Ian Fleming - James Bond 04 by Diamonds Are Forever

Author:Diamonds Are Forever
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-21T11:32:31+00:00

Diamonds Are Forever

15

RUE DE LA PAY

THE plane made a big curve out over the sparkling blue Pacific and then swept round across Hollywood and gained height so as to make the Cajon Pass through the great golden cliff of the High Sierras.

Bond caught a glimpse of endless miles of palm-lined avenues, of sprinklers whirling over emerald lawns in front of gracious homes, of sprawling aircraft factories, of the outside lots of film studios with their jumble of gimcrack sets-city streets, Western ranches, what looked like a miniature motor-racing track, a full-size four-masted schooner planted in the ground-and then they were in the mountains and through them and over the interminable red desert that is the backstage of Los Angeles.

They flew over Barstow, the junction from which the single track of the Santa Fe strides off into the desert on its long run across the Colorado Plateau, skirting on their right the Calico Mountains, once the borax centre of the world, and leaving far away to the left the bone-strewn wastes of Death Valley. Then came more mountains, streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth, and then a glimpse of green in the midst of the blasted, Martian landscape, and then a slow-descent and ‘please fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarettes’.

The heat hit Bond’s face like a fist, and he had begun to sweat in the fifty yards between his cool plane and the blessed relief of the air-conditioned terminal building. The glass doors, operated by seeing-eye photo-electric cells, hissed open as he approached and slowly closed behind him, and already the slot-machines, four banks of them, were right in his path. It was natural to bring out the small change and jerk the handles and watch the lemons and the oranges and the cherries and the bell-fruits whirl round to their final click-pause-ting, followed by a soft mechanical sigh. Five cents, ten cents, a quarter. Bond gave them all a try, and only once two cherries and a bell fruit coughed back three coins for the one he had played.

As he moved away, waiting for the baggage of the half-dozen passengers to appear on the ramp near the exit, his eyes caught a notice over a big machine that might have been for iced water. It said: OXYGEN BAR. He strolled over to it and read the rest: BREATHE PURE OXYGEN, it Said. HEALTHFUL AND HARMLESS. FOR A QUICK LIFT. EASES DISTRESS OF OVER-INDULGENCE, DROWSINESS, FATIGUE, NERVOUSNESS AND MANY OTHER SYMPTOMS.

Bond obediently put a quarter into the slot and bent over so that his nose and mouth were enclosed in a wide black rubber mouthpiece. He pressed a button and, as instructed, breathed in and out slowly for a full minute. It was just like breathing very cold air-no taste, no smell. At the end of the minute there was a click from the machine and Bond straightened himself. He felt nothing but a slight dizziness, but later he recognized that there had been carelessness in

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