Carte Blanche

about South Africa but it seems you know a few things yourself.”
    “This wine’s as good as anything you’ll get in Reims.”
    “Where is that?”
    “France—where champagne is made. East of Paris. A beautiful place. You’d enjoy it.”
    “I’m sure it’s lovely but apparently there’s no need to go there if our wine is as good as theirs.”
    Her logic was unassailable. They tilted their glasses toward each other. “ Khotso, ” she said. “Peace.”
    “ Khotso .”
    They sipped and sat for some moments in silence. He was surprisingly comfortable in the company of this “difficult woman.”
    She set her glass down. “May I ask?”
    “Please,” Bond responded.
    “When Gregory Lamb and I were in the caravan at the Sixth Apostle, recording your conversation with Felicity Willing, you said to her that you’d hoped it might work out between you two. Was that true?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then I’m sorry. I’ve had some bad luck too when it comes to relationships. I know what it’s like when the heart turns against you. But we’re resilient creatures.”
    “We are indeed. Against all odds.”
    Her eyes slipped away and she stared at the harbor for a time.
    Bond said, “It was my bullet that killed him, you know—Niall Dunne, I mean.”
    Startled, she began, “How did you know I was . . . ?” Her voice faded.
    “Was that the first time you’d shot someone?”
    “Yes, it was. But how can you be sure it was your bullet?”
    “I’d decided at that range to make my target vector a head shot. Dunne had one wound in his forehead and one in the torso. The head shot was mine. It was fatal. The lower wound, yours, was superficial.”
    “You’re sure it was your shot in his head?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “In that shooting scenario I wouldn’t’ve missed,” Bond said simply.
    Jordaan was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I suppose I’ll have to believe you. Anyone who uses the phrases ‘target vector’ and ‘shooting scenario’ surely would know where his bullets went.”
    Earlier, Bond thought, she might have said this with derision—a reference to his violent nature and flagrant disregard for the rule of law—but now she was simply making an observation.
    They sat back and chatted for a time, about her family and his life in London, his travels.
    Night was cloaking the city now, a kind autumn evening of the sort that graces this part of the Southern Hemisphere, and the vista sparkled with fixed lights on land and floating lights on vessels. Stars, too, except in the black voids nearby—where the king and prince of Cape Town’s rock formations blocked out the sky: Table Mountain and Lion’s Head.
    The plaintive baritone call of a horn reached up to them from the harbor.
    Bond wondered if its source was one of the ships delivering food.
    Or perhaps it was from a tour boat bringing people back from the prison museum on nearby Robben Island, where people like Nelson Mandela, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma—all of whom had become presidents of South Africa—had been locked away for so many hard years during apartheid.
    Or maybe the horn was from a cruise ship preparing to depart for other ports of call, summoning tired passengers, carrying bags of cling-film-wrapped biltong, pinotage wine and ANC black, green and yellow tea towels, along with their tourist impressions of this complicated country.
    Bond gestured to the waiter, who proffered menus. As the policewoman took one, her wounded arm brushed his elbow briefly. And they shared a smile, which was slightly less brief.
    Yet despite the personal truth-and-reconciliation occurring between them at the moment, Bond knew that, when dinner concluded, he would put her into a taxi that would take her to Bo-Kaap and return to his room to pack for his flight to London tomorrow morning.
    He knew this, as Kwalene Nkosi would say, without doubt.
    Oh, the idea of a woman who was perfectly attuned to him, with whom he could share all secrets—could share his life—appealed to James Bond and had proved comforting and sustaining in the past. But in the end, he now realized, such a woman, indeed any woman, could occupy but a small role in the peculiar reality in which he lived. After all, he was a man whose purpose found him constantly on the move, from place to place, and his survival and peace of mind required that this transit be fast, relentlessly fast, so that he might overtake prey and outpace pursuer.
    And, if he correctly recalled