The Splintered Sunglasses Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 22

"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, "that 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.

By the evening of that day, they had identified many of the witnesses whose testimony they could read in these xeroxed sheets—the fat man and his even fatter wife who ran the tobacco kiosk let into the post office wall opposite, the uniformed war veteran who opened and closed the post office doors, a lean man who walked up and down selling papers, the curvaceous and come-hither redhead with the tie shop next door, the blind matchseller who sat all day on the sidewalk outside the kiosk, the three waiters at the cafe-bar on the corner and the sloe-eyed, bosomy girl who operated its espresso machine, and the two smart, bespectacled women who owned the flower shop immediately underneath their office.