Now it was easy. He bent down, grabbed an ingot, was surprised by how heavy it was, but lifted it up and turned to push it onto the deck of Granjya, under the lower bar of the rail. Then he transferred a second ingot, and then he paused; they were really very heavy.
When he lifted the third ingot and turned, the deck of Granjya was too far away. Some wave had slightly altered the two vessels’ courses.
No matter. They were still tied together. What Curtis had to do now was get to the rear of the submarine, grab the rope, bring the two boats back in line.
It seemed to him too dangerous to try to crawl over the top of the submarine. It was probably too slippery, and he didn’t want to wind up in the water, even with Granjya right there next to him. So he slid down into the submarine, lay on his back on the lumpy ingots of gold, and opened the aft hatch cover from inside. All of this was taking longer than he’d expected.
This cover also slid away into the sea. Curtis slithered along the gold, raised himself through the aft hatch, and by the running lights of Granjya he could see that the two vessels had now yawed widely from one another, like an alligator’s mouth opening very wide. Both ships tried to move steadily forward, but each was hampered by the other, and they were turning almost disdainfully away from one another, the submarine attached by the rope around its rudder at the rear now facing almost directly away from the prow of Granjya.
The rope! Curtis saw it was going to happen, and lunged, but too late. The ships made one more incremental turn away from one another, and the rope tying them together met the spinning propeller of the submarine, and the propeller neatly sliced through.
Immediately the ships lunged away from one another. Curtis saw the lights of Granjya rapidly recede. There were no lights on the submarine.
Dive into the sea? He couldn’t possibly hope to swim fast enough to catch up with Granjya. But if he stayed in the submarine, what then?
Granjya’s lights were fainter, they disappeared. Curtis was getting wet. As the waves ran over the submarine, water ran inside through the two open hatches.
He was in pitch blackness, in this small heaving boat on the surface of the sea. It was riding lower, taking on water faster.
There was no light anywhere in the world, except far away to the north, far away, the cold white sheen of Hong Kong against the night sky. Curtis, standing in the hatchway on his gold ingots, his body moving with the roll of the submarine, kept his eyes on that far-off pale glow.
After a while, the lights were still there, but he was not.
Afterword by Jeff Kleeman
I discovered the joys of James Bond in 1973, when I was nine years old and my stepfather took me to see Live and Let Die. Two years later I discovered Donald Westlake. While wandering in a bookstore I came upon a novel by Tony Kenrick. One reviewer compared Kenrick to Westlake. Who is this Westlake guy who’s supposed to be so great, I wondered.
So I went hunting, like a heist artist in a Westlake plot. But trying to find a Westlake book in a sleepy California suburb, long before the days of Internet searches, wasn’t so easy. Eventually, I unearthed a trove of them in the public library and once I overcame the final obstacle (a librarian concerned the books were inappropriate for a child), I was hooked for life.
Twenty years later, a veteran fan of all things Westlake and Bond, I joined United Artists, where I found a way to unite them for the first time. Or so I thought. While I was unaware at the time, it turns out that watching Live and Let Die in 1973 was actually the first moment I laid eyes on both Bond and Don. Here’s Don divulging it to me in 1995:
Dear Jeff,
In LIVE AND LET DIE, I am the passenger in the red car in the stunt driving sequence on the FDR Drive in New York. When I saw the movie, back then, I was astonished at how much that black silhouette (moi) inside that car was being thrown around. At the time, it had just seemed like a little sideswipe, not such a much at all.
One car didn’t make it into the shot; a flashy pimpmobile with a black stunt driver in outrageous togs. After a rehearsal, he told the director he was almost out of gas and drove away and didn’t come back. Hours later, we learned what had happened. Being, like all the stunt drivers on that job, from Pennsylvania, he hadn’t known he couldn’t make a right turn on a red light in New York City. Wall Street area, Sunday, zero traffic. He turns, a police car appears out of nowhere, he’s stopped, he’s asked for license and registration. There’s no registration in the glove compartment of this rented specialty car. His wallet is in his regular clothes, not his costume. He has nothing. He said, “You see, I’m a stunt driver in a James Bond movie.” “And I,” said the cop, “am Minnie Mouse. Outta the car.” It was five hours before he got his phone call.
Show biz.
The tale of reviving the James Bond franchise is too lengthy to be unspooled here, but this you need to know: when we made GoldenEye, the film industry didn’t believe it would succeed. They had good reason. Marketing surveys revealed that the majority of teenage boys in 1995 had no idea who James Bond was. The few who were aware described him as “that guy my father likes.” There was a good reason for this: a Bond film hadn’t done substantial business since Octopussy in 1983. The Dalton Bonds never found a large audience. Fifteen-year-olds in 1995 had been only two years old the last time James Bond had been culturally significant.
The massive doubts about GoldenEye were accentuated by several factors: Pierce Brosnan was an ex-TV actor whose biggest recent role was a supporting turn in the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. Martin Campbell had done some wonderful television but had never directed a successful feature film. Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson had grown up working on the Bond films, but they had never before been lead producers.
The first hint that GoldenEye would explode conventional Hollywood wisdom came during production, when Martin Campbell did something I’d never seen another director do: even though we were in the middle of a complex shoot, Martin managed to cut together the opening sequence and then showed it to the cast, crew and all of us at the studio. This was his way of keeping morale high. Boy, did he succeed.
The next indicator came when we released a teaser trailer that displayed everything we believed a Bond film should be. In theaters across the country the response was ecstatic.
By the time we saw a first cut in early 1995, the feeling at MGM/UA had shifted from doubt to hope that Bond might be the savior the studio needed.
In 1993, when I joined United Artists, I rewatched every Bond film, reread every book, dove into the archives and learned everything I could about the history of the franchise. I was struck by the unusual connections between the movies and novelists. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice and the finished film has a unique, rebellious wit I suspect comes directly from Dahl. Anthony Burgess wrote the first draft of the Spy Who Loved Me screenplay.
I began to fantasize about what a Donald Westlake version of Bond would be. Don struck me as having it all — intricate plotting, Dahl and Burgess’s anarchic wit, plus an ability neither of them had: writing ingenious, tough, gritty action.