The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 31

The only thing to do, he decided finally, was to wait where he was until Illya came through again. He would lose three hours, but if he pressed on and then discovered it had been in the wrong direction, he might find he had lost even more.

Catching sight of the blue and red neon surrounding the entrance to a roadside restaurant, Solo suddenly realized he was hungry. He had not eaten since his picnic lunch in the Ardennes almost ten hours ago.

He swung the DS off the road and crunched onto the graveled parking lot at one side of the building.

An illuminated sign over a glassed-in portion announced that the place was open from 8 A.M. until 2 A.M., and there was a board at one side on which the bill of fare was displayed in two-inch lettering. Judging from the number of cars still in the lot, business was good.

Solo walked past cars registered in Germany, Switzerland and several departments of France. He was negotiating a group of puddles left by the evening's rain, when he came to a dead stop. His eye, ranging across colored reflections of neon in the pools of moisture, was arrested by the inverted image of a car's license plate. He looked up. The letters NL on an oval white plaque surmounted the letters and figures of a Dutch registration.

And the car bearing them was a Fiat 850 coupe in a flamboyant shade of mustard.

The girl was sitting alone at the back of the restaurant. Solo didn't see her at first; he was momentarily swamped by the tide of warmth that submerged him as soon as he pushed through the door. The place had lost the hectic air of early evening—there was just the murmur of voices and the discreet tinkle of cutlery to complement savory aromas spiced with garlic and the background tang of coffee and dark cigarettes. The tables, clothed in red checks, were set in waist-high wooden booths arranged around a vast central cheminee bright with copper pans. The agent gave his coat to a waiter in a white linen jacket and looked around for a table.

Only when he glanced past the flames leaping on the great hearth did he see Annike, her blonde head gleaming below the oak beams.

He crossed the room and slid into the vacant seat on the other side of the table.

Her elbows were planted on either side of her coffee cup and her chin was resting on crossed hands. "The truite aux amandes is quite good," she said without looking up, "and they have Gewurztraminer in pichons, which is a must."

"Sold to the gentleman with the hungry eyes," Solo said. "Though I shall take leave to have a steak after that trout and an avocado with huge prawns before. What are you doing here—if the question is not indiscreet?"

"Waiting for a gentleman to buy me an armagnac."

"No sooner asked than granted. Waiter!"

"Thank you, kind sir. Now, I'll answer your question if you'll answer mine first—what are you doing here, Mr. Solo?" the girl said brightly. Her uptilted nose was slightly red at the tip. She looked as though she had been crying.

"You know what I'm doing here. I'm trying to catch a man who runs an escape service for criminals."

Annike caught her breath. A tear welled from her left eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. She smiled.

"It's him, isn't it?" Solo said with a flash of inspiration. "He's let you down."

"How do you know?"

"It's a fair deduction. Somebody had been asking questions about me in your office. You knew who I was, and you engineered it so I should go back to my hotel. Nice girls like you don't usually arrange for total strangers to be knocked on the head... unless a man they're in love with asks them to. Ergo, you are in love with someone from the organization. And now, since I know it's a one-man show, obviously you were in love with the one man. You went to see him on your off days—and evidently, something has gone wrong."

"The bastard!" the girl said venomously. "Oh, the salaud! After all he promised me... and it's only with some thin-faced cow from Czechoslovakia. I could kill him!"

A waiter was standing at Solo's side. "Would you care to order, sir?"

"Yes, please. Bring a double armagnac for the lady. I'll take the avocado with prawns, the trout with almonds, and a porterhouse steak, medium to rare, with salad."

"Very good, sir. And to drink?"

"I'll take a pichon of the Gewurztraminer."

After the man had tucked the carbon copy of the order under their tablecloth and gone away, Solo asked, "Tell me, Annike—how did you get me out of the hotel?"

She rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the universal gesture to indicate money changing hands. "They have very large laundry baskets," she said, "that go down in the service elevator and then get dumped in the yard."

Solo finished his meal, and they went out to the parking lot. Annike was wearing blue slacks and a ribbed sweater that clung to the supple outlines of her figure like a second skin. She looked young, desirable, and very vulnerable. "Where's your boyfriend now?" the agent asked as they reached her car.

"I've no idea. He had some job—taking someone from Praha to Zurich, I believe. If that wasn't just a stall to hide the fact that he's with that woman."

"That was no stall. The someone is a friend of mine," Solo said, taking the baton from his pocket and showing it to her. "I'm expecting to hear from him later on this little gadget. Then we'll really know where he is." Absently be thumbed the button.

To their astonishment a confused sound burst from the tiny speaker, and a moment later—distorted but understandable—Illya Kuryakin's agitated voice: "... misfired …Bartoluzzi has spotted me, and I have been handed over to the authorities as Cernic... taken with military… East Germany... back to Prague..."

The line abruptly went dead.

"That's smart!" Solo said admiringly. "He must have denounced him as Cernic the moment he found out he wasn't Cernic! That way, he roped in soldiers to take the impostor out of his hair."

He paused and then added reflectively, "The only thing is, what do I do? Illya will be able to identify himself in time in Prague... but where has your boyfriend got to in the meantime?"

"Bart would never do that," the girl said decidedly. "Never."

"Never do what?"

"Let them take away a possible witness against him. I know Bart. And I know the way his mind works. If you ask me, he's just using the military to get the man across a frontier for which he hasn't any papers or something. As soon as it's convenient to him, he'll contrive to get your friend back again—and after that I wouldn't rate his chances very high."

"What do you mean?" Solo asked uneasily.

"He'll take him to that place of his and kill him. You'll see."

"Place? What place?"

"His headquarters. He has a fantastic place in a forest somewhere south of Dresden—a cross between the world's most comprehensive junkyard and a medieval castle!"

"And you think he'll hijack the prisoner and take him there?"

"I'm certain of it. The swine," the girl said vehemently. "The rotten swine... and the woman's years older than me!"

"Do you know the way to this place? Could you take me there?... You'd like to get your own back, wouldn't you? Do you know the way?"

The girl stopped and turned to face him. "Of course I know," she said.

"Crazy!" Solo cried, taking her elbow and turning her toward the row of parked cars. "We're on our way!"