The drummer, on his calypso box, began a hasty beat like a quickened pulse. The service door opened and shut, and a curious object was wheeled into the circle of light. It was a huge hand, perhaps six feet tall at its highest point, upholstered in black leather. It stood, half open on its broad base, with the thumb and fingers outstretched as if ready to catch something. The drummer hastened his beat. The service door sighed. A glistening figure slipped through, and after pausing in the darkness, moved into the pool of light round the hand with a strutting jerk of belly and limbs. There was Chinese blood in her, and her body, totally naked and shining with palm oil, was almost white against the black hand. As she jerked round the hand she caressed its outstretched fingers with her hands and arms and then, with well-acted swooning motions, climbed into the palm of the hand and proceeded to perform languorous, but explicit and ingenious, acts of passion with each of the fingers in turn. The scene, the black hand, now shining with her oil and seeming to clutch at the squirming white body, was of an incredible lewdness, and Bond, himself aroused, noticed that even Scaramanga was watching with rapt attention, his eyes narrow slits. The drummer had now worked up to his crescendo. The girl, in well-simulated ecstasy, mounted the thumb, slowly expired upon it, and then, with a last grind of her rump, slid down it and vanished through the exit. The act was over. The lights came on and everyone, including the band, applauded loudly. The men came out of their separate animal trances. Scaramanga clapped his hand for the bandleader, took a note out of his case, and said something to him under his breath. The chieftain, Bond suspected, had chosen his bride for the night!
After this inspired piece of sexual dumb crambo, the rest of the carbaret was an anticlimax. One of the girls, only after her G-string had been slashed off with a cutlass by the bandleader, was able to squirm under a bamboo pole balanced just eighteen inches off the floor on the top of two beer bottles. The first girl, the one who had acted as an unwitting pineapple tree to Bond's William Tell act, came on and combined an acceptable strip-tease with a rendering of "Belly-Lick" that got the audience straining its ears again, and then the whole team, less the Chinese beauty, came up to the audience and invited them to dance. Scaramanga and Hendriks refused with adequate politeness and Bond stood the two left-out girls glasses of champagne and learned that their names were Mabel and Pearl while he watched the four others being almost bent in half by the bearlike embraces of the four sweating hoods as they clumsily cha-cha'd round the room to the now riotous music of the half-drunk band. The climax to what could certainly class as an orgy was clearly in sight. Bond told his two girls that he must go to the men's room and slipped away when Scaramanga was looking elsewhere, but, as he went, he noted that Hendriks' gaze, as cool as if he had been watching an indifferent film, was firmly on him as he made his escape.
When Bond got to his room, it was midnight. His windows had been closed and the air-conditioning turned on. He switched it off and opened the windows halfway and then, with heartfelt relief, took a shower and went to bed. He worried for a while about having shown off with the gun, but it was an act of folly which he couldn't undo, and he soon went to sleep to dream of three black-cloaked men dragging a shapeless bundle through dappled moonlight towards dark waters that were dotted with glinting red eyes. The gnashing white teeth and the crackling bones resolved themselves into a persistent scrabbling noise that brought him suddenly awake. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It said 3:30. The scrabbling became a quiet tapping from behind the curtains. James Bond slid quietly out of bed, took his gun from under his pillow, and crept softly along the wall to the edge of the curtains. He pulled them aside with one swift motion. The golden hair shone almost silver in the moonlight. Mary Goodnight whispered urgently, "Quick, James! Help me in!"
Bond cursed softly to himself. What the hell? He laid his gun down on the carpet and reached for her outstretched hands and half-dragged, half-pulled her over the sill. At the last moment, her heel caught in the frame and the window banged shut with a noise like a pistol shot. Bond cursed again, softly and fluently, under his breath. Mary Goodnight whispered penitently, "I'm terribly sorry, James."
Bond shushed her. He picked up his gun and put it back under his pillow and led her across the room and into the bathroom. He turned on the light and as a precaution, the shower, and, simultaneously with her gasp, remembered he was naked. He said, "Sorry, Goodnight," and reached for a towel and wound it round his waist and sat down on the edge of the bath. He gestured to the girl to sit down on the lavatory seat and said, with icy control, "What in hell are you doing here, Mary?"
Her voice was desperate. "I had to come. I had to find you somehow. I got on to you through the girl at that, er, dreadful place. I left the car in the trees down the drive and just sniffed about. There were lights on in some of the rooms and I listened and, er"—she blushed crimson—"I gathered you couldn't be in any of them and then I saw the open window, and I just somehow knew you would be the only one to sleep with his window open. So I just had to take the chance."
"Well, we've got to get you out of here as quick as we can. Anyway, what's the trouble?"
"A Most Immediate in Triple-X came over this evening. I mean yesterday evening. It was to be passed to you at all costs. H.Q. thinks you're in Havana. It said that one of the K.G.B. top men who goes under the name of Hendriks is in the area and that he's known to be visiting this hotel. You're to keep away from him. They know from A Delicate But Sure Source"—Bond smiled at the old euphemism for cypher-breaking—"that among his other jobs is to find you and, er, well, kill you. So I put two and two together, and, what with you being in this corner of the island and the questions you asked me, I guessed that you might be already on his track but that you might be walking into an ambush, sort of. Not knowing, I mean, that while you were after him, he was after you."
She put out a tentative hand, as if for reassurance that she had done the right thing. Bond took it and patted it absent-mindedly while his mind chewed on this new complication. He said, "The man's here all right. So's a gunman called Scaramanga. You might as well know, Mary, that Scaramanga killed Ross. In Trinidad." She put her hand up to her mouth. "You can report it as a fact, from me. If I can get you out of here, that is. As for Hendriks, he's here all right, but he doesn't seem to have identified me for certain. Did H.Q. say whether he was given a description of me?"
"You were simply described as 'the notorious secret agent, James Bond.' But this doesn't seem to have meant much to Hendriks because he asked for particulars. That was two days ago. He may get them cabled or telephoned here at any minute. You do see why I had to come, James?"
"Yes, of course. And thanks, Mary. Now, I've got to get you out of that window, and then you must just make your own way. Don't worry about me. I think I can handle the situation all right. Besides, I've got help." He told her about Felix Leiter and Nicholson. "You just tell H.Q. you've delivered the message and that I'm here and about the two C.I.A. men. H.Q. can get the C.I.A. angles from Washington direct. Okay?" He got to his feet.
She stood up beside him and looked up at him. "But you will take care?"
"Sure, sure." He patted her shoulder. He turned off the shower and opened the bathroom door. "Now, come on. We must pray for a stroke of luck."
A silken voice from the darkness at the end of the bed said, "Well, the Holy Man just ain't running for you today, mister, Step forward both of you. Hands clasped behind the neck."
11
Ballcock, and Other, Trouble