18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (11 page)

The rusted paneling swung outward. Immediately behind the truck stood the short man the agent had seen before, his hair plastered to his skull by the rain, his jaw jutting more ferociously than ever.

Solo had no means of knowing how many others there might be. His only hope was to act fast and run. It was no time for detailed investigation of who they were or why they had kidnapped him. The thing to do was to get away!

He poised on the tailboard of the truck, waiting to leap. Watching him with glittering eyes, the little man hefted a big spanner wrench from hand to hand. Behind him the shrouded shapes of trucks and trailers in a parking lot blanked off the neon lights of an all-night café.

And then, as the man with the chin moved forward, the agent acted. But instead of jumping, he pulled the pen from his breast pocket, sank to his heels on the tailboard, and aimed the pen at his adversary's face.

Before the man could lift the spanner, Solo had operated the lever, and the jet of nerve gas screamed full at his adversary's nose and mouth.

Above the huge jaw, the man's eyes widened in surprise. His mouth opened—but before he could utter a sound, he had twisted around and slumped to the wet ground as dramatically as a puppet whose strings have been cut.

With a single bound, Solo cleared his recumbent figure and sped off into the rain and the night.

A moment later, he was back. He had forgotten, until his stockinged feet squelched into the wet ground, that he had not put his shoes back on. Cursing, he dragged them over his drenched and muddy socks and set off once more.

When he was a hundred yards away down the road, he stopped and looked back. There seemed to be nobody else around the truck and there had so far been no hue and cry. The blare of a jukebox seesawed from behind the steamed up windows of the café. Cars and trucks hurtling past in each direction sent long fingers of light probing the dark along the wet road. But otherwise there was no sign of life.

Astonishingly, though, he knew where he was! By a chance in a thousand, he recognized the stretch of road. It was a phenomenon he had remarked before—how suddenly, without any tangible clue, the mind would "read" into a certain confluence of landscape features here, an arrangement of wall and tower and roof there, the certain knowledge of place. So that rounding a bend, one would know positively that at any moment such and such a sight was going to appear. So that on an apparently unknown stretch of road, one would become irrationally possessed of the certitude that this village or that bridge was just ahead.

So that on a night like tonight, Napoleon Solo would know beyond all argument that he was—out of all the roads in Europe—on a section between Hasselt and Maastricht in southeastern Belgium and that a mile down the road, there would be a rather high-class roadhouse in whose vast parking area he would almost certainly be able to steal a car.

Buttoning up his collar against the rain, he hurried on.

Mercifully, his papers had not been removed from his breast pocket, so there would be no trouble crossing the frontier on his way back to Holland. But it was unlikely that any car he could knock off would have its own documents and insurance certificates neatly stowed in the glove compartment! Regrettably, things just didn't happen that way....

He would have to junk the stolen vehicle at Lommel, on the border, cross the frontier on foot, and pick up another at Bergeijksche Barrière, on the far side. Allowing for these delays, the 13-odd miles to The Hague should take him in the neighborhood of three to three and a quarter hours, he figured.

Actually, it took less—mainly because the first car he acquired was a 300SE Mercedes, and the second was a Volvo, but partly because it was a miserable night and the men at the frontier posts were tired.

The Sint Pietersstraat was shuttered and silent when he coasted the Volvo to a halt a little after four o'clock. Nobody saw him flit down to the towpath and melt into the shadows of the archways. Nobody heard the faint creak as the wooden door opened. Finding the secret switch behind the planks was a chore because the fluid in his lighter was almost gone. But at last he was standing on the elevator being carried up to the wardrobe in Tufik's bedroom.

He turned the handle and strode in. The room was empty, but there was a gleam of light from behind the curtains. The fat man was busy marking up some papers, crouched down in his wheelchair in the light from a single green-shaded lamp pulled low down over a table.

"Good evening," Solo said evenly. "I'm sorry I'm late."

Van der Lee looked at his wristwatch. "A bit," he said. "But sure, pay it no mind, for I never sleep until six."

"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.