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The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You To Read - Let's Read James Bond
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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 1: Roseland

quote:

The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.

He might have been drowned and fished out of the pool and laid out on the grass to dry while the police or the next-of-kin were summoned. Even the little pile of objects in the grass beside his head might have been his personal effects, meticulously assembled in full view so that no one should think that something had been stolen by his rescuers.

To judge by the glittering pile, this had been, or was, a rich man. It contained the typical membership badges of the rich man’s club–a money clip, made of a Mexican fifty-dollar piece and holding a substantial wad of banknotes, a well-used gold Dunhill lighter, an oval gold cigarette case with the wavy ridges and discreet turquoise button that means Fabergé, and the sort of novel a rich man pulls out of the bookcase to take into the garden–The Little Nugget–an old P. G. Wodehouse. There was also a bulky gold wrist-watch on a well-used brown crocodile strap. It was a Girard-Perregaux model designed for people who like gadgets, and it had a sweep second-hand and two little windows in the face to tell the day of the month, and the month, and the phase of the moon. The story it now told was 2.30 on June 10th with the moon three-quarters full.

Today, a Girard-Perregaux watch would cost as much as $15,000.

quote:

A blue and green dragon-fly flashed out from among the rose bushes at the end of the garden and hovered in mid-air a few inches above the base of the man’s spine. It had been attracted by the golden shimmer of the June sunshine on the ridge of fine blond hairs above the coccyx. A puff of breeze came off the sea. The tiny field of hairs bent gently. The dragon-fly darted nervously sideways and hung above the man’s left shoulder, looking down. The young grass below the man’s open mouth stirred. A large drop of sweat rolled down the side of the fleshy nose and dropped glittering into the grass. That was enough. The dragon-fly flashed away through the roses and over the jagged glass on top of the high garden wall. It might be good food, but it moved.

The garden in which the man lay was about an acre of well-kept lawn surrounded on three sides by thickly banked rose bushes from which came the steady murmur of bees. Behind the drowsy noise of the bees the sea boomed softly at the bottom of the cliff at the end of the garden.

There was no view of the sea from the garden–no view of anything except of the sky and the clouds above the twelve-foot wall. In fact you could only see out of the property from the two upstairs bedrooms of the villa that formed the fourth side of this very private enclosure. From them you could see a great expanse of blue water in front of you and, on either side, the upper windows of neighbouring villas and the tops of the trees in their gardens–Mediterranean-type evergreen oaks, stone pines, casuarinas and an occasional palm tree.

The blonde man's time sunning himself in the villa garden is interrupted by the sound of a car approaching. The doorbell is the only thing to give him even a slight stir, opening his blue eyes for a quick second before relaxing again.

quote:

A young woman carrying a small string bag and dressed in a white cotton shirt and a short, unalluring blue skirt came through the glass door and strode mannishly across the glazed tiles and the stretch of lawn towards the naked man. A few yards away from him, she dropped her string bag on the grass and sat down and took off her cheap and rather dusty shoes. Then she stood up and unbuttoned her shirt and took it off and put it, neatly folded, beside the string bag.

The girl had nothing on under the shirt. Her skin was pleasantly sunburned and her shoulders and fine breasts shone with health. When she bent her arms to undo the side-buttons of her skirt, small tufts of fair hair showed in her armpits. The impression of a healthy animal peasant girl was heightened by the chunky hips in faded blue stockinet bathing trunks and the thick short thighs and legs that were revealed when she had stripped.

The girl put the skirt neatly beside her shirt, opened the string bag, took out an old soda-water bottle containing some heavy colourless liquid and went over to the man and knelt on the grass beside him. She poured some of the liquid, a light olive oil, scented, as was everything in that part of the world, with roses, between his shoulder blades and, after flexing her fingers like a pianist, began massaging the sterno-mastoid and the trapezius muscles at the back of the man’s neck.

It was hard work. The man was immensely strong and the bulging muscles at the base of the neck hardly yielded to the girl’s thumbs even when the downward weight of her shoulders was behind them. By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swimming pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her. But that wasn’t what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man’s back. It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen.

This girl has been his masseuse for two years now. As she stares at him and tries to wonder why she feels so strangely about his body, we get enough of a description that it makes me question Fleming's sexuality.

quote:

To take the small things first: his hair. She looked down at the round, smallish head on the sinewy neck. It was covered with tight red-gold curls that should have reminded her pleasantly of the formalized hair in the pictures she had seen of classical statues. But the curls were somehow too tight, too thickly pressed against each other and against the skull. They set her teeth on edge like fingernails against pile carpet. And the golden curls came down so low into the back of the neck–almost (she thought in professional terms) to the fifth cervical vertebra. And there they stopped abruptly in a straight line of small stiff golden hairs.

The girl paused to give her hands a rest and sat back on her haunches. The beautiful upper half of her body was already shining with sweat. She wiped the back of her forearm across her forehead and reached for the bottle of oil. She poured about a tablespoonful on to the small furry plateau at the base of the man’s spine, flexed her fingers and bent forward again.

This embryo tail of golden down above the cleft of the buttocks–in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial. No, reptilian. But snakes had no hair. Well, she couldn’t help that. It seemed reptilian to her. She shifted her hands on down to the two mounds of the gluteal muscles. Now was the time when many of her patients, particularly the young ones on the football team, would start joking with her. Then, if she was not very careful, the suggestions would come. Sometimes she could silence these by digging sharply down towards the sciatic nerve. At other times, and particularly if she found the man attractive, there would be giggling arguments, a brief wrestling-match and a quick, delicious surrender.

With this man it was different, almost uncannily different. From the very first he had been like a lump of inanimate meat. In two years he had never said a word to her. When she had done his back and it was time for him to turn over, neither his eyes nor his body had once shown the smallest interest in her. When she tapped his shoulder, he would just roll over and gaze at the sky through half-closed lids and occasionally let out one of the long shuddering yawns that were the only sign that he had human reactions at all.

Did, uh, did you use a model for this Ian?

quote:

The girl shifted her position and slowly worked down the right leg towards the Achilles tendon. When she came to it, she looked back up the fine body. Was her revulsion only physical? Was it the reddish colour of the sunburn on the naturally milk-white skin, the sort of roast meat look? Was it the texture of the skin itself, the deep, widely spaced pores in the satiny surface? The thickly scattered orange freckles on the shoulders? Or was it the sexuality of the man? The indifference of these splendid, insolently bulging muscles? Or was it spiritual–an animal instinct telling her that inside this wonderful body there was an evil person?

The masseuse got to her feet and stood, twisting her head slowly from side to side and flexing her shoulders. She stretched her arms out sideways and then upwards and held them for a moment to get the blood down out of them. She went to her string bag and took out a hand-towel and wiped the perspiration off her face and body.

When she turned back to the man, he had already rolled over and now lay, his head resting on one open hand, gazing blankly at the sky. The disengaged arm was flung out on the grass, waiting for her. She walked over and knelt on the grass behind his head. She rubbed some oil into her palms, picked up the limp half-open hand and started kneading the short thick fingers.

The girl glanced nervously sideways at the red-brown face below the crown of tight golden curls. Superficially it was all right–handsome in a butcher’s-boyish way, with its full pink cheeks, upturned nose and rounded chin. But, looked at closer, there was something cruel about the thin-lipped rather pursed mouth, a pigginess about the wide nostrils in the upturned nose, and the blankness that veiled the very pale blue eyes communicated itself over the whole face and made it look drowned and morgue-like. It was, she reflected, as if someone had taken a china doll and painted its face to frighten.

The masseuse worked up the arm to the huge biceps. Where had the man got these fantastic muscles from? Was he a boxer? What did he do with his formidable body? Rumour said this was a police villa. The two men-servants were obviously guards of some sort, although they did the cooking and the housework. Regularly every month the man went away for a few days and she would be told not to come. And from time to time she would be told to stay away for a week, or two weeks, or a month. Once, after one of these absences, the man’s neck and the upper part of his body had been a mass of bruises. On another occasion the red corner of a half-healed wound had shown under a foot of surgical plaster down the ribs over his heart. She had never dared to ask about him at the hospital or in the town. When she had first been sent to the house, one of the men-servants had told her that if she spoke about what she saw she would go to prison. Back at the hospital, the Chief Superintendent, who had never recognized her existence before, had sent for her and had said the same thing. She would go to prison. The girl’s strong fingers gouged nervously into the big deltoid muscle on the point of the shoulder. She had always known it was a matter of State Security. Perhaps that was what revolted her about this splendid body. Perhaps it was just fear of the organization that had the body in custody. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of who he might be, of what he could order to be done to her. Quickly she opened them again. He might have noticed. But the eyes gazed blankly up at the sky.

I don't find it coincidental that this blonde, blue-eyed man bears such a resemblance to James Bond, either in musculature or his tendency to disappear and then come back covered in injuries.

As she starts on his face, the telephone rings inside and the man shoots up onto one knee as if ready to sprint inside. A voice inside answers the phone and he's off and running before the servant is halfway through signaling him to come in. To avoid any perception that she might be spying, the masseuse dives into the pool.

quote:

Although it would have explained her instincts about the man whose body she massaged, it was as well for the girl’s peace of mind that she did not know who he was.

His real name was Donovan Grant, or ‘Red’ Grant. But, for the past ten years, it had been Krassno Granitski, with the codename of ‘Granit’.

He was the Chief Executioner of SMERSH, the murder apparat of the M.G.B., and at this moment he was receiving his instructions on the M.G.B. direct line with Moscow.
* # ¿ Feb 18, 2019 16:00
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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 2: The Slaughterer

quote:

Grant put the telephone softly back on its cradle and sat looking at it.

The bullet-headed guard standing over him said, ‘You had better start moving.’

‘Did they give you any idea of the task?’ Grant spoke Russian excellently but with a thick accent. He could have passed for a national of any of the Soviet Baltic provinces. The voice was high and flat as if it was reciting something dull from a book.

‘No. Only that you are wanted in Moscow. The plane is on its way. It will be here in about an hour. Half an hour for refuelling and then three or four hours, depending on whether you come down at Kharkov. You will be in Moscow by midnight. You had better pack. I will order the car.’

Grant got nervously to his feet. ‘Yes. You are right. But they didn’t even say if it was an operation? One likes to know. It was a secure line. They could have given a hint. They generally do.’

‘This time they didn’t.’

Grant walked slowly out through the glass door on to the lawn. If he noticed the girl sitting on the far edge of the pool he made no sign. He bent and picked up his book, and the golden trophies of his profession, and walked back into the house and up the few stairs to his bedroom.





Red Grant was portrayed in the film adaptation by the famous Robert Shaw. While Fleming writes him with a somewhat thuggish appearance, Shaw is brutally handsome and looks every bit the part of the perfect killer. Because the movie changes the villains to SPECTRE, Grant has no connection to the Soviet Union and is instead SPECTRE's star pupil in training specifically to kill James Bond.

quote:

The room was bleak and furnished only with an iron bedstead, from which the rumpled sheets hung down on one side to the floor, a cane chair, an unpainted clothes cupboard and a cheap washstand with a tin basin. The floor was strewn with English and American magazines. Garish paper-backs and hard-cover thrillers were stacked against the wall below the window.

Grant bent down and pulled a battered Italian fibre suitcase from under the bed. He packed into it a selection of well-laundered cheap respectable clothes from the cupboard. Then he washed his body hurriedly with cold water, and the inevitably rose-scented soap, and dried himself on one of the sheets from the bed.

There was the noise of a car outside. Grant hastily dressed in clothes as drab and nondescript as those he had packed, put on his wrist-watch, pocketed his other belongings and picked up his suitcase and went down the stairs.

The front door was open. He could see his two guards talking to the driver of a battered ZIS saloon. ‘Bloody fools,’ he thought. (He still did most of his thinking in English.) ‘Probably telling him to see I get on the plane all right. Probably can’t imagine that a foreigner would want to live in their blasted country.’ The cold eyes sneered as Grant put down his suitcase on the doorstep and hunted among the bunch of coats that hung from pegs on the kitchen door. He found his ‘uniform’, the drab raincoat and black cloth cap of Soviet officialdom, put them on, picked up his suitcase and went out and climbed in beside the plain-clothes driver, roughly shouldering aside one of the guards as he did so.



ZiS (Zavod imeni Stalina, or Stalin Plant) was one of the premier Soviet automotive manufacturers. It would be renamed ZiL (Zavod imeni Likhachyova, or Likhachov Plant) after its former director in 1956 as part of getting rid of the cult of personality around Stalin. It survived as a joint-stock company until 2012 when it finally shut down.

The car here would likely have been something like a ZIS-110. After reverse engineering a 1942 Packard Super Eight, they produced this car virtually unchanged from 1946 until between 1958 and 1961. They were often given away as gifts to foreign communist leaders, which means one of them is still sitting outside Ho Chi Minh's former residence in Hanoi.

quote:

The two men stood back, saying nothing, but looking at him with hard eyes. The driver took his foot off the clutch, and the car, already in gear, accelerated fast away down the dusty road.

The villa was on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea, about half way between Feodosiya and Yalta. It was one of many official holiday datchas along the favourite stretch of mountainous coastline that is part of the Russian Riviera. Red Grant knew that he was immensely privileged to be housed there instead of in some dreary villa on the outskirts of Moscow. As the car climbed up into the mountains, he thought that they certainly treated him as well as they knew how, even if their concern for his welfare had two faces.

The forty-mile drive to the airport at Simferopol took an hour. There were no other cars on the road and the occasional cart from the vineyards quickly pulled into the ditch at the sound of their horn. As everywhere in Russia, a car meant an official, and an official could only mean danger.

The dacha is the Eastern European version of having a summer home. They originated as the czar giving small country estates to the wealthy and nobility as gifts and evolved into a common trend of city dwellers having a second home in the countryside where they could spend part of the year vacationing.

The Soviet government heavily restricted dacha ownership and construction to give priority to party officials and others who curried favor with them and put restrictions on size and features to keep anyone from making something more extravagant than their neighbor's. This leads to some very odd-looking houses from attempts to cheat the system, like getting around "you can only have a one-story house" by just building a mansard roof to make it legally a giant attic:



quote:

There were roses all the way, fields of them alternating with the vineyards, hedges of them along the road and, at the approach to the airport, a vast circular bed planted with red and white varieties to make a red star against a white background. Grant was sick of them and he longed to get to Moscow and away from their sweet stench.

They drove past the entrance to the Civil Airport and followed a high wall for about a mile to the military side of the aerodrome. At a tall wire gate the driver showed his pass to two tommy-gunned sentries and drove through on to the tarmac. Several planes stood about, big camouflaged military transports, small twin-engined trainers and two Navy helicopters. The driver stopped to ask a man in overalls where to find Grant’s plane. At once a metallic twanging came from the observant control tower and a loudspeaker barked at them: ‘To the left. Far down to the left. Number V-BO.’

You might pause here. Soviets using Thompsons? Actually not out of the question! A lot of M1911A1 pistols and Thompson submachine guns were given to the USSR as part of the Lend-Lease aid program during World War II. They were rarely used because of a lack of .45 ACP ammunition, but they certainly did exist.

There's also a possibility that Fleming may have been thinking of the PPSh-41, a Soviet submachine gun known for often using giant 71-round drums. They don't really look anything alike except superficially, but it's apparent that Fleming was inexperienced with any guns that he didn't personally use.

quote:

The driver was obediently motoring on across the tarmac when the iron voice barked again. ‘Stop!’

As the driver jammed on his brakes, there sounded a deafening scream above their heads. Both men instinctively ducked as a flight of four MIG 17s came out of the setting sun and skimmed over them, their squat wind-brakes right down for the landing. The planes hit the huge runway one after the other, puffs of blue smoke spurting from their nose-tyres, and, with jets howling, taxied to the distant boundary line and turned to come back to the control tower and the hangars.

‘Proceed!’

This seems like a safe airport.



The MiG-17 "Fresco" was a subsonic fighter introduced by the Soviets in 1952. Its predecessor, the similar MiG-15 "Fagot", is the most produced jet in history with over 18,000 produced; over 10,000 of the MiG-17 were produced.

The MiG-17 improved on its predecessor with a different wing angle to improve aerodynamics and later versions would add afterburners and guided missile support. Despite technically being obsolete by the Vietnam War, they served surprisingly well against supersonic fighters like the F-4 Phantom II due to their small size, agility, and American guided missiles and doctrine being extremely poor for actually targeting and firing on enemy aircraft.

quote:

A hundred yards further on they came to a plane with the recognition letters V-BO. It was a two-engined Ilyushin 12. A small aluminium ladder hung down from the cabin door and the car stopped beside it. One of the crew appeared at the door. He came down the ladder and carefully examined the driver’s pass and Grant’s identity papers and then waved the driver away and gestured Grant to follow him up the ladder. He didn’t offer to help with the suitcase, but Grant carried it up the ladder as if it had been no heavier than a book. The crewman pulled the ladder up after him, banged the wide hatch shut and went forward to the cockpit.

There were twenty empty seats to choose from. Grant settled into the one nearest the hatch and fastened his seat-belt. A short crackle of talk with the control tower came through the open door to the cockpit, the two engines whined and coughed and fired and the plane turned quickly as if it had been a motor car, rolled out to the start of the north-south runway, and, without any further preliminaries, hurtled down it and up into the air.



The Il-12 "Coach" was developed during World War II as a replacement for the licensed copy of the Douglas DC-3 that the USSR was already making. It follows the same generic layout except for tricycle landing gear, which makes it much easier to taxi and land. They began regular passenger service in the Soviet Union in 1947 and remained in use until 1970; China kept them in service until 1986. They seem to have had a pretty poor safety record, as 49 of the 663 planes produced crashed (about 7.3% of them!) with over 400 fatalities.

quote:

Grant unbuckled his seat-belt, lit a gold-tipped Troika cigarette and settled back to reflect comfortably on his past career and to consider the immediate future.

Donovan Grant was the result of a midnight union between a German professional weight-lifter and a Southern Irish waitress. The union lasted for a quarter of an hour on the damp grass behind a circus tent outside Belfast. Afterwards the father gave the mother half-a-crown and the mother walked happily home to her bed in the kitchen of a café near the railway station. When the baby was expected, she went to live with an aunt in the small village of Aughmacloy that straddles the border, and there, six months later, she died of puerperal fever shortly after giving birth to a twelve-pound boy. Before she died, she said that the boy was to be called Donovan (the weight-lifter had styled himself ‘The Mighty O’Donovan’) and Grant, which was her own name.

The boy was reluctantly cared for by the aunt and grew up healthy and extremely strong, but very quiet. He had no friends. He refused to communicate with other children and when he wanted anything from them he took it with his fists. In the local school he continued to be feared and disliked, but he made a name for himself boxing and wrestling at local fairs where the bloodthirsty fury of his attack, combined with guile, gave him victory over much older and bigger boys.

It was through his fighting that he came to the notice of the Sinn-Feiners who used Aughmacloy as a principal pipeline for their comings and goings with the north, and also of the local smugglers who used the village for the same purpose. When he left school he became a strong-arm man for both these groups. They paid him well for his work but saw as little of him as they could.

It was about this time that his body began to feel strange and violent compulsions around the time of the full moon. When, in October of his sixteenth year, he first got ‘The Feelings’ as he called them to himself, he went out and strangled a cat. This made him ‘feel better’ for a whole month. In November, it was a big sheepdog, and, for Christmas, he slit the throat of a cow, at midnight in a neighbour’s shed. These actions made him ‘feel good’. He had enough sense to see that the village would soon start wondering about the mysterious deaths, so he bought a bicycle and on one night every month he rode off into the countryside. Often he had to go very far to find what he wanted and, after two months of having to satisfy himself with geese and chickens, he took a chance and cut the throat of a sleeping tramp.

There were so few people abroad at night that soon he took to the roads earlier, bicycling far and wide so that he came to distant villages in the dusk when solitary people were coming home from the fields and girls were going out to their trysts.

When he killed the occasional girl he did not ‘interfere’ with her in any way. That side of things, which he had heard talked about, was quite incomprehensible to him. It was only the wonderful act of killing that made him ‘feel better’. Nothing else.

Charming man.

quote:

By the end of his seventeenth year, ghastly rumours were spreading round the whole of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh. When a woman was killed in broad daylight, strangled and thrust carelessly into a haystack, the rumours flared into panic. Groups of vigilantes were formed in the villages, police reinforcements were brought in with police dogs, and stories about the ‘Moon Killer’ brought journalists to the area. Several times Grant on his bicycle was stopped and questioned, but he had powerful protection in Aughmacloy and his story of training-spins to keep him fit for his boxing were always backed up, for he was now the pride of the village and contender for the North of Ireland light-heavyweight championship.

Again, before it was too late, instinct saved him from discovery and he left Aughmacloy and went to Belfast and put himself in the hands of a broken-down boxing promoter who wanted him to turn professional. Discipline in the sleazy gymnasium was strict. It was almost a prison and, when the blood first boiled again in Grant’s veins, there was nothing for it but to half kill one of his sparring partners. After twice having to be pulled off a man in the ring, it was only by winning the championship that he was saved from being thrown out by the promoter.

Grant got himself into the Royal Corps of Signals on his 18th birthday in 1945, going out into the woods with a bottle of whiskey on the full moon and chugging it until he passed out to keep from killing anyone. He ended up stationed in Berlin as a driver, where he started thinking that the Soviets would really appreciate his brutality and let him get his aggressions out. After being disqualified in an army boxing match for foul fighting and made a motorcycle courier before he was scheduled to be sent back to England, he decided that now was the time.

quote:

The transfer could not have suited Grant better. He waited a few days and then, one evening when he had collected the day’s outgoing mail from the Military Intelligence Headquarters on the Reichskanzlerplatz, he made straight for the Russian Sector, waited with his engine running until the British control gate was opened to allow a taxi through, and then tore through the closing gate at forty and skidded to a stop beside the concrete pillbox of the Russian Frontier post. T

hey hauled him roughly into the guardroom. A wooden-faced officer behind a desk asked him what he wanted. ‘I want the Soviet Secret Service,’ said Grant flatly. ‘The Head of it. ’

The officer stared coldly at him. He said something in Russian. The soldiers who had brought Grant in started to drag him out again. Grant easily shook them off. One of them lifted his tommy-gun.

Grant said, speaking patiently and distinctly, ‘I have a lot of secret papers. Outside. In the leather bags on the motor cycle. ’ He had a brainwave. ‘You will get into bad trouble if they don’t get to your Secret Service. ’

The officer said something to the soldiers and they stood back. ‘We have no Secret Service,’ he said in stilted English. ‘Sit down and complete this form. ’

Grant sat down at the desk and filled in a long form which asked questions about anyone who wanted to visit the Eastern zone – name, address, nature of business and so forth. Meanwhile the officer spoke softly and briefly into a telephone.

By the time Grant had finished, two more soldiers, non-commissioned officers wearing drab green forage caps and with green badges of rank on their khaki uniforms, had come into the room. The frontier officer handed the form, without looking at it, to one of them and they took Grant out and put him and his motor cycle into the back of a closed van and locked the door on him. After a fast drive lasting a quarter of an hour the van stopped, and when Grant got out he found himself in the courtyard behind a large new building. He was taken into the building and up in a lift and left alone in a cell without windows. It contained nothing but one iron bench. After an hour, during which, he supposed, they went through the secret papers, he was led into a comfortable office in which an officer with three rows of decorations and the gold tabs of a full colonel was sitting behind a desk.

The desk was bare except for a bowl of roses.  

Ten years later, Grant, looking out of the window of the plane at a wide cluster of lights twenty thousand feet below, which he guessed was Kharkov, grinned mirthlessly at his reflection in the Perspex window.

Roses. From that moment his life had been nothing but roses. Roses, roses, all the way.
* # ¿ Feb 19, 2019 16:43
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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Jaguars! posted:

I think that he is probably using it as a general term, Alistair MacLean and other thriller writers about that time generally didn't bother much and often referred to that class of guns as Smeissers or Spandaus. Fleming actually entered into a correspondence about weapons during the production of Russia (The secret service armourer who appears in the next book is named Boothroyd after his correspondent), but focused pretty much entirely on pistols.

I got given The Man With the Golden Typewriter a while ago which is a book of Fleming's Bond related letters (The gold plated typewriter was a real thing he ordered to celebrate finishing Casino Royale). I think the letters from his proof readers would be of interest to the thread, is it all right if I post some when I find the time and they don't spoiler the thread?

Incidentally, I just came across a list of the guns Fleming owned that I didn't realize was in the book, they were:
  • .25 Browning special (leftover from his time in Naval intelligence)
  • .38 Colt Police Special (present from General Donovan, head of the US secret service)
  • 2 Holland & Holland 12-bore Shotguns
  • .22 Browning Rifle used for pest control at Goldeneye, his Jamaican Residence.

Sure, post away as long as they're not spoilers! A .25 ACP pistol and a .38 Colt both match the guns Bond brings with him in Casino Royale, along with the .45 in his car. I just realized that none of them ever end up getting used in the whole book.

* # ¿ Feb 20, 2019 14:33
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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 3: Post-Graduate Studies

quote:

‘So you would like to work in the Soviet Union, Mister Grant?’

It was half an hour later and the M.G.B. colonel was bored with the interview. He thought that he had extracted from this rather unpleasant British soldier every military detail that could possibly be of interest. A few polite phrases to repay the man for the rich haul of secrets his dispatch bags had yielded, and then the man could go down to the cells and in due course be shipped off to Vorkuta or some other labour camp.

‘Yes, I would like to work for you. ’

‘And what work could you do, Mister Grant? We have plenty of unskilled labour. We do not need truck-drivers and,’ the colonel smiled fleetingly, ‘if there is any boxing to be done we have plenty of men who can box. Two possible Olympic champions amongst them, incidentally. ’

‘I am an expert at killing people. I do it very well. I like it. ’

The colonel saw the red flame that flickered for an instant behind the very pale blue eyes under the sandy lashes. He thought, the man means it. He’s mad as well as unpleasant. He looked coldly at Grant, wondering if it was worth while wasting food on him at Vorkuta. Better perhaps have him shot. Or throw him back into the British Sector and let his own people worry about him.

‘You don’t believe me,’ said Grant impatiently. This was the wrong man, the wrong department. ‘Who does the rough stuff for you here?’ He was certain the Russians had some sort of a murder squad. Everybody said so. ‘Let me talk to them. I’ll kill somebody for them. Anybody they like. Now. ’

The colonel sighs and makes a call to SMERSH. They come up with a simple win-win plan where Grant will help them sow chaos whether or not he fails in his mission: return to the western half of Berlin and kill Dr. Baumgarten, the head of an Allied spy ring. The Russians will change the license plate on his motorcycle and let him use his disguise as a dispatch rider to get close to Baumgarten at his flat and kill him.

quote:

The plane roared on across the Heartland of Russia. They had left behind them the blast furnaces flaming far away to the east around Stalino and, to the west, the silver thread of the Dnieper branching away at Dnepropetrovsk. The splash of light around Kharkov had marked the frontier of the Ukraine, and the smaller blaze of the phosphate town of Kursk had come and gone. Now Grant knew that the solid unbroken blackness below hid the great central Steppe where the billions of tons of Russia’s grain were whispering and ripening in the darkness. There would be no more oases of light until, in another hour, they would have covered the last three hundred miles to Moscow.

For by now Grant knew a lot about Russia. After the quick, neat, sensational murder of a vital West German spy, Grant had no sooner slipped back over the frontier and somehow fumbled his way to ‘Colonel Boris’ than he was put into plain clothes, with a flying helmet to cover his hair, hustled into an empty M.G.B. plane and flown straight to Moscow.

Then began a year of semi-prison which Grant had devoted to keeping fit and to learning Russian while people came and went around him – interrogators, stool-pigeons, doctors. Meanwhile, Soviet spies in England and Northern Ireland had painstakingly investigated his past.

At the end of the year Grant was given as clean a bill of political health as any foreigner can get in Russia. The spies had confirmed his story. The English and American stool-pigeons reported that he was totally uninterested in the politics or social customs of any country in the world, and the doctors and psychologists agreed that he was an advanced manic depressive whose periods coincided with the full moon. They added that Grant was also a narcissist and asexual and that his tolerance of pain was high. These peculiarities apart, his physical health was superb and, though his educational standards were hopelessly low, he was as naturally cunning as a fox. Everyone agreed that Grant was an exceedingly dangerous member of society and that he should be put away.

When the dossier came before the Head of Personnel of the M.G.B., he was about to write ‘Kill him’ in the margin when he had second thoughts.

Grant gets much, much less background in the film. He's simply a murderer who escaped from prison and got recruited by SPECTRE.

quote:

A great deal of killing has to be done in the U.S.S.R., not because the average Russian is a cruel man, although some of their races are among the cruellest peoples in the world, but as an instrument of policy. People who act against the State are enemies of the State, and the State has no room for enemies. There is too much to do for precious time to be allotted to them, and, if they are a persistent nuisance, they get killed. In a country with a population of 200,000,000, you can kill many thousands a year without missing them. If, as happened in the two biggest purges, a million people have to be killed in one year, that is also not a grave loss. The serious problem is the shortage of executioners. Executioners have a short ‘life’. They get tired of the work. The soul sickens of it. After ten, twenty, a hundred death-rattles, the human being, however sub-human he may be, acquires, perhaps by a process of osmosis with death itself, a germ of death which enters his body and eats into him like a canker. Melancholy and drink take him, and a dreadful lassitude which brings a glaze to the eyes and slows up the movements and destroys accuracy. When the employer sees these signs he has no alternative but to execute the executioner and find another one.

The Head of Personnel of the M.G.B. was aware of the problem and of the constant search not only for the refined assassin, but also for the common butcher. And here at last was a man who appeared to be expert at both forms of killing, dedicated to his craft and indeed, if the doctors were to be believed, destined for it.

Head of Personnel wrote a short, pungent minute on Grant’s papers, marked them ‘SMERSH Otdyel II’ and tossed them into his OUT tray.

Department 2 of SMERSH, in charge of Operations and Executions, took over the body of Donovan Grant, changed his name to Granitsky and put him on their books.

Do you think Fleming liked the Russians? I must be missing some subtle clues as to his thoughts on them.

quote:

The next two years were hard for Grant. He had to go back to school, and to a school that made him long for the chipped deal desks in the corrugated iron shed, full of the smell of little boys and the hum of drowsy blue-bottles, that had been his only conception of what a school was like. Now, in the Intelligence School for Foreigners outside Leningrad, squashed tightly among the ranks of Germans, Czechs, Poles, Balts, Chinese and Negroes, all with serious dedicated faces and pens that raced across their notebooks, he struggled with subjects that were pure double-dutch to him.

There were courses in ‘General Political Knowledge’, which included the history of Labour movements, of the Communist Party and the Industrial Forces of the world, and the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, all dotted with foreign names which he could barely spell. There were lessons on ‘The Class-enemy we are fighting’, with lectures on Capitalism and Fascism; weeks spent on ‘Tactics, Agitation and Propaganda’ and more weeks on the problems of minority peoples, Colonial races, the Negroes, the Jews. Every month ended with examinations during which Grant sat and wrote illiterate nonsense, interspersed with scraps of half-forgotten English history and mis-spelled Communist slogans, and inevitably had his papers torn up, on one occasion, in front of the whole class.

But he stuck it out, and when they came to ‘Technical Subjects’ he did better. He was quick to understand the rudiments of Codes and Ciphers, because he wanted to understand them. He was good at Communications, and immediately grasped the maze of contacts, cut-outs, couriers and post-boxes, and he got excellent marks for Fieldwork in which each student had to plan and operate dummy assignments in the suburbs and countryside around Leningrad. Finally, when it came to tests of Vigilance, Discretion, ‘Safety First’, Presence of Mind, Courage and Coolness, he got top marks out of the whole school.

At the end of the year, the report that went back to SMERSH concluded ‘Political value Nil. Operational value Excellent’ – which was just what Otdyel II wanted to hear.

The next year was spent, with only two other foreign students among several hundred Russians, at the School for Terror and Diversion at Kuchino, outside Moscow. Here Grant went triumphantly through courses in judo, boxing, athletics, photography and radio under the general supervision of the famous Colonel Arkady Fotoyev, father of the modern Soviet spy, and completed his small-arms instruction at the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Godlovsky, the Soviet Rifle Champion.

Fleming's Bond managed to uncover the source of Arkady Fotoyev. Apparently Fleming had lifted a lot of information about a Soviet spy training school from a contemporary article about the defection of a spy who refused to order a political assassination and revealed the details of his training. We'll go over this story in detail later, but Colonel Fotoyev was indeed a real Soviet espionage instructor.

As for Godlovsky, he doesn't appear to be mentioned in the article and a Google search isn't coming up with any hits that aren't the text of the book.

quote:

Twice during this year, without warning, an M.G.B. car came for him on the night of the full moon and took him to one of the Moscow jails. There, with a black hood over his head, he was allowed to carry out executions with various weapons – the rope, the axe, the sub-machine gun. Electro-cardiograms, blood-pressure and various other medical tests were applied to him before, during and after these occasions, but their purpose and findings were not revealed to him. It was a good year and he felt, and rightly, that he was giving satisfaction.

In 1949 and ’50 Grant was allowed to go on minor operations with Mobile Groups or Avanposts, in the satellite countries. These were beatings-up and simple assassinations of Russian spies and intelligence workers suspected of treachery or other aberrations. Grant carried out these duties neatly, exactly and inconspicuously, and though he was carefully and constantly watched he never showed the smallest deviation from the standards required of him, and no weaknesses of character or technical skill. It might have been different if he had been required to kill when doing a solo task at the full-moon period, but his superiors, realizing that at that period he would be outside their control, or his own, chose safe dates for his operations. The moon period was reserved exclusively for butchery in the prisons, and from time to time this was arranged for him as a reward for a successful operation in cold blood.

In 1951 and ’52 Grant’s usefulness became more fully and more officially recognized. As a result of excellent work, notably in the Eastern Sector of Berlin, he was granted Soviet citizenship and increases in pay which by 1953 amounted to a handsome 5000 roubles a month. In 1953 he was given the rank of Major, with pension rights back-dated to the day of his first contact with ‘Colonel Boris’, and the villa in the Crimea was allotted to him. Two bodyguards were attached to him, partly to protect him and partly to guard against the outside chance of his ‘going private’, as defection is called in M.G.B. jargon, and, once a month, he was transported to the nearest jail and allowed as many executions as there were candidates available.

