'Well, that's different,' he chuckled. 'I still stick to the etchings.'
She had the passenger door open. 'Oh, but I have gadgets,' she laughed again. 'I'm a senior executive of Q Branch, remember. I like to take my work home with me.'
Bond locked the doors, followed her up the steps and into the small elevator which had been installed during what estate agents call 'extensive modernisation'.
From the small entrance hall of Q'ute's apartment Bond could see the kitchen and bathroom. She opened the main door and they passed into the remainder of the apartment one huge room the walls hung with two large matching gilt-framed mirrors, a genuine Hockney and an equally genuine Bratby, of a well-known composer whose musicals had been at their peak fifteen to twenty years ago. The furnishings were mainly late 1960s Biba, and the lighting was to match Swedish in design, and mounted on battens angled into the corners of the room.
'Ah, period decor,' said Bond with a grin.
Ann Reilly smiled back. 'All is not as it seems,' she giggled, and for a moment Bond wondered if she was not used to drinking: perhaps the wine had gone to her head. Then he saw her hand move to a small console of buttons by the light switches. Her fingers stabbed at the buttons, and in the next few seconds Bond could only think of transformation scenes at childhood pantomimes.
The lights dimmed and the room became bathed in a soft red glow which came from the skirting boards. The large, circular, smoked glass table which formed a focal point at the centre of the room seemed to sink into the carpet, and from it there came the sound of splashing water as it gleamed with light to become a small pond with a fountain playing at its centre. The Hockney, Bratby, and both of the mirrors appeared to cloud over, then clear, changed into paintings of a nature that almost shocked Bond by their explicitness.
He sniffed the air: a musky scent had risen around him, while the sound of piano music gently rose in volume a slow, sensual blues solo, so close and natural that Bond peered about him, thinking the girl was actually sitting at an instrument somewhere. The scent and music began to claw at his senses. Then he took a step back, his eyes moving to the wall on his right. The wall had started to open up, and, from behind it, a large, high, waterbed slid soundlessly into the room above it a mirrored canopy hanging from crimson silk ropes.
Ann Reilly had disappeared. For a second, Bond was disorientated, his back to the wall, head and eyes moving over the extraordinary sight. Then he saw her, behind the fountain, a small light, dim but growing to illuminate her as she stood naked but for a thin, translucent nightdress; her hair undone and falling to her waist hair and the thin material moving and blowing as though caught in a silent zephyr.
Then, as suddenly as it all happened, the room started to change again. The lighting returned to normal, the table rose from the fountain, the Hockney, Bratby, and mirrors were there once more, and Q'ute slowly faded from view. Only the bed stayed in place.
There was a chuckle from behind him, and Bond turned to find Q'ute, still in her brown velvet, and with her hair smooth and pleated, as she leaned against the wall laughing. 'You like it?' she asked.
Bond frowned. 'But?..'
'Oh come on, James. The transformation's easy: micro and electronics;son et lumiere.I built it all myself.'
'But you?..'
'Yes,' she frowned, 'that's the most expensive bit, but I put most of that together as well; and the modelisme. Hologram. Very effective, yes? Complete 3D. Come on, I'll show you the gubbins...'
She was about to move away when Bond caught hold of her, pulled her close and into a wild kiss. She slid her hands to his shoulders, gently pushing him away. 'Let's see.' She cocked an eyebrow at him. 'I thought you'd have got the idea. You said the place was period decor 1960s. All I've done and I've spent many happy hours getting it right is add in a 1960s' fantasy: music, lights, the waterbed, scent, and an available bird with very few clothes on. I thought you of all people, James Bond, would have got the message. Fantasies should change with the times. Surely we're all more realistic these days. Particularly about relationships. The word is, I think, maturity.'
Yes, thought Bond, Q'utewasa good name for Ann Reilly, as she scurried around showing off the electronics of her fantasy room. 'It might be an illusion', he said, 'but it still has a lethal effect.'
She turned towards him, 'Well, James, the bed's still there. It usually is. Have some coffee and let's get to know one another.'
In his own flat the next morning, Bond was awake before six-thirty. The biter bit, he thought, with a wry smile. If ever a man's bluff had been called, it was by the ingenious Q'ute. In good humour he exercised, took a hot bath, followed by a cold shower; shaved, dressed and was in his dining room when the faithful May came in with his copy of The Timesand his normal breakfast the favourite meaclass="underline" two large cups of black coffee, from De Bry, without sugar; a single 'perfectly boiled' brown egg (Bond still affected to dislike anything but brown eggs, and kept his opinion regarding three and one-third minutes constituting the perfect boiling time); then two slices of wholewheat toast with Jersey butter and Tiptree 'Little Scarlet' strawberry jam, Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade or Norwegian heather honey.
Governments could come and go; crises could erupt; inflation may spiral, but when in London Bond's breakfast routine rarely changed. In this he was the worst thing a man in his profession could be: a man of habit, who enjoyed the day starting in one particular manner, eating from the dark blue egg cup with a gold ring around the top, which matched the rest of his Minton china, and happy to see the Queen Anne silver coffee pot and accessories on his table. Faddish as this quirk certainly was, Bond would have been outraged if anyone told him it smacked of snobbery. For James Bond, snobbery was for others, in all walks of life. A man has a right to certain pleasurable idiosyncrasies more than a right, if they settled his mind and stomach for the day ahead.
Following the Q'ute incident, Bond hardly took any time off during the preparation for what he now thought of as an assignation with Anton Murik on Gold Cup day.
On most evenings lately he had gone straight back to his flat and a book which he kept between his copiesof Scarne's Complete Guide to Gamblingand an 1895 edition of the classic Sharps and Flats A complete revelation of the secrets of cheating at games of chance and skillby John Nevil Maskelyne. The book he read avidly each night had been published privately around the turn of the century. Bond had come across it in Paris several years before, and had it rebound in board and calf by a printer often employed by the Service. It was written by a man using the pseudonym Cutpurse and titledThe Skills, Arts and Secrets of the Dip.It was, in fact, a comprehensive treatise on the ancient arts of the pickpocket and light-fingered body-thief.
Using furniture, old coats even a standard lamp Bond practised various moves in which he was already well skilled. His discussions with M, as to how he should introduce himself to the Laird of Murcaldy and his entourage, had formulated a plan that called for the cleverest possible use of some of the tricks described by Cutpurse. Bond knew that to practise some of these dodges, it was necessary to keep in constant trim like a card sharp, or even a practitioner of the harmless, entertaining, business of legerdemain. He therefore began anew, re-learning the bump, the buzz, the two-fingered lift, the palm-dip (usually used on breast pockets), the jog in which a small billfold is literally jogged from a man's hip pocket or the thumb-hitch.
A pickpocket seldom works alone. Gangs of from three to ten are the normal rule, so Bond's own plan was to be made doubly difficult: first he had to do the thing by himself; second, the normal picking of pockets did not apply. He was slowly working up his skill to the most difficult move in the book the necklace flimp: flimp being a word that went back to the early nineteenth century, when flimping referred, normally, to the removal of a person's fob watch. Towards the end of the period Bond was spending several hours a night perfecting the moves of the necklace flimp. All he could hope for was that M's information, given to him during those long hours of briefing under the Cooper painting of Admiral Jervis's victory, would prove accurate.