Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  August 19: Mrs. Pollifax visits the Parrot Bookstore to pick up microfilms and vanishes

  August 19: Farrell visits the Parrot Bookstore for unknown reasons, and also vanishes

  August 19 or 20: Mrs. Pollifax’s room at the Hotel Reforma Intercontinental entered and searched.

  Bishop was thoughtful. “I see what you mean. Why go to the bother of keeping the bookstore open after DeGamez’ demise, and why search Mrs. Pollifax’s room, if they’d gotten what they wanted.”

  Carstairs nodded. “Exactly. It implies a certain lack of success. If General Perdido had gotten the microfilms from DeGamez before DeGamez was killed, then I don’t really see what purpose was served by his turning into a bookstore clerk to set a trap for Mrs. Pollifax and Farrell. And that’s another thing: their including Farrell bothers me very much. Farrell’s only link with the Chinese Reds was the friendship with Miss Willow Lee that he was busy cultivating at our orders. He had no knowledge of either Tirpak or Mrs. Pollifax, and as to the microfilms, he didn’t even know of their existence.”

  Bishop nodded. “Snatching him does imply desperation on the part of General Perdido.”

  “Yes. And that’s why I’m reasonably sure that he chose to keep Farrell and Mrs. Pollifax alive—at least for a day or two. And that, my dear Bishop, is why I am not sleeping well these nights, because General Perdido’s methods of extracting information are neither polite nor pretty.”

  “But Mrs. Pollifax had no information to extract,” pointed out Bishop.

  Carstairs gave him a hard look. “Let’s not be naïve, Bishop. Do you think Perdido would believe that?”

  There was a long silence during which Bishop tried to think of something tactful to say. Finally, with a forced brightness, he concluded, “Well if Perdido doesn’t have the microfilms, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  Carstairs gave a short laugh. “Oh yes—yes, indeed. It means they’re lost to everyone, floating in space, so to speak, and of no use to anyone. If they were appended to a book sold in DeGamez’ shop then someone at this very moment may be reading that book, never realizing that it’s the repository of secrets costing eight months work and the lives of innumerable people who would otherwise be alive today. And that is what I call waste. Where is the telegram sent to Mrs. Pollifax’s next of kin?”

  Bishop drew copies from his file. “Here they are, sir. They went off late yesterday from Mexico City; this one to Mr. Roger Pollifax in Chicago, this one to Mrs. Conrad Kempf in Arizona.”

  Carstairs read them with irony:

  HAVING WONDERFUL TIME STOP POSTPONING RETURN A WEEK OR MORE STOP MEXICO CHARMING STOP LOVE TO ALL MOTHER

  CHAPTER 12

  General Perdido returned to the cell the next afternoon, but Mrs. Pollifax had been forewarned by the sound of his voice in the hall. The general, entering, found Mrs. Pollifax playing a quiet game of solitaire and Farrell tossing feverishly on his cot.

  “Good afternoon,” said Mrs. Pollifax coldly.

  “Where?” shouted Farrell, thrashing feebly. “Take the green ones away, for God’s sake!”

  Both the general and Mrs. Pollifax turned to look at Farrell, one with exasperation, the other with admiration. To the general Mrs. Pollifax said bitingly, “I have set his leg but he still has a bullet in his arm and I am not Dr. Schweitzer. The wound is infected.”

  General Perdido crossed the cell to Farrell and looked down at him. “Senor Farrell,” he said harshly.

  Farrell opened his eyes and stared into the face above him.

  “Carmelita?” he said tenderly, and then, hopefully, “My darling?”

  General Perdido drew back his arm and sent his fist crashing against Farrell’s cheekbone. There was a sickening sound of bone meeting bone. Mrs. Pollifax turned away and thought, “I really can’t bear this.”

