11. Domino

The girl in the sapphire blue MG two-seater shot down the slope of Parliament Street and at the junction with Bay Street executed an admirable racing change through third into second. She gave a quick glance to the right, correctly estimated the trot of the straw-hatted horse in the shafts of the rickety cab with the gay fringe, and swerved out of the side street left-handed. The horse jerked back his head indignantly and the coachman stamped his foot up and down on the big Bermuda bell. The disadvantage of the beautiful deep ting-tong, ting-tong of the Bermuda carriage bell is that it cannot possibly sound angry, however angrily you may sound it. The girl gave a cheerful wave of a sunburned hand, raced up the street in second, and stopped in front of the Pipe of Peace, the Dunhills of Nassau.

Not bothering to open the low door of the MG, the girl swung one brown leg and then the other over the side of the car, showing her thighs under the pleated cream cotton skirt almost to her waist, and slipped to the pavement. By now the cab was alongside. The cabby reined in. He was mollified by the gaiety and beauty of the girl. He said, ?Missy, you done almost shaved de whiskers off of Old Dreamy here. You wanna be more careful.?

The girl put her hands on her hips. She didn't like being told anything by anyone. She said sharply, ?Old Dreamy yourself. Some people have got work to do. Both of you ought to be put out to grass instead of cluttering up the streets getting in everyone's way.?

The ancient Negro opened his mouth, thought better of it, said a pacifying ?Hokay, Missy. Hokay,? flicked at his horse, and moved on, muttering to himself. He turned on his seat to get another look at the she-devil, but she had already disappeared into the shop. ?Dat's a fine piece of gal,? he said inconsequentially, and put his horse into an ambling trot.

Twenty yards away, James Bond had witnessed the whole scene. He felt the same way about the girl as the cabby did. He also knew who she was. He quickened his step and pushed through the striped sun blinds into the blessed cool of the tobacconist's.

The girl was standing at a counter arguing with one of the assistants. ?But I tell you I don't want Senior Service. I tell you I want a cigarette that's so disgusting that I shan't want to smoke it. Haven't you got a cigarette that stops people smoking? Look at all that.? She waved a hand toward the stacked shelves. ?Don't tell me some of those don't taste horrible.?

The man was used to crazy tourists, and anyway the Nassavian doesn't get excited. He said, ?Well, Ma'am . . .? and turned and languidly looked along the shelves.

Bond said sternly to the girl, ?You can choose between two kinds of cigarette if you want to smoke less.?

She looked sharply up at him. ?And who might you be?? ?My name's Bond, James Bond. I'm the world's authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly. You're lucky I happen to be handy.?

The girl looked him up and down. He was a man she hadn't seen before in Nassau. He was about six feet tall and somewhere in his middle thirties. He had dark, rather cruel good looks and very clear blue-gray eyes that were now observing her inspection sardonically. A scar down his right cheek showed pale against a tan so mild that he must have only recently come to the island. He was wearing a very dark blue lightweight single-breasted suit over a cream silk shirt and a black knitted silk tie. Despite the heat, he looked cool and clean, and his only concession to the tropics appeared to be the black saddle-stitched sandals on his bare feet. It was an obvious attempt at a pick-up. He had an exciting face, and authority. She decided to go along. But she wasn't going to make it easy. She said coldly, ?All right. Tell me.?

?The only way to stop smoking is to stop it and not start again. If you want to pretend to stop for a week or two, it's no good trying to ration yourself. You'll become a bore and think about nothing else. And you'll snatch at a cigarette every time the hour strikes or whatever the intervals may be. You'll behave greedily. That's unattractive. The other way is to have cigarettes that are either too mild or too strong. The mild ones are probably the best for you.? Bond said to the attendant, ?A carton of Dukes, king-size with filter.? Bond handed them to the girl. ?Here, try these. With the compliments of Faust.?

?Oh, but I can't. I mean . . .?

But Bond had already paid for the carton and for a packet of Chesterfields for himself. He took the change and followed her out of the shop. They stood together under the striped awning. The heat was terrific. The white light on the dusty street, the glare reflected back off the shop fronts opposite and off the dazzling limestone of the houses made them both screw up their eyes. Bond said, ?I'm afraid smoking goes with drinking. Are you going to give them both up or one by one??

