CHAPTER 17
‘MY DEAR BOY’
It was a large bare room, sparsely furnished in cheap French art nouveau style. It was difficult to say whether it was intended as a living- or dining-room for a flimsy-looking mirrored sideboard, sporting an orange crackle-ware fruit dish and two painted wooden candlesticks, took up most of the wall opposite the door and contradicted the faded pink sofa ranged against the other side of the room.
There was no table in the centre under the alabasterine ceiling light, only a small square of stained carpet with a futurist design in contrasting browns.
Over by the window was an incongruous-looking throne-like chair in carved oak with a red velvet seat, a low table on which stood an empty water carafe and two glasses, and a light arm-chair with a round cane seat and no cushion.
Half-closed Venetian blinds obscured the view from the window, but cast bars of early sunlight over the few pieces of furniture and over part of the brightly papered wall and the brown stained floorboards.
Le Chiffre pointed at the cane chair.
‘That will do excellently,’ he said to the thin man. ‘Prepare him quickly. If he resists, damage him only a little.’
He turned to Bond. There was no expression on his large face and his round eyes were uninterested. ‘Take off your clothes. For every effort to resist, Basil will break one of your fingers. We are serious people and your good health is of no interest to us. Whether you live or die depends on the outcome of the talk we are about to have.’
He made a gesture towards the thin man and left the room.
The thin man’s first action was a curious one. He opened the clasp-knife he had used on the hood of Bond’s car, took the small arm-chair and with a swift motion he cut out its cane seat.
Then he came back to Bond, sticking the still open knife, like a fountain-pen, in the vest pocket of his coat. He turned Bond round to the light and unwound the flex from his wrists. Then he stood quickly aside and the knife was back in his right hand.
‘Vite.’
Bond stood chafing his swollen wrists and debating with himself how much time he could waste by resisting. He only delayed an instant. With a swift step and a downward sweep of his free hand, the thin man seized the collar of his dinner-jacket and dragged it down, pinning Bond’s arms back. Bond made the traditional counter to this old policeman’s hold by dropping down on one knee, but as he dropped the thin man dropped with him and at the same time brought his knife round and down behind Bond’s back. Bond felt the back of the blade pass down his spine. There was the hiss of a sharp knife through cloth and his arms were suddenly free as the two halves of his coat fell forward.
He cursed and stood up. The thin man was back in his previous position, his knife again at the ready in his relaxed hand. Bond let the two halves of his dinner-jacket fall off his arms on to the floor.
‘Allez,’ said the thin man with a faint trace of impatience.
Bond looked him in the eye and then slowly started to take off his shirt.
Le Chiffre came quietly back into the room. He carried a pot of what smelt like coffee. He put it on the small table near the window. He also placed beside it on the table two other homely objects, a three-foot-long carpet-beater in twisted cane and a carving knife.
He settled himself comfortably on the throne-like chair and poured some of the coffee into one of the glasses. With one foot he hooked forward the small arm-chair, whose seat was now an empty circular frame of wood, until it was directly opposite him.
Bond stood stark naked in the middle of the room, bruises showing livid on his white body, his face a grey mask of exhaustion and knowledge of what was to come.
‘Sit down there.’ Le Chiffre nodded at the chair in front of him.
Bond walked over and sat down.
The thin man produced some flex. With this he bound Bond’s wrists to the arms of the chair and his ankles to the front legs. He passed a double strand across his chest, under the arm-pits and through the chair-back. He made no mistakes with the knots and left no play in any of the bindings. All of them bit sharply into Bond’s flesh. The legs of the chair were broadly spaced and Bond could not even rock it.
He was utterly a prisoner, naked and defenceless.
His buttocks and the underpart of his body protruded through the seat of the chair towards the floor.
Le Chiffre nodded to the thin man who quietly left the room and closed the door.
There was a packet of Gauloises on the table and a lighter. Le Chiffre lit a cigarette and swallowed a mouthful of coffee from the glass. Then he picked up the cane carpet-beater and, resting the handle comfortably on his knee, allowed the flat trefoil base to lie on the floor directly under Bond’s chair.
He looked Bond carefully, almost caressingly, in the eyes. Then his wrists sprang suddenly upwards on his knee.
The result was startling.
Bond’s whole body arched in an involuntary spasm. His face contracted in a soundless scream and his lips drew right away from his teeth. At the same time his head flew back with a jerk showing the taut sinews of his neck. For an instant, muscles stood out in knots all over his body and his toes and fingers clenched until they were quite white. Then his body sagged and perspiration started to bead all over his body. He uttered a deep groan.
Le Chiffre waited for his eyes to open.
