The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 12

"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…"