by Peter Leslie
"Yes. I thought it odd too. He must have included it because that number, and only that one, perfectly expressed his meaning. What do you make of it?"
"In our business, bird connected with brain can mean only one thing," Kuryakin said soberly.
"Exactly."
"And if he has stumbled on some plot of Thrush's - and they've caught him - his chances must be very slim," the Russian continued. "Mr. Waverly - I'd like you to assign me to go and get him out. I'm used to working with him, I know the methods he uses and therefore I can backtrack on him more easily."
"That is true. Very well - but please disabuse your mind of any romantic ideas of 'going in to get him out.' In the first place, we do not know for sure (a) whether it is in fact Thrush, and (b) whether there may not be some perfectly innocent explanation for his silence. Secondly, we do not in either case know for sure that he's 'in.' And thirdly, the requirements of the assignment - which naturally overrule personal consideration - may call for you to play a waiting game."
"But, Mr. Waverly -"
"The job, Mr. Kuryakin, comes before anything else. Surely you of all my operatives are aware of that?"
"Yes, sir.
"Good. To recap, then: you will go to Rio de Janeiro and pick up Mr. Solo's trail there. We know from his previous messages through Recife that he was using the name of Williams and the cover of a lawyer. We know that he spoke to a police captain named Garcia, and the two women he wished to interview were murdered in their beds, and that after visiting the site of the car crash, he returned to Rio and took the first available plane to Brasilia. The rest, as a great Englishman said, is silence."
"Very good, sir. Before following him to Brasilia, I had better try and find out what caused him to go. It will prove quicker in the long run, I think."
"I agree," Waverly said dryly. "But I am afraid you may be too late." He handed the agent a photostat.
It was a copy of a circled news item from a two-days- old Rio paper. It was headed DEATH STRIKES TWICE AT FATAL CURVE and it read:
The body of Miguel Oliveira, 73, retired fruit farmer of Santa Maria da Conceicao, was discovered yesterday afternoon on a mountain road outside the city at the very place where two American women were involved three days ago in a fatal accident when their car left the highway. The old man, who traversed the route every day, is thought to have dismounted from his mule for some reason and suffered at the hands of a hit-and-run driver.
"They - whoever they are - are nothing if not thorough," Waverly continued. "I wouldn't take any bets on whether or not that old man provided the reason for Mr. Solo's sudden decision to go to Brasilia. With him and the girls dead, you're left with no definite lead at all."
"Yes. I notice the pacer said nothing about the women having been murdered."
"No. The Brazilian police are touchy about people who get killed in their care. They preferred to let readers infer the girls died as a result of the accident."
"I see. There is just a slim chance, then, that our villains may not realize quite how much we know or have guessed about them?"
"I suppose so, yes."
"Good. I'll go to the armory and draw my PPK, then, and call in on Operations for a full briefing on my way back."
"Very well, Mr. Kuryakin. You may liaise with the Brazilian police to the extent that you may overtly be looking for a colleague, Mr. Williams, the lawyer, who a unaccountably to have disappeared."
"And my liaison with you?"
"Don't call me," Waverly said, superbly unconscious of paraphrasing: "I shall call you... I don't want to overload the radio traffic from Recife any more. Leave it to me to get in touch with you, and you can report as and when contacted. No doubt you will find the reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Hernando's Hideaway perfectly explicit once you are on the scene."
"No doubt," Illya said. "I'll see you at Philippi, then."
His chief looked up sharply "Philippi?" he queried. "Where's that? Or what's that?'
"It's the Greek for Sevastopol," Illya said softly as he closed the door from the outside.
---
He went to the armory and drew his gun and several smaller and more recondite devices, called in at Operations, went to the Library to read the secret files on the case so far, took the elevator down past the warren of the Communications section to the street level, and walked into the entrance foyer. From here, monitored by closed-circuit TV, four exits led from the building: one via the top floor of the restaurant-club at one end of the block; another through the public garage at the far end; a third by way of a subterranean channel cut through from the river; and the last, reserved for operating agents, via a concealed door in a changing cubicle at the back of Del Floria's tailor shop. Kuryakin handed in the triangular yellow badge that had permitted him to rise to Waverly's floor, said "Good-day" expressionlessly to the ex-West Indian beauty queen presiding at the desk, and walked through into the cubicle.
