16 - The Splintered Sunglasses Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "On the way to Caselle, though, you see him being driven away by a lady you know as the Signorina Eriksson. You guess what must be happening and you turn around and follow that couple. After they leave the Autostrada, you catch them up and in a place near to Buronzo you force their car to leave the road. Miss Eriksson escapes and you bring your friend back to the city. And then you call upon the Commendatore... this most aggravating plot used against you as you emerge from there. Now—my name is Giovanna del Renzio. I am here to help you. What can I do?"

  "Take us at once to a restaurant near here," Kuryakin said feelingly, "where we can exchange notes, plan what to do next—and eat. Above all, eat!"

  "But of course! We shall go to Angelo's. It is only just one block."

  And while they attended to a vast fritto misto with peperoni alia piemontese on the side, Illya sat below an oak beam groaning with pendant cheeses, strings of garlic, Parma beans and sausages, telling Solo and the girl the burden of Waverly's theorizing the previous day.

  "So, if I may recap, what it amounts to is this," Solo said finally, pouring the last of the Barbaresco into Giovanna's glass and signalling the waiter to bring more. "Leonardo acquires the list of intended Thrush satraps in Europe. He takes a copy and puts the original back in the safe of the Council Member (who may or may not be Carlsen). Then he visits Colonel Rinaldi and borrows the ruby laser to make a hologram of the list—which he immediately mails to Waverly. That's the initial bit, isn't it? Before I came in?"

  Kuryakin nodded. "That's it exactly, Napoleon."

  "Fine. He still has, however, the piece of semi-reflective substance which was used in conjunction with the laser beam to make that hologram. Somehow or other, he conceals this—and while he is on his way to let Waverly know what it is and where it is, he is killed, one assumes by agents of Thrush who have discovered the theft and know who is responsible. Are you with me?"

  Again the Russian nodded. "In the meantime, though," he said, "either Thrush or a rival organization which is as keen to have that list as we are decides to kidnap you from New York in the hope that they can force from you certain facts: one, whether Leonardo used a hologram and, if so, whether it was sent to Waverly; two, whether or not Waverly has been able to decode it, if he does have it; three, what is the U.N.C.L.E. routine in such matters."

  "Do you have any idea if it really is Thrush or not?" Giovanna del Renzio asked.

  Solo, exchanging a glance with Kuryakin, pursed his lips and shook his head. "The conversations I had at Carlsen's house would suggest the latter case," he said. "And the killing of Leonardo followed by my kidnapping make more sense if they were done by different teams. If it was the same lot, you'd think they would have captured Leonardo and forced him to talk before they tried me! But if not, then Carlsen might not have known it was Leonardo who stole the list, you see.... Only that it had been stolen and probably sent to New York."

  "I see what you mean."

  "On the other hand," Solo shrugged. "Does it really seem likely that there would be another organization—one that none of us has ever heard of—which could have found out sufficient facts about Leonardo's assignment to justify the action that has been taken?"

  "I guess not," Kuryakin said slowly. "Unless, of course, Leonardo himself was a part of it. But from my own knowledge of the man—and Waverly agrees—that would be so unlikely as to seem impossible."

  "Whichever it is, it appears to have been Carlsen who was responsible for doctoring my borrowed car at Rinaldi's place. For it seems to me obvious that the only aim of that operation was to stop me meeting Illya—so that they could put in Miss Eriksson and take him off to the country house to be drugged and interrogated in his turn. How much did she find out before I caught up, Illya?"

  "Enough to make me feel an idiot," the Russian said bitterly. "Mainly, I confirmed for them that there was a hologram, that it had been received, and that Leonardo hadn't specified the key for reproducing it. She also wanted to know what we thought about the case and how we proposed to work—but fortunately I stalled off those."

  "Where do you suppose Leonardo did hide the glass or whatever it was?" the girl asked. "Mightn't he have mailed that to New York too, from another office?"

