They had dinner in the garden with the swimming pool shimmering behind them and the stars crowding out the night sky. Everything was silent. The cicadas had decided enough was enough. True to her word, Sixtine had prepared the simplest of meals: grilled fish, salad, cheese she had picked up from the Marché de la Libération in Nice, fresh bread. They sat next to each other at the table and for a while they didn’t speak. There was a part of Bond that was uneasy, at war with himself. As much as he now saw that it was inevitable they should have become lovers, he was worried that he had confused the situation and that he might come to regret it. Put bluntly, it was still quite possible that she was his enemy.
As if sensing what was on his mind, she levelled her eyes on him and said, without emotion: ‘Do you still want information?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought we might enjoy the evening together.’
‘I’ll enjoy learning more about you.’
She considered. ‘What do you want to know, James? Was I responsible for the death of your friend? No. Or the girl this morning? I don’t even know who she was. You asked me what I was doing here in the south of France. Why should I tell you? You know nothing about me and unless it’s connected to your work, you care even less.’
‘You’re wrong.’ Bond lifted his wine glass and swirled the honey-coloured liquid in the palm of his hand. Puligny-Montrachet is one of the few wines that can trace its origins back to Roman times and he enjoyed it as much for its age and antiquity as its taste. ‘I want to know everything about you. Not just what you’re doing here in France. You’re obviously quite an operator. My office in London has a healthy respect for you and I can see that you’ve enjoyed putting me in my place. But why don’t we leave the games behind us now? Why don’t you tell me about yourself?’ He put his hand on his chest. ‘I cross my heart it’ll go no further than where we are now. If we’re both on the same side, it seems crazy to have secrets from each other.’
‘If we’re both on the same side . . .’ She let the words hang in the air. ‘All right.’ She held out her glass and Bond refilled it. ‘But if you betray me, if you make any move against me, I will never forgive you, James. More than that, I will make sure you regret it. Just because I’ve given myself to you tonight, don’t think I belong to you. The opposite is true. Because of tonight, part of you belongs to me.’
Bond said nothing. He waited for her to begin.
‘You may be surprised but I was born in New Zealand. I don’t even remember the place, really. My father was from France. He was an engineer and he’d been invited down there to work on the main trunk line from Auckland to Wellington. My mother made dresses. I was there for the first five years of my life and I remember almost nothing about that time except that I felt bored and trapped. There were only about a million people living in the entire country and everything was very ordinary, very safe. It was all beige. Nice little houses with nice little gardens but I don’t think I was a nice little girl. I was glad when the work finished and my father announced that we would have to move back to Paris. I can still remember the excitement I felt as I packed my suitcase. Paris – even the word – was like something out of a fairy story. It was the secret door that was going to take me to a new life. How could I have known that we were going to arrive just in time for the outbreak of a world war?
‘It’s hard for me to describe my feelings about the city a month after we got there. On the one hand, there was the glamour: the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the boulevards, the shops with their huge windows that made Auckland look like the nowhere it had always been. But at the same time, there were guns everywhere. People were afraid. The Germans were getting closer and closer – at one stage they were just fifteen miles away and hundreds of taxis turned up to carry French soldiers to the front. I actually saw them leave and thought how ridiculous it was, that all these young men should get into taxis to take them to their death.
‘By now, my mother was working in a defence factory. My father had got a job helping to build the railway from Montparnasse to Porte de Vanves. I didn’t see either of them very much. I was looked after by a neighbour, an old lady who smelled of sour milk and who talked to her cats. I think I was a very angry child. After the first excitement, Paris was a disappointment to me. I was trapped in a small flat in Montrouge, which isn’t even part of the city. It’s a suburb in the south. I’d learned to speak French from my father but I didn’t have any friends. I went to a school that was run by nuns and they were vicious. The food was horrible. In a way, those were the days that made me what I am because if there was one thing I learned it was to be self-sufficient. I had to find the strength to look after myself.’
She fell briefly silent, looking into her wine glass as if it could provide some window into her past life. The robe she was wearing was unfastened at the collar and Bond found himself examining the line of her throat and the valley below. Her hair was still damp from the shower and it suited her, making her look more wild and unpredictable. The moon was behind her and the shadows wrapped themselves around her.
