The white-haired man had been lying relaxed on one of the beds. Now he was up on one elbow and his other hand was at his shirt, half-way up to the gun in the black holster at his armpit. He looked incuriously at Bond and his mouth was square with the empty letter-box smile. From the middle of his smile a wooden toothpick protruded from between closed teeth like the tongue of a snake.
Bond’s gun held the neutral space between the two men. When he spoke his voice was low and taut.
‘Tiffany,’ he said slowly and distinctly. ‘Get down on your knees. Edge away from that man. Keep your head down. Get into the middle of the room.’
He didn’t watch her, and his eyes continued to flicker between the man on the chair and the man on the bed.
Now she was clear of the two targets.
‘I’m there, James.’ The voice thrilled with hope and excitement.
‘Get up and walk straight into the bathroom. Shut the door. Get into the bath and lie down.’
His eyes slid towards her to see that he was being obeyed. She had stood up and was facing him. His eyes registered the red splay of a whole hand on the white skin of her body. Then she had obeyed him and there was the click of the bathroom door shutting.
Now she was safe from the bullets. And she would not witness what had to be done.
There was five yards between the two men and Bond reflected that if they could draw fast enough they had him bracketed. With men like these, even in the split second of his killing one of them, the other would have drawn and fired. While his own gun was silent, its threat was infinite. But with his first bullet, for a flash, the threat would be lifted from the other man.
‘Forty-eight sixty-five eighty-six.’
The variation on the American football signal, one of fifty other combinations which they must have practised together a thousand times, spat out of the fat man’s mouth. Simultaneously he hurled himself on the floor and his hand flashed to his waistband.
In a swirl of motion the man on the bed swung his legs side-ways and away from Bond so that his body was now only a narrow head-on target. The hand at his chest flickered up.
‘Thud’.
Bond’s gun gave a single muffled grunt. A blue keyhole opened just beneath the peak of the white hair.
‘Boom’ answered the dead man’s pistol, fired by the last twitch of his finger, and the bullet buried itself into the bed beneath his corpse.
The fat man on the floor let out a scream. He was looking up into the single empty black eye that didn’t care about him one way or the other, but was only interested in which square centimetre of his envelope it would open first.
And the fat man’s gun had only achieved the elevation of Bond’s knees and was pointing futilely between Bond’s braced legs at the white-painted ironwork behind him.
‘Drop it.’
There was a small noise as the gun fell to the carpet.
‘Get up.’
The fat man scrambled to his feet and stood looking into Bond’s eyes, as a tubercular looks into his handkerchief, with fearful expectancy.
‘Sit down.’
Was there a flash of relief in the surrendered eyes? Bond stayed tense as a stalking cat.
The fat man turned slowly. He stretched his hands above his head, although Bond had not told him to do so. He took the two steps back to his chair and slowly turned round as if to sit down.
He stood facing Bond and quite naturally he let his hands fall down to his sides. And the two hands, relaxed, swung naturally back, the right hand more than the left. And then suddenly, at the top of the back-swing, the right arm tautened and flashed forward and the throwing-knife bloomed from the tips of the fingers like a white flame.
‘Thud’.
The quiet bullet and the quiet knife crossed in midair, and the eyes of the two men flinched simultaneously as the weapons struck.
But the flinch in the eyes of the fat man turned into an upward roll of the eyeballs as he fell backwards, clawing at his heart, while Bond’s eyes only looked incuriously down at the spreading stain on his shirt and at the flat handle of the knife hanging loosely from its folds.
There was a crash as the chair splintered under the fat man, and a rasping noise, and then a drumming on the floor.
Bond looked once and then turned away towards the open porthole.
For a while he stood with his back to the room, staring at the softly swaying curtains. He gulped down the air and listened to the beautiful sea-sounds from the world outside that still belonged to him and to Tiffany, but not to the two others. Very slowly his body and his strung nerves relaxed.
After a time he pulled the knife out of his shirt. He didn’t look at it, but reached up and drew the curtain aside and threw the knife far out into the blackness. Then, still looking out into the quiet night, he put up the safe of the Beretta and, with a hand that suddenly seemed as heavy as lead, slowly thrust the gun back into the waistband of his trousers.
Almost reluctantly he turned back and faced the shambles of the cabin. He looked it over thoughtfully and with an unconscious gesture he wiped his hands down his flanks. Then he carefully picked his way across the floor to the bathroom and said, ‘It’s me, Tiffany,’ in a tired, flat voice and opened the door.
She hadn’t heard his voice. She was lying face downwards in the empty bath with her hands over her ears, and when he had half-lifted her out and had taken her into his arms, she still couldn’t believe it but clung to him and then slowly explored his face and his chest with her hands to make sure it was true.
He flinched as her hand touched his cut rib and she broke away from him and looked at his face and then at the blood on her fingers and then at his scarlet shirt.
‘Oh, God. You’re hurt,’ she said flatly, and her nightmares were forgotten as she took off his shirt and washed the gashed rib with soap and water and bound it with strips of towel cut with one of the dead men’s razor blades.
She still asked no questions when Bond collected her clothes from the floor of the cabin and gave them to her and told her not to come out until he was ready and to clean up everything and wipe every object she had touched to kill the fingerprints.
She just stood and looked at him with her eyes shining. And when Bond kissed her on the lips she still said nothing.
Bond gave her a reassuring smile and walked out and shut the door of the bathroom behind him and went about his business, doing everything with great deliberation and pausing before each move so as to examine its effect on the eyes and minds of the detectives who would come on board at Southampton.
First he tied an ash-tray in his bloodstained shirt to weight it and went to the porthole and threw the shirt as far out as he could. The men’s tuxedos were hanging behind the door. He took the handkerchiefs out of the breast pockets and wrapped them round his hands and searched through the cupboards and the chest of drawers until he found the white-haired man’s evening shirts. He put one on and stood for a moment in the centre of the cabin thinking. Then he gritted his teeth and heaved the fat man into a sitting position, took off the fat man’s shirt and went to the porthole and took out his Beretta, held it against the small hole over the heart of the shirt and fired another bullet through the hole. Now there was a smoke smudge round the hole to look like suicide. He dressed the corpse again in its shirt, wiped his Beretta thoroughly, pressed the fingers of the dead man’s right hand all over it, and finally fitted the gun into his hand with the index finger on the trigger.