Текст книги "The Diving Dames Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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THE DIVING DAMES AFFAIR

THERE WERE TWO BLONDES in the red convertible. White teeth gleamed in tanned faces as the car swept past Miguel Oliveira on his mule and then braked for the first of the hairpin bends leading down the mountainside to the main road and to Rio de Janeiro. The old man turned and watched it out of sight around a corner of the sun-baked rock face. Plenty of young people drove up here in the weekends, but it was unusual to see two girls in a car alone. He listened to the squealing of tires and the rising bellow of the exhaust as the convertible accelerated away from the turn, then transferred his gaze to the brush-covered rocky precipice dropping away to his right. Presently the car reappeared on a loop of road far below him, chrome glinting in the bright light as it arrowed down towards the last of the bends.

Sixty feet below the parapet guarding the curve, the broad highway to the state capital bisected the valley. And just beyond the corner, hidden from the girls in the low sports car but clearly visible to Miguel Oliveira, the driver of a decrepit truck who had found he was on the wrong road was laboriously turning.

The convertible entered the hairpin too fast. Oliveira saw its brake lights blaze as the blonde driver stamped on the pedal. The car slewed sideways, was expertly corrected, and snaked out of the bend to find the roadway almost completely blocked by the truck. Again the twin lights glowed – and then the girl, realizing that she could never stop in time, swung the wheel over in a desperate attempt to squeeze through between the radiator of the truck and the parapet. But the car, already partially out of her control, lurched sideways again and slammed into the low wall.

As Oliveira watched, horrified, it burst through the parapet, rose into the air, and hung for an instant motionless before plunging out of sight onto the steep slope linking the side road with the highway below. While the truck driver was erupting from his cabin to run to the edge, a cloud of dust mushroomed up over the shattered wall.

Seconds later, it seemed to the old man, the sound of the impact floated up the mountainside.

–

"Will they live?" the police captain asked the hospital intern later.

The young doctor raised white-coated shoulders in a professional shrug. "Barring unforeseen complications," he said. "It was fortunate for them that it was an open car. They were both thrown out before it landed upside down on the rock."

"And their injuries?"

"Multiple contusions and extensive lacerations in each case. The girl who was driving broke both legs against the steering wheel as she came out, but the other one's really worse off: there were boulders where she landed, and she has a cracked skull, a fractured pelvis and several broken ribs."

"They're still unconscious, both of them?"

The intern nodded. "And likely to remain so for some time. It was nearly half an hour before the ambulance got to them – and the sun's fierce at that time in the afternoon."

The policeman sighed. "I suppose we'd better go through the motions, then," he said, flicking a speck of dust from his olive green jacket. "I'll have to make a report, get in touch with next of kin, and so on. Shall we have a look at their effects?"

The doctor nodded again and led the way to an anteroom at the far end of the rubber tiled hospital corridor. A highway patrolman sprang to attention and saluted as the two men entered. Behind him, the sounds of suburban traffic filtered through green shutters closing out the dusk.

"Ah, Gomez," the police captain said, returning the salute. "What have we found out about these unfortunate ladies?"

The man looked uncomfortable. "Captain," he said, "I am very sorry, but… there is nothing."

"Nothing? But their names, surely? Their addresses?"

Gomez shook his head slowly. "Nothing," he repeated. "No driving license, no insurance certificate, no passports, no papers at all. I think they are Americans, but so far I have been unable to find out anything about their identity."

The captain stared in disbelief. "That is very curious," he said at last. "Let us see if perhaps their clothes…"

He moved across the room to a table on which were laid out two handbags and their contents, a pair of shattered sunglasses, shoes, several tourist's road maps, an entertainment guide to Rio, and two piles of blood stained clothing.

"I'm afraid we had to cut the clothes quite a bit," to get them off…" the doctor began apologetically.

"It does not matter," the policeman said. He picked up the ripped garments gingerly, one by one, and examined them: brightly colored blouses, underclothes, a skirt, a garter belt, what had once been a pair of white slacks. Finally he dropped the last one back on the table and turned to the doctor.

"The man is right," he said. "This is very odd: not one of these things has a name tag on it, Moreover, the labels and makers' names have been removed also."

