Flemming, Ian - James Bond - 14 - Octopussy By Ian Fleming.pdf

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OCTOPUSSY
Octopussy
By
Ian Fleming
Courtesy:
Shahid Riaz
Islamabad – Pakistan
shahid.riaz@gmail.com
http://www.esnips.com/web/Literature
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You know what?" said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. "You're going to have a
real treat today if I can manage it."
He had spoken aloud, and his breath had steamed up the glass of his Pirelli mask. He
put his feet down to the sand beside the coral boulder and stood up. The water reached
to his armpits. He took off the mask and spat into it, rubbed the spit round the glass,
rinsed it clean, and pulled the rubber band of the mask back over his head. He bent
down again.
The eye in the mottled brown sack was still watching him carefully from the hole in the
coral, but now the tip of a single small tentacle wavered hesitatingly an inch or two out
of the shadows and quested vaguely with its pink suckers uppermost. Dexter Smythe
smiled with satisfaction. Given time—perhaps one more month on top of the two during
which he had been chumming the octopus—and he would have tamed the darling. But
he wasn't going to have that month. Should he take a chance today and reach down
and offer his hand, instead of the expected lump of raw meat on the end of his spear, to
the tentacle? Shake it by the hand, so to speak? No, Pussy, he thought. I can't quite
trust you yet. Almost certainly other tentacles would whip out of the hole and up his
arm. He only needed to be dragged down less than two feet for the cork valve on his
mask to automatically close, and he would be suffocated inside it or, if he tore it off,
drowned. He might get in a quick lucky jab with his spear, but it would take more than
that to kill Pussy. No. Perhaps later in the day. It would be rather like playing Russian
roulette, and at about the same five-to-one odds. It might be a quick, a whimsical, way
out of his troubles! But not now. It would leave the interesting question unsolved. And
he had promised that nice Professor Bengry at the Institute.... Dexter Smythe swam
leisurely off toward the reef, his eyes questing for one shape only, the squat, sinister
wedge of a scorpionfish, or, as Bengry would put it, Scorpaena plumieri.
Major Dexter Smythe, O.B.E., Royal Marines (Retd.), was the remains of a once
brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man who had had the sexual run of
his teeth all his life, particularly among the Wrens and Wracs and ATS who manned the
communications and secretariat of the very special task force to which he had been
attached at the end of his service career. Now he was fifty-four and slightly bald, and
his belly sagged in his Jantzen trunks. And he had had two coronary thromboses, the
second (the "second warning" as his doctor, Jimmy Greaves, who had been one of their
high poker game at Prince's Club when Dexter Smythe had first come to Jamaica, had
half jocularly put it) only a month before. But, in his well-chosen clothes, with his
varicose veins out of sight, and with his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt
behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail
party or dinner on the North Shore. And it was a mystery to his friends and neighbors
why, in defiance of the two ounces of whiskey and the ten cigarettes a day to which his
doctor had rationed him, he persisted in smoking like a chimney and going to bed
drunk, if amiably drunk, every night.
The truth of the matter was that Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death
wish. The origins of this state of mind were many and not all that complex. He was
irretrievably tied to Jamaica, and tropical sloth had gradually riddled him so that, while
outwardly he appeared a piece of fairly solid hardwood, inside the varnished surface,
the termites of sloth, self-indulgence, guilt over an ancient sin, and general disgust with
himself had eroded his once hard core into dust. Since the death of Mary two years
before, he had loved no one. (He wasn't even sure that he had really loved her, but he
knew that, every hour of the day, he missed her love of him and her gay, untidy,
chiding, and often irritating presence.) And though he ate their canapés and drank their
martinis, he had nothing but contempt for the international riffraff with whom he
consorted on the North Shore. He could perhaps have made friends with the more solid
elements—the gentleman-farmers inland, the plantation owners on the coast, the
professional men, the politicians—but that would mean regaining some serious purpose
in life which his sloth, his spiritual accidie, prevented, and cutting down on the bottle,
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which he was definitely unwilling to do. So Major Smythe was bored, bored to death,
and, but for one factor in his life, he would long ago have swallowed the bottle of
barbiturates he had easily acquired from a local doctor. The lifeline that kept him
clinging to the edge of the cliff was a tenuous one. Heavy drinkers veer toward an
exaggeration of their basic temperaments, the classic four—sanguine, phlegmatic,
choleric, and melancholic. The sanguine drunk goes gay to the point of hysteria and
idiocy; the phlegmatic sinks into a morass of sullen gloom; the choleric is the fighting
drunk of the cartoonists who spends much of his life in prison for smashing people and
things; and the melancholic succumbs to self-pity, mawkishness, and tears. Major
Smythe was a melancholic who had slid into a drooling fantasy woven around the birds
and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of Wavelets (the name he had given
his small villa was symptomatic), its beach, and the coral reef beyond. The fish were his
particular favorites. He referred to them as "people," and since reef fish stick to their
territories as closely as do most small birds, he knew them all, after two years,
intimately, "loved" them, and believed that they loved him in return.