  There was, for the next few minutes, a great deal more to bear. The general was a thorough man, a determined and an intelligent man, and he intended to leave no stone unturned in his search to learn whether Farrell was shamming or if his mind could still be reached. Mrs. Pollifax moved to the attenuated window and forced herself to look beyond it to the narrow rectangle of stones glittering in the sun, and the thin slice of bleached white sky. “I won’t listen,” she thought. “I will detach myself forever from this room and this moment.” It was an exercise in deception that she had practiced before but never so desperately as now. But when at last the general desisted she was more calm than he—the general’s face was distorted with fury. Pausing with his hand on the cell door he said stiffly, “I will be going away until I am informed that Mr. Farrell is well enough to be questioned. You may tell him so. You may also tell him that I will look forward to his speedy recovery.” He opened the door and turned back dramatically. “As for you, Mrs. Pollifax, you have inconvenienced me so greatly that I resent your very existence.” The door slammed behind him and she heard the bolt drawn outside. Only then did she dare look at Farrell. “I think General Perdido has been seeing too many B movies,” she said lightly, and wanted to cry at the sight of Farrell’s battered face.

  Farrell said evenly, his words slurred by two very puffy lips, “Let’s give him to Hollywood then with our compliments.” He sat up. “Did he break my nose, damn him?”

  Mrs. Pollifax sat down beside him and for the next few minutes they took inventory. The list was encouraging: it consisted of bruises, two loosened teeth—both molars—and a split upper lip; but there appeared to be no bones broken and Mrs. Pollifax felt it was reasonable to hope there was no concussion of the cheekbone. She said gently, “You managed very well. Have you had to endure this sort of thing before?”

  He glanced away. “Once, during the war. That was when I knew Carstairs.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “There are limitations, you know, especially after the first time. The second time the mind knows what to expect. It anticipates. Actually the mind can become a worse enemy than the person inflicting the pain. But this was brief—mercifully.”

  Mrs. Pollifax considered his words and nodded. “Yes, I see how that can be.” She felt his forehead and sighed. “You still have a fever, you know. About a hundred and one, I’d guess.”

  “But not the raving kind,” he said, and winced as he tried to smile.

  “No, not the raving kind—you put on a very good act.” She brought from her purse the package of cigarettes he had given her and held out the last one to him. “Could you manage this with your torn lip?”

  “Pure nectar,” he said longingly. He took it and began stabbing his mouth with it to find a comfortable corner for it. She lighted it for him and he inhaled deeply. “Duchess,” he said gratefully, “I’ve known an incredible number of young, beautiful and nubile women—more than any one man deserves—but I would have to nominate you as the Woman I Would Most Like to Be Captured with in Albania. You are a true blessing to me in my old age—and I feel I’m aging pretty damn fast in this place.”

  “Ah, you are feeling better, I’m delighted,” said Mrs. Pollifax with a twinkle. She returned to her own cot, carrying her small table with her, and laid out her playing cards for a game of Clock Solitaire. “How did you fall into this preposterous sort of life?” she asked, thinking he might like to talk now. “This preposterous life with beautiful nubile women and General Perdidos in it. You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “As American as San Francisco,” he said, sending streams of blue smoke toward the ceiling from his horizontal position. “My mother was Spanish—I learned to speak Spanish before I knew English. And I got the wandering bug from them. They were both vaudeville people—dancers.”

  “How very nice,” said Mrs. Pollifax, charmed by the thought. “I always did enjoy the flamenco. Did you live out of a suitcase?”

  “Mmm, just about.”

  “Do you dance?”

  “Only a waltz,” he said cheerfully. “In me the talent came out in art. I was in the war very early, and when I got out I headed for Mexico to paint. It may surprise you to he
ar that I really do paint—off and on. By the time Carstairs found me I had already acquired just the reputation he wanted: half playboy, half adventurer, half artist.”

  “You have too many halves there,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax primly.

  “You don’t feel that exaggeration adds flavor?” he inquired.

  Mrs. Pollifax struggled and lost. “Actually, I have been guilty of a small amount of exaggeration myself at times.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll bet you have, Duchess, I’ll bet you have. But lived a very quiet and respectable life in spite of it?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Very quiet and very respectable. My husband was a lawyer, a very fine one. My son is a lawyer, too,” she added, and thinking back added with nostalgia, “Yes, it was a very pleasant and peaceful life.”