Around this time, the official exchange rate was 4 rubles to the dollar. This would make his pay $1250 a month in 1953 money, about $11,800 a month today (or $141,000 a year). By Soviet standards, he's fantastically wealthy.

quote:

Naturally Grant had no friends. He was hated or feared or envied by everyone who came in contact with him. He did not even have any of those professional acquaintanceships that pass for friendship in the discreet and careful world of Soviet officialdom. But, if he noticed the fact, he didn’t care. The only individuals he was interested in were his victims. The rest of his life was inside him. And it was richly and excitingly populated with his thoughts.

Then, of course, he had SMERSH. No one in the Soviet Union who has SMERSH on his side need worry about friends, or indeed about anything whatever except keeping the black wings of SMERSH over his head.

Grant was still thinking vaguely of how he stood with his employers when the plane started to lose altitude as it picked up the radar beam of Tushino Airport just south of the red glow that was Moscow.

He was at the top of his tree, the chief executioner of SMERSH, and therefore of the whole of the Soviet Union. What could he aim for now? Further promotion? More money? More gold nicknacks? More important targets? Better techniques?

There really didn’t seem to be anything more to go for. Or was there perhaps some other man whom he had never heard of, in some other country, who would have to be set aside before absolute supremacy was his?
* # ¿ Feb 20, 2019 15:01
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Epicurius posted:

I like how the MGB is kind of freaked out by Grant.

Anyway, it looks like a lot of Fleming's description here is lifted from the 1955 book "Soviet Spy Net", by EH Cookridge. Cookridge was a pseudonym of Edward Spiro, a journalist who wrote a bunch of books about espionage. Here's Cookridge's description of training for MVD agents:

There we go! Looks like the different name spellings in the Latin alphabet is what tripped me up.

Generally when Fleming incorporates a ton of detail and knowledge on a subject despite it being outside his personal experience in the war, you can safely assume he lifted sections almost wholesale from a reference book or newspaper.

* # ¿ Feb 20, 2019 16:03
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 4: The Moguls of Death

quote:

SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of ‘Smiert Spionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.

The headquarters of SMERSH is a very large and ugly modern building on the Sretenka Ulitsa. It is No. 13 on this wide, dull street, and pedestrians keep their eyes to the ground as they pass the two sentries with sub-machine guns who stand on either side of the broad steps leading up to the big iron double door. If they remember in time, or can do so inconspicuously, they cross the street and pass by on the other side.



The actual headquarters of SMERSH in real life was the 4th and 6th floors of the Lubyanka building in Moscow. The building was originally constructed as an insurance company headquarters in 1898, but was seized by the Cheka after the revolution and remained the headquarters of the secret police all the way to the modern FSB. It was joked that it was the tallest building in Russia because "you could see Siberia from its basement."



Ulitsa Sretenka 13 does exist and resembles how Fleming described it, but I can't find any description of what the building serves as. I think the street numbers may have also changed over time.

quote:

The direction of SMERSH is carried out from the 2nd floor. The most important room on the 2nd floor is a very large light room painted in the pale olive green that is the common denominator of government offices all over the world. Opposite the sound-proofed door, two wide windows look over the courtyard at the back of the building. The floor is close-fitted with a colourful Caucasian carpet of the finest quality. Across the far left-hand corner of the room stands a massive oak desk. The top of the desk is covered with red velvet under a thick sheet of plate glass.

On the left side of the desk are IN and OUT baskets and on the right four telephones.

From the centre of the desk, to form a T with it, a conference table stretches diagonally out across the room. Eight straight-backed red leather chairs are drawn up to it. This table is also covered with red velvet, but without protective glass. Ash-trays are on the table, and two heavy carafes of water with glasses.

On the walls are four large pictures in gold frames. In 1955, these were a portrait of Stalin over the door, one of Lenin between the two windows and, facing each other on the other two walls, portraits of Bulganin and, where until January 13th, 1954, a portrait of Beria had hung, a portrait of Army General Ivan Aleksandrovitch Serov, Chief of the Committee of State Security.

On the left-hand wall, under the portrait of Bulganin, stands a large Televisor, or TV set, in a handsome polished oak cabinet. Concealed in this is a tape-recorder which can be switched on from the desk. The microphone for the recorder stretches under the whole area of the conference table and its leads are concealed in the legs of the table. Next to the Televisor is a small door leading into a personal lavatory and washroom and into a small projection room for showing secret films.

Under the portrait of General Serov is a bookcase containing, on the top shelves, the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and more accessibly, books in all languages on espionage, counter-espionage, police methods and criminology. Next to the bookcase, against the wall, stands a long narrow table on which are a dozen large leather-bound albums with dates stamped in gold on the covers. These contain photographs of Soviet citizens and foreigners who have been assassinated by SMERSH.

About the time Grant was coming in to land at Tushino Airport, just before 11.30 at night, a tough-looking, thick-set man of about fifty was standing at this table leafing through the volume for 1954.

Fleming is very insistent that not only is the location he provided for the SMERSH headquarters accurate, but so is the description of the conference room.

quote:

The Head of SMERSH, Colonel General Grubozaboyschikov, known in the building as ‘G.’, was dressed in a neat khaki tunic with a high collar, and dark blue cavalry trousers with two thin red stripes down the sides. The trousers ended in riding boots of soft, highly polished black leather. On the breast of the tunic were three rows of medal ribbons – two Orders of Lenin, Order of Suvorov, Order of Alexander Nevsky, Order of the Red Banner, two Orders of the Red Star, the Twenty Years Service medal and medals for the Defence of Moscow and the Capture of Berlin. At the tail of these came the rose-pink and grey ribbon of the British C.B.E., and the claret and white ribbon of the American Medal for Merit. Above the ribbons hung the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Above the high collar of the tunic the face was narrow and sharp. There were flabby pouches under the eyes, which were round and brown and protruded like polished marbles below thick black brows. The skull was shaven clean and the tight white skin glittered in the light of the central chandelier. The mouth was broad and grim above a deeply cleft chin. It was a hard, unyielding face of formidable authority.

This guy's got enough medals from the Great Patriotic War to jingle when he walks.

Order of Lenin: The highest civilian order given by the Soviet Union, given to both civilians and soldiers for outstanding service to the state. From 1944 to 1957, it also acted as a 25-year service medal for the military.

Order of Suvorov: Awarded for exceptional service in combat, generally from overcoming disadvantageous odds.

Order of Alexander Nevsky: Awarded for displaying personal bravery in combat.

Order of the Red Star: Awarded for displaying personal bravery in combat, meritorious service in peacetime, or exceptional service in providing security, training, or scientific progress to the Soviet Union.

Medal For Defense of Moscow: Awarded for participating in the Battle of Moscow during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Medal For the Capture of Berlin: Awarded for participating in the invasion and capture of Berlin in 1945.

Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire: Awarded for public service to the United Kingdom (one level below knighthood).

Medal for Merit: Awarded to civilians for service in World War II.

Hero of the Soviet Union: The highest distinction ever awarded by the USSR. It comes with special privileges, including first priority for housing, rent and tax reductions or exemptions, and medical and entertainment benefits.

In short, G. is a very important man.

quote:

One of the telephones on the desk buzzed softly. The man walked with tight and precise steps to his tall chair behind the desk. He sat down and picked up the receiver of the telephone marked in white with the letters V.Ch. These letters are short for Vysokochastoty, or High Frequency. Only some fifty supreme officials are connected to the V.Ch. switchboard, and all are Ministers of State or Heads of selected Departments. It is served by a small exchange in the Kremlin operated by professional security officers. Even they cannot overhear conversations on it, but every word spoken over its lines is automatically recorded.

‘Yes?’

‘Serov speaking. What action has been taken since the meeting of the Praesidium this morning?’

‘I have a meeting here in a few minutes’ time, Comrade General – RUMID, GRU and of course M.G.B. After that, if action is agreed, I shall have a meeting with my Head of Operations and Head of Plans. In case liquidation is decided upon, I have taken the precaution of bringing the necessary operative to Moscow. This time I shall myself supervise the preparations. We do not want another Khoklov affair.’

‘The devil knows we don’t. Telephone me after the first meeting. I wish to report to the Praesidium tomorrow morning.’

‘Certainly, Comrade General.’

General G. put back the receiver and pressed a bell under his desk. At the same time he switched on the wire-recorder. His A.D.C., an M.G.B. captain, came in.

‘Have they arrived?’

‘Yes, Comrade General.’

‘Bring them in.’

So, the Khokhlov affair.



Nikolai Khokhlov was a KGB officer, the son of a Red Army commissar. His father was assigned to a penal battalion for making unfavorable remarks about Stalin and died in the Battle of Moscow in 1941. His stepfather volunteered during the same battle and died pretty much immediately. The teenage Nikolai was recruited from a demolitions battalion into the NKVD, the infamous secret police of the Soviet Union, and was part of an assignment to assassinate a group of German officers with a vaudeville show in the event that they captured Moscow. The Germans retreated, preventing this Inglorious Basterds ending from occurring.

Khokhlov was the video game protagonist of the USSR. He romanced fellow agents, parachuted behind enemy lines disguised as a German, aided in the assassination of Wilhelm Kube (the occupying leader of Belarus, who planned to level the city of Minsk and rebuild it as Asgard) by blackmailing his maid into planting a bomb under his bed, and likely engaged in even more action that's remained buried in the records. As far as the NKVD was concerned, he was a hero. But he had been having his doubts about the Soviet mission and what he had been told of their way of life. After being told that the quality of life in the Soviet Union was unsurpassed, he saw firsthand what the Poles and Germans had when he raided their homes on the push to Berlin.

After the war, Khokhlov was given a false identity and stationed in Romania as a sleeper agent, ready to jump into action at a moment's notice. He was exposed to the squalor in which the Romanians were forced to live in under what was essentially an occupying Soviet government. He tried to be relieved from duty, but was only given a few months leave to visit his family (during which he married an old school acquaintance).

In 1954, after being assigned to East Berlin, Khokhlov was assigned to supervise the assassination of Georgiy Okolovich, a chairman of the anti-communist National Alliance of Russian Solidarists who was living in Frankfurt. Unlike every other mission, he hesitated. The man who had recruited him into the NKVD and made him a top agent, Pavel Sudoplatov, had been arrested as part of the purge of Stalinists after Stalin's death (he only avoided being executed alongside Beria because he feigned insanity, and he survived until 1996). Khokhlov had limited loyalty to his new superior and his disillusionment was growing every day.

After discussing the matter with his wife, Khokhlov drove to Okolovich's flat and told him of the Soviet plan to assassinate him. Okolovich called his CIA contacts and arranged a defection of Khokhlov. He was subjected to long and suspicious interrogations, including an accusation of being a fake after a mix-up with Moscow telephone directories caused an operator to accidentally say Khokhlov's phone had been disconnected, but he was eventually able to convince the Americans and British that he was telling the truth. He brought them all the information that Fleming used to describe Grant's training as a Soviet spy, along with the weapons he had picked out for the assassination: guns disguised as cigarette cases, firing hollow cyanide-filled bullets.

While being held at a safe house in Oberursel, they told Khokhlov to publicize his defection. He was afraid that his family would be executed in retaliation if he did anything except return to Russia and pretend to still be a loyal spy, but he was convinced that the public embarrassment could put enough pressure on Moscow that they would simply send his family away to live with him instead of risk public perception by killing them. While his family was indeed arrested after Khokhlov went in front of news cameras, they weren't killed. He just never saw them again.

In 1957, after the writing of this book, Khokhlov was poisoned by thallium in his coffee. He miraculously survived the assassination attempt and continued to speak out against the Soviet Union around the world. In 1968, he permanently moved to the United States and became a professor of psychology at Cal State in San Bernardino, writing papers on parapsychology and insisting that the Soviets had successful experiments with psychic powers. He divorced his wife without ever seeing her again to make life in Russia easier for her and he married a second time (though his new son died in his mid-20s in 1991 from kidney disease). He lived long enough to see the USSR dissolve, dying in 2007 and buried next to his son.

If you'd like to know more, he wrote a book, In the Name of Conscience: The Testament of a Soviet Secret Agent.

quote:

In a few minutes six men, five of them in uniform, filed in through the door and, with hardly a glance at the man behind the desk, took their places at the conference table. They were three senior officers, heads of their departments, and each was accompanied by an A.D.C. In the Soviet Union, no man goes alone to a conference. For his own protection, and for the reassurance of his department, he invariably takes a witness so that his department can have independent versions of what went on at the conference and, above all, of what was said on its behalf. This is important in case there is a subsequent investigation. No notes are taken at the conference and decisions are passed back to departments by word of mouth.

On the far side of the table sat Lieutenant-General Slavin, head of the GRU, the intelligence department of the General Staff of the Army, with a full colonel beside him. At the end of the table sat Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of RUMID, the Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a middle-aged man in plain clothes. With his back to the door, sat Colonel of State Security Nikitin, Head of Intelligence for the M.G.B., the Soviet Secret Service, with a major at his side.

‘Good evening, Comrades.’

A polite, careful murmur came from the three senior officers. Each one knew, and thought he was the only one to know, that the room was wired for sound, and each one, without telling his A.D.C., had decided to utter the bare minimum of words consonant with good discipline and the needs of the State.

‘Let us smoke.’ General G. took out a packet of Moskwa-Volga cigarettes and lit one with an American Zippo lighter. There was a clicking of lighters round the table. General G. pinched the long cardboard tube of his cigarette so that it was almost flat and put it between his teeth on the right side of his mouth. He stretched his lips back from his teeth and started talking in short clipped sentences that came out with something of a hiss from between the teeth and the uptilted cigarette.

General G. has brought these men here to discuss a matter of national security, including giving them the potentially dangerous knowledge of state secrets. Especially after the purges in 1953, any of them could potentially find themselves on the wrong side of a pistol just for being asked to make a decision here.

quote:

‘Our recommendation concerns a conspicuous act of terrorism to be carried out in enemy territory within three months.’

Six pairs of expressionless eyes stared at the head of SMERSH, waiting.

‘Comrades,’ General G. leant back in his chair and his voice became expository, ‘the foreign policy of the U.S.S.R. has entered a new phase. Formerly, it was a “Hard” policy – a policy [he allowed himself the joke of Stalin’s name] of steel. This policy, effective as it was, built up tensions in the West, notably in America, which were becoming dangerous. The Americans are unpredictable people. They are hysterical. The reports of our Intelligence began to indicate that we were pushing America to the brink of an undeclared atomic attack on the U.S.S.R. You have read these reports and you know what I say is true. We do not want such a war. If there is to be a war, it is we who will choose the time. Certain powerful Americans, notably the Pentagon Group led by Admiral Radford, were helped in their firebrand schemes by the very successes of our “Hard” policy. So it was decided that the time had come to change our methods, while maintaining our aims. A new policy was created – the “Hard-Soft” policy. Geneva was the beginning of this policy. We were “soft”. China threatens Quemoy and Matsu. We are “hard”. We open our frontiers to a lot of newspaper men and actors and artists although we know many of them to be spies. Our leaders laugh and make jokes at receptions in Moscow. In the middle of the jokes we drop the biggest test bomb of all time. Comrades Bulganin and Khrushchev and Comrade General Serov [General G. carefully included the names for the ears of the tape-recorder] visit India and the East and blackguard the English. When they get back, they have friendly discussions with the British Ambassador about their forthcoming goodwill visit to London. And so it goes on – the stick and then the carrot, the smile and then the frown. And the West is confused. Tensions are relaxed before they have time to harden. The reactions of our enemies are clumsy, their strategy disorganized. Meanwhile the common people laugh at our jokes, cheer our football teams and slobber with delight when we release a few prisoners of war whom we wish to feed no longer!’

There were smiles of pleasure and pride round the table. What a brilliant policy! What fools we are making of them in the West!

‘At the same time,’ continued General G., himself smiling thinly at the pleasure he had caused, ‘we continue to forge everywhere stealthily ahead – revolution in Morocco, arms to Egypt, friendship with Yugoslavia, trouble in Cyprus, riots in Turkey, strikes in England, great political gains in France – there is no front in the world on which we are not quietly advancing.’

You might notice a distinct change in writing style from Fleming here. The book feels almost like a Clancy-esque political thriller, focusing on the manipulation of complex Cold War politics. We've made a swerve from pulp detective novels to discussions on Soviet foreign policy.

quote:

General G. saw the eyes shining greedily round the table. The men were softened up. Now it was time to be hard. Now it was time for them to feel the new policy on themselves. The Intelligence services would also have to pull their weight in this great game that was being played on their behalf. Smoothly General G. leaned forward. He planted his right elbow on the desk and raised his fist in the air.

‘But Comrades,’ his voice was soft, ‘where has there been failure in carrying out the State Policy of the U.S.S.R.? Who has all along been soft when we wished to be hard? Who has suffered defeats while victory was going to all other departments of the State? Who, with its stupid blunders, has made the Soviet Union look foolish and weak throughout the world? WHO?’

The voice had risen almost to a scream. General G. thought how well he was delivering the denunciation demanded by the Praesidium. How splendid it would sound when the tape was played back to Serov!

He glared down the conference table at the pale, expectant faces. General G.’s fist crashed forward on to the desk.

‘The whole Intelligence apparat of the Soviet Union, Comrades.’ The voice was now a furious bellow. ‘It is we who are the sluggards, the saboteurs, the traitors! It is we who are failing the Soviet Union in its great and glorious struggle! We!’ His arm swept round the room. ‘All of us!’ The voice came back to normal, became more reasonable. ‘Comrades, look at the record. Sookin Sin [he allowed himself the peasant obscenity], son-of-a-bitch, look at the record! First we lose Gouzenko and the whole of the Canadian apparat and the scientist Fuchs, then the American apparat is cleaned up, then we lose men like Tokaev, then comes the scandalous Khoklov affair which did great damage to our country, then Petrov and his wife in Australia – a bungled business if ever there was one! The list is endless – defeat after defeat, and the devil knows I have not mentioned the half of it.’

Hoo boy. That's a lot to cover.

Igor Gouzenko was a cipher clerk working in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Three days after World War II ended, he defected and handed over all the documents he could get on Soviet intelligence activities in the west. He exposed Stalin's efforts to steal American atomic secrets and plant sleeper agents in the United States and Canada, serving as one of the trigger events of the Cold War.

Klaus Fuchs was a German physicist responsible for many significant calculations in developing the first atomic bombs, including early hydrogen bombs. Then in 1950, he was arrested after it was found that he was supplying information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviets. He served 9 years in prison (as the Soviet Union was still officially an ally and thus it didn't legally count as treason) and was deported to East Germany, where he lived until 1988.

I believe they're referring to Grigori Aleksandrovich Tokaev, a Russian rocket scientist who served in the Soviet Air Force during the war. While he became a leading Party representative and academic after the war, he had long been critical of Stalin and moved to Britain in 1948, taking all of his knowledge with him.



The Petrov Affair was contemporary to the Khokhlov Affair in 1954. Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet embassy in Canberra and colonel in the KGB, was afraid that he would be purged like Beria if he returned home. He worked with Australian intelligence to defect, but unfortunately declined to tell his wife (an MVD agent). Two MVD couriers were sent to take her back to Moscow, but she was visibly scared and indecisive on the plane and photographed being roughly dragged on board by anti-Soviet demonstrators on the tarmac. When the plane stopped for refueling, Australian agents under orders from Prime Minister Robert Menzies ambushed the plane, detained the Soviet agents, and gave her asylum.

The USSR expelled the Australian embassy in Moscow and pulled their embassy out of Canberra in retaliation. Along with its major repercussions for international relations in the Cold War, there were local political repercussions as Menzies faced accusations of arranging the defection to improve his party's chances in the 1954 elections. Even today, some Labour-supporting Australians maintain a conspiracy theory that the defection was rigged to help the Liberal party win.

This is the context that Fleming is writing the Soviets in. It's hard not to see them from his point of view when those years have been wracked with defectors, sleeper agents, stolen atomic secrets, purges, and assassination attempts.

quote:

General G. paused. He continued in his softest voice. ‘Comrades, I have to tell you that unless tonight we make a recommendation for a great Intelligence victory, and unless we act correctly on that recommendation, if it is approved, there will be trouble.’

General G. sought for a final phrase to convey the threat without defining it. He found it. ‘There will be,’ he paused and looked, with artificial mildness, down the table, ‘displeasure.’
* # ¿ Feb 21, 2019 16:29
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 5: Konspiratsia

quote:

The moujiks had received the knout. General G. gave them a few minutes to lick their wounds and recover from the shock of the official lashing that had been meted out.

"Moujik" is the Russian word for a peasant. The "knout" was a Russian whip used for corporal punishment, often ending in death.

quote:

No one said a word for the defence. No one spoke up for his department or mentioned the countless victories of Soviet Intelligence that could be set against the few mistakes. And no one questioned the right of the Head of SMERSH, who shared the guilt with them, to deliver this terrible denunciation. The Word had gone out from the Throne, and General G. had been chosen as the mouthpiece for the Word. It was a great compliment to General G. that he had been thus chosen, a sign of grace, a sign of coming preferment, and everyone present made a careful note of the fact that, in the Intelligence hierarchy, General G., with SMERSH behind him, had come to the top of the pile.

At the end of the table, the representative of the Foreign Ministry, Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of RUMID, watched the smoke curl up from the tip of his long Kazbek cigarette and remembered how Molotov had privately told him, when Beria was dead, that General G. would go far. There had been no great foresight in this prophecy, reflected Vozdvishensky. Beria had disliked G. and had constantly hindered his advancement, sidetracking him away from the main ladder of power into one of the minor departments of the then Ministry of State Security, which, on the death of Stalin, Beria had quickly abolished as a Ministry. Until 1952, G. had been deputy to one of the heads of this Ministry. When the post was abolished, he devoted his energies to plotting the downfall of Beria, working under the secret orders of the formidable General Serov, whose record put him out of even Beria’s reach.

Serov, a Hero of the Soviet Union and a veteran of the famous predecessors of the M.G.B. – the Cheka, the Ogpu, the N.K.V.D. and the M.V.D. – was in every respect a bigger man than Beria. He had been directly behind the mass executions of the 1930s when a million died, he had been metteur en scène of most of the great Moscow show trials, he had organized the bloody genocide in the Central Caucasus in February 1944, and it was he who had inspired the mass deportations from the Baltic States and the kidnapping of the German atom and other scientists who had given Russia her great technical leap forward after the war.

And Beria and all his court had gone to the gallows, while General G. had been given SMERSH as his reward. As for Army General Ivan Serov, he, with Bulganin and Khrushchev, now ruled Russia. One day, he might even stand on the peak, alone. But, guessed General Vozdvishensky, glancing up the table at the gleaming billiard-ball skull, probably with General G. not far behind him.

Let's talk a little bit about Lavrentiy Beria. He's been touched on before in a previous book, but he was a major part (and in some ways a cause) of the post-war purge of Stalinists.



Like Stalin, Beria was a native Georgian. He joined the Bolsheviks while attending a petroleum industry polytechnic school, but he established a pattern later in life by also being cool working with the anti-Bolshevik Müsavat Party in Baku, Azerbaijan. He narrowly avoided execution when the Red Army captured the city because there wasn't enough time to kill and replace him, so he decided to play it cool. He played it so cool that he ended up joining the Cheka. He quickly became the head of the NKVD shortly after its founding and (as usual) had his predecessor executed, by some accounts personally strangling him.

Beria was incredibly ruthless, a sociopath with no real loyalty to anyone except himself and his own aspirations for power. He unhesitatingly ordered the executions of tens or hundreds of thousands of people over his career, including the infamous Katyn Massacre of 1940. He arranged the executions of political rivals or their family members to gain further power and became one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates by 1935 by faking a conspiracy to assassinate him and pretending to foil it.

He was also a notorious serial rapist/murderer, which was known by pretty much everyone who worked with him; Stalin once freaked out when he found out that his daughter was alone in a house with Beria. He would drive down the street with his bodyguards and pick out pretty girls to kidnap off the street to wine, dine, and rape at his mansion. He would give them a flower bouquet to take, which would imply that the sex was consensual. Didn't take the bouquet? Expect to be arrested and sent to the gulag. Resist his advances too much? He'd strangle you and bury you in the garden out back. He would offer to release political prisoners in return for sex from their friends and relatives, even if he already knew that they had been executed months earlier.

The only thing that kept Beria alive was Stalin deciding that he was too important to just get rid of. After the war, he resigned from the NKVD and went right back to what he did before the war: consolidating his power in the hopes that he could take over when Stalin inevitably died. It's believed that Stalin even fabricated a conspiracy of Jewish doctors poisoning top Soviet officials in the hopes that he would have an excuse to replace Beria (because Stalin was also a sociopath who was cool with executing innocent people if it meant getting rid of inconvenient political problems).

And then on March 5, 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke. Stalin infamously spent about 12 hours before anyone called a doctor, as nobody wanted to check on him or actually start treating him. It was partly a fear of the increasingly crazy Stalin's micromanaging and paranoia potentially biting them in the rear end if he survived and found out that anyone had taken action without his permission (at the time of his death, his private doctor was being tortured in retaliation for suggesting he needed more bed rest) and partly Beria really wanting to get rid of Stalin. He was noted as being unusually exuberant at the confirmation of Stalin's death, to the point where the rest of his inner circle actually sprinted to their limousines in the hopes of reaching the Kremlin before he did.

Beria was appointed First Deputy Premier and reinstated as the head of the MVD, with his ally Georgy Malenkov declared Prime Minister. It was well known that Malenkov was a weaker personality than Beria and that Beria would eventually work his way to becoming the new head of the Soviet Union, which led to the rest of the Party plotting a way to get rid of him. After an uprising in East Germany three months after Stalin's death, they had their chance.

Malenkov reluctantly joined the coup; after Beria was accused during a meeting of the Presidium of being a traitor and a spy, Malenkov signaled for Marshal Zhukov and a team of armed guards to burst in and arrest him. He was put through a rapid kangaroo court, declared guilty of treason and terrorism (including multiple actions that were done directly on the orders of Stalin), and executed. The sociopathic monster turned out to be a coward in the end, as he cried and screamed in fear so much that they had to stuff a rag in his mouth before shooting him in the head. His trial was certainly unjust, but did anyone really think he shouldn't have been shot by that point?

Beria's execution occurred concurrently with a purge of all of his subordinates and allies. Nikita Khrushchev carefully worked to consolidate power for himself after the coup and remove Stalin's legacy; at the time of the book, he would have been the First Secretary of the Communist Party and by 1958 would become the Premiere.

quote:

The skull lifted and the hard bulging brown eyes looked straight down the table into the eyes of General Vozdvishensky. General Vozdvishensky managed to look back calmly and even with a hint of appraisal.

That is a deep one, thought General G. Let us put the spotlight on him and see how he shows up on the sound-track.

‘Comrades,’ gold flashed from both corners of his mouth as he stretched his lips in a chairman’s smile, ‘let us not be too dismayed. Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot. We have never thought that our departments were so successful as to be beyond criticism. What I have been instructed to say to you will not have come as a surprise to any of us. So let us take up the challenge with a good heart and get down to business.’

Round the table there was no answering smile to these platitudes. General G. had not expected that there would be. He lit a cigarette and continued.

‘I said that we have at once to recommend an act of terrorism in the intelligence field, and one of our departments – no doubt my own – will be called upon to carry out this act.’

An inaudible sigh of relief went round the table. So at least SMERSH would be the responsible department! That was something.

‘But the choice of a target will not be an easy matter, and our collective responsibility for the correct choice will be a heavy one.’

Soft-hard, hard-soft. The ball was now back with the conference.

General G. wants something more damaging and subtle than a simple bombing or assassination: a scandal. Something that everyone will know was the work of a Soviet operation (which they'll obviously deny when asked) and embarrass their enemies in a way that won't incite them to greater strength or unity. The first step is to pick a target.

quote:

General Vozdvishensky was not dismayed by his task. He had been in intelligence, mostly abroad, for thirty years. He had served as a ‘doorman’ at the Soviet Embassy in London under Litvinoff. He had worked with the Tass Agency in New York and had then gone back to London, to Amtorg, the Soviet Trade Organization. For five years he had been Military Attaché under the brilliant Madame Kollontai in the Stockholm Embassy. He had helped train Sorge, the Soviet master spy, before Sorge went to Tokyo. During the war, he had been for a while Resident Director in Switzerland, or ‘Schmidtland’, as it had been known in the spy-jargon, and there he had helped sow the seeds of the sensationally successful but tragically misused ‘Lucy’ network. He had even gone several times into Germany as a courier to the ‘Rote Kapelle’, and had narrowly escaped being cleaned up with it. And after the war, on transfer to the Foreign Ministry, he had been on the inside of the Burgess and Maclean operation and on countless other plots to penetrate the Foreign Ministries of the West. He was a professional spy to his finger-tips and he was perfectly prepared to put on record his opinions of the rivals with whom he had been crossing swords all his life.

The A.D.C. at his side was less comfortable. He was nervous at RUMID being pinned down in this way, and without a full departmental briefing. He scoured his brain clear and sharpened his ears to catch every word.

Vozdvishensky talks about the different potential targets. Sweden is dismissed despite the skill of their agents because "they're always having spy scandals there". Italy and Spain are disregarded as they mostly stick to their own part of the world and trying to take on Spanish counter-intelligence operatives would likely be a Pyrrhic victory. He suggests France, specifically going after Mathis (who by this point has become the head of the Deuxième Bureau). While the United States seems like an easy target due to their agents' massive resources combined with unprofessional behavior overseas, they want to target someone who's actually competent for the scandal.

What they settle on is England. A large, powerful intelligence service with operatives who remain loyal despite relatively low pay and none of the special privileges that Soviet agents get.

quote:

‘I agree. And now for the target within that organization. I remember Comrade General Vozdvishensky saying something about a myth upon which much of the alleged strength of this Secret Service depends. How can we help to destroy the myth and thus strike at the very motive force of this organization? Where does this myth reside? We cannot destroy all its personnel at one blow. Does it reside in the Head? Who is the Head of the British Secret Service?’

Colonel Nikitin’s aide whispered in his ear. Colonel Nikitin decided that this was a question he could and perhaps should answer.

‘He is an Admiral. He is known by the letter M. We have a zapiska on him, but it contains little. He does not drink very much. He is too old for women. The public does not know of his existence. It would be difficult to create a scandal round his death. And he would not be easy to kill. He rarely goes abroad. To shoot him in a London street would not be very refined.’

‘There is much in what you say, Comrade,’ said General G. ‘But we are here to find a target who will fulfil our requirements. Have they no one who is a hero to the organization? Someone who is admired and whose ignominious destruction would cause dismay? Myths are built on heroic deeds and heroic people. Have they no such men?’

There was silence round the table while everyone searched his memory. So many names to remember, so many dossiers, so many operations going on every day all over the world. Who was there in the British Secret Service? Who was that man who …?

It was Colonel Nikitin of the M.G.B. who broke the embarrassed silence.

He said hesitantly, ‘There is a man called Bond.’

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Feb 25, 2019

* # ¿ Feb 25, 2019 16:21
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Epicurius posted:

So G and Grant are basically the dark mirrors of M and Bond, right?

Pretty much!

Sperglord Actual posted:

'Muzhik' in more modern transliteration. Colloquially it can mean something like 'man' or 'guy' IIRC.

I’m going to guess “peasant” is what Fleming was going for since it was in the same context as a tsarist execution method.

* # ¿ Feb 25, 2019 20:51
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

mllaneza posted:

I can recommend without hesitation the film Death of Stalin for a dark, comedic look into the events following Stalin's death. It's a truly remarkably cinematic achievement and should be considered essential viewing to go along with this LR.

They also let all the actors use their regular accents without bothering to change them, so Zhukov is just Jason Isaacs and Nikita Khrushchev is Steve Buscemi being himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_y0YfT2I_s

* # ¿ Feb 25, 2019 21:19
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

mllaneza posted:

And it's glorious.

Jason Isaacs is definitely a glorious Zhukov.



Previous Bond books (and many or most subsequent ones) stick to the pulp structure and are easy to follow along, but I highly recommend that anyone reading From Russia With Love start by educating themselves on the state of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Not only does it make all of the political talk much easier to digest, it also explains why Fleming characterizes the Soviets the way he does.

You tend to see some revisionism today, both among Russians longing for the good ol' days and tankies who unironically support 1950s communist states and leaders like Chairman Mao, but the Soviet Union in 1955 was just recovering from a horrific period of Russian history. Relations between the USSR and the rest of the Allies hadn't been perfect during the war and Britain specifically feared that they would need to go to war with the Soviets as soon as Germany was taken care of, but at least they weren't enemies. The sudden rash of incidents and "affairs" with people like Igor Gouzenko and Vladimir Petrov after the war ended led to increasing tensions as it became apparent that Stalin was extending the same courtesies to his allies as he had his enemies, from planting sleeper agents to stealing national security secrets like details on the Manhattan Project.

And even if you weren't in a war zone, just living in the USSR could be hazardous to your health. In 1937 and 1938 alone, Stalin's purges of "counter-revolutionaries" and "enemies of the people" killed between 681,000 and 1.2 million people to consolidate his power and further establish his cult of personality. Many of the people killed were innocent civilians from all walks of life, rounded up to be shot and thrown in a mass grave even if you hadn't done anything really wrong. The "Doctors' Plot" accusing Jewish doctors of poisoning Party officials was found to be entirely fabricated, but not before hundreds of innocents were arrested and tortured. The official who was accused of fabricating the plot was, of course, executed.

Soviet censors would go so far as to manipulate photographs and historical texts to erase particular undesirables from history when Stalin decided that one of his former comrades needed shooting; Nikolai Yezhov helped orchestrate the mass executions, then ended up being killed in the execution room he designed as part of Beria's manipulation to become the NKVD chief.

As Stalin's mind evaporated and it became apparent that he wasn't going to live forever, power struggles among the Party became even worse. Beria was only the most famous of many who carried out orders to commit crimes and atrocities for the government, only to have these crimes and atrocities used as an excuse later on to get them out of the picture. By the time of Stalin's death, his policies and demands led to at least 6 million people over his reign being killed (over 9 million if you include foreseeable deaths from his policies, like famine). Exact numbers might never be known due to the modern Russian government working very hard to suppress any evidence they may have.

