Free James Bond: The Authorised Biography by John Pearson Page B

1890s, Fernande, the little Belgian, and the extraordinary Charles Wells, the original ‘man who broke the bank of Monte Carlo’. (In fact he did this six times before his luck ran out.) Such men were considered good for the casino. They were showmen who encouraged other gamblers, raised the stakes and brought Monte Carlo valuable publicity. The Roumanians were different. From their appearance at the beginning of the previous season, they had spelt bad news for the casino.
    They were a syndicate of four, headed by a man called Vlacek. No one had heard of them before, but in the season which had just ended they had played steadily and won remorselessly. Nobody knew quite how they did it.
    Naturally there had been endless speculation over the systems they were using, but as the four Roumanians lived in seclusion in a walled villa down the road at Juan les Pins, they kept their secrets to themselves. The casino had automatically investigated them – supervised their play, checked their credentials, attempted every known test against cheating – without result. The Roumanians, whatever else they were, were clean. And night after night, like dark automata, they had continued their inexorable game. Against all known odds they had continued steadily to win. Nobody seemed to know how much, but, according to Maddox's informant inside the casino, they had milked the tables of something over £12 million during the last season.
    For the casino all this was far more serious than most outsiders realized. In the first place, most of this money ultimately came from the bank – the casino paid. And in the second, these invulnerable Roumanians had begun to scare off the big-time gamblers. The entry every night of this inscrutable quartet into the grande salle, had a depressing influence on play.
    For the management it was an anxious situation and Maddox had decided to make the most of it. This golden corner of the South of France had long been a centre of intrigue. Like most of his profession, Maddox was often there; as something of a gambler himself he knew how the casino always attracted that ‘floating world’ of spies and diplomats and women of the world who were his clientele. Anything that he could do to help the management would inevitably pay off – Maddox knew how useful it could be to have the powerful Société des Bains de Mer who ran the casino in his debt. And it would do no harm if word got round that the casino had been saved by the British Secret Service.
    During those weeks when Maddox had been visiting James Bond in the nursing home at Fontainebleau, they had often played bridge together in the evening. For Bond it passed the time; for Maddox it gave just the chance he wanted to assess Bond's character and capabilities. For as a one-time international bridge player – he had represented Britain in the Biarritz Tournament of 1929 – Maddox believed the card-table was the perfect place to reveal an opponent's strength and weakness. In Bond he recognized something quite unusual. Despite his youth, Bond was that rarity – a natural player whose instinct was to win. Even Maddox often had his work cut out to beat him; more to the point, he could recognize in James Bond's play that combination of daring and stamina, memory and rigid self-control that makes great gamblers and secret agents.
    All this made Bond the natural choice for the assignment taking shape in Maddox's extraordinary imagination. It also meant that James Bond's basic secret-service training was, to say the least, unorthodox.
    He was brought back to London with strict instructions to stay incognito. Maddox arranged for him to stay in the now defunct Carlton Hotel on the corner of Haymarket under the pseudonym of Haynes. Maddox was staying in the hotel as well. From time to time he would appear and then haul Bond before a bewildering succession of medical experts, language and firearms experts and men behind large desks in Whitehall. Throughout these