The Thousand Coffin Affair - Avallone Michael - Страница 16

“Nothing on the teletype. No cablegrams, no transatlantic phone calls. Which is not like him.”

“No, it isn’t.” Waverly consulted his watch. It had been a mere three hours since the jet bomber had set down on the La Guardia runway. Time and more than time. U.N.C.L.E. should have heard from Solo hours ago. He would have reached Paris long before Hendryx landed in New York. After all, they had had an entire ocean to contend with.

Perhaps the girl—no, that couldn’t be. She had checked out thoroughly with Security. Damnation. Things were getting a bit thick.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Kuryakin?”

“When we finish analyzing the chemical in the pellet, I’d like to go to Paris.”

“Oh? Why, may I ask?”

“He might need a hand.”

“He has one. Two, in fact. Two very pretty ones.”

Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin grinned. It made him seem more harmless than ever, his straw hair untidily youthful.

“Three agents are better than two.”

“You are needed here, Kuryakin. But we shall see. Time enough to decide when we clear up these lab matters.”

“Peculiar about Fromes’ clothing, sir. It must mean something.”

Waverly smiled. “You too, eh? Perhaps you and Solo are correct. It is odd to find a body dressed that way.”

“Any ideas?”

“A few. None that would interest you right now. If you’ll be good enough to return to your office, I shall make some inquiries about our dear Solo.”

“Yes, of course. Goodbye, sir.”

When Kuryakin had gone. Waverly put a few well-oiled wheels of communication into motion. Within twenty minutes he would know if Napoleon Solo had returned to Paris.

It was damned worrisome that the young idiot hadn’t gotten through to Headquarters as yet.

The frightened people of Oberteisendorf had another mystery on their hands. The afternoon sky had been full of the angry, violent buzzing of two airplanes in a battle of some kind.

They had seen the fall of the lighter plane and the frenzied attack of the black one. Then the awful crash that made the ground shudder. The most ambitious and adventurous of the townspeople, a blacksmith named Goethal, set out in his battered truck for the scene of the crash. He was certain the plane had fallen somewhere in the vicinity of Orangeberg Cemetery.

When he returned two hours later, he had a grim report to make.

Yes, it was the plane that the American had come in. Yes, the plane was a mass of twisted wreckage.

No, he had not found the bodies of either of the Americans.

It was as if the earth had swallowed them up.

TWO MORE UNFORTUNATES

NAPOLEON SOLO had a dream.

In the dream he experienced no pain or pleasure, only a kind of concentrated euphoria. He was weightless, bodiless, airborne—in an existence which through vague distortions told him somehow that he was dreaming, that all he saw and did was in no way the slightest bit real.

Jerry Terry was in the dream, too.

He saw her as he had never seen her before. She was resplendently free and completely naked. The sight would normally have delighted him, yet for some reason, in his dream, it did not. Instead, it was somehow alarming, sinister. He fought to clear his head.

She was crouched before him huddled like some shapely question mark of damp, quivering flesh. Her long, slender arms were encircled with cuffs of some leathery kind. All of her superb figure was taut and stiff with her face lowered to the ground. Behind her, close to her naked flesh, he could make out a curious lattice of bars or rungs of some kind. With a sudden start, he realized, or rather he sensed, that the bars and rungs were before her now. He watched, through a haze, as she crouched and knelt, not standing erect or moving to any degree. It was quite as if she were frozen into this clumsy position of obsequiousness, as though she were humbling herself before some ancient idol

He could see that the terrible position had cost her. Her rib cage was drawn taut, showing muscular hollows, thrusting her fine breasts into a painful cramp of beauty. The long, coppery hair had fallen limply athwart her shoulders, dangling like the rest of her. Her thighs shone with perspiration. He could hear the sketchy, impure sound of her breathing.

The walls surrounding her were ladders of bars, crossed and criss-crossed. Damp stone gleamed from a wall behind her. Somewhere not far off, he could hear the mossy mutterings of drops of liquid. Water, perhaps.

Solo blinked his eyes. It was ridiculous but—there it was. And it would not go away or shimmer into unreality like a dream.

She was still half-bent and stooped in that terrible position when he re-focused his eyes. And now he sought to determine his own place in the scheme of his dream, or his nightmare.

He tried to stare down at himself.

He was hardly surprised to find that he too was naked; that he too was staring at his own knee-caps, performing the same weird ballet as was Jerry Terry. His own lithe body of a hundred and eighty pounds was contorted and doubled like some fantastic pretzel not of his own making.

The trouble was, he felt no pain as yet. The euphoria of his dream had not worn off.

And dream or not—he and the girl were each and separately imprisoned like some strange species of bird in awesome cages of iron. Cages large enough to hold their bodies but not big enough to permit them to stand or lie down, and so constructed that they couldn’t even maneuver into a sitting position.

There were leather thongs on his wrists, holding him away from the iron lattice surrounding him. Why?

He tried to think about the Debonair.

He could remember the MIG, the big round holes in the wings and the dizzying spin into nowhere. It was all so hazy. What had happened, really? Was he dreaming or was he dead? Was this reality or simply hell? Himself—who had always loved the ladies—staked out naked in an oval cage while the loveliest lady of his immediate acquaintance was similarly indisposed a scant but inaccessible few feet away. He laughed harshly but he did not hear the sound of his own laughter. If this was Hell, they had indeed picked the right one for him.

Why didn’t he feel pain? Surely, the leather thongs had bitten deep into his flesh. And the muscles of his body should be racked and spent from the ordeal. Instead, he felt simply puffy and lifeless, like a wad of absorbent cotton.

He closed his eyes and tried to think.

He tried to move his leg. It brushed against the bars of his cage. He pulled it back as quickly as his lame muscles would respond. The reason for the thongs was self-evident now: the bars of his cage were electrically charged and the leather bands had kept his body suspended away from contact with them. Why?

Later, he heard the door slam. It shut with a dull thump of noise. It brought him back to reality though the numbness had not left his body. He stared, twisting his stiffened neck away from his arched shoulders to see what had made the noise.

A man had come between him and the iron cage that enclosed the naked body of Jerry Terry.

A tall man, muffled in a long dark cloak of some kind, wrapped tightly about his neck. Yet if he should have hidden anything at all, he should have masked his face.

The dream-nightmare had continued.

The man’s face was a grotesque mask of outraged flesh—hairless, nearly fleshless. At some time, this man had been in a great fire that had left his face a skull-like travesty of scarred tissue. His nose was merely a pair of twin holes studding the distance between the pit of a forehead and an ugly gash of mouth. His head was an encrustation of scarred, dead tissue. Only the browless eyes showed any evidence of life. And the expression they held was not…quite…sane.