18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (6 page)

The driver of the van had intended to run Solo down and kill him.

Oddly enough, this fact caused Solo to smile cheerfully as he limped back to his hotel after making his escape from the well-wishers in the avenue Georges V.

For if somebody was interested enough to try to kill him, that meant that his investigations—superficial though they had been so far—were causing that person worry and annoyance. Even panic, perhaps. And this in turn confirmed Waverly's original hunch that there was something going on worth exposing—for you didn't try to commit murder in public unless you had something fairly important to hide.

All of which added up to the fact that Napoleon Solo was not, after all, wasting his time on a wild-goose chase. The job was going to be worthwhile. And so Solo smiled, for above all he liked action.

At his hotel—the small, unpretentious, extremely comfortable and fairly expensive Ile de France, in a side street near the Opéra—the vision at the reception desk handed him a letter that had come by special messenger.

The agent thanked her, turned aside—and then suddenly turned back again. She looked just as pretty, her hair demurely curled on her slender neck, her lips quizzically uptilted at one corner. "They work you a long day here, don't they, honey?" he said in French. "What time do you get off this evening?"

"Officially at eight, monsieur Solo," the girl said in English. "But I usually stay ten or twelve minutes longer. My husband works until eight too, and by the time he has got out the car and driven around here..." She flashed him a dazzling smile.

"
Touché
!" Solo murmured ruefully. He raised a hand in salute as the doors of the diminutive elevator slid shut.

In the envelope was a train ticket and a seat reservation on the evening express from Paris to The Hague. Attached to it was a slip confirming a booking for a single room with bath at the Grand Hotel Terminus. There was no letter or other form of message with these enclosures.

Solo sighed. The old man was up to his tricks again. They had agreed during their radio conversation that he should return to Holland and, without making his presence known to the police this time, try to pick up the trail of the men with whom Waverly himself had come in contact. His mission was simply—now that they knew the escape network existed—to find out how it worked and by whom it was run. Having done that, he was to try to find out if THRUSH had made any approaches to the principals or whether they were in any way concerned in the running of the scheme.

If the answer to either of those questions was in the affirmative, he was to report back to Waverly so that they could decide between them the best way of handing over their findings to the police in the country or countries involved.

If it was negative, he was to evaluate whether the escape organization was
likely
to interest THRUSH in the future and again report back for a decision on further action.

But in all these operations, it had been tacitly understood that Solo made his own way, as always, and arranged his own timetables.

The arrival of the special-delivery letter, complete with tickets and the peremptorily implicit command to use them, was a typical Waverly stroke. Presumably he had some particular reason for wanting Solo to be at that hotel tonight—maybe a contact he had instructed to meet him there. But on principle the agent asked the receptionist to look up the planes for him.

It turned out that by the time he had taken a cab out to Orly, waited for his flight, flown to Amsterdam, cleared immigration and customs, taken a cab from the airport at Schiphol into town, and traveled by train or car the 3 miles to the capital, he would get there no more quickly than he would by train!

In addition, now that he came to think of it, it was just as likely that Waverly would have arranged for a contact to meet him on the train itself.

It was also possible—Solo had to admit—that the planning boys at U.N.C.L.E. had looked up the planes themselves and had come to the same conclusion as he had regarding the time factor.

He called for his bill, checked out, and took a cab to the station.

Nobody approached him on the train, however. He ate an excellent, if rather solid, dinner. He read and he listened to endless business conversations in Dutch and German. In between times, he watched the gaunt, spare outlines of the northern landscape whirl past at 100 miles per hour in the yellow lozenges of light streaming through the windows of the coach.

The Grand Hotel Terminus was a large nineteenth-century block immediately opposite the station. Cheap souvenir shops, fried potato stalls, automat milk bars and garages surrounded the building, but inside the revolving doors all was bourgeois respectability and comfort.

The blast of overheated air that greeted him as he pushed through into the foyer was redolent of cigars, roast foods and aromatic coffee.

