Published in 1977 by Triad/PantherBooks
Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, AL2 2NF
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1977
Copyright © Gildrose Publications as Trustee 1977
Love in the Afternoon
The girl lay back against the pillow and looked out on to the balcony. The man was still leaning against the balustrade, his hands spread wide and his head tilted forward as he examined something that was happening on the beach. He was naked except for a light-blue towel hitched round his waist. Although in repose, there was a quality of tension about him, like a baited trap. His body was not conspicuously muscled, but lean and hard. The girl knew that.
She pulled the sheet up about her own naked body and willed the man to turn round. He did not move. She turned and looked at the mans watch beside the bed. It was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The slim antennae hands showed four o'clock; an afternoon when the heat still clung persistently, sulkily refusing to give way to the inevitability of evening. The girl dabbed her cheek with the sheet and changed her position against the pillow. She wanted him to come back to her, but she was a proud girl and she did not want to ask. Nothing that she could think of saying sounded anything more than an attempt to make conversation. And conversation was a way of asking.
The girl looked down at the innocent swelling of her breasts beneath the sheet and blushed. Was it obvious? Could anybody tell at a glance that she had been making love, wild, beautiful love? She pulled her fingers through her hair trying to find how tangled it was. There had been a Greta Garbo film about a queen who was trapped in a wayside inn with a man. He did not know that she was a queen and as the snow separated them from the outside world they had stayed in a room and made love. And the queen had wandered round the room touching the now familiar objects and consigning them to her memory. For she would never come back to this room and nothing with the man would ever be the same again.
What in this room was to be stored away? It was a sad room the furniture heavy and ill-matched as so often in hotels, and the lining of the tall curtains beginning to drift away at the seams. No paintings hung on the heavy wood panelling and the carpet was an unlovely grey.
A cry from the beach distracted her and she looked out once more towards the man on the balcony. A shiver of wind, the first of the day, tugged at the curtains and he turned and approached her. She gazed at the face as if seeing it for the first time. It was dark and clean-cut, and the eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn mouth. The eyes were harsh and the mouth was cruel, the line of the jaw was straight and firm.
The girl felt herself becoming hot and moist and was ashamed, because she was not a promiscuous girl. She lowered her gaze. The man took her chin in his hand and forced it up so that he could look into her eyes. ‘You know that I'm going this evening. I have a job to do.’
She nodded. ‘You told me.’ Why was he telling her again? Was it his way of saying firmly that the pleasant interlude was over? Or was he in a way excusing himself? Apologizing for making love to her and then leaving her? Whatever it was, she wanted him to kiss her. To kiss her and press her back into the pillows and hold her tight and make her forget everything except the marvellous feeling that had spilled over her the last time.
The man leaned forward again. ‘You are probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.' He looked into her eyes for several seconds and then abruptly kissed her with such passion that she expected to taste blood on her lips. His hard, blunt shoulders bore her down and the sheet was contemptuously torn aside like a leaf from a calendar. The girl closed her eyes.
The jangle of the telephone was obscene. There were three lights in its base - red, yellow and green - and the red light was flashing. The man cursed, rolled to the edge of the bed and snatched up the receiver. The voice on the other end of the line sounded very far away and was difficult to pick out through the static.
The girl watched the man’s face as he talked, and her last hopes disappeared. Eventually, he held the receiver over the rest like a bomb waiting to be dropped.
‘A change of plan?’
The man nodded glumly. ‘Apparently. You are to report to Moscow at once.’
The girl smiled a brief, sad smile of farewell and then swung her long legs from the bed. ‘Tell them that I am leaving immediately, Sergei,’ she said.
Piste Dangereuse!
James Bond was angry with himself. He had committed a number of elementary blunders which a man of his training and experience should not have committed. He had been guilty of hubris and complacency. To put it in more direct terms, he had been a damn fool.
To start with, he should never have trusted the girl. Women you pick up in casinos are either straightforward whores or have run out of money playing some ridiculous system. Either way they are going to be very expensive and probably very neurotic. Bond loved gambling because to him tension was a form of relaxation, but he should have been more wary of the lynx-eyed redhead spilling five-hundred-franc plaques round his ankles and receiving his offer of a drink with an alacrity considerably less discreet than the scent she was wearing - Fracas by Piguet. Anybody knowing that he was in town would have expected him to make an appearance at the casino and could have organized the assignation accordingly.
Bond was in Chamonix. M had suggested that he needed a few days’ ‘holiday’ and that the mountain air - a little skiing, a little walking - would do him good. In the summer you have to go high to ski. Through the Mont Blanc tunnel and up the Italian side of the Monte Blanco - somehow it did not seem to be the same mountain in Italian. Bond was not feeling charitable towards Italians. They had descended like a cloud of black
The girl said that she came to Chamonix every summer though in winter she skied at Courchevel. Yes, the skiing at Tignes was excellent but it was bleak and there were too many Germans. The Germans were not sympathique. She hoped Bond did not mind? Bond did not mind.
The girl also had a friend who worked for Heliski. He would be able to lift them high into the mountains by helicopter where they could find the best snow conditions. There were huts with bunks up there. They could spend the night.
It was when they were going up the face of the Aiguille du Mon that Bond first began to have doubts. The Aiguille du Mort drops sheer for two thousand feet and even in the severest winter conditions never more than a thin powdering of snow clings to the shallow contours of its bleak, granite physique. But it was not the physical danger that Bond feared. He was aware of the isolation towards which he was heading. Over the lip of the peak and it was a lunar landscape clad in unending snow. The neat pattern of Chamonix disappearing below him was a child’s toy town. Above his head, the rotor droned and his breath froze against the reinforced perspex of the cabin. The wind was streaming the snow off the peaks like smoke, and the Gyrafrance lurched in the treacherous air- currents. Outside the cabin the refracted image of the pilot peered back at him as if projected against the cliff face. Butterfly-wing mirror sunglasses slanting away beside the nose; a brutal smudge of a moustache. The man had hardly touched his hand when they greeted each other. It was if Bond was something not to be touched. Something that was to be moved quickly from one place to the other and then dropped.
The helicopter hit an air-pocket and fell ten feet. Bond felt his stomach tighten like a fist. He looked towards the girl. She looked tense and he could see the whites of her knuckles as she gripped the pilot’s frameback seat.
