Chapter 11. Steel Teeth in Rio.

Bond decided that the most beautiful views in Rio de Janeiro were looking out to sea,

from the Copacabana beach to the Ponto de Lem and the Ila de Contunduba,

with the uneven brown and green heights of the Niteroi in the background.

All that and the beach itself, a magnificent sweep of sand like a

great playing field speckled with football pitches and volleyball courts, where all colours of skin

from honey to jet black twisted, turned, dived and leapt to steer balls over nets or between

posts, and where to lie still beneath the tropical sun and listen to the

Atlantic waves, thump against the flattened strand, was a confession of apathy tolerated

only in tourists and exceptionally beautiful girls. Behind the beach in the broad divided highway,

the unremarkable hotels and apartment blocks stood shoulder to shoulder like white pickets in a fence.

Held back behind them was the jungle, two and a half thousand miles of it, stretching to the

Pacific Cordillera and still within the boundaries of Brazil.

Bond pressed a button in the window of the Rolls-Royce purred down to bury itself in the coachwork.

It seemed amazing that in only

five and a half hours flying time, Concord had borne him from Europe to halfway down the coast of South

America. The mist shrouded Charles de Gaulle Airport belongs not only to another continent,

but to another season. Here the air was warm, balmy with fragrance, the light, lucid and clear. In Paris, the lights of

cars had shone dully through an opaque screen. People walked in a cloud of their own breath.

The rolls came to another halt in the slowly moving procession of traffic, and Bond sniffed the

smell of freshly roasted coffee and watched the ebb and flow of humanity scurrying about him.

The soft drinks and hot dog vendors, the shooshine boys darting between the pavement cafes,

...