Mors Pax Aeterna

Over four months have lapsed since my last entry and I have spent a good part of the past month in agitated reflection. I still find myself somewhat unnerved by the outcome of the matter that had begun unexpectedly in February.

To give this some background, in the early 1960s there was the business of a SPECTRE tie-in with The Mechanics, a group of gangsters who operated out of Toronto. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had got wind of their targetting a Russian defector in the city and I was sent in to help take care of the matter after the RCMP had informed M of the situation and its connection to SPECTRE. Apparently, SPECTRE had secured a contract from the Russians to do the job of eliminating the defector, a man named Boris. He was a top naval constructor in the elevated ranks of the Russian nuclear submarine team. An ex-Gestapo German named Horst Uhlmann served as the middleman for SPECTRE in hiring The Mechanics to do the actual hit. Long story short, they failed, and I had the distasteful yet obligatory task of riddling Uhlmann with several bullets after he had killed a Mountie, and a wounded one, no less. Uhlmann did not die promptly, but I’m sure he suffered sufficiently enough before his own departure the next morning.

It was after this Boris affair, while en route to Washington for a briefing with the CIA on the Toronto mission, that my hired car struck a puncture about 10 miles west of the Lake George area at the Adirondack Mountains in central New York state. In the driving rain of that mid-October night I managed to hobble the car to the first motel I could find, the Dreamy Pines Motor Court. It was there that I met Vivienne Michel. She had come from Quebec and by happenstance, while heading south, she was offered a temporary job as the motel keeper. But she also had had the misfortune of having herself encountered a pair of unseemly gangsters during her brief tenure there. I stayed long enough to ensure her safety and see her situation through. Fleming recounted that incident in what he claimed to be his experimental novel, "The Spy Who Loved Me." It was actually more of a mundane affair than an experimental one, but it was the last of Quebec, or at least anything or anyone remotely connected to it, that I would come into contact with - until last February.

I had just returned home late after an exceptionally good night of gaming at the casino in Monte Carlo. Entering by the carport, I noted the rear entry lock to my house had been tampered with. I could feel the hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. I had one gun in my bedroom, but I also had one in the car, and so I made my way back to the Martin. Reaching into the glove compartment, I wrapped my hand around my old Walther PPK which produced an assured sigh of relief from me.

I returned to the house, gun at the ready. I kept the lights out as I entered by the kitchen. The night’s full moon shone enough light through the large windows of the house to aid me in maneouvering through the rooms without the risk of stumbling over any of the furniture. It was too eerily silent. I moved from the kitchen to the dining room and into the living room, keeping a keen ear and casting a wary eye all around. It was nearby the staircase at the living room's end that I heard a faint shuffle from the upper floor. Crouching a little, I stealthily climbed the stairs, keeping close along the wall, gun angled upward from my waist. Making to near the top, I stopped, back stiffening against the wall, and wondered which direction of the hallway to turn. In the dimness I couldn’t make out much ahead of me, so I peered around the corner of the wall to look behind, when an object suddenly slammed hard with a thud against its edge, missing my face by what must have been a literal centimetre! I could feel its wind. I reactively angled back against the banister, seeing the dark shadow of someone still wielding his weapon – a bat? – and moving towards me to strike again. No time to waste, I fired a shot at the intruder’s legs. Whichever one I hit would have suited me just fine. The shot immediately crippled the intruder. The tone of the gasped "arrghh" in reaction to being struck clearly was that of a male. As he fell to the floor and dropped his weapon beside him, I rushed up and kicked whatever it was well away from him. Standing over him, I began to apply some effective pressure with the weight of my foot on his wounded leg to keep him in check as I kept my gun trained on him. I flicked on the light switch behind me, but it still didn’t shed any light for me as to who he was. Blond-haired, he appeared to be in his forties and physically fit, but his face was a mystery.

"Now what’s this about?" I asked him sternly.

He refused to answer, gritting his teeth in an expression of pained agony as he clutched at his leg.

"I’m not a very patient man," I said, "and don’t let my age fool you." As I applied more pressure on his wounded leg, I added, "I can guarantee greater discomfort than this. Now why don’t we try to be civil."
"You are Bond," he said.
"What of it?"
"Yes. You are Bond," he repeated, this time with a certain resignation. "I came to kill you, James Bond. For killing my father."

