As they walked down the passageway, Bond wondered at the normality of the place. It appeared to be like any other hotel. Doors were open while maids worked inside, and you could peep into suites and rooms like the one they had just vacated – all in the same condition, the woodwork smooth and unfinished.
At the end of the corridor they came to a bank of three elevators. Three other people waited – two elderly women and a man, talking in voluble Russian.
‘I have no doubt, as I said to Rebecca,’ one of the women said. ‘He was the man. I saw him every day for almost two years. You think I could forget that one? He killed my sister. Little Zarah he killed. Shot her there in the mud because she laughed.’ Tears welled in the old eyes which seemed to look back with loathing to another place and another hated time.
‘I wish to hear him speak,’ the man replied. He was stooped, a short person who seemed bowed now with a terrible weight. ‘I am not certain, not until I hear his voice. They will let us hear his voice, surely?’
‘Most certainly,’ the other woman said, more calmly than her companions. ‘You’re both well in character. You’ve worked hard and that is good. Stay in character. Remain there the whole time, for the camera will be on your faces. It will use your expressions, eyes, mouths, to gauge the truth.’
‘I could never forget Zarah,’ the first woman said.
They did not speak again as they rode down in the elevator cage, to find themselves emerging into a large room filled with people. Most of them elderly, some of them very old. The conversation rose and fell, a babble of languages swarming around the ears.
Natasha motioned them to follow her, and Bond soon realised they were walking along the inside of the wooden well, the part which looked like a cloister. He tried to make a ground plan in his head, so he could work out exactly which way they were heading. With concentration, he divined they had traversed one wall of the four when they reached another large room, like the foyer of a hôtel. This time, though, the wall furthest from them was not a wall, but two vast metal doors. There was a small entrance, set into the doors to the right of where the doors met, and next to it, a pair of lights, red and green. The green was on and Natasha went straight for the smallest door, ushering them through.
‘Ah, here, I sincerely hope, come our blessed camera crew, and about time too, ’Tasha darling. What’ve you been doing with them? Doesn’t anybody realise we’re on the tightest of schedules here. Tighter than your little backside, ’Tasha.’ He was a tall and willowy man in dark pants and a shirt. Long hair flowed to his shoulders, his hands danced, playing invisible arpeggios on the air, and he was accompanied by three smaller men who seemed to hang on every word. They looked, Bond thought, like trained whippets ready to streak away the moment their master commanded them.
‘Come along, then, let’s all get moving. You’re Guy, I suppose.’ His small eyes looked up over a pair of granny glasses straight at Bond. ‘See, I’m right. I’m always right. I can spot a cameraman at fifty paces in me high heels. So you,’ to Natkowitz, ‘must be the sound tech.’ His head whipped round to settle his eyes on Nina. ‘Oh, but Lord knows what we’re going to do with the pretty lady, and she won’t tell, will she?’
‘Clive,’ Natasha muttered by way of introduction.
But Bond was hardly listening to this stream of words which seemed unstoppable. Instead, he was taking in the sight which had greeted them on passing through the door. The area was vast and hot from the huge lighting gantries which ran above them. Cables snaked across the floors and at the far end there was a massive set which was immediately recognisable as an immaculate replica of a real courtroom.
‘Now, Guy,’ the tone was high, peevish and irritable. ‘I hope to goodness you’ve worked with Ikegami equipment before, because if you haven’t you’re going to be no use to me.’
They stood on a very real sound stage which was almost certainly an exact copy of one of the major Hollywood studio sound stages. The only thing missing was the mass of technicians and assistants usually associated with sound stages during the shooting of movies. Only Clive, his three stooges and a handful of assorted men and women – Bond counted six – who fiddled with cables and were doing things to the lighting gantries.
Clive saw the look and plunged straight in. ‘Yes, I know, Guy dear. I do know what you’re thinking. There aren’t nearly enough people here to shoot a major movie, but it’s make do and mend time as they used to say in the navy, and I had plenty of experience both making do and mending. We just have to go with what we’ve got, and I only hope, in the name of Ossie Morris, that you’re at least competent with a camera.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Bond looked round, still taken aback by the scale of the sound stage. ‘Oh, I’m competent. Just tell me what you want and I’ll do it.’
‘Ah,’ Clive gave a little dance, two steps forward and two back. ‘Ah, so we have a pro. Thank heaven for small mercies as my old mother used to say. Now, perhaps we can get on with the bloody picture.’
‘What’s it called and have you got a shooting script?’ Bond asked.
‘No, dear. No script. We have to make it up as we go along. As for the title, weeeellll, I suppose we could call it Death of a Salesman but I suppose Arthur Miller’d be a bit miffed. Let’s make up a name – after all we are making up a movie. Let’s call it Death With Everything, because that just about sums up the plot. Grisly, dears, just too grisly.’ He gave an almost sly pout in Nina’s direction. ‘Hope you’ve got a strong tummy, dear. The people in this epic aren’t exactly your normal cosy down-memory-lane folks.’ He paused, sadly only for a quick breath. ‘These good people do go down memory lane, only all the mementos are mori, as it were. It’s as amusing as an evening with grim-visaged death, as the Bard would have said.’ He sighed, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘Lord how I miss Stratford,’ then in an aside to Bond, ‘I was there with Peter, you know. And how that boy’s got on, bless him. Get him now? Oh, well, we can’t all be visited by a good fairy in our cradles, can we? I think they let Karabos into my nursery.’
At the far end of the sound stage, people had begun to drift in, and even at a distance, a cold chill descended blotting out the heat from the lights.
12
DEATH WITH EVERYTHING
Nigsy Meadows was right – and wrong. As he had expected, M sent him a flash which came in at three in the morning. They woke him and he tottered down to the bubble to deal with it. After that, he found it difficult to sleep. The signal did not contain the instructions he had expected, ordering him back to London. Instead, he was told to meet M personally at the Grand Hotel, Stockholm. The wording indicated that the Old Man wanted Nigsy there yesterday. For breakfast and, preferably, on toast.
He arrived in the middle of the afternoon. The people at Aeroflot were their usual uncommunicative selves. Even under the twin turbos of glasnost and perestroika, very little has changed in the manner in which the Russians run their hotels, restaurants or state airline. In his short time back at the embassy, Nigsy heard stories of couples trying to get meals in Moscow hotels. They were usually turned away from half-empty restaurants because they were not ‘a party’. When it came to booking a flight on Aeroflot, they wanted to know, as Nigsy’s old father would have crudely put it, ‘the far end of a fart’.