  Farrell turned his head to look at her through the gloom. He said tactfully, “Think I’ll have a little nap now, Duchess.” Carefully adjusting his position to his wounded arm he left Mrs. Pollifax to her thoughts and pretended to fall asleep.

  It was at mealtime that the new prisoner arrived. He was pushed in ahead of the trays and kicked ungenerously by Major Vassovic and apparently sworn at in the language of the country. A third cot was then brought in and placed along the third wall. Mrs. Pollifax was too busy feeding Farrell with a spoon to pay much attention, but while she ate her own meal—reluctantly putting away her playing cards to make room for it—she eyed the man curiously. He lay on his side, with his face resting on his two hands, but all that she could really see of him was a bristling, white, walrus moustache jutting up, and the top of a bald pink head fringed with white about the ears. It was a very elegant, splendidly Victorian moustache—she hadn’t seen one like it since she was a child. She realized that Farrell, propped against the opposite wall, was also studying the man. He said suddenly, “My name’s Farrell, what is yours, sir?”

  The man’s head shifted, aware of Farrell’s voice, but his face remained blank and he said nothing.

  “Speak English?” asked Farrell.

  “Inglese?” repeated the man, and with a shake of his head added a jumble of words in a language that neither of them understood.

  “He doesn’t speak English—that’s good,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “What did we eat tonight, by the way?”

  Farrell said broodingly, “Heaven only knows.” He was still watching the stranger. He said suddenly, in a particularly meaningful voice, “Look at the candle!”

  Mrs. Pollifax’s glance went at once to the candle over the newcomer’s head, and she frowned because there was nothing wrong with it, nothing to see but the one sputtering flame that gave little more than an illusion of lighting the shadows. Then she realized that the new man, who had been lying on his side, had thrown back his head so that he, too, was looking at the candle. How very curious, she thought, he had understood perfectly what Farrell said. It occurred to her that he was arriving in their cell just as General Perdido had announced that he was leaving for a few days, and she pondered the connection. Yes, it was quite possible; it would be very inefficient of the general to leave without making some arrangements to learn more about her and Farrell. The general would not care to waste time, and what better way to make time work for him than to place a spy in their cell to eavesdrop on them while he was gone? Apparently the general had unearthed another English-speaking member of the Sigurimi. She smiled at Farrell to show him that she understood his warning.

  Tonight it was Lulash who came to remove their trays and he went first to Mrs. Pollifax after directing a quick glance at the new prisoner. “We are late tonight in collecting your tray. General Perdido had to be driven to his airplane.”

  Mrs. Pollifax saw that he had deposited two aspirins on her table and she gave him a grateful glance.

  “Also for you, to read in the English about my country.” He spoke in a very low voice, and with his back still to the new prisoner he leaned over and slipped a book under her pillow. “It is the book, the one I told you about,” he added reverently. “I carry it everywhere with me, it is even inscribed to me.”

  Mrs. Pollifax had to content herself with another grateful glance, for she dared not speak. Lulash moved away to Farrell’s table and after removing his tray went out. With her table again empty Mrs. Pollifax arranged her cards for a new game of solitaire and played doggedly for an hour. Farrell was the first to fall into a restless sleep. Soon the stranger turned his back to the room and filled the air with rhythmic snores, and Mrs. Pollifax, growing drowsy herself, put away the cards and lay down.

