The Finger in the Sky Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги без TXT) 📗

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..."

"What chance have you got of getting the others out?"

"Haven't a hope in hell. This is an old building, mister. Wood beams, bricks, plaster. Not like one of your concrete places with steel frames—you got a chance there; the girders hold the rubble away from corners and intersections and such. But here..." He shrugged sadly. "The explosion hit the Sister's office in the middle of the ward, it seems, and up she went—then down she came with two stories and the roof and water tanks and all caved in on her." He shrugged again. "And then the fire...No, I guess the ones that weren't blown up were buried, crushed to death or suffocated. And the ones that didn't go that way would've been burned anyway...We're doin' what we can, but the main job's really to stop the fire spreading now. I've got the rest of the place evacuated on the lawns at the other side of the building."

Solo watched firemen direct hoses to tamp down the flames barring the path of salvage workers trying to burrow under a tangle of bricks and boards. A group of them gathered around a tunnel in the wreckage and the interest of the watching crowd quickened. Voices died away. The crackle of flames sounded suddenly louder. There was a flurry of movement among the rescuers perched high on the rubble slope; they were extracting something or somebody. Then a steel-helmeted man in oilskins stepped down a few feet, looked over towards the Chief, and shook his head definitively. A sigh wavered across the crowd—and once more the hum of voices rose.

"Could it have been sabotage?" Solo asked.

"Sabotage?"

"Dynamite, plastic, a time bomb—something like that."

The Fire Chief stroked his chin with finger and thumb. "Could be," he said laconically.

Solo shouldered his way back to the car and drove out along the road to the airport. On the first quiet stretch, he pulled to the side under a row of trees and cut the motor. Pulling the tiny transmitter from his breast pocket, he called up the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York.

"Tell Mr. Waverly," he said to the girl on duty, "that somebody got there before me, both at St. Mary's and in Cicero. He'll know what I mean. And Barbara—tell him I'm not even bothering to go to the third place. I'm going to hang on here while you make a call for me."

"You want me to keep the channel open while I call?"

"Yeah. Call the chief of the Homicide Squad at Wilmington, Delaware. Ask him have they any reports of a homicide at a place called Worsthorne Court, on State Street. If they have, it'll be a client by the name of Spaggia, Enrico Spaggia—an invalid...Got that?"

"Worsthorne Court...Spaggia...Yes, Mr. Solo. And if there's no such report?"

"If there's not, I'll be asking him to place a very special guard over that gentleman for his own protection. But somehow I don't think I'll be troubling him...Oh, and Barbara—while you're putting through the call, get one of the other girls to call the Chicago police, will you? There's a murdered man at 1362 Venice Avenue, in Cicero..."

"You are getting around, aren't you, Mr. Solo!" the girl said. "Hold on: I'll give you a report on the Delaware call in a moment."

Waiting for the girl's voice to emerge from the diminutive radio, the agent looked at his watch. It was a quarter after ten, and he hadn't eaten yet. Somehow, though, he felt that soon he would be heading for a restaurant—he couldn't believe that there would be any need for him to catch a plane to Wilmington...not if the agents of THRUSH were as efficient there as they had been in the Middle West."

"Mr. Solo?"—the girl sounded astonished—"ten out of ten for perspicacity! Spaggia and his wife were both shot dead by an unknown assailant using a twelve-bore sporting gun, probably with a sawn-off barrel. The Wilmington police chief is most impressed. If you weren't so far away, he says, he'd book you for the killings yourself! The patrolman's report only came in ten minutes ago and the shooting itself took place in the last half hour. I'm about to ask you, Mr. Solo—and I quote—how in hell you knew about it!"

The man from U.N.C.L.E. smiled wearily. "Tell him with my compliments," he replied, "that a little bird told me..."

Chapter 6 — Some advice from the man on the top floor

It was sunny and warm again on Fifth Avenue. The girl at the Information Desk on the ground floor of the T.C.A. Building had a warm and sunny smile too. It was, Napoleon Solo supposed, what she was paid for. "An appointment with the Chairman, Mr. Solo?" she said sweetly. "Of course. I'll have someone come down and fetch you. Er—it was Mr. Maximilian Plant you wanted, sir?"

"Certainly. Mr. Maximilian Plant, the Chairman."

"Very good, Mr. Solo. We have to ask. Sometimes visitors ask for him when all they want really is Mr. Benedict Plant, or Mr. Gaylord, or Mr. Iain."

"How embarrassing."

"Er—yes. Quite." The girl spoke softly into the operator's mouthpiece which sprouted like a mad ship's ventilator from between her remarkable breasts. In a few minutes the doors of the center elevator slid open and a raven-haired beauty with equally vital statistics appeared.

"Mr. Solo?"

"The same."

"If you would be so kind as to follow me, please..."

"To the ends of the earth," the agent said, becoming seized by a kind of madness as the doors closed them in the small cage. "Are you the Old Man's secretary?"

"The Old..? Mr. Plant's secretary? Good Heavens no!" The girl was appalled by the idea of so much responsibility. "I'm just the Top Floor Hostess. I'm to take you to Miss Finnegan."