Текст книги "The Diving Dames Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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It was nearly ten o'clock at night when he returned. As soon as the dusty car turned the last bend and came in sight of the scattered lights of the town below, he pulled off the road and cut the motor. From the luggage space in the VW's front, he removed a pigskin case – and from the case he took a pair of silver backed brushes, a safety razor, a manicure set and a bottle of toilet water with an ornate stopper. Each of these articles could be dismantled, and from the interior of each came an assortment of precision parts which could be assembled into a miniature radio transceiver. It took the agent two and a quarter minutes to set up the gear, another thirty seconds to dismantle the car aerial and refit it in a special socket at one side of the set, and nine minutes of patient fiddling with dials and knobs and tuners before he heard an answer to his call-sign on the wavelength he was using.

He picked up the tiny microphone, thumbed the button on its side and spoke softly. "Hello, Recife?" he said. "Is that Da Costa at Recife?... Are you hearing me loud and clear?... Please acknowledge and advise. Over."

Releasing the button, he lifted a small earphone, flicked a diminutive switch and craned his head to one sale, listening to the tinny sounds within the can.

"Okay," he said at length, resuming the microphone and throwing the switch once more. "I'm not going to dictate you a message for passing on to Waverly. You know the procedure. It'll read oddly because you are to send it in clear – do you understand? It is to go in clear, for political reasons. Message begins: Following are certs and probables for Brazilian Hit Parade..."

–

Half an hour later, he was running the Volkswagen in under the eaves of the huge barn which acted as garage for the inn. Hardly a light showed in the shuttered streets; there was more illumination from a sky prickled out with stars than was offered to the municipality of Goiás as he stumbled across the yard and in at the back door of the hotel.

Once in his room, he checked methodically the half dozen tiny personal signposts that every agent leaves to tip him off in case of entry or search. Of the five cigarettes in the pack carelessly thrown on the table, three still had the brand names on the paper facing downwards. The corner of the folded map on the bureau still coincided with the angle of a letter V in the title of a book below it. Nothing had disturbed the irregularly shaped morsel of flint he had balanced on top of one of the drawers. He poured himself a glass of water from the carafe, pulled his sticky shirt over his head, and continued. The suitcase came next: carefully he eased open the catches. Balanced on a stud-box inside was a small pile of coins. The top one should be a 1936 Spanish peseta with the first numeral of the date pointing at the top left-hand corner of the case.

It was.

Solo sighed with relief. It looked as though the place was clean, all right. Not that he expected anything, but you could never relax. He would just check the last three pointers and then he could get to bed. First, though, he must have another drink and get the rest of his clothes off. It really was tremendously hot tonight.

He was staring straight at the ceiling then. He couldn't think why, for the moment, and then he realized that he was lying on his back on the floor. He had no recollection of having fallen, and no time seemed to have elapsed since he had formed the thought about the closeness of the night. It was very odd.

He got up, shaking his head, and reached for the glass of water. At least some of it was left – and he was exceedingly thirsty.

The floor spun away to his left and the bed moved in and hit him on the shoulder. He opened his mouth but no sound came out of it. The religious pictures on the wall advanced and receded in a blur of movement.

And then suddenly, in a blinding moment of c1arity, he had it: of course they hadn't bothered to search his things or turn over his luggage. Why bother when you can drug a man's drinking water on a hot night – and then search to your heart's content without arousing his… without arousing his what?... It was too dark to remember.

Desperately, Solo struggled to a sitting position. Idiot, idiot, idiot, a voice screamed into his dwindling consciousness. For a professional to be caught by such a trick...

He clawed at the bed but his fingers were swollen and woolly. The counterpane whirled away into the stars as the night burst through the wall. Dimly, he sensed the presence of people, of figures moving in a mist.

And then something exploded with a soft, almost caressing flare in his head, and he began to fall…

Chapter 4

A Matter of Interpretation

ICY RAIN lanced across the East River and rattled on the window of Alexander Waverly's office as a squall hurled itself on the city from the north. Outside the shabby block sheathing the electronic complexities of U.N.C.L.E. from a curious world, people turned up the collars of their raincoats and hurried to get in off the glistening street. A young man wrestled with an umbrella that had blown inside out on the sidewalk by Del Floria's tailor shop.

