhaps as large as a tennis court. It had the look and the smell of age and the two large chandeliers, to fit in with the period, blazed warmly in contrast to the strip lighting along the vaulted ceiling whose glass roof was partly obscured by a blind, still half-drawn against the sun that would have been blazing down on the afternoon’s sale. Miscellaneous pictures and tapestries hung on the olive green walls and batteries of television and other cameras (amongst them the M.I.5 cameraman with a press pass from The Sunday Times) were clustered with their handlers on a platform built out from the middle of a giant tapestried hunting scene. There were perhaps a hundred dealers and spectators sitting attentively on small gilt chairs. All eyes were focused on the slim, good-looking auctioneer talking quietly from the raised wooden pulpit. He was dressed in an immaculate dinner jacket with a red carnation in the buttonhole. He spoke unemphatically and without gestures.
‘Fifteen thousand pounds. And sixteen,’ a pause. A glance at someone in the front row. ‘Against you, sir.’ The flick of a catalogue being raised. ‘Seventeen thousand pounds I am bid. Eighteen. Nineteen. I am bid twenty thousand pounds.’ And so the quiet voice went, calmly, unhurriedly on while down among the audience the equally impassive bidders signalled their responses to the litany.
‘What is he selling?’ asked Bond, opening his catalogue.
‘Lot 40,’ said Mr Snowman. ‘That diamond rivière the porter’s holding on the black velvet tray. It’ll probably go for about twenty-five. An Italian is bidding against a couple of Frenchmen. Otherwise they’d have got it for twenty. I only went to fifteen. Liked to have got it. Wonderful stones. But there it is.’
Sure enough, the price stuck at twenty-five thousand and the hammer, held by its head and not by its handle, came down with soft authority. ‘Yours, sir,’ said Mr Peter Wilson and a sales clerk hurried down the aisle to confirm the identity of the bidder.
‘I’m disappointed,’ said Bond.
Mr Snowman looked up from his catalogue, ‘Why is that?’
‘I’ve never been to an auction before and I always thought the auctioneer banged his gavel three times and said going, going, gone, so as to give the bidders a last chance.’
Mr Snowman laughed. ‘You might still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sale rooms since I’ve been attending them.’
‘Pity. It adds to the drama.’
‘You’ll get plenty of that in a minute. This is the last lot before the curtain goes up.’
One of the porters had reverently uncoiled a glittering mass of rubies and diamonds on his black velvet tray. Bond looked at the catalogue. It said ‘Lot 41’ which the luscious prose described as:
A PAIR OF FINE AND IMPORTANT RUBY AND DIAMOND BRACELETS, the front of each in the form of an elliptical cluster composed of one larger and two smaller rubies within a border of cushion-shaped diamonds, the sides and back formed of simpler clusters alternating with diamond openwork scroll motifs springing from single-stone ruby centres millegriffe-set in gold, running between chains of rubies and diamonds linked alternately, the clasp also in the form of an elliptical cluster.
* According to family tradition, this lot was formerly the property of Mrs Fitzherbert (1756–1837) whose marriage to the Prince of Wales afterwards Geo. IV was definitely established when in 1905 a sealed packet deposited at Coutts Bank in 1833 and opened by Royal permission disclosed the marriage certificate and other conclusive proofs. These bracelets were probably given by Mrs Fitzherbert to her niece, who was described by the Duke of Orleans as ‘the prettiest girl in England’.
While the bidding progressed, Bond slipped out of his seat and went down the aisle to the back of the room where the overflow audience spread out into the New Gallery and the Entrance Hall to watch the sale on closed-circuit television. He casually inspected the crowd, seeking any face he could recognize from the 200 members of the Soviet embassy staff whose photographs, clandestinely obtained, he had been studying during the past days. But amidst an audience that defied classification – a mixture of dealers, amateur collectors and what could be broadly classified as rich pleasure-seekers – was not a feature, let alone a face, that he could recognize except from the gossip columns. One or two sallow faces might have been Russian, but equally they might have belonged to half a dozen European races. There was a scattering of dark glasses, but dark glasses are no longer a disguise. Bond went back to his seat. Presumably the man would have to divulge himself when the bidding began.
‘Fourteen thousand I am bid. And fifteen. Fifteen thousand.’ The hammer came down. ‘Yours, sir.’
There was a hum of excitement and a fluttering of catalogues. Mr Snowman wiped his forehead with a white silk handkerchief. He turned to Bond, ‘Now I’m afraid you are more or less on your own. I’ve got to pay attention to the bidding and anyway for some unknown reason it’s considered bad form to look over one’s shoulder to see who’s bidding against you – if you’re in the trade that’s to say – so I’ll only be able to spot him if he’s somewhere up front here, and I’m afraid that’s unlikely. Pretty well all dealers, but you can stare around as much as you like. What you’ve got to do is to watch Peter Wilson’s eyes and then try and see who he’s looking at, or who’s looking at him. If you can spot the man, which may be quite difficult, note any movement he makes, even the very smallest. Whatever the man does – scratching his head, pulling at the lobe of his ear or whatever, will be a code he’s arranged with Peter Wilson. I’m afraid he won’t do anything obvious like raising his catalogue. Do you get me? And don’t forget that he may make absolutely no movement at all until right at the end when he’s pushed me as far as he thinks I’ll go, then he’ll want to sign off. Mark you,’ Mr Snowman smiled, ‘when we get to the last lap I’ll put plenty of heat on him and try and make him show his hand. That’s assuming of course that we are the only two bidders left in.’ He looked enigmatic. ‘And I think you can take it that we shall be.’
