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FROM A VIEW TO A KILL

The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint In the howling speed-tur seventy, they were the only quiet things in the hurtling flesh and les, they stared fixedly ahead from just above the centre of the handlebars, and their dark unwavering focus was that of gun ot into the face through the rin that showed big tourin the cheeks had been blown out by the wind into pouches that fluttered slightly To right and left of the hurtling face under the crash helauntlets, broken-wristed at the controls, looked like the attacking paws of a big animal

The man was dressed in the unifornals, and his reen, ith certain modifications to the valves and the carburettor and the reive more speed, identical with a standard British Ar in the est that he was not what he appeared to be, except a fully loaded Luger held by a clip to the top of the petrol tank

It was seven o'clock on a May littered with the tiny lu On both sides of the road the reat oak trees held the theatrical enchantment of the royal forests of Versailles and St Ger local traffic in the St Germain area, and the motor-cyclist had just passed beneath the Paris-Mantes autoroute already thundering with co north towards St Gerht in either direction, except, perhaps half a ure - another Royal Corps dispatch-rider He was a younger, sli thehis speed to around forty He ell on time and it was a beautiful day He wondered whether to have his eggs fried or scraht

Five hundred yards, four hundred, three, two, one The auntlet up to his teeth and pulled it off He stuffed the gauntlet between the buttons of his tunic and reached down and unclipped the gun

By now heman jerked his head round, surprised to find another dispatch-rider on his run at that ti He expected that it would be an Aht be anyone froht NATO nations that nized the uniforhted Who the hell could it be? He raised a cheerful right thu for the other side With one eye on the road ahead and the other on the approaching silhouette in the h the names of the British riders in the Special Service Transportation Unit at Headquarters Coht be Wally, sa about that little frog bit in the canteen - Louise, Elise, Lise - what the hell was her name

The un had slowed Noas fifty yards away His face, undistorted by the wind, had set into blunt, hard, perhaps Slav lines A red spark burned behind the black, aipie flew out of the forest ahead of the young dispatch-rider It fled clun that said that St Gerrinned and raised an ironical finger in salute and self-protection - 'One pie is sorrow'

Twenty yards behind hiun took both hands off the handlebars, lifted the Luger, rested it carefully on his left forearm and fired one shot

The young man's hands whipped off his controls andspine His machine veered across the road, jurass and lilies of the valley There it rose up on its screa back wheel and slowly crashed backwards on top of its dead rider The BSA coughed and kicked and tore at the young man's clothes and at the flowers, and then lay quiet

The killer executed a narrow turn and stopped with hisback the way he had come He stamped down the wheel-rest, pulled histhe wild flowers under the trees He knelt down beside the dead hly he tore the black leather dispatch-case off the corpse and ripped open the buttons of the tunic and removed a battered leather wallet He wrenched a cheap wrist-watch so sharply off the left wrist that the chro the dispatch-case over his shoulder While he stowed the wallet and the watch away in his tunic pocket he listened There were only forest sounds and the slow tick of hot metal from the crashed BSA The killer retraced his steps to the road He walked slowly, scuffing leaves over the tyre marks in the soft earth and moss He took extra trouble over the deep scars in the ditch and the grass verge, and then stood beside his motor-cycle and looked back towards the lily of the valley patch Not bad! Probably only the police dogs would get it, and, with ten miles of road to cover, they would be hours, perhaps days - plenty long enough The in He could have shot the et to twenty And taking the watch and the wallet had been nice touches - pro touches

Pleased with himself, the man heaved his machine off its rest, vaulted smartly into the saddle and kicked down on the starter Slowly, so as not to show skid marks, he accelerated away back down the road and in a ain and the wind had redrawn the erin across his face

Around the scene of the killing, the forest, which had held its breath while it was done, slowly began to breathe again

