Miss Moneypenny and I cross the mountains alive, despite the car full of agents of The Eight who tried to force us over a cliff. The fiends! But I gripped the road, and they skidded and fell. I'm Bond!
Down into softer country, to the hotel. Turn the roadster round in the cobbled square before the lobby. For the first time a discordant note intrudes, for instead of the usual stylish swing and a leap from the car, I must stop and back up; the wheelbase is just too long. Miss Moneypenny goes inside to check our room while I wrestle with the roadster. "I'll just go make sure the bed is warm" she purrs. Ever-considerate Moneypenny!
As I park, I notice the trees. Just to the right of the old hotel, many trunks rise from one base. The warm grey curving polished limbs are subtly but unmistakably like naked bodies. Tree-torsos doing headstands, doing the splits, legs and crotches waving in the air.
From the heart of the grove, in the green shadow where where the trunks meet, rises the nude torso of a girl peering shyly out from her hollow hiding place... A lady in distress! Where are her clothes?
I blink and look again as I realize she's rising out of the wood, not behind it. A tree-spirit, a dryad!
The erotic limbs echo her exquisite little body, flaunts her over and over, while she hides. She's not so shy as she looks. Hungry for love! The whole tree writhes with loneliness.
But I'm Bond. I have responsibilities. Moneypenny is waiting. Though my heart urges me to stray, I force myself up the stony steps. Beside the dryad's tree, it feels like a crypt.
But I'm Bond. I have my script.
Our room upstairs has an oval mirror above the bed, reflecting Moneypenny, sprawled in gauze like a range of golden hills. "Come test the bed!" she says. And so we begin our obligatory love scene. The leaves rustle and peer in the window.
"Oh, James" she sighs, as I slide into her. Her voice sounds unusual, and I realize, with a shock, I've heard it before. The bomb threat! She's a double, not the real Moneypenny! A superb actress (and, I must say, an excellent lay). But I'm Bond, and my superb love-making skills have made her forget everything but me; she cries out in her true voice.
She's an agent for The Eight (those fiends!)
So I covertly activate my 99 mm repeating penile implant, and fuck her to death. As I fire away inside her, she dies happy.
As I disengage from her soft, warm corpse, I notice she's in more than a negligee: her knee-high go-go boots. Good. She was an opponent to respect, and even an enemy agent should die with her boots on.
Crash! Zing! The window shatters and a bullet punches the wall above my head. A sniper! I hide behind the bed, using M's luscious flesh as a shield.
Curious... now the window's intact again! Yet the bullet hole's still there. Was I hallucinating?
LSD in the champagne, of course! The fiends! This means the staff's compromised. It's a deathtrap. But even drugged, I'm more than a match for them! I'm BOND!
I dive out the double doors to the balcony, and over the stone rail, down to the lawn, firing at the snipers and enemy agents disguised as guests... I run round under cover of the flower-bushes, toward the roadster. Red lights flash around it--police vans. I pull out my card, my licence to kill, and roar "Get these vans out of the way AT ONCE!" The police grab me and cuff me. "You can't arrest me! I'm BOND!"
They can. They're in on it too.
A long dreary trip in a police van.
Helpless, I'm dragged before the enemy. THE EIGHT themselves! The whole Congressional Investigative Subcommittee on Intelligence Activities. They're all there: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, the Sleeper, the Shuffler, the Whisperer, the Note-Taker... and the Questioner.
This has never happened to me before. They begin the torture--the torture of having my actions questioned. I picture them as barking seals, to break their spell on me, but as I give evasive Agency answers, I suddenly see myself as the seal, a performing seal with a ball of lies balanced on the tip of my nose.
On the wall hangs a schedule:
|
8AM: E. Howard Hunt 10AM: Prisoner #2 Noon: Lunch 1PM: Oliver North 2:30 PM: James Bond 4PM: Joseph McCarthy |
A layer of double consciousness grows. Increasingly, I see myself the way the Committee of Eight sees me and my evasions: a paranoid liar. I don't even make much sense to me. Tangle myself up, now, worse and worse.
The Questioner, a tired man with glasses, asks me over and over, patiently, trying to get straight answers my mind is too twisted to give. Even he loses patience at last. "Have you no decency left, sir? At long last, have you no... decency... at... ALL?"
Seeing how he looks at me--this sad, patient man, trying to get some truth from my ravings... that I realized they're right. I AM insane. Paranoid, lying, killing.
I am the fiend.
I should have gone with the girl in the tree.