Well, part of the snake had been smashed. Was it the head or the tail? Difficult to say, but Bond was inclined to think that Jack Spang and the mysterious A B C were the real operators of the smuggling racket and that Seraffimo had only handled the receiving end. Seraffimo could be replaced. Tiffany could be discarded. Shady Tree, whom she could implicate in the diamond smuggling, would have to be got under cover until the storm, if Bond was indeed a storm signal, had blown over. But there was nothing to implicate Jack Spang or the House of Diamonds and the only clue to A B C was the London telephone number which Bond reminded himself to extract from the girl as soon as possible. That, and the machinery of contacts connected with it, would be changed directly the full facts of Tiffany’s defection and Bond’s escape had been communicated to London, presumably by Shady Tree. So all this, reflected Bond, made Jack Spang his next target and through him, A B C. Then there only remained the beginning of the pipeline in Africa, and that could only be reached through A B C. Bond’s immediate concern, he concluded before letting sleep take him, was to report the whole situation to M as soon as possible after boarding the Queen Elizabeth, and let London take over. Vallance’s men would get working. There wouldn’t be much for Bond to do even when he got back. A lot of reports to write. The same old routine at the office. And in the evenings there would be Tiffany in the spare room of his flat off the King’s Road. He would have to send a cable to May to get things fixed.
Let’s see – flowers, bath essence from Floris, air the sheets ...
Just ten hours after leaving Los Angeles they roared over La Guardia and turned out at sea for the long run in.
It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning and there were few people about at the airport, but an official stopped them as they were walking in off the tarmac and led them to a side entrance where there were two young men waiting, one from Pinkertons and one from the State Department. While they chatted about the flight, their luggage was brought round and they were taken to a side door and out to where a smart maroon Pontiac was waiting, its engine purring and the blinds in the rear pulled down.
And then there were some empty hours in the apartment belonging to the Pinkerton man until, at around four in the afternoon, but with a quarter of an hour between them, they were climbing up the covered gangway into the great safe, black British belly of the Queen Elizabeth and were at last in their cabins on M deck with their doors locked against the world.
But, as first Tiffany Case and then James Bond went into the mouth of the gangway, a dockhand from Anastasia’s Longshoreman’s Union had walked swiftly to a phone booth in the customs shed.
And three hours later two American businessmen were dropped at the dockside by a black sedan and were just in time to get through Immigration and Customs and up the gangway before the loudspeakers began calling for all visitors to leave the ship please.
And one of the businessmen was youngish, with a pretty face and a glimpse of prematurely white hair under the Stetson with the waterproof cover, and the name on the brief-case he was carrying was B. Kitteridge.
And the other was a big, fattish man with a nervous glare in the small eyes behind the bi-focals, and he was sweating profusely and constantly wiping his face round with a big handkerchief.
And the name on the label of his grip was W. Winter, and below the name, in red ink, was written: ‘MY BLOOD GROUP IS F’.
22 | LOVE AND SAUCE BÉARNAISE
Punctually at eight, the great reverberating efflatus of the Queen Elizabeth’s siren made the glass tremble in the skyscrapers and the tugs fussed the big ship out into midstream and nosed her round and, at a cautious five knots, she moved slowly down-river on the slack tide.
There would be a pause to drop the pilot at the Ambrose Light and then the quadruple screws would whip the sea into cream and the Elizabeth would give a shudder of release and lance off on the long flat arc up from the 45th to the 50th parallel and the dot on it that was Southampton.
Sitting in his cabin, listening to the quiet creak of the woodwork and watching his pencil on the dressing-table roll slowly between his hair-brush and the edge of his passport, Bond remembered the days when her course had been different, when she had zig-zagged deep into the South Atlantic as she played her game of hide-and-seek with the U-boat wolfpacks, en route for the flames of Europe. It was still an adventure, but now the Queen, in her cocoon of protective radio impulses – her radar, her Loran, her echo-sounder – moved with the precautions of an oriental potentate among his bodyguards and outriders, and, so far as Bond was concerned, boredom and indigestion would be the only hazards of the voyage.
He picked up the telephone and asked for Miss Case. When she heard his voice she gave a theatrical groan. ‘The sailor hates the sea,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling sick already and we’re still in the river.’
‘Just as well,’ said Bond. ‘Stay in your cabin and live on dramamine and champagne. I’ll be no good for two or three days. I’m going to get the doctor and the masseur from the Turkish bath and try and stick the bits together again. And anyway it won’t do any harm to stay out of sight for most of the voyage. It’s just conceivable they picked us up in New York.’
‘Well, if you promise to call me up every day,’ said Tiffany, ‘and promise to take me to this Veranda Grill place as soon as I feel I can swallow a little caviar. Okay?’
Bond laughed. ‘If you absolutely insist,’ he said. ‘And now listen, in exchange, I want you to try and remember anything you can about A B C and the London end of this business. That telephone number. And anything else. I’ll tell you what it’s all about and why I’m interested as soon as I can, but in the meantime you’ve just got to trust me. Is it a deal?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said the girl indifferently, as if all that side of her life had lost its importance; and for ten minutes Bond questioned her minutely, but except for small details, fruitlessly, about the A B C routine.
Then he put down the receiver and rang for the steward and ordered some dinner and sat down to write the long report which he would have to transpose into code and send off that night.
The ‘Metal Mike’ took the ship quietly on into the darkness and the small township of three thousand five hundred souls settled down to the five days of its life in which there would be all the happenings natural to any other sizeable community – burglaries, fights, seductions, drunkenness, cheating; perhaps a birth or two, the chance of a suicide and, in a hundred crossings, perhaps even a murder.
As the iron town loped easily along the broad Atlantic swell and the soft night wind thrummed and moaned in the masthead, the radio aerials were already transmitting the morse of the duty operator to the listening ear of Portishead.
And what the duty operator was sending at exactly ten p.m. Eastern Standard Time was a cable addressed: A B C, CARE HOUSE OF DIAMONDS, HATTON GARDEN, LONDON, which said: PARTIES LOCATED STOP IF MATTER REQUIRES DRASTIC SOLUTION ESSENTIAL YOU STATE PRICE PAYABLE IN DOLLARS. The signature was WINTER.
An hour later, while the Queen Elizabeth’s operator was sighing at the thought of having to transmit five hundred five-letter groups addressed: THE MANAGING DIRECTOR, UNIVERSAL EXPORT, REGENTS PARK, LONDON, Portishead radio was sending a short cable addressed: WINTER FIRST CLASS PASSENGER QUEEN ELIZABETH, which said: DESIRES TIDY SPEEDY CONCLUSION OF CASE REPEAT CASE STOP WILL PAY TWENTY GRAND STOP WILL PERSONALLY HANDLE OTHER SUBJECT ON ARRIVAL LONDON CONFIRM A B C.