Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [4]
‘It’s his tongue,’ said Dumont.
Mathis lowered Hashim’s arm. ‘Why mutilate him when he’s dead? Some code or signal, do you think?’
‘ They didn’t do it when he was dead,’ said
Dumont. ‘I’m almost certain they did it when he was alive. Must have ripped it out with pliers or something.’
‘God.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Haven’t you?’ said Mathis. ‘I have. It rings a bell. I’ve come across it somewhere . . . Somewhere. Anyway, thank you, Doctor. You can put him back now. I have work to do.’
He strode down the corridor, through the lobby of the building and out into the rain. ‘ Turn that awful Piaf racket off,’ he said, as he climbed into the car,
‘and take me to the office.’
The driver said nothing, but switched off the radio, pushed the gear lever up into first and moved off
with the inevitable squeal. It was just past two a.m.
.
2. A Voice from the Past
It was a bright Sunday morning, and the pilgrims had gathered in their thousands in St Peter’s Square to hear the Pope address them from an upstairs window.
James Bond dallied for a moment among the faithful. He watched their credulous faces crane towards the distant balcony and the light of joy that came into them when the old man spoke a few words in their own language. He almost envied them their simple faith. He shook his head and moved off through the pigeons.
Not even the supposedly universal tongue of Latin had been able to make an impression on Bond, a disconsolate figure as he walked off past the squat Castel Sant’ Angelo and crossed the Tiber into the via Zanardelli, where he stopped at a bar and ordered
an americano – a pungent espresso that lasted two sips instead of the single one of the regular caffe`. The place was filled with people taking a leisurely late breakfast, talking animatedly, and of waiters cheerily calling out their orders to the bar. One or two middleaged women had brought their pet dogs and fed them morsels of pastry beneath the table. Bond stood at the bar to drink his coffee, left a few coins and wandered off again into the street.
His three-month sabbatical, enforced by the medical people back in London, still had two weeks to run. It had been pleasant enough to begin with. An old friend of M’s had fixed him up with a cottage in Barbados where he’d been able to swim and snorkel most of the day before eating dinner on the terrace, cooked and served by a plump female islander called Charity. She did marvellous grilled fish and rice dishes, with home-made ice-creams and piles of sliced mango and papaya to follow. At the medics’ insistence, Bond had drunk no alcohol and retired to bed no later than ten o’clock with only a paperback book and a powerful barbiturate for company.
He kept up a fitness regimen to no more than 75 per cent of his potential. In addition to the swimming, he ran three miles a day, did pull-ups on a metal bar on the beach and fifty press-ups before his
second shower of the day. It was enough to stop him going stale, but little more than that.
However, he had also been given honorary
membership of the local tennis club, and in the early evenings, instead of drinking cocktails, he walked down to play with Wayland, an impressively quick youngster from the local police service. Bond, who, since his schooldays, had played tennis only a dozen times, and then without great enthusiasm, found his competitive instinct aroused by Wayland’s booming serve-and-volley game. Tennis was not, it turned out, a game of cucumber sandwiches and sporting pleas to ‘take two more’ – not how Wayland played. It was a lung-searing, shoulder-wrenching battle of wills. Bond was horribly out of practice, but his coordination was exceptional and his will to win even more so. It wasn’t until the fifth encounter that he managed to take a set from the younger man, but as his own game improved he began to exploit the mental weaknesses in Wayland’s play. It became an encounter neither wished to lose, and they generally stopped at two sets all for