"It is the same with the handbags, Captain," the patrolman interrupted. "See – cigarettes, lighters, money, lipsticks and compacts, keys, suntan oil, tissues… but no letters, no papers of any kind."

"Evidently," the captain said, "these are ladies who wished to remain incognito. But we have our duty to perform. We must find out who they are so that their relatives can be informed. We must force ourselves to be ungallant enough to unmask them."

Gomez smiled dutifully. "Yes, Captain," he murmured. "No doubt the laboratory could eventually trace them through these clothes and the shoes, but for an ordinary road accident it hardly seems…" The captain pause "What about the accident, by the way?" he inquired. "How did it happen? What do the witnesses say?"

"There were witnesses in three different cars on the highway. But all they saw was the second part of the accident, as it were. They saw the car bounce down the bank after it had broken through the parapet of the road above."

"Were there no witnesses up there?"

"We have found none."

"But what caused the accident? Why did the car break through the parapet?"

"We could find no reason for that either. There are two skid marks just after the hairpin, about a hundred and fifty yards before the place where the wall is breached – as though someone had braked hard there. But of course they could have been made by some other car."

"Quite," the captain said dryly. "So there are no marks at all – other than the broken wall – where the car left the road?"

"No, sir. None at all."

"This begins to get very puzzling. What about the car itself?"

"It was an Alfa Romeo 2600 – a beautiful car," Gomez said, his face lighting up with the enthusiasm of the car aficionado. "It is completely wrecked. Beyond any hope of repair."

"Yes, Gomez, yes," the captain prompted gently. "No doubt. But what I meant was – what is its number, where does it come from, and was there anything interesting in it?"

"Oh, I see. I'm sorry, sir... No, there was nothing at all in it of interest. A Japanese transistor radio and a pair of string gloves in the cubbyhole; a flask of brandy that was smashed in a door pocket. No papers."

"And the owner's name?"

"It was a rented car, Captain. Locally registered and belonging to a garage two blocks inland from Copacabana.

"Ah. No doubt the rental company can give us a lead on the person who rented it, then."

"Yes, sir. Da Silva's over there now making inquiries."

But the rental company was unable to reveal the names either of the driver or her companion. The car had been rented on behalf of an organization.

"D-A-M-E-S?" the police captain spelled out slowly in his office the next morning. "What on earth does that stand for?"

"It's a yanqui welfare organization," the patrolman called Da Silva said. "It means..." He consulted a piece of paper in his hand. "It means Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service."

"Missionaries! They don't look like missionaries! And what are they doing here? I've never heard of them. Do they have an office here – if indeed these women belong to the organization?"

"From the descriptions, they're the ones who booked the car, all right. They're not exactly missionaries as such – the D.A.M.E.S. is one of those charitable trusts that does good work wherever it's needed. Looking after earthquake survivors, helping famine victims, and so on."

"But we don't have any earthquakes or famine in Rio!"

"No, sir. We don't have a D.A.M.E.S. office either."

"Perhaps it's just as well... Did anyone think to check the mileage on the car speedometer with the mileage logged by the garage when it was hired?"

Da Silva's plump cheeks widened in a self-congratulatory smile. "Yes, Captain. I got the figures from the garage and went over to look at the car early this morning. It had covered nearly fifteen hundred miles since it was rented three days ago."

"Good. If they didn't have passports with them, they couldn't have crossed the frontier, so let's see…"

The captain rose from his desk, took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, picked up a pair of dividers and walked to a large wall map. The ceiling fan in that corner of the room stirred the hot, heavy air and detached a tendril of hair from his carefully groomed head as he applied the dividers to the scale.

"Yes," he said a moment later. "As I thought… they could have been to Porto Alegre, Bahia or Brasilia – or for that matter they could have done lots of little trips locally. But get in touch with our people in those places and ask if they have any mission or bureau run by the D-A-whatever-it-is."

"Yes, sir."

The officer sat down at his desk again. He took a small hand mirror from a drawer and studied his face. Above the thin moustache, there were hollows in his cheeks and the sallow skin below his eyes was pouched and puffy. He was already overworked: there had been a series of burglaries with violence in his subdivision and his superiors were pressing for results. Now he was burdened with this extra mystery. If only, he thought, the yanqui girls had written off their car further away from the city, or waited until the weather was less oppressive...

