The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 23

"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!