The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric. Страница 2

“Mr. Waverly told me you planned to be here,” he said, refusing Napoleon’s offer to be third on a match. As he lit his own Gauloise Blue he continued, “I mentioned I’d be in the Village tonight, and he asked me to deliver a message; then he reconsidered, and decided he had a number of things to say. He’d like you to call him at your earliest convenience.”

“I plan to see him first thing in the morning,” said Napoleon, suspicions confirmed. Pleading with his eyes to be let off, he continued, “I, uh, don’t think I can call him just now” Reaching inside his coat, Napoleon tried to indicate to his partner that he had left behind his U.N.C.L.E. communicator, to avoid the embarrassment of beeping in the middle of his date.

“Oh, certainly you can call him,” smiled Illya, speaking with sufficient firmness to make it an order relayed. “There’s a telephone booth just by the entrance to this room. Oh, and here’s the pen you left behind, in case you need to make notes.” Without a sign that he was forcing Solo’s hand, the Russian casually passed over his own two-way U.N.C.L.E. communicator.

Excusing himself, Napoleon found the booth and stepped inside to cover his call. Thumbing the catch on Illya’s communicator, he said quietly, “Open Channel D, please.”

“Yes, Mr. Solo,” replied Waverly’s dry voice. “I see I estimated Mr. Kuryakin’s timing correctly; it was only a moment ago I had your channel put through to my office. Would you be so good as to come here tonight?”

Napoleon was rapidly thinking of excuses he could offer his chief.

“And, Mr. Solo, please contact agents Langley and Ellik. You will have to pass on to them your current projects; what I have for you this evening promises to be a full time project.” Napoleon dismissed the excuses.

“I’m escorting an outsider, sir,” he said simply. Waverly would know that upsetting the normal requirements of a date could strain the effectiveness of his mundane cover.

“That has been taken into consideration, Mr. Solo,” answered Waverly’s quiet voice. “I have matters to discuss with you, but the whole world will not be plunged into chaos while you escort the-ah, outsider-home. Please do not tarry, however, as I would like you to join Mr. Kuryakin and me in less than an hour.” Napoleon winced, and then had an unreasoning twinge of fear that somehow Waverly could see his expression over the communicator. But there it was: nothing for it but to drive full-bore to Goodrich in the Bronx and back again. He signed off and returned to the table, mentally preparing his excuses for Beth.

Wishing Illya had not make the evening a threesome, he was astonished to find the Russian and Beth with their heads close together, bent over the newspaper Illya had brought. They were working the crossword puzzle.

As he sat down, the pair finally noticed his return. “Oh, Napoleon,” said the girl, “I’m glad you’re back. What’s a five-letter word for surrender?”

“U.N.C.L.E.” he said glumly.

While Illya penciled in the solution, and several others it led to, Napoleon signaled for and paid the check.

“I suppose you two have to be getting on, now,” Illya said. “I’ll see you later, Napoleon. It has been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Gottsendt.” He crammed the paper into his pocket and strolled off toward the exit, leaving Beth a bit frustrated as to how the puzzle would come out.

Napoleon took Beth to her home, presenting her with an amusing if rather fanciful excuse for cutting their evening short. She was almost angry and very intrigued as they said their goodnights in the shadows of an entranceway.

Searching for a key, she looked up at him from under dark eyelashes. “Are you certain you can’t come up for just one drink? It’s been ever so long since I’ve entertained a dark, mysterious stranger.” The perfume of her hair seconded the invitation.

Napoleon found himself drifting forward. He briefly considered dropping his U.N.C.L.E. identification into a mail box with a note saying, “I quit!”

But then he sighed. Still looking deeply into her eyes, he said, “I can’t; I have to return to town now.” Teetering on the thin edge of his sense of duty, he leaned down and took a kiss that warmly repeated her invitation.

“A rain check, please,” he said finally, unhappily, and turned abruptly to hurry back to his car.

He made the drive back to midtown Manhattan in less than twenty minutes. Lesser cars were left in his wake as he weaved the Sting-Ray through late night traffic. He thumbed the borrowed communicator alive, and spoke as he drove, with economy and precision. Before the twenty minutes had passed, substitute U.N.C.L.E. agents had complete details on the smuggling operation Napoleon had been about to close out.

Flipping the keys to a parking attendant, he entered the ancient brownstone housing U.N.C.L.E. headquarters through the Masked Club. Del Floria’s, the usual agent’s entrance, had long since closed for the night. Napoleon was led to a dark alcove, where he closed one set of curtains and then turned to another. The maitre d’ adjusted a fixture on the wall, and Napoleon was rotated, alcove and all, into the stone and steel reception room of U.N.C.L.E.

Two cold seagulls perched atop a plywood space antenna over a large building on the wildest of the several amusement piers just off the deserted Coney Island beach. Below the gulls a peeling sign brassily announced, “the hilarious, ROLLICKING, UNPARALLELED SPACE HOUSE.” A Second plywood aerial, painted silver once as was the first, waved in the wind above the Space House’s main entrance, where in fairer weather barkers would stand hawking the many attractions of the place.

Inside, all was quiet. The Alien Room was empty except for the papier mache Bug Eyed Monsters. The Space Maze was deserted, and all its portholes, glass “teleport” bridges and mirrors were smartly polished since the last customers had left; the floor was clean of tobacco and gum, and no handprints marred the see-through obstacles.

Beyond the Space Maze, deep in a part of the funhouse the public never saw, men in black uniforms and berets tiptoed from place to place, standing or sitting silently, smoking with a minimum of conversation when they had no need to move about. In the room deepest into the Space House, far from the seagulls’ cries, a fat man slept.

The bed of the fat sleeper was a violet chair without legs, floating motionless in the center of a blue tiled pool. Overhead, a plastene ceiling kept out the winds and knifelike chill of November. Electric heating lamps made the swimming area into a twenty-four hour, year-round summertime, while delicately modulated fans circulated air through the expansive, aquatic bedroom.

Next to the sleeper a pink styrofoam shark and a purple penguin bobbed in unison as he breathed. His head floated just above the water between them, taking color from both in the semi-tropical artificial lighting.

A bell-like chime rang once across the room, carrying softly over the water to waken him. His first deep breath caused small wavelets to break at the pool’s edge as he peered about from eyes buried deeply in fat.

“Did you have a nice nap, Sylvester?” he asked the shark. “And you, Pierette?” he said to the penguin. He sat straighter in his floating chair, and the pudgy fingers on his left hand turned a small rudder as his right activated a sea-screw at the rear of the chair. Literally breasting the waves, underwater but for his head and shoulders, he guided himself to the pool stairs.

Step by step, the once balloonlike body rose slowly from the pool. Rolls of fat jiggled and bounced as he mounted the stairs in slow, careful motion. The backwash from his progress sent the shark leaping at the penguin.

He dripped his way across the colorful carpet, revealing that his nude body was completely hairless, eyebrows and scalp hair were totally gone, making his head a grotesquerie of white flesh and whiter scar tracings. Heavy pendants of flesh dropped and creased all about his body. His fat fingers reached out to depress a delicate figurine, which emitted an even more delicate click, and the wall slid open.