Текст книги "The Unfair Fare Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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"Have you seen Annike?"

"Certainly. She was in just before midnight. She said you'd stood her up, too—took her back to your hotel and walked out on her, she said."

"That may be true," Solo said enigmatically. "I was sapped and then taken for a ride. Whether or not it was because that young lady suggested I should go and fetch something from my room, I don't know. In the meantime, since the people responsible are almost bound to be the same ones I'm asking you to find out about, I'm more than eager to hear what you've discovered. Give!"

"Ah, sure, you're not in a hurry at all. Sit you down and let's have a spot of the creature."

"I'm in a hurry to hear your news. What have you found out?"

The fat man toyed with a fat sealed envelope he had picked up from the table top. "Now who wants to be hasty!" he said evasively. "Relax, you. And wait'll I tell you some thing."

"Well?"

Van der Lee sighed. He seemed ill at ease. Spinning the chair away from the light, he picked up the envelope suddenly and held it out to Solo. The agent took it and slit open the flap with his thumb. It was filled with banknotes.

"Four thousand five hundred guilders," Van der Lee's voice said from behind. "You'd better count it to make sure it's correct."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

The fat man was wheeling about all over the room, straightening a pile of papers on this table, making unnecessary adjustments to the clippings on that. "Sure, it's simple enough," he said gruffly without looking at Solo. "I can't help you, I'm afraid. I cannot take the job."

"But... but why on earth not, man?"

"I'm very sorry," Van der Lee said awkwardly. "But it turns out, now I've had a chance to look into it, that the people who run this escape network, the fellows you asked me to find out about, are in fact already clients of mine. So I can't tell you anything about them—it would be against all me own rules."

"You couldn't... break the rules just this once? For old times' sake?"

"You know better than that, Mr. Solo. Sure, me cardinal principle is that there's only one kind of information I don't sell—information about another client. You wouldn't want me to break that!"

"I guess not...but..."

"There is one thing I can tell you before you take your money and go, however—if it's of any use to you..."

"I'd welcome any information, of course."

"Well then, I'll tell you—since the client protection business can work in two ways!... The boyo you're askin' 'about, he asked me a question I was not able to answer too!"

The fat man paused, looked straight at Solo, and said, "He wanted me to find out everything I could about you."

Chapter 10

The Contact Is Made.

FOR TWO DAYS, it rained incessantly in Prague. It was raining all over Europe, but the downpour was heavier, more relentless, and seemed somehow wetter, in the Czech capital.

Illya Kuryakin sat and shivered in Cernic's attic room, listening to the ceaseless drumming on the roof and wondering if the damp was getting in under the tiles and destroying the hoard of banknotes hidden there. There was nothing else to do—the bank robber, whatever else he may have been, had certainly not been a reading man, for there was not a single book or paper in the place!

Each morning, Illya took a raincoat from a hook behind the door and battled his way through the downpour to a general store on a corner in the lane below. Here he bought milk, pilsner beer, black bread, a few vegetables and a kilo of parkys—the succulent Czech sausages, which he cooked on the battered hotplate, his sole means of heat. In the evening, he went to the kavarna on the square and drank steadily for an hour or an hour and a half, speaking to nobody in particular and keeping his general remarks pessimistic in tone and surly in utterance.

Once he had got used to the steady pelting of the rain on the roof, he found the attic uncannily quiet. The lower floors in the old building were entered from a different street altogether, and the two stories immediately below him were used as a stationery store anyway. The place was too hemmed in for any traffic noises to penetrate. And even the birds appeared to prefer the caves of the higher buildings surrounding them.

There was apparently no landlord or landlady. So far as the police had been able to find out, the place belonged to Cernic himself. Perhaps he had acquired it years ago and kept it against just such an eventuality as this.

To amuse himself, Kuryakin improvised a set of chessmen from the screw tops of toothpaste tubes, shaving cream, ointment and tomato puree, using as pawns a collection of studs of the kind that launderers put in shirts. He carved squares from the top of the chest of drawers with a kitchen knife and played conscientiously against himself as the long hours dragged past.

The first time he had been to the shop, the storekeeper—a red-faced man in round spectacles—had called out, "Ha! So you're back again! What happened to you yesterday and the day before? We thought you'd got lost or run over or something."

