The Diving Dames Affair Read online

  The man gave a short laugh. "Getuliana?" he said. "The new city? When they build it - if they build it – I may have to consider such things. But at the moment that is very much a thing of the future."

  "They will never build it," a fat fruit farmer said mournfully.

  "If you ask me," the third man, a pharmacist with drooping moustaches, put in, "they never intended to build the place. It's just a way for businessmen in the capital to chisel money out of the government."

  "It is not completed, then?" Solo asked innocently.

  "Getuliana completed?" the pharmacist exploded. "That would be the day, senhor! The site is flattened and streets are marked out. They say some power cables and drains are down. But not one stone has been laid upon another..."

  "Even the machines have departed," the farmer said. "There are a few bulldozers left, a handful of trucks, and one crane, I think."

  "Window dressing!" the wholesaler snorted. "To make the people think the work proceeds. In truth only the dispensation of money proceeds - while the contractors and their lawyers disport themselves at Copacabana and Sao Paulo and Bahia. Maybe even at Brasilia."

  "But I thought the new dam… One had heard..."

  "Ah, the San Felipe dam: that is a different matter. For some reason they have got a move on there. They have been working -"

  "That is just what I mean," the pharmacist interrupted. "Not a house is built in the city, yet already the hydroelectric scheme is finished, thousands of hectares of land drowned, thousands of people made homeless, and nowhere for the electricity to go! This is town planning?"

  "You are right, Humberto. It is madness."

  "I do not agree," the farmer said. "If - I say if - the city is ever to be built, surely it is prudent to have the electricity ready beforehand - then they can use the power to help build the place!"

  "No, no. You miss the point..."

  "One must consider the dispossessed peasants…"

  "I thought" - Solo in turn interrupted, struggling for a foothold in the discussion - "I thought those displaced from their land and their homes by the new reservoir I

  had been resettled with the aid of this American missionary body."

  "Resettled? Unsettled, more likely," the wholesaler said. "Those women, I suppose you mean? The ones in the uniforms?"

  "Well, yes. But -"

  "This is a Catholic country, senhor. Admittedly most of the people resettled were either Indians - the Carajas - or country Negroes who worship at their own Candomblé. Even so, the susceptibilities of the population as a whole must be considered."

  "You cloak the truth with words, Miguel. The fact of the matter is that these women behave in a manner likely to offend anyone, anywhere."

  "I'm afraid I don't understand," Solo said. "The society - the D.A.M.E.S., it is called - is ultra-respectable. Whenever their members are stationed abroad, they have to live in special hostels and follow a set of rigid behavior rules. What exactly is being complained of here?"

  "Drunken singing far into the night, indecent behavior with the men from the site, reckless driving on the roads, unseemly dress - anything you like."

  "But this is astonishing," Solo said. "For an organization so well considered..."

  "It astonished us, too, senhor. You will not take the criticism personally as an American, I hope. But San Felipe do Caiapo is a very small village."

  "I understand. Perhaps the women will go away when the dam is completed and leave the villagers in peace."

  "Perhaps. But it is already finished, I believe.'

  "You do not know? Is it not a remarkable thing that people drive out to see, this man-made lake?"

  The pharmacist laughed. "The road from Goiás to Leopoldina is reputed to be the worst in Brazil," he said. "Halfway along it, there turns off the road to San Felipe - and this makes the Leopoldina road seem like one of your superhighways! From here to the dam is almost seventy miles - and over the second half of the journey it is impossible to average ten miles per hour."

  "Also," the farmer said, "those building the dam and the power station by the barrage actively discourage visitors, it seems. Besides, it is high in the bare hills and the road, such as it is, follows the lower ground."

  "But surely there must be many trucks, convoys of trucks, taking materials to the site?"

  "Not through Goiás. We see a few - mainly hauliers from the coast carrying Brazilian goods from Volta Redondas: oil and chemicals and that sort of thing. There are others bringing staff south from the river at Leopoldina; they offload it from the boats there. But the bulk of it is flown in to the strip at Getuliana, of course."