Which father would that have been? I must have killed dozens.

"Who was your father?"
"You don’t see the resemblance in my face?"
"I’m in no mood for games."

He gave a short laugh of disdain.

"It is not necessary to keep your foot on my leg," he said. "I think you have effectively done your job to subdue me."

His trace of an accent had now registered with me. German. I eased my foot from his leg, feeling that in his impaired condition my gun alone would be enough to keep him disciplined. He slid himself back to the wall and propped himself against it, sitting up as comfortably as he could.

"My name is Hans Uhlmann. My father was Horst Uhlmann."

I recalled the name.

"Your father killed a man in cold blood. A wounded man, a member of a Canadian police regimen. And perhaps many other men, too."
"Liar!"

I saw some explaining and correction of facts were going to be in order. But first I gave him some bandages with which to wrap his wound, as I rather preferred he not bleed to death on my floor. I then offered him some Scotch and spare cigarettes I kept lying around for an occasion just as this. Nearly a half-hour had passed before I began to relate to him my experience with his father those many years ago. What he had been told instead was far different:

After Horst Uhlmann died, a friend of his, Wilhelm Rauss, began seeing Hans’ mother, Leyna. She was several months pregnant with Hans at the time, seeded by Uhlmann. Hans was raised by his mother and Rauss. And it was Rauss who, later in years, told Hans how his father had died and under what circumstance. Rauss fabricated a tale of Uhlmann having been an innocent man recruited by a British Secret Service agent named James Bond to work undercover behind the Berlin Wall in East Germany. The tale continued that Uhlmann reluctantly agreed because he was blackmailed into it. He took many risks with his life in stealing the secret information that Bond needed. But when, after a year, the day came that Bond ordered Uhlmann to kill the mistress of a top East German general and he refused to go along with it, Bond killed Uhlmann point blank – coldly, ruthlessly.

It was a neat, simple fantasy without any complex embellishments. When I asked Hans what Rauss did for a living, he replied that he used to be in the exporting business, but he never was clear about what Rauss actually exported. When Rauss tried to get him involved in the business, Hans, still in his 20s at the time, proved to be too young and too loose in his ways to be at all very much interested.

As we both sat there on the floor at the top of the stairs, facing each other across the hallway, our conversation by this point had become fairly relaxed, like that of between two old friends.

"What made you want to come here and do this?" I asked him. "I would think that some forty-odd years later would be a long time to bear a grudge, especially since you had never known your father."
"It is my initiation."
"Initiation?"
"You have heard of SPECTRE."

My hand tensed around the handle of the gun. "What of it?" I asked with feigned indifference.

"As I told you, I had no interest in joining Rauss’s export business when I was younger. But as I got older and I found that my irresponsible lifestyle wasn’t going to make me financially secure in my later years, I had second thoughts. So Rauss introduced me to his business. And then he introduced me to his other business. SPECTRE."

"Now it all fits," I said understandingly. "Your father and Rauss were both tied to SPECTRE. Rauss fed you some tall tale about your father having been an innocent man, which I believe I’ve just straightened you out on the details of that. But you must be joking that SPECTRE would send you to kill me."
"I elected to do so. They had another target in mind. In fact, they didn’t care who I killed, as long as I killed someone. When I suggested your name, because of what Rauss had told me about you, they didn’t refuse."
"Well, I must say your skills as an amateur are most underwhelming."
"What will you do with me now?"

I rang the police and followed it up with a call to MI-6. The ensuing interrogation of Hans Uhlmann over the next few days yielded some information of minimal value, including that Rauss, now 77, was residing in Montreal, Canada, in the province of Quebec. Apparently, Uhlmann had only barely gotten through the front door of SPECTRE to know at all much else about the organisation.

By week’s end I boarded a flight at Nice to London to meet with M and further discuss the results of the interrogation. Rather than show up at the office, M and I settled on a rendezvous for a late lunch at Blades. It had been quite some time since I had last visited it and M was gracious enough to oblige my request. I soaked in the nostalgic embrace of the Victorian atmosphere of the exclusive private card club as I was led down the black and white marble floor of the hall. Atop the wide staircase with its mahogany balustrade, the page led me past the tall doors to the gaming room, which stirred within me a vivid recollection of my first encounter with the boorish ogre Hugo Drax over a game of Bridge at the outset of the Moonraker affair. Across the well of the staircase was the next set of tall doors, one wing of which the page pushed aside and held open for me. Through it I entered the white and gold Regency dining room, where I found M seated at one of the tables at the far end.

