The Ugly Man Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  Under the hood the engine roared. Solo rammed the shift into drive and lurched the car out of the slot. A bullet whanged off the hood. Another shattered the rear window, sprayed more glass against their necks. From the floor of the tonneau Elisabeth moaned feebly.

  “Where the devil are we going?” Illya demanded.

  “Got to lose them,” Solo replied, driving as fast as he dared in the lot.

  “Impossible,” Illya said. “It’s nearly the rush hour. Traffic in Rome at this time is---“

  “Maybe it’ll help us.”

  Solo barely touched the brakes as he reached the parking lot entrance. He swung left into the street between two speeding automobiles. The driver of one howled with rage and shook his fist as Solo’s left fender caressed the smaller vehicle.

  Solo was unfamiliar with the streets of Rome. The twilight made vision difficult. All around him, little cars raced at top speed, headlights and taillights dazzling. Thunder rumbled. Lights had come on in the offices and shops. Ahead, the tide of wild traffic in which Solo suddenly found himself bore to the right, around a traffic circle.

  Illya looked out through the broken back window. “I’m sure the count is back there in the Rolls.”

  Whipping the wheel right, Solo followed the tide of cars around through the traffic circle. The drivers around him manipulated their vehicles as though they were on a race course. Blaring horns and shouted oaths filled the air. The sky was changing from pale lemon to a sinister amber as the storm advanced rapidly toward Rome’s hills. The end of the traffic circle was just ahead.

  Solo maneuvered to stay in his lane, shot out of the circle and down a wide boulevard where the going was a little easier.

  Traffic was still fast here, but it moved in orderly lanes split by a central grass-planted divider. On the right and left were shops. Abruptly the shops on the right vanished, replaced by the wider vista of a giant apartment-building complex in the early stages of construction.

  Half a dozen vast superstructures of steel, fifteen stories high, reared up against the darkening sky. All around the site, bulldozers and other heavy construction equipment stood at odd angles on the slopes of rubble-heaps. Rain began to patter on the windshield. “I see the Rolls, Napoleon. It’s coming up fast behind us.”

  Solo fumbled in his pocket, drew out his communicator, passed it to Illya. “See whether you can get anyone at the hotel on Channel B. Tell them we need reinforcements.”

  Illya nodded, began adjusting the calibrations. Solo alternated between watching the traffic around him and the road behind via the rear mirror. He thought he could pick out the gleaming Rolls now. It veered wildly in and out among the other cars in an effort to catch them.

  The Rolls was about four cars behind. Suddenly the roof section folded back. A man’s head and torso appeared. The man was apparently standing on the rear seat. He brought up a long, cylindrical device with a stock which fitted to his shoulder. The Rolls stopped veering, moved ahead on a straight course.

  Solo saw a break on his right, whipped ahead of a van into the curb lane. “Hurry up,” he warned Illya. “They’ve got a launcher back there---“

  The whu-chuff was followed by a thunderous explosion that rocked the rear of the car.

  Solo swore as the back tires blew like giant firecrackers.

  Smoke billowed into the car through the shattered rear window. The small projectile fired straight ahead and down from the speeding Rolls, had disabled their car completely. Illya’s call to the U.N.C.L.E. agents at the hotel was drowned out in the clang and whine of metal as the car smashed against the right-hand curb, banged over it, shot out of control across the mercifully empty sidewalk and plowed toward the side of one of the rubble heaps at the edge of the construction project.

  “Hang on for---“ was all the warning Solo had time to shout.

  The car smashed into the side of the rubble pile and rode half way up, stopped. Illya dropped the communicator, hit the door handle on his side. Solo did the same on his. He hauled open the tonneau door, pulled Elisabeth out and sprinted to the top of the rubble heap.

  Illya was a flickering shadow beside him. Rain hit Solo in the face as he tossed Elisabeth down the other side of the hill of dirt and gravel and dove after her.

  Their wrecked car exploded with a roar of gasoline and a geyser of light and smoke.