Waverly himself faced a woman across the immensity of his desk. Apart from the low humming of the air-conditioning, there was silence in the room. At length, the woman gave a short sigh of exasperation and shrugged her plump shoulders. "All right, Alexander, if you insist on being so conscientious, I suppose I'll have to accept it... but I think you're being unnecessarily obstructive. As Commandant of the D.A.M.E.S., surely I have a right to -"

"Barbara! Please!" Waverly interrupted. "There are no 'rights' at all in this matter. And I'm not being over-scrupulous at all."

I didn't say that. I said obstructive. And I think -"

"You meant that. But the point is simply this: we happen to have come across a case where, in another country, some women have been claiming to be members of your organization. The circumstances surrounding that case are of interest to us, so we are investigating it. Because the women are actually not members of your body, naturally you are interested too. You want to know why. But that does not give you the right to demand information about the case as a whole, or to be made party to the confidential reports of my operatives. Indeed, I'm very surprised that you should ask."

"Oh, Alexander, don't be so stuffy! You know perfectly well what I mean: I simply want to know, to put it in a nutshell, what it's all about. That's all."

"And to vulgarize my own position, Barbara, the answer is that I simply cannot tell you. I haven't the right to. All I can say, if it's any help, is that the fact they chose your organization as a cover is practically coincidental."

"I'm delighted. But what I want to know -"

"The case we're investigating, quite literally, has nothing whatever to do with you. Nothing."

"Since you have interrupted me three times in the past two minutes, I gather that's as much as you are prepared to say. But I warn you, Alexander – I'll take the matter further. We do have friends in the Pentagon."

Waverly rose to his feet. He was smiling good-naturedly. "By all means, Barbara, pull all the strings you can," he said equably. "And if you come across anything really succulent, let me know, won't you?"

Mrs. Stretford rose too – five foot four inches of efficiency tightly swathed in the green tweed of the D.A. M.E.S. military-style uniform. "You can joke as much as you like," she said briskly, settling the hat with its gold-starred cockade and upturned brim more firmly above her clear eyes and ruddy cheeks. "But you know I have a way of getting things done."

Waverly merely smiled. He reached for a pipe, discovered that it was already stuffed with unsmoked tobacco, and groped in his pocket for another. As soon as the creak of Barbara Stretford's sensible brogues had died away across the anteroom, he thumbed the button on his desk and called: "Have Mr. Kuryakin come in now, if you please."

Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin had been born in Russia – a fact that the international organization employing him occasionally found useful, especially when they were working in cooperation with Warsaw Pact powers. Beneath a high forehead fringed with pale hair, his eyes, blue and deep-set, regarded the world of his adoption with a seriousness that was alternately the stimulation and the exasperation of the young women who worked in the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. He lived in a small bachelor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, he was a good lab man, a mine of information on the latest electronic advances, an expert on firearms and radio. And he was also, with Napoleon Solo, one of the two Enforcement Agents Waverly rated highest on his private list.

"My apologies for keeping you waiting, Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly said now as he motioned Illya to a chair on the far side of his desk. "I have been doing battle with Commandant Stretford, the D.A.M.E.S. lady. If only she realized how little – how very little – we know about her precious Brazilian, ah, bombshells!"

"You have heard no more from Napoleon?"

"Nothing. Just the one radio message forwarded by Recife. Not a word since… and that was the morning of the day before yesterday."

"Maybe he found himself on a promising trail and hasn't been able to find time to get through again. Were you definitely expecting him to call back?"

"Yes, we were. On his own instructions, too. He told our man in Recife to listen at the same time the following evening, to be sure he didn't miss out on a transmission he expected to be very important."

Kuryakin's quiet blue-gray eyes rested steadily on Waverly for a long moment before he said softly, "I see what you mean."

"I don't like it. I don't like it at all," Waverly said. "It's not like Mr. Solo to make an arrangement and fail to keep it. Something must have happened to him. The question is – what? If only he had been able to be more explicit in his message…"

"Was it in clear or in code, Mr. Waverly?"

