Live and Let Die (James Bond, #2)

by Ian Fleming

They drew up at the best hotel in New York, the St Regis, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street.

He was reminded to ask for the ‘check’ rather than the ‘bill’, to say ‘cab’ instead of ‘taxi’ and (this from Leiter) to avoid words of more than two syllables. (‘You can get through any American conversation,’ advised Leiter, ‘with “Yeah”, “Nope” and “Sure”.’) The English word to be avoided at all costs, added Leiter, was ‘Ectually’. Bond had said that this word was not part of his vocabulary.

‘In my job,’ he said, ‘when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s “live and let die”.’

Leiter ordered medium-dry Martinis with a slice of lemon peel. He stipulated House of Lords gin and Martini Rossi. The American gin, a much higher proof than English gin, tasted harsh to Bond. He reflected that he would have to be careful what he drank that evening.

In front of his eyes, the rain came down in swift, slanting strokes – italic script across the unopened black cover that hid the secret hours that lay ahead.

They ordered scotch-and-soda – Haig and Haig Pinchbottle. Bond looked the crowd over. It was nearly all men. There were two or three whites, boxing fans or reporters for the New York sports columns, Bond decided. The atmosphere was warmer, louder than downtown. The walls were covered with boxing photographs, mostly of Sugar Ray Robinson and of scenes from his great fights. It was a cheerful place, doing great business.

The whole scene was macabre and livid, as if El Greco had done a painting by moonlight of an exhumed graveyard in a burning town.

‘Those who deserve to die,’ he paused, ‘die the death they deserve. Write that down,’ he added. ‘It’s an original thought.’

Bond ordered Old Fashioneds, and stipulated ‘Old Grandad’ Bourbon, chicken sandwiches, and decaffeined ‘Sanka’ coffee so that their sleep would not be spoilt.

Years later, she had found out about the Voodoo drink – a concoction of rum, gunpowder, grave-dirt and human blood. She almost retched as the taste came back to her mouth.

His growing warmth towards Solitaire and his desire for her body were in a compartment which had no communicating door with his professional life.

Bond liked fast cars and he liked driving them. Most American cars bored him. They lacked personality and the patina of individual craftsmanship that European cars have.

Then he had the biggest steak, rare, with French fries, he had ever seen. It was a small grill called Pete’s, dark and friendly. He drank a quarter of a pint of Old Grandad with the steak and had two cups of very strong coffee. With all this under his belt he began to feel more sanguine.

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother’s womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world.

The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.

He looked at the Rolex watch on his wrist. It was three minutes past eleven o’clock. He selected the seven-hour fuse from the handful he extracted from a zipped side-pocket and inserted it in the fuse pocket of the mine and pushed it home. The rest of the fuses he buried in the sand so that if he was captured the mine would not be betrayed.

The first tears since his childhood came into James Bond’s blue-grey eyes and ran down his drawn cheeks into the bloodstained sea.

‘I hope I’ve made it right,’ she said. ‘Six to one sounds terribly strong. I’ve never had Vodka Martinis before.’