Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Page 10

  He stopped the car and backed it into a parking space and Mrs. Pollifax saw that across the street a large building bore the sign PTT. “Understand what?” asked Robin, turning off the ignition.

  “I think I’d better send the cable first,” she said. “It’s half-past eight?”

  “Just.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded and climbed out of the car and crossed the street. Entering the echoing, cavernous room she went to the telegraph window and copied out Madame Parviz’s message, hesitating only when she reached the space for the sender’s name. Since privacy seemed to matter very much to Madame Parviz she stood a moment, reflecting, pencil in hand. Inspiration arrived at last and feeling quite resourceful at keeping the Clinic out of it she wrote the name of William Carstairs, The Legal Building, Baltimore, Maryland. With that accomplished she paid for it and left.

  “You were beginning to understand something,” said Robin when she rejoined him, “and I hope you’re not going to leave me hanging in midair.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Yes, I’m beginning to understand why it’s been impossible for Hafez to tell me anything. He can’t. I’m also beginning to understand to what lengths he went to arrange my visit last night with his grandmother. It wasn’t easy.”

  Robin looked startled. “You’re implying a great deal wrong indeed.”

  “Yes, I am. Can we go back now? I want to sit in the garden and think, preferably over a pot of very hot coffee.”

  He started up the car. “I’ve nothing against thinking. I don’t suppose I should ask about what in particular?”

  “About thirteen tablets of aspirin, and what I report at ten o’clock tonight when I make my rather primitive contact with Interpol, about Marcel’s death and what I tell the police when they make their inquiries.”

  “Which explains everything and nothing but I’ve already learned enough to scare the hell out of me. I wish it would scare the hell out of you,” he said with a sidelong glance at her face. “I think I’m going to keep a very close eye on you today if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” said Mrs. Pollifax imperturbably.

  As they drove into the entrance road of the Clinic and past the greenhouse Mrs. Pollifax saw a man in a green apron sweeping the steps, and Hafez seated on the top stair with his chin in his hand, the very same scene that had met her glance when she arrived on Friday. Now it was Sunday and Marcel was dead. She thought it would have been very convenient on Friday to have been clairvoyant and to have seen the seeds of destruction waiting here for catalyzation. The workings of fate always struck her with awe, for on these small assignments she inevitably arrived just in time to meet the effect of causes sown recklessly long ago. Marcel had been sent here, and had died, and his death in turn was setting new influences in motion. Where it would lead she couldn’t guess but she knew that at some point influences and coincidences would converge. Nothing, she felt, happened purely by accident; it was an unraveling process.

  As she walked toward the door Hafez stood up, eyes anxious and inquiring. “It’s been taken care of,” she told him in a low voice.

  “Oh, thank you, madame,” he gasped. His hand reached out to touch her arm, trembled there a moment, and then he turned and ran off up the stairs.

  “Where are you going now?” Robin demanded.

  Amused, she said, “To my room first, to order some coffee for the garden and to put away my sweater, and then—”

  “Okay,” he said hastily, “I’ll see you later.”

  He too went up the stairs but Mrs. Pollifax lingered, her glance moving over the head of the concierge to the office behind him. It was still empty. There were no secretaries, no directors, no police in plainclothes in consultation and she found herself uneasy.

  “Madam is looking for someone?” asked the head concierge.

  She shook her head.

  “Perhaps madam would like a copy of yesterday’s Herald Tribune,” he suggested. “We were sent an extra paper.”

  She thanked him, tucked it under her arm and went upstairs. As she changed into a cooler dress she briefly scanned the front page of the Tribune. The Common Market had agreed upon new farm tariffs. The price of silver had hit an all-time high. A minor official had been assassinated in Syria. She turned a page and found a photograph of King Jarroud of Zabya, and because this was Hafez’s king she ran her eyes down the column quickly while she zipped up her dress. On Tuesday the King was celebrating his fortieth birthday and his tenth year in power … A parade, lunch in the palace beside the beautiful Arabian Nights pool, America’s vice-president among the long list of luminaries invited to the daylong festivity … Jarroud an extremely popular monarch with the people but not without his enemies, mainly among those of the upper class who distrusted his sweeping reforms … Had already done much to narrow the huge gap between rich and poor … Illiteracy rate reduced from 89 percent to 21 percent after ten years of compulsory schooling, 80 percent of the people now owned some land … the country 60 percent desert.

