YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (James Bond Classic). Ian Fleming

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СКАЧАТЬ And, since the war, the second qualification was a rare one.

      M. turned sideways to his guest and watched the traffic up St James’s.

      Sir James Molony said, ‘My friend, like everybody else, you have certain patterns of behaviour. One of them consists of occasionally asking me to lunch at Blades, stuffing me like a Strasbourg goose, and then letting me in on some ghastly secret and asking me to help you with it. The last time, as I recall, you wanted to find out if I could extract certain information from a foreign diplomat by getting him under deep hypnosis without his knowledge. You said it was a last resort. I said I couldn’t help you. Two weeks later, I read in the paper that this same diplomat had come to a fatal end by experimenting with the force of gravity from a tenth floor window. The coroner gave an open verdict of the “Fell Or Was Pushed” variety. What song am I to sing for my supper this time?’ Sir James Molony relented. He said with sympathy, ‘Come on, M.! Get it off your chest!’

      M. looked him coldly in the eye. ‘It’s 007. I’m getting more and more worried about him.’

      ‘You’ve read my two reports on his condition. Anything new?’

      ‘No. Just the same. He’s going slowly to pieces. Late at the office. Skimps his work. Makes mistakes. He’s drinking too much and losing a lot of money at one of these new gambling clubs. It all adds up to the fact that one of my best men is on the edge of becoming a security risk. Absolutely incredible considering his record.’

      Sir James Molony shook his head with conviction. ‘It’s not in the least incredible. You either don’t read my reports or you don’t pay enough attention to them. I have said all along that the man is suffering from shock.’ Sir James Molony leant forward and pointed his cigar at M.’s chest. ‘You’re a hard man, M. In your job you have to be. But there are some problems, the human ones for instance, that you can’t always solve with a rope’s end. This is a case in point. Here’s this agent of yours, just as tough and brave as I expect you were at his age. He’s a bachelor and a confirmed womanizer. Then he suddenly falls in love, partly, I suspect, because this woman was a bird with a wing down and needed his help. It’s surprising what soft centres these so-called tough men always have. So he marries her and within a few hours she’s shot dead by this super-gangster chap. What was his name?’

      ‘Blofeld,’ said M. ‘Ernst Stavro Blofeld.’

      ‘All right. And your man got away with nothing worse than a crack on the head. But then he started going to pieces and your M.O. thought he might have suffered some brain injury and sent him along to me. Nothing wrong with him at all. Nothing physical that is – just shock. He admitted to me that all his zest had gone. That he wasn’t interested in his job any more, or even in his life. I hear this sort of talk from patients every day. It’s a form of psycho-neurosis, and it can grow slowly or suddenly. In your man’s case, it was brought on out of the blue by an intolerable life-situation – or one that he found intolerable because he had never encountered it before – the loss of a loved one, aggravated in his case by the fact that he blamed himself for her death. Now, my friend, neither you nor I have had to carry such a burden, so we don’t know how we would react under it. But I can tell you that it’s a hell of a burden to lug around. And your man’s caving in under it. I thought, and I said so in my report, that his job, its dangers and emergencies and so forth, would shake him out of it. I’ve found that one must try and teach people that there’s no top limit to disaster – that, so long as breath remains in your body, you’ve got to accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition. Have you tried him on any tough assignments in the last few months?’

      ‘Two,’ said M. drearily. ‘He bungled them both. On one he nearly got himself killed, and on the other he made a mistake that was dangerous for others. That’s another thing that worries me. He didn’t make mistakes before. Now suddenly he’s become accident-prone.’

      ‘Another symptom of his neurosis. So what are you going to do about it?’

      ‘Fire him,’ said M. brutally. ‘Just as if he’d been shot to pieces or got some incurable disease. I’ve got no room in his Section for a lame-brain, whatever his past record or whatever excuses you psychologists can find for him. Pension, of course. Honourable discharge and all that. Try and find him a job. One of these new security organizations for the banks might take him.’ M. looked defensively into the clear blue, comprehending eyes of the famous neurologist. He said, seeking support for his decision, ‘You do see my point, Sir James? I’m tightly staffed at Headquarters, and in the field, for that matter. There’s just no place where I can tuck away 007 so that he won’t cause harm.’

      ‘You’ll be losing one of your best men.’

      ‘Used to be. Isn’t any longer.’

      Sir James Molony sat back. He looked out of the window and puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. He liked this man Bond. He had had him as his patient perhaps a dozen times before. He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in the man, could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting-rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. ‘Give him one more chance, M. If it’ll help, I’ll take the responsibility.’

      ‘What sort of chance are you thinking of?’

      ‘Well now, I don’t know much about your line of business, M. And I don’t want to. Got enough secrets in my own job to look after. But haven’t you got something really sticky, some apparently hopeless assignment you can give this man? I don’t mean necessarily dangerous, like assassination or stealing Russian ciphers or whatever. But something that’s desperately important but apparently impossible. By all means give him a kick in the pants at the same time if you want to, but what he needs most of all is a supreme call on his talents, something that’ll really make him sweat so that he’s simply forced to forget his personal troubles. He’s a patriotic sort of a chap. Give him something that really matters to his country. It would be easy enough if a war broke out. Nothing like death or glory to take a man out of himself. But can’t you dream up something that simply stinks of urgency? If you can, give him the job. It might get him right back on the rails. Anyway, give him the chance. Yes?’

      The urgent thrill of the red telephone, that had been silent for so many weeks, shot Mary Goodnight out of her seat at the typewriter as if it had been fitted with a cartridge ejector. She dashed through into the next room, waited a second to get her breath back and picked up the receiver as if it had been a rattlesnake.

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘No, sir. It’s his secretary speaking.’ She looked down at her watch, knowing the worst.

      ‘It’s most unusual, sir. I don’t expect he’ll be more than a few minutes. Shall I ask him to call you, sir?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’ She put the receiver back on its cradle. She noticed that her hand was trembling. Damn the man! Where the hell was he? She said aloud, ‘Oh, James, please hurry.’ She walked disconsolately back and sat down again at her empty typewriter. She gazed at the grey keys with unseeing eyes and broadcast with all her telepathic strength, ‘James! James! M. wants you! M. wants you! M. wants you!’ Her heart dropped a beat. The Syncraphone. Perhaps just this once he hadn’t forgotten it. She hurried back into his room and tore open the right hand drawer. No! There it was, the little plastic receiver on which he could have been bleeped by the switchboard. The gadget that it was mandatory for all senior Headquarters staff to carry СКАЧАТЬ