Текст книги "The Finger in the Sky Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

"No, Illya, no!" Solo said firmly. "This is way beyond me. Let me leave the technical stuff to you. When you have an idea, tell me—and we'll act on it. Until then, you're on your own, boy!"

"Just as you like, Napoleon. I think I might have the glimmering of an idea how someone might—just might—begin to make...what did the man say?"

"A set of conditions?"

"That's it! A set of conditions! A set of conditions in which this equipment might be made to react falsely without permanently damaging it...but I'd like to brood on it before I commit myself."

"You do that. In the meantime, we'll start on the social side, as we said..."

* * *

At seven thirty, they met Helga for a drink in the airport lounge. Sheridan Rogers had still not returned to her apartment, nor had she left any message at the T.C.A. office or in the bureau at the terminal building. They gave her a half hour and left at eight o'clock—calling once again at the empty apartment on the way to Haut-des-Cagnes.

Illya, customarily a reserved companion, was abnormally quiet and worried during the short journey. Solo and Helga, torn between the extremes of failing to cheer him up and appearing too flippant in the face of his obvious distress, struck a kind of subdued bantering note in their exchanges as the car sped along the motor road to Cros-des-Cagnes and then turned inland towards the medieval village perched so picturesquely above it. From the coast, Haut-des-Cagnes presents a symmetrical aspect—a pyramid of rough, red-tiled Proven�al roofs crowned by a 14th century Grimaldi castle, beneath whose floodlit and crenellated keep the place clusters at night. But the visitor who ventures along either of the valleys running inland to each side of it soon sees the village in a different perspective. It is built—for a start—at the end of a spur and not on a hillock...so that a moving viewpoint presents constantly shifting profiles. At one moment, the emphasis seems to be rectangular—a line of picture-postcard houses serrating the sky at the top of a squared-up bluff; the next minute, the picture is all zig-zags—a series of slopes linked by hairpin bends, the whole complex rising to stone ramparts and punctuated by clusters of cottages clinging to the wall as tenaciously as the bougainvillea which covers them. And yet on the far side of the valley, a little higher up, an onlooker would characterize the place as a series of stepped terraces, rectangular plots and parcels of land related vertically by the swooping walls of villas and the trailing profusion of flowers hanging from their balustrades.

Illya drove about a kilometer along the road leading inland to Vence and then made a steep, climbing turn back to the right, approaching the old village from the north.

The center of social life in Haut-des-Cagnes is the place at the very summit of the pyramid—a small square dominated by the battlemented turret of the keep. Here a handful of expensive and chi-chi boutiques and souvenir shops vie with the three cabaret-restaurants in the laudable task of parting the tourist painlessly and as elegantly as possible from his money. And here in the summer—especially in August—an absurd and ludicrous number of cars attempt to park.

As the 404 negotiated the narrow, steep streets leading by degrees to the place, it became increasingly necessary to stop and allow other vehicles room for manoeuver—despite the traffic lights which in a desultory way tried to regulate the traffic coming up and down. As always, the square was full, and people on their way to the boutiques or the cafés had left their cars absolutely anywhere: they lined the constricted roadway, projected across intersections, blocked the exits from drives and garages, balked those wishing to turn and sprawled across every available inch of space in the congested village. Illya was eventually forced to turn around at the top and drive down again to a square only halfway up the ramparts. After waiting a moment here, they slid into a space vacated by a departing Belgian and climbed back to the place at the top via a steep stone staircase.

The party from T.C.A.—there were really three separate parties—was easy enough to identify. The alert young men and women in their crisp uniforms had taken over the three outside tables on one of the café terraces.

Helga, Illya and Solo took a table nearby and watched them curiously for a while. But the stereotyped banter, the stereotyped horseplay and the expected ploys soon palled and they began to look around at the other tourists there. Next door to their restaurant was another, and those sitting outside under the floodlit vine pergolas were separated from them only by a row of white fencing running from the junction of the two buildings. It was very warm in the soft summer darkness—a little humid, perhaps—and the shrill banalities of the holidaymakers sounded loud in the night air. On the far side of the square, beyond the massed lights of the parked cars, away from the milling convolutions of the café patrons, blue-clad men with lined faces the color of walnuts played a quiet game of pétanque.