"Oh, didn't I show it to you? Here…" Waverly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and passed it across. "It's kind of half and half, as you see. I told him not to send anything in code or cypher, because we can't run the risk of offending the Brazilians by sending secret messages out of their country without telling them we're operating there. You never know when a regular post might be monitored. On the other hand, he couldn't very well put down chapter and verse in clear. So he's done it in plain English – but we have to interpret the meaning." He smiled frostily as Kuryakin put on a pair of glasses and read the message:

FOLLOWING ARE CERTS AND PROBABLES

FOR BRAZILIAN HIT PARADE STOP CERTS

THE LADY IS A TRAMP STOP REPEAT STOP

REPEAT STOP DAM YANKEES STOP UP THE

LAZY RIVER STOP I'M GONNA GO FISHING

STOP HELP BY THE BEETLES STOP PROBABLES

STARS FELL ON ALABAMA STOP OUT

OF NOWHERE STOP HERNANDO'S HIDEAWAY

STOP UNCLE TOM'S CABIN STOP BIRD BRAIN

STOP SECOND TEN PROWAVERLY TOMORROW

STOP EXOLO.

"Well?" Waverly inquired as Kuryakin looked up.

"Not too easy," the Russian admitted. "I take it the technique of using a popular song Hit Parade is merely a device to provide reason for having a number of unusual images all together, rather than a lead in itself?"

Waverly nodded.

"Then we have ten songs listed – five under certs and five under probables. May we assume these are simply facts and conjectures, respectively?"

Again Waverly inclined his head. "That's the way I see it," he said.

"Good. Now, first of all, why the two repeats in the first entry? I cannot understand that at all."

"Simply, I think, to make the title plural. Several ladies. In other words, he confirms that there are spurious D.A.M.E.S., none of whom are – as my mother used to say – any better than they should be."

"Then obviously he is saying later that he is going to investigate somewhere – going fishing. Though where the lazy river is, I don't know. There are several water images… Oh." He paused and looked at Waverly. "I see the 'Danm' of Damn Yankees is spelled wrong. Would that be deliberate?"

"It would. Recife said he was insistent on triple-checking all the spelling."

"Ah. Could the river perhaps be lazy because of a dam, then?"

"It's a possibility – though what it has to do with Yankees, I cannot see."

"Let's leave that for a moment, then, and pass to the last factual one. He needs help – but why put in the artists, when he hasn't before, and again, why misspell the Beatles?"

"There's a reason," Waverly said. "We'll come to it later. In the meantime, what do you make of the second five?"

"Stars fell on Alabama out of nowhere – that's a frightening image," Illya said thoughtfully. "Especially when you connect it with the last entry."

"The last entry?"

"A minor Charlie Parker piece. Not well know even among his fans – and in quite a different category from the rest, all of which are big, number one best-sellers of one era or another."

"Yes. I thought it odd too. He must have included it because that number, and only that one, perfectly expressed his meaning. What do you make of it?"

"In our business, bird connected with brain can mean only one thing," Kuryakin said soberly.

"Exactly."

"And if he has stumbled on some plot of Thrush's – and they've caught him – his chances must be very slim," the Russian continued. "Mr. Waverly – I'd like you to assign me to go and get him out. I'm used to working with him, I know the methods he uses and therefore I can backtrack on him more easily."

"That is true. Very well – but please disabuse your mind of any romantic ideas of 'going in to get him out.' In the first place, we do not know for sure (a) whether it is in fact Thrush, and (b) whether there may not be some perfectly innocent explanation for his silence. Secondly, we do not in either case know for sure that he's 'in.' And thirdly, the requirements of the assignment – which naturally overrule personal consideration – may call for you to play a waiting game."

"But, Mr. Waverly -"

"The job, Mr. Kuryakin, comes before anything else. Surely you of all my operatives are aware of that?"

"Yes, sir.

"Good. To recap, then: you will go to Rio de Janeiro and pick up Mr. Solo's trail there. We know from his previous messages through Recife that he was using the name of Williams and the cover of a lawyer. We know that he spoke to a police captain named Garcia, and the two women he wished to interview were murdered in their beds, and that after visiting the site of the car crash, he returned to Rio and took the first available plane to Brasilia. The rest, as a great Englishman said, is silence."

"Very good, sir. Before following him to Brasilia, I had better try and find out what caused him to go. It will prove quicker in the long run, I think."

"I agree," Waverly said dryly. "But I am afraid you may be too late." He handed the agent a photostat.

