The maitre d’ greeted Solo in French. Solo replied affably in the same language. They were escorted to a secluded corner table.
Shortly a wine steward was hovering beside them. Along with several other waiters, water-pourers, napkin-folders and other functionaries, all of whom wore dark gold-frogged waistcoats and satin breeches.
The restaurant, Solo thought, was a different world. Here there was no struggle, no THRUSH, no death. Here were only release from tensions, the aromas of fine cuisine and old wine, the muted loveliness of the attractive young girl across the table.
Solo reached out, squeezed her hand. Sabrina glanced up from the giant gold-embossed menu. Her smile was warm and heartfelt.
By the time they had worked their way through several courses and arrived at the cognac in costly crystal snifters, a trio of strolling musicians had arrived on the scene, softly playing Mademoiselle de Paris. The dinner conversations had ranged over dozens of innocuous topics unrelated to the deadly spying trade. They’d discussed everything from the fortunes of the Manhattan pro football teams to the antics of women’s hemlines.
Still, Solo was nagged by the anxiety Sabrina had shown in the taxi. He decided to check on it.
“As soon as we finish, how about going up to The Insider? If I can climb a Swiss mountain, I imagine I’m in shape for frugging to some of that electronic music.”
Sabrina smiled. “I’d love to. My, this is marvelous brandy. Expensive?”
“Mr. Waverly can afford it.” Carefully he added, “The club isn’t more than a block or two. We can walk if you have a thing about taxicabs these days.”
Sabrina’s hand shook noticeably. She set the snifter down on the damask.
“You’re being so oblique you’re obvious.” Trying to make it a joke, she half smiled.
“Guess I am at that. You don’t have to tell me, of course. But you did look a bit shaken on the ride up here.”
In the candlelit softness where the music beat, Sabrina said, “We were being followed.”
“By a cab? Yes, I thought so at first. But it disappeared before we got here.”
“It’s around,” Sabrina replied firmly. “It’ll be back. Or one like it.”
Now Solo began to sense the serious undertone in her carefully controlled voice. “Sabrina, I think you’d better tell me what this is all about.”
Rather nervously, Sabrina gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. That’s what makes it so puzzling. I don’t know whether something really is the matter, or whether it’s just fatigue catching up. Section V has been on double-time lately. I’ve worked extra a lot. The old beauty-sleep routine has gone by the boards many a night. I don’t think too clearly when I’m tired. That’s why I’m not certain that I’ve really seen what I think I have.”
Solo quirked an eyebrow. “Sounds bizarre. What did you see? General De Gaulle marching down Fifth Avenue in an American Legion uniform?”
The lovely blonde girl managed a laugh. “No, a taxi. A yellow taxi. It cruises along about a block behind me when I walk to work. And when I go home in the evening.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“A week. Perhaps a week and a half.”
“Are you certain it’s the same taxi every time?”
“I’m not certain at all, Napoleon. Don’t you understand? It might be coincidence---“
“But there just might be something behind it. Has this taxi tried to pick you up?”
Sabrina frowned. “Never. That’s the most peculiar part. If I get off very late, I always take a cab, even though it’s only a few blocks. Usually there’s a cab waiting at the stand on the corner near headquarters. You know, down in front of The Mask Club. But it’s never the taxi that’s following me. That cab is always parked somewhere else nearby, with the lights out.”
Solo’s nerves tightened up a notch. “Did you report it?”
“I haven’t yet, simply because nothing has happened. I’m almost to the point where I want to report it, though. It’s making me nervous.”
Quickly, Sabrina finished her brandy, closing her eyes as she swallowed. Then her violet eyes glowed again. Her smile returned.
“I feel better now that I’ve told somebody. As I say, maybe I’ve simply been worn out, imagined things. Maybe I’ve mixed up several different cabs.
Solo summoned the waiter with a flourish. “Could be, Sabrina. I won’t give you any stuffy lectures about the seemingly odd ways our little friends sometimes work. Let me bring it up to Waverly, though. As if it just started yesterday. If I pretend it hasn’t been happening for more than a week, the chief won’t give you any stuffy little lecture either, about how you should have reported it right away. But he may want to assign a man to check it out.”
