The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗

"Very good, sir. Before following him to Brasilia, I had better try and find out what caused him to go. It will prove quicker in the long run, I think."

"I agree," Waverly said dryly. "But I am afraid you may be too late." He handed the agent a photostat.

It was a copy of a circled news item from a two-days- old Rio paper. It was headed DEATH STRIKES TWICE AT FATAL CURVE and it read:

The body of Miguel Oliveira, 73, retired fruit farmer of Santa Maria da Conceicao, was discovered yesterday afternoon on a mountain road outside the city at the very place where two American women were involved three days ago in a fatal accident when their car left the highway. The old man, who traversed the route every day, is thought to have dismounted from his mule for some reason and suffered at the hands of a hit-and-run driver.

"They - whoever they are - are nothing if not thorough," Waverly continued. "I wouldn't take any bets on whether or not that old man provided the reason for Mr. Solo's sudden decision to go to Brasilia. With him and the girls dead, you're left with no definite lead at all."

"Yes. I notice the pacer said nothing about the women having been murdered."

"No. The Brazilian police are touchy about people who get killed in their care. They preferred to let readers infer the girls died as a result of the accident."

"I see. There is just a slim chance, then, that our villains may not realize quite how much we know or have guessed about them?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"Good. I'll go to the armory and draw my PPK, then, and call in on Operations for a full briefing on my way back."

"Very well, Mr. Kuryakin. You may liaise with the Brazilian police to the extent that you may overtly be looking for a colleague, Mr. Williams, the lawyer, who a unaccountably to have disappeared."

"And my liaison with you?"

"Don't call me," Waverly said, superbly unconscious of paraphrasing: "I shall call you... I don't want to overload the radio traffic from Recife any more. Leave it to me to get in touch with you, and you can report as and when contacted. No doubt you will find the reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Hernando's Hideaway perfectly explicit once you are on the scene."

"No doubt," Illya said. "I'll see you at Philippi, then."

His chief looked up sharply "Philippi?" he queried. "Where's that? Or what's that?'

"It's the Greek for Sevastopol," Illya said softly as he closed the door from the outside.

---

He went to the armory and drew his gun and several smaller and more recondite devices, called in at Operations, went to the Library to read the secret files on the case so far, took the elevator down past the warren of the Communications section to the street level, and walked into the entrance foyer. From here, monitored by closed-circuit TV, four exits led from the building: one via the top floor of the restaurant-club at one end of the block; another through the public garage at the far end; a third by way of a subterranean channel cut through from the river; and the last, reserved for operating agents, via a concealed door in a changing cubicle at the back of Del Floria's tailor shop. Kuryakin handed in the triangular yellow badge that had permitted him to rise to Waverly's floor, said "Good-day" expressionlessly to the ex-West Indian beauty queen presiding at the desk, and walked through into the cubicle.

Outside the steamed-up windows of the shop, the rain had stopped and a hundred sections of dripping guttering above the brownstones played an obbligato to the mournful swish of tires on the wet street. But there was still hardly a soul about. The young man with the inside-out umbrella - he had finally junked it in a trash basket - had no difficulty in following Illya Kuryakin at all.

Chapter 5

Old Wine In New Bottles!

IN RIO DE JANEIRO, Illya Kuryakin met with a blank wall of official silence - not because the authorities wished to impede his investigation, but because Solo, after all, had been working strictly alone and they had nothing to tell him. About the murdered girls, police head quarters were polite but noncommittal. It was a murder case, they were handling it in their own way, and since he had no official standing they were giving nothing away. In the district bureau, Captain Garcia was equally courteous - and equally vague. The Senhor Williams had come to the hospital, learned the tragic news, accompanied the captain back to his office and talked for a while, and then left. It was true that patrolmen Da Silva and Gomez had seen his hired car parked near the site of the accident - what he had wanted there, the Captain could not think - but that was not against the law and anyway he had come straight back to the city, returned the rented Buick, and left by plane for Brasilia shortly after. So far as the old man killed by the hit- and-run driver was concerned, the police were disposed to dismiss it as a coincidence. There was, it was true, the slight - the million to one - chance that the old man had been deliberately killed to stop him revealing some thing he had told the Senhor Williams in a conversation. It was an interesting possibility, and one that the police would keep in mind.

It was the same thing at the hotel. The gentleman had checked in, stayed the night, eaten elsewhere, spent a second night there, called for his bill, paid, and left by the early morning plane to Brasilia. He had given them no forwarding address.

At a public library near the hotel, a clerk recognized a photo of the missing agent, and said that he had been consulting topographical maps of the country. He had himself recommended him to go to the bureau of public works if he wished to inform himself more closely. Some thing to do with a projected dam or a hydroelectric scheme, he thought...

The car rental company could add nothing to the details of the short transaction that Illya already knew. A lawyer had hired a Buick and returned it the following day having done less than a hundred miles. Period.

He was walking disconsolately back to the hotel, wondering what possible lead he could follow up next, when he halted in mid-stride as he was passing a barbershop. It must be a coincidence, it was not possible, it was a trick of hearing… but he could have sworn that, through the bead curtain masking the doorway, he had caught an echo from the past, a voice from the dead. He shook his head, his lips creased in a wry little smile, and he was about to go on when he heard the voice again. There was no mistaking it: it did sound exactly like… On an impulse, he swept aside the curtain and peered into the somber interior of the small shop.

There were only four chairs, ranged before their basins and mirrors in one of the world's most universal patterns. Two of them were untended. The third, at the far end, cradled a recumbent figure swathed in steaming towels with a white-coated barber, beyond, busied about a cupboard of shining instruments. The nearest chair was empty - but beside it was a wheelchair holding an enormous man, a man so vast that he overflowed the big carriage on all sides and towered above the shining steel rails of its back, a man so fat that the swell of his belly almost covered his knees and his bright blue, humorous eyes were nearly lost among the rolls of flesh forming his face. Half submerged in lather, the head topping this great bulk sported a few strands of reddish hair which were combed across the freckled scalp. From a cavern opening and closing in the middle of the foam rumbled the voice whose characteristic tones had first arrested Illya outside the shop.

"And be sure, Pedro me boy, to glide your implement neatly around the spot at the base of me chin - for if you decapitate it again, I'll sure as hell be provoked into leapin' out of this chair at all, and wrappin' your razor around your Brazilian nut," he was saying amiably to the barber shaving him.