She looked at him quizzically. ?This is very sudden, Mr.-er-Bond. Well, all right. But somewhere out of the town. It's too hot here. Do you know the Wharf out beyond the Fort Montague?? Bond noticed that she looked quickly up and down the street. ?It's not bad. Come on. I'll take you there. Mind the metal. It'll raise blisters on you.?

Even the white leather of the upholstery burned through to Bond's thighs. But he wouldn't have minded if his suit had caught fire. This was his first sniff at the town and already he had got hold of the girl. And she was a fine girl at that. Bond caught hold of the leather-bound safety grip on the dashboard as the girl did a sharp turn up Frederick Street and another one onto Shirley.

Bond settled himself sideways so that he could look at her. She wore a gondolier's broadrimmed straw hat, tilted impudently down over her nose. The pale blue tails of its ribbon streamed out behind. On the front of the ribbon was printed in gold ? M/Y DISCO VOLANTE .? Her short-sleeved silk shirt was in half-inch vertical stripes of pale blue and white and, with the pleated cream skirt, the whole get-up reminded Bond vaguely of a sunny day at Henley Regatta. She wore no rings and no jewelery except for a rather masculine square gold wristwatch with a black face. Her flat-heeled sandals were of white doeskin. They matched her broad white doeskin belt and the sensible handbag that lay, with a black and white striped silk scarf, on the seat between them. Bond knew a good deal about her from the immigration form, one among a hundred, which he had been studying that morning. Her name was Dominetta Vitali. She had been born in Bolzano in the Italian Tyrol and therefore probably had as much Austrian as Italian blood in her. She was twenty-nine and gave her profession as ?actress.? She had arrived six months before in the Disco and it was entirely understood that she was mistress to the owner of the yacht, an Italian called Emilio Largo. ?Whore,? ?tart,? ?prostitute? were not words Bond used about women unless they were professional streetwalkers or the inmates of a brothel, and when Harling, the Commissioner of Police, and Pitman, Chief of Immigration and Customs, had described her as an ?Italian tart? Bond had reserved judgment. Now he knew he had been right. This was an independent, a girl of authority and character. She might like the rich, gay life but, so far as Bond was concerned, that was the right kind of girl. She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not on theirs.

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest danger potential, and two women as nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other's faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person's expression, perhaps in order to read behind the other's words or to analyze the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other's attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver has to hear, and see, not only what her companion is saying but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.

But this girl drove like a man. She was entirely focused on the road ahead and on what was going on in her driving mirror, an accessory rarely used by women except for making up their faces. And, equally rare in a woman, she took a man's pleasure in the feel of her machine, in the timing of her gear changes, and the use of her brakes.

She didn't talk to Bond or seem to be aware of him, and this allowed him to continue his inspection without inhibition. She had a gay, to-hell-with-you face that, Bond thought, would become animal in passion. In bed she would fight and bite and then suddenly melt into hot surrender. He could almost see the proud, sensual mouth bare away from the even white teeth in a snarl of desire and then, afterward, soften into a half-pout of loving slavery. In profile the eyes were soft charcoal slits such as you see on some birds.but in the shop Bond had seen them full face. Then they had been fierce and direct with a golden flicker in the dark brown that held much the same message as the mouth. The profile, the straight, small uptilted nose, the determined set of the chin, and the clean-cut sweep of the jaw line were as decisive as a royal command, and the way the head was set on the neck had the same authority-the poise one associates with imaginary princesses. Two features modified the clean-cut purity of line-a soft, muddled Brigitte Bardot haircut that escaped from under the straw hat in an endearing disarray, and two deeply cut but soft dimples which could only have been etched by a sweet if rather ironic smile that Bond had not yet seen. The sunburn was not overdone and her skin had none of that dried, exhausted sheen that can turn the texture of even the youngest skin into something more like parchment. Beneath the gold, there was an earthy warmth in the cheeks that suggested a good healthy peasant strain from the Italian Alps, and her breasts, high riding and deeply V-ed, were from the same stock. The general impression, Bond decided, was of a willful, high-tempered, sensual girl-a beautiful Arab mare who would only allow herself to be ridden by a horseman with steel thighs and velvet hands, and then only with curb and saw bit-and then only when he had broken her to bridle and saddle. Bond thought that he would like to try his strength against hers. But that must be for some other time. For the moment another man was in the saddle. He would first have to be unhorsed. And anyway, what the hell was he doing fooling with these things? There was a job to be done. The devil of a job.