At the time Fleming is setting this book, the USSR has only exited the absolute worst of its instability. After Beria's death, they finally settled down and stopped executing everyone in the room after taking power. But the statement about people in the Presidium being afraid to learn state secrets as part of their job was absolutely true. Until Khrushchev actually took full power as the Premier in 1958, there was always the risk of someone else gaining power and deciding that you're too inconvenient to have around. Knowledge of the Soviet Union's weaknesses is great when you're the one making the decisions. Not so great when someone thinks you might use that knowledge to your advantage and figures that you need to go away forever.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Feb 25, 2019

* # ¿ Feb 25, 2019 21:55
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 6: Death Warrant

quote:

‘Y*b**nna mat!’ The gross obscenity was a favourite with General G. His hand slapped down on the desk. ‘Comrade, there certainly is “a man called Bond” as you put it.’ His voice was sarcastic. ‘James Bond. [He pronounced it ‘Shems’.] And nobody, myself included, could think of this spy’s name! We are indeed forgetful. No wonder the Intelligence apparat is under criticism.’

General Vozdvishensky felt he should defend himself and his department. ‘There are countless enemies of the Soviet Union, Comrade General,’ he protested. ‘If I want their names, I send to the Central Index for them. Certainly I know the name of this Bond. He has been a great trouble to us at different times. But today my mind is full of other names – names of people who are causing us trouble today, this week. I am interested in football, but I cannot remember the name of every foreigner who has scored a goal against the Dynamos.’

‘You are pleased to joke, Comrade,’ said General G. to underline this out-of-place comment. ‘This is a serious matter. I for one admit my fault in not remembering the name of this notorious agent. Comrade Colonel Nikitin will no doubt refresh our memories further, but I recall that this Bond has at least twice frustrated the operations of SMERSH. That is,’ he added, ‘before I assumed control of the department. There was this affair in France, at that Casino town. The man Le Chiffre. An excellent leader of the Party in France. He foolishly got into some money troubles. But he would have got out of them if this Bond had not interfered. I recall that the Department had to act quickly and liquidate the Frenchman. The executioner should have dealt with the Englishman at the same time, but he did not. Then there was this Negro of ours in Harlem. A great man – one of the greatest foreign agents we have ever employed, and with a vast network behind him. There was some business about a treasure in the Caribbean. I forget the details. This Englishman was sent out by the Secret Service and smashed the whole organization and killed our man. It was a great reverse. Once again my predecessor should have proceeded ruthlessly against this English spy.’

Colonel Nikitin broke in. ‘We had a similar experience in the case of the German, Drax, and the rocket. You will recall the matter, Comrade General. A most important konspiratsia. The General Staff were deeply involved. It was a matter of High Policy which could have borne decisive fruit. But again it was this Bond who frustrated the operation. The German was killed. There were grave consequences for the State. There followed a period of serious embarrassment which was only solved with difficulty.’

General Slavin of GRU felt that he should say something. The rocket had been an Army operation and its failure had been laid at the door of GRU. Nikitin knew this perfectly well. As usual M.G.B. was trying to make trouble for GRU – raking up old history in this manner. ‘We asked for this man to be dealt with by your department, Comrade Colonel,’ he said icily. ‘I cannot recall that any action followed our request. If it had, we should not now be having to bother with him.’

Colonel Nikitin’s temples throbbed with rage. He controlled himself. ‘With due respect, Comrade General,’ he said in a loud, sarcastic voice, ‘the request of GRU was not confirmed by Higher Authority. Further embarrassment with England was not desired. Perhaps that detail has slipped your memory. In any case, if such a request had reached M.G.B., it would have been referred to SMERSH for action.’

‘My department received no such request,’ said General G. sharply. ‘Or the execution of this man would have rapidly followed. However, this is no time for historical researches. The rocket affair was three years ago. Perhaps the M.G.B. could tell us of the more recent activities of this man.’

Colonel Nikitin whispered hurriedly with his aide. He turned back to the table. ‘We have very little further information, Comrade General,’ he said defensively. ‘We believe that he was involved in some diamond smuggling affair. That was last year. Between Africa and America. The case did not concern us. Since then we have no further news of him. Perhaps there is more recent information on his file.’

As you can probably tell from all the historical talk in this thread, this infighting is very normal for the 1950s Soviet government. Nobody trusts one another or wants their departments to help others.

General G. picks up the phone and requests their file on Bond from the central repository. While waiting for the file to arrive, they affirm that making Bond the center of their scandal and killing him will suitably embarrass the British thanks to his popularity and admiration by the rest of the intelligence community even if the general public doesn't know who he is.

quote:

The file had a shiny black cover. A thick white stripe ran diagonally across it from top right-hand corner to bottom left. In the top left-hand space there were the letters ‘S.S.’ in white, and under them ‘SOVER-SHENNOE SEKRETNO’, the equivalent of ‘Top Secret’. Across the centre was neatly painted in white letters ‘JAMES BOND’, and underneath ‘Angliski Spion’.

General G. opened the file and took out a large envelope containing photographs which he emptied on to the glass surface of the desk. He picked them up one by one. He looked closely at them, sometimes through a magnifying glass which he took out of a drawer, and passed them across the desk to Nikitin who glanced at them and handed them on.

The first was dated 1946. It showed a dark young man sitting at a table outside a sunlit café. There was a tall glass beside him on the table and a soda-water siphon. The right forearm rested on the table and there was a cigarette between the fingers of the right hand that hung negligently down from the edge of the table. The legs were crossed in that attitude that only an Englishman adopts – with the right ankle resting on the left knee and the left hand grasping the ankle. It was a careless pose. The man didn’t know that he was being photographed from a point about twenty feet away.

The next was dated 1950. It was a face and shoulders, blurred, but of the same man. It was a close-up and Bond was looking with careful, narrowed eyes at something, probably the photographer’s face, just above the lens. A miniature buttonhole camera, guessed General G.

The third was from 1951. Taken from the left flank, quite close, it showed the same man in a dark suit, without a hat, walking down a wide empty street. He was passing a shuttered shop whose sign said ‘Charcuterie’. He looked as if he was going somewhere urgently. The clean-cut profile was pointing straight ahead and the crook of the right elbow suggested that his right hand was in the pocket of his coat. General G. reflected that it was probably taken from a car. He thought that the decisive look of the man, and the purposeful slant of his striding figure, looked dangerous, as if he was making quickly for something bad that was happening further down the street.

The fourth and last photograph was marked Passe. 1953. The corner of the Royal Seal and the letters ‘… REIGN OFFICE’ in the segment of a circle showed in the bottom right-hand corner. The photograph, which had been blown up to cabinet size, must have been made at a frontier, or by the concierge of an hotel when Bond had surrendered his passport. General G. carefully went over the face with his magnifying glass.

It was a dark, clean-cut face, with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek. The eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The hair was black, parted on the left, and carelessly brushed so that a thick black comma fell down over the right eyebrow. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn but cruel mouth. The line of the jaw was straight and firm. A section of dark suit, white shirt and black knitted tie completed the picture.

Bond's long history of getting exposed and spied on dates all the way back to the end of the war! How often has this guy been secretly photographed by drat near everyone he's run into?

quote:

General G. held the photograph out at arm’s length. Decision, authority, ruthlessness – these qualities he could see. He didn’t care what else went on inside the man. He passed the photograph down the table and turned to the file, glancing rapidly down each page and flipping brusquely on to the next.

The photographs came back to him. He kept his place with a finger and looked briefly up. ‘He looks a nasty customer,’ he said grimly. ‘His story confirms it. I will read out some extracts. Then we must decide. It is getting late.’ He turned back to the first page and began to rattle off the points that struck him.

‘First name: JAMES. Height: 183 centimetres; weight: 76 kilograms; slim build; eyes: blue; hair: black; scar down right cheek and on left shoulder; signs of plastic surgery on back of right hand (see Appendix “A”); all-round athlete; expert pistol shot, boxer, knife-thrower; does not use disguises. Languages: French and German. Smokes heavily (N.B.: special cigarettes with three gold bands); vices: drink, but not to excess, and women. Not thought to accept bribes.’

The only possible explanation for "not to excess" is that they're judging him by Russian standards.

quote:

General G. skipped a page and went on:

‘This man is invariably armed with a .25 Beretta automatic carried in a holster under his left arm. Magazine holds eight rounds. Has been known to carry a knife strapped to his left forearm; has used steel-capped shoes; knows the basic holds of judo. In general, fights with tenacity and has a high tolerance of pain (see Appendix “B”).’

General G. riffled through more pages giving extracts from agents’ reports from which this data was drawn. He came to the last page before the Appendices which gave details of the cases on which Bond had been encountered. He ran his eye to the bottom and read out: ‘Conclusion. This man is a dangerous professional terrorist and spy. He has worked for the British Secret Service since 1938 and now (see Highsmith file of December 1950) holds the secret number “007” in that Service. The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service. There are believed to be only two other British agents with this authority. The fact that this spy was decorated with the C.M.G. in 1953, an award usually given only on retirement from the Secret Service, is a measure of his worth. If encountered in the field, the fact and full details to be reported to headquarters (see SMERSH, M.G.B. and GRU Standing Orders 1951 onwards).’

All the officers agree that Bond is their man. On the phone, General G. issues a death warrant for James Bond as an enemy of the state. The paper is brought in and everyone in the room signs it, affirming that Bond is now ready to be fully hunted by the Soviet government. General G. makes one addendum that Bond is to be killed "with ignominy."

quote:

When the conference had filed out, General G. rose to his feet and stretched and gave a loud controlled yawn. He sat down again at his desk, switched off the wire-recorder and rang for his A.D.C. The man came in and stood beside his desk.

General G. handed him the yellow paper. ‘Send this over to General Serov at once. Find out where Kronsteen is and have him fetched by car. I don’t care if he’s in bed. He will have to come. Otdyel II will know where to find him. And I will see Colonel Klebb in ten minutes.’

‘Yes, Comrade General.’ The man left the room.

General G. picked up the V.Ch. receiver and asked for General Serov. He spoke quietly for five minutes. At the end he concluded: ‘And I am now about to give the task to Colonel Klebb and the Planner, Kronsteen. We will discuss the outlines of a suitable konspiratsia and they will give me detailed proposals tomorrow. Is that in order, Comrade General?’

‘Yes,’ came the quiet voice of General Serov of the High Praesidium. ‘Kill him. But let it be excellently accomplished. The Praesidium will ratify the decision in the morning.’

The line went dead. The inter-office telephone rang. General G. said ‘Yes’ into the receiver and put it back.

A moment later the A.D.C. opened the big door and stood in the entrance. ‘Comrade Colonel Klebb,’ he announced.

A toad-like figure in an olive green uniform which bore the single red ribbon of the Order of Lenin came into the room and walked with quick short steps over to the desk.

General G. looked up and waved to the nearest chair at the conference table. ‘Good evening, Comrade.’

The squat face split into a sugary smile. ‘Good evening, Comrade General.’

The Head of Otdyel II, the department of SMERSH in charge of Operations and Executions, hitched up her skirts and sat down.
* # ¿ Feb 26, 2019 15:51
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Epicurius posted:

It turns out there are actually regional varieties in how men cross their legs. Crossing one leg over another is called the "European" style, and is more common in Continental Europe, and crossing your ankle over your knee is called a "figure four", and is more common in Britain and the US.

Yeah, I definitely grew up with the "figure four" style. The way Bond sits is identical to how I do.

* # ¿ Feb 26, 2019 20:46
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 7: The Wizard of Ice

quote:

The two faces of the double clock in the shiny, domed case looked out across the chess-board like the eyes of some huge sea monster that had peered over the edge of the table to watch the game.

The two faces of the chess clock showed different times. Kronsteen’s showed twenty minutes to one. The long red pendulum that ticked off the seconds was moving in its staccato sweep across the bottom half of his clock’s face, while the enemy clock was silent and its pendulum motionless down the face. But Makharov’s clock said five minutes to one. He had wasted time in the middle of the game and he now had only five minutes to go. He was in bad ‘time-trouble’ and unless Kronsteen made some lunatic mistake, which was unthinkable, he was beaten.

Kronsteen sat motionless and erect, as malevolently inscrutable as a parrot. His elbows were on the table and his big head rested on clenched fists that pressed into his cheeks, squashing the pursed lips into a pout of hauteur and disdain. Under the wide, bulging brow the rather slanting black eyes looked down with deadly calm on his winning board. But, behind the mask, the blood was throbbing in the dynamo of his brain, and a thick worm-like vein in his right temple pulsed at a beat of over ninety. He had sweated away a pound of weight in the last two hours and ten minutes, and the spectre of a false move still had one hand at his throat. But to Makharov, and to the spectators, he was still ‘The Wizard of Ice’ whose game had been compared to a man eating fish. First he stripped off the skin, then he picked out the bones, then he ate the fish. Kronsteen had been Champion of Moscow two years running, was now in the final for the third time and, if he won this game, would be a contender for Grand Mastership.

In the pool of silence round the roped-off top table there was no sound except the loud tripping feet of Kronsteen’s clock. The two umpires sat motionless in their raised chairs. They knew, as did Makharov, that this was certainly the kill. Kronsteen had introduced a brilliant twist into the Meran Variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. Makharov had kept up with him until the 28th move. He had lost time on that move. Perhaps he had made a mistake there, and perhaps again on the 31st and 33rd moves. Who could say? It would be a game to be debated all over Russia for weeks to come.





As all the other villains in the film adaptation, Kronsteen was recast as a SPECTRE agent. He was played by Vladek Sheybal, a Polish actor who became a naturalized British citizen; he was a friend of Sean Connery's and personally recommended for the role by him. Apart from appearing in the Casino Royale spoof as Le Chiffre's assistant, his one brush with Bond was his most prominent role and he generally stuck to British TV, film, and theatre for the rest of his career.

quote:

There came a sigh from the crowded tiers opposite the Championship game. Kronsteen had slowly removed the right hand from his cheek and had stretched it across the board. Like the pincers of a pink crab, his thumb and forefinger had opened, then they had descended. The hand, holding a piece, moved up and sideways and down. Then the hand was slowly brought back to the face.

The spectators buzzed and whispered as they saw, on the great wall map, the 41st move duplicated with a shift of one of the three-foot placards. R-Kt8. That must be the kill!

Kronsteen reached deliberately over and pressed down the lever at the bottom of his clock. His red pendulum went dead. His clock showed a quarter to one. At the same instant, Makharov’s pendulum came to life and started its loud, inexorable beat.

Kronsteen sat back. He placed his hands flat on the table and looked coldly across at the glistening, lowered face of the man whose guts he knew, for he too had suffered defeat in his time, would be writhing in agony like an eel pierced with a spear. Makharov, Champion of Georgia. Well, tomorrow Comrade Makharov could go back to Georgia and stay there. At any rate this year he would not be moving with his family up to Moscow.

A man in plain clothes slipped under the ropes and whispered to one of the umpires. He handed him a white envelope. The umpire shook his head, pointing at Makharov’s clock, which now said three minutes to one. The man in plain clothes whispered one short sentence which made the umpire sullenly bow his head. He pinged a handbell.

‘There is an urgent personal message for Comrade Kronsteen,’ he announced into the microphone. ‘There will be a three minutes’ pause.’

Annoyed, Kronsteen opens the letter. It simply says "You are required this instant." He doesn't need any details to know who or where. Making a very dangerous move, he elects to continue the game. After a few seconds, Makharov concedes and Kronsteen leaves.

quote:

Kronsteen knew it would be a waste of breath to apologize to the plain-clothes guard. It would also be contrary to discipline. After all, he was Head of the Planning Department of SMERSH, with the honorary rank of full Colonel. And his brain was worth diamonds to the organization. Perhaps he could argue his way out of the mess. He gazed out of the window at the dark streets, already wet with the work of the night cleaning squad, and bent his mind to his defence. Then there came a straight street at the end of which the moon rode fast between the onion spires of the Kremlin, and they were there.



"Kremlin" is the Russian word for a castle or fortress in a city, but colloquially refers to the center of the Russian government. While the President of the United States just gets a big mansion with a fence and the rest of the government is spread around, the Soviets/Russians get a huge walled complex. You've got cathedrals, a 25,000 square meter palace for the president, the Kremlin Senate building, former royal armories (one of which is a museum and the other still in military use by the Kremlin Regiment), and as of 1961 the State Kremlin Palace for concerts.

quote:

When the guard handed Kronsteen over to the A.D.C., he also handed the A.D.C. a slip of paper. The A.D.C. glanced at it and looked coldly up at Kronsteen with half-raised eyebrows. Kronsteen looked calmly back without saying anything. The A.D.C. shrugged his shoulders and picked up the office telephone and announced him.

When they went into the big room and Kronsteen had been waved to a chair and had nodded acknowledgment of the brief pursed smile of Colonel Klebb, the A.D.C. went up to General G. and handed him the piece of paper. The General read it and looked hard across at Kronsteen. While the ADC walked to the door and went out, the General went on looking at Kronsteen. When the door was shut, General G. opened his mouth and said softly, ‘Well, Comrade?’

Kronsteen was calm. He knew the story that would appeal. He spoke quietly and with authority. ‘To the public, Comrade General, I am a professional chess player. Tonight I became Champion of Moscow for the third year in succession. If, with only three minutes to go, I had received a message that my wife was being murdered outside the door of the Tournament Hall, I would not have raised a finger to save her. My public know that. They are as dedicated to the game as myself. Tonight, if I had resigned the game and had come immediately on receipt of that message, five thousand people would have known that it could only be on the orders of such a department as this. There would have been a storm of gossip. My future goings and comings would have been watched for clues. It would have been the end of my cover. In the interests of State Security, I waited three minutes before obeying the order. Even so, my hurried departure will be the subject of much comment. I shall have to say that one of my children is gravely ill. I shall have to put a child into hospital for a week to support the story. I deeply apologize for the delay in carrying out the order. But the decision was a difficult one. I did what I thought best in the interests of the Department.’

General G. looked thoughtfully into the dark slanting eyes. The man was guilty, but the defence was good. He read the paper again as if weighing up the size of the offence, then he took out his lighter and burned it. He dropped the last burning corner on to the glass top of his desk and blew the ashes sideways on to the floor. He said nothing to reveal his thoughts, but the burning of the evidence was all that mattered to Kronsteen. Now nothing could go on his zapiska. He was deeply relieved and grateful. He would bend all his ingenuity to the matter on hand. The General had performed an act of great clemency. Kronsteen would repay him with the full coin of his mind.

Kronsteen is handed the file on Bond. With no expense to be spared on ruining and killing Bond, he starts formulating a plan. General G. asks Colonel Klebb for suggestions and she starts rattling off stories.

quote:

Kronsteen stopped listening. He knew all these cases. He had handled the planning of most of them and they were filed away in his memory like so many chess gambits. Instead, with closed ears, he examined the face of this dreadful woman and wondered casually how much longer she would last in her job – how much longer he would have to work with her.

Dreadful? Kronsteen was not interested in human beings – not even in his own children. Nor did the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have a place in his vocabulary. To him all people were chess pieces. He was only interested in their reactions to the movements of other pieces. To foretell their reactions, which was the greater part of his job, one had to understand their individual characteristics. Their basic instincts were immutable. Self-preservation, sex and the instinct of the herd – in that order. Their temperaments could be sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic. The temperament of an individual would largely decide the comparative strength of his emotions and his sentiments. Character would greatly depend on upbringing and, whatever Pavlov and the Behaviourists might say, to a certain extent on the character of the parents. And, of course, people’s lives and behaviour would be partly conditioned by physical strengths and weaknesses.

It was with these basic classifications at the back of his mind that Kronsteen’s cold brain considered the woman across the table. It was the hundredth time he had summed her up, but now they had weeks of joint work in front of them and it was as well to refresh the memory so that a sudden intrusion of the human element in their partnership should not come as a surprise.

Of course Rosa Klebb had a strong will to survive, or she would not have become one of the most powerful women in the State, and certainly the most feared. Her rise, Kronsteen remembered, had begun with the Spanish Civil War. Then, as a double agent inside P.O.U.M. – that is, working for the O.G.P.U. in Moscow as well as for Communist Intelligence in Spain – she had been the right hand, and some sort of a mistress, they said, of her chief, the famous Andreas Nin. She had worked with him from 1935-37. Then, on the orders of Moscow, he was murdered and, it was rumoured, murdered by her. Whether this was true or not, from then on she had progressed slowly but straight up the ladder of power, surviving setbacks, surviving wars, surviving, because she forged no allegiances and joined no factions, all the purges, until, in 1953, with the death of Beria, the bloodstained hands grasped the rung, so few from the very top, that was Head of the Operations Department of SMERSH.

And, reflected Kronsteen, much of her success was due to the peculiar nature of her next most important instinct, the Sex Instinct. For Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a Neuter. Kronsteen was certain of it. The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.

In her, the Herd instinct would also be dead. Her urge for power demanded that she should be a wolf and not a sheep. She was a lone operator, but never a lonely one, because the warmth of company was unnecessary to her. And, of course, temperamentally, she would be a phlegmatic – imperturbable, tolerant of pain, sluggish. Laziness would be her besetting vice, thought Kronsteen. She would be difficult to get out of her warm, hoggish bed in the morning. Her private habits would be slovenly, even dirty. It would not be pleasant, thought Kronsteen, to look into the intimate side of her life, when she relaxed, out of uniform. Kronsteen’s pouting lips curled away from the thought and his mind hastened on, skipping her character, which was certainly cunning and strong, to her appearance.

Rosa Klebb would be in her late forties, he assumed, placing her by the date of the Spanish War. She was short, about five foot four, and squat, and her dumpy arms and short neck, and the calves of the thick legs in the drab khaki stockings, were very strong for a woman. The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag, and in general her figure, with its big pear-shaped hips, could only be likened to a ’cello.

The tricoteuses of the French Revolution must have had faces like hers, decided Kronsteen, sitting back in his chair and tilting his head slightly to one side. The thinning orange hair scraped back to the tight, obscene bun; the shiny yellow-brown eyes that stared so coldly at General G. through the sharp-edged squares of glass; the wedge of thickly powdered, large-pored nose; the wet trap of a mouth, that went on opening and shutting as if it was operated by wires under the chin. Those French women, as they sat and knitted and chatted while the guillotine clanged down, must have had the same pale, thick chicken’s skin that scragged in little folds under the eyes and at the corners of the mouth and below the jaws, the same big peasant’s ears, the same tight, hard dimpled fists, like knobkerries, that, in the case of the Russian woman, now lay tightly clenched on the red velvet table-top on either side of the big bundle of bosom. And their faces must have conveyed the same impression, concluded Kronsteen, of coldness and cruelty and strength as this, yes, he had to allow himself the emotive word, dreadful woman of SMERSH.





In the film, Klebb maintains her status as the SMERSH Head of Operations and just transfers over to SPECTRE. She was played by Lotte Lenya, an Austrian-American singer and stage actress who fled the Nazi regime as it gained power.

quote:

‘Thank you, Comrade Colonel. Your review of the position is of value. And now, Comrade Kronsteen, have you anything to add? Please be short. It is two o’clock and we all have a heavy day before us.’ General G.’s eyes, bloodshot with strain and lack of sleep, stared fixedly across the desk into the fathomless brown pools below the bulging forehead. There had been no need to tell this man to be brief. Kronsteen never had much to say, but each of his words was worth speeches from the rest of the staff.

Kronsteen had already made up his mind, or he would not have allowed his thoughts to concentrate for so long on the woman.

He slowly tilted back his head and gazed into the nothingness of the ceiling. His voice was extremely mild, but it had the authority that commands close attention.

‘Comrade General, it was a Frenchman, in some respects a predecessor of yours, Fouché, who observed that it is no good killing a man unless you also destroy his reputation. It will, of course, be easy to kill this man Bond. Any paid Bulgarian assassin would do it, if properly instructed. The second part of the operation, the destruction of this man’s character, is more important and more difficult. At this stage it is only clear to me that the deed must be done away from England, and in a country over whose press and radio we have influence. If you ask me how the man is to be got there, I can only say that if the bait is important enough, and its capture is open to this man alone, he will be sent to seize it from wherever he may happen to be. To avoid the appearance of a trap, I would consider giving the bait a touch of eccentricity, of the unusual. The English pride themselves on their eccentricity. They treat the eccentric proposition as a challenge. I would rely partly on this reading of their psychology to have them send this important operator after the bait.’

Kronsteen paused. He lowered his head so that he was looking just over General G.’s shoulder.

‘I shall proceed to devise such a trap,’ he said indifferently. ‘For the present, I can only say that if the bait is successful in attracting its prey, we are then likely to require an assassin with a perfect command of the English language.’

Kronsteen’s eyes moved to the red velvet table-top in front of him. Thoughtfully, as if this was the kernel of the problem, he added: ‘We shall also require a reliable and extremely beautiful girl.’
* # ¿ Feb 27, 2019 17:37
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
The Spanish Civil War is also very important as a "test bed" for the weapons that would be used in World War II. As the Soviets provided support for the Republicans, Nazi Germany provided support for the Nationalists. Both countries sent volunteers (Germany had as many as 10,000 soldiers participating at one time) and provided hundreds of tanks and planes of the same types that would be used in the early stages of WW2. The lessons learned when this equipment came into contact led to rapid development of technology and doctrine that would eventually be used properly a few years later.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 22, 2019

* # ¿ Feb 28, 2019 03:08
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Proteus Jones posted:

No joke, this thread has been way more interesting and engrossing that I imagined it would be when it started.

Thank you for all the effort posts regarding the context of post-WWII and Cold War politics and other minutiae during that time.

Thank you for enjoying it! The Bond books are incredibly detailed and provide a glimpse into a world that no longer exists. Fleming wrote them as contemporary novels in which everything was taken for granted and rarely explained, as there was no expectation of what would become unusual or unknown 60 years later. Fully understanding the books from a 1950s perspective requires a lot of research of contemporary politics, social cues, food and drink, and technology.

* # ¿ Feb 28, 2019 03:18
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 8: The Beautiful Lure

quote:

Sitting by the window of her one room and looking out at the serene June evening, at the first pink of the sunset reflected in the windows across the street, at the distant onion spire of a church that flamed like a torch above the ragged horizon of Moscow roofs, Corporal of State Security Tatiana Romanova thought that she was happier than she had ever been before.

Her happiness was not romantic. It had nothing to do with the rapturous start to a love affair – those days and weeks before the first tiny tear-clouds appear on the horizon. It was the quiet, settled happiness of security, of being able to look forward with confidence to the future, heightened by the immediate things, a word of praise she had had that afternoon from Professor Denikin, the smell of a good supper cooking on the electric stove, her favourite prelude to Boris Goudonov being played by the Moscow State Orchestra on the radio, and, over all, the beauty of the fact that the long winter and short spring were past and it was June.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71oQl46glYs

quote:

The room was a tiny box in the huge modern apartment building on the Sadovaya-Chernogriazskay Ulitza that is the women’s barracks of the State Security Departments. Built by prison labour, and finished in 1939, the fine eight-storey building contains two thousand rooms, some, like hers on the third floor, nothing but square boxes with a telephone, hot and cold water, a single electric light and a share of the central bathrooms and lavatories, others, on the two top floors, consisting of two- and three-room flats with bathrooms. These were for high-ranking women. Graduation up the building was strictly by rank, and Corporal Romanova had to rise through Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major and Lieutenant-Colonel before she would reach the paradise of the eighth and Colonels’ floor.

But heaven knew she was content enough with her present lot. A salary of 1,200 roubles a month (thirty per cent more than she could have earned in any other Ministry), a room to herself; cheap food and clothes from the ‘closed shops’ on the ground floor of the building; a monthly allocation of at least two Ministry tickets to the Ballet or the Opera; a full two weeks’ paid holiday a year. And, above all, a steady job with good prospects in Moscow – not in one of those dreary provincial towns where nothing happened month after month, and where the arrival of a new film or the visit of a travelling circus was the only thing to keep one out of bed in the evening.

Of course, you had to pay for being in the M.G.B. The uniform put you apart from the world. People were afraid, which didn’t suit the nature of most girls, and you were confined to the society of other M.G.B. girls and men, one of whom, when the time came, you would have to marry in order to stay with the Ministry. And they worked like the devil – eight to six, five and a half days a week, and only forty minutes off for lunch in the canteen. But it was a good lunch, a real meal, and you could do with little supper and save up for the sable coat that would one day take the place of the well-worn Siberian fox.

At the thought of her supper, Corporal Romanova left the chair by the window and went to examine the pot of thick soup, with a few shreds of meat and some powdered mushroom, that was to be her supper. It was nearly done and smelled delicious. She turned off the electricity and let the pot simmer while she washed and tidied, as, years before, she had been taught to do before meals.

Rather than talk about what kind of specific dish she must be making, let's discuss the infamous Soviet cuisine as a whole.



Efforts were made by the Soviet Union to erase the national identity of its individual states as much as possible to create a general Soviet identity. They were also infamous for constant shortages, both due to lack of production and corruption. When combined, these two realities of Soviet life led to the creation of a national cuisine as well.

Before the Russian Revolution, the cuisine of Imperial Russia varied from grandiose to barely there depending on your social standing. The wealthy and nobility enjoyed imported foods and embraced international cuisine, especially French. While the peasants would usually be surviving on various soups and rye bread, the Romanovs would have elaborate dishes of jellied meat, roasts, canapes, cheese-filled pastries, and cakes. The French influence didn't totally disappear after the formation of the Soviet Union, but it was heavily simplified. Georgian cuisine was also introduced across Eastern Europe thanks to Stalin being Georgian.

The typical dish for a Soviet worker like Tanya would have been soup or stew. Along with the famous/infamous borscht, okroshka was a common one. This was a soup made from a kvass base (a very low-alcohol beer made by fermenting rye bread in water) with various vegetables, meats, and sour cream. Especially in times of hardship, "okroshka" could be made on a base of anything from water to diluted kefir (a fermented milk drink that I absolutely hate) and the ingredients could be chopped hot dogs or canned Vienna sausages, boiled potatoes, and hard boiled eggs. If you could chop it up, it would go in the pot.

For solid foods, you've got some variety depending on your wealth and connections. Cutlets, Beef Stroganoff, salads, cabbage rolls, peas, etc. Many workers got their meals outside the home from state-run canteens that served the same food just about everywhere. Restaurants existed that took hard currency, but they often wouldn't have everything on the menu and you would usually just ask "What do you have today?" upon arriving. While modern Russian cuisine is greatly improved and you can generally find whatever you want now, a lot of people still think it's all borscht and potatoes.

Overall, Tania's meal is typical and probably close to what she eats at home just about every day. You take what you can get and make it into stew.

quote:

While she dried her hands, she examined herself in the big oval looking-glass over the washstand.

One of her early boy-friends had said she looked like the young Greta Garbo. What nonsense! And yet tonight she did look rather well. Fine dark brown silken hair brushed straight back from a tall brow and falling heavily down almost to the shoulders, there to curl slightly up at the ends (Garbo had once done her hair like that and Corporal Romanova admitted to herself that she had copied it), a good, soft pale skin with an ivory sheen at the cheekbones; wide apart, level eyes of the deepest blue under straight natural brows (she closed one eye after the other. Yes, her lashes were certainly long enough!), a straight, rather imperious nose – and then the mouth. What about the mouth? Was it too broad? It must look terribly wide when she smiled. She smiled at herself in the mirror. Yes, it was wide; but then so had Garbo’s been. At least the lips were full and finely etched. There was the hint of a smile at the corners. No one could say it was a cold mouth! And the oval of her face. Was that too long? Was her chin a shade too sharp? She swung her head sideways to see it in profile. The heavy curtain of hair swung forward and across her right eye so that she had to brush it back. Well, the chin was pointed, but at least it wasn’t sharp. She faced the mirror again and picked up a brush and started on the long, heavy hair. Greta Garbo! She was all right, or so many men wouldn’t tell her that she was – let alone the girls who were always coming to her for advice about their faces. But a film star – a famous one! She made a face at herself in the glass and went to eat her supper.

In fact Corporal Tatiana Romanova was a very beautiful girl indeed. Apart from her face, the tall, firm body moved particularly well. She had been a year in the ballet school in Leningrad and had abandoned dancing as a career only when she grew an inch over the prescribed limit of five feet six. The school had taught her to hold herself well and to walk well. And she looked wonderfully healthy, thanks to her passion for figure-skating, which she practised all through the year at the Dynamo ice-stadium and which had already earned her a place on the first Dynamo women’s team. Her arms and breasts were faultless. A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s.

Corporal Romanova was admired far beyond the confines of the English translation section of the M.G.B. Central Index. Everyone agreed that it would not be long before one of the senior officers came across her and peremptorily hauled her out of her modest section to make her his mistress, or if absolutely necessary, his wife.





Tatiana in the movie was played by Daniela Bianchi, one of the relatively few actors from these early Bond films who's still alive today. She's an Italian putting on a fake Russian accent, but shared a connection with the character by being the daughter of an army colonel. She retired from acting and modeling in 1970 and married a wealthy shipping magnate.

quote:

The girl poured the thick soup into a small china bowl, decorated with wolves chasing a galloping sleigh round the rim, broke some black bread into it and went and sat in her chair by the window and ate it slowly with a nice shiny spoon she had slipped into her bag not many weeks before after a gay evening at the Hotel Moskwa.

When she had finished, she washed up and went back to her chair and lit the first cigarette of the day (no respectable girl in Russia smokes in public, except in a restaurant, and it would have meant instant dismissal if she had smoked at her work) and listened impatiently to the whimpering discords of an orchestra from Turkmenistan. This dreadful Oriental stuff they were always putting on to please the kulaks of one of those barbaric outlying states! Why couldn’t they play something kulturny? Some of that modern jazz music, or something classical. This stuff was hideous. Worse, it was old fashioned.

Her Professor Denikin calls her, and unusually refers to her as Corporal Romanova instead of "Tatiana" or "Tania." That means trouble.

He informs her that she's been requested for an interview by Colonel Klebb in 15 minutes, who lives on the 8th floor of their apartment building. He doesn't give her any details and very abruptly hangs up.

quote:

The girl held the receiver away from her face. She stared at it with frenzied eyes as if she could wring more words out of the circles of little holes in the black ear-piece. ‘Hullo! Hullo!’ The empty mouthpiece yawned at her. She realized that her hand and her forearm were aching with the strength of her grip. She bent slowly forward and put the receiver down on the cradle.

