The Thousand Coffins Affair

“KISS ME BEFORE YOU DIE”

The private interview began within ten minutes of their unscheduled landing. Solo was thankful for small favors. For some reason, Denise Fairmount seemed to be in charge here and she wanted to question him privately.

“You’re not looking eminently officerish, Denise. I rather like you in that uniform. Though I must say I much prefer silver lamé on lady agents.”

“Please spare me your sarcasms. We may be alone, but I’ve only to press a buzzer and you will be extremely incapable of escaping from this place alive. Also, as you see, I have a Luger.”

He remained seated in the hard-backed wooden chair. She had ushered him into this tiny cubicle in the stone building and was now ensconced behind a low metal desk, idly training a dark Luger at his heart. It would be useless to try anything sudden or ill-timed. She knew it and he knew it.

She had removed the visored hat and placed it to her left on the desk. Her dark hair was wound in a severe yet attractive bun behind her neck.

“You should have told me you were a Colonel back in Paris,” Solo said lightly. ‘We could have had all kinds of fun saluting and marching back and forth.”

She frowned at him, her eyes cautious.

“Yes, I am a Colonel. I have until now killed twenty-seven men. I will kill more. I will kill you when the time comes. I tell you all this so that we will not waste each other’s time with the sentimentalities of the Hotel Internationale. You were an assignment then, however pleasant. And you still are. But that is all you will ever mean to me, Napoleon Solo.”

“If you say so, Colonel.”

He had already measured distances and opportunities, and concluded with regret that nothing could be accomplished in this office. It was so small that the woman would have little to do but start blasting away. A lady with twenty-seven notches on her Luger would have no difficulty managing the twenty-eighth one.

“I am interested in what you have to say, Solo.”

He smiled. “It’s nice to know I have a ready audience, anyway. But what about the girl? There’s nothing she can tell you.”

“When she is revived, she will be brought here. One can find out many things when two prisoners are involved, don’t you think?”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Denise Fairmount laughed. “Perhaps not. But I’ve been instructed to take the chance. The unit you escaped from has lost their opportunity. When your escape was relayed here, we waited. I must confess I never thought I’d see you again.”

“You’re seeing me. Now what do we do?”

She showed her teeth in a smile, but her eyes were cold.

“You are to provide a list of names, I understand.”

“Is that all you want? I’ve got a million of them. Daniel Boone, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, my aunt Trudy—”

“Stop it!” she snapped, her military composure breaking; “Foolish talk will get you nowhere. Would you like to watch while the girl dies? It won’t be a pleasant death, I assure you.”

“I can think of several other things I’d prefer,” he admitted.

There was a black telephone on the desk. Solo could see that Denise Fairmount was expectant, waiting for it to ring. He gauged the distance between himself and the desk. Too far. He would have to find another way.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in the spy business, Denise?”

Her dark eyebrows shifted in surprise.

“I believe in the future of what I am doing. The same, no doubt, as you do. That is reward enough. And when the day comes—” She paused, catching herself.

“Go on,” he urged. “You were going to say something about today Europe, tomorrow the world? The song never changes, does it? Only different people sing it from time to time.”

Her eyes flashed and the Luger jutted menacingly across the top of the desk.

“You are an idiot,” she said quietly. “I should kill you now and claim you attempted to escape.”

“Why don’t you, then? I can make it look good. I’ll reach across the desk and kiss you.”

She bit her lip, a flush rising in her face. Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “No, you will not trick me. In spite of what we shared at the Internationale. There are many men yet and I am still young.”

“You’ll get old in this business, lady. Take my word for it.”

“I only want your word on names, and places in the U.N.C.L.E. organization.”

“Sorry, I’m all out of names now.”

“We shall see—”

The phone rang. Deftly, she spun the receiver to her ear and listened. “Good. At once, then.” She replaced the receiver. He didn’t like the pleased smile on her face.

“You won’t change your mind, Solo?”

“It’s not my business to change my mind. I thought you knew that much about me, Denise.”

She stood up, brushing her jodhpurs with her left hand and tugging the Sam Browne belt which girdled her slim waist. The Luger centered on his chest. She also returned the officer’s cap to her head.

“Get up,” she commanded. “And walk through that door. We shall see how much agony your lovely friend will have to endure before you begin to tell us what we want to hear. Our doctor has patched up the lady so that she will be wide awake to enjoy her coming torment.’

