The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 20

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 Barriere, 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 facade 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."