The man Bond was sent to kill had been run as a double in London for nearly ten years. His demands had become more grandiose as each year went by. He gave less and wanted more. He had started to display all the symptoms of
When, at last, the storm was about to break and threaten him, he had been pushed over the edge by a woman. The beautiful girl with whom he had been living in London left him and ran to America, to LA. The man followed her and was doing foolish things, like creeping up to the house in which she sheltered, leaving flowers in the dark on the doorstep, telephoning her in the middle of the night. He was also telephoning the British Embassy in Washington, demanding to talk with the chief spook, making threats which would have caused much embarrassment to the British intelligence community. So Bond was dispatched to operate, without American sanction, in the United States.
He tracked the man down and killed him by running his car off the road in the Hollywood hills. He could still recall that night – the car turning over and over, its headlights strobing the darkness before it landed against rocks and blew up in a fireball.
On the following evening he engineered a casual meeting with the man this spy’s girl had run to. His name was Tony Adamus and he was a professional TV News cameraman. They dined together, and Bond made certain that neither he nor the girl suspected foul play in the spy’s death. He already knew the LAPD regarded it as an accident. They talked for a long time about Adamus’s work.
During the conversation, Adamus told him, ‘There’s nothing difficult about a studio cameraman’s job. He has to have a good memory and excellent reflexes, he must have a good eye so that he can focus the camera quickly and correctly, good hearing to obey the orders that come from the director and he must be strong enough to move the ped or pedestal on which the camera is mounted.
‘The real skill in being a news cameraman is when you work in the field,’ Adamus had said. He was, naturally, a field man.
Bond was obsessed with the detail of other professional people’s lives. He also knew that it was best to know everything about journalism, for journalistic cover is often the most secure. On returning to the UK, he had gone out of his way to learn more about TV crews, cameramen and those who worked alongside them.
Now, on the large sound stage, the knowledge bore fruit. On the first day, Clive instructed them that they would be taping many people giving evidence, though the accused would not be present. The court was soon revealed to be a kind of military tribunal. Three senior officers sat in judgement while a prosecuting officer took turns with a defending officer in questioning clouds of witnesses.
Bond was amazed to see that Pete Natkowitz appeared at home with the sound equipment, swinging the big overhead sound boom on its silent mechanism and fine-tuning the words which came from the witnesses. Most of these were Russian, though there were some who were questioned and cross-questioned through interpreters. Clive said the final cut would be in Russian, though subtitles would be added so that the non-Russian people’s replies would be clear to an audience.
The first half-dozen witnesses were German. Each identified the absent accused as Josif Vorontsov. They all said that, in 1941, he was an SS-Unterscharfuhrer in the Waffen-SS Special Duties Brigade, just as they evidenced the fact that on September 29th, 1941, he had been at the Babi Yar massacre. They had been there also, as soldiers. The prosecuting officer told the court these men had all been purged of their sins. No action would be taken against them. They had been given immunity.
These old soldiers of the Third Reich gave ghastly details of the massacre. Two of them wept as they told the story and one fainted and had to be revived by medical orderlies. They were shooting the video in black and white. Clive said it would give more credence to the final result. People remembered the Nuremberg trials when the Nazi leaders were accused, filmed in grainy black and white. Also the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann had been relayed to the world mainly in black and white. It was fitting. Psychologically the impact would be strong.
It was also horrific. Bond watched Natkowitz and Nina Bibikova and saw that, in spite of the fact they realised this was all a performance, they were deeply moved and disgusted by what they saw and heard. It was all convincing. You could hear the screams, the pleading and the bullets.
They completed the ‘testimony’ of the Germans by late afternoon. Then came the other witnesses – Jewish people, either very old or middle-aged, who had, supposedly, come up against Vorontsov in the death camp at Sobibor. If the Germans’ evidence had been harrowing on a scale of one to ten, the new evidence rated sixty.
By nine o’clock that night they had heard memories which could strip sanity to the bone. These old people described, in excruciating detail, the beatings, clubbings, stranglings – the casual violence meted out as daily normality in the death camp. After the first three witnesses, the mind became numb with revulsion. This was certainly death with everything as the director had warned.
Clive decreed they had time for one more. An old woman, supported by her equally aged husband, took the stand. They looked drained, haunted, as though living lives which had been taken away from them long ago. They gave their evidence in Russian, answering questions slowly. They had met in Sobibor and married later.
‘We did not expect to survive,’ the old woman said. ‘Even though we were still strong enough to be made into trusted prisoners, we did not dare hope for a life after the camp. Nobody remained trusted for long. Vorontsov, that man over there,’ she pointed with a trembling, aged finger, in the direction of the empty box, out of shot. By this time, as they all agreed, it was as though the shade of Josif Vorontsov stood there in reality.
‘That man. Vorontsov,’ the old woman stumbled over the words, ‘he made certain you did not remain trusted. One morning, we had two young girls assigned to our group. Our job was loathsome, for we had to help pick over the corpses for any jewellery or personal items that could be salvaged. These two girls were strong. In their twenties. They had worked on a farm, but they could not stand this. One of them began to retch, and this set off the other. Vorontsov was standing near the pile of bodies that morning. It was a gloomy day – every day was grim but today it was drizzling and worse. He . . . he gave an order to one of the guards.
‘The girls were dragged away. He considered them unfit for the job, so they were put in a special hut and used continuously for two days by the soldiers. On the third day they were dragged out. He had dressed them in some kind of finery, clothes taken from the dead, but considered sexually arousing. He paraded them in front of the whole camp. Then . . .’ she paused, unable to continue with the revolting way they had died. When she did manage to get the words out, everyone was shocked and stunned. It was one of the most horrific stories of atrocity Bond had ever heard. He could not even bear to picture it in his head and he blotted out the words, concentrating through the view-finder of the camera, obeying Clive’s trembling voice which came in through the headphones clamped over his ears. Clive told him to move in very close. ‘Get her head. That’s it. Right in. Now close on the lips. Just the eyes, nose and lips.’
Bond watched, seeing the lips moving but blocking out the words of her terrible description. And as he looked at this face, close in, he realised that, under the make-up, he saw something else which suddenly tangled his mind. His brow furrowed, his back straightened in involuntary reflex. His chest felt tight. He glanced towards Nina and saw that she was weeping, but her eyes were fixed on the old woman.
Behind the mask of this aged, haunted person, Bond saw laughing eyes and a young mouth, perfect lipstick and arched eyebrows. He knew who this broken old woman really was. Beyond the work of clever make-up artists with their latex, putty and paint, he could see the face of Emerald Lacy in the photograph that hung in the headquarters building in London – Emerald Lacy back in the sixties, telling some secret tale, leaning over the Xerox machine. Only then did he dimly recall that she was supposed to have been a wonderful amateur actress, and that theatre was a passion she had shared with Michael Brooks. His eyes shifted to the old Jew, the woman’s husband.
13
THE MAN FROM BARBAROSSA
‘The problems are incredibly complex. Byzantine really.’ Stepakov appeared hardly to have heard M’s offer of assistance. He spoke the word ‘Byzantine’ as though proud of his choice of English. They still walked along the quay