“My, you are a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Move,” was all she said, motioning him toward the other door of the cubicle. Solo rose and sauntered toward the barrier, keeping his hands away from his body.

The door.

There was no telling what was behind the door.

It was as bad as he had expected. Worse, possibly. It was one thing to be in the soup himself, quite another to have to stand around while it was stirred with somebody he liked.

The door opened on a short corridor without illumination which led into the long, low hangar. Solo could smell the heavy odor of gasoline and grease. There was a stench like burning rubber in the air, too.

The hangar was empty of aircraft. The wide doors had been left open, hanging crookedly on their steel running bars to show the German landscape. The mountains stood poised in view beyond the tarmac.

There were just two uniformed soldiers and Jerry Terry in the building. They had formed a small semicircle in the center of the hangar. At first Solo had no notion of what they were doing until Denise Fairmount nudged him sharply with the muzzle of the Luger.

The soldiers had Jerry Terry suspended between them, each holding one of her arms. She was made to stand straddle-legged to support her own weight without slumping. Her face was ashen and drained of life. Despite the bandaged wound of her shoulder, she was standing up and taking notice. Notice had closed her mouth in terror.

There was a metal barrier of sorts on the concrete floor. It was alive with radiant heat of some kind, glowing like a sunburst. Solo could feel the suffocating warmth as they drew nearer. There was something hopelessly cruel about the white-hot poker resting in the heart of the brazier. An electric cord ran from the handle of the thing to a wall outlet nearby. The faces of the two soldiers were dull and expressionless. Like trained seals, Solo thought. They could stick knives in a lovely girl and not raise a sweat. Or brand her with a metal burning tool, the sort of instrument used to forge letters and numbers on steel parts.

Denise Fairmount halted him and stepped around to where she could keep him in her sights.

“Must I spell all this out for you, Solo? I could print the message across Miss Terry’s face.” She indicated the metal-burner and brazier.

“I get the idea. Roast lady spy if I don’t open my big mouth.”

Jerry Terry swallowed nervously, shaking her head, but her eyes had never left the white-hot tip of the burning poker.

“You don’t like me anyway, remember, Solo? Forget it.”

Denise Fairmount spun on her, viciously. “Quiet, you fool! He can save you a great deal of pain.”

As Denise Fairmount glared at the girl, Solo moved one step toward her. It was as far as he dared go with the guards watching, but it would have to be far enough. Denise was still well beyond arm’s length, but—

Solo cleared his throat. “All right then, Denise. Unaccustomed as I am to public squealing…

She turned back toward him, surprised that he was giving in so easily. It put her off her guard just enough—

Solo’s right leg shot upward and his body arched backwards in a perfectly executed Le Savate kick. The tip of his shoe caught the Luger directly under the barrel, sending it high into the air above their heads. It flipped twice neatly and he caught it before it hit the floor. He quickly turned it to the proper position, his finger on the trigger.

Denise Fairmount fell back with a shriek and the two men holding Jerry Terry released her and went for their guns. Unfortunately for them, their weapons were slung behind their shoulders in the required form for soldiers bearing rifles.

Yet they were foolhardy and wouldn’t stop. Released from their grip, Jerry Terry fell hard to the floor. Denise Fairmount, in her anxiety to regain control of the situation, went wildly for the white-hot poker in the brazier. There was no time to shout orders or commands to halt the carnage. The soldiers were bringing their rifles to bear and Denise Fairmount was already brandishing the glowing poker.

Solo’s first shot caught one soldier high in the chest and spun him around. His second found a nesting place directly in the forehead of the other man. Both of them were dead before they hit the stone floor of the hangar.

And then there was Denise Fairmount.

If she had stopped — if she had for a moment considered she was going up against a marksman at close quarters — he might have stayed his hand. He didn’t want to shoot the woman; she could be valuable later on. But Denise Fairmount had lost all power to think coherently or to evaluate consequences. All of her headlong charge, with the poker held like a flaming rapier, was spearheaded for the body of Napoleon Solo. Unluckily for her, he didn’t have the time for a fancy or well-chosen shot. The time had arrived at that split second when all lives are changed by the next bullet.

Solo triggered the Luger once more. A single, telling shot.

