The James Bond Anthology

The cars began rolling up. Scaramanga was in evidence. He switched a careful smile of welcome on and off. No hands were shaken. The host was greeted either as ‘Pistol’ or ‘Mr S’ except by Mr Hendriks, who called him nothing.

Bond stood within earshot of the desk and fitted the names to the men. In general appearance they were all much of a muchness. Dark-faced, clean-shaven, around five feet six, hard-eyed above thinly smiling mouths, curt of speech to the manager. They all held firmly on to their brief-cases when the bell boys tried to add them to the luggage on the rubber-tyred barrows. They dispersed to their rooms along the East Wing. Bond took out his list and added hat-check notations to each one except Hendriks who was clearly etched in Bond’s memory. Gengerella became ‘Italian origin, mean, pursed mouth’; Rotkopf, ‘Thick neck, totally bald, Jew’; Binion, ‘bat ears, scar down left cheek, limp’; Garfinkel, ‘the toughest. Bad teeth, gun under right armpit’; and, finally, Paradise, ‘Showman type, cocky, false smile, diamond ring’ .

Scaramanga came up. ‘What you writing?’

‘Just notes to remember them by.’

‘Gimme.’ Scaramanga held out a demanding hand.

Bond gave him the list.

Scaramanga ran his eyes down it. He handed it back. ‘Fair enough. But you needn’t have mentioned the only gun you noticed. They’ll all be protected. Except Hendriks, I guess. These kinda guys are nervous when they move abroad.’

‘What of?’

Scaramanga shrugged. ‘Mebbe the natives.’

‘The last people who worried about the natives were the redcoats, perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘Who cares? See you in the bar around twelve. I’ll be introducing you as my Personal Assistant.’

‘That’ll be fine.’

Scaramanga’s brows came together. Bond strolled off in the direction of his bedroom. He proposed to needle this man, and go on needling until it came to a fight. For the time being the other man would probably take it because it seemed he needed Bond. But there would come a moment, probably on an occasion when there were witnesses, when his vanity would be so sharply pricked that he would draw. Then Bond would have a small edge, for it would be he who had thrown down the glove. The tactic was a crude one, but Bond could think of no other.

Bond verified that his room had been searched at some time during the morning – and by an expert. He always used a Hoffritz safety razor patterned on the old-fashioned heavy-toothed Gillette type. His American friend Felix Leiter had once bought him one in New York to prove that they were the best, and Bond had stayed with them. The handle of a safety razor is a reasonably sophisticated hideout for the minor tools of espionage – codes, microdot developers, cyanide and other pills. That morning Bond had set a minute nick on the screw base of the handle in line with the ‘Z’ of the maker’s name engraved on the shaft. The nick was now a millimetre to the right of the ‘Z’. None of his other little traps, handkerchiefs with indelible dots in particular places arranged in a certain order, the angle of his suitcase with the wall of the wardrobe, the semi-extracted lining of the breast pocket of his spare suit, the particular symmetry of certain dents in his tube of Maclean’s toothpaste, had been bungled or disturbed. They all might have been by a meticulous servant, a trained valet. But Jamaican servants, for all their charm and willingness, are not of this calibre. No. Between nine and ten, when Bond was doing his rounds and was well away from the hotel, his room had received a thorough going-over by someone who knew his business.

Bond was pleased. It was good to know that the fight was well and truly joined. If he found a chance of making a foray into No. 20, he hoped that he would do better. He took a shower. Afterwards, as he brushed his hair, he looked at himself in the mirror with inquiry. He was feeling a hundred per cent fit, but he remembered the dull, lacklustre eyes that had looked back at him when he shaved after first entering The Park – the tense, preoccupied expression on his face. Now the grey-blue eyes looked back at him from the tanned face with the brilliant glint of suppressed excitement and accurate focus of the old days. He smiled ironically back at the introspective scrutiny that so many people make of themselves before a race, a contest of wits, a trial of some sort. He had no excuses. He was ready to go.