Bond 04 - Diamonds Are Forever Read Online Free PDF

won’t be back until 3.30. I suggest you get there at 3.15. Never does any harm to have a look round first. Always useful to get your man a bit off balance. How’s it going?’
    Sergeant Lobiniere held up a pocket mirror in front of Bond.
    A touch of white at the temples. The scar gone. A hint of studiousness at the corners of the eyes and mouth. The faintest shadows under the cheekbones. Nothing you could put your finger on, but it all added up to someone who certainly wasn’t James Bond.

4 ....... ‘WHAT GOES ON AROUND HERE?’
    I N THE patrol car Sergeant Dankwaerts was occupied with his thoughts, and they drove in silence along the Strand and up Chancery Lane and into Holborn. At Gamages they turned left into Hatton Garden and the car drew up near the neat white portals of the London Diamond Club.
    Bond followed his companion across the pavement to a smart door in the centre of which was a well polished brass plate on which was engraved ‘The House of Diamonds’. And underneath ‘Rufus B. Saye. Vice-President for Europe’. Sergeant Dankwaerts rang the bell and a smart Jewish girl opened the door and led them across a thickly carpeted entrance hall into a panelled waiting-room.
    ‘I am expecting Mr Saye any minute now,’ she said indifferently and went out and closed the door.
    The waiting-room was luxurious and, thanks to an unseasonable log-fire in the Adam fireplace, tropically hot. In the centre of the close-fitted dark red carpet there was a circular Sheraton rosewood table and six matching armchairs that Bond guessed were worth at least a thousand pounds. On the table were the latest magazines and several copies of the Kimberley Diamond News. Dankwaerts’s eyes lit up when he saw these and he sat down and started to turn over the pages of the June issue.
    On each of the four walls was a large flower painting in a golden frame. Something almost three dimensional about these paintings caught Bond’s attention and he walked over to examine one of them. It was not a painting, but a stylized arrangement of freshly cut flowers set behind glass in niches lined with copper-coloured velvet. The others were the same, and the four Waterford vases in which the flowers stood were a perfect set.
    The room was very quiet except for the hypnotic tick of a large sunburst wall-clock and the soft murmur of voices from behind a door opposite the entrance. There was a click and the door opened a few inches and a voice with a thick foreign intonation expostulated volubly: ‘Bud Mister Grunspan, why being so hard? Vee must all make a liffing, yes? I am telling you this vonderful stone gost me ten tousant pounts. Ten tousant! You ton’t pelieff me? Bud I svear it. On my vort of honour.’ There was a negative pause and the voice made its final bid. ‘Bedder still! I bet you fife pounts!’
    There was the sound of laughter. ‘Willy, you’re a real card,’ said an American voice, ‘But it’s no dice. Be glad to help you, but that stone isn’t worth more than nine thousand, and I’ll give you a hundred on top of that for yourself. Now you go along and think about it. You won’t get a better offer in The Street.’
    The door opened and a stage American business man with pince-nez and a tightly buttoned mouth ushered out a small harassed-looking Jew with a large red rose in his button-hole. They looked startled at finding the waiting-room occupied and, with a muttered ‘Pardon me’ to no one in particular, the American almost ran his companion across the room and out into the hall. The door closed behind them.
    Dankwaerts looked up at Bond and winked. ‘That’s the whole of the diamond business in a nutshell,’ he said. ‘That was Willy Behrens, one of the best-known freelance brokers in The Street. I suppose the other man was Saye’s buyer.’ He turned again to his paper, and Bond, resisting the impulse to light a cigarette, went back to his examination of the flower ‘pictures’.
    Suddenly the rich, carpeted,