From the man’s certainty, James Bond felt pretty sure that Mr Snowman had been given instructions to get the Emerald Sphere at any cost.
A sudden hush fell as a tall pedestal draped in black velvet was brought in with ceremony and positioned in front of the auctioneer’s rostrum. Then a handsome oval case of what looked like white velvet was placed on top of the pedestal and, with reverence, an elderly porter in grey uniform with wine red sleeves, collar and back belt, unlocked it and lifted out Lot 42, placed it on the black velvet and removed the case. The cricket ball of polished emerald on its exquisite base glowed with a supernatural green fire and the jewels on its surface and on the opalescent meridian winked their various colours. There was a gasp of admiration from the audience and even the clerks and experts behind the rostrum and sitting at the tall counting-house desk beside the auctioneer, accustomed to the Crown jewels of Europe parading before their eyes, leaned forward to get a better look.
James Bond turned to his catalogue. There it was, in heavy type and in prose as stickily luscious as a butterscotch sundae:
THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE DESIGNED IN 1917 BY CARL FABERGÉ FOR A RUSSIAN GENTLEMAN AND NOW THE PROPERTY OF HIS GRANDDAUGHTER 42 A VERY IMPORTANT FABERGÉ TERRESTRIAL GLOBE.
A sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats and of a superb colour and vivid translucence, represents a terrestrial globe supported upon an elaborate rocaille scroll mount finely chased in quatre-couleur gold and set with a profusion of rose-diamonds and small emeralds of intense colour, to form a table-clock.
Around this mount six gold putti disport themselves among cloud-forms which are naturalistically rendered in carved rock-crystal finished matt and veined with fine lines of tiny rose-diamonds.
The Globe itself, the surface of which is meticulously engraved with a map of the world with the principal cities indicated by brilliant diamonds embedded within gold collets, rotates mechanically on an axis controlled by a small clock-movement, by G. Moser, signed, which is concealed in the base, and is girdled by a fixed gold belt enamelled opalescent oyster along a reserved path in champlevé technique over a moiré guillochage with painted Roman numerals in pale sepia enamel serving as the dial of the clock, and a single triangular pigeon-blood Burma ruby of about five carats set into the surface of the orb, pointing the hour.
Height: 7½ in. Workmaster, Henrik Wigström. In the original double-opening white velvet, satin-lined, ovi-form case with the gold key fitted in the base.
* The theme of this magnificent sphere is one that had inspired Fabergé some fifteen years earlier, as evidenced in the miniature terrestrial globe which forms part of the Royal Collection at Sandringham. (See plate 280 in The Art of Carl Fabergé, by A. Kenneth Snowman.)
After a brief and searching glance round the room, Mr Wilson banged his hammer softly. ‘Lot 42 – an object of vertu by Carl Fabergé.’ A pause. ‘Twenty thousand pounds I am bid.’
Mr Snowman whispered to Bond, ‘That means he’s probably got a bid of at least fifty. This is simply to get things moving.’
Catalogues fluttered. ‘And thirty, forty, fifty thousand pounds I am bid. And sixty, seventy, and eighty thousand pounds. And ninety.’ A pause and then: ‘One hundred thousand pounds I am bid.’
There was a rattle of applause round the room. The cameras had swivelled to a youngish man, one of three on a raised platform to the left of the auctioneer who were speaking softly into telephones. Mr Snowman commented, ‘That’s one of Sotheby’s young men. He’ll be on an open line to America. I should think that’s the Metropolitan bidding, but it might be anybody. Now it’s time for me to get to work.’ Mr Snowman flicked up his rolled catalogue.
‘And ten,’ said the auctioneer. The man spoke into his telephone and nodded. ‘And twenty.’
Again a flick from Mr Snowman.
‘And thirty.’
The man on the telephone seemed to be speaking rather more words than before into his mouthpiece – perhaps giving his estimate of how much further the price was likely to go. He gave a slight shake of his head in the direction of the auctioneer and Peter Wilson looked away from him and round the room.
‘One hundred and thirty thousand pounds I am bid,’ he repeated quietly.
Mr Snowman said, softly, to Bond, ‘Now you’d better watch out. America seems to have signed off. It’s time for your man to start pushing me.’
James Bond slid out of his place and went and stood amongst a group of reporters in a corner to the left of the rostrum. Peter Wilson’s eyes were directed towards the far right-hand corner of the room. Bond could detect no movement, but the auctioneer announced, ‘And forty thousand pounds.’ He looked down at Mr Snowman. After a long pause Mr Snowman raised five fingers. Bond guessed that this was part of his process of putting the heat on. He was showing reluctance, hinting that he was near the end of his tether.