Over a light meal of smoked salmon and a couple of relaxed rounds of the usual for each of us, M and I bantered over the Rauss matter. Apparently, Rauss was a low-level member of SPECTRE for the longest time, until shortly after I had left the Service. It was then, in the mid-1980s, that he began to inflict his most damage, illegally acquiring and indiscriminately supplying cash, drugs and armaments to any offensive lot of disreputable and disruptive elements around the world. His profiteering ventures had directly or indirectly cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people all over the globe, mostly through resulting deadly skirmishes, upheavals, military coups and civil wars made possible by his dealings. He had eluded detection of his unseemly services for nearly two decades, and by the time some degree of comprehensive intelligence was pieced together on him, it was fragmented at best and he had by then greatly curtailed his exporting involvement, if not retired from it altogether. But the interrogation of Hans Uhlmann helped add a few more pieces in further assembling the Rauss puzzle. One of those pieces was instrumental in verifying the delivery of a huge shipment of arms to Osama bin Laden as recently as 2000. It may have been only a single shipment that was ever made to bin Laden, but I found the deal reprehensible enough as to make Rauss a persona non grata in my view. On the basis of a favour still owed me, M discreetly revealed Rauss’s home and office addresses and telephone and cell numbers to me. I locked them all into my memory. M then casually let slip the name of a contact in Montreal - should I ever happen to wish to holiday in the city at some time in the near future.

Two days later, most of my flight time to Montreal was spent formulating plans in my mind on how I would dispose of this Rauss, but they only ended up being little more than rough sketches. The final draft, I knew, could only materialize itself once I was in the city and had my bearings.

Arriving at the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport, I was met by the contact M had named. Surprisingly, Herve Brossard was a short, rotund man in his mid-50s, quite genial in nature. Not at all who I had expected to meet. But then, I myself may have surprised him with my being 81. But still quite spry, if I must say so myself. Nevertheless, we greeted each other warmly and he led me to his vehicle in the airport’s car park. We engaged in some cheerful general chat during the 20-minute drive to the downtown of the city. After claiming my room reservation at the Ritz Carlton Hotel under the assumed name of Peter Franks, Herve and I found ourselves at the Altitude 737, a restaurant atop one of the city’s tallest buildings, Place Ville Marie. Over an early dinner of veal cutlets stuffed with portobella mushrooms we talked about Wilhelm Rauss.

"He is a very patient man, this Rauss," Herve said. "He doesn’t conduct business with just anyone who wishes to do so with him. Especially now when he seems to do very little of it. He takes his time, he studies his potential clients. You would do best to work out a plan that works with that patience of his. That is, if he still is in business."
"I’ve thought of some ideas on the plane here, but what do you propose?"
"I could be a middleman for you. I establish contact, I approach him, I explain the situation to him, all in your name. He will size me up, he will want to know more about you, he will no doubt investigate your background, and when he feels confident that you are legitimate, he will agree to a meeting with you. This way, the impression is that you are perfectly comfortable in having a subordinate take the time to arrange all the contact details for you, because you do not want to come across as too eager, and so, too suspicious. It will also give you an air of importance and credibility - in a detached sort of way."

Herve’s idea seemed a viable one and I liked it. Over a week had passed of detailing and fine-tuning the plan before we felt confident enough with the scheme we had drawn up. I then forwarded the plan to M, who had his team of strategists modify and firm it further over the next several days. In addition, the necessary corresponding documents, false background information and contacts to support the concocted story were also produced. Then M’s stamp of approval was given on the last of the drafts, and Herve and I were ready to go to work.

What we hadn’t factored into the plan was how extremely patient Rauss would really be in responding to our inquiry of a business arrangement. We wondered if perhaps he had not truly retired, in which case our plan would have had to have been completely revised or even entirely abandoned. It took four telephone conversations and two meetings with Herve over a three-month period before Rauss decided he would see me, but still without giving any firm commitment to it.