Outside the steamed-up windows of the shop, the rain had stopped and a hundred sections of dripping guttering above the brownstones played an obbligato to the mournful swish of tires on the wet street. But there was still hardly a soul about. The young man with the inside-out umbrella - he had finally junked it in a trash basket - had no difficulty in following Illya Kuryakin at all.
Chapter 5
Old Wine In New Bottles!
IN RIO DE JANEIRO, Illya Kuryakin met with a blank wall of official silence - not because the authorities wished to impede his investigation, but because Solo, after all, had been working strictly alone and they had nothing to tell him. About the murdered girls, police head quarters were polite but noncommittal. It was a murder case, they were handling it in their own way, and since he had no official standing they were giving nothing away. In the district bureau, Captain Garcia was equally courteous - and equally vague. The Senhor Williams had come to the hospital, learned the tragic news, accompanied the captain back to his office and talked for a while, and then left. It was true that patrolmen Da Silva and Gomez had seen his hired car parked near the site of the accident - what he had wanted there, the Captain could not think - but that was not against the law and anyway he had come straight back to the city, returned the rented Buick, and left by plane for Brasilia shortly after. So far as the old man killed by the hit- and-run driver was concerned, the police were disposed to dismiss it as a coincidence. There was, it was true, the slight - the million to one - chance that the old man had been deliberately killed to stop him revealing some thing he had told the Senhor Williams in a conversation. It was an interesting possibility, and one that the police would keep in mind.
It was the same thing at the hotel. The gentleman had checked in, stayed the night, eaten elsewhere, spent a second night there, called for his bill, paid, and left by the early morning plane to Brasilia. He had given them no forwarding address.
At a public library near the hotel, a clerk recognized a photo of the missing agent, and said that he had been consulting topographical maps of the country. He had himself recommended him to go to the bureau of public works if he wished to inform himself more closely. Some thing to do with a projected dam or a hydroelectric scheme, he thought...
The car rental company could add nothing to the details of the short transaction that Illya already knew. A lawyer had hired a Buick and returned it the following day having done less than a hundred miles. Period.
He was walking disconsolately back to the hotel, wondering what possible lead he could follow up next, when he halted in mid-stride as he was passing a barbershop. It must be a coincidence, it was not possible, it was a trick of hearing… but he could have sworn that, through the bead curtain masking the doorway, he had caught an echo from the past, a voice from the dead. He shook his head, his lips creased in a wry little smile, and he was about to go on when he heard the voice again. There was no mistaking it: it did sound exactly like… On an impulse, he swept aside the curtain and peered into the somber interior of the small shop.
There we
re only four chairs, ranged before their basins and mirrors in one of the world's most universal patterns. Two of them were untended. The third, at the far end, cradled a recumbent figure swathed in steaming towels with a white-coated barber, beyond, busied about a cupboard of shining instruments. The nearest chair was empty - but beside it was a wheelchair holding an enormous man, a man so vast that he overflowed the big carriage on all sides and towered above the shining steel rails of its back, a man so fat that the swell of his belly almost covered his knees and his bright blue, humorous eyes were nearly lost among the rolls of flesh forming his face. Half submerged in lather, the head topping this great bulk sported a few strands of reddish hair which were combed across the freckled scalp. From a cavern opening and closing in the middle of the foam rumbled the voice whose characteristic tones had first arrested Illya outside the shop.
"And be sure, Pedro me boy, to glide your implement neatly around the spot at the base of me chin - for if you decapitate it again, I'll sure as hell be provoked into leapin' out of this chair at all, and wrappin' your razor around your Brazilian nut," he was saying amiably to the barber shaving him.
"Si, senhor," the hairdresser began, when he was rudely interrupted by Kuryakin, who surged past in a rare moment of exuberance to exclaim:
"Tufik! I knew I couldn't be mistaken: I'd know that County Cork accent anywhere! What in the world are you doing in Rio? You're supposed to be dead!"
The eyes in the great moon face remained closed. Not a muscle twitched beneath the lather. Eventually the hole opened again and the voice said quietly, "County Waterford, as it happens, in the locality of Lismore. But you have the advantage of me, sir - besides which you appear to have made a mistake, for the name by which you greeted me is not my own."
