23-The Finger in the Sky Affair Read online

  "Yes, I do. She works for T.C.A. too. I don't have her address in Nice right here—could you hang on a moment?" The girl disappeared into the back room and he heard her talking to someone behind the frosted glass partition. A moment later she was back, her face covered in smiles. "You're in luck," she said. "Sherry's actually here. She's on a short lay-off between shifts and it wasn't worth going home. You'll find her having a coffee on the terrace outside the restaurant upstairs."

  "Is she a stewardess too?"

  "No. She's Ground Staff Liaison, but the uniform's the same. It'll probably be the only T.C.A. uniform up there. Her name's Rogers—Sheridan Rogers."

  Illya thanked the girl for her help and walked away past the lines of passengers waiting to put their baggage on the weighing machines by the check-in desks. At the top of the wide, shallow staircase he paused for a moment to look back at the ant-like complexities of the crowd below. Between Arrivals and Departures they flooded the post office and bureau de change, besieged the semicircular information desk, overflowed the seats, summoned porters with an imperious finger, or merely stood about in disconsolate groups centered on piles of luggage. From the glass doors of the Customs hall a file of pale-faced arrivals emerged hesitantly to submit themselves to the greetings of tanned men in espadrilles and dark glasses. Up here beneath the geometric planes of the great roof, the acoustics of the place muted the babble of voices and amplified the sound of feet.

  The warm air of the restaurant was redolent of cigars, roast meats and garlic. On the wide terrace outside, Illya found Sheridan Rogers, sitting over a tiny cup of coffee and a large cognac. She had wide, wide blue eyes and a smile that wrinkled her nose and creased the flesh at each side of her face. Above the white T.C.A. uniform with its navy piping, her gamine-cut hair looked exceptionally dark.

  The Russian introduced himself as a Federal accident investigation officer. He drew a chair up to her table and gave her an edited account of the difficulties facing them in establishing what had caused the accidents. "And so you see, Miss Rogers," he concluded, "how very important it is for us to have at first hand the recollections of all survivors—however painful they may be, however unimportant the things they remember may seem."

  The girl stared out across the apron, the runway and the strip of dusty turf beyond which the sea stretched sparkling from Cap Ferrat to Cap d'Antibes. A group of racing dinghies heeled white sails over to a breeze drifting in from the west.

  "To be honest," she said at last, screwing up her eyes against the glare of the lunch-time sun, "I'd much prefer for her not to be troubled. She's still pretty ill. And of course profoundly shocked. To be the only survivor...If she hadn't gotten it into her head to check something in the baggage compartment...But I understand you have your duty to carry out."

  "It's not only that," Illya said, pressing his advantage. "The crashes may be due to sabotage. If so, we have to stop the same thing happening to other people...don't we?"

  "I guess so. I tell you what I'll do: I'll give you the phone number of my apartment and you can call Andrea. If she agrees to see you, I'll wheel her out onto the Promenade des Anglais early this evening—it's only a block from my place in the Rue Masséna. Then you can talk to her for a moment, and afterwards we'll let you buy us a cocktail at one of the sidewalk cafés. Okay?"

  "Splendid," the agent said warmly. "Let me buy you another cognac now, before you give me the number..."

  "Air France announces the departure of their Flight A.F./951 for London," the voice of the girl announcer twanged from the P.A. speaker above their heads.

  Together, they watched the slim, long-nosed Caravelle, with its twin tail-jets, trundle to the end of the runway, swing around, and then surge forward for the take-off with a scream of power. Once off the ground, the elegant machine roared into the sky in a steep climbing turn which left a double plume of black exhaust smoke hanging in the air over the beaches of Nice.

  "My goodness," Illya said, "they take them up like an elevator, don't they?"

  They watched the superb plane turn out at sea and fly back parallel to the coast—a silver dart winking in the bright sun. Almost before it had reached operational height, an aircraft precisely similar was sinking to the runway from the sky over Cagnes.

  Before they had finished their drinks, Illya had learned that Sheridan Rogers was twenty-five years old, that she had been born in Seattle and brought up in Paris, where her father was a consular official, and that she had been working for T.C.A. in Nice for nearly two years. He had also written down on a piece of paper the telephone number of her apartment. Presently, he excused himself and went to make the call.

