Solo had been just about to step into the road. The pigeons had caused him to falter and check his stride, and the vehicle that would otherwise have cut him down merely struck him a glancing blow as it sped past. Fortunately he was off-balance and thus rode with the impact up to a point.
He was spun across the sidewalk, to slam into a wooden seat and collapse giddily to the ground.
Passersby ran up as he sprawled there, panting for breath. Willing hands helped him to his feet and assisted him to the bench. A man rushed out from a wine store on the other side of the road, carrying a stiff Cognac in a glass, and an elderly lady kept telling anybody who would listen to call the police. In no time at all, quite a crowd had gathered.
"It's a scandal, the way these deliverymen drive," some one said.
"Only boys in their teens," another voice added. "It shouldn't be allowed!"
"Perfectly. I entirely agree," a third chimed in.
"Did you see? He shot down here like a racing driver after making a U-turn in the avenue—a thing expressly forbidden in the Code of the Route."
"He must have been doing sixty kilometers an hour!
"Why, only last week a friend of my uncle in Clermont Ferrand…"
"The foreigner didn't have a chance..."
"Has anyone telephoned for an ambulance?"
"Is he hurt?"
Solo struggled to his feet, brushing aside the offers of help as politely as he could. His head was spinning. He was bruised and shaken but otherwise undamaged. "No, no," he said. "Thank you very much, but I am quite all right... I assure you... a glancing blow only. There are no bones broken... I was very lucky, really."
"Are you certain you wouldn't like a doctor?" a woman inquired.
"Perfectly sure, thank you, madame."
"Did you get the number of the assassin?"
Solo shook his head again. It would have done no good if he had. The vehicle had been one of those small gray Citroen vans with corrugated sides that can be seen by the dozen in any street in France. It had probably been stolen, and even if it hadn't the plates would undoubtedly have been false. In any case it would turn out to be totally unidentifiable—for the man who had used the word "assassin" in the normal motorist's hyperbole had unknowingly been speaking nothing less than the literal truth.
The driver of the van had intended to run Solo down and kill him.
Oddly enough, this fact caused Solo to smile cheerfully as he limped back to his hotel after making his escape from the well-wishers in the avenue Georges V.
For if somebody was interested enough to try to kill him, that meant that his investigations—superficial though they had been so far—were causing that person worry and annoyance. Even panic, perhaps. And this in turn confirmed Waverly's original hunch that there was something going on worth exposing—for you didn't try to commit murder in public unless you had something fairly important to hide.
All of which added up to the fact that Napoleon Solo was not, after all, wasting his time on a wild-goose chase. The job was going to be worthwhile. And so Solo smiled, for above all he liked action.
At his hotel—the small, unpretentious, extremely comfortable and fairly expensive Ile de France, in a side street near the Opéra—the vision at the reception desk handed him a letter that had come by special messenger.
The agent thanked her, turned aside—and then suddenly turned back again. She looked just as pretty, her hair demurely curled on her slender neck, her lips quizzically uptilted at one corner. "They work you a long day here, don't they, honey?" he said in French. "What time do you get off this evening?"
"Officially at eight, monsieur Solo," the girl said in English. "But I usually stay ten or twelve minutes longer. My husband works until eight too, and by the time he has got out the car and driven around here..." She flashed him a dazzling smile.
"Touché!" Solo murmured ruefully. He raised a hand in salute as the doors of the diminutive elevator slid shut.
In the envelope was a train ticket and a seat reservation on the evening express from Paris to The Hague. Attached to it was a slip confirming a booking for a single room with bath at the Grand Hotel Terminus. There was no letter or other form of message with these enclosures.
Solo sighed. The old man was up to his tricks again. They had agreed during their radio conversation that he should return to Holland and, without making his presence known to the police this time, try to pick up the trail of the men with whom Waverly himself had come in contact. His mission was simply—now that they knew the escape network existed—to find out how it worked and by whom it was run. Having done that, he was to try to find out if THRUSH had made any approaches to the principals or whether they were in any way concerned in the running of the scheme.
If the answer to either of those questions was in the affirmative, he was to report back to Waverly so that they could decide between them the best way of handing over their findings to the police in the country or countries involved.
If it was negative, he was to evaluate whether the escape organization was likely to interest THRUSH in the future and again report back for a decision on further action.
But in all these operations, it had been tacitly understood that Solo made his own way, as always, and arranged his own timetables.
The arrival of the special-delivery letter, complete with tickets and the peremptorily implicit command to use them, was a typical Waverly stroke. Presumably he had some particular reason for wanting Solo to be at that hotel tonight—maybe a contact he had instructed to meet him there. But on principle the agent asked the receptionist to look up the planes for him.
It turned out that by the time he had taken a cab out to Orly, waited for his flight, flown to Amsterdam, cleared immigration and customs, taken a cab from the airport at Schiphol into town, and traveled by train or car the 3 miles to the capital, he would get there no more quickly than he would by train!
In addition, now that he came to think of it, it was just as likely that Waverly would have arranged for a contact to meet him on the train itself.
It was also possible—Solo had to admit—that the planning boys at U.N.C.L.E. had looked up the planes themselves and had come to the same conclusion as he had regarding the time factor.
He called for his bill, checked out, and took a cab to the station.
Nobody approached him on the train, however. He ate an excellent, if rather solid, dinner. He read and he listened to endless business conversations in Dutch and German. In between times, he watched the gaunt, spare outlines of the northern landscape whirl past at 100 miles per hour in the yellow lozenges of light streaming through the windows of the coach.
The Grand Hotel Terminus was a large nineteenth-century block immediately opposite the station. Cheap souvenir shops, fried potato stalls, automat milk bars and garages surrounded the building, but inside the revolving doors all was bourgeois respectability and comfort.
The blast of overheated air that greeted him as he pushed through into the foyer was redolent of cigars, roast foods and aromatic coffee.
While he registered, he looked around him. Besides the reception desk and the porter's lodge, the foyer housed a bureau de change, a newsstand, and several other large display cases rented by exclusive men's and women's outfitters in the town. Off to one side was a lounge full of efficient-looking men and women in armchairs. Beyond this, a paved court with a rectangular fishpond and potted shrubs showed through a line of French doors. The foyer, the shallow stairs curving around the elevator shaft, and the broad passage leading to the dining rooms and the bar were all covered in a heavy carpet patterned in blue and red.