‘The mermaid?’

‘Oh yes. Underneath the bottom corner of the lifebuoy where it dips into the sea, the hero had put a tiny mermaid combing her hair with one hand and beckoning him home with the other. That was supposed to be the woman he was going to find and marry. But you can see there wasn’t room and anyway her breasts were showing and Mr Player, who was a very strong Quaker, didn’t think that was quite proper. But he made it up to the hero in the end.’

‘Oh, how did he do that?’

‘Well you see the cigarettes were a great success. It was really the picture that did it. People decided that anything with a wonderful picture like that on the outside must be good and Mr Player made a fortune and I expect his Successors did too. So when the hero was getting old and hadn’t got long to live, Mr Player had a copy of the lifebuoy picture drawn by the finest artist of the day. It was just the same as the hero’s except that it wasn’t in colour and it showed him very much older, and he promised the hero that this picture too would always be on his cigarette packets, only on the inside bit. Here.’ She pushed out the cardboard container. ‘You see how old he looks? And one other thing, if you look closely, the flags on the two ships are flying at half mast. Rather sweet of Mr Player, don’t you think, to ask the artist for that. It meant that the hero’s first and last ships were remembering him. And Mr Player and his two sons came and presented it to him just before he died. It must have made it much easier for him don’t you think?’

‘It certainly must. Mr Player must have been a very thoughtful man.’

The girl was slowly returning from her dreamland. She said in a different, rather prim voice, ‘Well thank you anyway for having listened to the story. I know it’s all a fairy tale. At least I suppose it is. But children are stupid in that way. They like to have something to keep under the pillow until they’re quite grown up – a rag doll or a small toy or something. I know that boys are just the same. My brother hung on to a little metal charm his nanny had given him until he was nineteen. Then he lost it. I shall never forget the scenes he made. Even though he was in the air force by then and it was the middle of the war. He said it brought him luck.’ She shrugged her shoulders. There was sarcasm in her voice as she said, ‘He needn’t have worried. He did all right. He was much older than me, but I adored him. I still do. Girls always love crooks, particularly if they’re their brother. He did so well that he might have done something for me. But he never did. He said that life was every man for himself. He said that his grandfather had been so famous as a poacher and a smuggler in the Dolomites that his was the finest tombstone among all the Petacchi graves in the graveyard at Bolzano. My brother said he was going to have a finer one still, and by making money the same way.’

Bond held his cigarette steady. He took a long draw at it and let the smoke out with a quiet hiss. ‘Is your family name Petacchi then?’

‘Oh yes. Vitali is only a stage name. It sounded better so I changed it. Nobody knows the other. I’ve almost forgotten it myself. I’ve called myself Vitali since I came back to Italy. I wanted to change everything.’

‘What happened to your brother? What was his first name?’

‘Giuseppe. He went wrong in various ways. But he was a wonderful flyer. Last time I heard of him he’d been given some high-up job in Paris. Perhaps that’ll make him settle down. I pray every night that it will. He’s all I’ve got. I love him in spite of everything. You understand that?’

Bond stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. He called for the bill. He said, ‘Yes, I understand that.’

16 | SWIMMING THE GAUNTLET

The dark water below the police wharf sucked and kissed at the rusty iron stanchions. In the latticed shadows cast through the ironwork by the three-quarter moon, Constable Santos heaved the single aqualung cylinder up on to Bond’s back and Bond secured the webbing at his waist so that it would not snarl the strap of Leiter’s second Geiger counter, the underwater model. He fitted the rubber mouthpiece between his teeth and adjusted the valve release until the air supply was just right. He turned off the supply and took out the mouthpiece. The music of the steel band in the Junkanoo night-club tripped gaily out over the water. It sounded like a giant spider dancing on a tenor xylophone.

Santos was a huge coloured man, naked except for his swimming trunks, with pectoral muscles the size of dinner plates. Bond said, ‘What should I expect to see at this time of night? Any big fish about?’

Santos grinned. ‘Usual harbour stuff, sah. Some barracuda perhaps. Mebbe a shark. But they’s lazy an overfed with the refuse and muck from de drains. Dey won’t trouble you – less you bleedin’ that is. They’ll be night-crawlin’ things on the bottom – lobster, crab, mebbe a small pus-feller or two. The bottom’s mostly seagrass on bits o’ iron from wrecks an plenty of bottle and suchlike. Mucky, if you get me, sah. But the water’s clear and you’ll be hokay with this moon and the lights from the Disco to guide you. Tek you bout twelve, fifteen minute, I’da say. Funny ting. I been lookin’ for an hour and dere’s no watchman on deck and no one in the wheelhouse. An the bit o’ breeze should hide you bubbles. Coulda give you an oxygen re-breather, but ah doan like dem tings. Them dangerous.’

‘All right, let’s go then. See you in about half an hour.’ Bond felt for the knife at his waist, shifted the webbing and put the mouthpiece between his teeth. He turned on the air and, his fins slapping on the muddy sand, walked down and into the water. There he bent down, spat into his mask to prevent it steaming up, washed it and adjusted it. Then he walked slowly on, getting used to the breathing. By the end of the wharf he was up to his ears. He quietly submerged and launched himself forward into an easy leg crawl, his hands along his flanks.

The mud shelved steeply and Bond kept on going down, until, at about forty feet, he was only a few inches above the bottom. He glanced at the big luminous figures on the dial of his watch – 12.10. He untensed himself and put his legs into an easy, relaxed rhythm.

Through the roof of small waves the pale moonlight flickered on the grey bottom, and the refuse – motor tyres, cans, bottles – cast black shadows. A small octopus, feeling his shock-wave, turned from dark brown to pale grey and squeezed itself softly back into the mouth of the oil-drum that was its home. Sea flowers, the gelatinous polyps that grow out of the sand at night, whisked down their holes as Bond’s black shadow touched them. Other tiny night things puffed thin jets of silt out of their small volcanoes in the mud as they felt the tremor of Bond’s passage, and an occasional hermit crab snapped itself back into its borrowed shell. It was like travelling across a moon landscape, on and under which many mysterious creatures lived minute lives. Bond watched it all, carefully, as if he had been an underwater naturalist. He knew that was the way to keep nerves steady under the sea – to focus the whole attention on the people who lived there and not try and probe the sinister grey walls of mist for imaginary monsters.

The rhythm of his steady progress soon became automatic, and while Bond, keeping the moon at his right shoulder, held to his course, his mind reached back to Domino. So she was the sister of the man who probably hijacked the plane! Probably even Largo, if Largo was in fact involved in the plot, didn’t know this. So what did the relationship amount to? Coincidence. It could be nothing else. Her whole manner was so entirely innocent. And yet it was one more thin straw to add to the meagre pile that seemed in some indeterminate way to be adding up to Largo’s involvement. And Largo’s reaction at the word ‘SPECTRE’. That could be put down to Italian superstition – or it could not. Bond had a deadly feeling that all these tiny scraps amounted to the tip of an iceberg – a few feet of ice pinnacle, with below, a thousand tons of the stuff. Should he report? Or shouldn’t he? Bond’s mind boiled with indecision. How to put it? How to grade the intelligence so that it would reflect his doubts? How much to say and how much to leave out?