The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 3

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"Never mind. So long as the client's here... Okay then, Herr Bird-of-Passage—let's have your passport."

Bewildered, Waverly had climbed out of the car. More puzzled still, he looked now at the outstretched hand of the man in the leather coat. "Are you talking to me?" he asked.

"Look, don't mess around," the man said crossly. "I'm hardly likely to be asking for one from Willi here, now am I?"

"Yes, for God's sake do hurry, man," another member of the reception committee called from the truck. "We're half- frozen waiting here."

"You want my passport? My passport? Are you some kind of... of police patrol?"

"Police patrol he says! That's a good one!" the man in the leather coat guffawed. "Of course we want your passport; you don't think we fit you up with a new one and still leave you the old one, do you?"

"I haven't the least idea what you're talking about," Waverly said.

There was a sudden silence. It was quite dark in the lane. A gust of wind shook a scatter of heavy raindrops from the bare branches overhead. Squelching in the mud, the other two men moved slowly up to Waverly and their companion. "What did you say?" one of them asked softly.

"I said I had no idea what the hell you were talking about," he snapped. "And what's more, I don't care! All I want to do is get back to my hotel in Amsterdam. So if you'll kindly permit my chauffeur to turn-"

"Amsterdam? Hotel? What are you talking about?" the man snarled—and then, struck by a thought, added, "What's your name?"

"If it's anything to you, my name is Waverly. And I assure you—"

"Waverly! You're not Fleischmann?' the chauffeur exclaimed blankly.

"Fleischmann? I never heard of him. I tell you—"

Waverly broke off with a gasp as he was seized from behind. Rough hands dragged his overcoat and jacket down over his arms, effectively pinioning his elbows. At the same time, the man who had first spoken reached out a hand and drew his passport from the exposed inner pocket. He flicked over the pages, scowling. "By God, he'll telling the truth!" he said hoarsely.

"Of course I'm telling the truth, you cretin!" Waverly shouted, scarlet in the face and struggling. "This is an outrage! I warn you that my name is one to be conjured with; you'll hear about this!"

"Be quiet, you!" the third man rapped out. "You mean it's definitely not Fleischmann, Karl?"

"Apparently not. Come to think of it, doesn't look like him."

"Then who is it?"

"That, my friend, we shall have to find out."

"Let me go this instant." Waverly yelled. "You can't go around roughing people up and taking their passports and abducting—"

Abruptly he choked on his words. The lane spun up and slashed him across the face as an enormous weight descended on his skull and the inside of his head exploded into a million incandescent stars.

Chapter 2

Solo Shrugs It Off

"AND I REMEMBERED nothing more," Waverly said sourly to his Chief Enforcement Officer, Napoleon Solo, three days later in New York, "until I woke up in this shop doorway at three o'clock in the morning."

"Wow!" Solo exclaimed. "That must have been some sap they slugged you with!"

Wincing slightly at the slang, his superior corrected him. "It was not the result of the—er—sap," he said stiffly. "There was the mark of a hypodermic on my forearm. Apparently I had been drugged."

"And held while they checked that you really were who you said you were—and that you weren't a sleeper fed in to blow their little setup!"

"Ours is said to be an alive and vital language, Mr. Solo," Waverly remarked with a pained expression. "Yet there are times..." He sighed and shook his gray head.

"Then they took you back to Amsterdam in the middle of the night and jettisoned you in the doorway of this jeweler's store?"

"In the Kalverstraat, yes. Apparently I was unable to give a satisfactory explanation of my presence there to two representatives of the law who chanced to pass by shortly after ward—I wasn't myself, you know—and I was—er—placed under surveillance for the remainder of the night."

"They slung you in the pokey!"

"Mr. Solo, please!... Of course, as soon as I was permitted to call my colleagues at Interpol, I was released. The Chief of Police was most apologetic. Most. But by the time we got around to making an investigation, naturally there was nothing left to see."

"You went straight back there with a team?"

"Well... almost. One of the more disagreeable aspects of the case was that, as you may recall, the whole thing started because I was hungry. You will also remember that at the time I was bludgeoned into insensibility, I had still not eaten. With the result that, despite a severe headache, I was ravenous when I recovered consciousness at 3 A.M.

"I can imagine," Solo said, repressing a smile.

"Quite. And those fools of policemen refused to allow me to go to some respectable establishment and order a meal. I had to be content"—Waverly shuddered—"with a bag of fried potatoes, a cold soused herring, and a boiled sausage from an all-night stand before they locked me up. You can see, therefore, that before I set out on the following day I was obliged to cater extensively to the—er—inner man."

"Oh, absolutely," Solo said. He coughed and moved across Waverly's office to the window.

Few employees have had the opportunity of hearing their bosses explain how they were knocked on the head. But when the boss was Waverly and when the explanation included a complaint that the police arresting him had refused to allow him to go to a nightclub on the way to jail to order a meal... Solo took refuge in another fit of coughing and attempted to master his facial expressions.

"You found nothing, I suppose," he said after a moment, staring out at the tall tower of the U.N. building. It was raining in New York, too, and there was a strong wind gusting across the East River, stammering the windows in their frames.

"Nothing," Waverly echoed behind him. "Nobody had ever seen or heard of the boatman or anybody like him. Nobody had ever seen the Minerva taxi—which is odd, because there's no old-car cult in Holland, and thus a mid-thirties monster like this would be bound to attract attention, you'd think. Not a soul could be found, naturally, who had ever seen three men in green leather coats... and that was about it. We did locate the place where the taxi turned off the road. But there were so many tracks and it was so muddy in the lane that the police were not able to identify any one set."

He dragged from the pocket of his shapeless tweed jacket a brand-new meerschaum pipe he had bought in Amsterdam, jammed it between his teeth, and sauntered over to join Solo at the window.

"All right then, Mr. Solo," he said, staring out into the rain. "What do you make of it all? Cook me up a theory to fit these facts."

The agent turned and looked at him. "Unless it's a trick question, I should say it's a straightforward case of mistaken identity," he replied. "There's this little organization all set up and waiting for somebody—the man to take him from the island to the mainland, the liaison men to direct him to the waiting taxi, the men in the truck ready to supply false papers... and from there on down."

"I agree. But why pick on me?"

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