Illya said, "Good morning. Going into Wall Street?"
Mr. Waverly turned. "Ah! Mr. Kuryakin. Thank you for coming so promptly. You will be flying to Britain in an hour. So sit down, please, and read these."
Illya took the three sheets and scanned them, lingering over the third.
"Blodwen appears to have a sense of humor," he said.
"I am glad you think so," Mr. Waverly said coldly.
"'Brown bird singing,'" Illya read aloud. "That's obviously our old friend Thrush. But 'bumper bundle mintwise'?"
Mr. Waverly gestured toward the stacks of notes on the O-shaped table. "Those are specimens. What do you make of them?"
Illya picked up a five-hundred-kroner note, an American ten-dollar bill and an English five-pound note. He took them across to the window and examined them carefully. "They look all right to me," he said at last.
"You would be prepared to spend them?"
His eyes lit up hopefully. "Can I?"
"If you did, you would inevitable end in jail," Mr. Waverly said. "They are all forgeries."
"But they're perfect!"
"Almost perfect," Napoleon Solo corrected. "In every case the paper is slightly wrong. Take the Bank of England notes: they look right and they feel right — but the metal thread running through the paper is fractionally too thick. There's a similar infinitesimal flaw in all the others. But the printing is fantastically good. The forgers have either got access to the original plates — which on the face of it is impossible — or else they've succeeded in making exact copies."
"That's been done before," Illya said. "Some kind of photographic process."
Mr. Waverly shook his head. "No. With a photographic reproduction, the same number appears on every note. On those, you will observe, the numbers are random."
"Then how is it done?"
"That," said Mr. Waverly, "is what you are flying to Britain to find out. We know neither how nor where the notes are made. But we must find the answer quickly. You are intelligent enough to realize the disaster which would follow if Thrush were allowed to flood the world's markets with these almost undetectable forgeries. There would be financial panic. The economy of every country would collapse like the proverbial house of cards."
Illya nodded. "I see that. But what's the background? Blodwen's 'street fatality' doesn't tell me much."
Mr. Waverly sat down at the table, took a brier pipe from the pocket of his shabby tweed jacket and began to turn it between his hands. He said, "I can give you only the facts as Blodwen has reported them. An unidentified man arrives in the important Welsh seaport of Newport, Monmouthshire, and visits two inns in Market Street. For all we know, he may already have visited other establishments in the town. He is obviously a stranger to the district. He speaks with an uneducated English accent, nothing like the local intonation, and he has to find a Welsh doll to know that he has come to the right place."
"Couldn't he have been told the name of the inn?" Solo objected. "Wouldn't that be above the door?"
"It was painted along the entire length of the front wall above the window," Mr. Waverly said. "That might argue, of course, that our man was illiterate."
"Or the doll could have been a signal?"
"No. We checked that. The doll had stood on the shelf for many months. But let me continue—
"The man orders a pint of bitter, which he does not drink. He sits at a table, plainly waiting for someone. Two men come through the door. Our man panics. He dashes out into the street, straight under the wheels of a truck. Immediately, bank notes worth a small fortune are scattered all over the road. When his body is taken to the morgue, more bundles of notes are found stitched inside his trenchcoat and suit linings. As nearly as we can estimate he was carrying on his person assorted forged currency to the face value of one hundred thousand dollars."
Illya whistled soundlessly. He said, "And no clue to where he came from?"
"None. His description was circulated to police stations, published in the evening newspapers and broadcast over radio and television. Nobody has come forward to identify him. Inquiries are proceeding, but you must remember that Newport is a town of more than one hundred and five thousand inhabitants, with a large floating population of seamen — to say nothing of the people who come in and out from the mining valleys and from the Welsh capital, Cardiff, only a few miles away."
Solo asked, "What about the two men who frightened him?"
Mr. Waverly said, "We have checked them. They were tunnelers working on one of the big Monmouthshire motorway projects. They were on vacation in Newport and just happened to stop at the inn for a drink. Probably, as the barmaid suggested, our man took them for detectives."
Illya picked up the third telegram. "'Needle haystackwise,'" he quoted. "Lady, you ain't kidding."
Mr. Waverly put the unlighted pipe back in his pocket and stood up with an air of finality.
"You have not much time to catch your plane, Mr. Kuryakin," he said. "You will fly direct to Rhoose, the Cardiff airport, and a car will take you on to Newport. Contact Blodwen as soon as you arrive. Is there anything else you wish to know?"
"Just one thing," Illya said gloomily. "Where do I pick up my crystal ball?"
Chapter Three
The girl sitting on a stool at the bar was in her late twenties. Her close-cut, shining black hair framed an oval face of almost gypsy swarthiness. Her big eyes were deep hazel, fringed with long curling lashes. The hands that cradled a glass of gin and vermouth were brown and well-shaped, with slender, sensitive fingers. She wore a fluffy white nylon coat over a black cashmere sweater and tight white sharkskin pants. Her shoes, narrow-pointed, high-topped, like those of a medieval pageboy, were in scarlet suede. A tiny gray poodle, no bigger than a kitten, was sleeping placidly in her lap. She looked as out of place in a Welsh seaport pub as a rabbit at a christening.
She looked up when Illya came in, eyed him disinterestedly, then returned to her desultory conversation with an elderly man who looked like a traveling salesman.
The barmaid appeared, smiling, from the back room where the jukebox was blaring lustily. Illya ordered a Scotch on the rocks, and she said, "I don't often get asked for that. Are you an American?"
"Does it show?"
"Not to much, love. I shouldn't worry about it." She laughed throatily.
The salesman had gone and the girl was sitting alone. Illya gestured with his glass toward the poodle and asked, "Did it take you long to knit that?"
She said unoffended, "Don't bother, chum. We've heard them all." She scratched the dog's head. It blinked black shoebutton eyes and yawned widely, showing teeth like tiny ivory needles.
Illya said, "Will you join me? I hate drinking alone."
"If you twist my arm." She slid the glass to the barmaid. "Same again, dear." Then to Illya: "Slightly off your course, aren't you, sailor?"
"Not really. I'm traveling for my uncle."
"Yes," she said. "I thought you might be." She raised her refilled glass. "Here's to him, bless his cotton socks."
They finished their drinks to companionable silence, and then the girl got down from her stool.
"Sorry," she said, "but I must leave you. Got to take the dog for an airing." She smiled at the barmaid. "Same old routine every day. Twice around Belle Vue Park, and then home for tea."
"It's nice up by there," the barmaid agreed, "especially now, with all the dahlias out. See you tomorrow?"
"Maybe." The girl attached a thin scarlet leash to the poodle's jeweled collar. The little dog pattered out beside her, looking like a bug on a string.