19 - The Power Cube Affair (4 page)

"Don't be silly, Mario!" she chided, in a thickly husky affected tone. "It's my table. It always is. You can't put me off!"

"Miss Perrell, please!" Mario scuttled around, lifting his clasped hands in pleading. "I ask you a favor. Your table is reserved. Take another one. Look, I go on my knees to you!"

"Silly man! Don't you dare do that. What will people think?"

Miss Perrell stepped around him, apparently unaware that every eye in the place was fixed on her, pointed herself again toward the reserved-table, smiled, put slim fingers to the cord of her cape, swirled out of it and draped it over her left arm. There was an instant hush thick enough to feel, then a burst of noise like that which comes as the lights go up after a dramatic first act curtain. Solo cleared his throat.

"Like it or not," he said, "this table is reserved."

"Let her come, Napoleon. Nobody puts on a show like that by accident."

"You mean—?"

"Can't do any harm to find out."

Solo sat again, then rose politely as the blonde stranger reached the table and stood smiling down. Before either could speak the headwaiter came running, clutching his brow.

"What can I say, gentlemen? You saw? I tried!" He clapped palms to cheeks and cast his gaze aloft to some personal deity. Solo stood, seized the nearest chair, waited until the lady had draped her cape over its back, then settled her in.

"All the same," he said, as he regained his own seat, "this table is reserved. For us!"

"Pooh! Who cares about things like that? Bring soup, Mario. The chicken, please." She shared her bright blue gaze equally between the two men. "This is my favorite table. I always sit here." She conjured up a brilliant smile, waited a moment, then, "Nothing to say? Oh dear, you're embarrassed!"

It could have been true. The openwork silver mesh came up only as far as her ribcage, where it gathered itself into a pair of jutting platforms to support the generous hemisphere above. But there it ceased, leaving the rest of her to manage unhampered. There was quite a lot of her to see, but at this moment Solo's mind was otherwise occupied.

"Hardly embarrassed," he said. "But curious. My name is Solo. This is Mr. Kuryakin. You are-

"Nanette Perrell, and please, no funnies about my name. I've heard them all before. Now, what else shall we talk about?"

"We could discuss the unpleasant things that happen to ladies who interfere, or what happens to Barnett's girl friends," Kuryakin suggested quietly.

Solo saw the surprise come and go on her face, and he became very wary indeed. This girl was, in her way, every bit as breathtaking as the gorgeous Miss Thompson, yet as different as a tea rose from a tulip. He had judged one to be beautiful but empty. He was not about to make that mistake again. He looked closely, past the overdone makeup, the lacquered hair, the outthrust arrogance of her flesh, and he realized that this time they were facing a masquerade, a sham!

"You're quick," she said to Kuryakin. "And you," she swung her gaze at Solo, hesitated a moment, then added, "Don't stare like that!"

"Why not? When you put the wares in the window you expect people to stop and admire, don't you?"

"Admire? That steely glare?"

"Perhaps not. Appraisal, then. Is that the idea? Make the poor man so embarrassed he won't know where to look, and thus won't notice that you are a fraud?"

That got home. He saw the red tide burn her cheeks and spread fascinatingly downwards. She put her hands to her face all at once.

"Don't say anything," she muttered. "I haven't made a fool of myself like this in years."

A waiter came and went. In a while the scorching red tide receded and she achieved calm.

"Let's start over," Kuryakin suggested. "You were sent here to meet us, right?"

"What did you expect?" She answered his tone rather than his words. "A little man with a beard and a middle-European accent?"

"Let's just say we anticipated something a bit more subdued."

"Hide in a corner and people will come to see why you're hiding. But who's going to take any notice of us like this? They will stare, yes, but they won't look. Not with the brain. Now, you have a message to pass on?"

"Not to you." Solo was prompt and firm. "You're just another stooge, like Barnett."

"Don't you believe it." Her voice was hard now. "You bulldozed your way past him, but you won't get by me that easily."

"Save the dramatics." Solo grew impatient all at once. "Did you know Mary Chantry?"

"Yes. I knew her. Not well, but well enough."