He loosened his tie and patted his forehead with a white handkerchief. "I'm not happy with this business of the witnesses," he said, combing his hair into place and putting the mirror back in its drawer. "Surely somebody must have seen what happened; something must have made that car break through the wall! Put out a radio message – you know: an accident occurred… a red sports car left the road… two foreign women were gravely injured… will anyone who witnessed the affair please contact us. The old routine."

"Very well, Captain."

"And Da Silva – you'd better take Gomez and go back to the hospital. If these girls are still unconscious, take their fingerprints and wire them to New York. In the matter of identification, we can probably save ourselves a lot of trouble that way."

CONTENTS

chapter

1: Briefing For Solo

2: The Man On The Mule

3: Up-Country Girls

4: A Matter OF Interpretation

5: Old Wine In New Bottles!

6: A Lady Is Unmasked

7: Trespassers Will Be Liquidated

8: A Break-In – And A Surprise!

9: The Message That Had To Get Through

10: "Don't Call Us – We'll Call You!.

11: In At The Back Door...

12: Hearse Under Water

13: Illya Changes His Mind

Chapter 1

Briefing For Solo

THERE WERE FOUR pieces of paper on the huge desk presided over by Alexander Waverly, head of the Police and Operations Department of the organization designated by the letters U.N.C.L.E. – the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

The Command's headquarters faced the slender monolith of the United Nations building in New York (although in fact only a single window, the one in Waverly's office, linked the building with the open air, the rest being sheathed by a row of seedy brownstone buildings, a public garage, and a restaurant-"key" club). From it, a network of communications and agents of all nationalities fanned out over the world to combat threats to peace and good order wherever and whatever they might be. The problem occupying Alexander Waverly at this moment was whether the four pieces of paper on his desk added up to such a threat.

His lean, lined face crumpled into a grimace of exasperation as he took a briar pipe from the pocket of his buggy tweed suit and shuffled the papers around with the stem. Two of them were carbon flimsies, one was a short newspaper cutting pasted onto a sheet of typing paper, and the last was a leaf torn from a desk memorandum on which a single word was scrawled in pencil. He shook his gray head, pursed his lips, and finally pressed one of a row of buttons set into a platen on the desk.

"Yes, Mr. Waverly?" The girl's voice came from a concealed speaker somewhere behind the paneling.

"Ask Mr. Solo to come in, please," Waverly said into air – and he slumped into the chair behind the desk and began filling his pipe from a Dresden jar. There were already two other pipes – a Meerschaum and a cherrywood – filled but unsmoked on the desk.

In a few minutes Napoleon Solo knocked and came in – medium height, compact figure, brown eyes below crisp, dark hair, and a determined chin which offset a mouth frequently curved in an ironic smile.

"I'd like you to have a look at these, Mr. Solo," Waverly said, laying down the briar and flicking three of the pieces of paper across the polished wood of his desk.

Solo sat down and picked up the sheets. The cutting was from that morning's edition of one of the New York papers. It was clipped from an inside page below the fold, and was headed DAMES IN DISTRESS. The story read:

Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday. – Two young women, believed to be American citizens, were seriously injured in an automobile accident near the Brazilian ex-capital last night when their sports car crashed through the retaining wall of a mountain road and fell to the highway below. They are thought to be members of a Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service (D.A.M.E.S.) team. Every effort is being made to establish the identity of the two women, both of whom were still unconscious early today.

One of the carbons was a copy of a letter from the D.A.M.E.S. headquarters in the East Fifties to Police Headquarters in Rio. It was signed "Barbara Stretford" and stated succinctly that the Service had no teams at present operating in Rio, Porto Alegre, Brasilia, or indeed any place in Brazil. The other was a copy of a cable to the same address from the FBI. It read:

270767/0815 YOUR 260767/1435 STOP PRINTS

IDENTIFY AAA RITA ROSENTHAL TWENTY-

SIX CONVICTED LOS ANGELES 1963 FELONY

1965 1966 FRAUD BBB BERNADINE SCIOTTO

TWENTYTHREE CONVICTED BERKELEY 1964

FELONY PRESENTLY WANTED FRAUD

CHARGES IOWA STOP AIRMAILED DETAILS

FOLLOW PLEASE DETAIN BBB AND ADVISE.