  Andrea Bergen's voice was deep and husky, with a trace of an accent he couldn't place. At first she was most unwilling to see him at all. "I am much—how do you say?—bashed around," she said. "I do not wish to be seen in this state. Besides, I feel very ill. My nerves are poor. I have no confidence."

  "I only want to talk to you for two minutes, Miss Bergen. There is no need for anyone to see you at all. We can talk in the open air, on the promenade, if you like."

  "But what can I say that will be of any interest to you?"

  "Anything you say about the crash will be of interest to me. Anything at all, I promise you."

  "But I remember nothing. I am in the baggage compartment because I think I hear some loose things. I find I am wrong and—poof! Everything is darkness. How can this help?"

  "It's not your actual recollection of the impact—perhaps I did not make myself clear—but rather of the few moments immediately before it. If you were in the compartment as the plane was landing, I assume you had to ask permission of the Captain—you should have been sitting down with a safety belt on, after all. Did you ask?"

  "I—let me—Yes! Yes, I did."

  "Good. Did you ask over the intercom or did you go up front?"

  "I went myself."

  "There you are, you see. You are being interesting already...Now while you were there, did you hear any of the crew say anything—even the tiniest, most insignificant remark—that you can remember, or that you feel might be useful?"

  "I don't think I...Wait a minute...I—No, there was some little thing...Yes. The Flight Engineer. He made a remark I couldn't quite understand. Something about being surprised by a reading—I can't quite..."

  "Look, Miss Bergen: never mind now. This is intensely interesting to me. It's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Meet me with Sheridan tonight, as I asked...and think about it. Try to recall everything the Engineer said, every inflection, will you?"

  "I suppose so." The voice was still dubious. "But you'll have to excuse me if I wear a scarf over my head and face. I'm...rather badly scarred, you see..."

  Illya hung up and went back to make arrangements with Sherry Rogers. Outside the kiosk, he nearly stumbled over a small, dark man waiting to enter the booth. The Russian smiled pleasantly in apology, but the man—Illya thought he had seen him earlier, somewhere in the building—pushed past and slammed the door with a scowl.

  Later, when the girl had gone back on duty, he left the terminal building to see about hiring a car. After the cool depths of the main hall, the blare of heat outside was stunning. Between the spiky palms, yucca, agave and oleander bushes bordered the huge parking area in greens and corals and scarlets. Two gendarmes in khaki shirts blotched with dark stains across the shoulders regulated the traffic past the glass entrance doors. Beyond, coachwork massed in martial rows glittered in the fierce light.

  The plastic upholstery on the hired Peugeot 404 was blisteringly hot. Illya was glad to wind down the windows, steer the car around the cloverleaf connecting the airport complex with the dual highway coastal road, and accelerate away towards Nice in an attempt to stir some freshness into the tepid air.

  Later, not long before his rendezvous with Sheridan Rogers on the Promenade des Anglais, occasional gusts of wind began to agitate the foliage of flowering shrubs planted along the central strip of the famous stre
et.

  The girl came into sight some way along the wide pavement between the roadway and the beach. She was wearing pearl gray slacks which clung to her long legs and a flowered silk shirt against which the points of her small breasts tilted provocatively. Illya watched her threading the wheelchair through the crowd of holidaymakers with unabashed pleasure. Andrea Bergen still had one arm in a cast. The lower half of her body was covered with a light blanket and her head, swathed in chiffon, was bent so that her face was invisible. She acknowledged Sheridan Roger's introduction in a low voice without looking up.

  "I'll leave you two together for a few moments," Sherry said tactfully. "I have to change some magazines at the kiosk over there: the girl must have given me someone else's this morning..."

  She had almost reached the gaily colored stand when a big woman in an orange terrycloth beach-robe collided with her and sent the armful of magazines flying.

  "Excuse me one moment," Illya said to the crippled girl in the wheelchair. "I'll be right back..."

