Devil May Care

without a parting. He was dressed in a beige tropical suit, probably from Airey and Wheeler, with a pale blue shirt and scarlet tie such as one sees in the windows ofJermyn Street. The carriagework of the car shone with a deep black gleam and the burgundy leather seats had been buffed to a factory finish. But what held Bond’s eye was the fact that the man affected a single driving glove.
    Even when he took a silver case from his pocket, manoeuvred a cigarette out and lit it, he kept the glove on. Was it Bond’s imagination, or did the glove seem remarkably large, as though the hand it encased was bigger than the other?
    More interesting than any physical peculiarity was something the man gave off – a kind of aura. He exuded arrogance. The attitude of his thrown-back head, the set of his lips and the movement of his wrist as he flicked ash on to the cobbles conveyed contempt for all around him. But there was something else – a sense of burning, zealous concentration. This was a man with a mission of such consuming urgency that he would trample anything before him. Perhaps, Bond thought, that was why he held himself so aloof – because he feared that being exposed to the demands of other people might corrupt the purity of his purpose. But how many years, and what bitterness or reverses, must it have taken to create such a creature?
    His colleague returned to the car, carrying a bag, his face in shadow beneath his strange kepi. In the boutiques of the King’s Road, Chelsea, near his flat, Bond had seen the new fashion for military uniforms among the young, who sported coats and tunics with coloured braid. But this man was no ‘hippie’ or ‘child of peace’. Though short of stature, he walked with the speed and agility of an army scout or tracker. There was a functional brutality about his movements as he climbed into the driver’s seat, threw the small canvas bag into the back and started the engine. This was a man ofaction, the NCO fanatically loyal to the overbearing officer beside him.
    He turned the big cabriolet round in a single sweep and accelerated hard. A small dog ran out from one of the cafés, barking at a seagull on the dock. It was caught by the front wheel of the car, and flattened. While the animal lay squealing in its death throes, the Mercedes drove off without stopping.
    Bond travelled listlessly along the Côte d’Azur. He spent a couple of nights at the Eden Roc on the Cap d’Antibes, but rapidly grew tired of the clientele. Although his work had often forced him to mingle with the rich and he’d developed expensive tastes of his own in liquor, cars and women, he found it enervating to be always in the company of men who’d made a paper fortune by sitting on their backsides in a bourse, and women whose looks were kept precariously alive by the surgeon’s knife and the resources of the hotel beautician.
    At Monte Carlo he made a modest killing at the chemin de fer table, but lost at poker. Neither game excited him as once it might have done. Did he need an opponent of the calibre of Le Chiffre or Hugo Drax, he wondered, to make the game worth the candle?
    One evening in the early-summer twilight, he sat at a café overlooking the Mediterranean at Cannes, hearing the chatter of the tree frogs in the pines. How wonderful this little fishing town must have seemed to its first English visitors, with the softness of its air, the fragrance of the breeze and the simplicity of life exemplified in its food – grilled fish, salads and chilled wine. It was turning into a version of Blackpool now, Bond thought, with the cheaphotels, the crowds, the youths on noisy scooters and two-stroke motorcycles. Soon they’d put a ferris wheel on the promenade.
    Bond caught himself thinking in this way too often.
    In his hotel room he took a vigorous shower, first as hot as he could bear it, then freezing cold, letting the icy needles pierce his shoulders. He stood naked in front of the mirror and looked into his face, with a distaste he made no attempt to soften.
    ‘You’re tired,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re played out. Finished.’
    His torso and arms bore a network of scars, small and large, that traced a history of his violent life. There was the slight displacement of his spine to the left where he had fallen from a train in Hungary, the skin graft on the back of the left hand. Every square inch of trunk and limb seemed to contribute to the story. But he knew that it was what was in his