  “Mmm,” she murmured, postponing details until later, and moved to the telephone to order coffee sent to the garden. Really, this life of luxury was infectious and she wondered how she would ever adjust again to washing dishes.

  Fifteen minutes later she descended to the ground floor and again strolled past the Unterwasser Massage room, hesitating only a moment when she found it still deserted. She understood very clearly that a murder could empty the rooms of any establishment in a matter of hours but it was unbelievable to her that no traces remained of an event that must have shaken the Clinic to its foundations. Did a man’s life count for so little these days?

  She pulled a chaise longue into the sun and lay down, recalling Marcel’s dancing blue eyes and his mock, comic gestures. When death came to the general, she thought, it would be a completion, it would be the closing of a circle on a fulfilled life but there were the other deaths, the ones that did violence to meaning by their abrupt and senseless interruption of life, and it was these deaths she mourned in particular. Why had it been necessary to sentence Marcel to death? What had he done? Most vital of all, what had he known?

  The general was being helped into a chair by the nurse. The Palisburys, she noticed, had already arrived and were establishing themselves under the poplar tree. The man in the wheelchair, Ibrahim Sabry, sat beside a table with a pink umbrella and read a thick newspaper. The same tableau was arranging itself but Marcel was missing. Fraser, too, had been snatched away from this tranquil garden scene and no one had missed him, just as few people would notice Marcel’s absence. And someone among these people was a murderer … someone here knew.

  The glass doors swung open and a white-jacketed waiter came out bearing a tray. Seeing her he crossed the lawn toward her, picking up a small table as he came. “Bon jour, madame—your coffee!” he said.

  Marcel had brought her tea yesterday with just such a flourish but now he was dead and in his murder lay the answer to a good many things if only she could find the right question to ask. “Thank you,” she said absently, and as the waiter left she went back in her thoughts to yesterday. She had hailed Marcel and asked him if he was a good actor. He had taken out his order book while she told him of her anxieties about Madame Parviz. He had not thought highly of them but he had agreed to look into them. And he had told her—just before Robin arrived—that he would have information for her at midnight.

  He had been safe at that hour yesterday, she was sure of it.

  She thought, Whatever Marcel did after I saw him in the afternoon must have taken him closer to something, turned him in a new and different direction, toward territory someone had marked off as forbidden. The question was, what had Marcel done between half-past three in the afternoon and midnight, when he was killed? Whatever Marcel had discovered she must discover, too.

  “I hate to disturb your thinking processes,” said Robin, strolling up behind her, “but I’ve been looking for Court and I can’t find her anywhere. Has she passe
d this way?”

  “My thinking processes are behaving very poorly at the moment,” she said, “and no, I’ve not seen her. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “I’d love one if you have a spare.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Look here, shouldn’t there be an air of repressed alarm here today, a few damp eyes, a policeman or two? I can’t help noticing that business is very much as usual.”

  “I’ve noticed it, too,” she said, nodding. “It bothers me.”

  “Yes, I thought it might. Of course things are very different for the rich, you know. They’ve got to be protected and they pay liberally for that when they come here. They’re not supposed to be exposed to anything viler than an enema. It makes life in such a place a complete conspiracy.” He grinned cheerfully. “At the casinos they handle it very tidily, you know. A chap blows out his brains after losing his last shilling and three minutes later you can’t even find traces of the blood. I should resent that very much if it were I, and come back at once to haunt them.”

  “You’re being abominably flippant and you’re not cheering me up at all,” she told him.

  “Well, then, I wish you’d—oops!” he said in a startled voice and ducked his head under the table.