The MG swept out of Shirley Street on to Eastern Road and followed the coast. Across the wide harbor entrance were the emerald and turquoise shoals of Athol Island. A deep-sea fishing boat was passing over them, the. two tall antennae of her twelve-foot rods streaming their lines astern. A fast motorboat came hammering by dose inshore, the water-skier on the line behind her executing tight slaloms across the waves of her wake. It was a sparkling, beautiful day and Bond's heart lifted momentarily from the trough of indecision and despondency created by an assignment that, particularly since his arrival at dawn that day, seemed increasingly time-wasting and futile.

The Bahamas, the string of a thousand islands that straggle five hundred miles southeast from just east of the coast of Florida to just north of Cuba, from latitude 27o down to latitude 21o, were, for most of three hundred years, the haunt of every famous pirate of the western Atlantic, and today tourism makes full use of the romantic mythology. A road-sign said ? Blackbeard's Tower 1 mile ? and another ? Gunpowder Wharf. Sea Food. Native Drinks. Shady Garden. First Left .?

A sand track showed on their left. The girl took it and pulled up in front of a ruined stone warehouse against which leaned a pink clapboard house with white window frames and a white Adam-style doorway over which hung a brightly painted inn sign of a powder keg with a skull and crossbones on it. The girl drove the MG into the shade of a clump of casuarinas and they got out and went through the door and through a small dining room with red and white checked covers and out onto a terrace built on the remains of a stone wharf. The terrace was shaded by sea-almond trees trimmed into umbrellas. Trailed by a shuffling colored waiter with soup stains down his white coat, they chose a cool table on the edge of the terrace looking over the water. Bond glanced at his watch. He said to the girl, ?It's exactly midday. Do you want to drink solid or soft??

The girl said, ?Soft. I'll have a double Bloody Mary with plenty of Worcester sauce.?

Bond said, ?What do you call hard? I'll have a vodka and tonic with a dash of bitters.? The waiter said, ?Yassuh? and mooched away.

?I call vodka-on-the-rocks hard. All that tomato juice makes it soft.? She hooked a chair toward her with one foot and stretched out her legs on it so that they were in the sun. The position wasn't comfortable enough. She kicked off her sandals and sat back, satisfied. She said, ?When did you arrive? I haven't seen you about. When it's like this, at the end of the season, one expects to know most of the faces.?

?I got in this morning. From New York. I've come to look for a property. It struck me that now would be better than in the season. When all the millionaires are here the prices are hopeless. They may come down a bit now they're gone. How long have you been here?

?About six months. I came out in a yacht, the Disco Volante . You may have seen her. She's anchored up the coast. You probably flew right over her coming in to land at Windsor Field.?

?A long low streamlined affair? Is she yours? She's got beautiful lines.?

?She belongs to a relative of mine.? The eyes watched Bond's face.

?Do you stay on board??

?Oh, no. We've got a beach property. Or rather we've taken it. It's a place called Palmyra. Just opposite where the yacht is. It belongs to an Englishman. I believe he wants to sell it. It's very beautiful. And it's a long way away from the tourists. It's at a place called Lyford Key.?

?That sounds the sort of place I'm looking for.?

?Well, we'll be gone in about a week.?

?Oh.? Bond looked into her eyes. ?I'm sorry.?

?If you've got to flirt, don't be obvious.? Suddenly the girl laughed. She looked contrite. The dimples remained. ?I mean, I didn't really mean that-not the way it sounded. But I've spent six months listening to that kind of thing from these silly old rich goats and the only way to shut them up is to be rude. I'm not being conceited. There's no one under sixty in this place. Young people can't afford it. So any woman who hasn't got a harelip or a mustache-well not even a mustache would put them off. They'd probably like it. Well, I mean absolutely any girl makes these old goats get their bifocals all steamed up.? She laughed again. She was getting friendly. ?I expect you'll have just the same effect on the old women with pince-nez and blue rinses.?

?Do they eat boiled vegetables for lunch??

?Yes, and they drink carrot juice and prune juice.?

?We won't get on, then. I won't sink lower than conch chowder.?

She looked at him curiously. ?You seem to know a lot about Nassau.?

