18 - The Unfair Fare Affair Read Free Page A

still not eaten. With the result that, despite a severe headache, I was ravenous when I recovered consciousness at 3 A.M.
    "I can imagine," Solo said, repressing a smile.
    "Quite. And those fools of policemen refused to allow me to go to some respectable establishment and order a meal. I had to be content"—Waverly shuddered—"with a bag of fried potatoes, a cold soused herring, and a boiled sausage from an all-night stand before they locked me up. You can see, therefore, that before I set out on the following day I was obliged to cater extensively to the—er—inner man."
    "Oh, absolutely," Solo said. He coughed and moved across Waverly's office to the window.
    Few employees have had the opportunity of hearing their bosses explain how they were knocked on the head. But when the boss was Waverly and when the explanation included a complaint that the police arresting him had refused to allow him to go to a nightclub on the way to jail to order a meal... Solo took refuge in another fit of coughing and attempted to master his facial expressions.
    "You found nothing, I suppose," he said after a moment, staring out at the tall tower of the U.N. building. It was raining in New York, too, and there was a strong wind gusting across the East River, stammering the windows in their frames.
    "Nothing," Waverly echoed behind him. "Nobody had ever seen or heard of the boatman or anybody like him. Nobody had ever seen the Minerva taxi—which is odd, because there's no old-car cult in Holland, and thus a mid-thirties monster like this would be bound to attract attention, you'd think. Not a soul could be found, naturally, who had ever seen three men in green leather coats... and that was about it. We did locate the place where the taxi turned off the road. But there were so many tracks and it was so muddy in the lane that the police were not able to identify any one set."
    He dragged from the pocket of his shapeless tweed jacket a brand-new meerschaum pipe he had bought in Amsterdam, jammed it between his teeth, and sauntered over to join Solo at the window.
    "All right then, Mr. Solo," he said, staring out into the rain. "What do you make of it all? Cook me up a theory to fit these facts."
    The agent turned and looked at him. "Unless it's a trick question, I should say it's a straightforward case of mistaken identity," he replied. "There's this little organization all set up and waiting for somebody—the man to take him from the island to the mainland, the liaison men to direct him to the waiting taxi, the men in the truck ready to supply false papers... and from there on down."
    "I agree. But why pick on me?"
    "I guess they were expecting somebody from the island, somebody they didn't know too well by sight, and you turned up around the right time. I imagine you inadvertently gave the right password or innocently supplied the correct answer to a coded question. Something like that."
    "That's exactly what I thought," Waverly agreed. "I said, in German, 'Good day. I seem to have missed my way. Could you take me across.'"
    "Ah. That was probably the opening gambit."
    "I think it must have been. For he showed no surprise at all. Nor did he answer the question. He simply asked me where I was from, and when I replied absently—I was thinking of something else, you know—that I was from Section One, he got straight up and pulled in the boat."
    "That's it! That's it! The approach in German—and then, by an extraordinary coincidence, the right code word when you say Section One!"
    "I expect you're right. Because, come to think of it, I spoke in German; yet he replied in Dutch. And that's the way it went on—German from my side, Dutch from his. I can understand Dutch, you see, but I don't actually speak it. One surmises that this was another part of the arrangement, the twin language thing."
    Waverly paused, sucked noisily on the empty meerschaum, and reached into his pocket for a tobacco pouch. "Well, that's all right, as far as it goes," he