"The way she was taken care of? I don't think so. Look, we know how she died, and where, and when. And why. And who did it. You can play your own stupid little games whichever way you like and it's none of our business. All we want of you is the chance to meet the man, whoever he is, who put her where she was, so that she bought it. We have a message for him, from her, and we have a few choice words of our own for him. And that's all. We'll handle the rest of it ourselves."

"Just you two!" Her scorn crackled.

"Just us!" Kuryakin put in. "One fool on our side is more dangerous than ten enemies. If you don't like the terms, you go back to your boss and tell him we have work to do, and we'll contact him later."

She didn't like it, but she had her feelings under icy control, and Solo realized more and more that this female was ten times as potentially dangerous as Miss Thompson. All at once she shed her intensity.

"That's a tune to dance to," she declared. "Can you?"

It was obviously a challenge, and a good one. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she moves in response to music. Solo got to his feet at once. "I'm no exotic," he disclaimed, "but I can manage a few basic movements, nothing fancy."

She came into his arms tense but within three steps all was changed. She could move, and did, like a well oiled dream. When the music died she sighed.

"You're very good. That's something, anyway."

"You're not exactly lame," he retorted. "Professional?"

"I was once. You two have me baffled." She led the way back to the table "I was told you were troublemakers. My job was to pick you up, to dazzle you, analyze you, make you talk, take what you had, and then drop you. But," she seated herself neatly, "you don't pick, you don't dazzle, and I get the awful feeling that if I don't take care of you, you will go ahead and mix into this thing on your own."

"Don't lose any sleep over us," Kuryakin advised.

"I don't give a damn about your skin!" she snapped at him. "It's just that this operation is too damned important to be messed up by a couple of well meaning amateurs."

"Whereas you're a professional!" Solo gibed, and she shut her mouth tight for a moment.

"I've talked enough," she said, at last. "I think I will take you to the boss and let him sort you out. Come on. Try and look as if you've been picked up for the night."

"Wouldn't know how," Kuryakin murmured. "It's a new experience for us!" She rewarded him with a glare that was pure blue vitriol. Outside and just around the corner she led them to a sleek and massive automobile, made them get in the back seat, then did something with a switch which opened the windows. Kuryakin frowned.

"Polarized screens," he estimated. "Curiouser and curiouser."

"And a topless dress," Solo murmured. "Somehow I always felt that was a fashion that had to come back. I mean, look at San Francisco!"

"And just listen to that engine." He raised his voice a trifle. "Is this the Vanden Plas Princess I've heard about?"

"Near enough," she called back over her shoulder. "The only car that isn't a Rolls, but has a Rolls engine. Nice, isn't it?"

"Since you're such a smart Russian," Solo murmured, "maybe you already know who we're going to meet?"

"I'm not that smart, Napoleon. In any case I forget just who is the top man at MI6 these days."

"Oh yeah? One will get you ten it isn't him, or anybody like him!"

Within twenty minutes the car was murmuring down quiet lanes between venerable old buildings in a part of the city Solo couldn't identify only as somewhere near the law courts. It sighed to a halt outside an unlit arch. She conducted them across a cobbled yard, up a flight of stone steps into a small hallway, then into a room that was as black as night. There was heavy carpet underfoot and the pungent scent of a cigar. They touched the edge of a table, then seats. She murmured to them to sit. They heard her feet shush away over the carpet, and then a door sighed and clicked shut. After a second or two Solo managed to distinguish the faint cinder red of a cigar.

"Isn't this overdoing the cloak and dagger stuff a bit?" he asked.

"Theatrical, isn't it?" The voice was that of an old man, careful and precise, but far from senile. "Absolutely necessary, however."

"Why? For dramatic effect, from fear, or just shame?"

"A cheap gibe, Mr. Solo. Any one of a thousand people would pay you well to be told who I am. Or would try to get the information from you by other means, not pleasant ones. I can't risk that."

"You prefer to risk other people, like Mary Chantry?"

"Let me squash that error at once!" The old voice grew acid. "I did not send Mary into hazard. Specifically I forbade it. Her task was to observe and report, and nothing else. I do not know how she became involved to the point of death. Do you know?"