Eventually, she went on.
‘Every day, I prayed that things would change and they finally did, though not in the way that I had hoped. On 30 August 1914, my mother was killed by a German bomb that fell onto the Rue des Vinaigriers when she was on her way home from work. It was a completely random event. A German pilot was flying a Taube. That’s the German word for “dove”. He dropped three bombs by hand. One of the bombs fell into the chimney of a building and blew up a flat. It was the third bomb that killed my mother . . . as far as I know she was the first civilian ever to be killed in an air raid. In fact, there were three other casualties although nobody else was killed. It was completely hushed up at the time. The French were worried about morale. My father only told me what had really happened a few weeks before the war ended.
‘By that time, everything was over for him. He hadn’t been able to cope after my mother died. I’ve always believed that women are much stronger than men. We take the cards that life has dealt us and get on with it. Without our support, men just crumple and give up. That was how it was with him. He was drinking heavily . . . and I don’t even know how he managed it because alcohol wasn’t so easy to find. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who I was. I can still see him now. He had been a handsome man but he didn’t eat and he didn’t look after himself. He had eyes that stared at me as if he was wondering how I had got there. It was like he was collapsing into himself and I wasn’t at all surprised when I came home from school one day to find the neighbour sitting in our empty flat. She told me he was dead. She said he died of a broken heart but it’s more likely that he killed himself. I never found out. What difference did it make to me? Either way, I was alone.
‘When the war ended, I was sent to England. It turned out that I had an aunt who lived in London, in Pimlico, and she agreed to take me in. I don’t need to tell you very much about the next few years. I grew up. I went to school. People talk about “the roaring twenties” but they never really roared for me. There were jazz clubs and cocktail bars all over London. Women were beginning to break out. They were smoking cigarettes and driving cars, wearing the clothes they wanted to wear. People talked about “flappers”. You would still have been in short trousers, James. I’m sure it means nothing to you. It hardly meant anything to me, either. I was growing up with my aunt Lucy and she did everything she could to protect me from the world outside. Or maybe she was trying to protect the world from me.
‘It’s funny to think how ordinary everything was for me and how quickly I settled into what might have become my new life. I went to secretarial college and started working for an insurance company in Knightsbridge with radiators that were turned on full and plants on the windowsills and a tea trolley that came round every day at eleven o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. Aunt Lucy made me sandwiches and I would go out when the sun was shining and eat them in the park. There were other girls there and we got on well enough. They used to talk about the boys they were seeing and I wondered how much longer I was going to be alone. One of the underwriters took a liking to me and he drove me to Clacton in his Austin Seven and that was about as glamorous as it got.
‘And then everything changed when I met Danny.’
She hadn’t been eating her food, chasing it around the plate with her fork instead, and now she gave up altogether. She reached for her cigarettes. She smoked Morlands, the brand she had mentioned. Her cigarette was slim and elegant with a single silver band. She lit it. The flame leapt up briefly, reflecting in her eyes.
‘Danny Salgado – that was what he called himself,’ she went on. ‘We bumped into each other outside Knightsbridge station, quite literally, and he invited me for a drink. He was dark-haired, a few years older than me, expensively dressed. He wore a hat. Now that I think about it, he looked a bit like you but maybe a little more worldly. He had an extraordinary charm. That was the thing about him. The way he smiled at people, they sort of fell in love with him without a second thought and he knew it. He could turn it on with waiters, with police officers, with anyone he fancied. I saw him do it. It was like a technique. I’d never met anyone like him but you have to remember that I was still in my twenties and I’d been living half my life with a spinster aunt. I didn’t know much about anything.