Presenting a tough, villainous and boorish façade was the most difficult part of the assignment for Illya—normally the mildest-mannered and most equable of men. But he had to do the best he could.

"What the devil has it to do with you where I was?" he snarled, thrusting out his jaw as far as he could. "You should learn to mind your own business, my friend—and your business is selling people what they want with no questions asked. My business is... well, that's my business!"

"All right, all right," the shopkeeper said hastily. "No need to bite a man's head off, is there? I was just passing the time of day."

"Well, don't pass it prying into other folk's affairs," Kuryakin growled—and then, since it would probably be a good idea to put about some story accounting for the absence of Kurim Cernic, he added in less hectoring tones, "I was laid up with a dose of flu, if you must know. This damned climate gets me down; I wish the devil I could get away. Your beastly, dirty city air plays hell with the lungs of a man who's used to the fresh air of the country. Now, back in Slovakia, where I come from…"

He gave the same story to the proprietor of the kavarna. It was as well to answer questions before they were asked– and that remark of the shopkeeper's about being run over had come uncomfortably close to the truth! "Flu, was it?" the innkeeper said. "Takes it out of you, don't it? You look a bit peaky, I must say—you don't look yourself at all." And he scrutinized Illya's face with an intensity that made the agent quite uncomfortable.

Kuryakin had been told that Kurim Cernic had always used a particular corner of the kavarna, and he conscientiously carried his drinks over to this seat every evening. But however gruff and unapproachable he was, there was always one thing he could not guard against—the arrival of an intimate friend whom he might not know he should recognize; someone, perhaps, he might even be expected to hail! This was a hazard, however, that he would have to deal with when it arose. His first test in fact derived from a foe rather than a friend.

It was his second evening in the inn. He had stamped across to the bar to fetch his third Baracz. When he turned around with the shallow glass of apricot-colored liquor and started back to his seat, he saw that it had been taken in his absence.

A large mustached man with hands like hams was sitting nursing a pot of beer with a metal lid.

Judging from his baggy trousers and the peaked cap on his head, the fellow was some kind of workman. Illya had little doubt that he had taken the seat quite innocently and had no idea it had been occupied. But he realized from the giggles and covert winks being exchanged by the other customers that Cernic was expected to make something out of it.

A sudden silence fell in the bar as he walked heavily across to the corner, set his glass down on the scrubbed top of the table, and stood with his fists on his hips.

The man with the beer looked up and raised inquiring eyebrows.

"I think you're mistaken, friend," Illya said in an unfriendly voice. "That's my seat you're in."

"Your seat?" the big fellow said. "You bought the place maybe?"

"I was sitting there," Kuryakin growled. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Out."

"Well, I'm sitting there now," the man said shortly. He tugged a creased newspaper from his pocket, unfolded it, and began to read ostentatiously.

Scowling as ferociously as he could, Illya snatched the paper away and hurled it to the floor. "I said that's my seat. Get out of it!"

The big man half-rose threateningly. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he cried angrily. "I've a good mind to—"

He broke off as Kuryakin swept his tankard off the table with a crash. He drew a deep breath... and suddenly erupted into action in an attempt to throw the table over toward the Russian.

Kuryakin leaped in tigerishly and slammed it down on its legs again, pinning his adversary in the corner behind it. He was in some difficulty. The man was half a head taller than he was and strong besides. Cernic's reputation as a tough was almost certainly based on straight rough-housing and fist fighting. Yet Illya was not in fact particularly strong physically—and he could hardly risk making a show of the judo and karate of which he was master. In the split second that the big man was frozen against the wall by the table, he decided to try to cripple him with a single karate blow and then put in some fisticuffs afterward for the benefit of the gallery—and of his impersonation.

Seizing the man by the collar, he jerked him viciously face downward across the table top. Then, before his opponent could recover, he linked his hands and brought them hurtling down on the unprotected neck. The fight was in effect over then—the man's reflexes were paralyzed. But the window dressing had to be put in for the customers.

Kuryakin growled with simulated rage, cast aside the table, and thrust the fellow back up against the wall. Steadying him there with one hand, he drove three pile-driving blows to the pit of his stomach, allowed him to slide toward the floor, and finally helped him on his way with a couple of contemptuous rabbit punches. The man was out before he hit the ground.

