Continuing our discussion of the book For Your Eyes Only, an anthology with five short stories. This is the fourth.
THE BOOK: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
"RISICO"
THE PLOT
M sends Bond to uncover a drug-smuggling operation based in Italy that is sending narcotics to England, and to end it. Bond's contact is CIA informant Kristatos, who tells Bond the head of the operation is a man named Enrico Colombo. Bond is captured by Colombo, who says it is Kristatos who is behind the heroin operation. Bond picks a side and action ensues. He is given a woman as a reward for his help.
THE COMMENTARY
Bond meets Kristatos in Rome, a CIA-recommended contact who will help him shut down the heroin pipeline to England. We get the title drop immediately in the first line, where Kristatos says "In this pizniss there is much risico." Risico means "risk" in Italian.
Before anything happens, we suddenly have a flashback to the assignment scene. M is irritated that he has to send Bond on a mission to Italy for Special Branch of Scotland Yard, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health, to stop the heroin. M had resisted, but one of the agencies had gone over his head to the Prime Minister.
M says the Prime Minister "took the line that heroin, in the quantities that had been coming in, is an instrument of psychological warfare — that it saps a country's strength. He said that he wouldn't be surprised to find that this wasn't just a gang of Italians out to make big money — that subversion and not money was at the back of it." M didn't think much of that argument, but it turned out to be true: The Russians were back of it, for precisely the reasons described.
Here we learn that M hates it when his agents are sent off to do police work. We also learn that he has a few "bees in his bonnet" — pet peeves — and Bond spells them spelled out: "There were queen bees, like the misuse of the Service, and the search for true as distinct from wishful intelligence, and there were worker bees. These included such idiosyncrasies as not employing men with beards, or those who were completely bilingual, instantly dismissing men who tried bring pressure to bear on him through family relationships with members of the Cabinet, mistrusting men or women who were too 'dressy,' and those who called him 'sir' off-duty; and having an exaggerated faith in Scotsmen."
Beards? Dressy men? Scotsmen? I assume these are all Fleming prejudices as well, and I'd love to know the origins of all of them.
Bond likes Kristatos immediately as a same-level agent who know his onions and won't blow his cover. We get a little tradecraft, and Kristatos spells out how the operation works, and who's in charge — a fellow named Enrico Colombo, who owns the restaurant they're in. Kristatos points him out, along with his "plump" Viennese girlfriend Lisl Baum, who has been making eyes at Bond. He names his price (unbeknownst to him, far less than what Bond has available), but part of that price is that Bond must kill Colombo.
I enjoyed the tradecraft in this scene. I was surprised that the obvious Bond Girl-to-be isn't model-thin, and, despite being blonde, doesn't have blue eyes. Good for you, Fleming, for branching out a little!
Colombo records Bond's meeting with Kristatos with a tape recorder in a chair, and through some clever chair-swapping, gets the recorder into his private office. He learns the whole plan.
Colombo stage manages a scene between himself and Lisl, where it looks like she's breaking up with him, and makes it easy for Bond to come to her rescue. (How he knows Bond has a Galahad complex is not revealed.) Bond escorts Lisl to a taxi, jumps in with her and pretends to be a writer researching the heroin trade. He asks Lisl to give him rumors and common knowledge to enhance the verisimilitude of his book, in return for a diamond clip from Van Cleef. She agrees, but says he must meet her at 3 p.m. on the beach at the Lido peninsula near Venice. Lisl already knows Bond is an agent and is lying to her.
And it turns out, to no one's surprise (except maybe Bond's), to be a trap. He is captured (of course) after a pedestrian (ha!) foot-chase scene, but Colombo is pretty friendly. Colombo says Kristatos is the real leader of the heroin operation. Colombo is going to raid a key linchpin in the pipeline in the morning, a ship full of heroin hidden in rolls of newsprint, crewed by Albanians, rolls which are being offloaded to a warehouse. He wants to know if Bond wants in.
Bond does, and they go in like pirates, with grappling hooks! Do people still use grappling hooks? Well, thanks to Bond, the warehouse goes up in smoke, the Albanian ship goes down in water, and Kristatos is whisked away in an unguided car with a dead driver to an uncertain fate.
It helps that, evidently, nobody likes Albanians.
With the op over, Colombo gives Bond Lisl's hotel key. Technically, she's to show Bond the sights during the last few days he'll be in Italy, but Colombo makes it pretty obvious that she's Bond's sexual reward. "I give it to you from my heart. Perhaps also from hers!"
Well. Let's hope she gets a say.
SUMMARY
Another minor effort, whose sole purpose seems to be introduce the expansive, piratical Colombo as a colorful character. You know, that's enough.
STRAY BULLETS
- Following Fleming's usual naming convention, the British Secret Service bureau in Italy is Station I.
- The World War II connection: Both Kristatos and Colombo worked for the British during the war.
- While I think Fleming portrays Bond as more policeman than spy in most of his stories, M says flatly here that the Service's primary duty "is espionage, and where necessary, sabotage and subversion."
- M mentions the throwaway adventure at the beginning of Goldfinger, where Bond broke up a drug-smuggling operation in Mexico.
- This is the second story in For Your Eyes Only where the assignment scene with M, which is usually by the numbers, is a bit quirky and experimental.
- In a Bond book, the decision tree is like the one in Asgard that always leads to "It's Loki's fault." In a Bond book, it's always "Russia's behind it all."
- In 1958 Fleming went on vacation with his wife Ann in Venice and at the Lido peninsula. Fleming was also an admirer of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which was set in Lido. Fleming lifted all that for his setting.
- Colombo's "plump" girlfriend is named Lisl after one of Fleming's old girlfriends. I bet she was plump, too.
- Fleming lifted the surname of Ferrari engine designer Gioacchino Colombo for his pirate.
THE MOVIE: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
Replies
"Another minor effort..."
Yeah, I can't think of anything to add.
"Risico" hasn't been used as a movie title but, as you point out, the characters appeared in For Your Eyes Only.
Beards? Dressy men? Scotsmen? I assume these are all Fleming prejudices as well, and I'd love to know the origins of all of them.
We know that he wasn’t happy with the casting of Sean Connery (a Scotsman), deriding him as “Glaswegian lorry driver,” which translates to Glasgow truck driver. One of his pre-Bond jobs was driving a truck.
It helps that, evidently, nobody likes Albanians.
At the end of the 90s, the war in Kosovo called to the public attention that Kosovo, like Albania, was predominantly Muslim. Just a guess, but Fleming probably didn’t like Muslims.
Just a guess, but Fleming probably didn’t like Muslims.
Ohhh, I bet you're right. I knew Albania was primarily Muslim, thanks to the Ottomans, but I didn't connect the dots. Although it must be said that Fleming almost never mentions religion, except to say Bond doesn't believe in any. But surely he believed Western culture, including religion, superior to that of any other.