While he registered, he looked around him. Besides the reception desk and the porter's lodge, the foyer housed a
bureau de change
, a newsstand, and several other large display cases rented by exclusive men's and women's outfitters in the town. Off to one side was a lounge full of efficient-looking men and women in armchairs. Beyond this, a paved court with a rectangular fishpond and potted shrubs showed through a line of French doors. The foyer, the shallow stairs curving around the elevator shaft, and the broad passage leading to the dining rooms and the bar were all covered in a heavy carpet patterned in blue and red.

While a boy in uniform carried up his single light-weight valise, Solo was shown his room by an elderly woman in a starched uniform and cap. Apart from the usual bedroom furniture, the vast floor space accommodated two armchairs, a settee, a desk, several low tables, and an enormous wardrobe that looked like a model of Chartres cathedral in mahogany.

Not quite knowing what to do, he sat in the lounge drinking a coffee and a brandy, read the papers, and finally climbed the stairs to his room. Nobody had made any attempt to contact him.

As he left, a busload of tourists was arriving. The foyer was full of suitcases, ranked like an army before the porter's lodge, and the revolving doors spun to disgorge more and more transatlantic visitors of both sexes, short, grim-faced and bespectacled to a tourist, in search of shelter for the night.

Solo had resigned himself to a breakfast comprising a cup of coffee and a single croissant, and so it was with some surprise that he saw the tray left on his bedside table the following morning. On it there were coffee, hot milk, orange juice, black bread, white bread, whole wheat bread, jam, marmalade, rolls, slivers of raw bacon, a shelled boiled egg naked in a glass, cold ham, and several enormous slices of Gouda and Edam cheese.

He jumped out of bed, showered, shaved, and carried the tray to the largest of the tables. Such a meal, he felt, should be attacked by a man properly seated rather than by a sybarite lounging in bed!

When he had eaten as much as he could, he drew back the curtains and walked out onto the tiny balcony projecting from the façade of the hotel four floors above the entrance.

The place was on a corner of a T-junction whose cross- piece was formed by the station concourse. Opposite it was a line of stores, arid the wide road between them forming the stem of the letter accommodated at its center the terminus of a tramway line. Queues of workers who had arrived by train were already crowding the island refuges on each side of the lines, waiting to board cars for the city center of Scheveningen. It was cold on the balcony, but the sky over head was free of clouds, and bars of pale sunshine slashed the cream stucco of the buildings across the road.

Solo drew the cord of his dressing gown tight and surveyed the scene. Two men were pushing a gigantic barrel organ into position at the edge of the sidewalk below his window. It rested on four wheels and was pulled by shafts. The body of the machine must have been twelve or fourteen feet high, and on the brightly painted, scalloped wood of its canopy, multicolored lettering spelled out the legend DIE GROOTE HELDINGEN.

One of the men began turning a large handle projecting from the back of the organ while the other guided into a neat stack an unending succession of punched sheets, which the instrument vomited out concertina-wise as the rollicking, wheezing, jolly music cascaded into the wintry air.

Before the first tune was over, coins were showering down from the hotel windows and bouncing across from the city-bound workers by the trams. Solo ducked back into his bedroom to get a handful of small change.

His first toss was badly judged—the coin, lobbed too vigorously, landed some way from the organ and rolled into the groove of a tramline. Determined to succeed with the second, he leaned down over the balcony rail and tossed it more carefully toward the waiting musician.

As he bent forward, the rifle on the fifth floor of the building opposite cracked, and a bullet smacked into the brickwork behind his head.

Even as the agent's mind registered the explosion, a second slug drilled the French door, sending fragments of glass tinkling to the floor. The third shot was dead accurate. It whined across the balcony a foot above the rail, exactly where Solo had been leaning an instant before.

But by this time he was flat on his face on the cement floor, worming his way backward into the room.

