A moment later he was in the room, carrying a small piece of machinery in a cast iron housing, two lengths of high-tension cable, a six inch crank handle, and half a dozen bulldog clips.
"A magneto," he said proudly, laying the housing on the table with a heavy thump. "A twenty-four volt Bosch from an old dump truck out there. The paras in North Africa used to say there was nothing like them for making people volunteer information!... And it's nice that we can provide it from stock, as it were. I always knew this junkyard would come in useful one day!"
He laid the rest of his equipment down by the magneto and walked across to Kuryakin's chair. "And now, friend, we will see how sweetly Bartoluzzi can make you sing," he said softly.
Reaching forward, he seized the Russian's shirt and ripped it open from neck to waist in a single powerful gesture.
Napoleon Solo pulled the DS into a parking area in response to a signal from the slender arm projecting from the window of the mustard-colored Fiat in front.
The girl was standing by his door before the Citroën had stopped. "I think we'd better have a little council of war here," she said. "It's getting light, and we may not have the opportunity later on. Also, I think it might be better if I went on alone. You could wait for me in some secluded place."
"I should love to wait for you in some secluded place," Solo said. "But in this case, it's just out of the question. This is my show. It may be dangerous. I couldn't possibly allow you to do anything alone. Now that your ex-boyfriend has tumbled to the fact that my friend's not what he says he is, he'll be on his guard and doubly dangerous."
The girl laughed bitterly. "You don't realize what that man has done to me," she said. "He has made me break the law, risk prison many times. And he is not just my ex-boyfriend. We were going to get married... I heard so many times about the piece of land under the olive tree, the sound of the sea, the hot Mediterranean sun... and… and now... "
For a moment her voice faltered, and then she went on. "I do what I do because I want to. Because I must for my own self-respect. So you see, Mr. Solo, it's not a case of whether or not you permit me to take part. I'm going on to his place anyway; it's just a question of whether you come with me or wait here!"
Solo grinned. "If it's like that, we'd better go together."
"As you wish. We are between Wurzburg and Bamberg. The East German frontier is only about an hour's drive away. You are an American—do you think they will let you cross?"
"I may be an American citizen, but I work for an organization that is supranational. I have papers to prove I work for U.N.C.L.E.—and we are welcomed in the East as much as in the West, fortunately."
"Your papers will get you through right away?"
"Not as quickly as if I had a special permit or a visa. They'll probably have to phone their headquarters to check that it's okay to let me through. But it shouldn't take too long, I guess."
"I, on the other hand, am well-known. I can pass straight through. Do you not think, as your friend may be in great danger, that it would be best if I went ahead as I suggested? Then, when I have seen how things are at Bart's place, I can come back to you and we will decide what to do."
"Yes, but you may find yourself in great danger yourself."
"Do not worry. I know the paths and tracks of that forest like the back of my hand. Also the place where he lives. I can move secretly there and listen, where it would be impossible for two. Nobody will see me, I promise."
Solo sighed, "Okay. Seems I have very little choice—and it's too true that every minute counts if we're to rescue Illya. But you don't have to come back to me, not physically. Remember the little baton radio we heard my friend on, outside the restaurant?"
"But yes. It was most convenient."
"I have another. If I show you how to use it, you can take it with you—and then you can simply call me when you have found out what is happening. After that, you can give me directions and I will come to you. We shall save time that way. And also we can keep tabs on your... on Bartoluzzi. If you don't mind staying there until I arrive, that is."
"For this purpose," Annike said grimly, "it will be a pleasure."
Illya Kuryakin was unconscious, slumped forward against the retaining strap with his blond head hanging, when the clatter of the helicopter's rotors broke the silence in the big room.
Bartoluzzi dropped the magneto on the table. Leaving the leads still clipped in position, he ran to the stairs leading to the open air.
From the outside, his retreat presented an even more surrealistic aspect. It had originally been built as a shooting lodge for a Dresden businessman—a kind of Gothic Folly, with turrets and battlements pretentiously hiding what was in fact quite a small house—and it had always looked curiously unreal set in its forest hollow. But surrounded by a turbulent sea of scrap iron as it was now, the place became immediately a creation of the wildest fantasy.
Over a groundswell of bedsteads, cooking utensils, iron railings, disused cookers and lengths of railway track, great crests of heavier stuff swept toward the building in a rusty and remorseless flood—a flood culminating in a tidal wave of smashed car bodies, dented boilers and the skeletons of traction engines that had once, in their day, hauled entire circuses.
Dwarfed by this metal deluge, Bartoluzzi stood waiting. The helicopter sank down from the sky over the mountains forming the border with Czechoslovakia, skimmed across the surf of green tree tops that washed against the foothills, and lowered itself neatly to the ground in an open space between one of the mounds of scrap and the outer wall of the Folly.
A Plexiglas door opened in the machine's nose, and a lithe figure clad in black dropped to the ground.
Black boots laced to the knee strode purposefully across to the porch in which Bartoluzzi was waiting; beneath a form fitting black leather flying suit, the curves of a supple body moved enticingly; on the smooth brow of a black helmet, goggles were pushed up by black-gloved hands.
And the face, thin-cheeked and pale below the oversized lenses, was the face of Marinka, the blonde from the kavarna in Prague.
The Corsican shook hands formally and took her up to the room in which Kuryakin was held prisoner. She glanced cursorily at the inert figure and asked, "Has he come up with anything yet?"
Bartoluzzi shook his head. "He may not be the real Cernic, but he's a tough one all the same," he growled. "I was just about to make a change in the method, when I heard your plane."
He picked up an electric soldering iron, rammed the plug into a socket set in the wall beside the door, and laid the tool down on the tiled floor of the cheminée to heat up.
"He's said nothing at all?" the girl demanded. "He hasn't talked one way or the other?"
"Oh, he talked all right. They all talk when the electricity's flowing! But he didn't say anything worthwhile, nothing we could use. Mostly, he was babbling what I took to be his name—it sounded Russian to me—and some nonsense about his uncle."
"His uncle?"
"That's what it sounded like. He even spelled it for me, but I—"
"Do you mean he said he was from U.N.C.L.E.?"
"I think that was it. What does that mean?"
"It's... kind of an international police organization."
"This is a flic, a policeman?" Bartoluzzi made an instinctive movement toward the soldering iron, which was beginning to smoke slightly.