‘Danny told me that he was a business adviser. I wasn’t even sure what that meant but from the very start he made it clear that he didn’t like talking about his work. All I knew was that he worked with a lot of very important people. He was always travelling and he always went first class. Later on, I discovered he had three passports. I found out a lot of things about Danny but only when it was too late. Anyway, he took me for dinner that night – to Kettner’s in Soho. I had never been anywhere like it but everyone seemed to know him. He bought champagne and when it was time to pay, he scattered five-pound notes like they were meaningless to him. The bill was almost a week’s salary for me. “Plenty more where that came from, Jojo,” he would say. Jojo was what he called me and he was always saying cheesy things like that but somehow he made them sound all right. He loved jokes. He was the sort of man who could start a party just by walking into the room.
‘I didn’t sleep with him that night. In fact, it was a long time before I let him take me. He was the first man I’d ever been to bed with and I wanted to know him as a friend before I took him as a lover.’ She smiled wistfully, smoke trickling between her fingers. ‘It was easy to become friends with Danny. He had a suite of rooms at the Dorchester and that’s where he made a dishonest woman of me. When I woke up the next morning, he’d already gone but he left a note for me and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door and a bellboy came in with a huge bunch of flowers, champagne and breakfast on a trolley. We saw each other again a few days later and already he was urging me to give up work and move in with him – even though I didn’t actually know where he lived.
‘Danny and I got married three months later at Chelsea registry office. Aunt Lucy came to the service and I can still see her sitting there, trying to be happy for me when actually she disapproved. She was scared for me, I think. She must have known intuitively what sort of man Danny was but she never spoke a word against him. She didn’t believe it was her business even though she was sure it wouldn’t end happily and she was right. She’s dead now. She died quite young and I miss her terribly. She was the only close friend I ever had.
‘I was very happy for the first couple of years. Danny had bought a flat in Heddon Street, close to Piccadilly. At first I assumed it was for both of us although actually it was just for me. He gave me an allowance and he was generous. We travelled together – to Cannes, to Vienna, to Rome and to Malta. We stayed in the best hotels and went to wonderful restaurants. Danny was a gambler and he took me with him to the casinos. He was the one who introduced me to vingt-et-un. He always said it was the one casino game where you could actually beat the house, which was ironic in view of what happened. He taught me how to memorise the order of an entire pack of cards. I can still do it to this day. And he also showed me how to work out exactly how many cards the dealer was holding just by glancing at his hands. I spent hours and hours learning that, not because I thought it would be useful but because I wanted to please him.’
Bond had also stopped eating. He poured himself some more wine and settled back in his chair. He wondered why Sixtine was telling him all this. Perhaps it was because, although she would never admit it, she was lonely. He had thought that when he saw her for the first time at the casino. Who she was and what she did had set her apart from the rest of the world, and perhaps what she craved more than anything else was intimacy in every sense. Again, for someone who traded in information, freely opening herself up to him was the most effective way of lowering the barriers between them. She really did want him to believe that they were on the same side.
‘My love affair with Danny ended pretty much the day I got pregnant,’ Sixtine said. ‘Although I didn’t see it at the time. He was so happy when I told him. There were more flowers. Dinner at the Ritz. An expensive doctor in Cavendish Square. But at the same time, it was as if a switch had been thrown and he no longer felt comfortable with me. I knew it at once when he was in bed with me a few days after I’d told him and it was as if he wasn’t there. His whole manner towards me changed. He’d always made me feel special but now his eyes would flicker over me as if I’d become part of the furniture. He used to be someone I could talk to but now it was just a few sentences and he would be gone as soon as he could.’ She sighed. ‘I’m making it sound melodramatic but actually it was very ordinary. Isn’t that how marriage works? The days go by and you settle into a routine and piece by piece everything is taken away from you until there are two complete strangers sitting in the same room.
‘Suddenly, he was travelling more. He’d often been away for days at a time but after the baby was born – it was a boy – it became weeks. Danny loved being a father. He was so proud. But maybe there was a side of him that was afraid of responsibility, who didn’t want to be tied down. I never complained. I tried to make things easy for him. That’s how much of a fool I was. I had been married to him for five years before I discovered the truth.
‘I should have known from the start. Perhaps I had known and all along I’d just been pretending that I didn’t. There were the three passports, for a start, the different names. There had been telephone calls in the middle of the night, strange men who never announced their names arriving at the flat. And the money! Envelopes full of banknotes with no real explanation about where it was all coming from. I’d never met his parents or any of his relatives and the friends that he introduced me to seemed to change from season to season so that there was never anyone who was actually close. You know the mistake I’d made, James? I made Danny my whole world. I’ll never do that again with another man.
