The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 2
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"Yes, sir. Da Silva's over there now making inquiries."
But the rental company was unable to reveal the names either of the driver or her companion. The car had been rented on behalf of an organization.
"D-A-M-E-S?" the police captain spelled out slowly in his office the next morning. "What on earth does that stand for?"
"It's a yanqui welfare organization," the patrolman called Da Silva said. "It means..." He consulted a piece of paper in his hand. "It means Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service."
"Missionaries! They don't look like missionaries! And what are they doing here? I've never heard of them. Do they have an office here - if indeed these women belong to the organization?"
"From the descriptions, they're the ones who booked the car, all right. They're not exactly missionaries as such - the D.A.M.E.S. is one of those charitable trusts that does good work wherever it's needed. Looking after earthquake survivors, helping famine victims, and so on."
"But we don't have any earthquakes or famine in Rio!"
"No, sir. We don't have a D.A.M.E.S. office either."
"Perhaps it's just as well... Did anyone think to check the mileage on the car speedometer with the mileage logged by the garage when it was hired?"
Da Silva's plump cheeks widened in a self-congratulatory smile. "Yes, Captain. I got the figures from the garage and went over to look at the car early this morning. It had covered nearly fifteen hundred miles since it was rented three days ago."
"Good. If they didn't have passports with them, they couldn't have crossed the frontier, so let's see…"
The captain rose from his desk, took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, picked up a pair of dividers and walked to a large wall map. The ceiling fan in that corner of the room stirred the hot, heavy air and detached a tendril of hair from his carefully groomed head as he applied the dividers to the scale.
"Yes," he said a moment later. "As I thought… they could have been to Porto Alegre, Bahia or Brasilia - or for that matter they could have done lots of little trips locally. But get in touch with our people in those places and ask if they have any mission or bureau run by the D-A-whatever-it-is."
"Yes, sir."
The officer sat down at his desk again. He took a small hand mirror from a drawer and studied his face. Above the thin moustache, there were hollows in his cheeks and the sallow skin below his eyes was pouched and puffy. He was already overworked: there had been a series of burglaries with violence in his subdivision and his superiors were pressing for results. Now he was burdened with this extra mystery. If only, he thought, the yanqui girls had written off their car further away from the city, or waited until the weather was less oppressive...
He loosened his tie and patted his forehead with a white handkerchief. "I'm not happy with this business of the witnesses," he said, combing his hair into place and putting the mirror back in its drawer. "Surely somebody must have seen what happened; something must have made that car break through the wall! Put out a radio message - you know: an accident occurred… a red sports car left the road… two foreign women were gravely injured… will anyone who witnessed the affair please contact us. The old routine."
"Very well, Captain."
"And Da Silva - you'd better take Gomez and go back to the hospital. If these girls are still unconscious, take their fingerprints and wire them to New York. In the matter of identification, we can probably save ourselves a lot of trouble that way."
CONTENTS
chapter
1: Briefing For Solo
2: The Man On The Mule
3: Up-Country Girls
4: A Matter OF Interpretation
5: Old Wine In New Bottles!
6: A Lady Is Unmasked
7: Trespassers Will Be Liquidated
8: A Break-In - And A Surprise!
9: The Message That Had To Get Through
10: "Don't Call Us - We'll Call You!.
11: In At The Back Door...
12: Hearse Under Water
13: Illya Changes His Mind
Chapter 1
Briefing For Solo
THERE WERE FOUR pieces of paper on the huge desk presided over by Alexander Waverly, head of the Police and Operations Department of the organization designated by the letters U.N.C.L.E. - the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.
The Command's headquarters faced the slender monolith of the United Nations building in New York (although in fact only a single window, the one in Waverly's office, linked the building with the open air, the rest being sheathed by a row of seedy brownstone buildings, a public garage, and a restaurant-"key" club). From it, a network of communications and agents of all nationalities fanned out over the world to combat threats to peace and good order wherever and whatever they might be. The problem occupying Alexander Waverly at this moment was whether the four pieces of paper on his desk added up to such a threat.
His lean, lined face crumpled into a grimace of exasperation as he took a briar pipe from the pocket of his buggy tweed suit and shuffled the papers around with the stem. Two of them were carbon flimsies, one was a short newspaper cutting pasted onto a sheet of typing paper, and the last was a leaf torn from a desk memorandum on which a single word was scrawled in pencil. He shook his gray head, pursed his lips, and finally pressed one of a row of buttons set into a platen on the desk.
"Yes, Mr. Waverly?" The girl's voice came from a concealed speaker somewhere behind the paneling.
"Ask Mr. Solo to come in, please," Waverly said into air - and he slumped into the chair behind the desk and began filling his pipe from a Dresden jar. There were already two other pipes - a Meerschaum and a cherrywood - filled but unsmoked on the desk.
In a few minutes Napoleon Solo knocked and came in - medium height, compact figure, brown eyes below crisp, dark hair, and a determined chin which offset a mouth frequently curved in an ironic smile.
"I'd like you to have a look at these, Mr. Solo," Waverly said, laying down the briar and flicking three of the pieces of paper across the polished wood of his desk.
Solo sat down and picked up the sheets. The cutting was from that morning's edition of one of the New York papers. It was clipped from an inside page below the fold, and was headed DAMES IN DISTRESS. The story read:
Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday. - Two young women, believed to be American citizens, were seriously injured in an automobile accident near the Brazilian ex-capital last night when their sports car crashed through the retaining wall of a mountain road and fell to the highway below. They are thought to be members of a Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service (D.A.M.E.S.) team. Every effort is being made to establish the identity of the two women, both of whom were still unconscious early today.
One of the carbons was a copy of a letter from the D.A.M.E.S. headquarters in the East Fifties to Police Headquarters in Rio. It was signed "Barbara Stretford" and stated succinctly that the Service had no teams at present operating in Rio, Porto Alegre, Brasilia, or indeed any place in Brazil. The other was a copy of a cable to the same address from the FBI. It read:
270767/0815 YOUR 260767/1435 STOP PRINTS
IDENTIFY AAA RITA ROSENTHAL TWENTY-
SIX CONVICTED LOS ANGELES 1963 FELONY
1965 1966 FRAUD BBB BERNADINE SCIOTTO
TWENTYTHREE CONVICTED BERKELEY 1964
FELONY PRESENTLY WANTED FRAUD
CHARGES IOWA STOP AIRMAILED DETAILS
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