‘You see, dear boy?’ He smiled a soft, fat smile. ‘Is the position quite clear now?’
A drop of sweat fell off Bond’s chin on to his naked chest.
‘Now let us get down to business and see how soon we can be finished with this unfortunate mess you have got yourself into.’ He puffed cheerfully at his cigarette and gave an admonitory tap on the floor beneath Bond’s chair with his horrible and incongruous instrument.
‘My dear boy,’ Le Chiffre spoke like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults and it was very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket. Very foolish indeed and most unfortunate for you.
‘But we must stop joking, my dear fellow, although I am sure you would like to follow me in developing this amusing little cautionary tale.’
He suddenly dropped his bantering tone and looked at Bond sharply and venomously.
‘Where is the money?’
Bond’s bloodshot eyes looked emptily back at him.
Again the upward jerk of the wrist and again Bond’s whole body writhed and contorted.
Le Chiffre waited until the tortured heart eased down its laboured pumping and until Bond’s eyes dully opened again.
‘Perhaps I should explain,’ said Le Chiffre. ‘I intend to continue attacking the sensitive parts of your body until you answer my question. I am without mercy and there will be no relenting. There is no one to stage a last-minute rescue and there is no possibility of escape for you. This is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed and the hero is given a medal and marries the girl. Unfortunately these things don’t happen in real life. If you continue to be obstinate, you will be tortured to the edge of madness and then the girl will be brought in and we will set about her in front of you. If that is still not enough, you will both be painfully killed and I shall reluctantly leave your bodies and make my way abroad to a comfortable house which is waiting for me. There I shall take up a useful and profitable career and live to a ripe and peaceful old age in the bosom of the family I shall doubtless create. So you see, my dear boy, that I stand to lose nothing. If you hand the money over, so much the better. If not, I shall shrug my shoulders and be on my way.’
He paused, and his wrist lifted slightly on his knee. Bond’s flesh cringed as the cane surface just touched him.
‘But you, my dear fellow, can only hope that I shall spare you further pain and spare your life. There is no other hope for you but that. Absolutely none.’
‘Well?’
Bond closed his eyes and waited for the pain. He knew that the beginning of torture is the worst. There is a parabola of agony. A crescendo leading up to a peak and then the nerves are blunted and react progressively less until unconsciousness and death. All he could do was to pray for the peak, pray that his spirit would hold out so long and then accept the long free-wheel down to the final black-out.
He had been told by colleagues who had survived torture by the Germans and the Japanese that towards the end there came a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight where pain turned to pleasure and where hatred and fear of the torturers turned to a masochistic infatuation. It was the supreme test of will, he had learnt, to avoid showing this form of punch-drunkenness. Directly it was suspected they would either kill you at once and save themselves further useless effort, or let you recover sufficiently so that your nerves had crept back to the other side of the parabola. Then they would start again.
He opened his eyes a fraction.
Le Chiffre had been waiting for this and like a rattlesnake the cane instrument leapt from the floor. It struck again and again so that Bond screamed and his body jangled in the chair like a marionette.
Le Chiffre desisted only when Bond’s tortured spasms showed a trace of sluggishness. He sat for a while sipping his coffee and frowning slightly like a surgeon watching a cardiograph during a difficult operation.
When Bond’s eyes flickered and opened he addressed him again, but now with a trace of impatience.
‘We know that the money is somewhere in your room,’ he said. ‘You drew a cheque to cash for forty million francs and I know that you went back to the hotel to hide it.’
For a moment Bond wondered how he had been so certain.
‘Directly you left for the night club,’ continued Le Chiffre, ‘your room was searched by four of my people.’
The Muntzes must have helped, reflected Bond.
‘We found a good deal in childish hiding-places. The ball-cock in the lavatory yielded an interesting little code-book and we found some more of your papers taped to the back of a drawer. All the furniture has been taken to pieces and your clothes and the curtains and bedclothes have been cut up. Every inch of the room has been searched and all the fittings removed. It is most unfortunate for you that we didn’t find the cheque. If we had, you would now be comfortably in bed, perhaps with the beautiful Miss Lynd, instead of this.’ He lashed upwards.
Through the red mist of pain, Bond thought of Vesper. He could imagine how she was being used by the two gunmen. They would be making the most of her before she was sent for by Le Chiffre. He thought of the fat wet lips of the Corsican and the slow cruelty of the thin man. Poor wretch to have been dragged into this. Poor little beast.
Le Chiffre was talking again.