After a while, someone came out onto the terrace with an accordion and sang. They drank a bottle of cold, aromatic Alsatian white wine and ordered another. A second cabaret performer drifted among the closely packed tables playing a guitar and singing American folk songs. In the distance, they could hear the first singer and her accordion entertaining customers in the basement of the next-door café.

Automobile engines started up, revved and whined away in low gear. New arrivals labored up the hill seeking a place to park. Every now and then a burst of applause or a concerted shout of laughter testified to the success of the evening.

After the second cabaret act, waiters at the place beyond the white fence pushed together three tables and started laying out glasses and napkins. Several parties had left. Obviously a larger one was expected. Soon a dozen or more people were threading their way among the other patrons to reach the long table. All of them, Solo saw when they were installed, were women—and the majority of them were in trousers. Several were very heavy around the haunches, with severe, mannish shirts and lined faces wearing a determined look. Others were willowy and slim, with voluptuous bodies below cropped hair. One red-haired girl with shining eyes wore a low-cut bronze cocktail dress. She was very beautiful.

Some of them drank pastis but the majority nursed wide, heavy glasses carrying whisky and ice. They were very gay and giggled a lot, the small conversational clumps every now and then coalescing into one big group when someone related an item sufficiently salacious, funny or astonishing to engage their attention.

The red-haired girl appeared to be the enfant terrible of the party and at the same time a kind of butt. Almost everything she said was greeted with whoops of laughter or exclamations of feigned outrage. After one low-voiced confidence entrusted to her immediate neighbors had resulted in a shriek of mock dismay, a broad-beamed woman at the far end of the table called out: "If Macnamara's going to drag us all down to her level again, at least let her for God's sake speak up so we can all hear!"

"Oh, but she isn't," the redhead's neighbor assured the woman, forcibly preventing the girl from rising to her feet and declaiming, "We're having no more of Macnamara!"

"Darling, but I insist..."

"No, Kay. No," they chorused, laughing. "Macnamara's banned!"

And they they all started to sing at once: "Tara ra-raaa, Ta-rat-taraaaa Raaa..."

They had been there about twenty minutes when Solo suddenly realized that Sheridan Rogers was among them. She had her back to them and he hoped that Illya would not notice her—for in fact she looked rather drunk, with smudged make-up, a blotchy face and hair over one eye. But unfortunately the Russian chanced to look up then, saw the intensity of his regard, and—following his eye—also noticed the girl.

"Sherry!" he exclaimed with a great deal of warmth. "What happened to you? We've been wondering all day. How nice to see you..." He rose to his feet and crossed to the fencing, leaning over to address the missing date from behind her shoulder. The girl called Macnamara bent her head and whispered something, causing Sherry Rogers to giggle and glance shyly over her shoulder at the Russian. "Hi, comrade!" she said thickly. "How goes the investi—investiga—How goes the spy hunt, eh? Found any more enemy agents under your bed?" She rose clumsily to her feet and faced him.

One of the girls in trousers murmured something behind her hand and the whole table burst out laughing again.

"That's ri'," Sherry giggled. "I don't 'spect he has!...But what are you doin' here, lover-boy? Have you come to have yourself a bit of 'xperience? Or are you still after the bold, bad villains for Uncle Sam?"

Illya had fallen back in bewilderment. "Sherry!" he began; "what happened? I thought we had a date...?"

The girl laughed raucously. "That's a good one," she cried. "A date with a dream! My li'l Russian Lull'by....What makes you think I stick aroun' for spy-catchers, comrade?"

"But, Sherry —"

"Oh, wrap it up...You make me tired. You think I've nothing better to do —" The girl's voice died away. Swaying slightly, she stared across the low fence at him for a moment, then lurched a step to one side and sat down abruptly in her chair. "I want a drink," she complained.

In the silence which had fallen over the long table the voice of one of the beefy, butch girls rang out, finishing a sentence: "... at his hair, darling! It could be one of us in drag..." A dozen pairs of eyes, bright with maliciousness and amusement, stared at the Russian as he stood dumbfounded among the red linen tablecloths. Then Helga left her seat and walked over to him. "Let's go, Illya," she said softly, touching his arm. "I'm afraid you'll do no good staying here. I'm terribly sorry but there's no doubt about it...the girl's plastered!"

