Pulp Fiction | The Finger in the Sky Affair by Peter Leslie (14 page)

Solo looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Somewhere down below, Illya should be preparing to crash the entrance to the house.

He waited a minute and a half and then moved carefully to the edge of the roof. Now that he was nearer, he could see through the skylight into the attic below: part of a workbench, the edge of a chair, one side of a gray steel console studded with switches and dials.

Averting his eyes from the dizzy drop to the street, he leaned his back against the slanting buttress and swung first one leg and then the other over to the far side. Then, automatically dusting off his jacket with one hand, he moved thankfully back towards the center of the roof. The skylight was only ten feet away.

Something hard jammed into the small of his back. "Okay, bud," a voice rasped into his ear. "Raise those hands...
quick
. One move and you're dead..."

A rocket burst with a thunderous detonation and released a
fleur-de-lys
of colored streamers as Illya Kuryakin located the door of the house. It was a massive affair, peppered with iron studs and recessed deeply into a stone arch. Curiously, there were no windows on the ground floor of the building—nor could he see the row of name tags and bells which customarily flank the entrances to apartment houses.

He had been going to ring the bell of the ground-floor apartment if there had been one, with the intention of bluffing his way in on the pretext of having pressed the wrong button—and then improvising once he had got up the stairs. Now, however, he reconsidered: it looked as though any other apartments in the building might be a blind. Probably the whole place belonged to THRUSH. He examined the archway and the small porch behind it. Concealed among the ornamentations of the stonework was a diminutive circle of ground glass. A matching circle glinted dully on the opposite side of the opening. Presumably, once anyone crossed the threshold and broke the 'magic eye' beam which spanned the space between them, a photo-electric cell would actuate some kind of warning...perhaps a closed-circuit television camera—yes: the porch was roofed with tiles of bottle glass. One of them would be a hidden lens.

Kuryakin looked up and down the narrow street. On both sides, the ancient houses lay dark and silent. He had not seen a soul since he entered the village. The roadway was only six feet wide. The house opposite the THRUSH headquarters seemed to be some kind of gallery: there were paintings displayed in a window. From beneath a balcony on the first floor projected a stout wooden beam supporting a rustic sign—and a few feet from the end of the beam was the wall of the house he was trying to enter. If he could tightwalk to the end of the beam without falling, there was a wide window ledge opposite, a little higher up...

He crouched, flexed his muscles and sprang upwards. His outstretched fingertips brushed the wrought-iron curlicues supporting the beam, but he was unable to grab hold of them. He tried a second time—and again his hands hit the iron without being high enough to curve around it.

Breathing hard, Illya waited until fireworks over the roofs brightened the sky and then, gathering himself, leaped once more. This time his fingers curled over a loop of the ironwork and held. There was a wrench tearing at his hands and shoulders as his full weight dropped earthwards—but he hung on. Swinging back and forth with gathering momentum, he finally managed to hook one foot into another curlicue and from there levered himself painfully to the balcony.

After a pause to regain his breath, he stepped out onto the wooden beam. It was about two inches wide—and fortunately it was flat rather than rounded. Providing he could keep his balance...

Bringing one foot up behind the other—for he dared not risk overbalancing by crossing them—he inched out from the balcony towards the other side of the street.

In the occasional flicker of reflected light, the cobblestones gleamed fifteen feet below. When he was about halfway along, the beam creaked and shifted slightly. He swayed, sawing with outstretched arms on either side to preserve his balance. Another two feet only...but would the beam hold? For the further away from the balcony he got, the greater the leverage on the fixing points.

Eighteen inches to go—and again the beam creaked, more loudly this time. The sign hanging below it swung once to and fro, faintly squealing its iron hooks and eyes.

Six inches...There was a rending sound, a splintery crack. As the beam sank beneath him, Illya launched himself forwards and outwards, his hands desperately groping for the wide sill under the window opposite. His forearms struck the wide shelf hard, and an instant later his knees and toes crashed numbingly into the wall below it. Panting, he tensed his biceps and held on. There was no clatter from the street; the beam and the ironwork below it had loosened but not fallen; the sign still hung crazily above the cobblestones.