  Kuryakin shook his head. "It would have arrived by now. He might have mailed it to himself, though—either poste restante or to another address. He might have sent it to a friend, or hidden it. The murderers might even have it!"

  "Oh, I doubt that!" Solo protested. "They'd hardly be trying to run us down in the street if they already had it. After all, they only have two objectives: either to stop us finding it, or to stop us getting to Waverly with it if we do find it. If they had it already—"

  "That's all very well if it's only one organization involved," Illya argued. "But if there should after all be two... one might have found the thing, and the other, not knowing this, might still be trying to prevent us finding it."

  "I see what you mean. My general point is worth emphasising, though: given that this list is vital—for its decoding, from our point of view; for the prevention of this, from the others'—then they have much the easiest task. We have to locate the glass or whatever it is and after that convey it safely all the way back to New York, and then discover how it was used and repeat those conditions, before we can say we've succeeded. All they have to do is destroy it."

  "It looks as though the dice are charged against us, then!" Illya said.

  "Loaded," Solo corrected automatically. "Talking of which, let's get out of here before this Barbaresco seduces me into ordering a third bottle!"

  "Where are you going now?" the girl asked.

  "We'll have a look at Leonardo's apartment first. It's the obvious place and I've no doubt both the police and the opposition have already turned it over thoroughly. But you can never take anything for granted in this business; you just have to check."

  "Where did he live?"

  "An apartment block...," Solo consulted the sheaf of papers he had won from the Commendatore "...in the Corso Svizzere. Do you know it?"

  "Yes, of course. I'll take you there. Your car is nearby, isn't it?"

  They edged their way out of the oak-benched booth with its red check tablecloth and ceramic condiment set. While Solo paid the bill, a fleshy man with a sallow, blue-chinned face threw a handful of notes on to the table in the adjoining compartment and hurried out ahead of them.

  There were two carabinieri deep in conversation on the opposite side of the road when they left. In the square where the Fiat was parked, a nondescript man carrying a raincoat raised one eyebrow a fraction of an inch at the girl as they passed. And two youths apparently lounging against a fountain only straightened up and moved away as Solo started the motor and steered the car out from the kerb. "II Commendatore, I see, likes to make sure that his—er—guests are well looked after," he remarked with a crooked grin.

  "But of course," the girl said. "These are determined people—whoever they are. They will undoubtedly try again. And although we bow to nobody in our admiration of your efficiency, it has to be admitted that this is our home ground. I am sure that the Commendatore feels simply that there may be angles unknown to you which we may cover just by being there. As your English proverb has it—a stitch before it is too late, will avoid the use of eight."

  "A knit in time saves nine" Kuryakin corrected reprovingly.

  Napoleon Solo burst out laughing. "So much for my English proverb," he said. "What about these lights, now? Which way for the Corso Svizzere?"

  Leonardo's cover occupation had been as an accountant specializing in American company law. The neat two-room apartment he had lived in was on the tenth floor of a new tower block. The bedroom held a well-chosen selection of clothes just a little on the flashy side, a cupboard full of linen, drawers of shirts, ties, socks, underwear, a pile of freshly laundered handkerchiefs on top of a signed photograph of a girl. The kitchen had been strictly a bachelor one: coffee and fruit juice in the mornings, ice for the drink
s, and that was it! And the living room was full of paper. Statements, brochures, prospectuses, accounts sheets and reams and reams of notes overflowed the desk, littered the bookshelves, covered the occasional tables and the dining table, and even dotted the top of a comprehensive hi-fi complex.

  But of half-silvered mirrors; sheets of ground glass, frosted glass inserts or portions of semi-transparent plastic they found no trace at all.

  After they had spent more than an hour emptying and refilling drawers, cupboards and bookshelves. Solo shook his head and walked to the deep windows. He slid back a glass door and walked out on to a small concrete balcony covered in pots and boxes and jardinieres of geraniums. Below, the glittering lights of Turin mapped the city against the dark.

