John Pearson - James Bond - The Authorised Biography

During these weeks in the nursing home Maddox was a frequent visitor. He and Bond talked a lot and Maddox was able to sum him up and learn a great deal more about him. He also made inquiries on his own among a lot of contacts back in London. After some hesitation, Headquarters had given him a provisional go-ahead.

The evening James Bond left the nursing home, Maddox took him out to dinner – at the fashionable Oree de la Foret. The food was somehow typical of Maddox -fonds d'artichauts au foie gras, tournedos aux morilles , a bottle of Dom Perignon – and over the brandy and cigars, Maddox outlined his proposition. He did it with great charm and skill. James Bond has never forgotten the small, frog-like man with the bald head and bright black eyes who gave him his first introduction to the life he was to follow. It was a Faust-like situation with Maddox playing Mephistopheles. Bond had little chance against the future that fate had in store for him.

Maddox began by breaking the news of Marthe de Brandt's innocence. Bond was deeply shocked. Maddox did nothing to lessen the boy's sense of guilt. Instead, he cleverly exploited it. Such things, he said, did happen. Bond should forget the whole affair.

Bitterly Bond asked how he could possibly forget? He had killed the woman he loved, for something she had never done. How could he go on living with such a load of guilt?

Maddox was sympathetic then. If Bond really felt like that, there was something he could do – something dangerous, something which could save countless lives. Here was a chance for Bond to expiate his hideous mistake.

‘War is coming. It is a matter now of months not years; and there are certain ways in which you can help your country. You possess qualities which we can use. At times the life will seem glamorous and exciting, but I must warn you that your chances of ever seeing a comfortable old age are slim.’

There was no real decision to be made. James Bond agreed to work for the British Secret Service as Maddox knew he would.

At this period Maddox was still dealing with the mess left by the stolen documents affair. Officially the incident was closed. Behind the scenes it was regarded as a considerable loss of face for the British; in the undercover world of secret agents such things matter.

The Germans were exultant – the French mistrustful. Somehow the British needed to regain their credibility – with their own agents, with their allies, and, most of all, with the enemy.

Maddox was an aggressive man. In time of crisis his instinct was to attack. The early part of 1938 saw him mounting several swift operations aimed at restoring the prestige and confidence of his network. As a small part of this, James Bond was to perform his first assignment or as he calls it now, ‘my apprentice piece’.

It was an unlikely business for the British Secret Service to become involved in. Maddox would normally have steered well clear of it. But these were not normal times, and when Maddox heard of the chaos being caused at Monte Carlo by the Roumanians, he smelled his opportunity.

In the long history of the great casino there have been just a few notoriously successful players – Taylor, the professional gambler from Wyoming who had his succes fou back in the high days of the 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 Societe 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 encounters Bond always had the uncomfortable feeling that they knew far more about him than they said. Nobody told him anything specific – even Maddox had become curiously reticent – but Bond gathered that he was on probation for the Secret Service. He had been chosen for an unusual assignment. His training would begin within a day or two.

Maddox explained all this over dinner in the grill room. He also said that he would be saying goodbye to Bond for a month or two. Now that he had started him on his career he must return to Paris where he had work to do. But quite soon now, Bond would be meeting his instructor.