“I know I should have said something sooner,” Sabrina admitted as Solo counted off bills for the check and tip, whose sumptuous sizes matched the sumptuous meal they’d consumed. “But I didn’t want to bother anyone if it’s just a lot of girlish vaporing.”
They left the restaurant proper and crossed the elegant foyer where an ormolu clock ticked. The maitre d’ bid them good evening. Napoleon Solo opened the main door. Sabrina passed through onto the wide granite stoop.
And right there Sabrina Slayton’s relief ended.
TWO
Its roof shining a dull, deep yellow in the rain, a taxi with lights off and the right rear door open sat at the curb. Oddly, its very emptiness had the power to terrify.
Napoleon Solo glanced left and right along the rain-slicked street. A large truck was passing at the next intersection. A block down, two sailors walked along. Sabrina seized his arm. He could feel the sudden, reasonless terror in her as she stared at the taxi and whispered:
“Oh, Napoleon. It’s back again, damn it.”
“You folks are going with me,” said a strange, wheezy voice out of the dark. “Get into the hack before I got to shoot one of you.”
Solo whipped his head to the left. Out of the darkness of an entranceway situated directly adjacent to the Bonaparte’s granite steps, a huge man materialized, a comic horror of a man, weighing between two hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds.
The man wore outlandish checkered slacks, a white shirt that stretched tent-like over an immense belly, a battered brown leather jacket and a worn-out cap with a metal tag on the right side. He had a huge pie face. His fat pink cheeks glistened with rain. He wore black-rimmed spectacles, and his eyes behind the lenses were tiny and nervous. Blink, blink, blink.
In his porky-fingered right hand the man gripped a .38 revolver. It was pointed directly at Napoleon Solo’s shirt bosom. The man’s little mouth puckered as he said: “I ain’t kidding around. I’m dead serious. You two get in the hack before somebody gets hurt.”
“Are you the man who’s been following this young lady?” Solo asked.
His loud tone was partially effective. The stranger stepped back a pace, as though someone slapped him with a wet fish.
“We’ll get to the questions later. Just get in the hack.”
The man glanced frantically along the street.
“Quick, before anybody comes! I’m warning you both, I’m a desperate man. Very desperate,” he was almost shouting now.
A pause.
“Please, I ain’t kidding.”
For a minute Napoleon Solo wanted to laugh. The fat man’s puffing and panting made him comic. The .38, on the other hand, had the blue-shining solidity of the real article. And Solo didn’t laugh because he was well aware of the high percentage of homicidal maniacs, jolly fellows at first glance, who were at large in the melting pot of Manhattan.
Sabrina’s gloved fingers dug Solo’s arm as she said, “We’d better do a he says Napoleon. At least you see now that I wasn’t dreaming.”
“No, my dear, you weren’t.” Solo’s face was mask-like as he tensed. “And I agree, we should accommodate this gentleman immediately. Let me step aside. You precede me into the vehicle.”
The fat
man’s blink rate increased to a near-blinding speed. “Cut out the fancy jabber! Get in the hack and no more code words, I’m a desperate man!”
Napoleon Solo’s eyes took on a strange glint. As Sabrina went down the stairs past him, he said in a dead level voice, “Yes, you’ve already told us that. But I’m a desperate man too---“
And Solo was moving, left hand out to seize the granite railing of the restaurant steps, right leg up and over on a flashing vault.
“---desperate to avoid the company of you and yours at THRUSH.”
Down Solo went across the stone rail, feet first. He crashed into the upholstered corporation of the would-be kidnapper.
The fat man reeled backwards. His face broke into a sudden, terrified snarl. Solo’s heels had jammed deep in the fat man’s belly, while his superbly conditioned body twisted in mid-air. He intended to come down hard but squarely on his feet. He reckoned without the amazing recovery powers of the fat man.
The man jiggled off balance like an elephantine ballerina. But suddenly he righted himself, just at the instant Solo’s heels hit the pavement. The fat man lashed out with his gun hand. The muzzle of the .38 connected with Solo’s left temple. He jolted back against the concrete building front. Blazing constellations lit up the inside of his head.