She stood for a moment, frozen, gazing blindly at the black machine. Should she call him back? No, that was out of the question. He had spoken as he had because he knew, and she knew, that every call, in and out of the building, was listened to or recorded. That was why he had not wasted a word. This was a State matter. With a message of this sort, you got rid of it as quickly as you could, in as few words as possible, and wiped your hands of it. You had got the dreadful card out of your hand. You had passed the Queen of Spades to someone else. Your hands were clean again.

The girl put her knuckles up to her open mouth and bit on them, staring at the telephone. What did they want her for? What had she done? Desperately she cast her mind back, scrabbling through the days, the months, the years. Had she made some terrible mistake in her work and they had just discovered it? Had she made some remark against the State, some joke that had been reported back? That was always possible. But which remark? When? If it had been a bad remark, she would have felt a twinge of guilt or fear at the time. Her conscience was clear. Or was it? Suddenly she remembered. What about the spoon she had stolen? Was it that? Government property! She would throw it out of the window, now, far to one side or the other. But no, it couldn’t be that. That was too small. She shrugged her shoulders resignedly and her hand dropped to her side. She got up and moved towards the clothes cupboard to get out her best uniform, and her eyes were misty with the tears of fright and bewilderment of a child. It could be none of those things. SMERSH didn’t send for one for that sort of thing. It must be something much, much worse.

The girl glanced through her wet eyes at the cheap watch on her wrist. Only seven minutes to go! A new panic seized her. She brushed her forearm across her eyes and grabbed down her parade uniform. On top of it all, whatever it was, to be late! She tore at the buttons of her white cotton blouse.

As we've gone over, this kind of panic was absolutely normal and expected. An "interview" with the secret police could easily mean torture or execution, possibly for something you didn't even expect to kill you when you did it. You were only in more danger if you were actively involved in the government, as this gave you far more opportunities to gently caress up.

quote:

As she dressed and washed her face and brushed her hair, her mind went on probing at the evil mystery like an inquisitive child poking into a snake’s hole with a stick. From whatever angle she explored the hole, there came an angry hiss.

Leaving out the nature of her guilt, contact with any tentacle of SMERSH was unspeakable. The very name of the organization was abhorred and avoided. SMERSH, ‘Smiert Spionam’, ‘Death to Spies’. It was an obscene word, a word from the tomb, the very whisper of death, a word never mentioned even in secret office gossip among friends. Worst of all, within this horrible organization, Otdyel II, the Department of Torture and Death, was the central horror.

And the Head of Otdyel II, the woman, Rosa Klebb! Unbelievable things were whispered about this woman, things that came to Tatiana in her nightmares, things she forgot again during the day, but that she now paraded.

It was said that Rosa Klebb would let no torturing take place without her. There was a blood-spattered smock in her office, and a low camp-stool, and they said that when she was seen scurrying through the basement passages dressed in the smock and with the stool in her hand, the word would go round, and even the workers in SMERSH would hush their words and bend low over their papers – perhaps even cross their fingers in their pockets – until she was reported back in her room.

For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and look into the face and quietly say ‘No. 1’ or ‘No. 10’ or ‘No. 25’ and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume. And, depending on the eyes, she would quietly change the torture, and say ‘Now No. 36’ or ‘Now No. 64’ and the inquisitors would do something else. As the courage and resistance seeped out of the eyes, and they began to weaken and beseech, she would start cooing softly. ‘There, there my dove. Talk to me, my pretty one, and it will stop. It hurts. Ah me, it hurts so, my child. And one is so tired of the pain. One would like it to stop, and to be able to lie down in peace, and for it never to begin again. Your mother is here beside you, only waiting to stop the pain. She has a nice soft cosy bed all ready for you to sleep on and forget, forget, forget. Speak,’ she would whisper lovingly. ‘You have only to speak and you will have peace and no more pain.’ If the eyes still resisted, the cooing would start again. ‘But you are foolish, my pretty one. Oh so foolish. This pain is nothing. Nothing! You don’t believe me, my little dove? Well then, your mother must try a little, but only a very little, of No. 87.’ And the interrogators would hear and change their instruments and their aim, and she would squat there and watch the life slowly ebbing from the eyes until she had to speak loudly into the ear of the person or the words would not reach the brain.

But it was seldom, so they said, that the person had the will to travel far along SMERSH’s road of pain, let alone to the end, and, when the soft voice promised peace, it nearly always won, for somehow Rosa Klebb knew from the eyes the moment when the adult had been broken down into a child crying for its mother. And she provided the image of the mother and melted the spirit where the harsh words of a man would have toughened it.

Then, after yet another suspect had been broken, Rosa Klebb would go back down the passage with her camp-stool and take off her newly soiled smock and get back to her work and the word would go round that all was over and normal activity would come back to the basement.

After learning about how far Beria managed to get in politics despite being a literal serial killer, could anyone ever find Rosa Klebb to be too evil to be in the KGB?

quote:

Tatiana, frozen by her thoughts, looked again at her watch. Four minutes to go. She ran her hands down her uniform and gazed once more at her white face in the glass. She turned and said farewell to the dear, familiar little room. Would she ever see it again?

She walked straight down the long corridor and rang for the lift.

When it came, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin and walked into the lift as if it was the platform of the guillotine.

‘Eighth,’ she said to the girl operator. She stood facing the doors. Inside her, remembering a word she had not used since childhood, she repeated over and over ‘My God – My God – My God.’
* # ¿ Feb 28, 2019 16:11
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Ivan Serov was also a Rosa Klebb of his own. If you'd like, the CIA declassified their 1958 file on him.



He was slightly younger than Beria and likewise a youth when the Russian Revolution occurred. Whereas Beria had already gotten himself into hot water for playing with both sides, Serov joined the Red Army as a proud soldier after the civil war had already been decided in their favor. He joined the NKVD in 1939 at almost the exact same time that Beria killed his way into becoming its head.

As a commissar of the NKVD, Serov has been held responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths. He participated in the arrests of the Polish officers who would be killed during the Katyn Massacre. One of his top secret documents, the Serov Instructions, gave information on how to carry out mass deportations of Caucasian people (as in the peoples of the Caucasus, not white people) to the Siberian gulags. He boasted that he could "break every bone in a man's body without killing him". Really, the only thing really noticeable about Serov among his peers is that he wasn't unique in his sociopathic cruelty and capacity for violence.

After the war, Serov helped organize the Stasi (the infamous East German secret police that became as notorious as the NKVD). Seeing the writing on the wall when Beria took power after Stalin's death, he quickly saved his own skin by conspiring to betray Beria and avoid being purged himself. He continued his work as the head of the KGB, including personally participating in the Hungarian incident by reporting from the scene of the attempted revolution to the Kremlin and escorting Soviet politicians via armored personnel carrier.

As Epicurius said, he was quietly shuffled over to the GRU as Khrushchev tried to make the Soviet Union seem a little less overtly evil. For his failure to achieve a real Soviet victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the reveal that his protege Oleg Penkovsky had been a double-agent for the British, he was stripped of his party membership and fired. He spent the remainder of his life in obscurity and died in 1990, never living to see the fall of the country he crossed so many lines for.

* # ¿ Feb 28, 2019 22:15
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 9: A Labour of Love

quote:

Outside the anonymous, cream painted door, Tatiana already smelled the inside of the room. When the voice told her curtly to come in, and she opened the door, it was the smell that filled her mind while she stood and stared into the eyes of the woman who sat behind the round table under the centre light.

It was the smell of the Metro on a hot evening – cheap scent concealing animal odours. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not, and healthy, clean girls like Tatiana always walk home from the office, unless the rain or the snow is too bad, so as to avoid the stench in the trains and the Metro.

Now Tatiana was in a bath of the smell. Her nostrils twitched with disgust.

It was her disgust and her contempt for a person who could live in the middle of such a smell that helped her to look down into the yellowish eyes that stared at her through the square glass panes. Nothing could be read in them. They were receiving eyes, not giving eyes. They slowly moved all over her, like camera lenses, taking her in.

Colonel Klebb spoke: ‘You are a fine-looking girl, Comrade Corporal. Walk across the room and back.’

What were these honeyed words? Taut with a new fear, fear of the notorious personal habits of the woman, Tatiana did as she was told.

‘Take your jacket off. Put it down on the chair. Raise your hands above your head. Higher. Now bend and touch your toes. Upright. Good. Sit down.’ The woman spoke like a doctor. She gestured to the chair across the table from her. Her staring, probing eyes hooded themselves as they bent over the file on the table.

It must be my zapiska, thought Tatiana. How interesting to see the actual instrument that ordered the whole of one’s life. How thick it was – nearly two inches thick. What could be on all those pages? She looked across at the open folder with wide, fascinated eyes.

Colonel Klebb riffled through the last pages and shut down the cover. The cover was orange with a diagonal black stripe. What did those colours signify?

The woman looked up. Somehow Tatiana managed to look bravely back.

‘Comrade Corporal Romanova.’ It was the voice of authority, of the senior officer. ‘I have good reports of your work. Your record is excellent, both in your duties and in sport. The State is pleased with you.’

Klebb informs Tania that she's been singled out for a special mission and will be rewarded with a promotion to Captain of State Security upon its completion, completely unheard of for a 24-year-old girl. Klebb collects some French wine and offers Tania some Swiss chocolates, which she finds a little creepy.

Little does she know where this chapter is going.

quote:

Tatiana murmured her thanks. She reached out and chose a round one. It would be easier to swallow. Her mouth was dry with fear of the moment when she would finally see the trap and feel it snap round her neck. It must be something dreadful to need to be concealed under all this play-acting. The bite of chocolate stuck in her mouth like chewing-gum. Mercifully the glass of champagne was thrust into her hand.

Rosa Klebb stood over her. She lifted her glass merrily. ‘Za vashe zdarovie, Comrade Tatiana. And my warmest congratulations!’

Tatiana stitched a ghastly smile on her face. She picked up her glass and gave a little bow. ‘Za vashe zdarovie, Comrade Colonel.’ She drained the glass, as is the custom in Russian drinking, and put it down in front of her.

Rosa Klebb immediately filled it again, slopping some over the table-top. ‘And now to the health of your new department, Comrade.’ She raised her glass. The sugary smile tightened as she watched the girl’s reactions.

‘To SMERSH!’

Numbly, Tatiana got to her feet. She picked up the full glass. ‘To SMERSH.’ The word scarcely came out. She choked on the champagne and had to take two gulps. She sat heavily down.

Rosa Klebb gave her no time for reflection. She sat down opposite and laid her hands flat on the table. ‘And now to business, Comrade.’ Authority was back in the voice. ‘There is much work to be done.’ She leant forward. ‘Have you ever wished to live abroad, Comrade? In a foreign country?’

The champagne was having its effect on Tatiana. Probably worse was to come, but now let it come quickly.

Tania answers truthfully: she's never wanted to live anywhere but Moscow and has never thought of the pleasures and sights of a foreign culture. She's a product of the Soviet system, born around 1930 and virtually unaware of life that isn't the USSR around World War II.

quote:

The woman paused. There was girlish conspiracy in the next question.

‘Are you a virgin, Comrade?’

Oh, my God, thought Tatiana. ‘No, Comrade Colonel.’

The wet lips glinted in the light. ‘How many men?’

Tatiana coloured to the roots of her hair. Russian girls are reticent and prudish about sex. In Russia the sexual climate is mid-Victorian. These questions from the Klebb woman were all the more revolting for being asked in this cold inquisitorial tone by a State official she had never met before in her life. Tatiana screwed up her courage. She stared defensively into the yellow eyes. ‘What is the purpose of these intimate questions please, Comrade Colonel?’

Rosa Klebb straightened. Her voice cut back like a whip. ‘Remember yourself, Comrade. You are not here to ask questions. You forget to whom you are speaking. Answer me!’

Tatiana shrank back. ‘Three men, Comrade Colonel.’

‘When? How old were you?’ The hard yellow eyes looked across the table into the hunted blue eyes of the girl and held them and commanded. Tatiana was on the edge of tears. ‘At school. When I was seventeen. Then at the Institute of Foreign Languages. I was twenty-two. Then last year. I was twenty-three. It was a friend I met skating.’

‘Their names, please, Comrade.’ Rosa Klebb picked up a pencil and pulled a scribbling pad towards her.

Tatiana covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. ‘No,’ she cried between her sobs. ‘No, never, whatever you do to me. You have no right.’

‘Stop that nonsense.’ The voice was a hiss. ‘In five minutes I could have those names from you, or anything else I wish to know. You are playing a dangerous game with me, Comrade. My patience will not last for ever.’ Rosa Klebb paused. She was being too rough. ‘For the moment we will pass on. Tomorrow you will give me the names. No harm will come to these men. They will be asked one or two questions about you – simple technical questions, that is all. Now sit up and dry your tears. We cannot have any more of this foolishness.’

Klebb gives Tatiana some more champagne, which she pushes on her with more than a little urging. She asks one final question: do you find pleasure in sex, and could you enjoy it if it was with a man you didn't love?

quote:

Tatiana shook her head indecisively. She took her hands down from her face and bowed her head. The hair fell down on either side in a heavy curtain. She was trying to think, to be helpful, but she couldn’t imagine such a situation. She supposed … ‘I suppose it would depend on the man, Comrade Colonel.’

‘That is a sensible answer, my dear.’ Rosa Klebb opened a drawer in the table. She took out a photograph and slipped it across to the girl. ‘What about this man, for instance?’

Tatiana drew the photograph cautiously towards her as if it might catch fire. She looked down warily at the handsome, ruthless face. She tried to think, to imagine … ‘I cannot tell, Comrade Colonel. He is good-looking. Perhaps if he was gentle …’ She pushed the photograph anxiously away from her.

‘No, keep it, my dear. Put it beside your bed and think of this man. You will learn more about him later in your new work. And now,’ the eyes glittered behind the square panes of glass, ‘would you like to know what your new work is to be? The task for which you have been chosen from all the girls in Russia?’

‘Yes, indeed, Comrade Colonel,’ Tatiana looked obediently across at the intent face that was now pointing at her like a gun-dog.

The wet, rubbery lips parted enticingly. ‘It is a simple, delightful duty you have been chosen for, Comrade Corporal – a real labour of love, as we say. It is a matter of falling in love. That is all. Nothing else. Just falling in love with this man.’

‘But who is he? I don’t even know him.’

Rosa Klebb’s mouth revelled. This would give the silly chit of a girl something to think about.

‘He is an English spy.’

‘Bogou moiou!’ Tatiana clapped a hand over her mouth as much to stifle the use of God’s name as from terror. She sat, tense with the shock, and gazed at Rosa Klebb through wide, slightly drunk eyes.

Oh don't worry, Tania. Having sex with an English spy is the least of your worries in this room right now.

quote:

‘Yes,’ said Rosa Klebb, pleased with the effect of her words. ‘He is an English spy. Perhaps the most famous of them all. And from now on you are in love with him. So you had better get used to the idea. And no silliness, Comrade. We must be serious. This is an important State matter for which you have been chosen as the instrument. So no nonsense, please. Now for some practical details.’ Rosa Klebb stopped. She said sharply, ‘And take your hand away from your silly face. And stop looking like a frightened cow. Sit up in your chair and pay attention. Or it will be the worse for you. Understood?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’ Tatiana quickly straightened her back and sat up with her hands in her lap as if she was back at the Security Officers’ School. Her mind was in a ferment, but this was no time for personal things. Her whole training told her that this was an operation for the State. She was now working for her country. Somehow she had come to be chosen for an important konspiratsia. As an officer in the M.G.B., she must do her duty and do it well. She listened carefully and with her whole professional attention.

‘For the moment,’ Rosa Klebb put on her official voice, ‘I will be brief. You will hear more later. For the next few weeks you will be most carefully trained for this operation until you know exactly what to do in all contingencies. You will be taught certain foreign customs. You will be equipped with beautiful clothes. You will be instructed in all the arts of allurement. Then you will be sent to a foreign country, somewhere in Europe. There you will meet this man. You will seduce him. In this matter you will have no silly compunctions. Your body belongs to the State. Since your birth, the State has nourished it. Now your body must work for the State. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’ The logic was inescapable.

‘You will accompany this man to England. There, you will no doubt be questioned. The questioning will be easy. The English do not use harsh methods. You will give such answers as you can without endangering the State. We will supply you with certain answers which we would like to be given. You will probably be sent to Canada. That is where the English send a certain category of foreign prisoner. You will be rescued and brought back to Moscow.’ Rosa Klebb peered at the girl. She seemed to be accepting all this without question. ‘You see, it is a comparatively simple matter. Have you any questions at this stage?’

Tania wants to know what will happen to her target after she's done, which Klebb is indifferent about. She claims that the real goal is for her to spread false information to the British and learn more about life in Britain. Satisfied, Klebb tells Tania to finish off the chocolates while she goes to clean herself up for a friendly chat.

quote:

Tatiana sat back in her chair. So that was what it was all about! It really wasn’t so bad after all. What a relief! And what an honour to have been chosen. How silly to have been so frightened! Naturally the great leaders of the State would not allow harm to come to an innocent citizen who worked hard and had no black marks on her zapiska. Suddenly she felt immensely grateful to the father-figure that was the State, and proud that she would now have a chance to repay some of her debt. Even the Klebb woman wasn’t really so bad after all.

Tatiana was still cheerfully reviewing the situation when the bedroom door opened and ‘the Klebb woman’ appeared in the opening. ‘What do you think of this my dear?’ Colonel Klebb opened her dumpy arms and twirled on her toes like a mannequin. She struck a pose with one arm outstretched and the other arm crooked at her waist.

Tatiana’s mouth had fallen open. She shut it quickly. She searched for something to say.

Colonel Klebb of SMERSH was wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine. It had scallops of the same material round the low square neckline and scallops at the wrists of the broadly flounced sleeves. Underneath could be seen a brassière consisting of two large pink satin roses. Below, she wore old-fashioned knickers of pink satin with elastic above the knees. One dimpled knee, like a yellowish coconut, appeared thrust forward between the half open folds of the nightgown in the classic stance of the modeller. The feet were enclosed in pink satin slippers with pompoms of ostrich feathers. Rosa Klebb had taken off her spectacles and her naked face was now thick with mascara and rouge and lipstick.

She looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.

I'm really glad this part wasn't in the movie.

quote:

Tatiana stammered, ‘It’s very pretty.’

‘Isn’t it,’ twittered the woman. She went over to a broad couch in the corner of the room. It was covered with a garish piece of peasant tapestry. At the back, against the wall, were rather grimy satin cushions in pastel colours. With a squeak of pleasure, Rosa Klebb threw herself down in the caricature of a Recamier pose. She reached up an arm and turned on a pink shaded table-lamp whose stem was a naked woman in sham Lalique glass. She patted the couch beside her.

This is going exactly where you think it's going.

quote:

‘Turn out the top light, my dear. The switch is by the door. Then come and sit beside me. We must get to know each other better.’

Tatiana walked to the door. She switched off the top light. Her hand dropped decisively to the door knob. She turned it and opened the door and stepped coolly out into the corridor. Suddenly her nerve broke. She banged the door shut behind her and ran wildly off down the corridor with her hands over her ears against the pursuing scream that never came.
* # ¿ Mar 1, 2019 16:36
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 10: The Fuse Burns

quote:

It was the morning of the next day.

Colonel Klebb sat at her desk in the roomy office that was her headquarters in the underground basement of SMERSH. It was more an operations room than an office. One wall was completely papered with a map of the Western Hemisphere. The opposite wall was covered with the Eastern Hemisphere. Behind her desk and within reach of her left hand, a Telekrypton occasionally chattered out a signal en clair, duplicating another machine in the Cipher Department under the tall radio masts on the roof of the building. From time to time, when Colonel Klebb thought of it, she tore off the lengthening strip of tape and read through the signals. This was a formality. If anything important happened, her telephone would ring. Every agent of SMERSH throughout the world was controlled from this room, and it was a vigilant and iron control.

The heavy face looked sullen and dissipated. The chicken-skin under the eyes was pouched and the whites of the eyes were veined with red.

I think it's a sign of how valuable Tatiana is to the plot that she didn't get disappeared from her apartment that night.

quote:

One of the three telephones at her side purred softly. She picked up the receiver. ‘Send him in.’

She turned to Kronsteen who sat, picking his teeth thoughtfully with an opened paper clip, in an armchair up against the left-hand wall, under the toe of Africa.

‘Granitsky.’

Kronsteen slowly turned his head and looked at the door.

Red Grant came in and closed the door softly behind him. He walked up to the desk and stood looking down, obediently, almost hungrily, into the eyes of his Commanding Officer. Kronsteen thought that he looked like a powerful mastiff, waiting to be fed.

Rosa Klebb surveyed him coldly. ‘Are you fit and ready for work?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’

‘Let’s have a look at you. Take off your clothes.’ Red Grant showed no surprise. He took off his coat and, after looking around for somewhere to put it, dropped it on the floor. Then, unselfconsciously, he took off the rest of his clothes and kicked off his shoes. The great red-brown body with its golden hair lit up the drab room. Grant stood relaxed, his hands held loosely at his sides and one knee bent slightly forward, as if he was posing for an art class.

Rosa Klebb got to her feet and came round the desk. She studied the body minutely, prodding here, feeling there, as if she was buying a horse. She went behind the man and continued her minute inspection. Before she came back in front of him, Kronsteen saw her slip something out of her jacket pocket and fit it into her hand. There was a glint of metal.

The woman came round and stood close up to the man’s gleaming stomach, her right arm behind her back. She held his eyes in hers.

Suddenly, with terrific speed and the whole weight of her shoulder behind the blow, she whipped her right fist, loaded with a heavy brass knuckle-duster, round and exactly into the solar plexus of the man.

Whuck!

Grant let out a snort of surprise and pain. His knees gave slightly, and then straightened. For a flash the eyes closed tight with agony. Then they opened again and glared redly down into the cold yellow probing eyes behind the square glasses. Apart from an angry flush on the skin just below the breast bone, Grant showed no ill effects from a blow that would have sent any normal man writhing to the ground.

Rosa Klebb smiled grimly. She slipped the knuckleduster back in her pocket and walked to her desk and sat down. She looked across at Kronsteen with a hint of pride. ‘At least he is fit enough,’ she said.

The film compresses most of these introductory chapters into a scene at a SPECTRE training camp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFmLAqdPdsY

Klebb informs Grant that he's been given an assignment to assassinate an English spy. He'll be put through weeks of training and preparation to imitate an English gentleman, where a double-agent from the British Foreign Office will help him pass as a spy himself. Grant asks no questions and leaves, excited at the prospect of settling some scores with the English and being rewarded.

quote:

Rosa Klebb was writing up her note of the interview. She didn’t answer or look up and Grant went out and closed the door softly behind him.

The woman threw down her pen and sat back.

‘And now, Comrade Kronsteen. Are there any points to discuss before we put the full machinery in motion? I should mention that the Praesidium has approved the target and ratified the death warrant. I have reported the broad lines of your plan to Comrade General Grubozaboyschikov. He is in agreement. The detailed execution has been left entirely in my hands. The combined planning and operations staff has been selected and waiting to begin work. Have you any last minute thoughts, Comrade?’

Kronsteen sat looking up at the ceiling, the tips of his fingers joined in front of him. He was indifferent to the condescension in the woman’s voice. The pulse of concentration beat in his temples. ‘This man Granitsky. He is reliable? You can trust him in a foreign country? He will not go private?’ ‘He has been tested for nearly ten years. He has had many opportunities to escape. He has been watched for signs of itching feet. There has never been a breath of suspicion. The man is in the position of a drug addict. He would no more abandon the Soviet Union than a drugger would abandon the source of his cocaine. He is my top executioner. There is no one better.’

‘And this girl, Romanova. She was satisfactory?’

The woman said grudgingly, ‘She is very beautiful. She will serve our purpose. She is not a virgin, but she is prudish and sexually unawakened. She will receive instruction. Her English is excellent. I have given her a certain version of her task and its object. She is co-operative. If she should show signs of faltering, I have the addresses of certain relatives, including children. I shall also have the names of her previous lovers. If necessary, it would be explained to her that these people will be hostages until her task is completed. She has an affectionate nature. Such a hint would be sufficient. But I do not anticipate any trouble from her.’

‘Romanova. That is the name of a buivshi – of one of the former people. It seems odd to be using a Romanov for such a delicate task.’

‘Her grandparents were distantly related to the Imperial Family. But she does not frequent buivshi circles. Anyway, all our grandparents were former people. There is nothing one can do about it.'

And now comes the time to talk about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War.



The House of Romanov was the ruling noble family of Russia from the time of Michael I's election as Tsar in 1613 until March 15, 1917 when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne. The family line went through some twists, but overall the Romanovs maintained an uninterrupted rule over Russia for 304 years.

Discontent with the monarchy dated back a good century by the time of World War I. Cruel treatment of the peasants by the ruling class and poor working conditions were exacerbated over the 19th century by Western-influenced philosophers. In 1848, German philosopher Karl Marx publicized The Communist Manifesto, calling for the oppressed workers of the world to seize the means of production via revolution and control the state directly. But despite the role communists would play in the eventual downfall of the Russian nobility, the first revolution was otherwise unrelated to Marxists. It was a longtime pattern of oppression exacerbated by Russian military defeats in the Great War after Nicholas II attempted to take direct control of the army and very quickly demonstrated that he was an abysmal commander.

On March 8, 1917 (it's usually called the February Revolution due to the Russians not switching from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one until 1918), worker strikes grew to a boiling point. Tens of thousands of workers went on strike and rioted over a lack of food, growing to hundreds of thousands by the next day. Soldiers mutinied and joined the rioters, as they had it no better in the army than in the factories. The rioting continued for several days and ended in over 1300 deaths before Tsar Nicholas II returned from the war front. With the chaos seeming impossible to overcome, Nicholas abdicated the throne and placed his brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, in power.

Michael deferred acceptance of the throne, as he technically needed to be ratified by an official assembly. This never happened.

A conservative provisional government was enacted in the interim, as well as the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (a "soviet" was just the Russian word for "council" at the time), a city council of what we now call St. Petersburg. The Petrograd Soviet represented the common people of the Russian capital and engaged in a power struggle over the coming months with the provisional government, which the Soviet viewed as bourgeoisie.

The Bolsheviks, the Russian revolutionary socialist party in the government, had officially been formed into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1912 (which, now with the context, you now know was simply a referring to a union of the workers' councils). Vladimir Lenin returned from his exile in Switzerland to lead the Bolsheviks, whereupon he immediately began undermining the government. As tensions grew and the provisional government repressed the communists over the summer, General Lavr Kornilov attempted a coup that would eliminate the socialists from the government. The coup failed and only inspired further resentment of the provisional government, paving the way for the Bolsheviks to enact a full revolution in November 1917 ("October Revolution" due to the Julian calendar again).

The Bolsheviks and their Red Army of revolutionaries seized power over November 7 and 8 with only a few injuries among their number. Lenin formed the Council of People's Commissars as the new government with himself as the chairman. An impromptu four-man council consisting of Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Yakov Sverdlov acted as the true power behind the government (though Sverdlov was frequently absent from meetings and died in March 1919 from illness). The Romanovs were placed under house arrest in the Ipatiev House, a large merchant's mansion turned into their prison. They were forbidden from speaking any languages other than Russian, had their cameras and valuables confiscated, and were separated from their luggage.

As the communists worked to consolidate their power and legitimize their government, monarchists and various anti-communists almost immediately began their own protests and action against the latest revolutionaries. These groups formed what was informally called the "White movement", which was really just a loose confederation of anti-communist forces trying to restore the old government. Many of the states that had been part of the Russian Empire (including Finland, Poland, and Estonia) declared their independence from Russia. This sparked a massive conflict as the Bolsheviks sent the Red Army to defeat the Whites and firmly establish their control over Russia, which would lead to between 7 and 12 million deaths before it ended.

As this was going on, the Cheka decided to get rid of Grand Duke Michael, who was imprisoned in a hotel in Perm. They convinced him that they were transporting him elsewhere, then stopped their carriages in the forest and shot him to death.

As the Romanovs were having dinner on July 16, 1918, the plan was put into motion. At midnight, the family was awoken and ordered to dress; they were told they were being moved to a safer location due to unrest caused by the civil war. They were brought into a cellar, ostensibly to await a truck. Suddenly, a group of Cheka executioners entered. Yakov Yurovsky, one of the old-timer Bolsheviks, read out their death sentence and the squad immediately raised their pistols and fired. As the family attempted to flee, the executioners fired wildly around the room until it was full of smoke, they were all deaf, and the royal family was dead. The youngest, Alexei, was 13; he survived multiple bullets and bayonet wounds due to having jewels sewn into hidden pockets in his clothes, forcing them to shoot him twice in the head.

After stabbing and shooting every body until it was definitively dead, the executioners killed the rest of the royal family's retainers and servants. The bodies were stripped of anything valuable, their clothes burned, and the bodies disfigured with sulfuric acid (plus some facial smashing with rifle butts just in case) and dumped in a mass grave. They even took Alexei's and one of his sister's corpses to burn and smash into bone fragments to confuse anyone who found the grave. Nice people.

The Russian Civil War officially ended in 1922, though fighting continued through 1923. The communists had solidified their control over Russia and officially formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin was given the opportunity to act against his political rivals and gradually became the dictator we all know and love.

quote:

‘Our grandparents were not called Romanov,’ said Kronsteen dryly. ‘However, so long as you are satisfied.’ He reflected a moment. ‘And this man Bond. Have we discovered his whereabouts?’

‘Yes. The M.G.B. English network reports him in London. During the day, he goes to his headquarters. At night he sleeps in his flat in a district of London called Chelsea.’

‘That is good. Let us hope he stays there for the next few weeks. That will mean that he is not engaged on some operation. He will be available to go after our bait when they get the scent. Meanwhile,’ Kronsteen’s dark, pensive eyes continued to examine a particular point on the ceiling, ‘I have been studying the suitability of centres abroad. I have decided on Istanbul for the first contact. We have a good apparat there. The Secret Service has only a small station. The head of the station is reported to be a good man. He will be liquidated. The centre is conveniently placed for us, with short lines of communication with Bulgaria and the Black Sea. It is relatively far from London. I am working out details of the point of assassination and the means of getting this Bond there, after he has contacted the girl. It will be either in France or very near it. We have excellent leverage on the French press. They will make the most of this kind of story, with its sensational disclosures of sex and espionage. It also remains to be decided when Granitsky shall enter the picture. These are minor details. We must choose the cameramen and the other operatives and move them quietly into Istanbul. There must be no crowding of our apparat there, no congestion, no unusual activity. We will warn all departments that wireless traffic with Turkey is to be kept absolutely normal before and during the operation. We don’t want the British interceptors smelling a rat. The Cipher Department has agreed that there is no Security objection to handing over the outer case of a Spektor machine. That will be attractive. The machine will go to the Special Devices section. They will handle its preparation.'

The Spektor (renamed Lektor in the film to avoid confusion with SPECTRE) is a fictional device. When we get more details on it, we'll discuss the real machines it was based on.

quote:

Kronsteen stopped talking. His gaze slowly came down from the ceiling. He rose thoughtfully to his feet. He looked across and into the watchful, intent eyes of the woman.

‘I can think of nothing else at the moment, Comrade,’ he said. ‘Many details will come up and have to be settled from day to day. But I think the operation can safely begin.’

‘I agree, Comrade. The matter can now go forward. I will issue the necessary directives.’ The harsh, authoritative voice unbent. ‘I am grateful for your co-operation.’

Kronsteen lowered his head one inch in acknowledgment. He turned and walked softly out of the room.

In the silence, the Telekrypton gave a warning ping and started up its mechanical chatter. Rosa Klebb stirred in her chair and reached for one of the telephones. She dialled a number.

‘Operations Room,’ said a man’s voice.

Rosa Klebb’s pale eyes, gazing out across the room, lit on the pink shape on the wall-map that was England. Her wet lips parted.

‘Colonel Klebb speaking. The konspiratsia against the English spy Bond. The operation will commence forthwith.’
* # ¿ Mar 4, 2019 21:50
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
I think at this point, if you're a person of even nominal importance to any government, never get involved with a hot Russian lady who starts trying to proposition you for sex.

* # ¿ Mar 4, 2019 22:33
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

sebmojo posted:

Q: is she super hot
A: y
Q: have we got a box with SPY STUFF DO NOT STEAL ON IT
A: ye s
Q: .......
A: .......
Q: k we good let's do it

As we’ve seen in past books, it would loving work.

* # ¿ Mar 5, 2019 02:47
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 11: The Soft Life

quote:

The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.

In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

Oh poo poo, Bond is actually in this book!

quote:

At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12th, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.

Bond reached out and gave two rings on the bell to show May, his treasured Scottish housekeeper, that he was ready for breakfast. Then he abruptly flung the single sheet off his naked body and swung his feet to the floor.

There was only one way to deal with boredom – kick oneself out of it. Bond went down on his hands and did twenty slow press-ups, lingering over each one so that his muscles had no rest. When his arms could stand the pain no longer, he rolled over on his back and, with his hands at his sides, did the straight leg-lift until his stomach muscles screamed. He got to his feet and, after touching his toes twenty times, went over to arm and chest exercises combined with deep breathing until he was dizzy. Panting with the exertion, he went into the big white-tiled bathroom and stood in the glass shower cabinet under very hot and then cold hissing water for five minutes.

At last, after shaving and putting on a sleeveless dark blue Sea Island cotton shirt and navy blue tropical worsted trousers, he slipped his bare feet into black leather sandals and went through the bedroom into the long big-windowed sitting-room with the satisfaction of having sweated his boredom, at any rate for the time being, out of his body.

Sea Island cotton is a very soft cotton that originated in South Carolina and Georgia from plantations on the coastal islands. Ian Fleming was a huge fan of it and wore it all the time, so of course he gave it to Bond. Sea Island cotton accounts for 0.0004% of the world's cotton supplies, which means even a simple T-shirt made from it runs around $165 currently. Sunspel did a special James Bond run imitating the 1950s clothing he would have worn, with a polo shirt like the one Sean Connery wore in Dr. No going for $275.

It's also interesting to note that (again, presumably like Fleming) Bond prefers to wear an outfit more suited to the tropics while at home.

quote:

May, an elderly Scotswoman with iron grey hair and a handsome closed face, came in with the tray and put it on the table in the bay window together with The Times, the only paper Bond ever read.

Makes sense, as Fleming was an editor for The Sunday Times (its sister paper).

quote:

Bond wished her good morning and sat down to breakfast.