  He hurried over and helped Sherry retrieve the magazines from a bed of scarlet and mauve geraniums. "Clumsy bitch!" the girl said with a forgiving smile. "And she didn't even offer to stop and pick them up...thank you so much, Mr. Kuryakin. Now you run along back to Andrea and I'll see you for that apéritif in a few minutes."

  The agent turned back—and himself almost collided for the second time with the small, dark man he had seen outside the telephone booth at the airport. The wheelchair had rolled back slightly into the shelter of some ornamental shrubbery, where it was less likely to obstruct the dense crowds sauntering up and down the promenade. Late bathers still climbed the stairs from the Sporting, the Lido and the Ruhl-Plage, but the beach was nearly deserted and waiters had already dismantled most of the umbrellas and mattresses lined up along the carefully raked shingle. The sea was violet, only just strong enough to flop over into token waves at the edge, and the sun had vanished some time ago behind the pale cliffs of hotels and apartment houses fringing the five-mile sweep of the Baie des Anges.

  Illya pulled up one of the chairs with which the pavement was bordered and sat down slightly behind the wheelchair. "Sorry about that, Miss Bergen," he said. "Now, I shan't keep you for long—and believe me I do realize how painful it must be to recall the accident. But you must accept my word for it that it's necessary."

  The girl in the wheelchair sat with bowed head and made no reply.

  "All I want to ask you," he continued, "is, as I said, to make a very, very strong effort to remember every single thing you heard that Flight Engineer say."

  He paused. But the swathed figure before him still showed no sign of answering.

  "On the telephone," the agent prompted, "you mentioned something about a reading that surprised him. Did he say what that reading was?"

  For the third time he waited. And again there was no reply—or indeed any evidence that the girl had heard him speak at all. He leaned forward so that his face was just behind her shoulder. "Miss Bergen," he said. "Miss Bergen—do you hear me?"

  Behind the shrubbery, cars locked in the evening traffic jam hooted impatiently.

  Illya reached over and touched Andrea Bergen on the arm—then, with a smothered exclamation, he sprang to his feet and tore the chiffon scarf away from her head.

  From the scarred face, staring eyeballs bulged sightlessly at the sea. A blackened tongue poked obscenely from between the drawn-back lips. And the length of piano wire with its two polished wood ends lay buried deep in the swollen folds of the dead girl's neck.

  Chapter 5 — A surprise for Napoleon Solo

  Even in mid-August, there was an edge to the inevitable wind slicing south across Lakeshore Drive and Solo pressed the button to raise the passenger window on the rented Chevrolet as he left the congestion of downtown Chicago and headed for the suburb of Cicero. Far above his head, the street lights roosted on their iron gantries, a double line of futuristic birds marking the waterfront in dwindling perspective.

  It was just after dark and the traffic was light. The cool evening seemed to have kept most of the commuters indoors eating or watching television.

  Venice Avenue was a long, looping street curving out—it seemed to Solo—practically to Alaska before he hit the thirteen hundred block. The middle-class respectability of its faded private homes and stained concrete apartment houses seemed a far cry from the rambunctious free-for-all of Prohibition, when Cicero had been something very like a personal domain for Capone.

  "You come right on over, Mr. Solo," James Lester had said when the agent telephoned earlier. "I'm still covered with these pesky dressings and the burns give me trouble every time I move—but no darned bandage is going to stop J.H.V. Lester from bending his elbow! I got me a good story to tell, and until the doc allows me back into a saloon, the next best thing is to have a real good listener over at the apartment while I let a few fingers of rye slide down my craw!"

  "You're sure it won't inconvenience you?" Solo had asked.

  "Not on your life! My daughter lives in Winnipeg, my wife—rest her soul!—died ten years ago, and I'm all alone here. Until I can get back to work again, drinking in good company is my occupation. Care to help me in my job?"

  With a mental grimace at the man's archaic slang and archly ingratiating manner, Solo pulled up outside a liquor store across the street from Lester's address. A few minutes later, grasping a wrapped fifth of Seagram's V.O., he was standing outside the survivor's door. Thirteen sixty-two was a crumbling old house divided into three apartments, to reach which visitors had to negotiate rusty iron gates, a weed-grown driveway and a communal hall smelling of dust. The agent pushed the illuminated button outside the second-floor plaque labeling the steward's home. A double chime sounded within.

