James Bond and Moonraker by Christopher Wood

Author:Christopher Wood [Wood, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Triad/Panther
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

SUGAR LOAF — ONE LUMP OR TWO?

Carnival was dying as Bond took the cable car to the top of the Sugar Loaf. Drunks were finding that gutters no longer fitted as comfortably as they had a few hours before, and were beginning to limp home. The fires on the beaches were dying down to blackened embers and there was more litter on the streets than dancers. Even the unquenchable samba was a hydra-headed sound weaving from many different quarters rather than the blunt all-conquering rhythm that had once bludgeoned the eardrums with a single beat.

The cable car reached the first sharp prong of rock and the doors crashed open. Bond was alone save for two middle-aged men who stepped out and walked purposefully towards the boarded-up fronts of souvenir stalls situated below the steps that led from the cable car station. That these men were going to open the stalls in the hope that a few tourists remained sober enough to visit them was beyond doubt. They had not looked out of the windows once since entering the cable car. They had seen one of the most breathtaking views in the world a million times, going up and going down. It was wallpaper to them, their face in the shaving mirror, the wife’s head on the pillow. They did not see it any more.

Bond crossed to take the second cable car, looking up to the great slack weight of wire sagging above a thousand-foot drop. He was alone in the cable car and almost beyond the reach of the faint samba beat that eddied up from the streets and beaches and open places below. The doors closed and the wires began to hum. As the car jerked forward, so the twin car began its descent; a small red square that detached itself from the concrete mouth above like a bloody tooth. Bond looked down to the long grass and across to the skirt of foliage that clothed the side of the Sugar Loaf. Time and the elements had scored deep claw marks in its side and it looked easy enough to scale. To the right was the sea and to the left the peak of Corcovado, almost twice as high as the Sugar Loaf and with the statue of Christ at its summit, its arms spread wide, offering perpetual succour to the volatile city that sprawled beneath it. Bond decided he preferred Nelson’s Column, but his preference might have been either patriotism overcoming aesthetics or a pragmatic faith in secular saviours. Below and to the left was Botafogo Harbour affording snug retreat to some of the most expensive yachts in the world, and in the distance a glimpse of the freeway that swept impressively across the Bay of Guanabara. The sun had hauled itself up in the sky and was flooding distant peaks with dazzling light. The inside of the cable car was warm. All was there to content the soul of man, but Bond was uneasy. The beauty around him was no deeper than the surface of a maggot-eaten apple.

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