“Told you I was desperate,” the fat man panted. “You’re just causing me trouble. It’s the broad I want.” The blue-solid muzzle of the .38 flashed at Napoleon Solo’s head again.
Solo threw out his right fist to block the blow. Determined and hellishly strong for a man with so much blubber on him, the man batted Solo’s arm aside.
Sabrina cried out in fear. With a grunt, the fat man whipped the .38 down, pasting Solo across the scalp. Solo’s legs turned to jellied bouillon.
“You’d better believe I’m a desperate man,” said the attacker, like a broken record.
Solo wanted to tell him that he believed, he believed. Unfortunately he lost consciousness before he could.
THREE
The voices, unfamiliar and off-key, came filtering to his mind as though through an echo chamber.
“Real sorry I had to hit your boy friend so hard. He punches real good for a clothes-horse.”
In the twilight deeps of semi-consciousness, Solo stirred resentfully. His eyelids felt as though they were weighted with several pounds of lead shot each. His body was twisted position. Some kind of serrated surface went bump-and-rattle, rattle-and-pitch underneath him. It wasn’t too good for the stomach.
Was that Sabrina speaking now?
“---he’s a very tough man. When he wakes up, you’ll be sorry, I promise. Our organization will---“
“Hey, lady! You said our organization.” The voice, Napoleon Solo now realized, belonged to the mastodon who had knocked him out. “You both work for U.N.C.L.E.?”
“You know we do.” Sabrina sounded surprisingly cool now that the tension and uncertainty were over and the situation had resolved itself. ”THRUSH knows everything. Isn’t that what they drum into your demented little heads?”
Good for you, Solo thought. He got some of the lead shot off his eyelids and tried to straighten up. There was a peculiar, protesting gurgle from up ahead as the man said:
“THRUSH? Never heard of it. What is it, some bird society like them nuts that get up before sunrise in Central Park to watch robins and get mugged? Listen, lady, I don’t work for nobody but myself and the Lightning Cab Company. There, see? It says right on the license over the meter. Jackie Woznusky, Lightning Cabs. That’s my picture. Don’t it look like me?”
“I’ll admit it does,” Sabrina answered. “And if this is a THRUSH ploy, it’s the strangest---“
“It’s positively insane,” Napoleon Solo groaned, straightening up in the rear seat of the moving taxi where Jackie Woznusky, Hack License #2278, had apparently dumped him.
Solo rubbed his skull. Through the windshield he caught flashes of night neon on rainy pavement. The hackie was driving with his left hand, and driving expertly at that. With his right he brandished the .38 in a way which failed to make Solo feel very secure. The man didn’t handle firearms as though he knew how dangerous they could be.
The cabbie exclaimed: “I see you sitting up back there. No funny stuff or I’ll get rough again.” Sabrina’s face was pale in the gloom of the rear seat as she turned toward him. “Napoleon, are you all right?”
“Just suffering from a slightly wounded ego. This fat ape got the better of me. He won’t next time.”
“Don’t talk that way!” Jackie Woznusky sounded hurt. “I didn’t want to sap you. You just butted in. All I wanted to do is to talk to the lady. I gotta talk to somebody from that U.N.C.L.E. outfit. I been to the Federal building, the FBI, the police.
“They all want me to fill out forms and go talk to some professor who works for the Air Force. I know what the Air Force thinks. I said no thanks. It’s driving me outa my skull. Even my own mother and my brother Leo think I’m ready for the funny farm.”
“Shrewd fellow, that Leo,” Solo muttered under his breath. “Where the devil are we?”
Jackie Woznusky glanced out the window as he tooled around a parked truck with one-handed ease.
“That there’s the Presbyterian hospital. We’re heading up into Westchester County.”
“A lovely spot to be disposed of,” Solo growled. “If you know we work for U.N.C.L.E.---by the way, how do you know what U.N.C.L.E. is?”
“I had this fare one time, going out to LaGuardia. I picked him up just outside your building. Guy who acted like he was on the lam. He was carrying this damn cage full of white mice---“
Sabrina clapped her hands softly. “So that’s what became of our friend Wheatley, the double agent, a year ago.”