  Mrs. Pollifax looked behind her to see what had surprised him and saw walking across the lawn one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, which startled her, too, if for different reasons. Gilbert Roland, she thought, and then chided herself for such sentimental nonsense. Ibrahim Sabry was looking up from his newspaper and smiling—yes, the stranger was heading for Sabry—but everyone in the garden was watching as well. The man was wearing a dark pin-striped business suit but this scarcely succeeded in scaling him down to life size. He was a figure out of an epic, tall, lean, proud, a beak of a nose set in a swarthy face, his eyes gleaming under straight quizzical brows, his smile a flash of white in his dark face. “Who,” said Mrs. Pollifax with feeling, “is that!”

  Robin slid back into his chair looking sheepish but she noticed that he moved his chair so that he could sit with his back to the newcomer. She, on the other hand, moved her chair so that she could watch the stranger shake hands with Sabry.

  “Reflex action—sorry about that,” confessed Robin. “I forget that people I’ve lifted a few jewels from really have no idea I’m the culprit. That’s Yazdan Kashan. Good Lord, I’d forgotten it’s Sunday—this is Visiting Day.”

  “And you robbed that man?” said Mrs. Pollifax incredulously. “He looks extremely difficult to take anything from. Should I know who he is?”

  “Well, I don’t want you fainting, my dear Mrs. P., but he’s a sheik, a bona fide sheik.”

  “Ah,” she said with pleasure, “they really do exist then! But no longer, I take it, on the desert?”

  Robin grinned. “Not when they belong to one of the world’s richest families, although I think he still spends a good bit of the year with his people. But not in a tent. Kashan’s at least a generation away from all that, it was his grandfather who rode camels with the wind. Kashan’s father discovered he was encamped on some of the world’s richest oil fields in the Middle East, and Yazdan’s the new breed. Went to Oxford, as a matter of fact, and then became a playboy and left jewels lying around carelessly—at least he was damned careless in Paris when I ran into him in ’65.”

  “And now?”

  “Now he’s nearly forty and I hear he’s a nut on religion and doesn’t leave jewelry around. He reads the Koran instead.”

  “He’s not reading it now,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax. “He’s come to Montbrison to visit Mr. Sabry. What country is Mr. Kashan from?”

  Robin gave her a quick glance. “Frankly I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid all those deserts are one big blur to me.” He sighed. “I suppose I should feel sentimental about the chap—he was my first really big job and it went off like peaches and cream and gave me no end of confidence.”

  “Which deserted you rather abruptly a minute ago,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Well, I told you it was my first major job; I had to remind myself for months afterward that he could afford the loss.” He added indignantly, “I hope you don’t think I became a criminal easily.”

  “Not at all,” she murmured, “but there must be some way to make an honest man of you.”

  Hafez walked slowly across the lawn toward them and when he reached them twined one arm around Mrs. Pollifax’s chair and hung on it. “There’s going to be Wiener Schnitzel for lunch,” he confided. He addressed this information to Mrs. Pollifax but his gaze rested on the two men under the pink lawn umbrella.

  “Do you know Mr. Sabry, the man in the wheelchair, Hafez?” she asked, watching his face.

  “Yes, madame, he has the room across the hall from me.”

  “But did you know him before you came to the Clinic?”

  He shook his head. “No, madame.”

  She hesitated and then she added, “And Mr. Kashan, the man visiting him, do you know him?”

  Hafez’s eyes blazed before he dropped his gaze to the ground. “I know him,” he said tonelessly.

  “Is he from Zabya then?”

  “Yes, madame.” He lifted expressionless eyes and added, “I will go to lunch now, I think. Bon jour.”

  Robin watched him leave and then lifted an eyebrow at her. “I must say that was a strange bit of dialogue. You sounded rather like the Inquisition.”

  “And Hafez like a robot,” she said thoughtfully, “which means, I think, that we just had a fairly important conversation.”