  The book that Lulash had placed beneath her pillow proved uncomfortable to lie upon—she had forgotten its existence as soon as Lulash went away. Since no one was awake to see her she brought out the book and opened it. It was an old volume; the first thing she noted was its copyright date—1919—and at sight of this Mrs. Pollifax was touched that it was still such a treasure to Lulash, and then she was disappointed because a book written forty-five years ago could not possibly be informative; too many wars had been fought since then, too many political parties gone from the scene, making the book a virtual antique. She thumbed through it, however, with a feeling of nostalgia, recalling books in her childhood with the same gray, sunless photographs, the same pictures of people in national costume, with the author himself posed artfully beside monuments and graves and on horseback. The book was entitled Albania: Land of Primitive Beauty, and it was written in the florid verbiage of the day. The plainest sentence in the book stated simply that in size the country was equal to the state of Maryland. Its last chapter ended with the words, “And so I bade farewell to the head of the clan of Trijepsi, leaving him by the leaping flames of his campfire, a real friend whom I must always cherish. Rough, yes; but a pearl among men, truly a chief among men.” Mrs. Pollifax winced at the style and turned a few more pages to come face to face with a very clearly rendered black and white map. A map … she idly turned another page and then came quickly back to the map. It was a very good, clear map. There was Albania fitted neatly between Greece to the south and what would now be Yugoslavia on the north, and there was the Adriatic Sea.… Water, thought Mrs. Pollifax, feeling her way toward a thought not yet expressible. Thoughtfully she turned the map closer to the light and began looking for mountains, wondering just where they might be at this moment. In the south there was a thin line of mountain range facing the sea, but according to the description these were hardly fifteen hundred feet in height—the ones they had traveled through were higher and so she ignored these for the time being. The central part of the country was flat and open with the exception of one mountain rising out of the plains, but she and Farrell had been brought to a very long, high range of mountains and she dismissed this solitary peak. Her glance fastened on the north, narrowing as she spied the words North Albanian Alps. Farrell had said something about Alps, and the mountains to which they had been brought resembled Switzerland in their naked ruggedness. These mountains ran from east to west across the top of the country like a necklace—a necklace extremely close to Yugoslavia, she noticed—and, if the country was no larger than Maryland, they were not excessively far from the Adriatic Sea, either.

  “We have to be somewhere in these mountains,” she mused. She would have to begin reading the book tomorrow because in forty-five years the topography would remain the same. But still she lingered over the map. They had landed by plane in a town that was plainly old and well established, and after driving toward the mountains they had traveled for one or two hours by donkey. Would it be possible to figure out in what direction they had traveled?

  “The sun,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax. From the heaving, slippery back of her donkey she had watched the sun rise and spread across the valley in a flood of gold. Sleep left her as she concentrated on remembering. Yes, the sun had definitely risen in front of her and slightly to the right. Therefore they had been traveling eastward. If she reversed this, moving her finger westward, there was only one city, named Scutari, printed in bold print, that
would be large enough to sustain a crude airfield. The other towns were all in small print—villages, no doubt, none of them large enough to drive through for a period of ten minutes. If it was Scutari where they had landed then they must be about here, she decided, scratching an X with her fingernail. It was a point astonishingly close to Yugoslavia, and surprisingly near the Adriatic, and across the Adriatic lay Italy.…

  She placed the book carefully under the mattress at her feet and lay down, almost frightened by the thought that the map engendered. “But how very difficult it is to dismiss an idea once it has presented itself to the mind,” she mused. She would have to look at the map again more carefully tomorrow and read about the North Albanian Alps. Perhaps Farrell would have noticed landmarks she had missed. She tried to tame her thoughts, but it was a long time before she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 13

  “You may come out,” said Lulash the next afternoon, standing in the doorway and speaking to Mrs. Pollifax. “General Hoong has said you may have a little walk for the exercise.”

  “How very kind,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax.

  Lulash said cheerfully, “General Hoong has wired for instructions about you. Everyone has wired for instructions about you. Now with General Perdido gone we only wait.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded and went to look at Farrell. During the night his temperature had flared dangerously and she was very worried about him. If he was to survive at all the bullet would have to be removed from his arm; for what purpose he must survive she did not know, but it went against all of her instincts to let a man die without making every effort to save him. He was flushed and drowsy and his appetite had vanished; his temperature must be 104 or 105, she judged, and he was not always lucid. Mrs. Pollifax leaned over him and said gently, “I will be back in a few minutes.”

  Farrell opened one eye and grinned weakly. “Have fun.”