  "I guess we're wasting our time," he said over his shoulder. "The place has been done over by the police and the others, as I said. There's nothing here they would have missed. There isn't a mirror in the place that's not a fixture ... not even one of those round shaving ones most people seem to have."

  Kuryakin walked up to the french window and leaned on the jamb. "What about the photo of that girl?" he asked. "You don't think...?"

  "It's all in the dossier the Commendatore gave me. She's the daughter of an hotelier with whom Leonardo stayed whenever he went to Bordeaux. They seem to have had an affaire. Period."

  "She hasn't received any... packages... with an Italian postmark in the last few days?" the girl asked.

  Solo grinned. "They even thought of that. And the answer's no again!"

  "What about any other friends or contacts he has over here?" Kuryakin said.

  "I asked a special favor of the Commendatore. He has a squad of men investigating it on behalf of the Command. But I don't anticipate any results there; somehow I believe it's going to be something far more simple. After all, Leonardo had to use something that nobody would notice—and that would be equally easy both to hide afterwards and to find again—didn't he?"

  "I guess so. Well... if there's nothing here, I suppose we might as well make ourselves rare."

  "Scarce," Solo said. "Rare is what they make steak and what diamonds make themselves. Okay; let's go."

  They relocked the apartment and trooped out into the carpeted corridor. Apart from the bulky back of a man disappearing through the glass doors leading to the stairs, it was deserted. Solo approached the lifts and pressed the central button between the two sets of gates. There was a car already at the tenth floor and the grooved aluminum portals slid aside with a faint rumble. He was about to hand Giovanna into the brightly lit interior of the cage when Kuryakin laid a hand on his arm. "Just a moment," the Russian said. "That man we saw... why would someone ride to the tenth floor in a lift, get out, and then immediately take the stairs and go down again?"

  "Because he'd meant to press the button for the ninth," Solo said.

  "It would be easier to stay inside. This is not an express lift that won't stop at some floors. Let's just see... the other one will be here in a moment."

  He leaned inside the car, pressed the button for the ground floor, and then ducked out again as the hydraulically operated bar slid the doors shut. The inner gates rumbled together, they heard the whine of machinery as the car began to descend; the indicator arrow above the lifts sank from 10 past 9 to 8. "Suspicious," Solo said. "That's what you are! Now you've delayed—"

  Something twanged, twice, beyond the doors with enormous force. With an impact that appeared to shiver the building, a metallic thunderclap struck the far side of the grooved aluminum. There was a subdued rushing noise, rising to a crescendo, from within the shaft. Gear wheels, freed of their load, shrieked up the scale.

  Far below, there was a splintering crash which echoed up the empty lift well as the car, its twin steel hawsers sheared, plummeted 160 feet to the winch housing at the bottom of the shaft.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Rare Stake!

  The researches of the S.I.D. into Leonardo's contacts and friends drew as much of a blank as had Solo and Illya's abortive visit to the dead man's flat. The men from U.N.C.L.E. decided to leave that particular angle: they were most unlikely, in a foreign country, to improve on a routine job where the local operatives had been unable to succeed.

  After a talk with Waverly on the scrambler radio-telephone, they elected to play it cool. No known contacts of the murdered operative had received any package from him that might be the missing medium through which he had shot the hologram that Waverly so urgently wanted decoded. An exhaustive search through all the poste restante offices in northern Italy had yielded nothing. It followed therefore, both Solo and Illya thought, that there must be some thing, some little thing perhaps, which they had either overlooked or knew nothing about. If they played a waiting game, this could conceivably reveal itself.

  Whatever else happened, it was certain that the opposition were as ignorant of the nature and the whereabouts of the... what could it be?... as they were themselves. Had they located and destroyed it, there would be no need to keep up the flood of attempts on the lives of Illya and Solo!