  Twelve

  The sheik lunched with Ibrahim Sabry in the dining room. Their heads remained close together at the table as they engaged in energetic conversation, frequently with gestures, but all of it too muted for Mrs. Pollifax to overhear. Court arrived a few minutes after Mrs. Pollifax, calling breathlessly across the tables, “I’ve been playing the organ again. Will you be in the garden this afternoon?”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded; she had no intention of being anywhere else. For the genuine convalescent there was the gift of shapeless time: naps, sunbath, small walks, massages, but she could scarcely call herself convalescent and time was working against her.

  It was, therefore, in the garden that Court found her after lunch. “I want to talk to you,” she said, striding toward her across the lawn. “I have to talk to you. Do you mind awfully?”

  Mrs. Pollifax had been watching Sheik Kashan wheel Sabry into the gazebo; the wheelchair was barely narrow enough to fit through the door so that for a moment the structure shuddered threateningly. It was not the sturdiest of gazebos, anyway, being fashioned entirely of bamboo. Now Sabry was safely within, and the Sheik had seated himself at the round table inside and was pulling papers from an attaché case.

  She turned her attention to Court just as the girl slipped into a chair beside her. “I’m available,” she told her, smiling.

  Court looked close to tears. “I came back from the village this morning,” she said, her voice trembling, “and I packed my suitcase and then after lunch I went up and unpacked it again.”

  “For myself I’m not that fond of packing,” put in Mrs. Pollifax mildly, “but I daresay it’s a form of exercise.”

  Court grudgingly laughed. “I’m sounding the idiot, of course.” She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose. “I thought perhaps if I talked to you—I simply don’t know what to do, I ought to leave, I know it, but—”

  Mrs. Pollifax said gently, “Perhaps if you’d tell me just what seems to be the matter—”

  “Oh,” said the girl angrily, “I don’t want to fall in love again, that’s what’s the matter. And of all people with him.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Pollifax, enlightened at last. “We’re talking about Robin. Are you about to fall in love with Robin?”

  “Love,” said the girl scornfully. “And he’s so much like Eric.” She shivered. “I can’t bear that.”

  Mrs. Pollifax understood that there was going to be no
thing rational about this conversation and adjusted herself to the fact. “Eric,” she said pointedly.

  Court’s chin went up. “I could say that Eric abandoned me in every capital in Europe. As a matter of fact I will say it because it’s what he did. I’ve been so careful,” she explained, “I’ve gone to such lengths to avoid entanglements. I’ve dated only simpletons, frauds and ridiculous creatures I couldn’t possibly care about, and then I come here and—” She turned to Mrs. Pollifax angrily. “Last summer there wasn’t anyone here under forty. Not a soul. And this summer—I’m disintegrating,” she wailed. “I’m usually so poised, so calm, so—so—”

  “Controlled?” suggested Mrs. Pollifax, handing her a fresh handkerchief. “You haven’t told me who Eric is, by the way.”

  “My husband,” said Court, blowing her nose again. “Or was,” she added, wiping her eyes. “I married him when I was eighteen and we were divorced when I was twenty and that’s eight years ago. Mrs. Pollifax, I do want you to know I had no intention of crying.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “One seldom does. So you were married very young, and it wasn’t a happy marriage, and now Robin reminds you of Eric?”

  She shivered. “The pattern’s terrifyingly similar. Robin’s so attractive, and there’s all that charm and he doesn’t work for a living, which means no character at all. What he does have is too much money and too much experience—he’s been everywhere, done everything, and known everybody—and that’s just how it was with Eric. They’re both playboys. I hate love,” she announced, and after a second’s pause added ruefully, “It hurts.”

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “I daresay you’ve gotten the worst of it out of your system now and we can talk. But really love has nothing to do with hurt, you know, it’s we who supply the wounds. Which—if I may risk offending you—seems to be just what you’re doing now.”

  “Given the circumstances, how?” demanded Court.

  Mrs. Pollifax said dreamily, “I’ve often thought the Buddhists are quite right, you know, when they say the root of all suffering is desire. We’re so full of greed, wanting this or that—to love or to escape love, to be this or be that, to possess this or that. What do you think you’ll accomplish by packing your suitcase and bolting?”