  As he waited for the door to be opened, Solo glanced idly at the cracked cream-colored paint of the landing walls. A gleam of brightness in the low-wattage light caught his attention on the far side of the door. Thumbing the button for the second time, he paced across.

  Bent slightly outwards from the lintel, a telephone company's lead was reflecting the illumination via a bright core exposed by whoever had recently severed the wire.

  With a muttered exclamation, Solo tried the door. It was securely locked. He leaned his ear against the top panel and rapped with his knuckles. No sound came from inside the apartment. Finally, he fished a small silver cylinder rather like a pocket torch from his breast pocket and unscrewed the top. From it he took a selection of thin, delicate but extremely strong instruments in stainless steel. Studying the keyhole for a moment, he chose one and inserted it. It wouldn't turn. Selecting another, he pushed that slowly into the aperture and twisted. He had to manoeuver it this way and that, but at last it clicked sharply and the tumblers dropped home. A gun had somehow appeared in Solo's hand. Pushing off the safety catch, he turned the handle, flung open the door and walked into the apartment.

  It was a small place. A hallway with a bathroom off it, one large, untidy room with an unmade bed and dirty dishes on the table, a tiny kitchen—and that was all. A wheelback cottage chair lay overturned on the rumpled carpet.

  Lester was in the bathroom. He had been brutally beaten about the head and body, the clothes torn half off his back, the dressings ripped from his burns and hurled to the ground. Afterwards—after he had been knocked insensible, Solo hoped—his murderers had filled the tub under the shower and held his head under water until he drowned. Judging from the expression on the dead man's face, and from the state of the half-healed wounds, his end had been an agonizing one.

  Solo's face was very grim as he dragged the sodden body into the living room, lifted it onto the bed and pressed down the lids to close the frightened eyes. It would be pointless to search the place; there was nothing he could do—not even call the police, since the telephone wires were cut.

  He ran down the stairs, climbed into the Chevrolet, executed a tight U-turn with screaming tires and headed back for Chicago as fast as he cou
ld.

  St. Mary's Hospital was on the far side of town, beyond the stockyards. Solo heard the sirens while he was still a mile away. He flashed a very special pass at the uniformed State Trooper who was keeping the traffic moving and coasted to a halt behind the line of police cars, ambulances and fire equipment grouped around the gates. Over the heads of a dense crowd of sightseers flame licked sporadically at the underside of smoke bellying into the night sky.

  The agent pushed his way through the babble of voices...."They tried from the inside but there wasn't a chance"..."gotten two of them out through a window"..."First thing I knew, my screen door was in the parlor!"..."broken glass all over the sidewalk right down the eleven hundred block..." He went up to the Fire Chief and showed his pass again. "What happened?" he asked.

  The big man pushed his scuttle-shaped helmet to the back of his head and mopped his scarlet brow with a handkerchief. "Search me, mister," he said. "I guess that's for the accident investigators to find out. All I'm trying to do is stop it getting worse." From behind two wings of the rambling, four-story building, an avalanche of rubble slanted to the ground. Over it, asbestos-suited men of the disaster squad picked their way between the flames to lever at half-buried beams. There was the familiar smell of brickdust, plaster and charred wood to catch at the throat.

  "You misunderstand me, Chief," Solo said. "I wasn't looking for causes: I don't know what happened—at all."

  The big man turned and looked at him, reflections from the fire chasing expressions across his craggy face. "Explosion," he said gruffly at last. "Could be a gas main, could be a crashing airplane, could be oxygen bottles—though I doubt it; the damage is too great."

  "What part of the hospital did it affect?"

  "Women's surgical ward. There were twenty-three of them in there—plus a Sister and five nurses. All we've got out so far are two nurses and half a patient, and they're all dead." He gestured towards three sheeted figures lying behind an ambulance, and then cupped his hands to shout at a section of firemen hauling a hose towards the rubble. "Franklyn, Harman—tell Two Section for Chrissake to take the table around to the other side of the wing; give these guys some cover from on top..."