  For the affair of the lift was by no means the last. The following morning, Illya discovered and defused a booby-trap bomb concealed in the packaging of a bouquet of flowers delivered to their hotel room. And, a little later, it was Solo's turn to dismantle a Mafia-style device linking a veritable landmine to the starter circuit of his borrowed Fiat. So far as the lift itself went, police investigators told them that, after the hawsers had been sawn almost through, a peculiarly neat electrical modification to the mechanism had ensured that the remaining strands would part a few seconds after the cage was operated in a downward direction.

  And then, as they were on their way to hold a conference with Giovanna del Renzio, a group of thugs attacked them in an arcade between two busy streets. It was all over very quickly. There were five of the attackers; and unfortunately for them, Solo had just drawn Illya's attention to some object in a curved shop window when they decided to make their rush. The two agents therefore not only saw them coming but had time, watching the reflections, to make a plan of action.

  The thugs poured into the arcade from the entry to an apartment house half way along it. An instant before the ugly rush of feet was upon them, the men from U.N.C.L.E.—still with their backs to the attack—leaped as one man for the decorative wrought-ironwork which embellished the projecting window of the boutique.

  Guided by the distorted images in the glass, they lashed backwards with their heels and sent two of the attackers reeling to the marble floor of the arcade before they could realize what was happening.

  Then, still hanging from the pendant tracery of iron overhead, they swung out over the hunched shoulders of the remaining three and dropped to the ground behind them. One burly man came for Illya with an iron bar; the other two whirled round and went for Solo with knuckledusters and coshes.

  The Russian swayed to one side, bent forward, and reached for the hairy wrist wielding the bar. There was a sharp jerk, a cry of astonishment, and then an almighty clatter as the man sailed over his shoulder and broke the window of another boutique with his head. Great shards of glass were still tinkling to the marble floor as Kuryakin turned his attention to the couple who were attacking Solo. The agent was on the ground, fending off feet with feet as he struggled to disentangle his Berretta from the folds of his jacket.

  From behind, Illya crooked an arm around the neck of one man as he chopped in a karate blow to the kidney. The thug grunted with pain and went limp. Solo had in the meantime seized an ankle, twisted sharply, and upset the other man as he himself jumped to his feet. A moment later, the arcade was empty. The four fallen men scrambled to their feet cursing, dragged the fifth from the shattered window, and ran with him to the street. Only an irregular trail of scarlet on the marble testified to the short, violent battle that had just ended. Panting, the two agents straightened their collars and continued on their way. "But that's just one more reason why we feel," Solo told the girl later, "th
at it might be best to stake ourselves out near the murder spot for a day or two and watch the crowds go by. You never know. Among the regulars who pass each day, there may be someone who can tell us something... maybe somebody who knows something without even being aware of it."

  "Because, you see, we have to do something," Kuryakin added. "We simply have to find what it was that Leonardo used to make this hologram. For without that, the list it records will remain forever a secret; Thrush will be able to push on with its plans unchecked; and all Leonardo's work will have been in vain."

  "I guess you're right," the girl said. "But I'm afraid you may have a long wait."

  In the event, it was decided that Solo and Illya should keep watch together. They would see more if they were separated; but they would not be able to check their impressions one against the other until they met again. And however often this was, it was bound to lose them the immediacy they would gain if they pooled impressions on the spot as things happened. There was a tiny office to let on the first floor of an old building almost immediately opposite the post office, and after a few discreet telephone calls from the office of the Commendatore, they found themselves the temporary tenants of this.

  Giovanna, with the permission and connivance of the S.I.D., was to act as liaison between them and the office, carry out any follow-up chores that might arise, and generally stay on a roving patrol in the neighborhood.

  On the following morning, the two agents installed themselves at a desk in the window of the office. In front of them, a specially ordered pane of glass revealed the street but concealed them from anyone who might be watching. Beside them were cameras, tape machines binoculars and a selection of curious electronic devices perfected by the Command's laboratory technicians in New York; and behind them on a chair were transcripts of the Commendatore's dossier on the Leonardo case. Plus a large Thermos of coffee.