‘Good morning-s.’ (To Bond, one of May’s endearing qualities was that she would call no man ‘sir’ except – Bond had teased her about it years before – English kings and Winston Churchill. As a mark of exceptional regard, she accorded Bond an occasional hint of an ‘s’ at the end of a word.)

She stood by the table while Bond folded his paper to the centre news page.

‘Yon man was here again last night about the Televeesion.’

‘What man was that?’ Bond looked along the headlines.

‘Yon man that’s always coming. Six times he’s been here pestering me since June. After what I said to him the first time about the sinful thing, you’d think he’d give up trying to sell us one. By hire purchase, too, if you please!’

‘Persistent chaps these salesmen.’ Bond put down his paper and reached for the coffee pot.

‘I gave him a right piece of my mind last night. Disturbing folk at their supper. Asked him if he’d got any papers – anything to show who he was.’

‘I expect that fixed him.’ Bond filled his large coffee cup to the brim with black coffee.

‘Not a bit of it. Flourished his union card. Said he had every right to earn his living. Electricians Union it was too. They’re the Communist one, aren’t they-s?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Bond vaguely. His mind sharpened. Was it possible They could be keeping an eye on him? He took a sip of the coffee and put the cup down. ‘Exactly what did this man say, May?’ he asked, keeping his voice indifferent, but looking up at her.

‘He said he’s selling Televeesion sets on commission in his spare time. And are we sure we don’t want one. He says we’re one of the only folk in the square that haven’t got one. Sees there isn’t one of those aerial things on the house, I dare say. He’s always asking if you’re at home so that he can have a word with you about it. Fancy his cheek! I’m surprised he hasn’t thought to catch you coming in or going out. He’s always asking if I’m expecting you home. Naturally I don’t tell him anything about your movements. Respectable, quiet-spoken body, if he wasn’t so persistent.

Of course, Bond suspects that the "television salesman" is a spy checking on him to see if he's at home. He decides not to do anything about it for now, beyond making a mental note to tell Security Section and move into a new flat if something serious happens.

quote:

Bond went back to his breakfast. Normally it was little straws in the wind like this that would start a persistent intuitive ticking in his mind, and, on other days, he would not have been happy until he had solved the problem of the man from the Communist Union who kept on coming to the house. Now, from months of idleness and disuse, the sword was rusty in the scabbard and Bond’s mental guard was down.

Breakfast was Bond’s favourite meal of the day. When he was stationed in London it was always the same. It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar. The single egg, in the dark blue egg-cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes.

It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.) Then there were two thick slices of wholewheat toast, a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter and three squat glass jars containing Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry jam; Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum’s. The coffee pot and the silver on the tray were Queen Anne, and the china was Minton, of the same dark blue and gold and white as the egg-cup.

It's almost comforting being able to leave behind the bleakness of the Soviet Union and get back to Bond's incredibly particular breakfast.



The Chemex is a very popular coffee pot invented in 1941, which was especially stylish in the 50s and 60s. You simply place a proprietary paper filter in the top, fill it with grounds, and pour hot (not boiling) water over it. The thick filter removes additional off-flavor compounds from the coffee and the wood collar allows you to grasp and pour directly from the pot, eliminating the need for any kind of electric coffee maker as long as you have a separate source of hot water.



The Marans is a French breed of chicken that was first imported into the United Kingdom in the 1930s. Brown eggs do indeed taste different from typical white eggs, as the color is indicative of the chicken's diet, but any nutritional differences are negligible. Bond is just really particular here.



Tiptree Little Scarlett is a brand of strawberry preserves produced in Essex since 1885. It's made with Fragaria virginiana strawberries, which are only 1/5 the size of a regular strawberry. They're common in the wild in the United States, but are rarely grown for commercial purposes except for Tiptree. Tiptree was given a royal warrant to supply the crown with Little Scarlett in 1911, making it an extremely prestigious condiment despite being only $10-15 a jar.



Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade is another British condiment with a royal warrant, having been made since 1874. It's a dark, thick marmalade made from bitter Seville oranges. Combined with butter on toast, you'd have a surprisingly complex and rich spread.

As for the honey, it came from Fortnum & Mason, a famous London department store founded in 1707 as a grocery. The store still exists and heather honey is relatively easy to find there. All in all, Bond's breakfast at home is just as particular as what he eats on his travels. While "a boiled egg and some toast with coffee" sounds simple on its surface, Bond is making sure that he uses only the best ingredients and elevating it above simple diner fare.

quote:

That morning, while Bond finished his breakfast with honey, he pinpointed the immediate cause of his lethargy and of his low spirits. To begin with, Tiffany Case, his love for so many happy months, had left him and, after final painful weeks during which she had withdrawn to an hotel, had sailed for America at the end of July. He missed her badly and his mind still sheered away from the thought of her. And it was August, and London was hot and stale. He was due for leave, but he had not the energy or the desire to go off alone, or to try and find some temporary replacement for Tiffany to go with him. So he had stayed on in the half-empty headquarters of the Secret Service grinding away at the old routines, snapping at his secretary and rasping his colleagues.

She was too good for him anyway.

quote:

Even M. had finally got impatient with the surly caged tiger on the floor below, and, on Monday of this particular week, he had sent Bond a sharp note appointing him to a Committee of Inquiry under Paymaster Captain Troop. The note said that it was time Bond, as a senior officer in the Service, took a hand in major administrative problems. Anyway, there was no one else available. Headquarters were short-handed and the 00 Section was quiescent. Bond would pray report that afternoon, at 2.30, to Room 412.

It was Troop, reflected Bond, as he lit his first cigarette of the day, who was the most nagging and immediate cause of his discontent.

Bond describes Captain Troop as the man that unites everyone in the office by being universally hated by them. He's a typical micromanager, obsessing over minor details and meting out punishments for failing to meet his exacting standards.

quote:

It was inevitable that Captain Troop’s duties would bring him into conflict with most of the organization, but it was particularly unfortunate that M. could think of no one but Troop to spare as Chairman for this particular Committee.

For this was yet one more of those Committees of Inquiry dealing with the delicate intricacies of the Burgess and Maclean case, and with the lessons that could be learned from it. M. had dreamed it up, five years after he had closed his own particular file on that case, purely as a sop to the Privy Council Inquiry into the Security Services which the Prime Minister had ordered in 1955.

The "Burgess and Maclean case" is the case of the Cambridge Five spy ring, one of the most famous cases of a spy ring in the Cold War. It started in the public eye in 1951 when two British diplomats, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess (code names "Homer" and "Hicks") suddenly disappeared. Five years later, Khrushchev publicly confirmed that they had fled to the Soviet Union. Turns out the two of them had been devoted communists and were working as Soviet spies since the 1930s. Both of them would remain in the Soviet Union for the rest of their lives; Maclean assimilated into Soviet life and even had his wife and children move out to join him in Moscow, while Burgess assimilated even better into Soviet life by becoming a lonely alcoholic and dying in 1963 from liver failure.

At the time Fleming wrote this, only the defection of Burgess and Maclean had appeared in the news recently. In fact, there were three more spies, one of which would probably shock the hell out of Fleming shortly before his death: Kim Philby (code name "Sonny" or "Stanley"), the chief British intelligence agent stationed in Washington after the war. Philby was such a prominent agent that he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1946 and even assigned to hunt down "Homer". He was suspected, but cleared in 1956. They should have looked a little deeper, as in 1963 he vanished into the Soviet Union. I believe Fleming knew Philby and both of them had a mutual school friend in fellow spy Nicholas Elliott. Philby was disappointed with life in the Soviet Union (though he blamed the leadership rather than communism as a whole) and was denied any real work or rank by the KGB due to fear that he would try to return to London. He attempted suicide shortly after arriving, but ended up dying of heart failure in 1988.

Fleming would never know of the other two members of the ring, as their existence wasn't publicized until long after his death. They consisted of John Cairncross (code name "Liszt"), a British Foreign Office agent who passed code-breaking information from Bletchley Park, and Anthony Blunt (code names "Tony" or "Johnson"), a leading British art historian and MI5 agent. Cairncross confessed almost immediately after Burgess and Maclean disappeared, but had his confession covered up and ended up moving to the United States and then Rome. Blunt confessed in 1963 and was given immunity from prosecution and a concealment of his spying for 15 years. Both of them had their roles in the spy ring revealed in 1979, with Cairncross's being confirmed in 1990 by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.

This little talk about Burgess and Maclean by Bond is an excellent example of how complex the world of espionage is. Even Fleming had no way of knowing that not only were Burgess and Maclean only a portion of the spy ring, but that the third had already confessed to the government and one of his own comrades in the war was a fourth!

quote:

At once Bond had got into a hopeless wrangle with Troop over the employment of ‘intellectuals’ in the Secret Service.

Perversely, and knowing it would annoy, Bond had put forward the proposition that, if M.I.5. and the Secret Service were to concern themselves seriously with the atom age ‘intellectual spy’, they must employ a certain number of intellectuals to counter them. ‘Retired officers of the Indian Army,’ Bond had pronounced, ‘can’t possibly understand the thought processes of a Burgess or a Maclean. They won’t even know such people exist – let alone be in a position to frequent their cliques and get to know their friends and their secrets. Once Burgess and Maclean went to Russia, the only way to make contact with them again and, perhaps, when they got tired of Russia, turn them into double agents against the Russians, would have been to send their closest friends to Moscow and Prague and Budapest with orders to wait until one of these chaps crept out of the masonry and made contact. And one of them, probably Burgess, would have been driven to make contact by his loneliness and by his ache to tell his story to someone. But they certainly wouldn’t take the risk of revealing themselves to some man with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind.’

‘Oh really,’ Troop had said with icy calm. ‘So you suggest we should staff the organization with long-haired perverts. That’s quite an original notion. I thought we were all agreed that homosexuals were about the worst security risk there is. I can’t see the Americans handing over many atom secrets to a lot of pansies soaked in scent.’

‘All intellectuals aren’t homosexual. And many of them are bald. I’m just saying that …,’ and so the argument had gone on intermittently through the hearings of the past three days, and the other Committee members had ranged themselves more or less with Troop. Now, today, they had to draw up their recommendations and Bond was wondering whether to take the unpopular step of entering a minority report.

While this conversation is hilarious today, Bond's suggestion of hiring softer intellectuals who are attuned to human nature actually sets him out as the most left-wing voice on an otherwise very traditional committee.

quote:

How seriously did he feel about the whole question, Bond wondered as, at nine o’clock, he walked out of his flat and down the steps to his car? Was he just being petty and obstinate? Had he constituted himself into a one-man opposition only to give his teeth something to bite into? Was he so bored that he could find nothing better to do than make a nuisance of himself inside his own organization? Bond couldn’t make up his mind. He felt restless and indecisive, and, behind it all, there was a nagging disquiet he couldn’t put his finger on.

As he pressed the self-starter and the twin exhausts of the Bentley woke to their fluttering growl, a curious bastard quotation slipped from nowhere into Bond’s mind.

‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.’
* # ¿ Mar 5, 2019 17:48
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 12: A Piece of Cake

quote:

As it turned out, Bond never had to make a decision on the Committee’s final report.

He had complimented his secretary on a new summer frock, and was half way through the file of signals that had come in during the night, when the red telephone that could only mean M. or his Chief-of-Staff gave its soft, peremptory burr.

Bond picked up the receiver. ‘007.’

‘Can you come up?’ It was the Chief-of-Staff.

‘M.?’

‘Yes. And it looks like a long session. I’ve told Troop you won’t be able to make the Committee.’

‘Any idea what it’s about?’

The Chief-of-Staff chuckled. ‘Well, I have as a matter of fact. But you’d better hear about it from him. It’ll make you sit up. There’s quite a swerve on this one.’

As Bond put on his coat and went out into the corridor, banging the door behind him, he had a feeling of certainty that the starter’s gun had fired and that the dog days had come to an end. Even the ride up to the top floor in the lift and the walk down the long quiet corridor to the door of M.’s staff office seemed to be charged with the significance of all those other occasions when the bell of the red telephone had been the signal that had fired him, like a loaded projectile, across the world towards some distant target of M.’s choosing. And the eyes of Miss Moneypenny, M.’s private secretary, had that old look of excitement and secret knowledge as she smiled up at him and pressed the switch on the intercom.

‘007’s here, sir.’

‘Send him in,’ said the metallic voice, and the red light of privacy went on above the door.

Bond went through the door and closed it softly behind him. The room was cool, or perhaps it was the venetian blinds that gave an impression of coolness. They threw bars of light and shadow across the dark green carpet up to the edge of the big central desk. There the sunshine stopped so that the quiet figure behind the desk sat in a pool of suffused greenish shade. In the ceiling directly above the desk, a big twin-bladed tropical fan, a recent addition to M.’s room, slowly revolved, shifting the thundery August air that, even high up above the Regent’s Park, was heavy and stale after a week of heat-wave.

M opens up by asking Bond another personal question; he's been doing that a lot lately. He wants to know how Bond's relationship with Tiffany had been going.

quote:

Now what? wondered Bond. drat these office gossips. He said gruffly, ‘Well, sir, we did get on well. And there was some idea we might get married. But then she met some chap in the American Embassy. On the Military Attaché’s staff. Marine Corps major. And I gather she’s going to marry him. They’ve both gone back to the States, as a matter of fact. Probably better that way. Mixed marriages aren’t often a success. I gather he’s a nice enough fellow. Probably suit her better than living in London. She couldn’t really settle down here. Fine girl, but she’s a bit neurotic. We had too many rows. Probably my fault. Anyway it’s over now.’

M. gave one of the brief smiles that lit up his eyes more than his mouth. ‘I’m sorry if it went wrong, James,’ he said. There was no sympathy in M.’s voice. He disapproved of Bond’s ‘womanizing’, as he called it to himself, while recognizing that his prejudice was the relic of a Victorian upbringing. But, as Bond’s chief, the last thing he wanted was for Bond to be permanently tied to one woman’s skirts. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best. Doesn’t do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business. They hang on your gun-arm, if you know what I mean. Forgive me for asking about it. Had to know the answer before I told you what’s come up. It’s a pretty odd business. Be difficult to get you involved if you were on the edge of marrying or anything of that sort.’

M tells Bond that the head of Station T in Istanbul had received a typewritten message telling him to take a round trip on a ferry from the Galata Bridge at a specific time. Being a daring sort, he actually took the anonymous letter up on its request. After about 15 minutes, a Russian girl walked up to him and began telling him an extraordinary story.

quote:

M. paused to put another match to his pipe. Bond interjected, ‘Who is Head of T, sir? I’ve never worked in Turkey.’

‘Man called Kerim, Darko Kerim. Turkish father and English mother. Remarkable fellow. Been Head of T since before the war. One of the best men we’ve got anywhere. Does a wonderful job. Loves it. Very intelligent and he knows all that part of the world like the back of his hand.’ M. dismissed Kerim with a sideways jerk of his pipe. ‘Anyway, the girl’s story was that she was a Corporal in the M.G.B. Had been in the show since she left school and had just got transferred to the Istanbul centre as a cipher officer. She’d engineered the transfer because she wanted to get out of Russia and come over.’

‘That’s good,’ said Bond. ‘Might be useful to have one of their cipher girls. But why does she want to come over?’

M. looked across the table at Bond. ‘Because she’s in love.’

He paused and added mildly, ‘She says she’s in love with you.’

‘In love with me?’

‘Yes, with you. That’s what she says. Her name’s Tatiana Romanova. Ever heard of her?’

‘Good God, no! I mean, no, sir.’ M. smiled at the mixture of expressions on Bond’s face. ‘But what the hell does she mean? Has she ever met me? How does she know I exist?’

According to Tatiana, she's been working as a clerk in the MGB's Central Index for years and fell in love with Bond based on his file photo.

quote:

‘She said you particularly appealed to her because you reminded her of the hero of a book by some Russian fellow called Lermontov. Apparently it was her favourite book. This hero chap liked gambling and spent his whole time getting in and out of scraps. Anyway, you reminded her of him. She says she came to think of nothing else, and one day the idea came to her that if only she could transfer to one of their foreign centres she could get in touch with you and you would come and rescue her.’

The book she's referring to is probably A Hero ff Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, published in 1840. It's the story of Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, a classic Byronic hero who spends his time womanizing and adventuring around the Caucasus.

quote:

‘I’ve never heard such a crazy story, sir. Surely Head of T didn’t swallow it.’

‘Now wait a moment,’ M.’s voice was testy. ‘Just don’t be in too much of a hurry simply because something’s turned up you’ve never come across before. Suppose you happened to be a film star instead of being in this particular trade. You’d get daft letters from girls all over the world stuffed with Heaven knows what sort of rot about not being able to live without you and so on. Here’s a silly girl doing a secretary’s job in Moscow. Probably the whole department is staffed by women, like our Records. Not a man in the room to look at, and here she is, faced with your, er, dashing features on a file that’s constantly coming up for review. And she gets what I believe they call a “crush” on these pictures just as secretaries all over the world get crushes on these dreadful faces in the magazines.’ M. waved his pipe sideways to indicate his ignorance of these grisly female habits. ‘The Lord knows I don’t know much about these things, but you must admit that they happen.’

Bond smiled at the appeal for help. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, sir, I’m beginning to see there is some sense in it. There’s no reason why a Russian girl shouldn’t be just as silly as an English one. But she must have got guts to do what she did. Does Head of T say if she realized the consequences if she was found out?’

‘He said she was frightened out of her wits,’ said M. ‘Spent the whole time on the boat looking round to see if anybody was watching her. But it seems they were the usual peasants and commuters that take these boats, and as it was a late boat there weren’t many passengers anyway. But wait a minute. You haven’t heard half the story.’ M. took a long pull at his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke up towards the slowly turning fan above his head. Bond watched the smoke get caught up in the blades and whirled into nothingness. ‘She told Kerim that this passion for you gradually developed into a phobia. She got to hate the sight of Russian men. In time this turned into a dislike of the régime and particularly of the work she was doing for them and, so to speak, against you. So she applied for a transfer abroad, and since her languages were very good–English and French–in due course she was offered Istanbul if she would join the Cipher Department, which meant a cut in pay. To cut a long story short, after six months’ training, she got to Istanbul about three weeks ago. Then she sniffed about and soon got hold of the name of our man, Kerim. He’s been there so long that everybody in Turkey knows what he does by now. He doesn’t mind, and it takes people’s eyes off the special men we send in from time to time. There’s no harm in having a front man in some of these places. Quite a lot of customers would come to us if they knew where to go and who to talk to.’

Bond commented: ‘The public agent often does better than the man who has to spend a lot of time and energy keeping under cover.’

‘So she sent Kerim the note. Now she wants to know if he can help her.’ M. paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘Of course Kerim’s first reactions were exactly the same as yours, and he fished around looking for a trap. But he simply couldn’t see what the Russians could gain from sending this girl over to us. All this time the steamer was getting further and further up the Bosphorus and soon it would be turning to come back to Istanbul. And the girl got more and more desperate as Kerim went on trying to break down her story. Then,’ M.’s eyes glittered softly across at Bond, ‘came the clincher.’

That glitter in M.’s eyes, thought Bond. How well he knew those moments when M.’s cold grey eyes betrayed their excitement and their greed.

‘She had a last card to play. And she knew it was the ace of trumps. If she could come over to us, she would bring her cipher machine with her. It’s the brand new Spektor machine. The thing we’d give our eyes to have.’

‘God,’ said Bond softly, his mind boggling at the immensity of the prize. The Spektor! The machine that would allow them to decipher the Top Secret traffic of all. To have that, even if its loss was immediately discovered and the settings changed, or the machine taken out of service in Russian embassies and spy centres all over the world, would be a priceless victory. Bond didn’t know much about cryptography, and, for security’s sake, in case he was ever captured, wished to know as little as possible about its secrets, but at least he knew that, in the Russian secret service, loss of the Spektor would be counted a major disaster.



The Spektor is a fictional machine, but the way it's described is not too different from the most famous of the cryptographic machines: the Enigma. The Enigma machine was actually a commercial product that began being purchased by the German military in the 1920s and served as one of its main methods of encrypting messages. The work the Allies undertook to break the Enigma's encryption were a major drive in the development of computers (first mechanical, then electronic) and turned Alan Turing into a household name.

I actually have a video of myself playing with a real Enigma machine at the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBNc-lpJXU

Each key (which is quite hard to press) is connected to a different lamp, with the position of the rotors determining which lamp lights up. Every time you press a key, the rotors spin; similar to the hands of a clock, the second rotor spins every certain number of first rotor rotations, then the third rotor spins every certain number of second rotor rotations. This changes the lamps in a predictable sequence, which is what allows the message to be decoded: you write down the garbled text from the lamps as the message, then the receiver sets their rotors to the same setting and types the encrypted text to light up the plaintext letters. There was a codebook with a regularly changing list of rotor settings for particular time periods so everyone knew how to set their machines for encrypting and decrypting that day.

Because of how it worked, breaking the Enigma code was based around mathematically analyzing the messages to try and determine the rotor settings and which keys must be connected to which lamps. Codebreakers made heavy usage of "cribs", rules of thumb and common mistakes with the operation of the Enigma. Like a letter could never be encrypted to itself, so you could immediately take that letter out of consideration for what the plaintext could be (there was a funny story by Mavis Lever where she found a message without a single "L" in it and quickly determined that the operator had sent a lazy test message by just pressing one key over and over). Or you could find that an identical or almost identical message was sent in a weaker form of encryption through another channel, which would give you the text to help break the Enigma message.

What revolutionized it was the development of electro-mechanical computers called bombes. They were essentially brute force machines that could rapidly test different Enigma settings, doing what would take 100 people an entire day in 2 hours. Alan Turing developed the initial British bombe design and continued to work on computers until his homosexuality led to punishment by forced sterilization in 1952; he died two years later by eating a poisoned apple, which was either suicide or a careless accident depending on who you talk to.

Honestly, you could talk all day about the Enigma and its cryptanalysis. It's essential learning for anyone even mildly interested in military intelligence, codebreaking, or the history of computers.

quote:

Bond was sold. At once he accepted all M.’s faith in the girl’s story, however crazy it might be. For a Russian to bring them this gift, and take the appalling risk of bringing it, could only mean an act of desperation – of desperate infatuation if you liked. Whether the girl’s story was true or not, the stakes were too high to turn down the gamble.

‘You see, 007?’ said M. softly. It was not difficult to read Bond’s mind from the excitement in his eyes. ‘You see what I mean?’

Bond hedged. ‘But did she say how she could do it?’

‘Not exactly. But Kerim says she was absolutely definite. Some business about night duty. Apparently she’s on duty alone certain nights of the week and sleeps on a camp bed in the office. She seemed to have no doubts about it, although she realized that she would be shot out of hand if anyone even dreamed of her plan. She was even worried about Kerim reporting all this back to me. Made him promise he would encode the signal himself and send it on a one-time-only pad and keep no copy. Naturally he did as she asked. Directly she mentioned the Spektor, Kerim knew he might be on to the most important coup that’s come our way since the war.’

‘What happened then, sir?’

‘The steamer was coming up to a place called Ortakoy. She said she was going to get off there. Kerim promised to get a signal off that night. She refused to make any arrangements for staying in touch. Just said that she would keep her end of the bargain if we would keep ours. She said good night and mixed in the crowd going down the gang-plank and that was the last Kerim saw of her.’

M. suddenly leant forward in his chair and looked hard at Bond. ‘But of course he couldn’t guarantee that we would make the bargain with her.’

Bond said nothing. He thought he could guess what was coming.

‘This girl will only do these things on one condition. ’ M.’s eyes narrowed until they were fierce, significant slits. ‘That you go out to Istanbul and bring her and the machine back to England.’

Bond shrugged his shoulders. That presented no difficulties. But … He looked candidly back at M. ‘Should be a piece of cake, sir. As far as I can see there’s only one snag. She’s only seen photographs of me and read a lot of exciting stories. Suppose that when she sees me in the flesh, I don’t come up to her expectations.’

‘That’s where the work comes in,’ said M. grimly. ‘That’s why I asked those questions about Miss Case. It’s up to you to see that you do come up to her expectations.’
* # ¿ Mar 6, 2019 17:04
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Epicurius posted:

This is looking to be another example of the Service's sexism coming back to bite them. M is inclined to dismiss Tatiana as a silly girl who's willing to betray her country because she fell in love with an enemy spy she doesnt even know.

If it had been a man who wanted to defect because he said he had fallen in love with a picture of Moneypenny, I have to think M would have been more suspicious.

There's definitely some suspicion that it's not true, but the chance of getting their hands on a Spektor is enough that they're willing to dismiss her as a silly girl. The Soviets even established in the final Russian chapter that they're only planning to give her an empty case anyway.

* # ¿ Mar 6, 2019 19:02
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Turbinosamente posted:

Didn't they soften this in the movie, by having M outright declare it's an obvious trap but by God we're going to go and do it anyways if it means a chance at the Spektor?

Great thread by the way, glad it got randomly linked elsewhere in the forums. It's been years since I've read Bond and it's making me want to go dig up my books and re-read. Been enjoying people's reactions to the weirder poo poo just as much as the excellent history and culture notes.

Where did it get linked?

* # ¿ Mar 7, 2019 02:41
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 13: 'B.E.A. Takes You There'

quote:

The four small, square-ended propellers turned slowly, one by one, and became four whizzing pools. The low hum of the turbo-jets rose to a shrill smooth whine. The quality of the noise, and the complete absence of vibration, were different from the stuttering roar and straining horsepower of all other aircraft Bond had flown in. As the Viscount wheeled easily out to the shimmering east-west runway of London Airport, Bond felt as if he was sitting in an expensive mechanical toy.

There was a pause as the chief pilot gunned up the four turbo-jets into a banshee scream and then, with a jerk of released brakes, the 10.30 B.E.A. Flight 130 to Rome, Athens and Istanbul gathered speed and hurtled down the runway and up into a quick, easy climb.

I don't think Bond has ever flown on the same airliner twice. This one is a Vickers Viscount, which is actually a turboprop airliner that started service with British European Airways in 1953.



quote:

In ten minutes they had reached 20,000 feet and were heading south along the wide air-channel that takes the Mediterranean traffic from England. The scream of the jets died to a low, drowsy whistle. Bond unfastened his seat-belt and lit a cigarette. He reached for the slim, expensive-looking attaché case on the floor beside him and took out The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler and put the case, which was very heavy in spite of its size, on the seat beside him. He thought how surprised the ticket clerk at London Airport would have been if she had weighed the case instead of letting it go unchecked as an ‘overnight bag’. And if, in their turn, Customs had been intrigued by its weight, how interested they would have been when it was slipped under the Inspectoscope.

Q Branch had put together this smart-looking little bag, ripping out the careful handiwork of Swaine and Adeney to pack fifty rounds of .25 ammunition, in two flat rows, between the leather and the lining of the spine. In each of the innocent sides there was a flat throwing knife, built by Wilkinsons, the sword makers, and the tops of their handles were concealed cleverly by the stitching at the corners. Despite Bond’s efforts to laugh them out of it, Q’s craftsmen had insisted on building a hidden compartment into the handle of the case, which, by pressure at a certain point, would deliver a cyanide death-pill into the palm of his hand. (Directly he had taken delivery of the case, Bond had washed this pill down the lavatory.) More important was the thick tube of Palmolive shaving cream in the otherwise guileless spongebag. The whole top of this unscrewed to reveal the silencer for the Beretta, packed in cotton wool. In case hard cash was needed, the lid of the attaché case contained fifty golden sovereigns. These could be poured out by slipping sideways one ridge of welting.

The complicated bag of tricks amused Bond, but he also had to admit that, despite its eight-pound weight, the bag was a convenient way of carrying the tools of his trade, which otherwise would have to be concealed about his body.

It's taken us 5 books, but Bond finally has his first Bond gadget!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJ7Du14G-4

The film replicates the case mostly accurately. It's more high tech than its 1950s counterpart, with the throwing knives deploying automatically instead of needing to be pulled out. It also includes a .22 caliber AR-7 takedown rifle with an infrared scope (inaccurately referred to as .25 caliber in the movie, probably from mistakenly recycling the caliber carried for Bond's pistol in the book) and a tear gas bomb as an anti-tampering device.

quote:

Only a dozen miscellaneous passengers were on the plane. Bond smiled at the thought of Loelia Ponsonby’s horror if she knew that that made the load thirteen. The day before, when he had left M. and had gone back to his office to arrange the details of his flight, his secretary had protested violently at the idea of his travelling on Friday the thirteenth.

‘But it’s always best to travel on the thirteenth,’ Bond had explained patiently. ‘There are practically no passengers and it’s more comfortable and you get better service. I always choose the thirteenth when I can.’

‘Well,’ she had said resignedly, ‘it’s your funeral. But I shall spend the day worrying about you. And for heaven’s sake don’t go walking under ladders or anything silly this afternoon. You oughtn’t to overplay your luck like this. I don’t know what you’re going to Turkey for, and I don’t want to know. But I have a feeling in my bones.’

‘Ah, those beautiful bones!’ Bond had teased her. ‘I’ll take them out to dinner the night I get back.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ she had said coldly. Later she had kissed him goodbye with a sudden warmth, and for the hundredth time Bond had wondered why he bothered with other women when the most darling of them all was his secretary.

Film fans will quickly note that this matches the unresolved sexual tension between Bond and Moneypenny. Ms. Ponsonby was completely excised from the film to use M's secretary exclusively; there were some plans to introduce her in GoldenEye, but it was dropped.

quote:

The plane sang steadily on above the endless sea of whipped-cream clouds that looked solid enough to land on if the engines failed. The clouds broke up and a distant blue haze, far away to their left, was Paris. For an hour they flew high over the burned-up fields of France until, after Dijon, the land turned from a pale to a darker green as it sloped up into the Juras.

Lunch came. Bond put aside his book and the thoughts that kept coming between him and the printed page, and, while he ate, he gazed down at the cool mirror of the Lake of Geneva. As the pine forests began to climb towards the snow patches between the beautifully scoured teeth of the Alps, he remembered early skiing holidays. The plane skirted the great eye-tooth of Mont Blanc, a few hundred yards to port, and Bond looked down at the dirty grey elephant’s skin of the glaciers and saw himself again, a young man in his teens, with the leading end of the rope round his waist, bracing himself against the top of a rock-chimney on the Aiguilles Rouges as his two companions from the University of Geneva inched up the smooth rock towards him.

And now? Bond smiled wryly at his reflection in the Perspex as the plane swung out of the mountains and over the grosgrained terrazza of Lombardy. If that young James Bond came up to him in the street and talked to him, would he recognize the clean, eager youth that had been him at seventeen? And what would that youth think of him, the secret agent, the older James Bond? Would he recognize himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear – this man with the cold arrogant eyes and the scar down his cheek and the flat bulge beneath his left armpit? If the youth did recognize him what would his judgment be? What would he think of Bond’s present assignment? What would he think of the dashing secret agent who was off across the world in a new and most romantic role – to pimp for England?

Bond put the thought of his dead youth out of his mind. Never job backwards. What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple – or dead.

Gazing down on the sun-baked sprawl of Genoa and the gentle blue waters of the Mediterranean, Bond closed his mind to the past and focused it on the immediate future – on this business, as he sourly described it to himself, of ‘pimping for England’.

For that, however else one might like to describe it, was what he was on his way to do – to seduce, and seduce very quickly, a girl whom he had never seen before, whose name he had heard yesterday for the first time. And all the while, however attractive she was – and Head of T had described her as ‘very beautiful ’ – Bond’s whole mind would have to be not on what she was, but on what she had – the dowry she was bringing with her. It would be like trying to marry a rich woman for her money. Would he be able to act the part? Perhaps he could make the right faces and say the right things, but would his body dissociate itself from his secret thoughts and effectively make the love he would declare? How did men behave credibly in bed when their whole minds were focused on a woman’s bank balance? Perhaps there was an erotic stimulus in the notion that one was ravaging a sack of gold. But a cipher machine?

Bond's thoughts continue after he gets two Americano cocktails in Ciampino Airport before getting on the next flight. Of course, he recognizes the possibility that this could all be a Soviet plot. MI6 had actually held a full meeting all day and evening running the angles before deciding to actually send Bond on the mission. They decided that it was worth the risk because they can't understand why Bond would be a target. He doesn't have enough high level information to be useful interrogating, and if they wanted to kill him why not just do a car bomb or break into his flat and shoot him?

The plane passes through a lightning storm, which excites Bond with the possibility of danger. I think I know why he's taking this job...

quote:

Almost at once it got lighter in the cabin. The rain stopped crashing on the Perspex window and the noise of the jets settled back into their imperturbable whistle. Bond opened the door of his hurricane-room and stepped out. He slowly turned his head and looked curiously out of the window and watched the tiny shadow of the plane hastening far below across the quiet waters of the Gulf of Corinth. He heaved a deep sigh and reached into his hip-pocket for his gunmetal cigarette case. He was pleased to see his hands were dead steady as he took out his lighter and lit one of the Morland cigarettes with the three gold rings. Should he tell Lil that perhaps she had almost been right? He decided that if he could find a rude enough postcard in Istanbul he would.

The day outside faded through the colours of a dying dolphin and Mount Hymettus came at them, blue in the dusk. Down over the twinkling sprawl of Athens and then the Viscount was wheeling across the standard concrete air-strip with its drooping windsock and the notices in the strange dancing letters Bond had hardly seen since school.

Bond climbed out of the plane with the handful of pale, silent passengers and walked across to the transit lounge and up to the bar. He ordered a tumbler of ouzo and drank it down and chased it with a mouthful of ice water. There was a strong bite under the sickly anisette taste and Bond felt the drink light a quick, small fire down his throat and in his stomach. He put down his glass and ordered another.

That's, uh, not the best way to drink ouzo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5jbxh0C0UU

Ouzo is an anise-flavored spirit, which is almost undrinkable by itself due to the intense flavor. You're meant to mix it with water, creating a refreshing licorice-like beverage. Because the essential oils that provide the anise flavor are soluble in alcohol but not soluble in water, the drink turns milky white when water is added. You see the same effect with absinthe, which is likewise not the best thing to drink straight.

By doing an ice water chaser, Bond is basically subjugating himself to a horrific blast of anise in his mouth and doing very little to wash it out.

quote:

By the time the loudspeakers called him out again it was dusk and the half moon rode clear and high above the lights of the town. The air was soft with evening and the smell of flowers and there was the steady pulse-beat of the cicadas –zing-a-zing-a-zing –and the distant sound of a man singing. The voice was clear and sad and the song had a note of lament. Near the airport a dog barked excitedly at an unknown human smell. Bond suddenly realized that he had come into the East where the guard-dog howls all night. For some reason the realization sent a pang of pleasure and excitement into his heart.

