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the most terrifically romantic picture. I cut it off my first packet, when I smoked one in
the lavatory and felt terribly sick, and kept it until it fell to pieces. Then I cut off a fresh
one. I carried him with me always until things went wrong and I had to go back to Italy.
Then I couldn't afford Players. They're too expensive in Italy and I had to smoke things
called Nazionales.» Bond wanted to keep her mood. He said, «But what happened to
the Hero's pictures? How did the cigarette people get hold of them?»
«Oh, well, you see one day a man with a stovepipe hat and a frock coat came into the
Hero's pub with two small boys. Here.» She held the packet sideways. «Those are the
ones, `John Player & Sons.' You see, it says that their Successors run the business
now. Well they had one of the first motor cars, a Rolls Royce, and it had broken down
outside the Hero's pub. The man in the stovepipe hat didn't drink, of course those sort
of people didn't, not the respectable merchants who lived near Bristol. So he asked for
ginger beer and bread and cheese while his chauffeur mended the car. And the hero
got it for them. And Mr. John Player and the boys all admired the two wonderful
tapestry pictures hanging on the wall of the pub. Now this Mr. Player was in the tobacco
and snuff business and cigarettes had just been invented and he wanted to start
making them. But he couldn't for the life of him know what to call them or what sort of a
picture to put on the packet. And he suddenly had a wonderful idea. When he got back
to the factory he talked to his manager and the manager came along to the pub and
saw the Hero and offered him a hundred pounds to let his two pictures be copied for the
cigarette packet. And the Hero didn't mind and anyway he wanted just exactly a
hundred pounds to get married on.» She paused. Her eyes were far away. «She was
very nice, by the way, only thirty and a good plain cook and her young body kept him
warm in bed until he died many years later. And she bore him two children, a boy and a
girl. And the boy went into the Navy like his father. Well, anyway, Mr. Player wanted to
have the Hero in the lifebuoy on one side of the packet and the beautiful evening on the
other. But the manager pointed out that that would leave no room for all this» she
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turned over the packet »about `Rich, Cool,' and `Navy Cut Tobacco' and that
extraordinary trademark of a doll's house swimming in chocolate fudge with Nottingham
Castle written underneath. So then Mr. Player said, `Well then, we'll put one on top of
the other.' And that's just exactly what they did and I must say I think it fits in very well,
don't you? Though I expect the Hero was pretty annoyed at the mermaid being blanked
out.»
«The mermaid?»
«Oh, yes. Underneath the bottom comer of the lifebuoy where it dips into the sea, the
Hero had put a tiny mermaid combing her hair with one hand and beckoning him home
with the other. That was supposed to be the woman he was going to find and marry.
But you can see there wasn't room and anyway her breasts were showing and Mr.
Player, who was a very strong Quaker, didn't think that was quite proper. But he made
it up to the Hero in the end.»
«Oh, how did he do that?»
«Well you see the cigarettes were a great success. It was really the picture that did it.
People decided that anything with a wonderful picture like that on the outside must be
good and Mr. Player made a fortune and I expect his Successors did too. So when the
Hera was getting old and hadn't got long to live, Mr. Player had a copy of the lifebuoy
picture drawn by the finest artist of the day. It was just the same as the Hero's except
that it wasn't in color and it showed him very much older, and he promised the Hero
that this picture too would always be on his cigarette packets, only on the inside bit.
Here.» She pushed out the cardboard container. «You see how old he looks? And one
other thing, if you look closely, the flags on the two ships are flying at half mast. Rather
sweet of Mr. Player, don't you think, to ask the artist for that. It meant that the Hero's
first and last ship were remembering him. And Mr. Player and his two sons came and
presented it to him just before he died. It must have made it much easier for him, don't
you think?»
«It certainly must. Mr. Player must have been a very thoughtful man.»
The girl was slowly returning from her dreamland. She said in a different, rather prim
voice, «Well, thank you anyway for having listened to the story. I know it's all a fairy
tale. At least I suppose it is. But children are stupid in that way. They like to have
something to keep under the pillow until they're quite grown up a rag doll or a small toy
or something. I know that boys are just the same. My brother hung on to a little metal
charm his nanny had given him until he was nineteen. Then he lost it. I shall never
forget the scenes he made. Even though he was in the Air Force by then and it was the
middle of the war. He said it brought him luck.» She shrugged her shoulders. There
was sarcasm in her voice as she said, «He needn't have worried. He did all right. He
was much older than me, but I adored him. I still do. Girls always love crooks,
particularly if they're their brother. He did so well that he might have done something for
me. But he never did. He said that life was every man for himself. He said that his
grandfather had been so famous as a poacher and a smuggler in the Dolomites that his
was the finest tombstone among all the Petacchi graves in the graveyard at Bolzano.
My brother said he was going to have a finer one still, and by making money the same
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way.» Bond held his cigarette steady. He took a long draw at it and let the smoke out
with a quiet hiss. «Is your family name Petacchi, then?»
«Oh, yes. Vitali is only a stage name. It sounded better so I changed it. Nobody
knows the other. I've almost forgotten it myself. I've called myself Vitali since I came
back to Italy. I wanted to change everything.»
«What happened to your brother? What was his first name?» «Giuseppe. He went
wrong in various ways. But he was a wonderful flyer. Last time I heard of him he'd been
given some high-up job in Paris. Perhaps that'll make him settle down. I pray every
night that it will. He's all I've got. I love him in spite of everything. You understand that?»
Bond stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. He called for the bill. He said, «Yes, I
understand that.»
16. Swimming the Gantlet
The dark water below the police wharf sucked and kissed at the rusty iron stanchions.
In the latticed shadows cast through the ironwork by the three-quarter moon, Constable
Santos heaved the single aqualung cylinder up onto Bond's back and Bond secured the
webbing at his waist so that it would not snarl the strap of Leiter's second Geiger
counter, the underwater model. He fitted the rubber mouthpiece between his teeth and
adjusted the valve release until the air supply was just right. He turned off the supply
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