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‘All right.’
Signor Kristatos edged his chair nearer to Bond. He spoke softly and quickly. He gave specimen dates and names to document his narrative. He never hesitated for a fact and he did not waste time on irrelevant detail. It was a short story and a pithy one. There were two thousand American gangsters in the country – Italian-Americans who had been convicted and expelled from the United States. These men were in a bad way. They were on the blackest of all police lists and, because of their records, their own people were wary of employing them. A hundred of the toughest among them had pooled their funds and small groups from this elite had moved to Beirut, Istanbul, Tangier and Macao – the great smuggling centres of the world. A further large section acted as couriers, and the bosses had acquired, through nominees, a small and respectable pharmaceutical business in Milan. To this centre the outlying groups smuggled opium and its derivatives. They used small craft across the Mediterranean, a group of stewards in an Italian charter airline and, as a regular weekly source of supply, the through carriage of the Orient Express in which whole sections of bogus upholstery were fitted by bribed members of the train cleaners in Istanbul. The Milan firm – Pharmacia Colomba S.A. – acted as a clearing-house and as a convenient centre for breaking down the raw opium into heroin. Thence the couriers, using i
Bond interrupted. ‘Our Customs are pretty good at spotting that sort of traffic. There aren’t many hiding-places in a car they don’t know about. Where do these men carry the stuff?’
‘Always in the spare wheel. You can carry twenty thousand pounds worth of heroin in one spare wheel.’
‘Don’t they ever get caught – either bringing the stuff in to Milan or taking it on?’
‘Certainly. Many times. But these are well-trained men. And they are tough. They never talk. If they are convicted, they receive ten thousand dollars for each year spent in prison. If they have families, they are cared for. And when all goes well they make good money. It is a co-operative. Each man receives his tranche of the brutto. Only the chief gets a special tranche.’
‘All right. Well, who is this man?’
Signor Kristatos put his hand up to the cheroot in his mouth. He kept the hand there and spoke softly from behind it. ‘Is a man they call “The Dove”, Enrico Colombo. Is the padrone of this restaurant. That is why I bring you here, so that you may see him. Is the fat man who sits with a blonde woman. At the table by the cassa. She is from Vie
Bond said reflectively: ‘She is, is she?’ He did not need to look. He had noticed the girl, as soon as he had sat down at the table. Every man in the restaurant would have noticed her. She had the gay, bold, forthcoming looks the Vie
It was nearing the time for the after-cinema trade. The maître d’hôtel was supervising the clearing of the unoccupied tables and the setting up of new ones. There was the usual bustle and slapping of napkins across chair-seats and tinkle of glass and cutlery being laid.Vaguely Bond noticed the spare chair at his table being whisked away to help build up a nearby table for six. He began asking Kristatos specific questions – the personal habits of Enrico Colombo, where he lived, the address of his firm in Milan, what other business interests he had. He did not notice the casual progress of the spare chair from its fresh table to another, and then to another, and finally through the door marked UFFICIO. There was no reason why he should.When the chair was brought into his office, Enrico Colombo waved the maître d’hôtel away and locked the door behind him. Then he went to the chair and lifted off the squab cushion and put it on his desk. He unzipped one side of the cushion and withdrew a Grundig tape-recorder, stopped the machine, ran the tape back, took it off the recorder and put it on a play-back and adjusted the speed and volume. Then he sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette and listened, occasionally making further adjustments and occasionally repeating passages. At the end, when Bond’s ti
Enrico Colombo spoke swiftly and urgently to the girl. She nodded and glanced across the room at Bond. He and Kristatos were getting up from the table. She said to Colombo in a low, angry voice: ‘You are a disgusting man. Everybody said so and warned me against you. They were right. Just because you give me di
Enrico Colombo’s face was black with rage. Now he, too, was on his feet. ‘You goddam Austrian beech –’
‘Don’t dare insult my country, you Italian toad.’ She reached for a half-full glass of wine and hurled it accurately in the man’s face. When he came at her it was easy for her to back the few steps into Bond who was standing with Kristatos politely waiting to get by.
Enrico Colombo stood panting, wiping the wine off his face with a napkin. He said furiously to the girl: ‘Don’t ever show your face inside my restaurant again.’ He made the gesture of spitting on the floor between them, turned and strode off through the door marked UFFICIO.
The maître d’hôtel had hurried up. Everyone in the restaurant had stopped eating. Bond took the girl by the elbow. ‘May I help you find a taxi?’
She jerked herself free. She said, still angry: ‘All men are pigs.’ She remembered her ma