They had only a ninety-minute flight to Istanbul, across the dark Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. An excellent dinner, with two dry Martinis and a half-bottle of Calvet claret, put Bond’s reservations about flying on Friday the thirteenth, and his worries about his assignment, out of his mind and substituted a mood of pleased anticipation.

First, I wish you could still get this much alcohol on a flight.

Second, notice how long a flight from London to Istanbul is taking. The Vickers Viscount only has a range of 1380 miles, which is slightly less than the entire distance between the two cities. Taking into account fuel conservation in case of emergencies and the weight of the passengers and provisions, the plane would inevitably need to make several shorter jumps to safely make the journey. By comparison, a Boeing 757 has a range of about 4505 miles and a modern flight would take only 4 hours.

quote:

Then they were there and the plane’s four propellers wheeled to a stop outside the fine modern airport of Yesilkoy, an hour’s drive from Istanbul. Bond said goodbye and thank you for a good flight to the stewardess, carried the heavy little attaché case through the passport check into the customs, and waited for his suitcase to come off the plane.

So these dark, ugly, neat little officials were the modern Turks. He listened to their voices, full of broad vowels and quiet sibilants and modified u-sounds, and he watched the dark eyes that belied the soft, polite voices. They were bright, angry, cruel eyes that had only lately come down from the mountains. Bond thought he knew the history of those eyes. They were eyes that had been trained for centuries to watch over sheep and decipher small movements on far horizons. They were eyes that kept the knife-hand in sight without seeming to, that counted the grains of meal and the small fractions of coin and noted the flicker of the merchant’s fingers. They were hard, untrusting, jealous eyes. Bond didn’t take to them.

Outside the customs, a tall rangy man with drooping black moustaches stepped out of the shadows. He wore a smart dust-coat and a chauffeur’s cap. He saluted and, without asking Bond his name, took his suitcase and led the way over to a gleaming aristocrat of a car–an old black basket-work Rolls Royce coupé-de-ville that Bond guessed must have been built for some millionaire of the ’20s.

When the car was gliding out of the airport, the man turned and said politely over his shoulder, in excellent English, ‘Kerim Bey thought you would prefer to rest tonight, sir. I am to call for you at nine tomorrow morning. What hotel are you staying at, sir?’

‘The Kristal Palas.’

‘Very good, sir.’ The car sighed off down the wide modern road.

Behind them, in the dappled shadows of the airport parking place, Bond vaguely heard the crackle of a motor scooter starting up. The sound meant nothing to him and he settled back to enjoy the drive.
* # ¿ Mar 7, 2019 16:47
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
I've polished off a bottle of arak (the Middle Eastern ouzo) before, but I kinda want to buy another bottle so I can do the "shot and a water chaser" stunt and see how terrible it is. I did take a swig of straight arak just to see what it would taste like and it's godawful.

* # ¿ Mar 7, 2019 17:59
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 14: Darko Kerim

quote:

James Bond awoke early in his dingy room at the Kristal Palas on the heights of Pera and absent-mindedly reached down a hand to explore a sharp tickle on the outside of his right thigh. Something had bitten him during the night. Irritably he scratched the spot. He might have expected it.

When he had arrived the night before, to be greeted by a surly night-concierge in trousers and a collarless shirt, and had briefly inspected the entrance hall with the fly-blown palms in copper pots, and the floor and walls of discoloured Moorish tiles, he had known what he was in for. He had half thought of going to another hotel. Inertia, and a perverse liking for the sleazy romance that clings to old-fashioned Continental hotels, had decided him to stay, and he had signed in and followed the man up to the third floor in the old rope-and-gravity lift.

His room, with its few sticks of aged furniture and an iron bedstead, was what he had expected. He only looked to see if there were the blood spots of squashed bugs on the wall-paper behind the bedhead before dismissing the concierge.

He had been premature. When he went into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap it gave a deep sigh, then a deprecating cough, and finally ejected a small centipede into the basin. Bond morosely washed the centipede away with the thin stream of brownish water from the cold tap. So much, he had reflected wryly, for choosing an hotel because its name had amused him and because he had wanted to get away from the soft life of big hotels.

But he had slept well, and now, with the reservation that he must buy some insecticide, he decided to forget about his comforts and get on with the day.





The Kristal Palas is believed to be a thinly disguised Pera Palace, a real hotel in Istanbul built in 1892 to accommodate Orient Express passengers. While it was a palatial hotel when it was first built and has recently been renovated to its old standard of luxury, by the 1950s it was indeed a dingy mess.



This is the old elevator Bond mentions.

quote:

Bond got out of bed, drew back the heavy red plush curtains and leant on the iron balustrade and looked out over one of the most famous views in the world – on his right the still waters of the Golden Horn, on his left the dancing waves of the unsheltered Bosphorus, and, in between, the tumbling roofs, soaring minarets and crouching mosques of Pera. After all, his choice had been good. The view made up for many bedbugs and much discomfort.



This is the actual view from the Pera Palace of the river, courtesy of Fleming's Bond.

quote:

For ten minutes Bond stood and gazed out across the sparkling water barrier between Europe and Asia, then he turned back into the room, now bright with sunshine, and telephoned for his breakfast. His English was not understood, but his French at last got through. He turned on a cold bath and shaved patiently with cold water and hoped that the exotic breakfast he had ordered would not be a fiasco.

He was not disappointed. The yoghourt, in a blue china bowl, was deep yellow and with the consistency of thick cream. The green figs, ready peeled, were bursting with ripeness, and the Turkish coffee was jet black and with the burned taste that showed it had been freshly ground. Bond ate the delicious meal on a table drawn up beside the open window. He watched the steamers and the caiques criss-crossing the two seas spread out before him and wondered about Kerim and what fresh news there might be.

This is a surprisingly small breakfast for Turkey! A traditional Turkish breakfast is usually a menagerie of at least half a dozen small plates of fruit, vegetables, bread, yogurt, cheese, meat, pastries, etc.

quote:

Punctually at nine, the elegant Rolls came for him and took him through Taksim square and down the crowded Istiklal and out of Asia. The thick black smoke of the waiting steamers, badged with the graceful crossed anchors of the Merchant Marine, streamed across the first span of the Galata Bridge and hid the other shore towards which the Rolls nosed forward through the bicycles and trams, the well-bred snort of the ancient bulb horn just keeping the pedestrians from under its wheels. Then the way was clear and the old European section of Istanbul glittered at the end of the broad half-mile of bridge with the slim minarets lancing up into the sky and the domes of the mosques, crouching at their feet, looking like big firm breasts. It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera.

Across the bridge, the car nosed to the right down a narrow cobbled street parallel with the waterfront and stopped outside a high wooden porte-cochère.

A tough-looking watchman with a chunky, smiling face, dressed in frayed khaki, came out of a porter’s lodge and saluted. He opened the car door and gestured for Bond to follow him. He led the way back into his lodge and through a door into a small courtyard with a neatly raked gravel parterre. In the centre was a gnarled eucalyptus tree at whose foot two white ring-doves were pecking about. The noise of the town was a distant rumble and it was quiet and peaceful.

They walked across the gravel and through another small door and Bond found himself at one end of a great vaulted godown with high circular windows through which dusty bars of sunshine slanted across a vista of bundles and bales of merchandise. There was a cool, musty scent of spices and coffee and, as Bond followed the watchman down the central passage-way, a sudden strong wave of mint.

Bond is led into a room where half a dozen young men and women are doing paperwork on the traditional abacuses and pens dipped in pots of ink. A swarthy blue-eyed man comes up to Bond and leads him to a door in the back.

quote:

‘Ah, my friend. Come in. Come in.’ A very large man in a beautifully cut cream tussore suit got up from a mahogany desk and came to meet him, holding out his hand.

A hint of authority behind the loud friendly voice reminded Bond that this was the Head of Station T, and that Bond was in another man’s territory and juridically under his command. It was no more than a point of etiquette, but a point to remember.

Darko Kerim had a wonderfully warm dry handclasp. It was a strong Western handful of operative fingers – not the banana skin handshake of the East that makes you want to wipe your fingers on your coat-tails. And the big hand had a coiled power that said it could easily squeeze your hand tighter and tighter until finally it cracked your bones.

Bond was six feet tall, but this man was at least two inches taller and he gave the impression of being twice as broad and twice as thick as Bond. Bond looked up into two wide apart, smiling blue eyes in a large smooth brown face with a broken nose. The eyes were watery and veined with red, like the eyes of a hound who lies too often too close to the fire. Bond recognized them as the eyes of furious dissipation.

The face was vaguely gipsy-like in its fierce pride and in the heavy curling black hair and crooked nose, and the effect of a vagabond soldier of fortune was heightened by the small thin gold ring Kerim wore in the lobe of his right ear. It was a startlingly dramatic face, vital, cruel and debauched, but what one noticed more than its drama was that it radiated life. Bond thought he had never seen so much vitality and warmth in a human face. It was like being close to the sun, and Bond let go the strong dry hand and smiled back at Kerim with a friendliness he rarely felt for a stranger.





The story of Kerim Bey ("Bey" is a Turkish honorific, historically the title of a governor) is one of the saddest stories in film. He was played by Pedro Armendáriz, a popular Mexican actor through the 1940s and 50s. He was a favorite of John Ford, appearing in films like 3 Godfathers with John Wayne and The Fugitive with Henry Fonda.

Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with neck cancer. He was infamously one of 220 people (46 fatally) who contracted cancer after filming The Conqueror, a Genghis Khan epic filmed downwind of a nuclear testing site. While it was never conclusively proven that the filming site is what caused it and many of the people there were heavy smokers (including Armendáriz), it's often blamed as the cause of death of its lead, the hilariously miscast John Wayne.

Armendáriz took the role in From Russia With Love to provide money for his family after his death. He suffered great pain during filming and was eventually too ill to continue. On June 18, 1963, he shot himself with a gun he smuggled into the hospital to end his suffering. With filming still two months from completion, a body double was used for his remaining scenes.

quote:

‘Thanks for sending the car to meet me last night.’

‘Ha!’ Kerim was delighted. ‘You must thank our friends too. You were met by both sides. They always follow my car when it goes to the airport.’

‘Was it a Vespa or a Lambretta?’

‘You noticed? A Lambretta. They have a whole fleet of them for their little men, the men I call “The Faceless Ones”. They look so alike, we have never managed to sort them out. Little gangsters, mostly stinking Bulgars, who do their dirty work for them. But I expect this one kept well back. They don’t get up close to the Rolls any more since the day my chauffeur stopped suddenly and then reversed back as hard as he could. Messed up the paintwork and bloodied the bottom of the chassis but it taught the rest of them manners.’

Kerim went to his chair and waved to an identical one across the desk. He pushed over a flat white box of cigarettes and Bond sat down and took a cigarette and lit it. It was the most wonderful cigarette he had ever tasted – the mildest and sweetest of Turkish tobacco in a slim long oval tube with an elegant gold crescent.

Is there any historical precedent for Bulgarians being used for thug work like this? This must be the third or fourth book where Bulgarians are dismissed as a nation of incompetent gangsters, dating back to the first one.

quote:

While Kerim was fitting one into a long nicotine-stained ivory holder, Bond took the opportunity to glance round the room, which smelled strongly of paint and varnish as if it had just been redecorated.

It was big and square and panelled in polished mahogany, except behind Kerim’s chair where a length of Oriental tapestry hung down from the ceiling and gently moved in the breeze as if there was an open window behind it. But this seemed unlikely as light came from three circular windows high up in the walls. Perhaps, behind the tapestry, was a balcony looking out over the Golden Horn, whose waves Bond could hear lapping at the walls below. In the centre of the right-hand wall hung a gold-framed reproduction of Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen. Opposite, also imposingly framed, was Cecil Beaton’s war-time photograph of Winston Churchill looking up from his desk in the Cabinet Offices like a contemptuous bulldog. A broad bookcase stood against one wall and, opposite, a comfortably padded leather settee. In the centre of the room the big desk winked with polished brass handles. On the littered desk were three silver photograph frames, and Bond caught a sideways view of the copperplate script of two Mentions in Dispatches and the Military Division of the O.B.E.

Kerim lit his cigarette. He jerked his head back at the piece of tapestry. ‘Our friends paid me a visit yesterday,’ he said casually. ‘Fixed a limpet bomb on the wall outside. Timed the fuse to catch me at my desk. By good luck, I had taken a few minutes off to relax on the couch over there with a young Rumanian girl who still believes that a man will tell secrets in exchange for love. The bomb went off at a vital moment. I refused to be disturbed, but I fear the experience was too much for the girl. When I released her, she had hysterics. I’m afraid she had decided that my love-making is altogether too violent.’ He waved his cigarette holder apologetically. ‘But it was a rush to get the room put to rights in time for your visit. New glass for the windows and my pictures, and the place stinks of paint. However.’ Kerim sat back in his chair. There was a slight frown on his face. ‘What I cannot understand is this sudden breach of the peace. We live together very amicably in Istanbul. We all have our work to do. It is unheard of that my chers collègues should suddenly declare war in this way. It is quite worrying. It can only lead to trouble for our Russian friends. I shall be forced to rebuke the man who did it when I have found out his name.’ Kerim shook his head. ‘It is most confusing. I am hoping it has nothing to do with this case of ours.’

At Bond's confusion at Kerim publicly sending the Rolls out to pick him up, he explains the circumstances of the spy game in Istanbul. Both the Soviets and the Americans are present in large numbers in Turkey and are well aware of who's working for who. While it would have been possible for Kerim to smuggle Bond in through the Greek frontier, it wouldn't have served much purpose. Because Tatiana made it her condition that she be the one to arrange the meeting with Bond, he had to make his arrival known so it could be passed through the Soviet channels.

When Kerim criticizes the Kristal Palas, Bond says he didn't want to spend the money for an upscale place like the Istanbul Hilton (yes, there was a Hilton in Istanbul since 1955!).

quote:

‘Money?’ Kerim reached into a drawer and took out a flat packet of new green notes. ‘Here’s a thousand Turkish pounds. Their real value, and their rate on the black market, is about twenty to the pound. The official rate is seven. Tell me when you’ve finished them and I’ll give you as many more as you want. We can do our accounts after the game. It’s muck, anyway. Ever since Croesus, the first millionaire, invented gold coins, money has depreciated. And the face of the coin has been debased as fast as its value. First the faces of gods were on the coins. Then the faces of kings. Then of presidents. Now there’s no face at all. Look at this stuff!’ Kerim tossed the money over to Bond. ‘Today it’s only paper, with a picture of a public building and the signature of a cashier. Muck! The miracle is that you can still buy things with it. However. What else? Cigarettes? Smoke only these. I will have a few hundred sent up to your hotel. They’re the best. Diplomates. They’re not easy to get. Most of them go to the Ministries and the Embassies. Anything else before we get down to business? Don’t worry about your meals and your leisure. I will look after both. I shall enjoy it and, if you will forgive me, I wish to stay close to you while you are here.’

‘Nothing else,’ said Bond. ‘Except that you must come over to London one day.’

‘Never,’ said Kerim definitely. ‘The weather and the women are far too cold. And I am proud to have you here. It reminds me of the war. Now,’ he rang a bell on his desk. ‘Do you like your coffee plain or sweet? In Turkey we cannot talk seriously without coffee or raki and it is too early for raki.’

‘Plain.’

I must disagree with Kerim here. It is never too early for raki.

quote:

The door behind Bond opened. Kerim barked an order. When the door was shut, Kerim unlocked a drawer and took out a file and put it in front of him. He smacked his hand down on it.

‘My friend,’ he said grimly, ‘I do not know what to say about this case.’ He leant back in his chair and linked his hands behind his neck. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that our kind of work is rather like shooting a film? So often I have got everybody on location and I think I can start turning the handle. Then it’s the weather, and then it’s the actors, and then it’s the accidents. And there is something else that also happens in the making of a film. Love appears in some shape or form, at the very worst, as it is now, between the two stars. To me that is the most confusing factor in this case, and the most inscrutable one. Does this girl really love her idea of you? Will she love you when she sees you? Will you be able to love her enough to make her come over?’

Bond made no comment. There was a knock on the door and the head clerk put a china eggshell, enclosed in gold filigree, in front of each of them and went out. Bond sipped his coffee and put it down. It was good, but thick with grains. Kerim swallowed his at a gulp and fitted a cigarette into his holder and lit it.

With nothing else to go on for the case of Tatiana Romanova, Kerim tells Bond that he suspects more is going on in Istanbul. He doesn't have any solid proof, but he's got enough suspicious stuff happening that he smells something rotten.

quote:

‘There’s only one thing I want to know,’ said Bond flatly. ‘What do you think of this girl? Do you believe her story or not? Her story about me? Nothing else matters. If she hasn’t got some sort of a hysterical crush on me, the whole business falls to the ground and it’s some complicated M.G.B. plot we can’t understand. Now. Did you believe the girl?’ Bond’s voice was urgent and his eyes searched the other man’s face. ‘

Ah, my friend,’ Kerim shook his head. He spread his arms wide. ‘That is what I asked myself then, and it is what I ask myself the whole time since. But who can tell if a woman is lying about these things? Her eyes were bright – those beautiful innocent eyes. Her lips were moist and parted in that heavenly mouth. Her voice was urgent and frightened at what she was doing and saying. Her knuckles were white on the guard rail of the ship. But what was in her heart?’ Kerim raised his hands, ‘God alone knows.’ He brought his hands down resignedly. He placed them flat on the desk and looked straight at Bond. ‘There is only one way of telling if a woman really loves you, and even that way can only be read by an expert.’

‘Yes,’ said Bond dubiously. ‘I know what you mean. In bed.’

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Mar 8, 2019

* # ¿ Mar 8, 2019 17:56
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

poisonpill posted:

Reading this whole thing, I'm actually shocked the British Intelligence service was able to pull off Operation Mincemeat without accidentally telling the Nazis that the letter was fake by insisting on using the correct letterhead for false letters or something out of an etiquette manual

It almost seems like it was too easy to become a spy in WW2. So many journalists, writers, historians, etc. seem to have been recruited after little to no serious military work.

* # ¿ Mar 9, 2019 18:40
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Meaty Ore posted:

I happened to catch a few chapters back James starting up the Bentley. I thought he totaled that in Moonraker and got it replaced with a Rolls-Royce. Is this a continuity error or did something happen during Diamonds are Forever that I missed?

The replacement is a new Bentley Mk. VI.

* # ¿ Mar 10, 2019 18:57
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 15: Background to a Spy

quote:

Coffee came again, and then more coffee, and the big room grew thick with cigarette smoke as the two men took each shred of evidence, dissected it and put it aside. At the end of an hour they were back where they had started. It was up to Bond to solve the problem of this girl and, if he was satisfied with her story, get her and the machine out of the country.

Kerim undertook to look after the administrative problems. As a first step he picked up the telephone and spoke to his travel agent and reserved two seats on every outgoing plane for the next week – by B.E.A., Air France, S.A.S. and Turkair.

‘And now you must have a passport,’ he said. ‘One will be sufficient. She can travel as your wife. One of my men will take your photograph and he will find a photograph of some girl who looks more or less like her. As a matter of fact, an early picture of Garbo would serve. There is a certain resemblance. He can get one from the newspaper files. I will speak to the Consul General. He’s an excellent fellow who likes my little cloak-and-dagger plots. The passport will be ready by this evening. What name would you like to have?’

‘Take one out of a hat.’

‘Somerset. My mother came from there. David Somerset. Profession, Company Director. That means nothing. And the girl? Let us say Caroline. She looks like a Caroline. A couple of clean-limbed young English people with a taste for travel. Finance Control Form? Leave that to me. It will show eighty pounds in travellers’ cheques, let’s say, and a receipt from the bank to show you changed fifty while you were in Turkey. Customs? They never look at anything. Only too glad if somebody has bought something in the country. You will declare some Turkish Delight – presents for your friends in London. If you have to get out quickly, leave your hotel bill and luggage to me. They know me well enough at the Palas. Anything else?’

‘I can’t think of anything.’

With everything taken care of for their eventual escape to England, Bond is put back into the car; he's taking a quick stop at his hotel before being driven to the spice bazaar for lunch with Kerim.

quote:

A new concierge was on duty at the Kristal Palas, a small obsequious man with guilty eyes in a yellow face. He came out from behind the desk, his hands spread in apology. ‘Effendi, I greatly regret. My colleague showed you to an inadequate room. It was not realized that you are a friend of Kerim Bey. Your things have been moved to No. 12. It is the best room in the hotel. In fact,’ the concierge leered, ‘it is the room reserved for honeymoon couples. Every comfort. My apologies, Effendi. The other room is not intended for visitors of distinction.’ The man executed an oily bow, washing his hands.

If there was one thing Bond couldn’t stand it was the sound of his boots being licked. He looked the concierge in the eyes and said, ‘Oh.’ The eyes slid away. ‘Let me see this room. I may not like it. I was quite comfortable where I was.’

‘Certainly, Effendi,’ the man bowed Bond to the lift. ‘But alas the plumbers are in your former room. The water supply …’ the voice trailed away. The lift rose about ten feet and stopped at the first floor.

Well, the story of the plumbers makes sense, reflected Bond. And, after all, there was no harm in having the best room in the hotel.

The concierge unlocked a high door and stood back.

Bond had to approve. The sun streamed in through wide double windows that gave on to a small balcony. The motif was pink and grey and the style was mock French Empire, battered by the years, but still with all the elegance of the turn of the century. There were fine Bokhara rugs on the parquet floor. A glittering chandelier hung from the ornate ceiling. The bed against the right-hand wall was huge. A large mirror in a gold frame covered most of the wall behind it. (Bond was amused. The honeymoon room! Surely there should be a mirror on the ceiling as well.) The adjoining bathroom was tiled and fitted with everything, including a bidet and a shower. Bond’s shaving things were neatly laid out.

The concierge followed Bond back into the bedroom, and when Bond said he would take the room, bowed himself gratefully out.

Why not? Bond again walked round the room. This time he carefully inspected the walls and the neighbourhood of the bed and the telephone. Why not take the room? Why would there be microphones or secret doors? What would be the point of them?

His suitcase was on a bench near the chest-of-drawers. He knelt down. No scratches round the lock. The bit of fluff he had trapped in the clasp was still there. He unlocked the suitcase and took out the little attaché case. Again no signs of interference. Bond locked the case and got to his feet.

After checking if there are any messages for him, Bond gets back in the car. He figures that if this really is part of the Istanbul spy game, he may as well play it.

quote:

The car went back over the Galata Bridge and drew up outside the vaulted arcades of the Spice Bazaar. The chauffeur led the way up the shallow worn steps and into the fog of exotic scents, shouting curses at the beggars and sack-laden porters. Inside the entrance the chauffeur turned left out of the stream of shuffling, jabbering humanity and showed Bond a small arch in the thick wall. Turret-like stone steps curled upwards.

‘Effendi, you will find Kerim Bey in the far room on the left. You have only to ask. He is known to all.’

Bond climbed the cool stairs to a small ante-room where a waiter, without asking his name, took charge and led him through a maze of small, colourfully tiled, vaulted rooms to where Kerim was sitting at a corner table over the entrance to the bazaar. Kerim greeted him boisterously, waving a glass of milky liquid in which ice twinkled.



The Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarşısı, or "Egyptian Bazaar") is one of the largest and most famous covered shopping complexes in Istanbul. It was designed and constructed after the Great Fire of 1660 led to them having to rebuild 2/3 of the city, which also provided a legal excuse for them to ban the construction of new Christian and Jewish places of worship to solidify their Islamic population.

quote:

‘Here you are my friend! Now, at once, some raki. You must be exhausted after your sight-seeing.’ He fired orders at the waiter. Bond sat down in a comfortable-armed chair and took the small tumbler the waiter offered him. He lifted it towards Kerim and tasted it. It was identical with ouzo. He drank it down. At once the waiter refilled his glass.

He's not wrong. Raki, ouzo, and arak are all identical or virtually identical drinks with different regional names. Kerim actually drinks it correctly, watered down and cold.

quote:

‘And now to order your lunch. They eat nothing but offal cooked in rancid olive oil in Turkey. At least the offal at the Misir Carsarsi is the best.’

The grinning waiter made suggestions.

‘He says the Doner Kebab is very good today. I don’t believe him, but it can be. It is very young lamb broiled over charcoal with savoury rice. Lots of onions in it. Or is there anything you prefer? A pilaff or some of those damned stuffed peppers they eat here? All right then. And you must start with a few sardines grilled en papillote. They are just edible.’ Kerim harangued the waiter. He sat back, smiling at Bond. ‘That is the only way to treat these damned people. They love to be cursed and kicked. It is all they understand. It is in the blood. All this pretence of democracy is killing them. They want some sultans and wars and rape and fun. Poor brutes, in their striped suits and bowler hats. They are miserable. You’ve only got to look at them. However, to hell with them all. Any news?’

Is there a trope for when you have a native of the area do all the insulting for the white guy?

quote:

Bond shook his head. He told Kerim about the change of room and the untouched suitcase.

Kerim downed a glass of raki and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He echoed the thought Bond had had. ‘Well, the game must begin sometime. I have made certain small moves. Now we can only wait and see. We will make a little foray into enemy territory after lunch. I think it will interest you. Oh, we shan’t be seen. We shall move in the shadows, underground.’ Kerim laughed delightedly at his cleverness. ‘And now let us talk about other things. How do you like Turkey? No, I don’t want to know. What else?’

They were interrupted by the arrival of their first course. Bond’s sardines en papillote tasted like any other fried sardines. Kerim set about a large plate of what appeared to be strips of raw fish. He saw Bond’s look of interest. ‘Raw fish,’ he said. ‘After this I shall have raw meat and lettuce and then I shall have a bowl of yoghourt. I am not a faddist, but I once trained to be a professional strong man. It is a good profession in Turkey. The public loves them. And my trainer insisted that I should eat only raw food. I got the habit. It is good for me, but,’ he waved his fork, ‘I do not pretend it is good for everyone. I don’t care the hell what other people eat so long as they enjoy it. I can’t stand sad eaters and sad drinkers.’



En papillote means the food is cooked in parchment and served still in the wrapper. The parchment traps the moisture, steaming the food as it's heated.

Bond asks Kerim for his backstory, especially how a trainee strongman ended up a spy.

quote:

‘I come from Trebizond.’ Kerim watched his cigarette smoke curl upwards. ‘We were a huge family with many mothers. My father was the sort of man women can’t resist. All women want to be swept off their feet. In their dreams they long to be slung over a man’s shoulder and taken into a cave and raped. That was his way with them. My father was a great fisherman and his fame was spread all over the Black Sea. He went after the sword-fish. They are difficult to catch and hard to fight and he would always outdo all others after these fish. Women like their men to be heroes. He was a kind of hero in a corner of Turkey where it is a tradition for the men to be tough. He was a big, romantic sort of fellow. So he could have any woman he wanted. He wanted them all and sometimes killed other men to get them. Naturally he had many children. We all lived on top of each other in a great rambling old ruin of a house that our “aunts” made habitable. The aunts really amounted to a harem. One of them was an English governess from Istanbul my father had seen watching a circus. He took a fancy to her and she to him and that evening he put her on board his fishing boat and sailed up the Bosphorus and back to Trebizond. I don’t think she ever regretted it. I think she forgot all the world except him. She died just after the war. She was sixty. The child before me had been by an Italian girl and the girl had called him Bianco. He was fair. I was dark. I got to be called Darko. There were fifteen of us children and we had a wonderful childhood. Our aunts fought often and so did we. It was like a gipsy encampment. It was held together by my father who thrashed us, women or children, when we were a nuisance. But he was good to us when we were peaceful and obedient. You cannot understand such a family?’

‘The way you describe it I can.’

‘Anyway so it was. I grew up to be nearly as big a man as my father, but better educated. My mother saw to that. My father only taught us to be clean and to go to the lavatory once a day and never to feel shame about anything in the world. My mother also taught me a regard for England, but that is by the way. By the time I was twenty, I had a boat of my own and I was making money. But I was wild. I left the big house and went to live in two small rooms on the waterfront. I wanted to have my women where my mother would not know. There was a stroke of bad luck. I had a little Bessarabian hell-cat. I had won her in a fight with some gipsies, here in the hills behind Istanbul.

Hey Kerim what the gently caress

quote:

They came after me, but I got her on board the boat. I had to knock her unconscious first. She was still trying to kill me when we got back to Trebizond, so I got her to my place and took away all her clothes and kept her chained naked under the table. When I ate, I used to throw scraps to her under the table, like a dog. She had to learn who was master.'

HEY KERIM WHAT THE gently caress

quote:

'Before that could happen, my mother did an unheard of thing. She visited my place without warning. She came to tell me that my father wanted to see me immediately. She found the girl. My mother was really angry with me for the first time in my life. Angry? She was beside herself. I was a cruel ne’er-do-well and she was ashamed to call me son. The girl must immediately be taken back to her people. My mother brought her some of her own clothes from the house. The girl put them on, but when the time came, she refused to leave me.’ Darko Kerim laughed hugely. ‘An interesting lesson in female psychology, my dear friend.'

No that is a lesson in Stockholm Syndrome Kerim.

quote:

'However, the problem of the girl is another story. While my mother was fussing over her and getting nothing but gipsy curses for her pains, I was having an interview with my father, who had heard nothing of all this and who never did hear. My mother was like that. There was another man with my father, a tall, quiet Englishman with a black patch over one eye. They were talking about the Russians. The Englishman wanted to know what they were doing along their frontier, about what was going on at Batoum, their big oil and naval base only fifty miles away from Trebizond. He would pay good money for information. I knew English and I knew Russian. I had good eyes and ears. I had a boat. My father had decided that I would work for the Englishman. And that Englishman, my dear friend, was Major Dansey, my predecessor as Head of this Station. And the rest,’ Kerim made a wide gesture with his cigarette holder, ‘you can imagine.’

So that was.....enlightening. In the worst way imaginable.

quote:

‘But what about this training to be a professional strong man?’

‘Ah,’ said Kerim slyly, ‘that was only a sideline. Our travelling circuses were almost the only Turks allowed through the frontier. The Russians cannot live without circuses. It is as simple as that. I was the man who broke chains and lifted weights by a rope between the teeth. I wrestled against the local strong men in the Russian villages. And some of those Georgians are giants. Fortunately they are stupid giants and I nearly always won. Afterwards, at the drinking, there was always much talk and gossip. I would look foolish and pretend not to understand. Every now and then I would ask an innocent question and they would laugh at my stupidity and tell me the answer.’

The second course came, and with it a bottle of Kavaklidere, a rich coarse burgundy like any other Balkan wine. The Kebab was good and tasted of smoked bacon fat and onions. Kerim ate a kind of Steak Tartare–a large flat hamburger of finely minced raw meat laced with peppers and chives and bound together with yolk of egg. He made Bond try a forkful. It was delicious. Bond said so.

Kavaklıdere is the oldest extant commercial winery in Turkey, founded in 1929. Their wines are quite cheap in America if you can find them.

quote:

‘You ought to eat it every day,’ said Kerim earnestly. ‘It is good for those who wish to make much love. There are certain exercises you should do for the same purpose. These things are important to men. Or at least they are to me. Like my father, I consume a large quantity of women. But, unlike him, I also drink and smoke too much, and these things do not go well with making love. Nor does this work I do. Too many tensions and too much thinking. It takes the blood to the head instead of to where it should be for making love. But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone “This Man Died from Living Too Much”.’

"Also he kept sex slaves."

quote:

Bond laughed. ‘Don’t go too soon, Darko,’ he said. ‘M. would be very displeased. He thinks the world of you.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSJEd8KQB3s

quote:

‘He does?’ Kerim searched Bond’s face to see if he was telling the truth. He laughed delightedly. ‘In that case I will not let The Crab have my body yet.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Come, James,’ he said. ‘It is good that you reminded me of my duty. We will have coffee in the office. There is not much time to waste. Every day at 2.30 the Russians have their council of war. Today you and I will do them the honour of being present at their deliberations.’
* # ¿ Mar 11, 2019 16:35
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Selachian posted:

Well, we DID speculate that Fleming had a taste for BDSM.

I also note the use of the pulp writer's device of describing a character by comparing them to the celebrity you'd cast for them. So Bond is Hoagy Carmichael, Tatiana is a young Garbo...

Kerim is R. Kelly....

* # ¿ Mar 11, 2019 17:54
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Trin Tragula posted:

My favourite part of this bit is unquestionably this little nugget:


Doner kebabs were first sold in Britain about ten years after the book came out; by the 90s they were firmly established as cheap-and-dirty post-pub takeaway food, and these days it's absolutely hilarious to see them popping up as a detail to support James Bond's oh-so-exotic travels and finely honed gourmand's palate, when every high street in the country has at least one shop that looks like this on it:



The mental image of Bond weaving his way home after a long night of booze and baccarat and stopping off for a kebab on the way is, er, rather arresting.

Same with avocados. It wasn't until I think the end of the 1950s that avocados first became available in regular British supermarkets, so the mention of Bond eating one in Casino Royale is incredibly exotic despite them being all over the goddamn place today. Like I get avocado in my food by accident now.

* # ¿ Mar 11, 2019 22:06
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 16: The Tunnel of Rats

quote:

Back in the cool office, while they waited for the inevitable coffee, Kerim opened a cupboard in the wall and pulled out sets of engineers’ blue overalls. Kerim stripped to his shorts and dressed himself in one of the suits and pulled on a pair of rubber boots. Bond picked out a suit and a pair of boots that more or less fitted him and put them on.

With the coffee, the head clerk brought in two powerful flashlights which he put on the desk.

When the clerk had left the room Kerim said, ‘He is one of my sons – the eldest one. The others in there are all my children. The chauffeur and the watchman are uncles of mine. Common blood is the best security. And this spice business is good cover for us all. M. set me up in it. He spoke to friends of his in the City of London. I am now the leading spice merchant in Turkey. I have long ago repaid M. the money that was lent me. My children are shareholders in the business. They have a good life. When there is secret work to be done and I need help, I choose the child who will be most suitable. They all have training in different secret things. They are clever and brave. Some have already killed for me. They would all die for me – and for M. I have taught them he is just below God.’ Kerim made a deprecating wave. ‘But that is just to tell you that you are in good hands.’