‘He wasn’t a business adviser. He was a crook – plain and simple. I learned the truth from a Scotland Yard detective called Jack Travers who came looking for him and who took pity on me. Or maybe he wanted to use me to hurt Danny. I don’t know. Anyway, Danny had started his career as a confidence trickster. No surprises there. He was what was called “the roper” for a well-organised gang who worked in London and sometimes on transatlantic crossings. The roper is the one who pulls in the mark, which was exactly what he had done with me. All it takes is a lot of charm and plausibility. They had a series of scams with fanciful names: the Huge Duke, the Last Turn, the Hot Seat, the Tear-up . . . you wouldn’t believe how much practice went into it all. There were half a dozen of them pretending they didn’t know each other when in fact they were working together. I’d met some of them but I never knew their real names.
‘Recently, he’d branched out. He’d set up a racket forging National Health and Unemployment stamps. They were being printed in Poland and he was selling them through gangs that he was meeting in different parts of London . . . the Hoxton Mob and the Elephant Boys. He was a familiar figure, hanging out at clubs and racecourses. It seems that everyone knew him. Except me.
‘And I suppose it goes without saying that I wasn’t the only woman in his life. Far from it. DI Travers made sure I got all the details. Danny had girlfriends all over London. I got the impression that he must have been laughing about me when he was with them because I was the only one who didn’t know the truth. I’d constructed this little dream of being a wife and a mother when actually I was just a convenience. I’m not even sure why he married me, although later on I found out that Salgado wasn’t his real name so it didn’t matter anyway because the whole marriage was null and void, part of the pretence.’
The evening air was getting cooler. Sixtine drew the robe closer around her. Bond lit another cigarette.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to talk all night. You said you wanted to know everything about me. Well, I’ll spare you that. This is the edited version. Do you want me to go on?’
‘You can talk as long as you like,’ Bond said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I hope not, James. At least, I hope not tonight.’
She drank the rest of her wine and pushed the glass away.
‘I left Danny. We never had a row. We didn’t have any confrontation. I simply took my son and went back to Aunt Lucy. She’d been expecting me. My old room was ready for me and there was another room up in the attic for Julian. I’ll say one thing for Danny. He still sent me money every week. I don’t know whether it was for me, for his son or just for his conscience but I didn’t have to go back to work. I never saw him again. The truth is, in a way, we really had loved each other and we didn’t want to see each other now that everything had changed. It was better just to live with the memories.
‘When the money stopped, I knew it could only mean one thing. Danny had disappeared and nobody would give me any information about him so I went back to Travers and he told me exactly what I expected to hear. Danny had been shot dead by one of his gangster friends. It turned out that in the last few years of his life, despite everything he’d said, he’d allowed gambling to consume him – not just cards but craps and roulette – and in just a short time he’d been cleaned out by the casinos. It was all gone: the flat in Piccadilly, the cars, the nice clothes. I wondered how he’d found the money to send to me. Travers smiled when I asked him that. It seems he’d been dipping his hand in the till, stealing from his associates. That was what got him killed. I would have liked to have taken Julian to visit his grave but that wasn’t going to happen. Danny was probably weighed down at the bottom of the Thames. He didn’t leave anything behind. Not even a memory.’
Sixtine shivered.
‘Let’s go back inside. I’m getting cold.’
They went into the living room. Sixtine sat on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her. Bond sat opposite, waiting to hear the end of the story.
‘Another war was on the way and part of me was glad,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that terrible? But I needed my life to be shaken up. I wanted a new world to explore. I was thirty years old when war was finally declared and I thought about joining the Women’s Land Army or the ATS, but Aunt Lucy had a friend who taught at Imperial College and, knowing that I spoke fluent French, he suggested I apply for a job at somewhere called Bletchley Park. It was all top secret and I shouldn’t be talking to you about it even now. I went for an interview at a little office near Green Park and the next thing I knew, I’d signed the Official Secrets Act and I was on my way to Buckinghamshire with a job that would pay me thirty-six shillings a week – although I’d have to lose a guinea out of that for digs. Julian stayed in London with Aunt Lucy.
