Devil May Care

almost envied them their simple faith. He shook his head and moved off through the pigeons.
    Not even the supposedly universal tongue of Latin had been able to make an impression on Bond, a disconsolate figure as he walked off past the squat Castel Sant’ Angelo and crossed the Tiber into the via Zanardelli, where he stopped at a bar and ordered an americano – a pungent espresso that lasted two sips instead of the single one of the regular caffé. The place was filled with people taking a leisurely late breakfast, talking animatedly, and of waiters cheerily calling out their orders to the bar. One or two middle-aged women had brought their pet dogs and fed them morsels of pastry beneath the table. Bond stood at the bar to drink his coffee, left a few coins and wandered off again into the street.
    His three-month sabbatical, enforced by the medical people back in London, still had two weeks to run. It had been pleasant enough to begin with. An old friend of M’s had fixed him up with a cottage in Barbados where he’dbeen able to swim and snorkel most of the day before eating dinner on the terrace, cooked and served by a plump female islander called Charity. She did marvellous grilled fish and rice dishes, with home-made ice-creams and piles of sliced mango and papaya to follow. At the medics’ insistence, Bond had drunk no alcohol and retired to bed no later than ten o’clock with only a paperback book and a powerful barbiturate for company.
    He kept up a fitness regimen to no more than 75 per cent of his potential. In addition to the swimming, he ran three miles a day, did pull-ups on a metal bar on the beach and fifty press-ups before his second shower of the day. It was enough to stop him going stale, but little more than that.
    However, he had also been given honorary membership of the local tennis club, and in the early evenings, instead of drinking cocktails, he walked down to play with Wayland, an impressively quick youngster from the local police service. Bond, who, since his schooldays, had played tennis only a dozen times, and then without great enthusiasm, found his competitive instinct aroused by Wayland’s booming serve-and-volley game. Tennis was not, it turned out, a game of cucumber sandwiches and sporting pleas to ‘take two more’ – not how Wayland played. It was a lung-searing, shoulder-wrenching battle of wills. Bond was horribly out of practice, but his co-ordination was exceptional and his will to win even more so. It wasn’t until the fifth encounter that he managed to take a set from the younger man, but as his own game improved he began to exploit the mental weaknesses in Wayland’s play. It became an encounter neither wished to lose, and they generally stopped at two sets all for a long drink on the veranda.
    After four weeks M’s friends inconveniently required theirhouse back, and Bond, more or less banned by his boss from re-entering Britain, took himself off to the South of France. His plane landed in Marseille one hot evening in May, and he thought that, with time so heavy on his hands, he would take dinner in the port and stay the night rather than head straight off down the coast. He asked the taxi driver to take him to a place where they did the best bouillabaisse, and half an hour later found himself beneath an orange awning, sipping a chaste citron pressé and looking over at the ships that lay at anchor in the port.
    A man who travels alone has time to reflect and observe. A man, furthermore, who has been trained by the most rigorous and secret organization in his country and whose instincts have been honed by years of self-discipline will see things other travellers barely register.
    So it was that Bond, perhaps alone of all the diners on the quai that night, asked himself why the two men in the black Mercedes 300D Cabriolet did not fit in – even here, in a port loud with commerce and people of all nationalities.
    The car pulled up beside the dock, where the smaller of the two men, who wore a short-sleeved bush shirt with a kind of French military kepi, climbed out and began to inspect some of the vessels. Eventually, he went up the gangway of one and disappeared on board.
    Bond found himself looking at the man’s companion, who remained in the open-topped car. He was about Bond’s own age, of possibly Slavic or East European origin, he judged, from the high cheekbones and narrow eyes. His straw-coloured hair was oiled and driven back straight from his forehead