Napoleon Solo placed the papers carefully back on the desk and raised quizzical eyebrows at his chief. "And the fourth?" he asked.

Waverly spun around the memo sheet so that he could read it. The penciled scrawl read: Solo?

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," Solo said. "So two girls falsely representing themselves as members of D.A.M.E.S. almost write themselves off in Brazil. What does that have to do with us – or with me?"

"The balance of probabilities have to do with us, Mr. Solo," Waverly said. "You state the problem too simply. The newspaper cutting was one of the minor pieces of trivia that come my way. I should doubtless never have given it a second thought had I not run into Mrs. Stretford this morning. She happened to mention this odd query from the Rio police. And then, as a matter of routine, I found the FBI cable among the sheaf of courtesy copies they provide me with every day."

"Yes, but –"

"Patience, Mr. Solo. Patience! I was still disposed to file the matter away in my mind as an oddity – but then Forster of the Central Intelligence Agency telephoned me to ask what I thought of it."

"The C.I.A.! And what do you think of it?"

"I really don't know," Waverly said frankly. "Here we have two American citizens, both with police records, passing themselves off in a friendly foreign country as members of an eminently respectable trust based in New York. It's curious, to say the least. One wonders exactly why."

"Your papers don't say much about the D.A.M.E.S. angle."

"No, but I have been in touch with Rio by radio. Their car was hired and all the documents they produced were on official D.A.M.E.S. paper. Yet in the car they appear to have gone to a great deal of trouble to remove any reference to the organization – or to their identity at all. There were no papers, no licenses, no insurance certificates, no letters among their effects. And even their clothes had all the tabs removed."

"That is strange," Solo admitted. "You'd think that anyone who bothered to sail under the wrong flag, as it were, would keep it flying especially bravely, to foster the illusion."

"Exactly. There may be nothing more to it, of course, than a simple case of intended fraud or false pretenses. Some kind of confidence trick. On the other hand..."

"Any particular reason for the C.I.A. interest?"

"No, just routine. The facts I've given you are enough to make them wonder. But they're not sufficiently interested to risk their necks. You know how delicately they have to move these days: everything they do is wrong, everywhere. They're the whole world's whipping boy. And with the congress of Pan-American states and the O.A.S. conference coming up, Forster's especially keen to avoid treading on Brazilian toes. If they should go blundering in there and there's nothing to this thing, you can imagine what the Latin American papers would make of it!"

Solo nodded. "And they want us to be the fall guys, is that it?"

"As we're an international organization, it would look much better if there were any trouble. Since you're not engaged on anything specific at the moment," Waverly said almost apologetically, "I thought you might like to run down to Rio and, ah, nose around for a day or so."

"What exactly do you want me to do?"

"Be discreet above all. Try to find out what these girls were doing and why; find out where they are based and if there are any more of them. And don't declare yourself: you're strictly on your own. As I say, there's probably nothing in it, but I daresay it's worth a couple of days of your time."

"I can't go officially to the Rio police?"

"No."

"Well, the first thing, obviously, is to see the injured parties. Any objection if I present myself to the hospital – and to the police if necessary – as an American lawyer acting for them?"

"I don't think so. Just so long as nobody is involved officially before you find out what's going on. If in fact it turns out to be merely a police matter, you can simply report back to me and we'll hand the facts over to the proper authorities. If, on the other hand, this affair is the tip of some – ah – international iceberg of wrong-doing, then we shall probably have to state our case and ask for Brazilian cooperation."

Solo rose to his feet. "All right, then," he said. "I'll be on my way. If I hurry, I should be able to make the afternoon plane."

Waverly nodded. "I'll have Miss Tanimotu telephone for your ticket now," he said. "You can pick up a few notes I've made from Operations, and I'll send Geddes to meet you at the airport with a suitable passport, papers, cover story and so on."

"I'll be in touch by radio," Solo said. And he walked briskly out.

–

During the lunch hour, one of the switchboard girls from the vast U.N.C.L.E. communications center on the second floor of the headquarters went to a drugstore. After she had eaten, she went to the telephone booth in the back and dialed a number. She spoke rapidly and concisely for half a minute and then returned to her seat for coffee.