‘I was at Bletchley for most of the war. I started in the indexing hut . . . naval intelligence. My job was to look out for any words or phrases in French and German that might be of interest and put them down on cards for cross-referencing. It was a rather grim place with terrible food and I worked long hours, six days a week, but I was very happy there. I had a lot of friends, even though most of the girls were younger than me. We had to be close to each other because we weren’t allowed to talk about anything to anyone else. I remember swimming in the local reservoir during the summer, dances at Woburn Abbey, the Odeon at Fenny Stratford. I used to meet RAF pilots from Cranfield at a pub on the Grand Union Canal and there was a Polish airman I was close to for a time. In a way, I was protected, in a sort of cocoon. The work I was doing was important. We all knew that. I didn’t have to think about the rest of my life, about Danny, about any of it.
‘And then, in the summer of 1943, the same professor who had recommended me to Bletchley came calling a second time – only now he wanted me to join an organisation I’d never heard of and which, he said, would put my life in great danger. I knew at once that he wanted me to become a spy and I was right. He was talking about the SOE.’
Sixtine shivered again but this time Bond knew it wasn’t because of the cold.
‘I was recruited and sent to Scotland for training in field craft, weapons, demolition, night-and-day navigation and all the rest of it. I was thirty-four by then and I found it completely exhausting. Then it was off to Beaulieu for cryptography, weapons, escape and evasion techniques, Morse . . . I know you were in naval intelligence, James, so this is all probably very familiar to you.’
‘How do you know?’ Bond interrupted. ‘When we first met, you knew my name and everything about me. How did you get that information?’
She looked him in the eyes. ‘You think I’ve been spying on you?’
‘It’s what I assumed.’
‘Well, you’re wrong.’ She paused. ‘Irwin Wolfe told me about you. He even showed me your photograph and warned me to keep away from you.’
Bond considered what she had said. He still wasn’t sure if he should believe her. ‘That’s very interesting. But you were telling me about your work with the SOE . . .’
‘Actually, I don’t want to talk about it very much. It ended badly, very badly.’
‘You’re still alive.’
‘They used to say that a wireless operator with the SOE had a life expectancy of six weeks, so I suppose I was lucky.’ She took the cigarette that Bond was smoking, used it to light her own, then handed it back. ‘I was given the code name of Sixtine and I was sent out for the first time at the end of 1943. My job was to join the Stockbroker Circuit as a courier, relaying messages in and out. There was a strange irony. Stockbroker had launched a successful attack on the railway workshop at Fives-Lille and they’d also developed an interesting method of sabotage which they called “Phantom Train”. They’d hijack a locomotive and send it rushing down the tracks. Eventually it would crash into another locomotive or a building without any need of explosives. I was with them for three months and it always struck me as funny. When I was a little girl, my father had been creating the French railway system and here I was with the people who were destroying it. It made me wonder what he would have thought.
‘I was sent into France three times and on the third time my luck ran out. I’m not going to tell you what happened. I never talk about it. I don’t even think about it. I was arrested by the Gestapo one day after I parachuted into northern France and a week before D-Day. Of course, I’d been betrayed. They knew I was coming.’
Bond could see the memories tearing through her and reached out to hold onto her – but she shrugged him away.
‘I’m all right. A lot of people were hurt in the war and I was just one of them. But there was something that hurt a lot more, although I only found out about it later and maybe it will explain to you everything you want to know.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I say that I was betrayed and it was true. When I parachuted into France that third time, the Germans knew I was on my way and they were waiting for me. I fell right into their arms. But it was only later I discovered that the SOE had been aware of this all along. They knew that I would be arrested, interrogated and probably killed. There were whole networks – Stockbroker, Prosper and many others – that had been infiltrated by the Germans. But the SOE were playing a double game. They didn’t want the Germans to know that they knew. They wanted to distract their attention from the Normandy landings and if that meant sacrificing people like me, then so be it. And believe me, I wasn’t the only one.
