Diamonds are Forever (James Bond #4)

by Ian Fleming

‘There’s nothing so extraordinary about American gangsters,’ protested Bond. ‘They’re not Americans. Mostly a lot of Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meat-balls and squirting scent over themselves.’

Look at narcotics. Ten million addicts. Where do they get the stuff from? Look at gambling – legitimate gambling. Two hundred and fifty million dollars a year is the take at Las Vegas. Then there are the undercover games at Miami and Chicago and so on. All owned by the gangs and their friends.

Do you realize gambling’s the biggest single industry in America? Bigger than steel. Bigger than motor cars? And they take damned good care to keep it running smoothly. Get hold of a copy of the Kefauver Report if you don’t believe me.

‘Perhaps you haven’t read the F.B.I. Report on American Crime for this year. Interesting. Just thirty-four murders every day. Nearly 150,000 Americans criminally killed in the last twenty years.’ Bond looked incredulous. ‘It’s a fact, damn you.

How often, in his early days in his own Service, had he been part of this same routine – through Strasbourg into Germany, through Niegoreloye into Russia, over the Simplon, across the Pyrenees. The tension. The dry mouth. The nails ground into the palms of the hands. And now, having graduated away from all that, here he was going through with it again. ‘Yes, I see,’ said Bond, dodging his memories.

Then came more mountains, streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth, and then a glimpse of green in the midst of the blasted, Martian landscape, and then a slow descent and ‘please fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarettes’.

A glittering gunfire of light-splinters shot at Bond’s eyes from the windscreens of oncoming cars and from their blaze of chrome styling, and he felt his wet shirt clinging to his skin.

What did Bond’s feelings matter? It was only a moment of self-disgust, a touch of nausea brought on by being a stranger who had spent too many days too close to these sordidly powerful American gangs, too close to the gunpowder-scented ‘gracious life’ of gangland aristocracy.

It was not in his make-up to worry about how he himself was going to get away once he had achieved these two objectives. His own safety gave him no concern. He still had no respect for these people. Only contempt and dislike.

All this business about death and diamonds was too solemn. For Bond it was just the end of another adventure. Another adventure for which a wry phrase of Tiffany Case might be the epitaph. He could see the passionate, ironical mouth saying the words: ‘It reads better than it lives.’