‘I hadn’t imagined anything different.’

"The children who are not suitable to inherit my business are chained naked in cages until they learn obedience."

Kerim hands Bond one of the flashlights and wheels a glass-fronted bookcase aside, revealing a secret door into a dark stone stairwell. Bond is sent down first while Kerim closes the door.

quote:

Bond switched on his torch and stepped through the opening and went carefully down the stairs. The light of the torch showed fresh masonry, and, twenty feet below, a glimmer of water. When Bond got to the bottom he found that the glimmer was a small stream running down a central gutter in the floor of an ancient stonewalled tunnel that sloped steeply up to the right. To the left, the tunnel went on downwards and would, he guessed, come out below the surface of the Golden Horn.

Out of range of Bond’s light there was a steady, quiet, scuttling sound, and in the blackness hundreds of pinpoints of red light flickered and moved. It was the same uphill and downhill. Twenty yards away on either side, a thousand rats were looking at Bond. They were sniffing at his scent. Bond imagined the whiskers lifting slightly from their teeth. He had a quick moment of wondering what action they would take if his torch went out.

Kerim was suddenly beside him. ‘It is a long climb. A quarter of an hour. I hope you love animals,’ Kerim’s laugh boomed hugely away up the tunnel. The rats scuffled and stirred. ‘Unfortunately there is not much choice. Rats and bats. Squadrons of them, divisions – a whole air force and army. And we have to drive them in front of us. Towards the end of the climb it becomes quite congested. Let’s get started. The air is good. It is dry underfoot on both sides of the stream. But in winter the floods come and then we have to use frogmen’s suits. Keep your torch on my feet. If a bat gets in your hair, brush him off. It will not be often. Their radar is very good.’

They set off up the steep slope. The smell of the rats and of the droppings of bats was thick – a mixture of monkey house and chicken battery. It occurred to Bond that it would be days before he got rid of it.

Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim’s head or Bond’s brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness. Ahead of them as they climbed there was the forest of squeaking, scuffling red pin-points that grew denser on both sides of the central gutter. Occasionally Kerim flashed his torch forward and the light shone on a grey field sown with glittering teeth and glinting whiskers. When this happened, an extra frenzy seized the rats, and those nearest jumped on the backs of the others to get away. All the while, fighting tumbling grey bodies came sweeping down the central gutter and, as the pressure of the mass higher up the tunnel grew heavier, the frothing rear-rank came closer.

After the promised 15 minutes, the duo reach an alcove with two benches and something covered in a thick tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling. After a pause, the rat horde suddenly surges down the tunnel past them.

quote:

Kerim gave a non-committal grunt. ‘One of these days those rats will start dying. Then we shall have the plague in Istanbul again. Sometimes I feel guilty for not telling the authorities of this tunnel so that they can clean the place up. But I can’t so long as the Russians are up here.’ He jerked his head at the roof. He looked at his watch. ‘Five minutes to go. They will be pulling up their chairs and fiddling with their papers. There will be the three permanent men–M.G.B., or one of them may be from army intelligence, GRU. And there will probably be three others. Two came in a fortnight ago, one through Greece and another through Persia. Another one arrived on Monday. God knows who they are, or what they are here for. And sometimes the girl, Tatiana, comes in with a signal and goes out again. Let us hope we will see her today. You will be impressed. She is something.’

Kerim reached up and untied the tarpaulin cover and pulled it downwards. Bond understood. The cover protected the shining butt of a submarine periscope, fully withdrawn. The moisture glistened on the thick grease of the exposed bottom joint. Bond chuckled. ‘Where the hell did you get that from, Darko?’

‘Turkish Navy. War surplus.’ Kerim’s voice did not invite further questions. ‘Now Q Branch in London is trying to fix some way of wiring the drat thing for sound. It’s not going to be easy. The lens at the top of this is no bigger than a cigarette-lighter, end on. When I raise it, it comes up to floor level in their room. In the corner of the room where it comes up, we cut a small mousehole. We did it well. Once when I came to have a look, the first thing I saw was a big mousetrap with a piece of cheese on it. At least it looked big through the lens.’ Kerim laughed briefly. ‘But there’s not much room to fit a sensitive pick-up alongside the lens. And there’s no hope of getting in again to do any more fiddling about with their architecture. The only way I managed to install this thing was to get my friends in the Public Works Ministry to turn the Russians out for a few days. The story was that the trams going up the hill were shaking the foundations of the houses. There had to be a survey. It cost me a few hundred pounds for the right pockets. The Public Works inspected half a dozen houses on either side of this one and declared the place safe. By that time, I and the family had finished our construction work. The Russians were suspicious as hell. I gather they went over the place with a toothcomb when they got back, looking for microphones and bombs and so on. But we can’t work that trick twice. Unless Q Branch can think up something very clever, I shall have to be content with keeping an eye on them. One of these days they’ll give away something useful. They’ll be interrogating someone we’re interested in or something of that sort.’

Alongside the matrix of the periscope in the roof of the alcove there was a pendulous blister of metal, twice the size of a football. ‘What’s that?’ said Bond.

‘Bottom half of a bomb–a big bomb. If anything happens to me, or if war breaks out with Russia, that bomb will be set off by radio-control from my office. It is sad [Kerim didn’t look sad] but I fear that many innocent people will get killed besides the Russians. When the blood is on the boil, man is as unselective as nature.’

After a quick polish of the eyepieces, Kerim checks his watch again and gets on the periscope. Checking the room, he hands it over to Bond. There are 6 Russians in the room: the one at the head of the table is the Resident Director of their Turkish intelligence program with his two staff, and the three across from him are new.

quote:

Bond’s first impulse was to tell Kerim not to make so much noise. It was as if he was in the room with the Russians, as if he was sitting in a chair in the corner, a secretary perhaps, taking shorthand of the conference.

The wide, all-round lens, designed for spotting aircraft as well as surface ships, gave him a curious picture ’ a mouse’s eye view of a forest of legs below the fore-edge of the table, and various aspects of the heads belonging to the legs. The Director and his two colleagues were clear ’ serious dull Russian faces whose characteristics Bond filed away. There was the studious, professorial face of the Director ’ thick spectacles, lantern jaw, big forehead and thin hair brushed back. On his left was a square wooden face with deep clefts on either side of the nose, fair hair en brosse and a nick out of the left ear. The third member of the permanent staff had a shifty Armenian face with clever bright almond eyes. He was talking now. His face wore a falsely humble look. Gold glinted in his mouth.

Bond could see less of the three visitors. Their backs were half towards him and only the profile of the nearest, and presumably most junior, showed clearly. This man’s skin also was dark. He too would be from one of the southern republics. The jaw was badly shaved and the eye in profile was bovine and dull under a thick black brow. The nose was fleshy and porous. The upper lip was long over a sullen mouth and the beginning of a double chin. The tough black hair was cut very short so that most of the back of the neck looked blue to the level of the tips of the ears. It was a military haircut, done with mechanical clippers.

The only clues to the next man were an angry boil on the back of a fat bald neck, a shiny blue suit and rather bright brown shoes. The man was motionless during the whole period that Bond kept watch and apparently never spoke.

Now the senior visitor, on the right of the Resident Director, sat back and began talking. It was a strong, crag-like profile with big bones and a jutting chin under a heavy brown moustache of Stalin cut. Bond could see one cold grey eye under a bushy eyebrow and a low forehead topped by wiry grey-brown hair. This man was the only one who was smoking. He puffed busily at a tiny wooden pipe in the bowl of which stood half a cigarette. Every now and then he shook the pipe sideways so that the ash fell on the floor. His profile had more authority than any of the other faces and Bond guessed that he was a senior man sent down from Moscow.

Bond’s eyes were getting tired. He twisted the handles gently and looked round the office as far as the blurring jagged edges of the mousehole would allow. He saw nothing of interest ’ two olive green filing cabinets, a hatstand by the door, on which he counted six more or less identical grey homburgs, and a sideboard with a heavy carafe of water and some glasses. Bond stood away from the eyepiece, rubbing his eyes.

Unfortunately, the alcove has no microphone and Bond can't read their lips. The only thing they can do is watch.

Curious, Bond asks why the tunnels are even here.

quote:

‘It’s a lost drain from the Hall of Pillars,’ he said. ‘The Hall of Pillars is now a thing for tourists. It’s up above us on the heights of Istanbul, near St. Sophia. A thousand years ago it was built as a reservoir in case of siege. It’s a huge underground palace, a hundred yards long and about half as broad. It was made to hold millions of gallons of water. It was discovered again about four hundred years ago by a man called Gyllius. One day I was reading his account of finding it. He said it was filled in winter from “a great pipe with a mighty noise”. It occurred to me that there might be another “great pipe” to empty it quickly if the city fell to the enemy. I went up to the Hall of Pillars and bribed the watchman and rowed about among the pillars all one night in a rubber dinghy with one of my boys. We went over the walls with a hammer and an echo-sounder. At one end, in the most likely spot, there was a hollow sound. I handed out more money to the Minister of Public Works and he closed the place for a week ’ “for cleaning”. My little team got busy.’ Kerim ducked down again for a look through the eyepieces and went on. ‘We dug into the wall above water-level and came on the top of an arch. The arch was the beginning of a tunnel. We got into the tunnel and went down it. Quite exciting, not knowing where we were going to come out. And, of course, it went straight down the hill ’ under the Street of Books where the Russians have their place, and out into the Golden Horn, by the Galata Bridge, twenty yards away from my warehouse. So we filled in our hole in the Hall of Pillars and started digging from my end. That was two years ago. It took us a year and a lot of survey work to get directly under the Russians.’ Kerim laughed. ‘And now I suppose one of these days the Russians will decide to change their offices. By then I hope someone else will be Head of T.’

What Kerim is referring to is the Basilica Cistern, the largest of the ancient cisterns in Istanbul. Its massive size and gorgeous architecture make it a popular location for fiction of all sorts, from movies to video games.



The film decides to set this scene in the Cistern itself, which actually messes up some of the city's geography. The Soviet consulate is quite far from the Cistern, which is why Fleming set the tunnels in a drainage system that happen to pass under it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C4onQG3ViY

quote:

Kerim bent down to the rubber eyepieces. Bond saw him stiffen. Kerim said urgently, ‘The door’s opening. Quick. Take over. Here she comes.’
* # ¿ Mar 12, 2019 14:47
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 17: Killing Time

quote:

It was seven o’clock on the same evening and James Bond was back in his hotel. He had had a hot bath and a cold shower. He thought that he had at last scoured the zoo smell out of his skin.

He was sitting, naked except for his shorts, at one of the windows of his room, sipping a vodka and tonic and looking out into the heart of the great tragic sunset over the Golden Horn. But his eyes didn’t see the torn cloth of gold and blood that hung behind the minaretted stage beneath which he had caught his first glimpse of Tatiana Romanova.

He was thinking of the tall beautiful girl with the dancer’s long gait who had walked through the drab door with a piece of paper in her hand. She had stood beside her Chief and handed him the paper. All the men had looked up at her. She had blushed and looked down. What had that expression on the men’s faces meant? It was more than just the way some men look at a beautiful girl. They had shown curiosity. That was reasonable. They wanted to know what was in the signal, why they were being disturbed. But what else? There had been slyness and contempt – the way people stare at prostitutes.

It had been an odd, enigmatic scene. This was part of a highly disciplined para-military organization. These were serving officers, each of whom would be wary of the others. And this girl was just one of the staff, with a Corporal’s rank, who was now going through a normal routine. Why had they all unguardedly looked at her with this inquisitive contempt – almost as if she was a spy who had been caught and was going to be executed? Did they suspect her? Had she given herself away? But that seemed less likely as the scene played itself out. The Resident Director read the signal and the other men’s eyes turned away from the girl and on to him. He said something, presumably repeating the text of the signal, and the men looked glumly back at him as if the matter did not interest them. Then the Resident Director looked up at the girl and the other eyes followed his. He said something with a friendly, inquiring expression. The girl shook her head and answered briefly. The other men now only looked interested. The Director said one word with a question mark on the end. The girl blushed deeply, and nodded, holding his eyes obediently. The other men smiled encouragement, slyly perhaps, but with approval. No suspicion there. No condemnation. The scene ended with a few sentences from the Director to which the girl seemed to say the equivalent of ‘Yes, sir’ and turned and walked out of the room. When she had gone, the Director said something with an expression of irony on his face and the men laughed heartily and the sly expression was back on their faces, as if what he had said had been obscene. Then they went back to their work.

Bond clearly smells something fishy, but he just can't think of any good explanation for what he saw. As far as his opinion of her, he agrees that she's definitely beautiful and looks like Greta Garbo. He figures if she's the kind of girl to fall in love with a photo, she must be a hopeless romantic who hasn't been fully ground down by the Soviet system yet.

quote:

The telephone rang. It was Kerim. ‘Nothing new?’

‘No.’

‘Then I will pick you up at eight.’

‘I’ll be ready.’ Bond laid down the receiver and slowly started to put on his clothes.

Kerim had been firm about the evening. Bond had wanted to stay in his hotel room and wait for the first contact to be made – a note, a telephone call, whatever it might be. But Kerim had said no. The girl had been adamant that she would choose her own time and place. It would be wrong for Bond to seem a slave to her convenience. ‘That is bad psychology, my friend,’ Kerim had insisted. ‘No girl likes a man to run when she whistles. She would despise you if you made yourself too available. From your face and your dossier she would expect you to behave with indifference – even with insolence. She would want that. She wishes to court you, to buy a kiss’ – Kerim had winked – ‘from that cruel mouth. It is with an image she has fallen in love. Behave like that image. Act the part.’

Bond had shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right, Darko. I daresay you’re right. What do you suggest?’

‘Live the life you would normally. Go home now and have a bath and a drink. The local vodka is all right if you drown it with tonic water. If nothing happens, I will pick you up at eight. We will have dinner at the place of a gipsy friend of mine. A man called Vavra. He is head of a tribe. I must anyway see him tonight. He is one of my best sources. He is finding out who tried to blow up my office. Some of his girls will dance for you. I will not suggest that they should entertain you more intimately. You must keep your sword sharp. There is a saying “Once a King, always a King. But once a Knight is enough!” ’

The car arrives and Bond climbs in next to Kerim. As the Rolls-Royce climbs up the hill through the slums, the driver notes a Lambretta scooter following them. Kerim is unconcerned and doesn't mind being followed, so he declines to lose the tail. He figures it would be more unusual for him to not be taking his English friend out to a party on a Saturday night.

quote:

Bond looked back through the rear window and watched the crowded streets. From behind a stopped tram a motor scooter showed for a minute and then was hidden by a taxi. Bond turned away. He reflected briefly on the way the Russians ran their centres – with all the money and equipment in the world, while the Secret Service put against them a handful of adventurous, underpaid men, like this one, with his second-hand Rolls and his children to help him. Yet Kerim had the run of Turkey. Perhaps, after all, the right man was better than the right machine.

At half-past eight they stopped half way up a long hill on the outskirts of Istanbul at a dingy-looking open-air café with a few empty tables on the pavement. Behind it were the tops of trees over a high stone wall. They got out and the car drove off. They waited for the Lambretta, but its wasp-like buzz had stopped and at once it was on its way back down the hill. All they saw of the driver was a glimpse of a short squat man wearing goggles.

Kerim led the way through the tables and into the café. It seemed empty, but a man rose up quickly from behind the till. He kept one hand below the counter. When he saw who it was, he gave Kerim a nervous white smile. Something clanged to the floor. He stepped from behind the counter and led them out through the back and across a stretch of gravel to a door in the high wall and, after knocking once, unlocked it and waved them through.

There was an orchard with plank tables dotted about under the trees. In the centre was a circle of terrazza dancing floor. Round it were strung fairy lights, now dead, on poles planted in the ground. On the far side, at a long table, about twenty people of all ages had been sitting eating, but they had put down their knives and now looked towards the door. Some children had been playing in the grass behind the table. They also were now quiet and watching. The three-quarter moon showed everything up brightly and made pools of membraned shadow under the trees.

Kerim and Bond walked forward. The man at the head of the table said something to the others. He got up and came to meet them. The rest returned to their dinner and the children to their games.

The man greeted Kerim with reserve. He stood for a few moments making a long explanation to which Kerim listened attentively, occasionally asking a question.

The gipsy was an imposing, theatrical figure in Macedonian dress – white shirt with full sleeves, baggy trousers and laced soft leather top-boots. His hair was a tangle of black snakes. A large downward-drooping black moustache almost hid the full red lips. The eyes were fierce and cruel on either side of a syphilitic nose. The moon glinted on the sharp line of the jaw and the high cheekbones. His right hand, which had a gold ring on the thumb, rested on the hilt of a short curved dagger in a leather scabbard tipped with filigree silver.

Kerim introduces Bond to Vavra and acts as his translator. Vavra tells Bond that if he ever needs work, he'll hire him for murder and taming his women. Bond replies that he doesn't think Vavra needs any help, which impresses and endears him to the foreigner. As he walks away with a covered tray, Kerim takes Bond aside.

quote:

‘We have come on a bad night,’ he said. ‘The restaurant is closed. There are family troubles here which have to be solved – drastically, and in private. But I am an old friend and we are invited to share their supper. It will be disgusting but I have sent for raki. Then we may watch – but on condition that we do not interfere. I hope you understand, my friend.’ Kerim gave Bond’s arm an additional pressure. ‘Whatever you see, you must not move or comment. A court has just been held and justice is to be done – their kind of justice. It is an affair of love and jealousy. Two girls of the tribe are in love with one of his sons. There is a lot of death in the air. They both threaten to kill the other to get him. If he chooses one, the unsuccessful one has sworn to kill him and the girl. It is an impasse. There is much argument in the tribe. So the son has been sent up into the hills and the two girls are to fight it out here tonight – to the death. The son has agreed to take the winner. The women are locked up in separate caravans. It will not be for the squeamish, but it will be a remarkable affair. It is a great privilege that we may be present. You understand? We are gajos. You will forget your sense of the proprieties? You will not interfere? They would kill you, and possibly me, if you did.’

‘Darko,’ said Bond. ‘I have a French friend. A man called Mathis who is head of the Deuxième. He once said to me: “J’aime les sensations fortes.” I am like him. I shall not disgrace you. Men fighting women is one thing. Women fighting women is another. But what about the bomb? The bomb that blew up your office. What did he say about that?’

‘It was the leader of the Faceless Ones. He put it there himself. They came down the Golden Horn in a boat and he climbed up a ladder and fixed it to the wall. It was bad luck he didn’t get me. The operation was well thought out. The man is a gangster. A Bulgarian “refugee” called Krilencu. I shall have to have a reckoning with him. God knows why they suddenly want to kill me, but I cannot allow such annoyances. I may decide to take action later tonight. I know where he lives. In case Vavra knew the answer, I told my chauffeur to come back with the necessary equipment.’

A girl bids Bond and Kerim to the table; he notes that the girl is covered in gold jewelry to act as a dowry in case she's handed off to be married.

quote:

They walked over to the table. Two places had been cleared on either side of the head gipsy. Kerim gave what sounded like a polite greeting to the table. There was a curt nod of acknowledgment. They sat down. In front of each of them was a large plate of some sort of ragout smelling strongly of garlic, a bottle of raki, a pitcher of water and a cheap tumbler. More bottles of raki, untouched, were on the table. When Kerim reached for his and poured himself half a tumblerful, everyone followed suit. Kerim added some water and raised his glass. Bond did the same. Kerim made a short and vehement speech and all raised their glasses and drank. The atmosphere became easier. An old woman next to Bond passed him a long loaf of bread and said something. Bond smiled and said ‘thank you’. He broke off a piece and handed the loaf to Kerim who was picking among his ragout with thumb and forefinger. Kerim took the loaf with one hand and at the same time, with the other, he put a large piece of meat in his mouth and began to eat.

Bond was about to do the same when Kerim said sharply and quietly, ‘With the right hand, James. The left hand is used for only one purpose among these people.’

Bond halted his left hand in mid-air and moved it on to grasp the nearest raki bottle. He poured himself another half tumblerful and started to eat with his right hand. The ragout was delicious but steaming hot. Bond winced each time he dipped his fingers into it. Everyone watched them eat and from time to time the old woman dipped her fingers into Bond’s stew and chose a piece for him.

I've noticed how Bond is the only person in the entire book to drink raki and ouzo the wrong way. Everyone is adding water and ice like normal. It makes me wonder if it's intentional on Fleming's part to show Bond's lack of experience, or if he really was masochistic enough to like that shot straight.

The stew they were served is pretty typical Balkan food, like goulash.

quote:

When they had scoured their plates, a silver bowl of water, in which rose leaves floated, and a clean linen cloth, were put between Bond and Kerim. Bond washed his fingers and his greasy chin and turned to his host and dutifully made a short speech of thanks which Kerim translated. The table murmured its appreciation. The head gipsy bowed towards Bond and said, according to Kerim, that he hated all gajos except Bond, whom he was proud to call his friend. Then he clapped his hands sharply and everybody got up from the table and began pulling the benches away and arranging them round the dance floor.

Kerim came round the table to Bond. They walked off together. ‘How do you feel? They’ve gone to get the two girls.’

Bond nodded. He was enjoying the evening. The scene was beautiful and thrilling – the white moon blazing down on the ring of figures now settling on the benches, the glint of gold or jewellery as somebody shifted his position, the glaring pool of terrazza and, all around, the quiet, sentinel trees standing guard in their black skirts of shadow.

Kerim led Bond to a bench where the chief gipsy sat alone. They took their places on his right.

A black cat with green eyes walked slowly across the terrazza and joined a group of children who were sitting quietly as if someone was about to come on to the dance floor and teach them a lesson. It sat down and began licking its chest.

Beyond the high wall, a horse neighed. Two of the gipsies looked over their shoulders towards the sound as if they were reading the cry of the horse. From the road came the silvery spray of a bicycle bell as someone sped down the hill.

The crouching silence was broken by the clang of a bolt being drawn. The door in the wall crashed back and two girls, spitting and fighting like angry cats, hurtled through and across the grass and into the ring.
* # ¿ Mar 14, 2019 21:32
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 18: Strong Sensations

quote:

The head gipsy’s voice cracked out. The girls separated reluctantly and stood facing him. The gipsy began to speak in a tone of harsh denunciation.

Kerim put his hand up to his mouth and whispered behind it. ‘Vavra is telling them that this is a great tribe of gipsies and they have brought dissension among it. He says there is no room for hatred among themselves, only against those outside. The hatred they have created must be purged so that the tribe can live peacefully again. They are to fight. If the loser is not killed she will be banished for ever. That will be the same as death. These people wither and die outside the tribe. They cannot live in our world. It is like wild beasts forced to live in a cage.’

While Kerim spoke, Bond examined the two beautiful, taut, sullen animals in the centre of the ring.

They were both gipsy-dark, with coarse black hair to their shoulders, and they were both dressed in the collection of rags you associate with shanty-town negroes – tattered brown shifts that were mostly darns and patches. One was bigger-boned than the other, and obviously stronger, but she looked sullen and slow-eyed and might not be quick on her feet. She was handsome in a rather leonine way, and there was a slow red glare in her heavy lidded eyes as she stood and listened impatiently to the head of the tribe. She ought to win, thought Bond. She is half an inch taller, and she is stronger.

Where this girl was a lioness, the other was a panther – lithe and quick and with cunning sharp eyes that were not on the speaker but sliding sideways, measuring inches, and the hands at her sides were curled into claws. The muscles of her fine legs looked hard as a man’s. The breasts were small, and, unlike the big breasts of the other girl, hardly swelled the rags of her shift. She looks a dangerous little bitch of a girl, thought Bond. She will certainly get in the first blow. She will be too quick for the other.

At once he was proved wrong. As Vavra spoke his last word, the big girl, who, Kerim whispered, was called Zora, kicked hard sideways, without taking aim, and caught the other girl square in the stomach and, as the smaller girl staggered, followed up with a swinging blow of the fist to the side of the head that knocked her sprawling on to the stone floor.

‘Oi, Vida,’ lamented a woman in the crowd. She needn’t have worried. Even Bond could see that Vida was shamming as she lay on the ground, apparently winded. He could see her eyes glinting under her bent arm as Zora’s foot came flashing at her ribs.

Vida catches Zora's foot and flips her to the ground, then leaps on her. As expected, the fight progresses with their dresses getting more and more tattered as they claw at each other. It gets to the point where both of them just fling off the last rags into the crowd and continue the fight nude. Zora is knocked to her knees, giving Vida the chance to close in and bite her throat.

quote:

‘BOOM!’

The explosion cracked the tension like a nut. A flash of flame lit the darkness behind the dance floor and a chunk of masonry sang past Bond’s ear. Suddenly the orchard was full of running men and the head gipsy was slinking forward across the stone with his curved dagger held out in front of him. Kerim was going after him, a gun in his hand. As the gipsy passed the two girls, now standing wild-eyed and trembling, he shouted a word at them and they took to their heels and disappeared among the trees where the last of the women and children were already vanishing among the shadows.

Bond, the Beretta held uncertainly in his hand, followed slowly in the wake of Kerim towards the wide breach that had been blown out of the garden wall, and wondered what the hell was going on.

The stretch of grass between the hole in the wall and the dance floor was a turmoil of fighting, running figures. It was only as Bond came up with the fight that he distinguished the squat, conventionally dressed Bulgars from the swirling finery of the gipsies. There seemed to be more of the Faceless Ones than of the gipsies, almost two to one. As Bond peered into the struggling mass, a gipsy youth was ejected from it, clutching his stomach. He groped towards Bond, coughing terribly. Two small dark men came after him, their knives held low.

Instinctively Bond stepped to one side so that the crowd was not behind the two men. He aimed at their legs above the knees and the gun in his hand cracked twice. The two men fell, soundlessly, face downwards in the grass.

Two bullets gone. Only six left. Bond edged closer to the fight.

A knife hissed past his head and clanged on to the dance floor.

It had been aimed at Kerim, who came running out of the shadows with two men on his heels. The second man stopped and raised his knife to throw and Bond shot from the hip, blindly, and saw him fall. The other man turned and fled among the trees and Kerim dropped to one knee beside Bond, wrestling with his gun.

‘Cover me,’ he shouted. ‘Jammed on the first shot. It’s those bloody Bulgars. God knows what they think they’re doing.’

One of the attackers grabs Bond and drags him to the ground, but leaves him to dogpile on Kerim. He gets up and cracks one of the Bulgarians on the head, and another is taken out by a thrown knife by Vavra. The third gives up on attacking Kerim and runs to the hole blown in the wall, shouting orders to the rest.

quote:

‘Shoot, James, shoot!’ roared Kerim. ‘That’s Krilencu.’ He started to run forward. Bond’s gun spat once. But the man had dodged round the wall, and thirty yards is too far for night shooting with an automatic. As Bond lowered his hot gun, there came the staccato firing of a squadron of Lambrettas, and Bond stood and listened to the swarm of wasps flying down the hill.



Krilencu was portrayed in the film by Fred Haggerty, a Hungarian-British actor and stuntman. He worked as a stuntman on many films since 1960, including the film adaptations of The Spy Who Loved Me, Octopussy, and A View to a Kill, along with films like An American Werewolf in London and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He appears to have retired from stuntwork in 1988 and acting entirely in 1990 before dying in 2002 at the age of 83.

quote:

There was silence except for the groans of the wounded. Bond listlessly watched Kerim and Vavra come back through the breach in the wall and walk among the bodies, occasionally turning one over with a foot. The other gipsies seeped back from the road and the older women came hurrying out of the shadows to tend their men.

Bond shook himself. What the hell had it all been about? Ten or a dozen men had been killed. What for? Whom had they been trying to get? Not him, Bond. When he was down and ready for the killing they had passed him by and made for Kerim. This was the second attempt on Kerim’s life. Was it anything to do with the Romanova business? How could it possibly tie in?

Bond tensed. His gun spoke twice from the hip. The knife clattered harmlessly off Kerim’s back. The figure that had risen from the dead twirled slowly round like a ballet dancer and toppled forward on his face. Bond ran forward. He had been just in time. The moon had caught the blade and he had had a clear field of fire. Kerim looked down at the twitching body. He turned to meet Bond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsL7T32XG3M

The film adaptation, of course, makes this scene much larger and more elaborate but has a surprising number of similar details. It features an interesting point regarding Grant actually working to protect Bond to avoid derailing the SPECTRE plot. As well as Kerim shooting someone with an empty gun at 0:42!

quote:

Bond stopped in his tracks. ‘You bloody fool,’ he said angrily. ‘Why the hell can’t you take more care! You ought to have a nurse.’ Most of Bond’s anger came from knowing that it was he who had brought a cloud of death around Kerim.

Darko Kerim grinned shamefacedly. ‘Now it is not good, James. You have saved my life too often. We might have been friends. Now the distance between us is too great. Forgive me, for I can never pay you back.’ He held out his hand.

Bond brushed it aside. ‘Don’t be a drat fool, Darko,’ he said roughly. ‘My gun worked, that’s all. Yours didn’t. You’d better get one that does. For Christ’s sake tell me what the hell this is all about. There’s been too much blood splashing about tonight. I’m sick of it. I want a drink. Come and finish that raki.’ He took the big man’s arm.

Good instincts, Bond.

quote:

As they reached the table, littered with the remains of the supper, a piercing, terrible scream came out of the depths of the orchard. Bond put his hand on his gun. Kerim shook his head. ‘We shall soon know what the Faceless Ones were after,’ he said gloomily. ‘My friends are finding out. I can guess what they will discover. I think they will never forgive me for having been here tonight. Five of their men are dead.’

‘There might have been a dead woman too,’ said Bond unsympathetically. ‘At least you’ve saved her life. Don’t be stupid, Darko. These gipsies knew the risks when they started spying for you against the Bulgars. It was gang warfare.’ He added a dash of water to two tumblers of raki.

They both emptied the glasses at one swallow. The head gipsy came up, wiping the tip of his curved dagger on a handful of grass. He sat down and accepted a glass of raki from Bond. He seemed quite cheerful. Bond had the impression that the fight had been too short for him. The gipsy said something, slyly.

Kerim chuckled. ‘He said that his judgment was right. You killed well. Now he wants you to take on those two women.’

‘Tell him even one of them would be too much for me. But tell him I think they are fine women. I would be glad if he would do me a favour and call the fight a draw. Enough of his people have been killed tonight. He will need these two girls to bear children for the tribe.’

Kerim translated. The gipsy looked sourly at Bond and said a few bitter words.

‘He says that you should not have asked him such a difficult favour. He says that your heart is too soft for a good fighter. But he says he will do what you ask.’

Vavra and Kerim talk rapidly, though Bond is able to pick up a few mentions of Krilencu. Once they've finished, Kerim translates the information they got from the captured gunman. Apparently Vavra's tribe and Kerim were the intended targets, but they were given an exacting description of Bond and strict orders not to harm him. They can't figure out why, beyond maybe the Soviets wanting to avoid an international incident by gunning down a British spy. This is another minor change to the plot compared to the film: as the film makes it a SPECTRE operation that the Soviets are unaware of, Krilencu is a SMERSH agent who has been assigned to assassinate Kerim due to the mistaken belief that he's responsible for killing the Soviet agents that SPECTRE is actually responsible for.

Vavra has business to finish here, so it's time for the outsiders to leave.

quote:

Nobody looked up from his work as Kerim and Bond climbed through the breach in the wall. The Rolls stood, glittering in the moonlight, a few yards down the road opposite the café entrance. A young man was sitting beside the chauffeur. Kerim gestured with his hand. ‘That is my tenth son. He is called Boris. I thought I might need him. I shall.’

The youth turned and said, ‘Good evening, sir.’ Bond recognized him as one of the clerks in the warehouse. He was as dark and lean as the head clerk, and his eyes also were blue.

The car moved down the hill. Kerim spoke to the chauffeur in English. ‘It is a small street off the Hippodrome Square. When we get there we will proceed softly. I will tell you when to stop. Have you got the uniforms and the equipment?’

‘Yes, Kerim Bey.’

‘All right. Make good speed. It is time we were all in bed.’

Kerim sank back in his seat. He took out a cigarette. They sat and smoked. Bond gazed out at the drab streets and reflected that sparse street-lighting is the sure sign of a poor town.

It was some time before Kerim spoke. Then he said, ‘The gipsy said we both have the wings of death over us. He said that I am to beware of a son of the snows and you must beware of a man who is owned by the moon.’ He laughed harshly. ‘That is the sort of rigmarole they talk. But he says that Krilencu isn’t either of these men. That is good.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I cannot sleep until I have killed that man. I do not know if what happened tonight has any connection with you and your assignment. I do not care. For some reason, war has been declared on me. If I do not kill Krilencu, at the third attempt he will certainly kill me. So we are now on our way to keep an appointment with him in Samarra.’
* # ¿ Mar 18, 2019 15:49
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 19: The Mouth of Marilyn Monroe

quote:

The car sped through the deserted streets, past shadowy mosques from which dazzling minarets lanced up towards the three-quarter moon, under the ruined Aqueduct and across the Ataturk Boulevard and north of the barred entrances to the Grand Bazaar. At the Column of Constantine the car turned right, through mean twisting streets that smelled of garbage, and finally debouched into a long ornamental square in which three stone columns fired themselves like a battery of space-rockets into the spangled sky.

‘Slow,’ said Kerim softly. They crept round the square under the shadow of the lime trees. Down a street on the east side, the lighthouse below the Seraglio Palace gave them a great yellow wink.

‘Stop.’

The car pulled up in the darkness under the limes. Kerim reached for the door handle. ‘We shan’t be long, James. You sit up front in the driver’s seat and if a policeman comes along just say “Ben Bey Kerim’in ortagiyim”. Can you remember that? It means “I am Kerim Bey’s partner”. They’ll leave you alone.’

Bond snorted. ‘Thanks very much. But you’ll be surprised to hear I’m coming with you. You’re bound to get into trouble without me. Anyway I’m damned if I’m going to sit here trying to bluff policemen. The worst of learning one good phrase is that it sounds as if one knew the language. The policeman will come back with a barrage of Turkish and when I can’t answer he’ll smell a rat. Don’t argue, Darko.’

‘Well, don’t blame me if you don’t like this.’ Kerim’s voice was embarrassed. ‘It’s going to be a straight killing in cold blood. In my country you let sleeping dogs lie, but when they wake up and bite, you shoot them. You don’t offer them a duel. All right?’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Bond. ‘I’ve got one bullet left in case you miss.’