  "I see... Gentlemen! Your glasses are empty. With what may it be my pleasure to fill them?" Solo said laughing. "And there is certainly one place, after our conversation, that you won't find me visiting while I'm in this part of the country!"

  ---

  Nevertheless, it was towards the road to Leopoldina and San Felipe that he headed the Volkswagen as soon as he could decently leave.

  The clouds had vanished and the startling blue of the sky was unbroken save for the shapes of vultures soaring over the gables of Goiás. Napoleon Solo hung his jacket on a hanger from the loop behind the front seat, loosened his collar, rolled up his sleeves and prepared for a long difficult and intensely hot journey.

  It was nearly ten o'clock at night when he returned. As soon as the dusty car turned the last bend and came in sight of the scattered lights of the town below, he pulled off the road and cut the motor. From the luggage space in the VW's front, he removed a pigskin case - and from the case he took a pair of silver backed brushes, a safety razor, a manicure set and a bottle of toilet water with an ornate stopper. Each of these articles could be dismantled, and from the interior of each came an assortment of precision parts which could be assembled into a miniature radio transceiver. It took the agent two and a quarter minutes to set up the gear, another thirty seconds to dismantle the car aerial and refit it in a special socket at one side of the set, and nine minutes of patient fiddling with dials and knobs and tuners before he heard an answer to his call-sign on the wavelength he was using.

  He picked up the tiny microphone, thumbed the button on its side and spoke softly. "Hello, Recife?" he said. "Is that Da Costa at Recife?... Are you hearing me loud and clear?... Please acknowledge and advise. Over."

  Releasing the button, he lifted a small earphone, flicked a diminutive switch and craned his head to one sale, listening to the tinny sounds within the can.

  "Okay," he said at length, resuming the microphone and throwing the switch once more. "I'm not going to dictate you a message for passing on to Waverly. You know the procedure. It'll read oddly because you are to send it in clear - do you understand? It is to go in clear, for political reasons. Message begins: Following are certs and probables for Brazilian Hit Parade..."

  ---

  Half an hour later, he was running the Volkswagen in under the eaves of the huge barn which acted as garage for the inn. Hardly a light showed in the shuttered streets; there was more illumination from a sky prickled out with stars than was offered to the municipality of Goiás as he stumbled across the yard and in at the back door of the hotel.

  Once in his room, he checked methodically the half dozen tiny personal signposts that every agent leaves to tip him off in case of entry or search. Of the five cigarettes in the pack carelessly thrown on the table, three still had the brand names on the paper facing downwards. The corner of the folded map on the bureau still coincided with the angle of a letter V in the title of a book below it. Nothing had disturbed the irregularly shaped morsel of flint he had balanced on top of one of the drawers. He poured himself a glass of water from the carafe, pulled his sticky shirt over his head, and continued. The suitcase came next: carefully he eased open the catches. Balanced on a stud-box inside was a small pile of coins. The top one should be a 1936 Spanish peseta with the first numeral of the date pointing at the top left-hand corner of the case.

  I
t was.

  Solo sighed with relief. It looked as though the place was clean, all right. Not that he expected anything, but you could never relax. He would just check the last three pointers and then he could get to bed. First, though, he must have another drink and get the rest of his clothes off. It really was tremendously hot tonight.

  He was staring straight at the ceiling then. He couldn't think why, for the moment, and then he realized that he was lying on his back on the floor. He had no recollection of having fallen, and no time seemed to have elapsed since he had formed the thought about the closeness of the night. It was very odd.

  He got up, shaking his head, and reached for the glass of water. At least some of it was left - and he was exceedingly thirsty.

  The floor spun away to his left and the bed moved in and hit him on the shoulder. He opened his mouth but no sound came out of it. The religious pictures on the wall advanced and receded in a blur of movement.

  And then suddenly, in a blinding moment of c1arity, he had it: of course they hadn't bothered to search his things or turn over his luggage. Why bother when you can drug a man's drinking water on a hot night - and then search to your heart's content without arousing his… without arousing his what?... It was too dark to remember.

