Box 88 : A Novel (2020), стр. 38
Seconds later, Billy Peele bursts through the door.
‘Gentlemen,’ he proclaims. ‘I am here to tell you that the most famous spy in the world has fallen off his perch.’
In one continuous movement, Peele slams the door behind him with the heel of his boot, places a pile of books and essays on his desk, removes a black beak’s cloak with the flourish of a matador wielding a cape at Las Ventas and spins it onto a nearby hook.
‘The name is no longer Bond, James Bond, gentlemen. Double 0 Seven is dead.’
Peele’s head snaps through ninety degrees, scanning the classroom of sleep-deprived students for a reaction to this astonishing newsflash. He is a physically fit, bearded thirty-eight-year-old with tortoiseshell glasses and his uneven, hastily assembled beak’s bow-tie looks as though it could do with a wash.
‘Is Timothy Dalton dead?’ asks one boy.
‘Good,’ Xavier declares. ‘He was shit in Living Daylights.’
‘Language please, Monsieur Bonnard,’ Peele grumbles. ‘Language.’
‘Not Dalton,’ says another student, who will later go on to become MP for North Dorset and a vocal proponent of Brexit. ‘Got to be Connery or Roger Moore. Is it one of them, sir?’
An exasperated sigh from Peele, Kite enjoying the show from the back row.
‘Don’t be so literal, Williams.’ Peele cleans the whiteboard with an ink-stained Charles and Diana T-towel and clears what sounds like forty overnight Gauloises from his barrel chest. ‘Think beyond the proverbial envelope. I said he has “fallen off his perch”. An ornithological clue with an old Alfordian link. Any bright sparks out there with the faintest whiff of an idea what on the planet Pluto I’m talking about?’
A sustained silence. Lachlan Kite is as much in the dark as everyone else. To his right, Cosmo de Paul is arranging his books and stationery into neat piles, anxious for the class proper to begin. A levels are scheduled to kick off in less than three months and he wants straight A’s for his CV. Peele, in common with every other A-level beak in the school, is supposed to be cramming the boys with every spare minute available.
‘Bueller?’ says Peele, mimicking the lifeless, energy-sapping teacher in the John Hughes movie and showing off a passable American accent in the process. ‘Anyone …? Bueller …?’
At last a hand shoots up, two rows from the front. It is Leander Saltash, who has read every thriller of the last hundred years, from The Riddle of the Sands to The Silence of the Lambs, from The Hunt for Red October to The Last Good Kiss.
‘I’ve got it, sir. Not the James Bond of the films but the James Bond of the books. The birdwatcher whose name Ian Fleming stole when he was writing Casino Royale. Is that right?’
‘Mr Saltash!’ Peele bangs a fist on the desk so that two marker pens jump and then roll onto the ground. ‘An excellent answer! If you’re not running the country by the time you’re forty, consider your talents to have been wasted. You would look slightly less fetching with a blue rinse and a handbag than our dear Mrs Thatcher, but it seems a small price to pay.’ Sudden eye contact with Kite, a knowing, private glance of the sort Peele bestows on him from time to time. ‘Yes, James Bond, the original James Bond, American ornithologist and author of that page-turning classic, Birds of the West Indies – kites included, no doubt, Master Lachlan – whose seemingly mundane, commonplace name was indeed adopted by Ian Fleming – late of this parish – for the hero of his bewilderingly successful series of espionage capers. This is the man who has indeed gone to the great birdbath in the sky. May he rest in peace.’
Cosmo de Paul raises a hand, exposing a melting clock face on his customised Dalí waistcoat.
‘Sir, will you be going over the Seven Years War today?’
‘Just a moment, Monsieur du Paul.’ It always pleases Kite when Peele deliberately mispronounces his surname. ‘I have another announcement to make. Speaking of birdwatchers, it will no doubt please the assembled company to know that an American golden-winged warbler, never before seen on British shores, has been spotted in the car park of a Tesco supermarket in Kent.’
‘That’s great news, sir,’ says Saltash.
‘Yes it is, Mister Saltash! Yes it is!’ Kite knows that Peele subscribes to the Spectator magazine and raids it for titbits that he can share with the boys at the start of each class. For this reason, among others, he always feels that Peele is playing the role of an eccentric schoolmaster, both for his own, and for the boys’ amusement, rather than showing them any glimpse of his true character and personality. In private, Peele is far less theatrical and in every way more inscrutable.
‘Speaking of distinguished novelists, what are the general feelings among you lot about Salman Rushdie and the lovely ayatollah’s fatwa? Senor del Paul, before we reintegrate with the Seven Years War, would you deign to comment?’
Cosmo de Paul is a short, reed-thin late developer with a first-class brain and a third-class personality. He will later try to seduce Kite’s girlfriend and, within a decade, expose him to the FSB as an intelligence officer. His views on the Rushdie affair are as impatient as they are predictable.
‘I think he had it coming, sir.’
Peele looks suitably appalled.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘If you walk into a field and poke a sleeping bull with a stick, don’t be surprised if it wakes up and tries to kill you.’
‘I’m not sure I follow the analogy. Isn’t it sleeping dogs that we shouldn’t be poking with sticks—’
De Paul talks over him.
‘Rushdie has written a provocative book that deliberately set out to enrage one of the world’s great religions. It’s not surprising Muslims are upset.’
‘Upset? That’s how you would characterise the ayatollah’s mood?’
De Paul hesitates. ‘More than