Abruptly the place was loud with chatter again. The proprietor stood the table upright, dusted it down and replaced Illya's drink. A couple of the bar's patrons dragged away the unconscious man, and Kuryakin sat down, staring morosely into his glass.

The clientele were a rough bunch. Among them were the two drunks who had accosted him the night he arrived. And several times he saw the blonde girl who had been with them regarding him furtively. But the majority of them seemed to be the Czech equivalent of gangsters. There was not the opportunity for an organized underworld here that there would be in a Western city, but such crooks and black marketeers as there were, he would wager, hung around this quarter and this particular bar.

On the morning of the third day, Illya awoke and realized that he could no longer hear the rain on the roof. He threw the shutters wide and looked out on a different city.

The downpour had not long been over, but the sky was now an impeccable blue and the pale winter sunshine gleamed and sparkled from a million droplets of moisture dewing the chaos of slates and dormers and tiles and cornices and gutters outside the window. A crescent of the river glittered between the high blank wall of a warehouse and a forest of chimneys to his right, and above it the turrets of the fairy– tale palace on the high ground above the town shone in the bright light.

In the narrow, twisting streets of the quarter, shopkeepers and their customers had an air almost of gaiety about them, and several food stores displayed crates and baskets of fruit and vegetables on the sidewalk.

Kuryakin felt justified in taking Cernic to the kavarna at lunchtime and passed off the ribald references to this break with tradition with a snarl a little less surly than usual. The blonde wearing the open raincoat—her name, he had discovered, was Marinka—even gave him a half smile when he came in, and the proprietor was quite cordial.

"That's a bit better, isn't it?" he said cheerfully as he took Illya's order. "Makes the world a more cheerful place, I always say, when there's a bit of sun around, eh?"

"For those that have time to notice, I suppose," the Russian said grumpily. "As for me, I still wish I was a thousand miles away from it."

"Why, comrade? It's not such a bad city. At least there's life here!"

"Life? I'd give a great deal to get out of it. Right out, I mean—and I'm not kidding. Rain or shine, it makes no difference to me. All I want—"

"If you hate it so much, why don't you get out, then?" the proprietor interrupted reasonably. "There doesn't seem to be anything to keep you here; you don't seem to have a job or anything."

"You mind your own damned business!" Kuryakin shouted, thumping the table. "It's none of your business why I stay here. What I do is my own affair and I don't want any interfering snoopers meddling."

He drained his glass and stalked out, leaving the inn keeper staring in amazement. Anyone at that bar who didn't suspect by now that "Milo" was a crook on the run, the agent thought to himself with a grim smile, must be pretty dumb!

That evening he returned to the kavarna and took his usual table. But he affected to be still angry and kept huffily to himself, returning none of the "Hey, there, Milo!" and "Looking for another victim?" pleasantries of the drinkers.

Several hours after he had returned to the attic, the soft knock on the door penetrated his consciousness. He got out of bed, drew on a pair of trousers, and opened it a crack. It was still fine outside, and in the light from a half moon he saw a girl standing at the top of the stairs.

She wore an open trenchcoat with the belt hanging, and the moonlight glinted on her hair.

It was Marinka, the blonde from the kavarna.

"What do you want? What the devil d'you mean by waking me up at this time of night?" Illya snapped ungraciously.

"Let me in," the girl whispered. "I have something to say to you. It's important. Come on! The longer I stand here, the more likely it is that someone will notice."

Grumbling and growling, the Russian opened the door wide and stood aside with bad grace to let her through. Once she was in, he closed it and turned the key before switching on the light. The girl was pushing thirty, thin faced, with large gray eyes.

"You're Kurim Cernic, aren't you?" she asked softly.

"Kurim who? Never heard of him!" Illya said promptly. He did not ask the girl to sit down.

"Look—do not bother to deny it. I know you are Cernic."

"I tell you I never heard—"

"Oh, never mind then! You're not Cernic! But you keep on saying how much you want to get away from here, don't you? Obviously you are on the run, or you would just go."

"Supposing I was, then?" Kuryakin said craftily.