Chapter 6

Enter An Old Friend

BEFORE VENTURING out of his room, Solo thought it prudent to stow about his person several devices perfected by the specialists in U.N.C.L.E.'s armory. These—which had been packed below the false bottom of his valise—included a fountain pen that fired a jet of liquid nerve gas; a cigarette lighter that ejected a sleep dart that would knock a man unconscious within a second; and a rather special pack of cigarettes. One of these was in fact a white-painted bolt of metal—and when the pack was squeezed a powerful spring projected it through the torn corner hard enough to render an adversary senseless at a range of ten feet.

There was also a tiny Berretta automatic, which the agent cached in a special holster clipped to his belt just behind his right hip. When he was dressed, it was completely hidden by his jacket.

At ten-thirty, he went warily downstairs and asked if there were any messages for him. There weren't.

He bought papers and sat in the lounge sipping Campari and soda. Every time the elevator cage opened or the entrance doors revolved he looked up. He felt absurdly vulnerable; whoever was after him seemed unusually well informed about his movements. It was a little alarming. And just because they had failed twice, this didn't mean they wouldn't try a third time. And it could be third time lucky––for them!

At eleven o'clock, Solo walked along the passage toward the dining room—and suddenly realized why Waverly had sent him here.

On the left of the wide corridor was the hotel's hairdressing salon. And from the archway leading to the reception counter and the chairs beyond, a rich and fruity voice boomed out in execrable Dutch.

Halting in his stride, the agent peered in. Surely it couldn't be true! The last time he had heard that voice had been in Brazil... and then he hadn't believed it!

But there was no mistake about it, the third draped figure before the minors, sitting lower than the others, turned out to be an enormous man in a wheelchair. Weighing more than 280 pounds, he sat with the great swell of his belly thrusting out the barber's sheet like a tent, the massive folds of flesh encasing his skull almost burying the unexpectedly humorous blue eyes twinkling among the fat.

It was Habib Tufik, alias Manuel O'Rourke!

Solo didn't go in right away. He waited by the entrance to the salon, watching the dexterous, almost balletic, movements of the barber as he guided a cut-throat razor unerringly among the convexities of the big man's chin.

Tufik—as he was originally named—had been born of an Irish mother and a Moroccan father. After an early encounter with gangsters that had crippled him for life, he had set up in Casablanca a specialized information service that had been without equal in the world. Police forces, embassy staff, military attaches, detectives, lawyers, newspapermen, crooks and secret agents from all over the world had come to him to buy the lowdown on anything from the private life of a foreign minister to the accommodation address used by an insignificant clerk. For Tufik sold information— just that. Any piece, or pieces, of knowledge required could be bought from him—at a price. He took no sides, and he asked no questions. The only reservation he had was that he would not sell information about one client to another.

His unrivaled sources had been built up over many years, and his encyclopedic knowledge derived in part from an exhaustive cross-referencing of gossip items culled from press outlets all over the world, in part from an adept system of bugging, and in part from plain eavesdropping and informing. It was said, though, that a fair proportion of the vast sums he received for his services was redeployed among the army of elevator operators, reporters, chambermaids, reception clerks, airline stewardesses, and cab drivers who supplied much of his raw material.

He had in fact enjoyed the reputation of being the most up-to-date gossipmonger on Earth... until Solo and his partner, Illya Kuryakin, had unwittingly involved him with THRUSH.[2] After that, he had survived a bomb attack on his headquarters and gone to South America, where—with the connivance of Waverly—he had begun to set up a similar organization. [3]

He had indeed for a short time been an ex-officio member of U.N.C.L.E.'s overseas staff, in which capacity he had materially helped Solo and Kuryakin to foil one of THRUSH's more dastardly attempts at nuclear trouble-making... and now here he was, of all places, in The Hague!

As the barber drew a towel down over the huge face to remove the last traces of soap, the man in the next chair rose and left. Solo slipped into the vacant seat.

"Yes, sir?" A young man with glossy black hair shook a pink sheet and held it out for the agent to insert his arms in the sleeves. The man looking after Tufik was preparing hot towels.