PUNCTUALLY at eight, the great reverberating efflatus of the Queen Elizabeth's siren made the glass tremble in the skyscrapers and the tugs fussed the big ship out into midstream and nosed her round and, at a cautious five knots, she moved slowly down-river on the slack tide.
There would be a pause to drop the pilot at the Ambrose Light and then the quadruple screws would whip the sea into cream and the Elizabeth would give a shudder of release and lance off on the long flat arc up from the 4jth to the 5oth parallel and the dot on it that was Southampton.
Sitting in his cabin, listening to the quiet creak of the woodwork and watching his pencil on the dressing-table roll slowly between his hair brush and the edge of his passport, Bond remembered the days when her course had been different, when she had zig-zagged deep into the South Atlantic as she played her game of hide-and-seek with the U-boat wolfpacks, en route for the flames of Europe. It was still an adventure, but now the Queen, in her cocoon of protective radio impulses-her radar; her Loran, her echo-sounder-moved with the precautions of an oriental potentate among his bodyguards and outriders, and, so far as Bond was concerned, boredom and indigestion would be the only hazards of the voyage.
He picked up the telephone and asked for Miss Case. When she heard his voice she gave a theatrical groan. "The sailor hates the sea," she said. "I'm feeling sick already and we're still in the river."
"Just as well," said Bond. "Stay in your cabin and live on dramamine and champagne. I'll be no good for two or three days. I'm going to get the doctor and the masseur from the Turkish bath and try and stick the bits together again. And anyway it won't do any harm to stay out of sight for most of the voyage. It's just conceivable they picked us up in New York."
"Well, if you promise to call me up every day," said Tiffany, "and promise to take me to this Veranda Grill place as soon as I feel I can swallow a little caviar. Okay?"
Bond laughed. "If you absolutely insist," he said. "And now listen, in exchange, I want you to try and remember anything you can about ABC and the London end of this business. That telephone number. And anything else. I'll tell you what it's all about and why I'm interested as soon as I can, but in the meantime you've just got to trust me. Is it a deal?"
"Oh, sure," said the girl indifferently, as if all that side of her life had lost its importance; and for ten minutes Bond questioned her minutely, but except for small details, fruitlessly, about the ABC routine.
Then he put down the receiver and rang for the steward and ordered some dinner and sat down to write the long report which he would have to transpose into code and send off that night.
The 'Metal Mike' took the ship quietly on into the darkness and the small township of three thousand five hundred souls settled down to the five days of its life in which there would be all the happenings natural to any other sizeable community-burglaries, fights, seductions, drunkenness, cheating; perhaps a birth or two, the chance of a suicide and, in a hundred crossings, perhaps even a murder.
As the iron town loped easily along the broad Atlantic swell and the soft night wind thrummed and moaned in the masthead, the radio aerials were already transmitting the morse of the duty operator to the listening ear of Portishead.
And what the duty operator was sending at exactly ten pm Eastern Standard Time, Was a cable addressed: ABC, CARE HOUSE OF DIAMONDS, HATTON GARDEN, LONDON, which Said : PARTIES LOCATED STOP IF MATTER REQUIRES DRASTIC SOLUTION ESSENTIAL YOU STATE PRICE PAYABLE IN DOLLARS. The Signature Was WINTER.
An hour later, while the Queen Elizabeth's operator was sighing at the thought of having to transmit five hundred five-letter groups addressed: THE MANAGING DIRECTOR, UNIVERSAL EXPORT, REGENTS PARK, LONDON, Portishead radio was sending a short cable addressed : WINTER FIRST CLASS PASSENGER QUEEN ELIZABETH, which said : DESIRE TIDY SPEEDY CONCLUSION OF CASE REPEAT CASE STOP WILL PAY TWENTY GRAND STOP WILL PERSONALLY HANDLE OTHER SUBJECT ON ARRIVAL LONDON CONFIRM ABC.
And the operator looked up Winter in the passenger list and put the message in an envelope and sent it down to a cabin on A deck, the deck below Bond and the girl, where two men were playing gin-rummy in their shirt-sleeves, and as the steward left the cabin he heard the fat man say cryptically to the man with white hair, "Whaddya know, Booful! It's twenty Grand for a rub these days, Boy-oh-boy!"
It was not until the third day out that Bond and Tiffany made a date to meet for cocktails in the Observation Lounge and later to have dinner in the Veranda Grill. At midday the weather was dead calm, and after lunch in his cabin Bond had got a peremptory message in a round girlish hand on a sheet of the ship's writing paper. It said, 'Fix a rendez-me today. Fail not,' and Bond's hand had gone at once to the telephone.
They were thirsty for each other's company after the three days' separation, but Tiffany's defences were up when she joined him at the obscure corner table he had chosen in the gleaming semi-circular cocktail bar in the bows.
"What kind of a table's this?" she inquired sarcastically. "You ashamed of me or something? Here I put on the best those Hollywood pansies can dream up and you hide me away like I was
Miss Rheingold 1914.1 want to have myself some fun on this old paddleboat and you put me in a corner as if I was catching."
"That's about it,", said Bond. "All you want to do is put the other men's temperatures up."
"What d'you expect a girl to do on the Queen Elizabeth? Fish?"
? Bond laughed. He signalled to the waiter and ordered Vodka dry Martinis with lemon peel. "I could give you one alternative."
"Dear Diary," said the girl, "having wonderful time with handsome Englishman. Trouble is, he's after my family jewels. What do I do? Yours truly, puzzled." Then suddenly she leant over and put her hand on his. "Listen, you Bond person," she said. "I'm as happy as a cricket. I love being here. I love being with you. And I love this nice dark table where no one can see me holding your hand. Don't mind my talk. I just can't get over being so happy. Don't mind my silly jokes, will you?"
She was wearing a heavy cream Shantung silk shirt and a charcoal skirt in a cotton-and-wool mixture. The neutral colours showed off her cafй-au-lait sunburn. The small square Carder watch with the black strap was her only jewellery and the short fingernails on the small brown hand that lay over his were un-painted.. The reflected sunlight from outside shone on the pale gold heavy falling swerve of her hair, in the depths of the chatoyant grey eyes, and on the glint of white teeth between the luxurious lips dial were half open with her question.
"No," said Bond. "No, I won't mind, Tiffany. Everything about you's fine."
She looked into his eyes and was satisfied. The drinks came and she withdrew her hand and observed him quizzically over the rim of her glass.
"Now tell me a few things," she said. "First of all, what do you do and who are you working for? At the beginning, in the hotel, I thought you were a crook. But somehow as soon as you had gone out the door I knew you weren't. Guess I should have warned ABC and we'd have avoided a lot of fuss. But I just, didn't. Come on, James. Start giving."
"I work for the Government," said Bond. "They want to stop this diamond smuggling."
"Sort of secret agent?"
"Just a Civil Servant."
"Okay. So what are you going to do with me when we get to London? Lock me up?"
"Yes. In the spare room of my flat."
"That's better. Shall I become a subject of the Queen like you? I'd rather like to be a subject person."
"I expect we could fix that."
"Are you married?" She paused. "Or anything?"
"No. I occasionally have affairs."
"So you're one of those old-fashioned men who like sleeping with women. Why haven't you ever married?"
"I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other."
Tiffany Case thought this over. "Maybe there's something in that," she said finally. "But it depends what you want to add up to. Something human or something inhuman. You can't be complete by yourself."
"What about you?"
The girl hadn't wanted the question. "Maybe I just settled for the inhuman," she said shortly. "And who in hell do you think I should have married? Shady Tree?"<............