‘Yes, James, I’m still alive. But when I got back to England from Ravensbrück, which is where I had been kept prisoner, and when I understood what had been done to me, how I had been manipulated, a large part of me died. It’s still dead now.’
She didn’t want to smoke any more of her cigarette and stubbed it out, the sparks rising around her fingertips.
‘That was when I decided I would never allow a man to tell me what to do again,’ she went on. ‘I would have no allegiance to anyone – and not to any country. I would go into business for myself. I would get rich and I wouldn’t care how I did it. I kept the name, Sixtine, because it was also a number and it seemed right that I should deliberately set aside part of my humanity. It’s something you and I have in common. They call you 007 because they know it will make it easier for you to kill brutally and without remorse. It matters to them that you should be a double zero. They have taken part of your humanity too.’
Bond didn’t believe what Sixtine was saying. He knew there had been double agents within the Special Operations Executive. He himself had spoken to Henri Déricourt, who had controlled air operations and who had been prosecuted for treason fourteen months after the end of the trial. Bond had taken a dislike to the French pilot but in the end Déricourt had been acquitted. He couldn’t believe that there had been some sort of conspiracy running through the upper echelons of the organisation and he was tempted to argue with Sixtine.
He decided to stay silent. He still needed information from her. He had to see this through to the end.
‘I don’t think of myself as a number,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you why I choose to do the work that I do. But there are two things I want to ask you. The first is – what happened to your son, Julian? You haven’t mentioned him.’
She made a vague gesture with one hand. ‘He’s in the Bahamas. I have a house there and he’s happier away from me. It’s easier for both of us that way.’
‘And you still haven’t told me what you’re doing in the south of France. What about Irwin Wolfe? I know you don’t love him. I imagine you don’t even like him. So what do you want from him?’
Bond waited. In a way the entire conversation had been leading up to this.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t want there to be any secrets between us and it may be that we can even help each other. I would have thought you’d have guessed anyway.’ She paused. ‘The first thing you should know is that Irwin is a sick man. I think he’s dying. He takes about a dozen pills every day but they’re not helping him any more. The strange thing is, his illness only makes him more determined. It’s driving him on. He’s developed a new product which could make him another fortune – even if it’s one he’ll never get to spend.’ She paused. ‘Do you know anything about Technicolor film?’
‘I know a little. I don’t often go to the cinema. I’ve always found more interesting things to do in the dark.’
She nodded. ‘I’m sure. Well, the basic process of Technicolor is very simple. The colours are divided into three basic components: red, green and blue. The trouble is, it demands three separate negatives and that causes complications.’
She was businesslike now, unemotional, as if everything she had been saying for the last hour had been forgotten. Bond observed her with a sense of admiration he had rarely felt for a woman. Child, orphan, wife, mother, widow, secret agent, prisoner and self-confessed criminal, she had managed to break down her life into separate compartments with a ruthlessness that had ensured not just her survival but her success. He remembered Reade Griffith, almost in awe of her. ‘I can tell you – she’s a piece of work!’ It was true. Bond had never met anyone quite like her.
‘Multiply the negatives and you divide the light,’ she went on. ‘So you have to use a lot more lighting when you’re shooting the film. And that makes it much more expensive.
‘But Irwin, or the people working for him, has invented a type of 35 mm colour negative stock that has a much wider latitude. It’s good for indoor and outdoor photography. He calls it G-Vision and it’s going to put Technicolor and all the rest of them out of business. Which is where I come in. There are certain people I know who want the formula. They’ve paid me a considerable amount of money to steal it.’
So that was it: industrial espionage, as simple as that. Bond couldn’t help smiling. At the same time, he wondered who the people were behind Sixtine and knew she wouldn’t tell him. ‘He produces this new film stock at his plant in Menton,’ he said.