  Two

  Tumbling down the rubble heap, Solo knew the intervening hill had saved them. He felt the intense heat, smelled the smoke, heard the cacophony of horns and brakes and fenders banging together on the boulevard beyond the explosion. Elisabeth lay crumpled at the bottom of the little hill.

  Solo staggered to his feet. He felt dizzy. Illya was picking himself up. The sky had lowered completely. The rain began in earnest. Solo searched the surrounding area visually. The apartment construction project was at least four blocks long on each side. The heavy pieces of earth-moving equipment stood out like strange metal animals against the distant lights of buildings. On the other side of the rubble flames crackled.

  There was a confusion of sound from the boulevard as more care piled up. Then, above all the other noise, Illya and Solo quite distinctly heard louder voices, the loudest being the count’s: “Half of you search the wreckage. The rest come with me. I think they got out. They must be somewhere among these unfinished apartments---“

  “Which is where we’d better be,” Solo panted, picking up Elisabeth again and staggering forward.

  Their only hope now was to cross the project to its far side and find sanctuary among the shops along the brightly lighted street there. As he ran Solo realized that he’d lost his pistol. Probably in the car. He was gratified to see that Illya still had his gun clutched in his hand. They reached the first of the steel superstructures. Great raw red uprights set in concrete thrust up out of the earth. Solo and Illya dodged into this square forest. The rain beat down steadily. Behind them, men clattered over gravel.

  The two agents had nearly reached the far side of the first open building when a beam of light lanced out of the rain behind them, swept over them, past them, then jerked back.

  “There, there!” Count Beladrac screamed.

  Guns crashed. Three, four, half a dozen shots. The bullets spanged and rang from the steel as the agents raced out of the skeleton of the first building and up another hill of rubble. Illya turned to fire, able to see the pursuers only as moving shadows flitting behind them, uncertain targets in the rain and the gloom and the jumble of angular shapes.

  Illya’s gun exploded twice. A Thrushman cried out and rolled noisily in gravel. Beladrac continued to shout orders mingled with obscenities as he urged his men forward.

  “Not much ammunition left,” Illya breathed as they ran again. “Two or three shots.”

  “Save them,” Solo rapped back. “We may need them.”

  The strange, grim chase continued, the U.N.C.L.E. agents plunging ahead toward the superstructure of the next unfinished building, a towering cage of girders and beams through which the rain slashed more and more heavily each second.

  The mud intermixed with gravel underfoot was turning to soup. Solo sloshed along, conscious of the increasing weight of Elisabeth’s body on his shoulder. Another shot rang out behind. The bullet plowed off the drum of a cement mixer at the near edge of the unfinished building.

  Illya whipped around to see whether he could get a clear target. In that moment, the figures of their pursuers---now down to three men, one of them surely Beladrac---appeared at the top of the rubble heap they’d just crossed. A fusillade of shots rang out from that direction.

  Solo ducked instinctively. So did Illya, but not in time. He let out a short, surprised cry and tumbled backwards against the nearest steel upright.

  As he fell, his trigger finger jerked out of control. Illya’s pistol emptied itself in the ground before he pitched over onto his side.

  Now fear rose inside Solo like an evil cloud. He carried Elisabeth back inside the tangle of steel uprights ha
t formed the base of this particular building, laid her down unceremoniously among a litter of lumber, the wreckage of the concrete forms used when the construction crews poured the ground sockets for the uprights. Then he ran back again to Illya. He knelt, thrust back Illya’s coat. He felt gingerly at the blackish-wet place on Illya’s left side where the bullet hit.

  The lower ribs. Whether it was a fatal wound at the moment was impossible to tell. Solo knew it would probably be fatal if he couldn’t get Illya out of here. His friend was unconscious, face a bloodless white blur. The rain beat mercilessly on Solo’s head.

  Knowing he was taking a chance, Solo pocketed Illya’s pistol. He lifted his friend and carried him carefully back to where he laid Elisabeth among the broken boards. He could hear the pursuers coming, rattling gravel with their feet. The rain hissed. The lights of the shops toward which they’d been running seemed to gleam at the far side of the universe.