It was a copy of a circled news item from a two-days– old Rio paper. It was headed DEATH STRIKES TWICE AT FATAL CURVE and it read:

The body of Miguel Oliveira, 73, retired fruit farmer of Santa Maria da Conceicao, was discovered yesterday afternoon on a mountain road outside the city at the very place where two American women were involved three days ago in a fatal accident when their car left the highway. The old man, who traversed the route every day, is thought to have dismounted from his mule for some reason and suffered at the hands of a hit-and-run driver.

"They – whoever they are – are nothing if not thorough," Waverly continued. "I wouldn't take any bets on whether or not that old man provided the reason for Mr. Solo's sudden decision to go to Brasilia. With him and the girls dead, you're left with no definite lead at all."

"Yes. I notice the pacer said nothing about the women having been murdered."

"No. The Brazilian police are touchy about people who get killed in their care. They preferred to let readers infer the girls died as a result of the accident."

"I see. There is just a slim chance, then, that our villains may not realize quite how much we know or have guessed about them?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"Good. I'll go to the armory and draw my PPK, then, and call in on Operations for a full briefing on my way back."

"Very well, Mr. Kuryakin. You may liaise with the Brazilian police to the extent that you may overtly be looking for a colleague, Mr. Williams, the lawyer, who a unaccountably to have disappeared."

"And my liaison with you?"

"Don't call me," Waverly said, superbly unconscious of paraphrasing: "I shall call you... I don't want to overload the radio traffic from Recife any more. Leave it to me to get in touch with you, and you can report as and when contacted. No doubt you will find the reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Hernando's Hideaway perfectly explicit once you are on the scene."

"No doubt," Illya said. "I'll see you at Philippi, then."

His chief looked up sharply "Philippi?" he queried. "Where's that? Or what's that?'

"It's the Greek for Sevastopol," Illya said softly as he closed the door from the outside.

–

He went to the armory and drew his gun and several smaller and more recondite devices, called in at Operations, went to the Library to read the secret files on the case so far, took the elevator down past the warren of the Communications section to the street level, and walked into the entrance foyer. From here, monitored by closed-circuit TV, four exits led from the building: one via the top floor of the restaurant-club at one end of the block; another through the public garage at the far end; a third by way of a subterranean channel cut through from the river; and the last, reserved for operating agents, via a concealed door in a changing cubicle at the back of Del Floria's tailor shop. Kuryakin handed in the triangular yellow badge that had permitted him to rise to Waverly's floor, said "Good-day" expressionlessly to the ex-West Indian beauty queen presiding at the desk, and walked through into the cubicle.

Outside the steamed-up windows of the shop, the rain had stopped and a hundred sections of dripping guttering above the brownstones played an obbligato to the mournful swish of tires on the wet street. But there was still hardly a soul about. The young man with the inside-out umbrella – he had finally junked it in a trash basket – had no difficulty in following Illya Kuryakin at all.

Chapter 5

Old Wine In New Bottles!

IN RIO DE JANEIRO, Illya Kuryakin met with a blank wall of official silence – not because the authorities wished to impede his investigation, but because Solo, after all, had been working strictly alone and they had nothing to tell him. About the murdered girls, police head quarters were polite but noncommittal. It was a murder case, they were handling it in their own way, and since he had no official standing they were giving nothing away. In the district bureau, Captain Garcia was equally courteous – and equally vague. The Senhor Williams had come to the hospital, learned the tragic news, accompanied the captain back to his office and talked for a while, and then left. It was true that patrolmen Da Silva and Gomez had seen his hired car parked near the site of the accident – what he had wanted there, the Captain could not think – but that was not against the law and anyway he had come straight back to the city, returned the rented Buick, and left by plane for Brasilia shortly after. So far as the old man killed by the hit– and-run driver was concerned, the police were disposed to dismiss it as a coincidence. There was, it was true, the slight – the million to one – chance that the old man had been deliberately killed to stop him revealing some thing he had told the Senhor Williams in a conversation. It was an interesting possibility, and one that the police would keep in mind.

It was the same thing at the hotel. The gentleman had checked in, stayed the night, eaten elsewhere, spent a second night there, called for his bill, paid, and left by the early morning plane to Brasilia. He had given them no forwarding address.

