Chapter Nineteen
In Transit
The Phantom's backseat was velvet-lined and cast brightly red. It altogether looked like a boudoir rather than a backseat. There was a cabinet fastened to the back of the front seat that was repurposed into a cooler. A table spread had been slid out from under it. There was Bollinger La Grande Année, and malossol cured caviar on a nacre plated dish. Freshly made blini encircled the bowl on the tray. Bond picked up a spoon (hand-carved animal horn) and went at preparing. There was a small bowl of creme fraiche, which he ignored.
Xenia took her place as driver, and off they went into the early morning gloom. The beast at the helm was an unstable mistress, keeping her seams from splitting through only the sternest concentration. A lesser horse would buck under the reins, but the Phantom did not protest. She hummed so quietly it was almost imperceptible, and Bond imagined that her scream was left only for the four-legged, who might not be inclined hoop and howl a response. The soundless cry would twist through the spine, Bond surmised, but it would be fair warning.
He knew the old girl, even in her day, could only top about fifty miles per hour, but she seemed to be going much faster. Trees whipped passed, barely images. Even so, he could see the eerily uniform lines of post-war-ravaged Europe, lurking still in the foreground like a double exposure. The woods, neat and slim, stood at attention, seemed to dance in the beams.
The privacy glass, like the spectral car, was soundless. Xenia only knew Bond made a move because her eyes hardly left him alone. "Be careful," he warned, and then spoke with a sliver of a smile. "Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere." The gray-green flash of his eyes betrayed the presence of the machine, which was calculating, machinating, even foreseeing.
Bond leaned up to the open partition, and his hand slipped around Xenia's face. "Have some."
Bond need not see those red lips to know they had contracted into a tightly pursed smile. The blini proved much more appetizing than the martini. She ate hungrily, her teeth clipped his finger cleanly, without so much as a tug. She was mid swallow when Bond made his real move, and she nearly choked. He attacked, not with his hands, but with a flat delivery of curt, snubbed words.
"So," he paused to suck the blood mark forming on his forefinger. "Did Military Intelligence recruit you before or after you met Trevelyan?"
Xenia cleared her throat and maintained her composure, but her dark eye-shadow tunneled a deeply set glower into the rear-view mirror. Brown burned hotly, consuming the green in her irides like a slow, smoldering, but determined forest blaze. A smile, too high in the cheekbone to be real. momentarily squinted the flame into the end of a dying cigarette ash. Her playful retort rang closer to patronizer, the kind of a young restaurant attendant forcing good temperament out of bad under a thin mask of accommodation. "So direct," she said. "I was told you appreciated a little foreplay."
His comeback was immediate and still fresh out of the Arctic tundra. "If we share the same mother, foreplay enhances the obscenity of the act."
Xenia was content to let the matter fall into a period of silence, but Bond carried on with the bluntness of an automated drill. The words crackled in her ears.
"Who has Mother set you on to? Me or Alec?"
He saw in the small mirror the slightest anchoring of a single eyebrow and it stirred him.
"Perhaps I am a double agent."
"Is it both of us?" His tone strained.
Silence.
"If you wanted me dead, your men could have taken me at the Kurhaus."
"You didn't drink the martini." Said more as a question. "It was a sedative. I am to serve you to Alec in as complete a form as possible, and you walked willingly into the trap."
Bond shook his head. "What has M planned?"
"If-" the word was emphatic, "I am working for other parties, it is only to serve our mutual friend-our brother-to use your slang. And that isn't really your concern. Not anymore."
Bond sighed wearily and punctuated it with a disaffected rumble. Then suddenly, he beamed and locked eyes with her. The conveyance slowed as did time, it seemed, and once again, they walked together between the seconds. Her pupils narrowed to dark hungry lights. She knew what he was going to say before his lips separated, and her answer was yes.
"Well, if I am to be the main course," he sighed again. "I should be entitled to a final meal. Although, an army girl like you is liable to be just as salty as this caviar." The joke was terrible, and a relic of a bygone era that hadn't suited Bond in a very long time, and he regretted saying it until, during the act of what we'll call love, Xenia whispered closely to his ear how badly she had wanted to strike him for it.