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James Bond, to cover his confusion, walked across to the calendar, verified that he had in fact pierced the fifteenth, pulled out the knife and slipped it back in his trouser pocket. He turned and said, ‘What makes you think so?’
The man didn’t answer. He said, ‘Come. Come and sit down. I have much to talk to you about. But first the whisky and soda. Yes?’ He indicated a comfortable armchair across the desk from his own, put in front of it a large silver box containing various kinds of cigarettes, and went to a metal filing cabinet against the wall and opened it. It contained no files. It was a complete and compact bar. With efficient, housekeeperly movements he took out a bottle of Pinchbottle Haig, another of I. W. Harper’s Bourbon, two pint glasses that looked like Waterford, a bucket of ice cubes, a siphon of soda and a flagon of iced water. One by one he placed these on the desk between his chair and Bond’s. Then, while Bond poured himself a stiff Bourbon and water with plenty of ice, he went and sat down across the desk from Bond, reached for the Haig and said, looking Bond very directly in the eye, ‘I learned who you are from a good friend in the Deuxième in Paris. He is paid to give me such information when I want it. I learned it very early this morning. I am in the opposite camp to yourself – not directly opposite. Let us say at a tangent on the field.’ He paused. He lifted his glass. He said with much seriousness, ‘I am now going to establish confidence with you. By the only means. I am going once again to place my life in your hands.’
He drank. So did Bond. In the filing cabinet, in its icebox, the hum of the generator broke in on what Bond suddenly knew was going to be an important moment of truth. He didn’t know what the truth was going to be. He didn’t think it was going to be bad. But he had an instinct that, somehow, perhaps because he had conceived respect and affection for this man, it was going to mean deep involvement for himself.
The generator stopped.
The eyes in the walnut face held his.
‘I am the head of the Union Corse.’
5 | THE CAPU
The Union Corse! Now at least some of the mystery was explained. Bond looked across the desk into the brown eyes that were now shrewdly watching his reactions while his mind flicked through the file that bore the i
It would be fun to drop some of these names casually in this quiet little room – fun to tell Marc-Ange that Bond knew of the old abandoned jetty called the Port of Crovani near the village of Galeria, and of the ancient silver mine called Argentella in the hills behind, whose maze of underground tu
(How typical of Corsica, Bond thought, that their top bandit should bear the name of an angel! He remembered that two other famous Corsican gangsters had been called ‘Gracieux’ and ‘Toussaint’ – ‘All-Saints’.) Marc-Ange spoke. He spoke excellent but occasionally rather clumsy English, as if he had been well taught but had little occasion to use the language. He said, ‘My dear Commander, everything I am going to discuss with you will please remain behind your Herkos Odonton. You know the expression? No?’ The wide smile lit up his face. ‘Then, if I may say so, your education was incomplete. It is from the classical Greek. It means literally “the hedge of the teeth”. It was the Greek equivalent of your “top secret”. Is that agreed?’
Bond shrugged. ‘If you tell me secrets that affect my profession, I’m afraid I shall have to pass them on.’
‘That I fully comprehend. What I wish to discuss is a personal matter. It concerns my daughter, Teresa.’
Good God! The plot was indeed thickening! Bond concealed his surprise. He said, ‘Then I agree.’ He smiled. ‘ “Herkos Odonton” it is.’
‘Thank you. You are a man to trust. You would have to be, in your profession, but I see it also in your face. Now then.’ He lit a Caporal and sat back in his chair. He gazed at a point on the aluminium wall above Bond’s head, only occasionally looking into Bond’s eyes when he wished to emphasize a point. ‘I was married once only, to an English girl, an English governess. She was a romantic. She had come to Corsica to look for bandits’ – he smiled – ‘rather like some English women adventure into the desert to look for sheiks. She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped.Well’ – this time he didn’t smile – ‘she found me in the mountains and she was raped – by me. The police were after me at the time, they have been for most of my life, and the girl was a grave encumbrance. But for some reason she refused to leave me. There was a wildness in her, a love of the unconventional, and, for God knows what reason, she liked the months of being chased from cave to cave, of getting food by robbery at night. She even learned to skin and cook a moufflon, those are our mountain sheep, and even eat the animal, which is tough as shoe leather and about as palatable. And in those crazy months, I came to love this girl and I smuggled her away from the island to Marseilles and married her.’ He paused and looked at Bond. ‘The result, my dear Commander, was Teresa, my only child.’