"If you wanted to get out of the city unseen, without the risk of being asked for papers; if you wanted to get out of the country, even... "

"Well...?"

"Well, I think—if you have money—I think I know some one who can arrange it for you," the girl said.

Chapter 11

Getting Underway

AT TEN-THIRTY the following evening, Illya Kuryakin stood on a corner of Wenceslas Square and watched the crowds thronging the wide pavements beneath the trees on the Vaclavske Namesti. Glittering with lights, bordered by push carts, and stalls selling hot parkys, the street pulsed with the gleam of fast-moving traffic. In a few minutes Kuryakin would have to act; but for the moment he was content to stare and to think.

He had argued and protested the previous night for what he considered a sufficiently credible amount of time before he permitted himself to be persuaded to talk seriously. He had guarded his suspicion and his hostility until the last possible moment. But finally he had given in and allowed the girl to make her proposition.

After bargaining and blustering for hours, he had eventually agreed to pay what he had considered privately to be an incredible sum for the privilege of being secretly transported to Zurich, Switzerland.

The girl had refused to divulge any details of how this was to be accomplished; she had merely said that the organization was well enough known to need no references. And she had made a rendezvous for the following night and told him to bring the sum with him in cash. He had filled in the intervening time by going to the roof and removing the correct amount of banknotes from the hoard under the tiles. He had also pretended to remove the balance and mail it to himself poste restante in Zurich. But the bulky envelope had in fact been stuffed with blank paper; by arrangement with Hradec, the loot was to stay in its hiding place for collection by the police.

He had no doubt, standing among the crowds clutching a cheap briefcase to his chest, that the police were keeping him personally under surveillance too. But they could hardly have acted against the girl and her accomplices, since it was not illegal to transport a citizen of the United States from Prague to Zurich, whatever method was used! And in any case it had been agreed that, having delivered Illya into the correct area, they would withdraw and leave the chase to U.N.C.L.E.

But they would be there, just the same, he was sure.

For the moment, though, the hour of truth was at hand. He glanced at his watch—it was ten-thirty-six—shifted the briefcase to his left hand, and walked a little way up the hill. Where the tramlines forked into double tracks, there was a safety zone in the middle of the street. He crossed over and stood there as if waiting for a tram.

At ten-thirty-seven precisely, a car—a Skoda Octavia in anonymous beige—stopped briefly by the safety zone. A door opened. Kuryakin got in.

The girl Marinka was driving, her slender wrists and feet expert about the controls as she whirled the car in and out of the traffic clotting the great square beneath the domes.

"Where are we going?" Kuryakin asked suspiciously. "Surely we can't simply drive out of the city openly like this. There are too many police about, we could be stopped and asked for our papers at any time... and anyway, my face is known."

"Do not worry," the girl said. "All is taken care of but it is best to begin with a short auto ride, lest there is anyone following. We have a rendezvous not far from where you were staying."

"Then why meet in the Wenceslas Square and drive there when we could have..."

The girl sighed. "We can leave the car and walk, if you wish. But it is better like this." She turned down toward the Carlos Bridge and then right along the embankment. Soon she turned again, up into the old town, and stopped by the long, blank wall of a warehouse. The building had perhaps once been some official place, for there were turrets at each end and the high wooden gates were enclosed in an ornamental arch. "See," the girl said. "We are by the repository you see from your window. There is the entrance to the other floors of your building, around that corner."

She pointed to the archway at the end of the wall. "And there is where you have to go now. Inside the gate is a small pass door. Soon, the watchman leaves to fetch his beer for the night. After he has gone, go through the door. It has been... arranged... that it will be open."

"And then?" Kuryakin demanded suspiciously.

"Inside is much furniture, stored on all the floors. But there is also a loading dock with a van and a trailer. They are already packed full. Get into the van—not the trailer– and squeeze as far forward as you can. You will find right at the front a wardrobe, facing away from the doors at the rear of the van. You get into this—it will be quite comfortable with blankets and pillows—and you wait."

"How long for? I don't like vague arrangements like this."

"I also. But here we have no choice. There are many police and you are much wanted. Besides, the people arranging this make good business for themselves, but also they must take risks. So they must state the terms. You understand me?"

"Very well, very well," Illya growled. "But I still don't like it."