In the interim, I had grown increasingly restless during this time and became rather weary of the little that Montreal offered me by way of diversions. The largely francophone population annoyed me in particular, with their bastardized usage of the French language. I didn’t reveal this to Herve, but it was far from the elitist inflections and intonations spoken by the Parisian. The Quebec counterpart was plagued by pedestrian slangs and twangs and rushed speech that made its linguistic tongue often an embarrassment to its ancestral origin. And while, on the one hand, Montreal, an island city with its downtown core angled alongside the foot of its mountain backdrop, bore a certain European aura about it, on the other hand, it was frighteningly shallow in what it had to propose by way of escapes beyond merely fine restaurants and trendy shopping boutiques. Even the cinemas, theaters and night clubs were sparse in number, and the Casino de Montreal was the only game in town. The city had clearly seen its wilder days back in the 1920s through the 1940s. I decided to relieve my ennui by taking the hour’s flight to New York City and spending most of the rest of my time there instead to satisfy my craving for at least some occasional entertainment as I waited for Rauss’s decision to meet.

It was late May before things had finally fallen into place and Herve contacted me at the beachfront home of Felix Leiter’s son, where I had been staying on Long Island. The meeting was finally arranged for the 27th, and so I returned to Montreal on the 25th. One more phone call by Rauss was made to Herve on the 26th to disclose the time and place of the rendezvous.

On the 27th, a Thursday of intermittent rain, Herve and I arrived at the small car park outside the administration house at the Notre Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery. Its grounds spanned atop the northwest half of the city’s mountain. It was 4:45 p.m. "An odd time for a meeting," I remember telling Herve, since the cemetery was to close its gates at 5 p.m. Curiously, we found Rauss - tall, robust, with a bushel full of thick, white, wavy, longish hair, and looking distinguished in a grandfatherly way - waiting alone by his Mercedes. Ours were the only vehicles in that area of the car park.

"Do you find this peculiar?" I asked Herve. "No one’s with him."
"Maybe it is a trap. I will keep my eyes open."
"Wish me luck, then."

I stepped out of the back seat of the black limousine Herve had rented for appearance sake. Rauss watched me carefully, almost studying me with a pointed scrutiny as I approached him.

"Mr. Rauss," I said.
"Mr. Franks," he said.
"They say good things come to one who waits, and I believe I have waited long enough."

We shook hands.

"And there is much to be said about patience being a virtue, Mr. Franks. I am sorry for the protracted delay, but an unexpected matter had intervened so as to take up a good deal of my time. But we are here now, so come... we shall walk, and we shall talk."

I gave a look back to Herve, now standing outside of the limousine, and nodded him a signal that Rauss and I were about to embark on a stroll.

"Are you fond of cemeteries, Mr. Franks?" Rauss asked.
"Fond is hardly a word I'd apply to a cemetery."
"Myself, I like the tranquility of such grounds. I am especially fond of this cemetery. It is about 150 years old now and is the third largest one in North America. And to think that here they put it on top of a mountain, of all places. Did you know this mountain is a dormant volcano? Just imagine if it should ever become active again ... ka-boom! The dead will rise, so to speak."

The path-road we walked wound its way to a T-intersection. I took note of the lot numbers plate on a post at the corner of it: B479-514.

"Before we get to business," Rauss said, "you must indulge me in my eccentricity of showing you three of my favourite monuments here."
"Well, I’ve waited this long, so yes, of course."

We diagonally crossed the grounds of lot numbers B479-514, weaving our way between family plots marked by diversified headstones until finally stopping nearby another path-road, alongside which the three specific monuments were erected. I patiently listened to Rauss’s architectural appreciation and personal interpretation of each of the monuments he showed me. The first was that of a draped full-figured male lying flat atop a tomb, his head cradled in the lap of a female resting on her haunches. The second was another full-figured statue, that of a mourning woman kneeling with her face buried in her crossed arms over an altar. And the third was angled at the intersection of two of the path-roads.

"This one is my favourite of all," Rauss said. "Impressive in its understated grandiosity, yet simple in its definition by only three elements: the barrier, the epitaph, and the statue. The statue... She is marvellous to behold, don’t you think?"

The realistic-looking gowned female figure sat lifeless, with her head rolled to her right, and almost sprawled on a throne-like seat. A low, wide, curved, granite wall branched out from either side of her throne.