Kuryakin was very quiet as Solo drove them back towards Nice. Once or twice he shook his head as though in disbelief. At length Solo glanced into the rear-view mirror, raised his eyebrows at the reflection of the Russian's glum expression which he saw there, and said seriously:

"Look, Illya—I was as astonished as you were. The girl's behavior doesn't seem to add up. But we all saw it; we all heard. And I'm sorry—believe me, I real sorry...But I guess anyone can make a mistake over somebody. In the meantime, I don't want to come on as the heavy, but we do have a job to do. We went out to keep an eye on the social life of T.C.A.'s people out here. The ones we went to watch seemed innocent enough—but don't forget Sheridan Rogers is a T.C.A. employee too."

The Russian sighed heavily. "Thank you, Napoleon," he said. "You are quite right, of course. And anyway I have long ago trained myself never to be surprised by what human beings do...at least not after the first shock. It was the...implications that were bothering me here."

Solo nodded. "I know," he said, pulling the car into the side of the road to allow an ambulance to hiss past, the blue light on its roof winking and the urgent two-tone siren blaring. "It does rather suggest a new dimension, doesn't it?"

Helga said good night and left them at St. Laurent du Var, half-way between Cagnes and the airport. She refused Solo's offer of a late meal in Nice on the grounds that she had to get back to her own apartment and see to various things. "Where do you have to get to, Helga?" he asked.

"St. Paul-de-Vence. It's not far—and look, there's a taxi stand on the other side of the road. That's why I asked you to stop here."

"But Helga—we were halfway there at Haut-des-Cagnes! Why didn't you let me take you there? Let me turn around and take you now..."

The wide mouth gleamed in a smile. "My dear," she said softly, leaning in at the window and laying a hand on his arm, "I wouldn't dream of it. You two boys get back to your hotel. I'll see you tomorrow. Promise..."

Before they reached the entrance to the airport another ambulance passed them, followed a moment later by two more.

"They're in a hurry!" Illya commented. "There must be a big pile-up on the Promenade des Anglais or something."

But he was wrong. The ambulances turned right at the airport. Beyond the spiky palms and the low, rectangular, blue-lit bulk of the terminal building, a crimson glare pulsed in the night sky. Across the dark field vehicles and people on foot swarmed towards an incandescent tangle of wreckage on the main runway.

And above them, piercing the clouds of smoke, rose a shattered tailplane bearing the three-letter monogram of Transcontinental Airways.

Chapter 9 – The silent witness

In the confusion among the frantic comings and goings of firemen, nurses, policemen, airport officials, gendarmerie and salvage corps, it was almost impossible to find out what had happened. In the excess of zeal which always afflicts officialdom on the occasion of disaster, the airport police were moving people on so fast that Solo wasn't even able to explain who they were. Eventually, they had to leave the Peugeot in one of the public parking area some distance away from the buildings and make their way out onto the apron by dodging the patrols.

It seemed—from what they were able to glean—that T.C.A.'s evening flight from Paris had crashed on arrival; that the aircraft had hit the ground and burst into flames with the loss of many lives; and that the accident had happened ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before they had arrived—probably while they were driving down from Haut-des-Cagnes, which would explain why they had not heard the impact or the explosion.

Ultimately, it was the Technical Director who supplied the details. He was hurrying back to the T.C.A. block from the scene of the crash when he saw them and paused.

"Hello, you chaps!" he called, actually taking his pipe from his mouth as he spoke. "What about this, eh? Carbon copy. Absolute carbon copy of the others, you know...This time I happened to be out on the terrace, watching the crate come in—and he flew it right straight into the ground again. No doubt about it. He flew it right down onto the deck." He shook his head uncomprehendingly.

"And everything was working perfectly, of course?" Solo asked.

"Well, we can't say until we've examined the pieces, can we? But judging from the dialogue between the captain and the bods up there"—he jerked his thumb towards the green windows of the control tower behind them—"everything seemed to be. Looks as though it's what you chaps call a dead ringer, what?"

"Survivors?" Illya queried.

The Director held up a single finger. "Only one. Again," he said. "Forty-two passengers and the rest of the crew gone west—the survivor's a steward, for a change."

"Where is he?"

"Hospital, naturally. Don't know which one they took him to—probably the Anglo-American between here and Villefranche—but I'll find out for you in a jiff."