Kuryakin followed the lead instinctively. "I'm so very sorry," he said at once. "I thought it was a friend I hadn't seen for years. Now that my eyes are accustomed to the light, I see I was wrong. My apologies for disturbing you." He smiled deprecatingly at the barber and went out.
Ten minutes later the fat man in the wheelchair was lifted through the bead curtain onto the sidewalk and propelled himself rapidly away on the shadowed side of the street. Kuryakin waited in the shelter of a doorway to an apartment building until he turned into a narrow alley, and then crossed the road and caught up with him.
"Sorry for letting my mouth get the better of me," he said quietly, walking along behind the chair. "I was so surprised to see you that I couldn't stop myself blurting out your name."
"Not to worry, boy," the fat man said without turning his head. "Mr. Kuryakov, isn't it?"
"Kuryakin. Illya Kuryakin."
"To be sure, to be sure. I'll be forgetting me own name next - which by the way is Manuel O'Rourke now. So far as Habib Tufik is concerned – I'd be grateful if you would forget that one!"
"Willingly - but what happened? Solo and I heard that Thrush had blown up your place in Casablanca and that you had died in the blast. We saw a story in the paper in Alexandria."
"Ah, sure you don't want to believe everything you read in the papers," the Irishman said. "If a feller has good friends - that he's paid well over a period of time, mind - likely it'll happen that they'll tip him off in time to get out while the goin's good, eh?"
Illya nodded with an inward grin. Habib Tufik - as Illya had known him - had been born of an Irish mother and a North African father and had built up over many years an information service in Casablanca**See The Man From U.N.C.L.E. #7, The Radioactive Camel Affair.
that had been without equal in the world. To him, police forces, embassy staff, military attaches, detectives, lawyers, spies and newspapermen from all over the world had come to buy knowledge in the days before Solo and Illya had unwittingly put him on the wrong side of Thrush. His service had been completely impersonal - if clients wanted information, he would supply it... at a price. And provided it did not compromise those who were already his clients. His systems of microphone eavesdropping, newspaper "milking," and world-wide cross-indexing, combined with an unrivaled control of hotel porters, liftmen and taxi drivers, had brought him the reputation of the most up-to-date gossip-monger on Earth. Crippled by an early encounter with gangsters whom he had attempted to take on single-handed, he had run his one-man show from his wheelchair, aided only by a handful of loyal strong-arm men.
Until U.N.C.L.E. had involved him with Thrush.
But although his organization had gone, it seemed he had amazingly survived personally the attentions of that evil and ruthless society. And now here he was in South America, complete with new name and personality.
Illya laughed aloud with pleasure at seeing him. "And what exactly are you doing here in Brazil, Senhor… O'Rourke? And when can you tell me your story?" he asked.
The fat man stopped his chair. "I go in here," he said. "Best not to make it too obvious. Walk on past, you. Then come back in ten minutes… You walk through the iron gates and take the lift. Press the button for the sixteenth."
"The sixteenth?"
"Sure, the penthouse floor. Nothing but the best for yours truly. Thank the dear Lord the Brazilians build wide lifts, eh?"
Illya glanced upwards. True enough, set a little way back from the old, shuttered houses lining the court, the slim pillar of a modern apartment building rose to the sky.
Ten minutes later, he pushed open a wrought-iron ornamental gate and walked down a long, cool passage to a foyer containing a bank of lifts at the far side.
Tufik - or O'Rourke, as Illya now tried to think of him - was waiting in his chair as the doors slid open on the top floor. Spinning the vehicle with all his old expertise, he led the way into a small apartment furnished in ultra-modern style. Beyond a living room bleak with Danish chairs and an angular room divider, a large flagged terrace stretched coolly away beneath a canopy of vines. There were geraniums, salvias, petunias and begonias in pots, and the flanking apartments were shut off by a dense hedge of macrocarpa in green wooden troughs. At the open end of the balcony, a stone balustrade partitioned a jumble of tiled roofs in red and green, beyond which palm trees fringed Copacabana and a vivid blue segment of sea.