‘Come on then,’ said Kerim reluctantly. ‘We’ve got quite a walk. The other two will be going another way.’

Kerim takes a long walking stick and a leather case from the car and they start down the empty street toward the lighthouse. I believe the lighthouse they're referring to might be the Ahırkapı Feneri, the current tower of which was built in 1857.



quote:

From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population. His instinct told him, as it has told other travellers, that Istanbul was a town he would be glad to get out of alive.

They came to a narrow stinking alley that dived steeply down the hill to their right. Kerim turned into it and started gingerly down its cobbled surface. ‘Watch your feet,’ he said softly. ‘Garbage is a polite word for what my charming people throw into their streets.’

The moon shone whitely down the moist river of cobbles. Bond kept his mouth shut and breathed through his nose. He put his feet down one after the other, flat-footedly, and with his knees bent, as if he was walking down a snow-slope. He thought of his bed in the hotel and of the comfortable cushions of the car under the sweetly smelling lime trees, and he wondered how many more kinds of dreadful stench he was going to run into during his present assignment.

They stopped at the bottom of the alley. Kerim turned to him with a broad white grin. He pointed upwards at a towering block of black shadow. ‘Mosque of Sultan Ahmet. Famous Byzantine frescoes. Sorry I haven’t got time to show you more of the beauties of my country.’ Without waiting for Bond’s reply, he cut off to the right and along a dusty boulevard, lined with cheap shops, that sloped down towards the distant glint that was the Sea of Marmara. For ten minutes they walked in silence. Then Kerim slowed and beckoned Bond into the shadows.

‘This will be a simple operation,’ he said softly. ‘Krilencu lives down there, beside the railway line.’ He gestured vaguely towards a cluster of red and green lights at the end of the boulevard. ‘He hides out in a shack behind a bill-hoarding. There is a front door to the shack. Also a trap-door to the street through the hoarding. He thinks no one knows of this. My two men will go in at the front door. He will slip out through the hoarding. Then I shoot him. All right?’

‘If you say so.’

Bond and Kerim stop in a doorway in front of a two-story wooden shed, where Kerim begins removing his equipment. Inside the leather case is a German infrared sniper scope, which he gives to Bond to look at the film advertisement across the way.

quote:

Bond rested his forearm against the door jamb and raised the tube to his right eye. He focused it on the patch of black shadow opposite. Slowly the black dissolved into grey. The outline of a huge woman’s face and some lettering appeared. Now Bond could read the lettering. It said: NIYAGARA. MARILYN MONROE VE JOSEPH COTTEN and underneath, the cartoon feature, BONZO FUTBOLOU. Bond inched the glass down the vast pile of Marilyn Monroe’s hair, and the cliff of forehead, and down the two feet of nose to the cavernous nostrils. A faint square showed in the poster. It ran from below the nose into the great alluring curve of the lips. It was about three feet deep. From it, there would be a longish drop to the ground.

Niagara is a 1953 Marilyn Monroe feature, a film noir distinguished by being filmed in color rather than black & white. It was one of the biggest hits for 20th Century Fox that year and gave Monroe her first elevation to star status. Bonzo Futbolou is the Turkish title for Bonzo Goes to College, the 1952 sequel to Bedtime for Bonzo.

quote:

Behind Bond there sounded a series of soft clicks. Kerim held forward his walking-stick. As Bond had supposed, it was a gun, a rifle, with a skeleton butt which was also a twist breech. The squat bulge of a silencer had taken the place of the rubber tip.

‘Barrel from the new 88 Winchester,’ whispered Kerim proudly. ‘Put together for me by a man in Ankara. Takes the .308 cartridge. The short one. Three of them. Give me the glass. I want to get that trap-door lined up before my men go in at the front. Mind if I use your shoulder as a rest?’

‘All right.’ Bond handed Kerim the Sniperscope. Kerim clipped it to the top of the barrel and slid the gun along Bond’s shoulder.

The Winchester Model 88 was a unique lever-action rifle with a rotating bolt and detachable box magazine; it resembles a bolt-action rifle with a lever attached rather than the distinct "cowboy" guns they're known for making. The .308 Winchester round is the civilian version of 7.62x51mm NATO, which was originally developed as the T65 cartridge to succeed the .30-06. It was designed to have similar ballistics, but takes advantage of advances in ballistic and materials science to get similar performance out of a shorter and lighter round.

In 1952, Winchester Ammunition began producing .308 commercially with the Winchester Model 88 introducing it to the masses. Two years later, pressure from the United States got NATO to adopt it as their standard rifle round. As history would prove, the round would turn out to be much less controllable than smaller rounds like the .280 that the British had unsuccessfully attempted to adopt and the US would eventually get everyone to switch to 5.56x45mm, developed for the M16.

quote:

‘Got it,’ whispered Kerim. ‘Where Vavra said. He’s a good man that.’ He lowered his gun just as two policemen appeared at the right-hand corner of the intersection. Bond stiffened.

‘It’s all right,’ whispered Kerim. ‘That’s my boy and the chauffeur.’ He put two fingers in his mouth. A very quick, very low-pitched whistle sounded for a fraction of a second. One of the policemen lifted his hand to the back of his neck. The two policemen turned and walked away, their boots ringing loudly on the paving stones.

‘Few minutes more,’ whispered Kerim. ‘They’ve got to get round the back of that hoarding.’ Bond felt the heavy barrel of the gun slip into place along his right shoulder.

The silence is broken by the signal box behind the shed clanging, as a rickety train passes by on its 100-mile journey to the Greek border. As the train disappears into the distance, Bond notes a darker square appear on the unlit billboard.

quote:

Bond cautiously lifted his left hand to shade his eyes from the moon. There came a hiss of breath from behind his right ear. ‘He’s coming.’

Out of the mouth of the huge, shadowed poster, between the great violet lips, half-open in ecstasy, the dark shape of a man emerged and hung down like a worm from the mouth of a corpse.

The man dropped. A ship going up towards the Bosphorus growled in the night like a sleepless animal in a zoo. Bond felt a prickle of sweat on his forehead. The barrel of the rifle depressed as the man stepped softly off the pavement towards them.

When he’s at the edge of the shadow, he’ll start to run, thought Bond. You drat fool, get the sights further down.

Now. The man bent for a quick sprint across the dazzling white street. He was coming out of the shadow. His right leg was bent forward and his shoulder was twisted to give him momentum.

At Bond’s ear there was the clunk of an axe hitting into a tree-trunk. The man dived forward, his arms outstretched. There was a sharp ‘tok’ as his chin or his forehead hit the ground.

An empty cartridge tinkled down at Bond’s feet. He heard the click of the next round going into the chamber.

The man’s fingers scrabbled briefly at the cobbles. His shoes knocked on the road. Then he lay absolutely still.

Kerim grunted. The rifle came down off Bond’s shoulder, Bond listened to the noises of Kerim folding up the gun and putting away the Sniperscope in its leather case.

Bond looked away from the sprawling figure in the road, the figure of the man who had been, but was no more. He had a moment of resentment against the life that made him witness these things. The resentment was not against Kerim. Kerim had twice been this man’s target. In a way it had been a long duel, in which the man had fired twice to Kerim’s once. But Kerim was the cleverer, cooler man, and the luckier, and that had been that. But Bond had never killed in cold blood, and he hadn’t liked watching, and helping, someone else do it.

Clever readers would note that Bond actually isn't telling the truth here! In Casino Royale when he begins reconsidering his employment as a spy, he admits to Mathis that he got his license to kill by completing two assassinations for the British government, one of which was even an urban sniping job like this one. Perhaps he considers it different since Kerim hasn't actually been ordered to murder this person and is committing preemptive self-defense?

quote:

Kerim silently took his arm. They walked slowly away from the scene and back the way they had come.

Kerim seemed to sense Bond’s thoughts. ‘Life is full of death, my friend,’ he said philosophically. ‘And sometimes one is made the instrument of death. I do not regret killing that man. Nor would I regret killing any of those Russians we saw in that office today. They are hard people. With them, what you don’t get from strength, you won’t get from mercy. They are all the same, the Russians. I wish your government would realize it and be strong with them. Just an occasional little lesson in manners like I have taught them tonight.’

‘In power politics, one doesn’t often have the chance of being as quick and neat as you were tonight, Darko. And don’t forget it’s only one of their satellites you’ve punished, one of the men they always find to do their dirty work. Mark you,’ said Bond, ‘I quite agree about the Russians. They simply don’t understand the carrot. Only the stick has any effect. Basically they’re masochists. They love the knout. That’s why they were so happy under Stalin. He gave it them. I’m not sure how they’re going to react to the scraps of carrot they’re being fed by Khrushchev and Co. As for England, the trouble today is that carrots for all are the fashion. At home and abroad. We don’t show teeth any more – only gums.’

Kerim laughed harshly, but made no comment. They were climbing back up the stinking alley and there was no breath for talk. They rested at the top and then walked slowly towards the trees of the Hippodrome Square.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqBOVGZnwjA

Unfortunately I can't find a good quality of this scene in English. It's very similar in the film, only using the .22 caliber AR-7 Bond brought in his suitcase and using a poster for Call Me Bwana with Anita Ekberg, one of the three films Eon Productions ever made that wasn't about Bond.

quote:

‘So you forgive me for today?’ It was odd to hear the longing for reassurance in the big man’s usually boisterous voice.

‘Forgive you? Forgive what? Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was affection in Bond’s voice. ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re doing it. I’ve been very impressed. You’ve got a wonderful set-up here. I’m the one who ought to apologize. I seem to have brought a great deal of trouble down on your head. And you’ve dealt with it. I’ve just tagged along behind. And I’ve got absolutely nowhere with my main job. M. will be getting pretty impatient. Perhaps there’ll be some sort of message at the hotel.’

But when Kerim took Bond back to the hotel and went with him to the desk there was nothing for Bond. Kerim clapped him on the back. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it. I will send the car in the morning and if nothing has happened I will think of some more little adventures to pass the time. Clean your gun and sleep on it. You both deserve a rest.’

Bond returns to his room and takes a shower, noting the irony of Saturday the 14th being so much more adventurous than Friday the 13th.

quote:

Bond drew aside one curtain and opened wide the tall windows and stood, holding the curtains open and looking out across the great boomerang curve of water under the riding moon. The night breeze felt wonderfully cool on his naked body. He looked at his watch. It said two o’clock.

Bond gave a shuddering yawn. He let the curtains drop back into place. He bent to switch off the lights on the dressing-table. Suddenly he stiffened and his heart missed a beat.

There had been a nervous giggle from the shadows at the back of the room. A girl’s voice said, ‘Poor Mister Bond. You must be tired. Come to bed.’

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Mar 19, 2019

* # ¿ Mar 19, 2019 17:00
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 20: Black on Pink

quote:

Bond whirled round. He looked over to the bed, but his eyes were blind from gazing at the moon. He crossed the room and turned on the pink-shaded light by the bed. There was a long body under the single sheet. Brown hair was spread out on the pillow. The tips of fingers showed, holding the sheet up over the face. Lower down the breasts stood up like hills under snow.

Bond laughed shortly. He leaned forward and gave the hair a soft tug. There was a squeak of protest from under the sheet. Bond sat down on the edge of the bed. After a moment’s silence a corner of the sheet was cautiously lowered and one large blue eye inspected him.

‘You look very improper.’ The voice was muffled by the sheet.

‘What about you! And how did you get here?’

‘I walked down two floors. I live here too.’ The voice was deep and provocative. There was very little accent.

‘Well, I’m going to get into bed.’

The sheet came quickly down to the chin and the girl pulled herself up on the pillows. She was blushing. ‘Oh no. You mustn’t.’

‘But it’s my bed. And anyway you told me to.’ The face was incredibly beautiful. Bond examined it coolly. The blush deepened.

‘That was only a phrase. To introduce myself.’

‘Well I’m very glad to meet you. My name’s James Bond.’

‘Mine’s Tatiana Romanova.’ She sounded the second A of Tatiana and the first A of Romanova very long. ‘My friends call me Tania.’

There was a pause while they looked at each other, the girl with curiosity, and with what might have been relief. Bond with cool surmise.

She was the first to break the silence. ‘You look just like your photographs,’ she blushed again. ‘But you must put something on. It upsets me.’

‘You upset me just as much. That’s called sex. If I got into bed with you it wouldn’t matter. Anyway, what have you got on?’

She pulled the sheet a fraction lower to show a quarter-inch black velvet ribbon round her neck. ‘This.’

Fortunately, the rest of her clothes are under the bed. While Bond would ordinarily not be very into a Russian girl breaking into his hotel room and trying to seduce him (considering the prevalence of honey pot traps at this time), he has to play along to get the Spektor.

quote:

The girl blushed again. She looked at him seriously. ‘Are you speaking the truth? I think my mouth is too big. Am I as beautiful as Western girls? I was once told I look like Greta Garbo. Is that so?’

‘More beautiful,’ said Bond. ‘There is more light in your face. And your mouth isn’t too big. It’s just the right size. For me, anyway.’

‘What is that – “light in the face”? What do you mean?’

Bond meant that she didn’t look to him like a Russian spy. She seemed to show none of the reserve of a spy. None of the coldness, none of the calculation. She gave the impression of warmth of heart and gaiety. These things shone out through the eyes. He searched for a non-committal phrase. ‘There is a lot of gaiety and fun in your eyes,’ he said lamely.

Tatiana looked serious. ‘That is curious,’ she said. ‘There is not much fun and gaiety in Russia. No one speaks of these things. I have never been told that before.’

Gaiety? She thought, after the last two months? How could she be looking gay?

The remnants of Klebb on her?

quote:

And yet, yes, there was a lightness in her heart. Was she a loose woman by nature? Or was it something to do with this man she had never seen before? Relief about him after the agony of thinking about what she had to do? It was certainly much easier than she had expected. He made it easy – made it fun, with a spice of danger. He was terribly handsome. And he looked very clean. Would he forgive her when they got to London and she told him? Told him that she had been sent to seduce him? Even the night on which she must do it and the number of the room? Surely he wouldn’t mind very much. It was doing him no harm. It was only a way for her to get to England and make those reports. ‘Gaiety and fun in her eyes.’ Well, why not? It was possible. There was a wonderful sense of freedom being alone with a man like this and knowing that she would not be punished for it. It was really terribly exciting.

‘You are very handsome,’ she said. She searched for a comparison that would give him pleasure. ‘You are like an American film star.’

She was startled by his reaction. ‘For God’s sake! That’s the worst insult you can pay a man!’

She hurried to make good her mistake. How curious that the compliment didn’t please him. Didn’t everyone in the West want to look like a film star? ‘I was lying,’ she said. ‘I wanted to give you pleasure. In fact you are like my favourite hero. He’s in a book by a Russian called Lermontov. I will tell you about him one day.’

One day? Bond thought it was time to get down to business.

‘Now listen, Tania.’ He tried not to look at the beautiful face on the pillow. He fixed his eyes on the point of her chin. ‘We’ve got to stop fooling and be serious. What is all this about? Are you really going to come back to England with me?’ He raised his eyes to hers. It was fatal. She had opened them wide again in that damnable guilelessness.

‘But of course!’

‘Oh!’ Bond was taken aback by the directness of her answer. He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were truthful now. She had stopped flirting.

‘You’re not afraid?’

He saw a shadow cross her eyes. But it was not what he thought. She had remembered that she had a part to play. She was to be frightened of what she was doing. Terrified. It had sounded so easy, this acting, but now it was difficult. How odd! She decided to compromise.

‘Yes. I am afraid. But not so much now. You will protect me. I thought you would. ’

This is an interesting way of presenting the deception. Ordinarily, an author would have skipped all or almost all of the first part of the book detailing the plot and left Tania's deception a twist. But Fleming removes any suspicion on the part of the audience by giving total information about both sides' motives and beliefs. He can present Tania's and Bond's thoughts simultaneously, which further shows how easily Bond is being fooled.

quote:

‘Well, yes, of course I will.’ Bond thought of her relatives in Russia. He quickly put the thought out of his mind. What was he doing? Trying to dissuade her from coming? He closed his mind to the consequences he imagined for her. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll look after you. ’ And now for the question he had been shirking. He felt a ridiculous embarrassment. The girl wasn’t in the least what he had expected. It was spoiling everything to ask the question. It had to be done.

‘What about the machine?’

Yes. It was as if he had cuffed her across the face. Pain showed in her eyes, and the edge of tears. She pulled the sheet over her mouth and spoke from behind it. Her eyes above the sheet were cold.

‘So that’s what you want.’

‘Now listen. ’ Bond put nonchalance in his voice. ‘This machine’s got nothing to do with you and me. But my people in London want it. ’ He remembered security. He added blandly, ‘It’s not all that important. They know all about the machine and they think it’s a wonderful Russian invention. They just want one to copy. Like your people copy foreign cameras and things.’ God, how lame it sounded!

‘Now you’re lying,’ a big tear rolled out of one wide blue eye and down the soft cheek and on to the pillow. She pulled the sheet up over her eyes.

Bond reached out and put his hand on her arm under the sheet. The arm flinched angrily away.

And Tania can play the game far better than Bond. She can even cry on command!

quote:

‘drat the bloody machine,’ he said impatiently. ‘But for God’s sake, Tania, you must know that I’ve got a job to do. Just say one way or the other and we’ll forget about it. There are lots more things to talk about. We’ve got to arrange our journey and so on. Of course my people want it or they wouldn’t have sent me out to bring you home with it. ’

Tatiana dabbed her eyes with the sheet. Brusquely she pulled the sheet down to her shoulders again. She knew that she had been forgetting her job. It had just been that … Oh well. If only he had said the machine didn’t matter to him so long as she would come. But that was too much to hope for. He was right. He had a job to do. So had she.

She looked up at him calmly. ‘I will bring it. Have no fear. But do not let us mention it again. And now listen. ’ She sat up straighter on the pillows. ‘We must go tonight.’ She remembered her lesson. ‘It is the only chance. This evening I am on night duty from six o’clock. I shall be alone in the office and I will take the Spektor.’

Bond’s eyes narrowed. His mind raced as he thought of the problems that would have to be faced. Where to hide her. How to get her out to the first plane after the loss had been discovered. It was going to be a risky business. They would stop at nothing to get her and the Spektor back. Roadblock on the way to the airport. Bomb in the plane. Anything.

‘That’s wonderful, Tania.’ Bond’s voice was casual. ‘We’ll keep you hidden and then we’ll take the first plane tomorrow morning.’

‘Don’t be foolish.’ Tatiana had been warned that here would be some difficult lines in her part. ‘We will take the train. This Orient Express. It leaves at nine tonight. Do you think I haven’t been thinking this thing out? I won’t stay a minute longer in Istanbul than I have to. We will be over the frontier at dawn. You must get the tickets and a passport. I will travel with you as your wife. ’ She looked happily up at him. ‘I shall like that. In one of those coupés I have read about. They must be very comfortable. Like a tiny house on wheels. During the day we will talk and read and at night you will stand in the corridor outside our house and guard it. ’

The Orient Express had been justified to Tania as giving her 4 days to learn to love Bond. There would also obviously be Soviet agents on the train to watch them and make sure she didn't try to bail. It's up to her to seem like a stubborn, foolish girl to Bond to make him give up and go with her.

quote:

‘Well, I still think it’s crazy,’ said Bond, wondering what M.’s reaction would be. ‘But I suppose it may work. I’ve got the passport. It will need a Yugoslav visa,’ he looked at her sternly. ‘Don’t think I’m going to take you on the part of the train that goes through Bulgaria, or I shall think you want to kidnap me. ’

‘I do.’ Tatiana giggled. ‘That’s exactly what I want to do. ’

‘Now shut up, Tania. We’ve got to work this out. I’ll get the tickets and I’ll have one of our men come along. Just in case. He’s a good man. You’ll like him. Your name’s Caroline Somerset. Don’t forget it. How are you going to get to the train?’

‘Karolin Siomerset,’ the girl turned the name over in her mind. ‘It is a pretty name. And you are Mister Siomerset.’ She laughed happily. ‘That is fun. Do not worry about me. I will come to the train just before it leaves. It is the Sirkeci Station. I know where it is. So that is all. And we do not worry any more. Yes?’

Bond starts having a tingle of suspicion at her lack of fear, which Tania deflects with more affection toward him. Unexpectedly, she pulls him onto the bed for a kiss. And things, as they do, go from there.

quote:

Above them, and unknown to both of them, behind the gold-framed false mirror on the wall over the bed, the two photographers from SMERSH sat close together in the cramped cabinet de voyeur, as, before them, so many friends of the proprietor had sat on a honeymoon night in the stateroom of the Kristal Palas.

And the view-finders gazed coldly down on the passionate arabesques the two bodies formed and broke and formed again, and the clockwork mechanism of the cine-cameras whirred softly on and on as the breath rasped out of the open mouths of the two men and the sweat of excitement trickled down their bulging faces into their cheap collars.

Bond Tape is real.

* # ¿ Mar 20, 2019 16:15
  • Quote
chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Chapter 21: Orient Express

quote:

The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.

Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the laboured breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another. Wisps of steam rose from the couplings between the carriages and died quickly in the warm August air. The Orient Express was the only live train in the ugly, cheaply architectured burrow that is Istanbul’s main station. The trains on the other lines were engineless and unattended – waiting for tomorrow. Only Track No. 3, and its platform, throbbed with the tragic poetry of departure.

The heavy bronze cipher on the side of the dark blue coach said, COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGON-LITS ET DES GRANDS EXPRESS EUROPÉENS. Above the cipher, fitted into metal slots, was a flat iron sign that announced, in black capitals on white, ORIENT EXPRESS, and underneath, in three lines:

ISTANBUL—THESSALONIKI—BEOGRAD
VENEZIA—MILAN
LAUSANNE—PARIS



The Orient Express has a romanticized reputation to the point where some people may have trouble imagining that it was a real thing that served from 1883 until 1977 at its peak. What made the Istanbul-Paris line unique was that in a time when train travel in Europe was still rough and uncomfortable, Georges Nagelmackers (the son of a Belgian banker) conceived of a luxury train that could compete with the Pullman cars of America. While service was interrupted by both world wars, the Orient Express became known as a preferred method of travel for the bourgeoisie.

In a time when air travel was an uncomfortable and noisy short-range trip, the Orient Express served diplomats, royalty, businessmen, and wealthy tourists with sleeping cars and fine meals. Agatha Christie's famous Murder on the Orient Express reflects this with its depiction before the Russian Revolution, with the passengers suspected of murder including a famous actress past her prime, a Russian princess, and a count and countess, plus all the staff and family members they need to enact their scheme.

The Orient Express was slowly chipped away by the increasing safety, speed, and comfort of air travel, border closures between warring Balkan nations, and communist governments establishing their own train routes. In 1971, Wagon-Lits sold the cars to the national railway companies and began just serving as a revenue collector. Istanbul ceased being the eastern terminus on May 19, 1977, then was cut back to a Vienna-Paris route in 2001, and finally discontinued completely in 2007.

Despite this, it lives on! The Venice-Simplon Orient Express, or VSOE, is a privately run train established in 1982 to recreate the luxury and exotic destinations of the famous Orient Express. Using replica cars, the train makes a London-Paris-Istanbul route every September with sightseeing tours and overnight stays in cities like Budapest and Bucharest. The train runs from March to November, visiting a wide array of famous and beautiful European cities. Tickets are as expensive as you would expect, as you receive a truly luxurious experience with fine dining and train cars beautiful enough to serve as a movie set.

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James Bond gazed vaguely at one of the most romantic signs in the world. For the tenth time he looked at his watch. 8.51. His eyes went back to the sign. All the towns were spelled in the language of the country except MILAN. Why not MILANO? Bond took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Where the hell was the girl? Had she been caught? Had she had second thoughts? Had he been too rough with her last night, or rather this morning, in the great bed?

8.55. The quiet pant of the engine had stopped. There came an echoing whoosh as the automatic safety-valve let off the excess steam. A hundred yards away, through the milling crowd, Bond watched the station-master raise a hand to the engine driver and fireman and start walking slowly back down the train, banging the doors of the third-class carriages up front. Passengers, mostly peasants going back into Greece after a week-end with their relatives in Turkey, hung out of the windows and jabbered at the grinning crowd below.

Beyond, where the faded arc-lights stopped and the dark blue night and the stars showed through the crescent mouth of the station, Bond saw a red pinpoint turn to green.

The station-master came nearer. The brown uniformed wagon-lit attendant tapped Bond on the arm. ‘En voiture, s’il vous plaît.’ The two rich-looking Turks kissed their mistresses – they were too pretty to be wives – and, with a barrage of laughing injunctions, stepped on to the little iron pedestal and up the two tall steps into the carriage. There were no other wagon-lit travellers on the platform. The conductor, with an impatient glance at the tall Englishman, picked up the iron pedestal and climbed with it into the train.

The station-master strode purposefully by. Two more compartments, the first- and second-class carriages, and then, when he reached the guard’s van, he would lift the dirty green flag.

At 9:00 sharp, a window bangs open on the train car above Bond's head; Tania is already aboard, her face disguised sloppily by a black veil that Bond notes has too wide a mesh to actually disguise her. Bond grabs onto the handrail and leaps into the carriage as the attendant apologizes for his wife having boarded at the last car.

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Bond went down the carpeted corridor to the centre coupé. A black 7 stood above a black 8 on the white metal lozenge. The door was ajar. Bond walked in and shut it behind him. The girl had taken off her veil and her black straw hat. She was sitting in the corner by the window. A long, sleek sable coat was thrown open to show a natural coloured shantung dress with a pleated skirt, honey-coloured nylons and a black crocodile belt and shoes. She looked composed.

‘You have no faith, James.’

Bond sat down beside her. ‘Tania,’ he said, ‘if there was a bit more room I’d put you across my knee and spank you. You nearly gave me heart failure. What happened?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tatiana innocently. ‘What could happen? I said I would be here, and I am here. You have no faith. Since I am sure you are more interested in my dowry than in me, it is up there.’

Bond looked casually up. Two small cases were on the rack beside his suitcase. He took her hand. He said, ‘Thank God you’re safe.’

Something in his eyes, perhaps the flash of guilt, as he admitted to himself that he had been more interested in the girl than the machine, reassured her. She kept his hand in hers and sank contentedly back in her corner.

Bond lights up his first cigarette of the trip as the train rounds the curve behind the billboard where Krilencu had his hideout. Tania is worried by how thoughtful and serious he looks as he stares out the window; she was given the Spektor case before leaving for the train, but strictly instructed not to show it to Bond lest he take it and abandon her.

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A signal box loomed up in the blue dusk outside the window. Tatiana watched Bond get up and pull down the window and crane out into the darkness. His body was close to her. She moved her knee so that it touched him. How extraordinary, this passionate tenderness that had filled her ever since she had seen him last night standing naked at the window, his arms up to hold the curtains back, his profile, under the tousled black hair, intent and pale in the moonlight. And then the extraordinary fusing of their eyes and their bodies. The flame that had suddenly lit between them – between the two secret agents, thrown together from enemy camps a whole world apart, each involved in his own plot against the country of the other, antagonists by profession, yet turned, and by the orders of their governments, into lovers.

Tatiana stretched out a hand and caught hold of the edge of the coat and tugged at it. Bond pulled up the window and turned. He smiled down at her. He read her eyes. He bent and put his hands on the fur over her breasts and kissed her hard on the lips. Tatiana leant back, dragging him with her.

There came a soft double knock on the door. Bond stood up. He pulled out his handkerchief and brusquely scrubbed the rouge off his lips. ‘That’ll be my friend Kerim,’ he said. ‘I must talk to him. I will tell the conductor to make up the beds. Stay here while he does it. I won’t be long. I shall be outside the door.’ He leant forward and touched her hand and looked at her wide eyes and at her rueful, half-open lips. ‘We shall have all the night to ourselves. First I must see that you are safe.’ He unlocked the door and slipped out.

Kerim (whose bulk fills the corridor) is on his first train smoke as well. He's already spotted the three strangers from the meeting at the Soviet Consulate aboard the train and suspects that Tania might have been bait. Bond can't believe it, so he returns to the cabin and demands to see the Spektor.

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She said indifferently, ‘Take it down and look.’ She examined the hands in her lap. So now it was going to come. What the Director had said. They were going to take the machine and throw her aside, perhaps have her put off the train. Oh God! This man was going to do that to her.

Bond reached up and hauled down the heavy case and put it on the seat. He tore the zip sideways and looked in. Yes, a grey japanned metal case with three rows of squat keys, rather like a typewriter. He held the bag open towards her. ‘Is that a Spektor?’

She glanced casually into the gaping bag. ‘Yes.’

Bond zipped the bag shut and put it back on the rack. He sat down beside the girl. ‘There are three M.G.B. men on the train. We know they are the ones who arrived at your centre on Monday. What are they doing here, Tatiana?’ Bond’s voice was soft. He watched her, searched her with all his senses.

She looked up. There were tears in her eyes. Were they the tears of a child found out? But there was no trace of guilt in her face. She only looked terrified of something.

She reached out a hand and then drew it back. ‘You aren’t going to throw me off the train now you’ve got the machine?’

‘Of course not,’ Bond said impatiently. ‘Don’t be idiotic. But we must know what these men are doing. What’s it all about? Did you know they were going to be on the train?’ He tried to read some clue in her expression. He could only see a great relief. And what else? A look of calculation? Of reserve? Yes, she was hiding something. But what?

The jig is up faster than anticipated! Bond still doesn't know that it's all an assassination plot against him, but it took him less than 24 hours to clue in that Tania was hiding something. The Soviets' advantage here is that Tania doesn't know either.

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Tatiana seemed to make up her mind. Brusquely she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. She reached forward and put the hand on his knee. The streak of tears showed on the back of the hand. She looked into Bond’s eyes, forcing him to believe her.

‘James,’ she said. ‘I did not know these men were on the train. I was told they were leaving today. For Germany. I assumed they would fly. That is all I can tell you. Until we arrive in England, out of reach of my people, you must not ask me more. I have done what I said I would. I am here with the machine. Have faith in me. Do not be afraid for us. I am certain these men do not mean us harm. Absolutely certain. Have faith.’ (Was she so certain, wondered Tatiana? Had the Klebb woman told her all the truth? But she also must have faith–faith in the orders she had been given. These men must be the guards to see that she didn’t get off the train. They could mean no harm. Later, when they got to London, this man would hide her away out of reach of SMERSH and she would tell him everything he wanted to know. She had already decided this in the back of her mind. But God knew what would happen if she betrayed Them now. They would somehow get her, and him. She knew it. There were no secrets from these people. And They would have no mercy. So long as she played out her role, all would be well.) Tatiana watched Bond’s face for a sign that he believed her.

Bond shrugged his shoulders. He stood up. ‘I don’t know what to think, Tatiana,’ he said. ‘You are keeping something from me, but I think it’s something you don’t know is important. And I believe you think we are safe. We may be. It may be a coincidence that these men are on the train. I must talk to Kerim and decide what to do. Don’t worry. We will look after you. But now we must be very careful.’

And as usual, Bond's coldness and professionalism runs headfirst into his sentimentality.

Just as with the train down to Florida, Bond will wedge the doors to the cabin shut. Unlike before, he's going to stay awake outside the cabin with Kerim and make a plan. As the conductor enters to check their tickets, Bond returns to the corridor where Kerim is still just gazing out the window at the Turkish night.

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Bond told him of the conversation. It was not easy to explain to Kerim why he trusted the girl as he did. He watched the mouth in the window curl ironically as he tried to describe what he had read in her eyes and what his intuition told him.

Kerim sighed resignedly. ‘James,’ he said, ‘you are now in charge. This is your part of the operation. We have already argued most of this out today – the danger of the train, the possibility of getting the machine home in the diplomatic bag, the integrity, or otherwise, of this girl. It certainly appears that she has surrendered unconditionally to you. At the same time you admit that you have surrendered to her. Perhaps only partially. But you have decided to trust her. In this morning’s telephone talk with M. he said that he would back your decision. He left it to you. So be it. But he didn’t know we were to have an escort of three M.G.B. men. Nor did we. And I think that would have changed all our views. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then the only thing to do is eliminate these three men. Get them off the train. God knows what they’re here for. I don’t believe in coincidences any more than you. But one thing is certain. We are not going to share the train with these men. Right?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then leave it to me. At least for tonight. This is still my country and I have certain powers in it. And plenty of money. I cannot afford to kill them. The train would be delayed. You and the girl might get involved. But I shall arrange something. Two of them have sleeping berths. The senior man with the moustache and the little pipe is next door to you – here, in No. 6.’ He gestured backwards with his head. ‘He is travelling on a German passport under the name of “Melchior Benz, salesman”. The dark one, the Armenian, is in No. 12. He, too, has a German passport – “Kurt Goldfarb, construction engineer”. They have through tickets to Paris. I have seen their documents. I have a police card. The conductor made no trouble. He has all the tickets and passports in his cabin. The third man, the man with a boil on the back of his neck, turns out also to have boils on his face. A stupid, ugly looking brute. I have not seen his passport. He is travelling sitting up in the first-class, in the next compartment to me. He does not have to surrender his passport until the frontier. But he has surrendered his ticket.’ Like a conjuror, Kerim flicked a yellow first-class ticket out of his coat pocket. He slipped it back. He grinned proudly at Bond.

‘How the hell?’

Kerim was fond of stealing train rides as a boy, so he simply pretended to be the conductor while the third agent was in the lavatory and asked him to slide his ticket under the door. The idiot actually fell for it. As for the other two, Kerim wants to embarrass them before tossing them off so the MGB will punish them when they return.

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While they were talking, the conductor had come out of No. 7. Kerim turned to Bond and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Have no fear, James,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We will defeat these people. Go to your girl. We will meet again in the morning. We shall not sleep much tonight, but that cannot be helped. Every day is different. Perhaps we shall sleep tomorrow.’

Bond watched the big man move off easily down the swaying corridor. He noticed that, despite the movement of the train, Kerim’s shoulders never touched the walls of the corridor. Bond felt a wave of affection for the tough, cheerful professional spy.

Kerim disappeared into the conductor’s cabin. Bond turned and knocked softly on the door of No. 7.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 10, 2019

* # ¿ Mar 21, 2019 15:07
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:27
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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014
Unrelated to the current book, one of my favorite bands, Poets of the Fall, did a cover of "You Know My Name" a while ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcjZZIRRBNA

* # ¿ Mar 22, 2019 04:07
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