  Desperately, Solo struggled to a sitting position. Idiot, idiot, idiot, a voice screamed into his dwindling consciousness. For a professional to be caught by such a trick...

  He clawed at the bed but his fingers were swollen and woolly. The counterpane whirled away into the stars as the night burst through the wall. Dimly, he sensed the presence of people, of figures moving in a mist.

  And then something exploded with a soft, almost caressing flare in his head, and he began to fall…

  Chapter 4

  A Matter of Interpretation

  ICY RAIN lanced across the East River and rattled on the window of Alexander Waverly's office as a squall hurled itself on the city from the north. Outside the shabby block sheathing the electronic complexities of U.N.C.L.E. from a curious world, people turned up the collars of their raincoats and hurried to get in off the glistening street. A young man wrestled with an umbrella that had blown inside out on the sidewalk by Del Floria's tailor shop.

  Waverly himself faced a woman across the immensity of his desk. Apart from the low humming of the air-conditioning, there was silence in the room. At length, the woman gave a short sigh of exasperation and shrugged her plump shoulders. "All right, Alexander, if you insist on being so conscientious, I suppose I'll have to accept it... but I think you're being unnecessarily obstructive. As Commandant of the D.A.M.E.S., surely I have a right to -"

  "Barbara! Please!" Waverly interrupted. "There are no 'rights' at all in this matter. And I'm not being over-scrupulous at all."

  I didn't say that. I said obstructive. And I think -"

  "You meant that. But the point is simply this: we happen to have come across a case where, in another country, some women have been claiming to be members of your organization. The circumstances surrounding that case are of interest to us, so we are investigating it. Because the women are actually not members of your body, naturally you are interested too. You want to know why. But that does not give you the right to demand information about the case as a whole, or to be made party to the confidential reports of my operatives. Indeed, I'm very surprised that you should ask."

  "Oh, Alexander, don't be so stuffy! You know perfectly well what I mean: I simply want to know, to put it in a nutshell, what it's all about. That's all."

  "And to vulgarize my own position, Barbara, the answer is that I simply cannot tell you. I haven't the right to. All I can say, if it's any help, is that the fact they chose your organization as a cover is practically coincidental."

  "I'm delighted. But what I want to know -"

  "The case we're investigating, quite literally, has nothing whatever to do with you. Nothing."

  "Since you have interrupted me three times in the past two minutes, I gather that's as much as you are prepared to say. But I warn you, Alexander - I'll take the matter further. We do have friends in the Pentagon."

  Waverly rose to his feet. He was smiling good-naturedly. "By all means, Barbara, pull all the strings you can," he said equably. "And if you come across anything really succulent, let me know, won't you?"

  Mrs. Stretford rose too - five foot four inches of efficiency tightly swathed in the green tweed of the D.A. M.E.S. military-style uniform. "You can joke as much as you like," she said briskly, settling the hat with its gold-starred cockade and upturned brim more firmly above her clear eyes and ruddy cheeks. "But you know I have a way of getting things done."

  Waverly merely smiled. He reached for a pipe, discovered that it was already stuffed with unsmoked tobacco, and groped in his pocket for another. As soon as the creak of Barbara Stretford's sensible brogues had died away across the anteroom, he thumbed the button on his desk and called: "Have Mr. Kuryakin come in now, if you please."

  Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin had been born in Russia - a fact that the international organization employing him occasionally found useful, especially when they were working in cooperation with Warsaw Pact powers. Beneath a high forehead fringed with pale hair, his eyes, blue and deep-set, regarded the world of his adoption with a seriousness that was alternately the stimulation and the exasperation of the young women who worked in the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. He lived in a small bachelor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, he was a good lab man, a mine of information on the latest electronic advances, an expert on firearms and radio. And he was also, with Napoleon Solo, one of the two Enforcement Agents Waverly rated highest on his private list.