"Now," the girl said briskly. "We must act. See, the watchman leaves to visit the kavarna." She waited until an elderly man in overalls had walked from the gates to the corner, and then vanished around it, before she continued, "You have the money with you?... So. Good. No, no—keep it. They will ask for it when it is time. Now, is there anything else before you go?"

"Yes. How long shall I be cooped up in there? When does the van leave? I hate being shut in, not knowing when to expect action... and I've not eaten since this afternoon, either."

"You would like to eat some food before? That also I can arrange."

"Forget it. Just tell me how long," the Russian said ungraciously.

"I cannot say. It is not for me to decide—it depends on too many things. Tonight sometime..." the girl said.

"Can't be too soon for me," Illya grumbled. "Well, is that all then? Because if it is, I'll be off. Get the thing over with."

"Yes, you may go now. And hurry while the man is away." Her long face creased into a smile, and for a moment, in the lamplight, she looked quite beautiful. "Perhaps I will say one thing more," she added, "I wish you the good luck…"

She leaned across and opened the passenger door.

The agent muttered something under his breath, got out of the car, and limped off down the pavement with his briefcase clutched to his chest, without so much as a backward glance. Before he got to the gates, he heard the Skoda's engine start and then the whine of gears as the girl turned in the narrow street and drove back the way they had come.

It went very much against the grain for him, but he figured that in one thing, at least, he had played his role true to the real Cernic–the girl and the clientele of the kavarna in the square must certainly be confirmed in their belief that he was the rudest, the most boorish, the most bad-tempered man they had ever met! He smiled grimly to himself as he approached the pass door let into the big gate; there were more serious ways in which he would have to test the authenticity of his impersonation soon. .

The door, as the girl had promised, was unlocked. He turned the handle, opened it, and stepped through.

There was a light burning inside a glassed-in hutch where the watchman obviously sat between his rounds. Through the glass, Illya saw sausage, black bread and pickles laid out on a newspaper awaiting the arrival of the beer. And there was a low-powered bulb hanging above the platform at the rear of the loading dock behind the gates. But otherwise the place was in darkness.

The van and its trailer looked enormous—two leviathans of the road silhouetted against the dim shapes of sheeted furniture bulked in the dark.

He let the door snick shut on its return spring and listened. Very distantly, he could hear the sounds of the city– a roar of far-off traffic, shouts and a snatch of music from another street, a siren on the river, bells (could it really be only eleven o'clock?). But nearer at hand there was nothing—no footsteps, no demanding voice; just a scuffle and a squeak as a rat scurried away somewhere down the aisles of furniture, the thin, high, singing of silence in a large place.

Satisfied, he walked openly to the space between the van and its trailer. The double doors at the back of the van were ajar. Pulling one open, he climbed up into the interior and edged his way between stacks of chairs and tables and crates exuding straw, toward the front of the vehicle.

The wardrobe was roomy. And there were blankets and pillows stuffed into it as the girl had promised. Making himself a kind of nest in the dark, Illya settled down and prepared to wait.

Soon after he had arrived, he heard faint sounds suggesting that the night watchman had returned. Not too long afterward—the luminous dial of his watch showed five minutes short of midnight—voices echoed under the high root of the loading dock. The doors at the back of the van were opened and then slammed shut. Retaining bars dropped into place. There was a clatter of mechanical activity as the great motor whined and then coughed to life... and the body of the truck began to vibrate as the diesel settled down to its normal idling speed.

A few minutes later, they jerked into motion and rolled out of the warehouse into the night.

It was easy enough for Illya to distinguish between cobbles and setts and asphalt; between town roads with tram-lines and country roads with potholes; between the surfaces of suburb and highway. But he soon lost all sense of direction and stopped trying to work out which way they were going. By and by, in the darkness, the monotonous rhythms of the vehicle and its trailer put him to sleep.

He was awakened by a bright light shining in his eyes. He struggled awake and sat up in his nest of bedclothes. "Ah—so it's you all right, then," a gravelly voice pronounced. "You'd better hop out of there. You change here, and we have a bit of business to transact anyway."