  With hands that were beginning to tremble a little, Napoleon Solo took Illya’s pistol from his pocket and examined it. Coldness ate upward from his belly. Illya had discharged all the shots. The gun was empty.

  He couldn’t begin to carry both of them, not and go fast enough. Beladrac and his friends were working their way toward him more quietly now, as if they sensed a kill was imminent.

  From the darkness someone laughed above the rain. “They are no longer running. We have them, I think.”

  That was Count Beladrac, all right. Solo laid Illya’s pistol aside. He tried to separate the shapes of his pursuers from the surrounding darkness. He couldn’t do it. The only light at all in the rubble-strewn construction project was a distant gleam from back on the boulevard where the crash had occurred. There, the glare of streetlamps had turned a murky red in the rain as the fire continued to burn in the wrecked car.

  For a moment Solo thought he heard whooping sirens. The Rome police rushing to the scene of the accident? He couldn’t be sure.

  Carefully he backed up a step, two. He crouched down among the splintered pile of lumber, feeling over the ground for something he might use as weapon. His knee dislodged one board stacked on top of several others. It fell over with a loud whack. Out in the rainy darkness, a man exclaimed, a low, guttural sound of pleasure. A gun banged.

  Solo ducked instinctively. The bullet smacked into a board inches from where he crouched. A splinter broken loose by the shot pierced his cheek like a miniature arrow.

  “No firing, please,” called Count Beladrac from out in the shadows. “I much prefer that we take him with our own hands now. Kill him that way also.”

  The count’s voice fairly dripped with sadism. A click-rattle disturbed the hiss of rain. Solo knew the three men were moving forward again, closing in.

  The sound of sirens on the boulevard intensified. He knew the police were arriving. But they would do him little good now.

  Because of the angle at which he crouched, Solo could see nothing of the ground between himself and the top of the last rubble-heap he’d crossed. Somewhere in that intervening blackness, the count and his pair of killers moved, rattling a stone again faintly now. Solo’s cheeks were chilled with the rain. His fingers closed around the length of board. He hefted it like a club, waiting. He was conscious of the faint breathing of Elisabeth and Illya crumpled in back of him.

  “I see him, Excellence,” one of the Thrushmen called. “By the board pile---“

  “Take him,” Beladrac said.

  From the right and left, the Thrushmen closed in. They stood up to run forward, their silhouettes showed against the top of the rubble heap behind them. They loomed like shadow-men, guns clearly defined in their hands.

  Well, thought Napoleon Solo, I never thought it would be here in Rome that I’d finally wind it all up. But you never know.

  A kind of trance fell over him, a cold, emotionless determination instilled into him from the very first day of U.N.C.L.E. training. He’d destroy them if he could. He wouldn’t sell his own life cheaply.

  The two Thrushmen running at him had already passed the first upthrusting girders at the end of the building. Solo came up from behind the lumber pile, swinging the board like a ball-bat.

  He connected with the head of the Thrushman angling in from his left. The man’s ear pulped. He screamed, going down. By that time the Thrushman from the right was on him, tearing at his throat, battering at his head.

  The Thrushman used his pistol as a miniature club, much more effective than Solo’s piece of lumber at close range. Thud. Solo took one blow in the center of his forehead. He saw star-patterns, dazzling lights.

  He stuck his left foot behind him to step away from the questing hands of the THRUSH killer. His heel slid in a patch of mud. Flailing, he tumbled over on his side. The piece of lumber dropped out of his hands.

  “Got him!” the Thrushman chortled. He pulled back his foot, brought it streaking in at Solo’s head.

  Solo caught the shoe, gave it practically a one hundred and eighty-degree wrench. The Thrushman clawed air and sat down heavily in the mud. Solo dove forward with his right fist out. He blasted the Thrushman in the jaw. The man snapped over backwards. Taking no chances, Solo hammered his head a couple of more times.

  “Ah,” said a voice quite close, “we should not have used our hands after all, eh, Solo?”

  The count loomed against the distant light behind the rubble-heaps. More red glares had been added back there---the flickering redness of police cruisers revolving in great sweeping arcs. Beladrac’s gun barrel shone in the rain.

