Devil May Care

from his pocket. Two guards held the workman’s arms rigid behind him while Chagrin inserted a chopstick into each of the man’s ears.
    ‘And this is what Chagrin used to do to the children who had listened to the Bible.’
    Bracing his feet at either side of the man, Chagrin banged the flat of his hands as hard as he could against the ends of the chopsticks, drilling them into the man’s head. Blood spurted from his ears as he screamed and fell forward on the floor.
    ‘He won’t hear anything for a long while now,’ said Gorner. ‘Not till his eardrums grow back. Some of the children never heard again.’
    Two guards dragged the screaming man away while two remained in the room.
    ‘And I expect you’d like to know how Chagrin came byhis nickname. The word means both “pain” and “grief” in French. Remarkable that a language should use the same word for both, don’t you think? But there was something else about Chagrin that made him a better, fiercer soldier than anyone else. When the Russians liberated the Nazi concentration camps they took the papers relating to the Nazi doctors’ experiments. A highly secret section of the Soviet health ministry continued with experiments along the same lines for many years afterwards. Unlike the Nazis, they asked for volunteers. Travel costs and a financial reward were guaranteed. Word reached Chagrin’s Communist cell in North Vietnam and he volunteered to go to a clinic in Omsk. Russian military doctors were interested in the neurological basis of psychopaths – by which we mean men who lack the ability to imagine the feelings of other people. They can’t project. They have no concept at all of “the other”. The doctors thought that such a capacity – or lack of it – might be useful to the army and particularly to the KGB. To cut a long story short, Chagrin was one of a dozen men who underwent brain surgery. Post-mortems of psychopaths had shown some abnormalities in the temporal lobe. Are you still with me, Bond?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘In Chagrin’s case the operation was a success. They cauterized an area of his temporal lobe the size of a fingernail. I don’t imagine Chagrin was exactly a bleeding heart before, but afterwards his indifference to others has been total. It’s really quite remarkable. Unfortunately, there was a small side-effect. The surgeons damaged a major cluster of pain-sensing neurons in his brain – quite close to the morphine receptors, as it happens. The brain registers pain in some of the same areas that govern emotion. If youtry to stop someone feeling compassion, you may take away other feelings. As a result, Chagrin’s ability to experience pain is uneven, sometimes barely existent. This means he has to be careful. He might jump down twenty feet and not even know that he’s broken his ankle. At other times, of course, it can be an advantage. In combat, he is a formidable opponent.’
    ‘I see,’ said Bond. It explained the stroke-victim appearance of part of Chagrin’s face. ‘But why the hat?’
    ‘The surgeons raised what’s called an osteoplastic flap. They drill holes in the skull, then insert a thin saw between the bone and the membranes beneath and cut upwards through the bone. When they’ve got three-quarters of a circle, they lift and fold back the skull. But the gentlemen in Omsk were in a hurry and didn’t finish the job properly. The flap doesn’t really fit. Chagrin feels shy about it.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Bond. ‘But why the cap of the Foreign Legion, when he fought so bitterly against the French?’
    Gorner shrugged. ‘I think perhaps the Russian neuro-surgeons removed his sense of irony.’
    Bond struggled to contain his hatred of this man. Which unwise student, he thought, which unthinking joker at Oxford University had first teased him about his hand and so set his life’s course on this perverted crusade?
    ‘You must be hungry, Bond,’ said Gorner. ‘But today, as I said, is a day of education. The lack of food is to remind you of how the British systematically starved the Irish in the great potato famine. I think a few pangs of yours don’t really compare to the pain of the millions who died. Do you?’
    ‘When do I leave on this venture of yours?’ asked Bond.
    Gorner was looking through the window at the slave workers on his factory floor and seemed not to hear. ‘I didthink of another way of bringing Britain to its knees,’ he said. ‘I considered investing the profits from my