"Is he badly hurt?"

"Apart from shock and shakings, not really—and that's a change too. He was dead lucky, that one. Dead lucky. In the baggage compartment, you know. Near the tail—so when that broke off..." he shrugged, smiled and added: "He made it."

"Which way was the plane landing?" Solo asked.

"Coming in from the Cannes direction. I told you, didn't I? I saw him take it right down onto—I was going to say into—the deck. Must have been a muckup on the altitude stage of the Murchison-Spears gear. Must have been...And there's another thing. Just occurred to me, as a matter of fact. Had you noticed—all three...no; four! All four of the crashes here have been landing? None taking off, no wrong trims, no stalling or any of that nonsense. Which again supports the idea of it being altitude evaluation at fault, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Solo said slowly. "You have a point there. I guess it does, at that."

"Oh, most definitely, old chap. No doubt about it."

"Any V.I.P.'s aboard, by the way?"

"All holidaymakers or businessmen—fortunately."

Illya smiled a crooked smile. " 'There's Less to Pay With T.C.A., Because of the Care they give you There,' " he quoted softly.

The Technical Director looked flustered. "Oh, no, old chap. I mean, really," he protested, puffing great clouds of smoke from the pipe. "Of course any passenger's death is a tragedy. Naturally. Perhaps I didn't express myself too well...But it's just that if V.I.P.'s are involved, so many bods kick up such a stink that one simply cannot get down to one's job...which is, after all, to find out what happened and why."

Solo clapped him on the shoulder. "Never mind," he said with a grin. "Don't take us too seriously...old chap!...nobody else seems to."

A smoke-grimed fire engine, the words Sapeurs-Pompiers and Ville de Nice blistered in its scarlet sides, passed them on its way to the exit gates in convoy with three closed ambulances. A young fireman dropped from the truck, wrenched off his metal helmet, and was quietly sick into a clump of bushes.

Dang—Dong—Dinggg...the three-chime call sign of the airport announcing system shouldered its incongruous way through the confusion. "Lufthansa regrets to announce the cancellation of their Flight number..." The amplified words echoing from the P.A. speakers sounded oddly thin out of doors. Solo and Illya Kuryakin walked around to the T.C.A. maintenance unit and waited for the Technical Director to find them the name of the hospital to which the plane's only survivor had been transported. Helga Grossbreitner was in the main office, lovely as ever if a little harassed, coping with a flood of calls on three different phones. She had heard the news on the radio as soon as she got home, and had hurried to the airport at once to offer what help she could to the airline's staff.

The hospital was a small one, lying somewhere back behind the harbor. The two agents drove past rows of small shops—still brightly lit even at this late hour—a couple of sidewalk cafés thronged with people, a terrace of old houses. Beyond the mellowed ochre fa�ades with their delicate iron balconies, an apartment block reared towards the sky. Between the two, an archway spanned the entrance to the hospital driveway.

They drove through and found themselves among trees. A double row of plane trees bordered each side of the drive and carried the eye on to the hospital itself. It was an elegant building in the style of the old houses at one side of the entrance—tall, narrow, weathered shutters leading onto the balconies and a shallow roof of sheltering painted friezes.

Halfway along the avenue, the Peugeot's motor coughed to a halt. "That's funny," Illya murmured as the car stopped. "Why should the thing suddenly..." He turned the ignition key and stabbed at the pedals experimentally, operated the switch again. The starter spun...but there was no sign of life from under the hood. The acrid tang of gasoline drifted through the car.

"You've flooded her now," Solo said. "Sounded to me like some kind of ignition failure. Perhaps we'd better have a look."

Illya pulled on the handbrake and opened his door to get out.

In the dense shadows beneath the plane trees a man squatted beside a cumbersome box-like machine on a tripod. Above the swivel mounting, an attachment like a wide lens with a long hood pointed at the front of the car.

"Look out!" Solo shouted suddenly.

Moving with incredible speed, he leaned across Kuryakin and yanked the door shut. Then, in a single complex movement, he slumped back against his own door, opening it with his elbow, and subsided backwards onto the ground, dragging the Russian bodily after him.

"Napoleon! What the...? What are you..." Illya gasped as he landed in the grass beside the roadway. "What was that...?"

"Quick!" Solo hissed. "Into the bushes..."