The agent pulled himself up onto the sill and peered into the window. The room inside was still in darkness.

Alarm wires led from the casement to a junction box along the wall. He pulled a flat box like a cigarette case from his pocket. Inside were two neat rows of shining implements. For a tenth of a second the beam of his flashlight brightened the embrasure. Then he worked industriously in the dark for two minutes: insulation was scraped away from one wire, a clip carrying a short lead was fastened on. The other end was attached to a miniature steel pin. There were two brief metallic taps as he drove the pin into the second wire by the frame.

Seconds later there was a sharp snap and the window swung inwards.

Illya swung his legs over the sill and dropped soundlessly to the floor inside. Apart from the humming of the generator, no sound broke the silence.

Again the thin ray of the flashlight lanced the dark. There was nothing in the small room but three rows of filing cabinets. The door was immediately opposite the window. He tiptoed around the end of the middle row and reached out for the handle...then paused, his hand arrested in mid-air.

From the matchbox-sized radio receiver in the breast pocket of his shirt, a call-sign was vibrating minutely against his chest. Solo was calling him...

Each of them was wearing an ornate dress ring which in fact was a tiny transmitter. The vibration meant that Solo had pressed the minuscule control at the side of his ring to initiate transmission. Illya fished the receiver from his pocket and held it to his ear, listening. Faintly, he heard the tail end of a sentence in a harsh and unfamiliar voice:

"... tell me what you're doing here, bud, or it'll be the worse for you. C'mon—what were you doing prowling about our roof?"

Then the whisper of Solos voice, in a passable imitation of cockney: "All right, mister, I'll come clean. I didn't mean no harm. Honest—I was just hopin' for a tickle. There's plenty of nobs in these gaffs. I thought maybe I'd find an open skylight...you know. I wasn't after your pad special, honest I wasn't..."

"Don't give me that. I seen you before somewhere—Celeste: don't we know this guy from someplace?"

"Could be"—it was a woman's voice speaking now—"the face seems kinda, well, familiar."

"That's what I thought, but I can't quite place it. Come on, you bastard: who sent you, and why are you here?" There was the sound of a blow and a strangled exclamation from Solo—then the agent's voice, panting:

"Well done, little one. Go on. Do it again. It must be a nice change hitting a man bound to a chair—bit of a relief from the monotony of beating up elderly nurses and throwing hospital patients over cliffs."

"He does know something," the woman's voice said. "Larsen—we'd better knock him off..."

"Naw. We can't do that without Number One's permission—and she's busy with the ray and can't be disturbed. I'll check with Fr�hlich—and in the meantime, we can find out exactly what he knows. Let's go get the dynamo and the clips. With a few hundred volts through you-know-where, he'll soon talk. C'mon: he's safe enough there..."

There was a pause, and then, faintly, Solo's voice: "Illya? Are you with me? I'm probably very distant because my arms are bound to the arms of a chair and I can't get the mike in my ring near my mouth."

Kuryakin lifted the ring on his own hand up to his mouth and pressed a tiny knob imbedded in the scrollwork of the setting. "I hear you, Napoleon," he said softly. "What happened?"

"I was stopped as I crossed the roof," the voice in the receiver whispered. "I would guess it was the same little dark villain you saw at the airport; the one who probably murdered Andrea Bergen and helped with the hospital job. The woman could be the one who knocked the magazines out of Sherry's hand and distracted your attention while Shorty killed Andrea. They've gone now."

"I gathered that. Where are you?"

"In an attic under the roof. I imagine the operations room is just below. Where are you?"

"In a room on the first floor. You'll be three stories above me. Shall I come and get you out—or shall I deal with Helga first?"

"What did you say? You're very faint. My receiver's in my breast pocket and I can hardly hear you."

"I said shall I deal with Helga or shall I come and get you?"

"Try to get me first—we've got to stop them finding out who I am. If they do, they'll call the whole thing off...and it'll need two of us to deal with them: apart from these two, there's Fr�hlich, whoever he is, and possibly the two others involved in the hospital deal."