?You mean about conch being an aphrodisiac? That's not only a Nassau idea. It's all over the world where there are conchs.?

?Is it true??

?Island people have it on their wedding night. I haven't found it to have any effect on me.?

?Why?? She looked mischievous. ?Are you married??

?No.? Bond smiled across into her eyes. ?Are you??

?No.?

Then we might both try some conch soup some time and see what happens.?

?That's only a little better than the millionaires. You'll have to try harder.?

The drinks came. The girl stirred hers with a finger, to mix in the brown sediment of Worcester sauce, and drank half of it. She reached for the carton of Dukes, broke it open, and slit a packet with her thumbnail. She took out a cigarette, sniffed it cautiously, and lit it with Bond's lighter. She inhaled deeply and blew out a long plume of smoke. She said doubtfully, ?Not bad. At least the smoke looks like smoke. Why did you say you were such an expert on giving up smoking??

?Because I've given it up so often.? Bond thought it time to get away from the small talk. He said, ?Why do you talk such good English? Your accent sounds Italian.?

?Yes, my name's Dominetta Vitali. But I was sent to school in England. To the Cheltenham Ladies College. Then I went to RADA to learn acting. The English kind of acting. My parents thought that was a ladylike way to be brought up. Then they were both killed in a train crash. I went back to Italy to earn my living. I remembered my English but?-she laughed without bitterness-?I soon forgot most of the rest. You don't get far in the Italian theater by being able to walk about with a book balanced on your head.?

?But this relative with the yacht.? Bond looked out to sea. ?Wasn't he there to look after you??

?No.? The answer was curt. When Bond made no comment she added, ?He's not exactly a relative, not a close one. He's a sort of close friend. A guardian.? ?Oh, yes.?

?You must come and visit us on the yacht.? She felt that a bit of gush was needed. ?He's called Largo, Emilio Largo. You've probably heard. He's here on some kind of a treasure hunt.?

?Really?? Now it was Bond's turn to gush. ?That sounds rather fun, Of course I'd like to meet him. What's it all about? Is there anything in it??

?Heaven knows. He's very secretive about it. Apparently there's some kind of a map. But I'm not allowed to see it and I have to stay ashore when he goes off prospecting or whatever he does. A lot of people have put up money for it, sort of shareholders. They've all just arrived. As we're going in a week or so, I suppose everything's ready and the real hunt's going to start any moment now.?

?What are the shareholders like? Do they seem sensible sort of people? The trouble with most treasure hunts is that either someone's been there before and sneaked off with the treasure or the ship's so deep in the coral you can't get at it.?

?They seem all right. Very dull and rich. Terribly serious for something as romantic as treasure hunting. They seem to spend all their time with Largo. Plotting and planning, I suppose. And they never seem to go out in the sun or go bathing or anything. It's as if they didn't want to get sunburned. As far as I can gather, none of them have ever been in the tropics before. Just a typical bunch of stuffy businessmen. They're probably better than that. I haven't seen much of them. Largo's giving a party for them at the Casino tonight.?

?What do you do all day??

?Oh, I fool around. Do a bit of shopping for the yacht. Drive around in the car. Bathe on other people's beaches when their houses are empty. I like underwater swimming. I've got an aqualung and I take one of the crew out or a fisherman. The crew are better. They all do it.?

?I used to do it a bit. I've brought my gear. Will you show me some good bits of reef sometime??

The girl looked pointedly at her watch. ?I might do. It's time I went.? She got up. ?Thanks for the drink. I'm afraid I can't take you back. I'm going the other way. They'll get you a taxi here.? She shuffled her feet into her sandals.

Bond followed the girl through the restaurant to her car. She got in and pressed the starter. Bond decided to risk another snub. He said, ?Perhaps I'll see you at the Casino tonight, Dominetta.?

?Praps.? She put the car pointedly into gear. She took another look at him. She decided that she did want to see him again. She said, ?But for God's sake don't call me Dominetta. I'm never called that. People call me Domino.? She gave him a brief smile, but it was a smile into the eyes. She raised a hand. The rear wheels spat sand and gravel and the little blue car whirled out along the driveway to the main road. It paused at the intersection and then, as Bond watched, turned righthanded toward Nassau.

Bond smiled. He said, ?Bitch,? and walked back into the restaurant to pay his bill and have a taxi called.