Ja at Fouquet's It was not a solid drink One cannot drink seriously in French caf‚s Out of doors on a pavein A fine … I'eau is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good A quart de chaht before luncheon, but in the evening one quart leads to another quart and a bottle of indifferent chaht Pernod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its liquorice taste reminded him of his childhood No, in cafes you have to drink the least offensive of the o with the - an Ae slice of lemon peel and soda For the soda he always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink

When Bond was in Paris he invariably stuck to the same addresses He stayed at the Terminus Nord, because he liked station hotels and because this was the least pretentious and most anonymous of them He had luncheon at the Caf‚ de la Paix, the Rotonde or the D“h and it amused him to watch the people If he wanted a solid drink he had it at Harry's Bar, both because of the solidity of the drinks and because, on his first ignorant visit to Paris at the age of sixteen, he had done what Harry's advertisement in the Continental Daily Mail had told him to do and had said to his taxi-driver 'Sank Roo Doe Noo' That had started one of thein the loss, alinity and his notecase For dinner, Bond went to one of the great restaurants - V‚four, the Caneton, Lucas-Carton or the Cochon d'Or These he considered, whatever Michelin ent, Maxims and the like, to have somehow avoided the tarnish of the expense account and the dollar Anyway, he preferred their cooking After dinner he generally went to the Place Pigalle to see ould happen to hi did, he would walk hoo to bed

Tonight Bond decided to tear up this dusty address-book and have hih Paris after a disarian border It had been a question of getting a certain Hungarian out Bond had been sent from London specially to direct the operation over the head of Station V This had been unpopular with the Vienna Station There had been s - wilful ones The man had been killed in the frontier minefield There would have to be a court of inquiry Bond was due back at his London headquarters on the following day to ht of it all depressed him Today had been so beautiful - one of those days when you aly - and Bond had decided to give the town just one irl as a real girl, and he would take her to dinner at some make-believe place in the Bois like the Armenonville To clean the money-look out of her eyes - for it would certainly be there - he would as soon as possible give her fifty thousand francs He would say to her: 'I propose to call you Donatienne, or possibly Solange, because these are na We knew each other before and you lent me this money because I was in a jam Here it is, and noill tell each other e have been doing since we last o In the meantime, here is the menu and the wine list and you must choose ill make you happy and fat' And she would look relieved at not having to try any h and say: 'But, James, I do not want to be fat' And there they would be, started on the ', and Bond would stay sober and be interested in her and everything she said And, by God, by the end of the evening it would not be his fault if it transpired that there was in fact no shred of stuffing left in the hoary old fairytale of 'A good time in Paris'

Sitting in Fouquet's, waiting for his Americano, Bond s at this fantasy for the satisfaction of launching a last kick at a town he had cordially disliked since the War Since 1945, he had not had a happy day in Paris It was not that the town had sold its body Many towns have done that It was its heart that was gone - pawned to the tourists, pawned to the Russians and Rouradually taken the town over And, of course, pawned to the Germans You could see it in the people's eyes - sullen, envious, ashalanced across the pavelinted painfully Everywhere it was the same as in the Champs-Elys‚es There were only two hours in which you could even see the town - between five and seven in thestreas, no spacious, tree-lined boulevards, could compete

The waiter's tray clattered down on the marble-topped table With a slick one-handed jerk that Bond had never been able to copy, the waiter's bottle-opener prised the cap off the Perrier The man slipped the tab under the ice-bucket, said a mechanical “Voil…, M'sieur” and darted away Bond put ice into his drink, filled it to the top with soda and took a long pull at it He sat back and lit a Laurens jaune Of course the evening would be a disaster Even supposing he found the girl in the next hour or so, the contents would certainly not stand up to the wrapping On closer examination she would turn out to have the heavy, dank, wide-pored skin of the bourgeois French The blonde hair under the rakish velvet beret would be brown at the roots and as coarse as piano wire The pepperarlic The alluring figure would be intricately scaffolded ire and rubber She would be from Lille and she would ask him if he was American And, Bond smiled to himself, she or her maquereau would probably steal his notecase La ronde! He would be back where he came in More or less, that was Well, to hell with it!