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This case isn’t ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr Big is “live and let live”.’ Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter. ‘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”.’
the Voodoo drink – a concoction of rum, gunpowder, grave-dirt and human blood.
‘Everybody’s nearly dead in St Petersburg,’ explained Solitaire. ‘It’s the Great American Graveyard. When the bank clerk or the post-office worker or the railroad conductor reaches sixty he collects his pension or his annuity and goes to St Petersburg to get a few years’ sunshine before he dies.
It’s a terrifying sight, all these old people with their spectacles and hearing-aids and clicking false-teeth.’
Bond caught a whiff of the atmosphere that makes the town the ‘Old Folks Home’ of America. Everyone on the sidewalks had white hair, white or blue, and the famous Sidewalk Davenports that Solitaire had described were thick with oldsters sitting in rows like the starlings in Trafalgar Square. Bond noted the small grudging mouths of the women, the sun gleaming on their pince-nez; the stringy, collapsed chests and arms of the men displayed to the sunshine in Truman shirts. The fluffy, sparse balls of hair on the women showing the pink scalp. The bony bald heads of the men. And, everywhere, a
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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.