Kuryakin knuckled the sleep from his eyes and followed the man with the flashlight past the furniture and out into the dark. The van and its trailer were drawn up under a canopy of trees beside the road. But as soon as they were standing on solid ground, his guide rapped twice on the paneled side. The starter whirred, the motor caught, the headlights were switched on, and the double juggernaut lumbered back onto the road and disappeared down the tunnel of light it was carving from the dark.

The Russian looked about him. The sky was clear, and in the moonlight he ould see hills on every side, most of them heavily wooded. The road showed as a faint ribbon twisting down into a valley, at the bottom of which water gleamed palely by a bridge.

Beside him, the man with the flashlight presented a stocky, powerful figure. He was wearing overalls and a peaked cap, and his face, in the reflected light, was seamed and wrinkled above a jutting jaw.

"What's the idea?" Kuryakin asked suspiciously. "Where are we?"

"Not far from Krumlov," the hoarse voice said. "That's southwest of Budejovice. We bypassed the town. That's the Vitava you can see in the valley down there."

"How far have we got to go to the border?" Illya asked, looking at his watch. He had slept nearly three hours.

"Less than thirty kilometers. Then it's only about the same distance again to Linz."

Kuryakin thought he had better put in a bit of character again. "That's all very well, my friend," he grated. "But how the devil are we supposed to get there, now that you have sent the transportation away? What are you playing at?" He hugged his briefcase to his chest and glared at the little man.

The latter laughed. "Keep your shirt on, comrade!" he said. "I only paid Jan to let me bring the van out of the city, just to get you clear. He has work to do that's a genuine load that has to be delivered. He has to get back to Kralovice, beyond Pizen, by daybreak."

"That's not my worry. Let him look after himself, whoever he is."

"He's been looking after you well enough, friend. Do you think we could have got you past the three roadblocks between here and Praha without that genuine load, complete with its bills of lading and other papers, and the authentic van?

"I tell you that's not my affair. What I'm paying you for—"

"Ah, yes!" the man with the jaw interrupted. "Paying… Talking of which—let's have it!" He held out a hand for the briefcase.

Illya hesitated and then passed it over.

The little man counted the money carefully in the light of the lamp. Then, dividing it roughly in two, he stuffed one half in his pocket and put the other back into the case, which he handed to Illya. The Russian stared at him.

"Matter of faith," the little man said. "We've always had a good reputation. Based on mutual trust. You don't seem too happy. So to show you we are on the level, I'm giving you half back. You can hand it over when we've got you safely to Zurich. Okay?"

Kuryakin nodded, reflecting with a wry smile that if by chance the man was treacherous and intended to kill the client and keep the cash, it would hardy matter in whose hands the notes were at the time of his death!

"We'll get on now," his guide was saying. "We cross the border at a very small custom post on a back road. There's only two night men on duty, and they'll be half-dead from sleep now. I'd like to get there before they start freshening up to meet the six o'clock relief."

"Yes," Kuryakin snarled, "but how the devil—?"

Placing a finger on his lips, the other walked a few paces to one side and parted a screen of bushes. Hidden by the leaves, a half-ton delivery van stood facing the road. On its sides, Illya could just make out lettering announcing the name of a firm of electrical suppliers in Linz.

"They're used to seeing this crate go through," the little man said. "At this time of night, it should be a piece of cake! They'll hardly look in the back... but we've taken precautions, just the same. Look at this..."

He opened the rear doors. In the small delivery space were two half-dismantled television sets, a few old-fashioned radios, a brand-new electric cooker, and a huge refrigerator.

"The refrigerator is empty," he continued. "All the shelves and so on have been taken out. When we get near the border, you can get in there, just in case. But until then, you'll be okay here in the back. I'll tip you off just before we get there." He handed the Russian into the van and then, with a curt nod, slammed the doors, ran around to the cab, and started the engine.

A moment later, they in their turn bumped out onto the road and sped on their way.

In the black interior, Illya made himself as comfortable c he could among the rattling, banging, bouncing items of electrical ware. The longer he could stay out of that refrigerator the better!...

But after that things started to happen rather quickly. As a prologue, Kuryakin took the baton transceiver from his breast pocket and pulled out the telescopic antenna. Thumbing the send switch, he bent his lips close to the tiny microphone aperture and spoke over the clattering of the little van.