At a public library near the hotel, a clerk recognized a photo of the missing agent, and said that he had been consulting topographical maps of the country. He had himself recommended him to go to the bureau of public works if he wished to inform himself more closely. Some thing to do with a projected dam or a hydroelectric scheme, he thought...

The car rental company could add nothing to the details of the short transaction that Illya already knew. A lawyer had hired a Buick and returned it the following day having done less than a hundred miles. Period.

He was walking disconsolately back to the hotel, wondering what possible lead he could follow up next, when he halted in mid-stride as he was passing a barbershop. It must be a coincidence, it was not possible, it was a trick of hearing… but he could have sworn that, through the bead curtain masking the doorway, he had caught an echo from the past, a voice from the dead. He shook his head, his lips creased in a wry little smile, and he was about to go on when he heard the voice again. There was no mistaking it: it did sound exactly like… On an impulse, he swept aside the curtain and peered into the somber interior of the small shop.

There were only four chairs, ranged before their basins and mirrors in one of the world's most universal patterns. Two of them were untended. The third, at the far end, cradled a recumbent figure swathed in steaming towels with a white-coated barber, beyond, busied about a cupboard of shining instruments. The nearest chair was empty – but beside it was a wheelchair holding an enormous man, a man so vast that he overflowed the big carriage on all sides and towered above the shining steel rails of its back, a man so fat that the swell of his belly almost covered his knees and his bright blue, humorous eyes were nearly lost among the rolls of flesh forming his face. Half submerged in lather, the head topping this great bulk sported a few strands of reddish hair which were combed across the freckled scalp. From a cavern opening and closing in the middle of the foam rumbled the voice whose characteristic tones had first arrested Illya outside the shop.

"And be sure, Pedro me boy, to glide your implement neatly around the spot at the base of me chin – for if you decapitate it again, I'll sure as hell be provoked into leapin' out of this chair at all, and wrappin' your razor around your Brazilian nut," he was saying amiably to the barber shaving him.

"Si, senhor," the hairdresser began, when he was rudely interrupted by Kuryakin, who surged past in a rare moment of exuberance to exclaim:

"Tufik! I knew I couldn't be mistaken: I'd know that County Cork accent anywhere! What in the world are you doing in Rio? You're supposed to be dead!"

The eyes in the great moon face remained closed. Not a muscle twitched beneath the lather. Eventually the hole opened again and the voice said quietly, "County Waterford, as it happens, in the locality of Lismore. But you have the advantage of me, sir – besides which you appear to have made a mistake, for the name by which you greeted me is not my own."

Kuryakin followed the lead instinctively. "I'm so very sorry," he said at once. "I thought it was a friend I hadn't seen for years. Now that my eyes are accustomed to the light, I see I was wrong. My apologies for disturbing you." He smiled deprecatingly at the barber and went out.

Ten minutes later the fat man in the wheelchair was lifted through the bead curtain onto the sidewalk and propelled himself rapidly away on the shadowed side of the street. Kuryakin waited in the shelter of a doorway to an apartment building until he turned into a narrow alley, and then crossed the road and caught up with him.

"Sorry for letting my mouth get the better of me," he said quietly, walking along behind the chair. "I was so surprised to see you that I couldn't stop myself blurting out your name."

"Not to worry, boy," the fat man said without turning his head. "Mr. Kuryakov, isn't it?"

"Kuryakin. Illya Kuryakin."

"To be sure, to be sure. I'll be forgetting me own name next – which by the way is Manuel O'Rourke now. So far as Habib Tufik is concerned – I'd be grateful if you would forget that one!"

"Willingly – but what happened? Solo and I heard that Thrush had blown up your place in Casablanca and that you had died in the blast. We saw a story in the paper in Alexandria."

"Ah, sure you don't want to believe everything you read in the papers," the Irishman said. "If a feller has good friends – that he's paid well over a period of time, mind – likely it'll happen that they'll tip him off in time to get out while the goin's good, eh?"