They certainly knew him, as the denizens of zoos know their keepers, because he
was a daily and a regular provider, scraping off algae and stirring up the sand and rocks
for the bottom-feeders, breaking up sea eggs and sea urchins for the small carnivores,
and bringing out scraps of offal for the larger ones. And now, as he swam slowly and
heavily up and down the reef and through the channels that led out to deep water, his
"people" swarmed around him fearlessly and expectantly, darting at the tip of the three-
pronged spear they knew only as a prodigal spoon, flirting right up to the glass of the
Pirelli, and even, in the case of the fearless, pugnacious demoiselles, nipping softly at
his feet and legs.
Part of Major Smythe's mind took in all these brilliantly colored little "people" and he
greeted them in unspoken words. ("Morning, Beau Gregory" to the dark blue demoiselle
sprinkled with bright blue spots—the jewelfish that exactly resembles the starlit
fashioning of a bottle of Guerlain's Dans La Nuit; "Sorry. Not today, sweetheart" to a
fluttering butterflyfish with false black eyes on its tail; and "You're too fat anyway, Blue
Boy," to an indigo parrotfish that must have weighed a good ten pounds.) But today he
had a job to do and his eyes were searching for only one of his "people"—his only
enemy on the reef, the only one he killed on sight, a scorpionfish.
The scorpionfish inhabits most of the southern waters of the world, and the rascasse
that is the foundation of bouillabaisse belongs to the family. The West Indian variety
runs up to only about twelve inches long and perhaps a pound ha weight. It is by far the
ugliest fish in the sea, as if nature were giving warning. It is a mottled brownish gray
with a heavy wedge-shaped shaggy head. It has fleshy pendulous "eyebrows" that
droop over angry red eyes and a coloration and broken silhouette that are perfect
camouflage on the reef. Though a small fish, its heavily toothed mouth is so wide that it
can swallow whole most of the smaller reef fishes, but its supreme weapon lies in its
erectile dorsal fins, the first few of which, acting on contact like hypodermic needles, are
fed by poison glands containing enough dotoxin to kill a man if they merely graze him in
a vulnerable spot—in an artery, for instance, or over the heart or in the groin. It
constitutes the only real danger to the reef swimmer, far more dangerous than the
barracuda or the shark, because, supreme in its confidence in its camouflage and
armory, it flees before nothing except the very close approach of a foot or actual
contact. Then it flits only a few yards, on wide and bizarrely striped pectorals, and
settles again watchfully either on the sand, where it looks like a lump of overgrown
coral, or among the rocks and seaweed where it virtually disappears. And Major
Smythe was determined to find one and spear it and give it to his octopus to see if it
would take it or spurn it—to see if one of the ocean's great predators would recognize
the deadliness of another, know of its poison. Would the octopus consume the belly
and leave the spines? Would it eat the lot? And if so, would it suffer from the poison?
These were the questions Bengry at the Institute wanted answered, and today, since it
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was going to be the beginning of the end of Major Smythe's life at Wavelets—and
though it might mean the end of his darling Octopussy—Major Smythe had decided to
find out the answers and leave one tiny memorial to his now futile life in some dusty
corner of the Institute's marine biological files.
For, in only the last couple of hours, Major Dexter Smythe's already dismal life had
changed very much for the worse. So much for the worse that he would be lucky if, in a
few weeks' time—time for an exchange of cables via Government House and the
Colonial Office to the Secret Service and thence to Scotland Yard and the Public
Prosecutor, and for Major Smythe's transportation to London with a police escort—he
got away with a sentence of imprisonment for life.
And all this because of a man called Bond, Commander James Bond, who had turned
up at ten-thirty that morning in a taxi from Kingston.
* * *
The day had started normally. Major Smythe had awakened from his Seconal sleep,
swallowed a couple of Panadols (his heart condition forbade him aspirin), showered,
skimped his breakfast under the umbrella-shaped sea almonds, and spent an hour
feeding the remains of his breakfast to the birds. He then took his prescribed doses of
anticoagulant and blood-pressure pills and killed time with the Daily Gleaner until it was
time for his elevenses, which, for some months now, he had advanced to ten-thirty. He
had just poured himself the first of two stiff brandy and ginger ales (The Drunkard's
Drink) when he heard the car coming up the drive.
Luna, his colored housekeeper, came out into the garden and announced "Gemmun
to see you, Major."
"What's his name?"
"Hun doan say, Major. Him say to tell you him come from Govment House."