"I do." Solo matched his tone for iciness. "She was observing. She made a mess of it. The man lured her on to his yacht, stole her clothes so she couldn't run off, had fun with her for a while then had her beaten to death and tossed into the water. All right?"

"That attitude will get you exactly nowhere, Solo!"

"It must be nice," Kuryakin murmured, "to be able to afford the luxury of hurt feelings. Of course, to do it properly you need an armchair, a secure room, a cigar, and somebody else to do the dying for you."

"That will do, Mr. Kuryakin!"

"Forget the parade ground bellow, it doesn't impress." Kuryakin kept his voice even. "So far as I'm concerned you're just an old man cowering in the dark, an old man who doesn't care for the plain truth. If that's your best you can let us out of here right now."

"You leave when I say, and not before. And to do what?"

"To find three men," Solo said promptly. "Possibly a fourth. And we know what to do with them when we find them."

"You do? You would break the law, Mr. Solo? I doubt the United Network Command would approve of that."

"You've been doing your homework," Solo approved. "Just by the way, though, we're on vacation. This is a personal chore. The people who rubbed out Mary Chantry also tried to do the same to a friend of ours."

"I see. The giant killers!"

"All David had was a sling and a stone," Kuryakin observed.

"Oh no," the old voice disagreed. "He was young, divinely inspired, and he had an army at his back, never for get that part. Virtue is an admirable thing, but it cannot stand alone."

"If you insist on quoting Confucius," Kuryakin murmured, "you really must try to get him right." A silence grew, drew out thin, then ended in a dry chuckle. The cigar end brightened a couple of times.

"Shall we try again?" the old voice suggested. "I'm in sympathy with your aims, but I cannot allow you to jeopardize my operations."

"I've heard that before." Solo grew impatient. "Your operational style leaves me cold. We'll play this hand our own way. And if you value Captain Barnett at all, you'd better leave him where he is. If he collides with us he is likely to get damaged."

"As for that overblown trollop you sent out to bring us in," Kuryakin declared, and grinned to himself in the dark as he heard a stifled gasp, "you can leave her at home too."

"That overblown trollop, as you called her," the old man said, "is sitting not three feet away from you at this moment, Mr. Kuryakin."

"I know. I can smell her. And hear her. Right now, for instance, she has just taken a weapon into her hand, most probably a gun of some kind, presumably aiming it at where she thinks I am. Would you care to bet I can't take it away from her before she can pull the trigger?"

This time the silence was so tight it rang. Then the old man sighed.

"Very well. Put it away, Nan, we'll have to try a different tack with this pair. Let me have a moment to think. Believe me, gentlemen, Mary was a mistake that must not be repeated. And my Operation isn't quite what you seem to think. Perhaps I had better explain that side of it."

"Is that wise, Charles?" Miss Perrell spoke for the first time.

"I think so, my dear. I don't think you've realized, yet, just who we are entertaining. You've heard of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement—"

"Oh my God!" she gasped. "U.N.C.L.E. agents. And I called them well meaning amateurs!"

"At any rate we can count on their discretion. You won't find us in any index, phone book or list, Mr. Solo. We have no name, no official existence, and, in a way, no authority, hut I'll come to that in a moment. We are outside the law, a position that has as many drawbacks as it has privileges. You see, those who uphold the law are equally tied by it, have to respect it. And that is why something like seventy percent of all crime in this country goes unpunished. Undetected even. Of course, most of it is petty stuff, but not all. I could recite you a list, a long list, of people who are literally above the law, who can buy and sell anyone who works for wages, who can buy justice, even invisibility. Most of them are known to the forces of law, but they can't be touched. And that is the situation my group strives to correct. As I've said, we have no official standing, nor do we have bosses, levels of authority, rules, a code—nor any system of payment, honors, rewards, nothing like that. You might say we are just an extraordinary assembly of highly individual people trying to do good."

"
Noblesse oblige
?" Kuryakin murmured.

"That's about it. That's what has brought you into it, the belief that you've run into something that ought to be stopped, right? I have that kind of thing reported to me several times a week! My function is to coordinate, to pass the information along to those who can deal with it."