The soft explosions of the silenced revolvers wielded by the men on the far side of the drive were hardly audible as they wriggled backwards into the shrubbery. Bullets thwacked heavily into the leaves above their heads.

"Did you see them?" Solo whispered. "Four, I think—two on each side of the guy with that tripod thing."

"Yes, I saw. Just an instant before you pulled the door shut. I'm afraid my reaction was very delayed....I wasn't expecting to be ambushed. But at least we know why the motor stopped."

"What d'you mean?"

"The thing on the tripod. I saw them testing one like it in East Germany some time ago. It's an electronic gadget—creates a field of force which will put any electrical machinery in its orbit out of commission. Too short range for general use—they've only been able to make them with an effective field of three or four yards so far—but perfect for a job like this!"

"So in effect it was ignition failure? The field stops the coil functioning properly, I suppose?"

"Yes—look out! I think they're going to rush us..."

The shooting had stopped. A hundred yards to their right, the lighted windows of the hospital stared impersonally down the drive. On their left, the glare of the city silhouetted the archway through which they had driven a few minutes before. Straight ahead, the dark bulk of the stationary car masked the adversaries whose stealthy movements they could just hear over the rumble of distant traffic.

"I guess they'll be fanning out," Solo murmured. "Cross the drive further up and come down through the shrubberies to take us on the flank..."

But for a long time nothing happened. The two men lay in the soft mold under the bushes, straining every nerve to see or hear a significant movement, their guns at the ready. Once Illya reached out for a fragment of tree branch lying on the ground and pitched it into a clump of oleanders some way to their left. At once the plopping of the silenced guns recommenced. Twigs and morsels of leaf shredded to the ground as the heavy slugs ripped through the bushes.

"They have spread out, Napoleon," the Russian whispered. "Those shots were coming from almost opposite the place that branch landed..."

He groped around in the mold and discovered a flat stone half buried in the loam. Prising it loose he spun it a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. The moment it landed among the leaves a similar fusillade started. After a few seconds, it stopped.

"You're right," Solo muttered. "Dead opposite again. They're strung out along the far side of the roadway. But I don't get it: they're at least five to two. Why don't they cross higher up and rush us?"

Illya shook his head. From their place of concealment, the two agents peered anxiously up the drive, strained back to look up into the branches above their heads, and craned under the immobilized Peugeot.

Nothing happened.

Solo fired two shots at random under the car. The double crack of the unsilenced automatic was thunderously loud in the darkness under the trees. But there was no answering fire from across the drive.

"I don't like it," he said quietly. "It's almost as though they were just keeping us pinned down. They only shoot if they think we're trying to move. If they wanted to kill us, they could easily —"

He broke off abruptly, his head cocked to one side, listening. From somewhere up by the hospital there was a clatter of feet. Voices shouted and a door slammed. Then a car engine burst into life and a moment later twin headlights blazed into view around a corner of the building and raced down the drive towards them. Fifty yards short of the Peugeot, the vehicle screeched to a halt. A wide door opened and two or three men ran from the bushes bordering the drive to pile inside. There was a grinding of gears, and the car lurched forward to stop again on the far side of their own.

"They're loading the tripod," Illya said, raising his gun arm as the driver engaged first gear and revved up the engine.

"Wait!" Solo laid a hand on his forearm and pressed it to the ground. "We might be sorry...Look."

The vehicle emerged from behind the Peugeot and slowed down as it came opposite the oleanders into which Illya had thrown the branch. It was—they saw now that they were no longer blinded by its headlights—a Citroen ambulance, long and low. A final man swung aboard, and the ambulance gathered speed, rocketing down towards the archway, where it swung left into the street with a squeal of its low-pressure tires.

Solo was already on his feet, running towards the hospital. "Come on!" he shouted. "I'm afraid we'll be too late, but we have to see."

They pelted down the drive and burst in through the swinging doors. In the middle of the tiled foyer a uniformed porter lay on his back with outflung arms. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead stared upwards like an obscene third eye. A receptionist slumped across the inquiry desk, her starched cap resting in a pool of blood. On the graceful curve of the stairway sprawled two male nurses in short white jackets.

At the far end of the entrance hall a young nurse stood petrified by the open door of an elevator, her eyes wide with horror.

