The James Bond Anthology

The B.O.A.C. flight dispatcher was close to Bond. She picked up the telephone – to Flight Control, Bond supposed – and said ‘I have forty passengers in the Final Lounge’. She waited for the okay and then put the telephone back and picked up the microphone.

‘Final Lounge?’ Cheerful start to flying the Atlantic, reflected Bond, and then they were all walking across the tarmac and up into the big Boeing and, with a burst of oil and metanol smoke, the engines fired one by one. The chief steward a

Bond lit a cigarette and was settling himself with his book when the back of the reclining seat on the left of the pair in front of him was lowered sharply towards him. It was one of the two American businessmen, the fat one, lying slumped down with his safety belt still fastened round his stomach. His face was green and sweating. He held a brief-case clutched across his chest and Bond could read the name on the visiting card inserted in the leather label tag. It said ‘Mr W. Winter’ and below, in neat red ink capitals, was written ‘MY BLOOD GROUP IS F’.

Poor brute, thought Bond. He’s terrified. He knows the plane is going to crash. He just hopes the men who pull him out of the wreckage will give him the right blood transfusion. To him this plane is nothing but a giant tube – full of anonymous deadweight, supported in the air by a handful of sparking plugs, and guided to its destination by a scrap of electricity. He has no faith in it, and no faith in safety statistics. He is suffering the same fears he had as a small child – the fear of noise and the fear of falling. He won’t even dare to go to the lavatory for fear he’ll put his foot through the floor of the plane when he stands up.

A silhouette broke the rays of the evening sun that filled the cabin and Bond glanced away from the man. It was Tiffany Case. She walked past him to the stairs leading down to the cocktail lounge on the lower deck and disappeared. Bond would have liked to follow her. He shrugged his shoulders and waited for the steward to wheel round the tray of cocktails and the caviar and smoked salmon canapés. He turned again to his book and read a page without understanding a single word. He put the girl out of his mind and started the page again.

Bond had read a quarter of the book when he felt his ears begin to block as the plane started its fifty-mile descent towards the western coastline of Ireland. ‘Fasten your seat-belts. No smoking’ and there was the green and white searchlight of Sha

Bond slept well and awoke only as they were approaching the southern shores of Nova Scotia. He went forward to the washroom and shaved, and gargled away the taste of a night of pressurized air, and then he went back to his seat between the lines of crumpled, stirring passengers and had his usual moment of exhilaration as the sun came up over the rim of the world and bathed the cabin in blood.

Slowly, with the dawn, the plane came alive. Twenty thousand feet below, the houses began to show like grains of sugar spilt across a brown carpet. Nothing moved on the earth’s surface except a thin worm of smoke from a train, the straight white feather of a fishing boat’s wake across an inlet, and the glint of chromium from a toy motor car caught in the sun; but Bond could almost see the sleeping humps under the bedclothes begi

Breakfast came, that inappropriate assortment of foods that B.O.A.C. advertise as ‘An English country house breakfast’, and the chief steward came round with the U.S. customs forms – Form No. 6063 of the Treasury Department – and Bond read the small print: ‘failure to declare any article or any wilfully false statement ... fine or imprisonment or both’ and wrote ‘Personal effects’ and cheerfully signed the lie.

And then there were three hours when the plane hung dead-steady in the middle of the world, and only the patches of bright sunshine swaying slowly a few inches up and down the walls of the cabin gave a sense of motion. But at last there was the great sprawl of Boston below them, and then the bold pattern of a clover-leaf on the New Jersey Turnpike, and Bond’s ears began to block with the slow descent towards the pall of haze that was the suburbs of New York. There was the hiss and sickly smell of the insecticide bomb, the shrill hydraulic whine of the air-brakes and the landing-wheels being lowered, the dip of the plane’s nose, the tearing bump of the tyres on the runway, the ugly roar as the screws were reversed to slow the plane for the entrance bay, the rumbling progress over the tired grass plain towards the tarmac apron, the clang of the hatch being opened, and they were there.

7 | ‘SHADY’ TREE

The customs officer, a paunchy good-living man with dark sweat marks at the armpits of his grey uniform shirt, sauntered lazily over from the Supervisor’s desk to where Bond stood, his three pieces of luggage in front of him, under the letter B. Next door, under C, the girl took a packet of Parliaments out of her bag and put a cigarette between her lips. Bond heard several impatient clicks at the lighter, and the sharper snap as she put the lighter back in her bag and closed the fastening. Bond felt aware of her watchfulness. He wished that her name began with Z so that she would not be so close. Zarathustra? Zacharias? Zophany ...?

‘Mr Bond?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this your signature?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just your personal effects?’

‘Yes, that’s all.’

‘Okay, Mr Bond.’ The man tore a customs stamp out of his book and pasted it on the suitcase. He did the same for the attaché case. He came to the golf clubs. He paused with the stamp book in his hand. He looked up at Bond.

‘What d’ya shoot, Mr Bond?’

Bond had a moment of blackout.

‘They’re golf clubs.’

‘Sure,’ said the man patiently. ‘But what d’ya shoot? What d’ya go round in?’

Bond could have kicked himself for forgetting the Americanism. ‘Oh, in the middle eighties, I guess.’