18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (2 page)

Waverly exclaimed in annoyance. For the Amsterdam indicator was pointing back the way they had come!

He leaned forward to slide aside the glass partition separating him from the chauffeur. It refused to move. He tried again, harder. Still the panel would not budge.

He rapped peremptorily upon the glass. But the stolid set of the driver's head remained unchanged. The peaked cap did not turn by as much as a hair's breadth.

Waverly began to feel alarmed. Perhaps the man was deaf. Suppose he was mad, even! Maybe the whole thing was some kind of kidnap setup.... Vaguely he recalled stories of doors that would not open from the inside, of gas pumped into the rear compartment from the chauffeur's compartment, through a speaking tube.

He stared around the huge, shabby car. There
was
a speaking tube, hooked to the armrest on the left-hand side!

Panicking, he grabbed the tarnished chrome door handle and jerked. There was an icy blast of wind as the heavy door flew open, letting in the rumble of the Minerva's suspension and the oily hiss of tires on the wet road. Feeling rather foolish, Waverly leaned out into the spray thrown up by the wheels and hauled the door shut.

A few minutes later, the taxi slowed down by a long red brick wall and turned into a lane at the far end of which there seemed to be some kind of junkyard. The driver braked to a halt, jumped out and opened Waverly's door. "Very well, Mynheer," he said. "The other party's waiting."

He jerked a thumb at three men in long green leather coats who were leaning against a decrepit truck in the shelter of the wall. One of them plucked a cigarette from his mouth, pitched it into a puddle filling a rut in the muddy lane, and lounged forward.

"You took your time!" he said in German. "We'd almost given you up."

"Jaap was late with the boat," the chauffeur said apologetically. "According to Hendrik, he never said why—just pushed off again to the island."

"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?"

"I guess they were expecting somebody from the island, somebody they didn't know too well by sight, and you turned up around the right time. I imagine you inadvertently gave the right password or innocently supplied the correct answer to a coded question. Something like that."

"That's exactly what I thought," Waverly agreed. "I said, in German, 'Good day. I seem to have missed my way. Could you take me across.'"

"Ah. That was probably the opening gambit."

"I think it must have been. For he showed no surprise at all. Nor did he answer the question. He simply asked me where I was from, and when I replied absently—I was thinking of something else, you know—that I was from Section One, he got straight up and pulled in the boat."

"That's it! That's it! The approach in German—and then, by an extraordinary coincidence, the right code word when you say Section One!"

"I expect you're right. Because, come to think of it, I spoke in German; yet he replied in Dutch. And that's the way it went on—German from my side, Dutch from his. I can understand Dutch, you see, but I don't actually speak it. One surmises that this was another part of the arrangement, the twin language thing."

Waverly paused, sucked noisily on the empty meerschaum, and reached into his pocket for a tobacco pouch. "Well, that's all right, as far as it goes," he continued, "but how do you see the thing in its broader aspects?"

"As a continuing organization, I think," Solo said after he had considered for a moment. "Rather than as a one-shot job, I mean."

"Why do you say that?"

"Several reasons. The boatman said he expected you wanted to be off as quickly as possible and added, 'Your lot
always
do.' Secondly, nobody knew the taxi, although it was easily identifiable. If it
had
been a one-shot job, they could have used a local car and bluffed it out—but a mystery auto spells organization to me! Third, all that insistence on 'it's best not to talk.' A hastily improvised organization would risk nothing by talk; but one that had subsequent tasks of the same nature to carry out… well, obviously the less known—and said—the better!"

Waverly nodded. "Yes, that's all good reasoning," he said.

"As to what such an organization
is
... well, my guess would be that it exists to smuggle undesirables—or contraband goods, even—into Holland. Judging from what you said, the mysterious Willem lands the clients on the north coast of the island, and they then walk across and meet your boatman on the south. And he in turn hands them on to the taxi and the men in the truck."

"Going where?" Waverly asked softly. "If they're already in, why would they need to be squired further?"

"Squired further…? Oh—I see what you mean." Solo was silent for a moment, and then he said slowly, "Long, green leather coats, did you say? Of a particular dark bottle green?"

Waverly nodded, stuffing tobacco into the vast bowl of the pipe.

"Then that suggests northern Germany, Westphalia, to me. There is a certain type of German, especially among the older ones, who automatically wears a coat like that in winter. Particularly in places like Hamburg, Bremen, Oldenburg, and so on."

"Precisely."

"In which case, it argues that Holland was only an interim stage on the route. That also fits in, of course, with the fact that the 'client' was to be issued with a fake passport
after
he had entered the country. If the three men were Germans, the passport would be required for crossing the
German
border."

Waverly tamped the tobacco down with his thumb and put the meerschaum back between his teeth. "That's the way I see it," he affirmed.

"This also takes care of the taxi. Suppose it is in fact a German vehicle which only appears in Holland when there is a job on, when they fit it out with false Dutch plates. Well, there's no wonder the locals haven't seen it! And then, when the passenger has been duly equipped with spurious German documents, they merely change back to the genuine plates and drive across the border!"

"Exactly. There are two dozen small frontier posts between Emmen and Enschede, any one of which they could have been heading for when they realized I was the wrong man. They could use a different one every time, to minimize the risk of someone noticing something."

It was Solo's turn to nod. "Yes, it all figures," he said. "Even the client's name—Fleischmann, did you say it was?—is German. I'd guess it's a big-time outfit too; your boat man said something to the effect that the fare was paid, didn't he? That implies large-scale operations to me—you pay the fare before you start, and everything's taken care of, just like on a travel-agency tour! No doubt that was why your ferryman turned on the screws and asked for the extra: Willem's man was for some reason late and, being a fugitive as it were, could scarcely refuse the demand!"