Free James Bond Anthology by Ian Fleming Page B

always be a round figure. Le Chiffre had chosen the second course.
    The croupier slipped some counters through the slot in the table which receives the cagnotte and announced quietly:
    ‘Un banco d’un million.’
    ‘Suivi,’ murmured the Greek, meaning that he exercised his right to follow up his lost bet.
    Bond lit a cigarette and settled himself in his chair. The long game was launched and the sequence of these gestures and the reiteration of this subdued litany would continue until the end came and the players dispersed. Then the enigmatic cards would be burnt or defaced, a shroud would be draped over the table and the grass-green baize battlefield would soak up the blood of its victims and refresh itself.
    The Greek, after taking a third card, could achieve no better than a four to the bank’s seven.
    ‘Un banco de deux millions,’ said the croupier.
    The players on Bond’s left remained silent.
    ‘Banco,’ said Bond.

 
    11 | MOMENT OF TRUTH
    Le Chiffre looked incuriously at him, the whites of his eyes, which showed all round the irises, lending something impassive and doll-like to his gaze.
    He slowly removed one thick hand from the table and slipped it into the pocket of his dinner-jacket. The hand came out holding a small metal cylinder with a cap which Le Chiffre unscrewed. He inserted the nozzle of the cylinder, with an obscene deliberation, twice into each black nostril in turn, and luxuriously inhaled the benzedrine vapour.
    Unhurriedly he pocketed the inhaler, then his hand came quickly back above the level of the table and gave the shoe its usual hard, sharp slap.
    During this offensive pantomime Bond had coldly held the banker’s gaze, taking in the wide expanse of white face surmounted by the short abrupt cliff of reddish-brown hair, the unsmiling wet red mouth and the impressive width of the shoulders, loosely draped in a massively cut dinner-jacket.
    But for the high-lights on the satin of the shawl-cut lapels, he might have been faced by the thick bust of a black-fleeced Minotaur rising out of a green grass field.
    Bond slipped a packet of notes on to the table without counting them. If he lost, the croupier would extract what was necessary to cover the bet, but the easy gesture conveyed that Bond didn’t expect to lose and that this was only a token display from the deep funds at Bond’s disposal.
    The other players sensed a tension between the two gamblers and there was silence as Le Chiffre fingered the four cards out of the shoe.
    The croupier slipped Bond’s two cards across to him with the tip of his spatula. Bond, still with his eyes holding Le Chiffre’s, reached his right hand out a few inches, glanced down very swiftly, then as he looked up again impassively at Le Chiffre, with a disdainful gesture he tossed the cards face upwards on the table.
    They were a four and a five – an unbeatable nine.
    There was a little gasp of envy from the table and the players to the left of Bond exchanged rueful glances at their failure to accept the two million franc bet.
    With a hint of a shrug, Le Chiffre slowly faced his own two cards and flicked them away with his finger nail. They were two valueless knaves.
    ‘Le baccarat,’ intoned the croupier as he spaded the thick chips over the table to Bond.
    Bond slipped them into his right-hand pocket with the unused packet of notes. His face showed no emotion, but he was pleased with the success of his first coup and with the outcome of the silent clash of wills across the table.
    The woman on his left, the American Mrs Du Pont, turned to him with a wry smile.
    ‘I shouldn’t have let it come to you,’ she said. ‘Directly the cards were dealt I kicked myself.’
    ‘It’s only the beginning of the game,’ said Bond. ‘You may be right the next time you pass it.’
    Mr Du Pont leant forward from the other side of his wife: ‘If one could be right every hand, none of us would be here,’ he said philosophically.
    ‘I would be,’ his wife