Kuryakin walked up to the french window and leaned on the jamb. "What about the photo of that girl?" he asked. "You don't think...?"
"It's all in the dossier the Commendatore gave me. She's the daughter of an hotelier with whom Leonardo stayed whenever he went to Bordeaux. They seem to have had an affaire. Period."
"She hasn't received any... packages... with an Italian postmark in the last few days?" the girl asked.
Solo grinned. "They even thought of that. And the answer's no again!"
"What about any other friends or contacts he has over here?" Kuryakin said.
"I asked a special favor of the Commendatore. He has a squad of men investigating it on behalf of the Command. But I don't anticipate any results there; somehow I believe it's going to be something far more simple. After all, Leonardo had to use something that nobody would notice—and that would be equally easy both to hide afterwards and to find again—didn't he?"
"I guess so. Well... if there's nothing here, I suppose we might as well make ourselves rare."
"Scarce," Solo said. "Rare is what they make steak and what diamonds make themselves. Okay; let's go."
They relocked the apartment and trooped out into the carpeted corridor. Apart from the bulky back of a man disappearing through the glass doors leading to the stairs, it was deserted. Solo approached the lifts and pressed the central button between the two sets of gates. There was a car already at the tenth floor and the grooved aluminum portals slid aside with a faint rumble. He was about to hand Giovanna into the brightly lit interior of the cage when Kuryakin laid a hand on his arm. "Just a moment," the Russian said. "That man we saw... why would someone ride to the tenth floor in a lift, get out, and then immediately take the stairs and go down again?"
"Because he'd meant to press the button for the ninth," Solo said.
"It would be easier to stay inside. This is not an express lift that won't stop at some floors. Let's just see... the other one will be here in a moment."
He leaned inside the car, pressed the button for the ground floor, and then ducked out again as the hydraulically operated bar slid the doors shut. The inner gates rumbled together, they heard the whine of machinery as the car began to descend; the indicator arrow above the lifts sank from 10 past 9 to 8. "Suspicious," Solo said. "That's what you are! Now you've delayed—"
Something twanged, twice, beyond the doors with enormous force. With an impact that appeared to shiver the building, a metallic thunderclap struck the far side of the grooved aluminum. There was a subdued rushing noise, rising to a crescendo, from within the shaft. Gear wheels, freed of their load, shrieked up the scale.
Far below, there was a splintering crash which echoed up the empty lift well as the car, its twin steel hawsers sheared, plummeted 160 feet to the winch housing at the bottom of the shaft.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Rare Stake!
The researches of the S.I.D. into Leonardo's contacts and friends drew as much of a blank as had Solo and Illya's abortive visit to the dead man's flat. The men from U.N.C.L.E. decided to leave that particular angle: they were most unlikely, in a foreign country, to improve on a routine job where the local operatives had been unable to succeed.
After a talk with Waverly on the scrambler radio-telephone, they elected to play it cool. No known contacts of the murdered operative had received any package from him that might be the missing medium through which he had shot the hologram that Waverly so urgently wanted decoded. An exhaustive search through all the poste restante offices in northern Italy had yielded nothing. It followed therefore, both Solo and Illya thought, that there must be some thing, some little thing perhaps, which they had either overlooked or knew nothing about. If they played a waiting game, this could conceivably reveal itself.
Whatever else happened, it was certain that the opposition were as ignorant of the nature and the whereabouts of the... what could it be?... as they were themselves. Had they located and destroyed it, there would be no need to keep up the flood of attempts on the lives of Illya and Solo!
For the affair of the lift was by no means the last. The following morning, Illya discovered and defused a booby-trap bomb concealed in the packaging of a bouquet of flowers delivered to their hotel room. And, a little later, it was Solo's turn to dismantle a Mafia-style device linking a veritable landmine to the starter circuit of his borrowed Fiat. So far as the lift itself went, police investigators told them that, after the hawsers had been sawn almost through, a peculiarly neat electrical modification to the mechanism had ensured that the remaining strands would part a few seconds after the cage was operated in a downward direction.
And then, as they were on their way to hold a conference with Giovanna del Renzio, a group of thugs attacked them in an arcade between two busy streets. It was all over very quickly. There were five of the attackers; and unfortunately for them, Solo had just drawn Illya's attention to some object in a curved shop window when they decided to make their rush. The two agents therefore not only saw them coming but had time, watching the reflections, to make a plan of action.
The thugs poured into the arcade from the entry to an apartment house half way along it. An instant before the ugly rush of feet was upon them, the men from U.N.C.L.E.—still with their backs to the attack—leaped as one man for the decorative wrought-ironwork which embellished the projecting window of the boutique.
Guided by the distorted images in the glass, they lashed backwards with their heels and sent two of the attackers reeling to the marble floor of the arcade before they could realize what was happening.
Then, still hanging from the pendant tracery of iron overhead, they swung out over the hunched shoulders of the remaining three and dropped to the ground behind them. One burly man came for Illya with an iron bar; the other two whirled round and went for Solo with knuckledusters and coshes.
The Russian swayed to one side, bent forward, and reached for the hairy wrist wielding the bar. There was a sharp jerk, a cry of astonishment, and then an almighty clatter as the man sailed over his shoulder and broke the window of another boutique with his head. Great shards of glass were still tinkling to the marble floor as Kuryakin turned his attention to the couple who were attacking Solo. The agent was on the ground, fending off feet with feet as he struggled to disentangle his Berretta from the folds of his jacket.
From behind, Illya crooked an arm around the neck of one man as he chopped in a karate blow to the kidney. The thug grunted with pain and went limp. Solo had in the meantime seized an ankle, twisted sharply, and upset the other man as he himself jumped to his feet. A moment later, the arcade was empty. The four fallen men scrambled to their feet cursing, dragged the fifth from the shattered window, and ran with him to the street. Only an irregular trail of scarlet on the marble testified to the short, violent battle that had just ended. Panting, the two agents straightened their collars and continued on their way. "But that's just one more reason why we feel," Solo told the girl later, "that it might be best to stake ourselves out near the murder spot for a day or two and watch the crowds go by. You never know. Among the regulars who pass each day, there may be someone who can tell us something... maybe somebody who knows something without even being aware of it."