"I see what you mean. Whoever's operating their weapon has got to continue thinking we're both on that plane...I'll be up."

"Okay. But hurry, Illya. The plane's due in nine minutes..."

The Russian took an automatic from his hip pocket, fitted a long silencer over the barrel and pushed a clip of ammunition into the butt. Then, cautiously opening the door, he slid out onto the dark landing. Now that he was outside the room, he could hear the low murmur of voices from somewhere above.

Before venturing upstairs, though, he had to make sure of his line of retreat. Waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, he finally made out an oblong of less intense darkness to his left. It was the entrance to a stone staircase leading down between arched plaster walls. Keeping to the outside of the tiled steps, he trod softly down.

As he rounded a bend in the stairway, he saw the origin of the faint illumination. A man sat with his back to the entrance in a small concierge's cubicle, poring over a magazine in the dim light of a low-wattage red bulb. Although paying lip service to the edict that all houses in St. Paul should show no lights during the display, the THRUSH headquarters was maintaining a basic supply with its own generator.

To one side of the concierge's desk was a fourteen-inch TV monitor screen flanked by a platen carrying warning lights and switches. The man, at second hand, was obviously the guardian of the front door.

Illya stole across the hall and paused in the doorway of the cubicle. The man had not moved. Engrossed in what he was reading, he was apparently mouthing to himself the words on the printed page as he laboriously followed the lines.

Illya raised his right arm, the hand held flat with the fingers extended. Abruptly, he swept the flat of the hand across and down to the nape of the man's neck in a
karate
chop.

The doorkeeper grunted once and slumped forward over the desk.

Thumbing back his eyelid to make sure he would take no part in the evening's festivities for the next hour or so, Kuryakin raced back to the first floor and groped along the wall for the stairs leading up. He found them at the far end of the landing and climbed cautiously to the next story. There were four doors, his exploring fingers discovered—two on each side of the passageway. Crouching, he peered through the keyhole of each in turn. Three of the rooms were in darkness. Through the fourth keyhole, a brighter light shone—and from behind the door he could hear voices raised in argument, among them those of the man and woman he had heard questioning Solo.

The third floor of the house boasted only three doors. Two of them, on the side of the building nearest the street, stood open—to reveal in the intermittent reflection of fireworks admitted through the uncurtained windows a bathroom and what looked like a miniature laboratory. Behind the third, which was closed, lay the room with the picture window, the operations room from which four T.C.A. Tridents had been sent crashing to their doom...

From this landing—Illya saw in the light of a blue-green flare—only a ladder led upwards to the attics. Gun at the ready, he swarmed aloft and disappeared through the open trapdoor in the ceiling.

The crude Proven�al armchair to which Solo was bound had its back to the door, and the first he knew of the Russian's presence was the hand that fell warningly on his shoulder.

"How long have we got?" Solo whispered urgently as Illya sawed through the electric flex clamping his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles to the wooden arms and legs.

Kuryakin glanced at his watch. "The plane is due to land in five and a quarter minutes, Napoleon," he said.

Solo rose to his feet, massaging the life back into his cramped limbs. "God, we have to move fast," he said. "And we can't afford to go into that operations room before we've accounted for the others. How many are there left, do you know?"

"The man and woman who were here with you, Fr�hlich—and probably one other. I've already—er—looked after one guard on the front door."

"Good. But the trouble is, we'll have to do it all in complete silence—the slightest sign of a struggle would tip Helga off..."

Together, they turned towards the door.

Larsen stood there with a Luger, the big gun steady in his dirty hand.

"Okay, you guys," he snarled. "So now it's a confederate, is it? Back up there—
now
. We'll see just who the hell you are..."

Balletically, Illya kicked straight-legged almost in reflex. The tip of his toe caught the barrel, and the heavy pistol went spinning across the room. As the small, dark man's mouth opened wide in dismay, the Russian chopped flat-handed at his throat, catching him viciously across the Adam's apple as the shout was forming. Solo made a dive to his left and caught the Luger before it could crash to the floor.