The James Bond Anthology

‘Impossible to say. Wartski’s will certainly bid very high. But of course they wouldn’t be prepared to tell anyone just how high – either on their own account for stock, so to speak, or acting on behalf of a customer. Much would depend on how high they are forced up by an underbidder. Anyway, not less than £100,000 I’d say.’

‘Hm.’ M.’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Expensive hunk of jewellery.’

Dr Fanshawe was aghast at this bare-faced revelation of M.’s philistinism. He actually looked M. straight in the face. ‘My dear sir,’ he expostulated, ‘do you consider the stolen Goya, sold at Sotheby’s for £140,000, that went to the National Gallery, just an expensive hunk, as you put it, of canvas and paint?’

M. said placatingly, ‘Forgive me, Dr Fanshawe. I expressed myself clumsily. I have never had the leisure to interest myself in works of art nor, on a naval officer’s pay, the money to acquire any. I was just registering my dismay at the runaway prices being fetched at auction these days.’

‘You are entitled to your views, sir,’ said Dr Fanshawe stuffily.

Bond thought it was time to rescue M. He also wanted to get Dr Fanshawe out of the room so that they could get down to the professional aspects of this odd business. He got to his feet. He said to M., ‘Well, sir, I don’t think there is anything else I need to know. No doubt this will turn out to be perfectly straightforward (like hell it would!) and just a matter of one of your staff turning out to be a very lucky woman. But it’s very kind of Dr Fanshawe to have gone to so much trouble.’ He turned to Dr Fanshawe. ‘Would you care to have a staff car to take you wherever you’re going?’

‘No thank you, thank you very much. It will be pleasant to walk across the park.’

Hands were shaken, goodbyes said and Bond showed the doctor out. Bond came back into the room. M. had taken a bulky file, stamped with the top secret red star, out of a drawer and was already immersed in it. Bond took his seat again and waited. The room was silent save for the riffling of paper. This also stopped as M. extracted a foolscap sheet of blue cardboard used for Confidential Staff Records and carefully read through the forest of close type on both sides.

Finally he slipped it back in the file and looked up. ‘Yes,’ he said and the blue eyes were bright with interest. ‘It fits all right. The girl was born in Paris in 1935. Mother very active in the Resistance during the war. Helped run the Tulip Escape Route and got away with it. After the war, the girl went to the Sorbonne and then got a job in the Embassy, in the Naval Attaché’s office, as an interpreter. You know the rest. She was compromised – some unattractive sexual business – by some of her mother’s old Resistance friends who by then were working for the N.K.V.D., and from then on she has been working under Control. She applied, no doubt on instruction, for British citizenship. Her clearance from the Embassy and her mother’s Resistance record helped her to get that by 1959, and she was then recommended to us by the F.O. But it was there that she made her big mistake. She asked for a year’s leave before coming to us and was next reported by the Hutchinson network in the Leningrad espionage school. There she presumably received the usual training and we had to decide what to do about her. Section 100 thought up the Purple Cipher operation and you know the rest. She’s been working for three years inside headquarters for the K.G.B. and now she’s getting her reward – this emerald ball thing worth £100,000. And that’s interesting on two counts. First it means that the K.G.B. is totally hooked on the Purple Cipher or they wouldn’t be making this fantastic payment. That’s good news. It means that we can hot up the material we’re passing over – put across some Grade 3 deception material and perhaps even move up to Grade 2. Secondly, it explains something we’ve never been able to understand – that this girl hasn’t hitherto received a single payment for her services. We were worried by that. She had an account at Glyn, Mills that only registered her monthly pay cheque of around £50. And she’s consistently lived within it. Now she’s getting her pay-off in one large lump sum via this bauble we’ve been learning about. All very satisfactory.’

M. reached for the ashtray made out of a twelve-inch shell base and rapped out his pipe with the air of a man who has done a good afternoon’s work.

Bond shifted in his chair. He badly needed a cigarette, but he wouldn’t have dreamed of lighting one. He wanted one to help him focus his thoughts. He felt that there were some ragged edges to this problem – one particularly. He said, mildly, ‘Have we ever caught up with her local Control, sir? How does she get her instructions?’