"Quite dramatic," I commented. "Almost something maternal about her."
"Yes. Yes, you are quite right. I hadn’t noticed that before. And see how she avails herself of her lap, almost as if inviting you to sit on it, even in her death. A welcoming gesture, wouldn’t you say?"

I looked at him, trying to gauge what he exactly meant by that.

"But now, Mr. Franks," he said with a grave turn in his voice. "Let us discuss your business."

I looked at my watch.

"The cemetery will be closing its gates in just a few minutes," I reminded him.
"Yes, I know," he said, undisturbed by the fact.

I gave a discreet passing look to my left, with a glance behind me over my shoulder. There was no one in view.

"You do realize what I am in the market for." The story was about acquiring a set of dirty bombs.
"Quite."

As I paced nonchalantly around him, I then gave a discreet passing look to my right and another glance behind me over my shoulder, again noting no one in sight.

"And this does not bother you in the least?"
"It is strictly business, Mr. Franks."

I felt a tenseness build within me as I approached closer to Rauss, as if to walk past him and toward the seated female statue. But I knew I needed to make my move there and then or lose my chance, so I quickly spun on my heel, catching him off guard, and got a grip of him from behind, grabbing and holding firm his left wrist and yanking it high up his back, then locking my right forearm against his throat. As I began to choke him unsparingly with the full pressure of my forearm against his throat, I dragged him the few feet to the statue. It all seemed quite surreal in the way Rauss did not appear surprised by my action, and what resistance he showed could not be described as either a genuine or determined one. I continued to extract the life out of him as I slowly lowered his body onto the statue’s lap, lowering myself as well to kneeling on one knee beside it. For a moment I could not help but feel the outright murderous nature of my act as I had never felt it before. Nevertheless, with a grit on my face that I knew was there, I finally exerted all the strength in me into one final crush of his windpipe. His body then suddenly went limp. It was almost too easy and too quick.

I slowly stood up and looked down at his dead face as he lay there on his back across the statue's lap. I thought I had been finished with this business of killing long ago, and I now had my doubts as to why I even engaged myself in it this time around.

"I must have better things to do than this," I muttered to myself.

I gave another quick look around the grounds to reassure myself that there had been no witnesses. Besides, it was closing time on a Thursday and it seemed unlikely anyone else would still be around at the last minute – aside from myself, Herve, Rauss, and whatever groundskeepers there may have been. The deed done, I hurried back to Herve and the limo. With my luggage in the trunk, I was already prepared to make my planned hasty departure for my flight back to London and the debriefing with M.

My time of reflection on all of this was borne out of what more I had learned from M shortly after I left London and returned home. It appeared that Rauss had already been handed a death sentence. He suffered from an incurable form of melanoma cancer. He had only learned of this midway through my stay in Montreal, at the beginning of April, which explained his prolonged delay in dealing with me. His own concern of mortality apparently was more important and he likely may have spent a good deal of time getting his affairs in order in preparation for the inevitable. If I hadn’t finished him off, he may have had another couple of months left in him. But maybe he didn’t want that. After all, he did come alone, without bodyguards or henchmen. Maybe he arrived prepared to die, having chosen his time and place. He came to the cemetery with which he had an affinity, as he claimed. He showed me his three preferred monuments, the last being his favourite, where it seemed he wanted to die. And I was there to facilitate that death for him. I even left him lying across the lap of the female statue and, appropriately enough, against the engraved words that spanned the monument’s wall behind her: Mors Pax Aeterna. It is Latin for Eternal Peaceful Death.

I can only believe that Rauss had decided that I would be his executioner. It was one thing to serve as an instrument for Queen and Country to kill someone who deserved to die. It felt entirely repugnant to be used as an instrument of death by someone who wished to die, as much as they may deserve their death. I am not even so sure that Rauss had not learned of my true identity through all of the delay. He may have actually found out who I really was and, in some perverse way, he may have felt honoured that he would die at the hands of the legendary James Bond. Perhaps I shouldn’t read much into it, but I do feel somewhat particularly unsettled by the numerical irony of a 77-year-old killed by a 007. There was something almost too personal in that. And again, in some twisted fashion, Rauss might have relished in the honour of that irony through his dying gasps.

Putrere in Barathrum Aeterna - may he eternally rot in hell.