The fat man to whom she had been speaking replaced the receiver on its cradle in the Park Avenue penthouse. He sat for a few moments drumming ringed fingers on a Sheraton occasional table. Then he reached for the instrument again.

"Hello, operator?" he said. "Will you give me Long Distance, International? I want to make a call to Rio de Janeiro."

Chapter 2

The Man On The Mule

PALM TREES LINED the private road leading to the hospital and punctuated the green verandas surrounding the low, white building. From the steps leading to the entrance, a bright crescent of sand and surf marking the distant waterfront was visible between two soaring apartment buildings further down the hill. Away to the right, above a colony of flat-roofed villas, the Sugarloaf humped itself into the sky at the seaward end of the chain of tree-covered mountains encircling the city.

Napoleon Solo braked the hired Buick to a halt on the graveled circle and ran up the steps to the foyer. His oatmeal-colored lightweight suit clung uncomfortably to shoulders and thighs. After the long flight and a sleepless night in a hotel room, he was exhausted by the unaccustomed heat.

A large pendant fan revolved slowly in the shadowy entrance hall. Beneath it, a uniformed police officer was speaking to the dark girl at the reception desk. Under her starched cap, the girl flashed a professionally inquiring smile at Solo. The agent placed his brief case on the desk and leaned forwards. "My name is Williams," he said. "I'm a New York attorney delegated to represent two patients you have here: Miss Rosenthal and Miss Sciotto – the two Americans injured in the auto crash. Have they regained consciousness, do you know; and, if so, may I see them?"

The police officer had swung around and was staring curiously at Solo. His sallow, moustached face was tired. As the receptionist was about to speak he interrupted.

"Captain Garcia at your service, Mr. Williams," he said, holding out his hand. "Evidently you have not heard."

"Heard?" Solo repeated, taking the hand. "Heard what, Captain?"

"Both the ladies are dead, senhor," the girl said.

"Dead?" Solo echoed. "Both of them? But I thought -"

"They were both improving, though it is true that neither had recovered consciousness. But then something happened." The girl glanced at Garcia.

"Regrettably – most regrettably – there seems to have been somebody with an interest in seeing that they never did recover consciousness," the policeman supplied.

"Do you mean that they were killed? Murdered?"

"Unfortunately. We might very well have accepted that they had succumbed to their injuries, were it not for the fact that the intruder left open a window that should have been closed. But once we were suspicious, we were able to ask the post-mortem doctor to – how do you say? – keep the open eye. He found that, beyond all doubt, they had been killed by that simplest of all methods: the air bubble injected straight into a vein by a hypodermic syringe..."

–

"I have no wish to be obtrusive, Captain," Solo said later in Garcia's office, "and as a lawyer, of course, I have no right at all to question you – but as a matter of interest, do you have any idea why these girls were killed, or who killed them?"

"None, Mr. Williams. At the same time – purely as a matter of interest, of course – I am curious to know how these ladies managed to instruct an attorney to come all the way from New York to represent them, when in fact they had never recovered consciousness after the accident. An accident they presumably never knew had occurred."

Solo smiled. "I confess my Portuguese at fault in expressing myself poorly," he lied easily. "I said delegated to represent them. I am not of course instructed by victims. That would, as you say, have been impossible. I was asked to come by the organization to which they falsely claimed to belong, the D.A.M.E.S. The directors naturally wish to know why they are being thus misrepresented I had hoped to find out for them by questioning the ladies."

"Ah. You were to hold what is called, I believe, a watching brief?"

"Exactly. Any information you are permitted to give me will therefore be of the greatest assistance."

"There is very little," Garcia said wearily. "The car was rented on behalf of the organization and they gave, at the time, no names. It was paid for in advance and the papers and indemnities they produced seemed to be in order."

"Was the accident itself... engineered?"

"We think not. At the time there were no direct witnesses – only passersby on the lower road who saw the car tumble down the slope. But after putting out a radio message, we pulled in a truck driver who seems to have been the unwitting cause of the affair. He had taken the wrong road and was making an illegal turn just before a sharp bend. The sports car hit the wall and went over in attempting to avoid him."

"'He did not come forward at the time?"

"No. He drove away because he was frightened he would be blamed."