  “I wanted to pull you apart piecemeal and make you suffer. You have ruined the effectiveness of my mission for THRUSH. Now, I suppose, I shall simply have to shoot you and be done. I believe the police have arrived back there. It is more important that I escape, survive and try to recoup---“

  Beladrac’s voice had grown thick with hate. He was no more than half a dozen feet from Solo now, his immense head clearly limned against the background of lights.

  Oddly, Solo didn’t feel fear any longer. Perhaps it was simply too late for that. Perhaps the odds were too hopeless. His hand scrabbled around in back of him. He’d lost the larger piece of lumber. He needed something else, anything, with which to fight---

  “Will you stand up for the bullet, Solo?” Beladrac asked him. “Or do you prefer that I shoot you as you are, crouching like a whipped animal?”

  Something rough brushed against Solo’s fingertips. He closed his hand around it, felt along it. It was a short length of lumber, snapped or split off a larger board. It had a sharp point at one end.

  The rain slashed against his eyes. Beladrac took another step forward. Solo’s eyes had become sufficiently accustomed to the darkness so that certain details of the count’s person were becoming clear. He made out the triangle of white shirt front showing between the sodden lapels of the count’s sports jacket.

  “Very well, Solo,” said Count Lugo Beladrac. “I have no more time to waste.”

  Up came his gun, centering, steadying.

  Solo gripped the bit of wood, unlocked his legs beneath him and straightened them like steel rods, lunging forward.

  Beladrac shot. The muzzle of his pistol spread a little orange smear in the dark. Solo drew his right arm high over his head as he charged.

  Beladrac’s bullet caught him in the left hip, a crashing, painful force. Solo nearly went down. But the momentum of his charge kept him going. He had one chance, one chance and that was all---

  Screaming in alarm as Solo hurtled at him out of the rainy dark, Beladrac tried to shoot again. Napoleon Solo slammed downward with his right hand with all the force left in him. The pointed end of the piece of wood slashed Beladrac’s shirt, drove through skin beneath and buried in the man’s chest.

  Solo tore his hand away, felt splinters dig into his own palm as Beladrac threw his head back, dropped the gun, clutched at the piece of wood sticking out of his shirt, tried to pull it free with both hands.

  Howling, Beladrac turned. He stumbl
ed up the slope of the nearest rubble-heap. At the crest he faltered, still plucking wildly at the piece of wood. He threw his head back again, his white teeth a dazzle in the distant glare of lights from the boulevard. His ugly face convulsed, became even uglier, an unspeakable mask of hate and pain---

  Count Lugo Beladrac fell over on his face, and his weight drove the wood deeper into his body. He lay dead in the rain.

  Solo heard scuttling, scurrying. He turned. The two Thrushmen had already fled off through the maze of steel. Solo began calling for the police at the top of his lungs. Presently someone answered him from the direction of the boulevard.

  Blood soaked his left trouser leg. He sank down to a sitting position, hung his head, exhausted. The boot-heels of the police drummed closer.

  Suddenly Solo lifted his head. An awful smile cracked his lips. He’d just realized how it was that he’d killed Count Beladrac. With a wooden stake in the chest. Fitting, he thought dizzily. Very fitting for a THRUSH vampire---

  He pitched over on his side, unconscious in the rain.

  THREE

  A week later, two men and several pounds of bandages could be found in the luxurious little cocktail bar of the Hotel Penti.

  The bandages were on the persons of the two men, Solo and Illya. Considerably refreshed by several days in bed, each had a drink in front of him. Each looked considerably happier with the general state of affairs than he had while the Beladrac business was in progress.

  “When are we flying back to America, Napoleon?”

  Solo sipped the drink. “As soon as Elisabeth is released from the hospital. I talked Mr. Waverly into a holiday for both of us. I said I’d escort Elisabeth back to the U.S. personally at the end of our vacation.”

  “Always the gallant,” said Illya, not without a trace of envy.

  “Well, I’ve got to do something to convince her---again---that all men in the world aren’t unprincipled bums and THRUSH agents like the count.”