  "My apologies for keeping you waiting, Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly said now as he motioned Illya to a chair on the far side of his desk. "I have been doing battle with Commandant Stretford, the D.A.M.E.S. lady. If only she realized how little - how very little - we know about her precious Brazilian, ah, bombshells!"

  "You have heard no more from Napoleon?"

  "Nothing. Just the one radio message forwarded by Recife. Not a word since… and that was the morning of the day before yesterday."

  "Maybe he found himself on a promising trail and hasn't been able to find time to get through again. Were you definitely expecting him to call back?"

  "Yes, we were. On his own instructions, too. He told our man in Recife to listen at the same time the following evening, to be sure he didn't miss out on a transmission he expected to be very important."

  Kuryakin's quiet blue-gray eyes rested steadily on Waverly for a long moment before he said softly, "I see what you mean."

  "I don't like it. I don't like it at all," Waverly said. "It's not like Mr. Solo to make an arrangement and fail to keep it. Something must have happened to him. The question is - what? If only he had been able to be more explicit in his message…"

  "Was it in clear or in code, Mr. Waverly?"

  "Oh, didn't I show it to you? Here…" Waverly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and passed it across. "It's kind of half and half, as you see. I told him not to send anything in code or cypher, because we can't run the risk of offending the Brazilians by sending secret messages out of their country without telling them we're operating there. You never know when a regular post might be monitored. On the other hand, he couldn't very well put down chapter and verse in clear. So he's done it in plain English - but we have to interpret the meaning." He smiled frostily as Kuryakin put on a pair of glasses and read the message:

  FOLLOWING ARE CERTS AND PROBABLES

  FOR BRAZILIAN HIT PARADE STOP CERTS

  THE LADY IS A TRAMP STOP REPEAT STOP

  REPEAT STOP DAM YANKEES STOP UP THE

  LAZY RIVER STOP I'M GONNA GO FISHING

  STOP HELP BY THE BEETLES STOP PROBABLES

  STARS FELL ON ALABAMA STOP OUT

  OF NOWHERE STOP HERNANDO'S HIDEAWAY

  STOP UNCLE TOM'S CABIN STOP BIRD BRAIN

  STOP SECOND TEN PROWAVERLY TOMORROW

  STOP EXOLO.


  "Well?" Waverly inquired as Kuryakin looked up.

  "Not too easy," the Russian admitted. "I take it the technique of using a popular song Hit Parade is merely a device to provide reason for having a number of unusual images all together, rather than a lead in itself?"

  Waverly nodded.

  "Then we have ten songs listed - five under certs and five under probables. May we assume these are simply facts and conjectures, respectively?"

  Again Waverly inclined his head. "That's the way I see it," he said.

  "Good. Now, first of all, why the two repeats in the first entry? I cannot understand that at all."

  "Simply, I think, to make the title plural. Several ladies. In other words, he confirms that there are spurious D.A.M.E.S., none of whom are - as my mother used to say - any better than they should be."

  "Then obviously he is saying later that he is going to investigate somewhere - going fishing. Though where the lazy river is, I don't know. There are several water images… Oh." He paused and looked at Waverly. "I see the 'Danm' of Damn Yankees is spelled wrong. Would that be deliberate?"

  "It would. Recife said he was insistent on triple-checking all the spelling."

  "Ah. Could the river perhaps be lazy because of a dam, then?"

  "It's a possibility - though what it has to do with Yankees, I cannot see."

  "Let's leave that for a moment, then, and pass to the last factual one. He needs help - but why put in the artists, when he hasn't before, and again, why misspell the Beatles?"

  "There's a reason," Waverly said. "We'll come to it later. In the meantime, what do you make of the second five?"

  "Stars fell on Alabama out of nowhere - that's a frightening image," Illya said thoughtfully. "Especially when you connect it with the last entry."

  "The last entry?"

  "A minor Charlie Parker piece. Not well know even among his fans - and in quite a different category from the rest, all of which are big, number one best-sellers of one era or another."