He stood and watched as Denise Fairmount’s face came apart with surprise and pain, as if she had never believed he would actually shoot her. The poker described a smoking eddy as it clanged to the stone, shooting off sparks. Denise Fairmount crumpled, her hands holding her Sam Browne belt as if that alone could hold her up and keep her from dying.

Wordlessly, Solo stepped over her body and lifted Jerry Terry to her feet. He kept an eye on the hangar entrance. Once again, the race would be to the swift.

Despite the obvious pain and confusion she was undergoing, Jerry couldn’t take her eyes off Denise Fairmount’s prone figure, curled up in death. “Solo — you killed her—”

“You can lecture me later,” he said impatiently. “Right now, I’m for that MIG and getting out of here, and nothing else.”

Her eyes were dazed.

“Come on — we have to move quickly. Can you walk?” She nodded dumbly, allowing him to half-push, half-drag her to the tarmac. Solo Hung a sweeping search over the field. The MIG was where he had parked it, even facing toward takeoff. There was no sign of the two patrol planes. It seemed as if there were no one else on the field. Everybody had been accounted for.

“You wide awake now, Terry?” he barked.

“Yes. Yes!”

“All right, then. Come on. And don’t look back. Just remember — it was Denise or us.”

Jerry Terry said nothing further. She lowered her head and staggered for the MIG. Solo was just behind her, imploring the silent gods to stay with them for just five minutes more until he got the damn MIG airborne once again.

But even as he made the unspoken plea, he could see a heavy motor lorry turn in from the roadway about five hundred yards down the field.

Grimly, he hurried Jerry Terry ahead of him, not bothering to mention the minor detail that their flight was not unobserved.

When the hounds were on the scent, it was downright amazing how they showed up at the most inopportune moments.

What was even worse, the pain had come back. Sharp, excruciating agony coursed through his body.

Partridge of the Paris Overseas Press Club was in the bar, finding new joy in the way Stanley mixed martinis, when he was summoned to the telephone. Shrugging heroically, he lifted his bulk from the leather stool and had a houseboy plug in a phone for him.

“Partridge here,” he said tiredly.

“Who gives the given signal?” a crisp voice asked.

He became alert immediately. “You do.”

“Who tells the untold millions?”

“I do.”

He knew it was Napoleon Solo’s voice at the other end, but one had to play the code out.

“Who had a second knife?’

“The same chap who had the first one.”

“Billy,” Solo said. “I need your help, and pronto.”

“Fire away, old sport.

“Fire one — I’m sitting at Landry’s airstrip. I owe him thousands of dollars for wrecking his plane. He won’t take a MIG in trade and the French Air Force is pretty mad at me for flying one in. Fire two — I’ve got a very sick girl friend on my hands. She could die if she doesn’t see a doctor soon. Fire three — the world is in sad shape. You’d better tell my uncle all about it. No doubt he’s dying to hear from me.”

“I see. Landry’s. Good show, old sport. Be there in two hours. I’ll call your uncle, of course. Think you can hold out until then?”

“I’ll try, Billy. And thanks.”

“Ever the faith endures,” Partridge chuckled. Anything else?”

“No, that ought to cover the preliminaries. The girl is my first concern right now.”

“Off I go.”

William Partridge hung up, drummed the phone for three taut seconds of preparation, downed his martini zestfully and left the bar like a shot.

Stanley, the bartender, had never seen him move so fast.

Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin was unhappy.

In his tiny West Side apartment in Manhattan, New York, he paced the rooms, looking for something to do. Working overtime at Headquarters had not improved his restlessness. There was just so much they had been able to discover about Stewart Fromes’ corpse. And that very, very special piece of dynamite his dead toes had revealed — the tiny capsule. If it was what the lab boys expected, then things indeed would get very bad around the world.

Kuryakin tried not to think about Napoleon Solo. Awkward business liking a fellow agent. When the going got rough, as it usually did, it was a terrible thing not to be on hand to assist with the difficulty. Kuryakin was level-headed enough to despise the Russian side of his nature which tended toward gloomy prophecy. Still, an agent of Napoleon’s capabilities should be able to take care of himself—

Memory of Stewart Fromes and his capabilities made Kuryakin’s brow cloud over again. Damn this infernal business of waiting, waiting, waiting. One had to be doing something at all times. It was a must.