"I see. Then it looks very much as though… You have not found out where the women were based? Where they came from?"

"Not yet, senhor. It is a big country with many states. We shall find out."

"Of course. It looks, then, as though they may have been killed to delay that investigation?

"Yes," Garcia said with a sigh. "I suppose it does."

–

Solo found the site of the accident without any trouble. He had not liked to ask the policeman any further details: as a lawyer, he could have no possible interest in viewing the place. But from local newspaper reports, he was able to identify the highway – and once there, the evidence was all too plain. The brushwood was still scarred and flattened where the breakdown cranes had penetrated to haul away the wrecked car. Above, a trail of stones fanned out from the breached wall of the side road curving up around the flank of the mountain.

The agent took the minor road and left his car a hundred yards below the hairpin. There was nothing to see, really – just the broken parapet and the remains of chalk marks made by the police investigators on the scorching macadam. Nearer the corner, where the foliage on the mountainside shimmered in the heat haze rising from the road, four black skid marks angled across the surface. The car had obviously been out of alignment, going partially sideways, when the driver braked. She must have taken the bend too fast, seen the truck, clamped on the anchors when she had already lost the back end, and then released them and tried to get through, Solo thought to himself.

He walked around the curve and crouched down to the height the driver of a sports car would have been.

As he had thought, the road beyond the hairpin was invisible.

There was not much traffic. An ancient bus full of Negro women in bright headscarves rattled down to wards the main road in low gear; a tan Chevrolet hissed past on its way up into the mountains. He walked slowly back to his car, fanning his face with a newspaper. By the Buick, an old man with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a blanket over one shoulder had halted his mule. Solo gave him good-day politely.

"Good day, senhor," the old man replied. "And a good route to you. It is a good day for those who travel prudently. But no day is good for those who would arrive before their time... the yanqui ladies whose haste brought them only to the disaster you have been investigating, for example."

"You saw the accident?"

"Naturally. I am always on this road at this time."

"But... you did not come forward in answer to the police radio message?"

"The senhor will forgive me – but he is perhaps of the police himself?"

"No, no. My name is Williams; I am an attorney. I am trying to find out what caused the accident. I represent the ladies."

"So. A lawyer. Miguel Oliveira at your service," the old man said courteously, holding out a seamed hand. "As to the matter of the police, when you reach my age you learn that is wisest to avoid any unnecessary contact with them. I have seen many different police forces – and today's friend may be tomorrow's enemy. Also I do not possess a radio."

"But you did see the accident," Solo said, shaking the hand. "Can you advance any… Why do you think it happened?"

"They were going too fast. There was a truck. But then they always went too fast. Man is not intended for such speeds."

"Always? You had seen the girls before?"

"Many times, senhor. In different cars. Perhaps three times each month, perhaps five. They could not have been here more often for they lived so far away."

"You know where they came from?" Solo asked in astonishment.

"Si, senhor. From far, from very far away, as I have said."

"Do you know what place, what town?"

"That I cannot tell you. But it was very far. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles. Beyond the mountains, across the plain, beyond the great forests, beyond Belo Horizonte, beyond Goiania, somewhere in the hills of the interior before the great new city that men say rises like white towers into the sky."

"You mean Brasilia?"

"I believe that is what it is called," Miguel Oliveira admitted graciously.

"But… but... how in the world – you will forgive me, senhor? – how can you know this?"

"Simply," the old man said. He extended an arm up towards the tree-covered crests piercing the aching blue of the sky. On the road somewhere above, an automobile windshield flashed fiercely in the sun. "Below the pass, Pedro Gonzales keeps a small shack where he sells trinkets and refreshing drinks to the tourists who stop to admire the view. Each day, I pause to bid him good day and to drink a little wine with him. On two occasions, I have heard the American women make a telephone call from there. They also drink there – and I understand some American, although I do not speak it very well."

"You heard what they said? You heard the exchange they called?"

"I cannot recall the name. But on each occasion, it seemed to be a name unknown to the operator. The lady telephoning insisted, and said, yes, it was the correct name – it was a place in the mountains before that city, where they make a new lake."

"A small place in the mountains behind Brasilia where they're building an artificial lake – probably a dam," Solo said. "Senhor Oliveira, you have been more than helpful. I cannot thank you enough."