"Fantastic!" Illya murmured wonderingly. "For a man in a wheelchair, you certainly manage to fall on your feet, don't you?"
The Irishman chuckled throatily, the pendant folds of flesh masking his chin shaking from side to side. "Ah, sure we manage, we manage," he said. "'Tis entirely a matter of knowing where to go at the right time... plus a little judicious – ah - emolument dispensed over the years, of course. It's surprised you'd be if you knew how many people I'd 'dropped' over the years to prepare for just such an eventuality as this!"
"But what are you doing here? Are you still in the same business?"
"In the same line of business, boy; but by no means in the same way of business. That sweet little setup I had in Casablanca was the result of thirty years' hard work. You can't replace that overnight. But, thank the dear Lord, I still had me overseas contacts and there were one or two souls were prepared to lend me a quid or two till I was on me feet again – if you see what I mean - so it begins, it begins."
"In that case," Illya said, "maybe you could be of help again."
"But of course, of course. Always ready to oblige an old client. Here, you're still standing up! Sit you down, sit you down. Let me fetch you a little something to refresh yourself. A vodka?"
"I'd rather have a Steinhaegger with a nice cold beer as a chaser, if your cellar can run to that."
"Certainly." The fat man detached a small, square box, louvered on one side, from the arm of his chair, raised it to his mouth, pressed a button, and called, "Joana! Are you there?"
Kuryakin smiled. The device, which would bleep until whoever was carrying its mate answered, was the same pattern as those used for local communications by the operatives of U.N.C,L.E.
"Yes, sir. You wanted something?" The soft voice came from the transceiver in the Irishman's hand.
"I did. A Steinhaegger
and pils for my guest; the usual for myself, if you please, my dear."
Again Illya grinned. "The usual," he said. "Still Turkish coffee and Izarra, is it?"
"Ah, yes. If you have the sweet tooth, it doesn't lessen as you get older... Now, how can my poor embryo organization help you?"
The agent pulled a chair out from a delicately wrought white iron table, swung one leg over the seat, and sat down with his forearms folded over its back. "Well, now," he said, "it's like this…"
Twenty minutes later, after the voluptuous eighteen-year-old with the flashing eyes had brought their second round of refreshments, O'Rourke leaned back in his chair and sighed.
"So what you feel might be useful," he said, "is a bit of a rundown on any set of circumstances that might link together the few facts you have and the disappearance of Mr. Williams?"
"That's about it, yes."
"The car accident, the murders, the death of the old man followed immediately by the departure of your friend for Brasilia, the cabled references to rivers and dams, the visit here to the public works bureau - plus, of course, the pretense that the women belonged to this, comic missionary body," the Irishman said, ticking the items off on his fingers one by one. "Seven positive items to balance one negative: the absence of news from your friend." He drained his coffee cup, took the liqueur glass still half full of the acid-yellow Basque digestive in one hand, and wheeled himself away towards the apartment with the other.
"Make yourself at home," he said over his shoulder, and we shall see what we can do. Though it's a case, mind, where I wish we had the use of a computer!"
Illya gulped down his schnapps and sipped the cold beer, relaxing in his chair as the drowsy sounds of afternoon washed over him. Bees probed the trumpets of petunia and busied themselves over the geraniums. An electric blue dragonfly darted under the vines, hovered for a moment in the shade, and then flashed away again into the sun. Across distant roofs the sounds of traffic rumbled.
From where he sat, he could see through a window into a room that seemed to be O'Rourke's office and workroom. There were gray steel filing cabinets along one wall, bounded at one side by the dials and pilot lights of a powerful transmitter, and on the other by two complex tape units with vertically mounted spools and a twelve-channel console. There was nothing to rival the comprehensive anarchy of the Irishman's old head quarters in Casablanca, but there were several tables covered in a chaos of magazines and newspaper cuttings - all of them, Illya guessed, ring outlined and coded and annotated in his own private, multi-colored system of cross-indexing. From time to time the man in the wheelchair himself was visible, crossing and recrossing the window, searching among pile's of paper for pencils or notes, burrowing for the telephone. Once a tall, slim man with a heavy moustache, whom Illya thought he had seen once before, at the airport, came in and talked earnestly for some minutes.