“Maybe,” Solo nodded. “Out the front door with the research animals from his lab and then out to the airport. I wasn’t around. I heard about it later. All our men went to Kennedy. Evidently it was the wrong airport. Jackie---“ Solo faced front again. “Did this man with the mice tell you about us?” he asked.
“Yeah, he was cussin’ and spittin’ about U.N.C.L.E. something awful. He was sort of a creepy foreign type so I figured your organization must be okay. When I started getting the run-around from the FBI and everybody else, I remembered U.N.C.L.E. I asked a couple of my fares about it. They’d heard of the outfit, okay. Didn’t know where it was though.
“I knew because I carried this guy who’d been there. I decided I hadda talk to somebody from U.N.C.L.E. once I found out it was a bunch of people that were strictly patriotic but who do things sometimes in a kind of nutty way.”
Woznusky panted on breathlessly, sounding less hostile, less menacing by the moment.
“I figured maybe U.N.C.L.E. would listen to me. So I hung around until I spotted this young lady comin’ out of that whitestone three nights running. I started following her. As soon as I seen she kept funny hours, I knew she must work for your bunch.
“I ain’t the bravest guy in the world, when it comes right down to it. I wanted to pick a better time and place to say something. But I ain’t been able to sleep. I keep this rod in the car in case of muggers. So tonight---well, I just decided I couldn’t wait any longer.
“Now I find out you work for U.N.C.L.E. too, mister. And that’s a break. Maybe one of you will believe me. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to talk.”
Solo leaned back, grinning. “Jackie, I almost believe you.”
“It’s true!” protested the cabbie. “On a stack of Bibles I’m willing to swear! Also on my father’s grave, God bless him. I saw it. I really saw it.”
The cab rolled ahead through the rain. In Woznusky‘s half-literate speech there was an odd, low note of terror that gave Napoleon Solo pause. He asked: “What did you see, Jackie?”
“I seen a flying saucer.”
After a long silence Sabrina Slayton sighed, “Oh good Lord.”
“Lady, I seen it! Would I tell a fib on my father’s sainted grave? No
t old Jackie W.!”
Solo tried to keep a straight face. “You saw a flying saucer. And the FBI wanted you to tell the Air Force about it? That’s standard procedure, Jackie. The Air Force checks out such things because most people who say they saw apparitions in the sky really saw something else. They saw a weather balloon, a reflection of another aircraft, a---“
Aircraft? Napoleon Solo’s scalp crawled.
Jackie said: I didn’t see the thing in the sky. I seen it sitting on the ground, up here in this deserted part of Westchester. That’s where I’m taking you right now, to show you. Can I put the gun up? I’d feel better driving with two hands. This traffic is murder.”
A small tic began to work in Napoleon Solo’s cheek. “Yes, Jackie. You can put the gun up. We’ll go along. Won’t we Sabrina?”
Solo looked earnestly into her violet eyes. She was plainly baffled. His voice dropped low.
“Sabrina, there’s a wild outside chance that Jackie’s story could be very important to U.N.C.L.E. I want to check it out.”
“It’s important to me,” Jackie Woznusky said. “Everybody thinks I’m nuts all of a sudden. I sit around worrin’ that maybe I am. I take those sleeping pills they advertise on the teevee but they don’t help. I keep seeing this big shining thing, round and covered with light---“
Napoleon Solo laid a hand on the partition separating front and rear seats. “Jackie, my name is Napoleon Solo. This is Miss Sabrina Slayton. It’s true we both work for U.N.C.L.E. And for a rather peculiar reason that even Miss Slayton doesn’t understand, I want to hear your story. When did you spot this thing you believe is a saucer?”
Jackie scratched his porcine chin. “I’ll never forget it. Two weeks ago Thursday.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“Jeez, somebody’s finally going to listen to me like I got some brains left!”
The fat cabbie whipped the yellow vehicle around a lagging produce truck and shot it up the rain-slicked approach ramp to an expressway that would carry them out to Westchester County. He drove fast and well. Before long they had left Manhattan and the Bronx behind. The cab slipped through the night on a route roughly paralleling the Hudson River. The night rain had congealed to a mist. The windshield wipers tick-tocked steadily while Jackie Woznusky talked.
The Dolls of Death Affair Page 3