Illya nodded with an inward grin. Habib Tufik – as Illya had known him – had been born of an Irish mother and a North African father and had built up over many years an information service in Casablanca**See The Man From U.N.C.L.E. #7, The Radioactive Camel Affair.

that had been without equal in the world. To him, police forces, embassy staff, military attaches, detectives, lawyers, spies and newspapermen from all over the world had come to buy knowledge in the days before Solo and Illya had unwittingly put him on the wrong side of Thrush. His service had been completely impersonal – if clients wanted information, he would supply it... at a price. And provided it did not compromise those who were already his clients. His systems of microphone eavesdropping, newspaper "milking," and world-wide cross-indexing, combined with an unrivaled control of hotel porters, liftmen and taxi drivers, had brought him the reputation of the most up-to-date gossip-monger on Earth. Crippled by an early encounter with gangsters whom he had attempted to take on single-handed, he had run his one-man show from his wheelchair, aided only by a handful of loyal strong-arm men.

Until U.N.C.L.E. had involved him with Thrush.

But although his organization had gone, it seemed he had amazingly survived personally the attentions of that evil and ruthless society. And now here he was in South America, complete with new name and personality.

Illya laughed aloud with pleasure at seeing him. "And what exactly are you doing here in Brazil, Senhor… O'Rourke? And when can you tell me your story?" he asked.

The fat man stopped his chair. "I go in here," he said. "Best not to make it too obvious. Walk on past, you. Then come back in ten minutes… You walk through the iron gates and take the lift. Press the button for the sixteenth."

"The sixteenth?"

"Sure, the penthouse floor. Nothing but the best for yours truly. Thank the dear Lord the Brazilians build wide lifts, eh?"

Illya glanced upwards. True enough, set a little way back from the old, shuttered houses lining the court, the slim pillar of a modern apartment building rose to the sky.

Ten minutes later, he pushed open a wrought-iron ornamental gate and walked down a long, cool passage to a foyer containing a bank of lifts at the far side.

Tufik – or O'Rourke, as Illya now tried to think of him – was waiting in his chair as the doors slid open on the top floor. Spinning the vehicle with all his old expertise, he led the way into a small apartment furnished in ultra-modern style. Beyond a living room bleak with Danish chairs and an angular room divider, a large flagged terrace stretched coolly away beneath a canopy of vines. There were geraniums, salvias, petunias and begonias in pots, and the flanking apartments were shut off by a dense hedge of macrocarpa in green wooden troughs. At the open end of the balcony, a stone balustrade partitioned a jumble of tiled roofs in red and green, beyond which palm trees fringed Copacabana and a vivid blue segment of sea.

"Fantastic!" Illya murmured wonderingly. "For a man in a wheelchair, you certainly manage to fall on your feet, don't you?"

The Irishman chuckled throatily, the pendant folds of flesh masking his chin shaking from side to side. "Ah, sure we manage, we manage," he said. "'Tis entirely a matter of knowing where to go at the right time... plus a little judicious – ah – emolument dispensed over the years, of course. It's surprised you'd be if you knew how many people I'd 'dropped' over the years to prepare for just such an eventuality as this!"

"But what are you doing here? Are you still in the same business?"

"In the same line of business, boy; but by no means in the same way of business. That sweet little setup I had in Casablanca was the result of thirty years' hard work. You can't replace that overnight. But, thank the dear Lord, I still had me overseas contacts and there were one or two souls were prepared to lend me a quid or two till I was on me feet again – if you see what I mean – so it begins, it begins."

"In that case," Illya said, "maybe you could be of help again."

"But of course, of course. Always ready to oblige an old client. Here, you're still standing up! Sit you down, sit you down. Let me fetch you a little something to refresh yourself. A vodka?"

"I'd rather have a Steinhaegger with a nice cold beer as a chaser, if your cellar can run to that."

"Certainly." The fat man detached a small, square box, louvered on one side, from the arm of his chair, raised it to his mouth, pressed a button, and called, "Joana! Are you there?"

Kuryakin smiled. The device, which would bleep until whoever was carrying its mate answered, was the same pattern as those used for local communications by the operatives of U.N.C,L.E.

"Yes, sir. You wanted something?" The soft voice came from the transceiver in the Irishman's hand.

"I did. A Steinhaegger and pils for my guest; the usual for myself, if you please, my dear."

Again Illya grinned. "The usual," he said. "Still Turkish coffee and Izarra, is it?"

"Ah, yes. If you have the sweet tooth, it doesn't lessen as you get older... Now, how can my poor embryo organization help you?"

The agent pulled a chair out from a delicately wrought white iron table, swung one leg over the seat, and sat down with his forearms folded over its back. "Well, now," he said, "it's like this…"