The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 8

"I see," Solo said. "And what about the fifth category, Herr Doktor?"

The man with the goatee looked again at his paper. "Ah, yes. Now this... this appears to he rather a different matter. Let me see...Section Three, (a), positive... It just says, and I quote, 'a nameless, noncommitted and nonaligned commercial organization set up to convey malefactors illegally and secretly across frontiers; an escape chain similar to those underground networks passing along allied escapees during the war; an organization for removing wrongdoers from the jurisdiction of those who condemn them.'"

"Does it say anything about how it works or who runs it?"

The Austrian looked at the paper again, frowned, pushed his glasses up on to his high forehead, and frowned again. He turned the paper over, as though he might find on its blank back an answer to the problem puzzling him. And finally, shaking his head, he said unbelievingly, "But no. Nothing at all. It is amazing, but we seem to have no information whatever on this network!"

"But it does exist?" Solo pursued.

"Exist? Oh, yes—it exists well enough. It spirited Hans Preisser and Otto Erlich away to Madrid only last week, despite the fact that the entire police force was looking for them after they had absconded with the funds of an insurance company."

"Exist?" the police captain in Madrid repeated. "Certainly not. There is no such organization, and I am in a position to explain to you that if it did exist, we should assuredly have laid its working bare and apprehended the miscreants operating it. They would be safely incarcerated in our jails! Yet there are no such persons imprisoned in Spain––you may visit the cells and see for yourself. It follows, therefore, that there can be no such organization."

"One has heard, nevertheless, of a certain senor Preisser and another––a senor Erlich–– who are rumored to have arrived last week from Austria…"

"There are always rumors in a capital city," the officer said.

"Clearly. Yet these particular rumors would appear to be well founded, inasmuch as the immigration authorities revealed to a foreign journalist––"

"Foreign newspaper reports frequently malign this country when the facts show the true picture to be far from dark. It is doubtless a matter of the language difference."

"The language difference?"

"Things become distorted in translation," the Spaniard said blandly. He flicked a speck of dust from the polished belt whose shoulder straps crossed his spotless olive-green uniform. "If it should happen," he added carefully, "that this man—Preisser, did you say his name was?—and his companion should chance to be in this country, then it must be assumed that they entered legally, by one of the routes. Had they not done so, as I have already pointed out, they would have been discovered and the clandestine agents who brought them arrested."

"… And there are no such people under arrest. Sure, I know." Solo stared through the window. It was ten o'clock at night. Under the chestnut trees in the brightly lit avenida below, the crowds were strolling—shopping, pausing for a drink at a sidewalk cafe, gossiping with friends, or merely promenading to see and be seen. He drew a deep breath and tried again.

"Captain," he began, "if we might for the sake of argument, just for the moment and purely as a hypothesis, assume that two such illegal immigrants had in fact been smuggled into your country, how exactly would your undoubtedly efficient counterintelligence services start to—"

He broke off as the officer rose to his feet, an elegant hand upraised. "You must forgive me, senor Solo"—his smile was charming, a flash of white teeth in the tanned face—"but I cannot officially entertain such theories. We deal only in facts here. We cannot permit ourselves to make any such wild assumptions."

"But surely you could at least explain how a hypothetical—"

"You must excuse me, senor. I am desolated, but we can help you no further."

If the Spanish authorities were reluctant to admit the presence of an organization whose members were not yet behind bars, Napoleon Solo found no trace of this official reticence in Turin.

He called at an address not far from the Corso Alessandro, where a special branch of the Italian police allied with the S.I.D., the Defense Department, had made its headquarters, and asked to see the man in charge.

The Commendatore was an old friend—a huge man, fat and friendly, with a luxuriant black moustache sprouting above a sharkskin suit.

"But of course it exist, this organization!" he exclaimed when Solo put his usual question. "It has been working for some time now—maybe one year, maybe two. Many times we have been give the tipoff—raid this club, be at this house at this hour, search that apartment, go to a warehouse. But always it is nothing that happen. Each trail is a death's end."'

"A dead end," Solo corrected. "But if the network is so secret—if it is one hundred percent impossible to contact it— then how the devil do the crooks using it approach the organization and explain that they wish to use it?"

"I think the shoe is upon the other leg, signor Solo. I think—I am not sure, and there may be exceptions—but I think the person wishing to get away is being contacted by the organization and offered an escape for a certain sum. This way, they are avoiding a time waste with small fries who do not have enough money to tempt them."

"I see. And even if you can find out nothing about the operation or how it works, Commendatore, you are absolutely certain, are you, that it really does exist?"

"But of course," the fat man said, dabbing his neck with a vast handkerchief. Although it was winter, and the central heating was set very high, the outside temperature was 81 degrees. "We know of several cases where people have use it. I give you one example: you remember the men from THRUSH we have capture last year after that mysterious affair of the hologram at Buronzo?"[1]

"I certainly do," Solo said grimly. He had good reason to!

"Well, there have been a jail break at Milano, and three of them have escape."

"And they got out of the country using this organization? THRUSH operatives?"

The Commendatore nodded. "Others have use it also," he said. "We do not think it is a THRUSH affair. It was convenient for them at the time and so they use it. But that is all."

"It's a very interesting all," Solo said. "Thank you very much."

Superintendent Rambouillet sat behind his desk in a dusty office near the Palais de Justice three floors above the Seine. His eyes were watering and his nose was red. He had a streaming cold, and he was feeling very sorry for himself. Across the room, Solo had taken up what was becoming his customary position, leaning against the windowsill. Behind him, rain fell from a gray sky on the Latin Quarter.

"We got a line on Mathieu quite by chance," Rambouillet was saying. "He got through the cordon in a dust cart."

"A dust cart!"

"Yes—one of those refuse collectors' trucks that are the same the world over, the kind they empty the dustbins into. They must have had a spare set of overalls ready and he simply joined the team. After all, who's going to pay any attention to the dustmen?"

"I see what you mean."

"Naturally, they couldn't go far. They had to transfer to some other vehicle before they left the outskirts of Paris, or else the dust cart would have become too noticeable. As it was, they took too much of a risk using it, because that's how we got onto them: someone noticed that the truck was an old one—a model the Public Health Department had stopped using some years ago. But what the hell, they were through our cordon before they had to change cars, so they were home and dry."