"Nurse!" Solo shouted. "Quick! The man from the air crash—the survivor...What ward's he in?"

"Number s-seventeen...F-f-first floor," the girl faltered. "What happened? I c-c-can't understand —"

But Solo and Illya were already half-way up the shallow flight of stairs. They dashed down the rubber-tiled corridor, paused at an intersection to consult an indicator board, and then hurried on to the far end of a passage.

The general wards appeared to be situated on the higher floors, for the doors were so close together that the rooms on the first floor must be quite small. Number 17 was the last on the left.

Solo pushed it open and strode inside.

The narrow iron bedstead was empty, sheets, pillows and blankets tumbled in a heap on the floor beside it. Bottles, glasses and jars on the bedside table appeared undisturbed, but the gray-curtained screen which had been around the patient was folded back and now leaned against a wall.

"God damn it!" Solo exclaimed bitterly in a rare moment of profanity. "Abducted under our eyes! Those THRUSH men in the drive were told just to keep us pinned down. We could have made a break for it and at least tried to stop them, if only we'd realized..." He broke off with an exasperated shrug.

Illya was touching his arm. There was a movement on the far side of the bed.

In two strides, Solo was across the room. A nurse lay face down on the floor. As he bent to grasp her shoulders, she groaned and shook her head.

"Easy, easy," he soothed in French as he hauled her to her feet. "Take it easy. It's all over now. Nobody's going to harm you...There. Sit down in this chair....Illya, give her a glass of water, will you?"

They propped the woman up and placed a pillow so she could lean her head against the wall. Congealed blood traced a network of lines from a dark contusion on her temple, but otherwise she seemed undamaged. Kuryakin soaked a wad of cotton in water and gently bathed the wound as she slowly recovered her senses. "It's all right; it's all right," he said quietly as recollection flamed in her eyes. "We have come to help you. Take your time...and tell us what happened..."

The nurse was a thin, gray-haired woman in her fifties, with a lined face. She made a visible effort to pull herself together, touched the ugly bruise with a trembling hand, and looked up at them dubiously.

"What...what...Who are you? What do you want?" she said at last in a weak voice.

"We were going to speak to your patient," Solo said, mastering his impatience. "But we were too late. He has been kidnapped, hasn't he? Please try to remember what happened."

"What happened?...The patient!" She remembered suddenly and caught her breath, looking wildly towards the empty bed. "Oh, those men! They hit him, they beat him so much...and then they..." She shuddered and began to cry, her spare body racked by great sobs.

Illya glanced again at the bed. There was blood on the undersheet, blood on the discarded pillows, splashes of blood on the tangle of blankets.

"Exactly what happened?" he repeated.

The woman pulled a handkerchief from her starched sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. "Forgive me," she said, sniffing. "It was such a—a shock...The patient had hardly been here a half hour..."

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Not—not when he came in. Profoundly shocked, of course. And very badly shaken. But apart from bruises and—and—and superficial burns...he did not appear too much damaged. He was to have an X-ray examination to see if there were any internal injuries...I was preparing him...That's why I thought it so odd that they should send an ambulance from...from..."

"From where?" Solo prompted gently.

"They said they were from the Anglo-American hospital at Villefranche, Monsieur. As the man was an American, and he kept on talking, talking all the time in American—well, at first I thought maybe they had decided to transfer him to a hospital where they would understand what he said."

"And later?"

"They appeared at the door with a stretcher, and they told me they had orders to transfer him. They had all the necessary pieces of paper, so I...well, I began to help them move him onto the stretcher. Then the patient himself seemed to question what they were doing..."

"He began to protest?"

"I could not understand what he said—I do not speak English—but I think so. They tried to pacify him...and so did I, as far as I was able. Then he attempted to get off the stretcher and they...they...Oh, it was horrible!...They hit him..."

"I understand. Do not distress yourself, Mademoiselle. They beat him unconscious, is that it?"

The woman nodded, tears coursing down her cheeks. "I had begun to wonder, just before. For I know most of the orderlies at Villefranche, and I realized that I had never seen any of these men before. And although they spoke French well enough, there was, well, something about them..."

Solo nodded. "And then you questioned their authority yourself?"

"As soon as the first blow fell, of course. It was so rapid.. so vicious—the poor man was unconscious almost before he had time to cry out. There were four of them, you see..."