‘That’s right. Or at least, that’s what I believe. I’ve been cosying up to him, trying to get him to give me a tour but Irwin has always been completely silent about what he gets up to in his secret compound in the middle of the woods. It’s been driving me crazy because, as you know, he’s leaving France on Tuesday morning and without him here I won’t get another chance. I even went out and took a sneaky look for myself and you’d think he was manufacturing nuclear bombs the amount of security he’s hired. There are two fences, the inner one electrified. He has armed guards on twenty-four-hour patrol and guard dogs. I can’t say I blame him. He’s sitting on something that could be worth millions of dollars.
‘Today was my last chance. I knew he was going to Menton this afternoon and when I met him on the Mirabelle, I really expected him to take me with him. It was more or less what he’d promised.’
‘And if he had taken you in – what then?’
‘I’m good at improvising. A few minutes on my own would have been all I needed. I know what I’m looking for and I’ve got a miniature camera. It’s just a question of meeting the right people and taking the right shots. Anyway, it looks as if I’m going to have to fall back on an alternative plan.’ She looked at Bond curiously. ‘And the funny thing is, meeting you could be exactly the break I need.’
‘You think I’m going to help you steal commercial secrets?’
‘Why not? Maybe I can help you find out what’s going on around here. You say this part of the world is poisoned. I agree. There’s definitely something nasty in the air. Scipio may look like he’s just walked out of a circus but he’s extremely dangerous. Trust me, you don’t want to go after him on your own.’
Bond was reminded of his confrontation with Jean-Paul Scipio and once again felt the liquid being thrown in his face. He still wondered why it had been water, not acid. Either way, describing him as dangerous was an understatement. He was a monster.
‘Why did you meet him at La Caravelle?’ Bond asked.
‘I already told you,’ Sixtine said. ‘Scipio heard I was in Marseilles. He knew who I was. He invited me to meet him except it wasn’t so much an invitation as a royal summons. There was no way I could refuse. He wanted to know that I wasn’t up to anything that might interfere with his business.’
‘What is his business? From what I understand, he’s given up narcotics.’
‘I have no idea. I didn’t ask and he didn’t say.’
‘Did you tell him why you were here?’
‘No. I make it a practice never to share information and certainly not in the way I have with you. I led him to believe that I was a gold-digger, trying to get my hooks into Irwin’s fortune. And he believed me. It fits with his view of women. I don’t think he likes us very much.’
She yawned and Bond glanced at his watch. It was only ten o’clock. He felt he had been in Antibes much longer. ‘I should leave,’ he said.
‘I was hoping you’d stay.’ She looked at him with laughter in her eyes. ‘I’m going to bed and you’re going to come with me. I want you to make love to me again but more slowly this time. You make love like a schoolboy. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of girls, James, but you’ve never had a woman and you’ve still got a lot to learn.’ He was about to protest but she stopped him. ‘Don’t say anything. We’ve talked enough. If there’s more to be said, we can do it in the morning.’
There was a staircase opposite the kitchen and she climbed up with Bond following. The bedroom was exactly as he had imagined it would be, small and pretty with ormolu wall lights and an antique bed and two windows leading out onto the terrace that he had seen at the front of the house. She turned as he came in. ‘No more talking,’ she said.
It was only the next morning, as the sun came up, that they spoke again. Bond was woken by Sixtine slipping out of bed and padding bare-footed out of the room. When she returned, she was wearing a long, striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up and carrying something in her hand. ‘I want you to have this,’ she said. ‘What I said to you last night, before we came upstairs, was unfair. I want you to have this as a souvenir of our time together. You can use it when you buy yourself some decent cigarettes.’
It was a flat square cigarette case made out of gunmetal. When Bond opened it, he saw that there were four words inscribed in the lid, but close to the edge where they were hard to see.
FOREVER AND A DAY.
‘I bought it for Danny,’ she explained. ‘On the day we got married, he said he wanted to be with me forever but I told him that wasn’t enough. I wanted forever and a day. I had this made for our anniversary but he was dead before I could give it to him. So I want to give it to you.’
‘I thought you hated Danny,’ Bond said, closing the lid.
‘Did I say that? No. How can I hate him? He’s part of my story and that story brought me to you.’
Bond reached out for her and as the first bright orange rays of the morning sun stretched across the wooden floor, she slipped into his arms, the two of them gently folding themselves into one another beneath the sheets.