Major Smythe was wearing nothing but a pair of old khaki shorts and sandals. He
said, "All right, Luna. Put him in the living room and say I won't be a moment." And he
went round the back way into his bedroom and put on a white bush shirt and trousers
and brushed his hair. Government House! Now what the hell?
As soon as he had walked through into the living room and seen the tall man in the
dark blue tropical suit standing at the picture window looking out to sea, Major Smythe
had somehow sensed bad news. And, when the man had turned slowly toward him and
looked at him with watchful, serious gray-blue eyes, he had known that this was
officialdom, and when his cheery smile was not returned, inimical officialdom. And. a
chill had run down Major Smythe's spine. "They" had somehow found out.
"Well, well. I'm Smythe. I gather you're from Government House. How's Sir Kenneth?"
There was somehow no question of shaking hands. The man said, "I haven't met him.
I only arrived a couple of days ago. I've been out round the island most of the time. My
name's Bond, James Bond. I'm from the Ministry of Defense."
Major Smythe remembered the hoary euphemism for the Secret Service. He said
bonhomously, "Oh. The old firm?"
The question had been ignored. "Is there somewhere we can talk?"
"Rather. Anywhere you like. Here or in the garden? What about a drink?" Major
Smythe clinked the ice in the glass he still held in his hand. "Rum and ginger's the local
poison. I prefer the ginger by itself." The lie came out with the automatic smoothness of
the alcoholic.
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"No thanks. And here would be fine." The man leaned negligently against the wide
mahogany windowsill.
Major Smythe sat down and threw a jaunty leg over the low arm of one of the
comfortable planters' chairs he had had copied from an original by the local
cabinetmaker. He pulled out the drink coaster from the other arm, took a deep pull at
his glass, and slid it, with a consciously steady hand, down into the hole in the wood.
"Well," he said cheerily, looking the other man straight in the eyes, "what can I do for
you? Somebody been up to some dirty work on the North Shore and you need a spare
hand? Be glad to get into harness again. It's been a long time since those days, but I
can still remember some of the old routines."
"Do you mind if I smoke?" The man had already got his cigarette case in his hand. It
was a flat gun-metal one that would hold around twenty-five. Somehow this small sign
of a shared weakness comforted Major Smythe.
"Of course, my dear fellow." He made a move to get up, his lighter ready.
"It's all right, thanks." James Bond had already lit his cigarette. "No, it's nothing local. I
want to... I've been sent out to... ask you to recall your work for the Service at the end
of the war." James Bond paused and looked down at Major Smythe carefully.
"Particularly the time when you were working with the Miscellaneous Objectives
Bureau."
Major Smythe laughed sharply. He had known it. He had known it for absolutely sure.
But when it came out of this man's mouth, the laugh had been forced out of Major
Smythe like the scream of a hit man. "Oh Lord, yes. Good old MOB. That was a lark all
right." He laughed again. He felt the anginal pain, brought on by the pressure of what
he knew was coming, build up across his chest. He dipped his hand into his trouser
pocket, tilted the little bottle into the palm of his hand, and slipped the white TNT pill
under his tongue. He was amused to see the tension coil up in the other man, the way
the eyes narrowed watchfully. It's all right, my dear fellow. This isn't a death pill. He
said, "You troubled with acidosis? No? It slays me when I go on a bender. Last night.
Party at Jamaica Inn. One really ought to stop thinking one's always twenty-five.
Anyway, let's get back to MOB Force. Not many of us left, I suppose." He felt the pain
across his chest withdraw into its lair. "Something to do with the Official History?"
James Bond looked down at the tip of his cigarette. "Not exactly."
"I expect you know I wrote most of the chapter on the Force for the War Book. It's
fifteen years since then. Doubt if I'd have much to add today."
"Nothing more about that operation in the Tirol—place called Oberaurach, about a
mile east of Kitzbühel?"
One of the names he had been living with for fifteen years forced another harsh laugh
out of Major Smythe. "That was a piece of cake! You've never seen such a shambles.
All those Gestapo toughs with their doxies. All of 'em hog-drunk. They'd kept their files
all ticketty-boo. Handed them over without a murmur. Hoped that'd earn 'em easy
treatment I suppose. We gave the stuff a first going-over and shipped all the bods off to
the Munich camp. Last I heard of them. Most of them hanged for war crimes I expect.
We handed the bumf over to HQ at Salzburg. Then we went on up the Mittersill valley
after another hideout." Major Smythe took a good pull at his drink and lit a cigarette. He
looked up. "That's the long and the short of it."
"You were Number Two at the time, I think. The CO was an American, a Colonel King
from Patton's army."
"That's right. Nice fellow. Wore a mustache, which isn't like an American. Knew his
way among the local wines. Quite a civilized chap."
"In his report about the operation he wrote that he handed you all the documents for a

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