‘Torture is a terrible thing,’ he was saying as he puffed at a fresh cigarette, ‘but it is a simple matter for the torturer, particularly when the patient,’ he smiled at the word, ‘is a man. You see, my dear Bond, with a man it is quite unnecessary to indulge in refinements. With this simple instrument, or with almost any other object, one can cause a man as much pain as is possible or necessary. Do not believe what you read in novels or books about the war. There is nothing worse. It is not only the immediate agony, but also the thought that your manhood is being gradually destroyed and that at the end, if you will not yield, you will no longer be a man.
‘That, my dear Bond, is a sad and terrible thought—a long chain of agony for the body and also for the mind, and then the final screaming moment when you will beg me to kill you. All that is inevitable unless you tell me where you hid the money.’
He poured some more coffee into the glass and drank it down leaving brown corners to his mouth.
Bond’s lips were writhing. He was trying to say something. At last he got the word out in a harsh croak: ‘Drink,’ he said and his tongue came out and swilled across his dry lips.
‘Of course, my dear boy, how thoughtless of me.’ Le Chiffre poured some coffee into the other glass. There was a ring of sweat drops on the floor round Bond’s chair.
‘We must certainly keep your tongue lubricated.’
He laid the handle of the carpet-beater down on the floor between his thick legs and rose from his chair. He went behind Bond and taking a handful of his soaking hair in one hand, he wrenched Bond’s head sharply back. He poured the coffee down Bond’s throat in small mouthfuls so that he would not choke. Then he released his head so that it fell forward again on his chest. He went back to his chair and picked up the carpet-beater.
Bond raised his head and spoke thickly.
‘Money no good to you.’ His voice was a laborious croak. ‘Police trace it to you.’
Exhausted by the effort, his head sank forward again. He was a little, but only a little, exaggerating the extent of his physical collapse. Anything to gain time and anything to defer the next searing pain.
‘Ah, my dear fellow, I had forgotten to tell you.’ Le Chiffre smiled wolfishly. ‘We met after our little game at the Casino and you were such a sportsman that you agreed we would have one more run through the pack between the two of us. It was a gallant gesture. Typical of an English gentleman.
‘Unfortunately you lost and this upset you so much that you decided to leave Royale immediately for an unknown destination. Like the gentleman you are, you very kindly gave me a note explaining the circumstances so that I would have no difficulty in cashing your cheque. You see, dear boy, everything has been thought of and you need have no fears on my account.’ He chuckled fatly.
‘Now shall we continue? I have all the time in the world and truth to tell I am rather interested to see how long a man can stand this particular form of . . . er . . . encouragement.’ He rattled the harsh cane on the floor.
So that was the score, thought Bond, with a final sinking of the heart. The ‘unknown destination’ would be under the ground or under the sea, or perhaps, more simply, under the crashed Bentley. Well, if he had to die anyway, he might as well try it the hard way. He had no hope that Mathis or Leiter would get to him in time, but at least there was a chance that they would catch up with Le Chiffre before he could get away. It must be getting on for seven. The car might have been found by now. It was a choice of evils, but the longer Le Chiffre continued the torture the more likely he would be revenged.
Bond lifted his head and looked Le Chiffre in the eyes.
The china of the whites was now veined with red. It was like looking at two blackcurrants poached in blood. The rest of the wide face was yellowish except where a thick black stubble covered the moist skin. The upward edges of black coffee at the corners of the mouth gave his expression a false smile and the whole face was faintly striped by the light through the Venetian blinds.
‘No,’ he said flatly, ‘. . . you . . .’
Le Chiffre grunted and set to work again with savage fury. Occasionally he snarled like a wild beast.
After ten minutes Bond had fainted, blessedly.
Le Chiffre at once stopped. He wiped some sweat from his face with a circular motion of his disengaged hand. Then he looked at his watch and seemed to make up his mind.
He got up and stood behind the inert, dripping body. There was no colour in Bond’s face or anywhere on his body above the waist. There was a faint flutter of his skin above the heart. Otherwise he might have been dead.
Le Chiffre seized Bond’s ears and harshly twisted them. Then he leant forward and slapped his cheeks hard several times. Bond’s head rolled from side to side with each blow. Slowly his breathing became deeper. An animal groan came from his lolling mouth.
Le Chiffre took a glass of coffee and poured some into Bond’s mouth and threw the rest in his face. Bond’s eyes slowly opened.
Le Chiffre returned to his chair and waited. He lit a cigarette and contemplated the spattered pool of blood on the floor beneath the inert body opposite.
Bond groaned again pitifully. It was an inhuman sound. His eyes opened and he gazed dully at his torturer.
Le Chiffre spoke.
‘That is all, Bond. We will now finish with you. You understand? Not kill you, but finish with you. And then we will have in the girl and see if something can be got out of the remains of the two of you.’
He reached towards the table.
‘Say good-bye to it, Bond.’