Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Page 16

  There was no one at the concierge’s desk. She passed it and hurried up the next flight to her own floor, glancing at her watch as she went. She had been downstairs for fifteen minutes—far too long—but the third level was quiet. No waiters had intruded yet on its silence with trays, and there were no sounds of conversation in the nurse’s room. The electrical failure had interrupted the quiet, unchanging routine.

  She turned the corner and abruptly stopped, one hand at her throat. The door to her room stood open. She was so astonished—Hafez had promised to lock it—that she forgot caution and hurried toward it without hesitation.

  The room was empty. Madame Parviz no longer lay across the bed. The curtains had been opened and the door to the balcony stood wide. There was no sign of Hafez.

  “Hafez?” she whispered, and then, “Hafez!” Moving to the balcony she leaned over the railing and looked down into the garden. “Hafez?” she called.

  She turned and hurried down the hall to room 150 and opened the still-unlocked door. Serafina remained bound to the chair, her eyes screaming silent hatred at her. Mrs. Pollifax absently patted her shoulder as she passed her to search the other two rooms. There was no sign of Hafez, or even of Munir and Fouad. If Sabry and his two men were not in the Clinic then why had Hafez bolted, and where had he taken his grandmother? What had happened while she was in the Clinic basement?

  She ran back to the staircase.

  “Good morning,” said Court cheerfully, descending from the floor above, “You’re certainly up early. There’s something wrong with the elevator, have you noticed?”

  “Yes. Have you seen Hafez?”

  “No, I haven’t. Is something wrong?”

  But Mrs. Pollifax had already placed one hand on the banister and was hurrying down the stairs to the Reception floor. In her haste she caught the heel of one shoe in the carpet and kept her balance only by dropping the suitcase and clinging with both hands to the railing. The suitcase bumped and slid ahead of her and was retrieved by the head concierge, who had just started up the stain. “Madame—you are all right?” he called.

  She nodded and slipped back into her shoe.

  “I was just coming up to knock on your door,” he said. “Madame, there are two policemen here inquiring for you.”

  “Thank heaven,” she said, walking down the stairs.

  “They would like for you to go with them to the headquarters. A small passport misunderstanding, I am sure.”

  “Passport misunderstanding?” She stopped cm the bottom stair, her eyes on the backs of the two men in uniform standing in the hall and she did not like those two backs at all. Taking a step backward she said, “Where’s Robin? Where’s Mr. Burke-Jones?”

  One of the policemen slowly turned. It was Fouad, looking very continental in uniform. “Good morning, madame,” he said pleasantly.

  “Good morning,” said Munir, walking swiftly to her side.

  Mrs. Pollifax turned but it was already too late; each of them held her by an arm. “But these aren’t policemen!” she cried to the head concierge. “Don’t you recognize them? They came with Madame Parviz, they belong in room 154!”

  The head concierge looked startled. “Madame?”

  “I said they’re not policemen!” she cried. “Surely you’ve seen than before, they came with Madame Parviz! Help me!” she called to Court, who stood transfixed on the staircase.

  Gently but firmly Fouad and Munir were pushing her ahead of them to the main door. “Help—help!” cried Mrs. Pollifax as the pressure on her arms mounted. The head concierge gaped at her so blankly that she was forced to remember Fouad and Munir had never stirred from their rooms. “Please!” she gasped, and then as they reached the door she turned and shouted to Court, “They’re not the police—get help!” For just a moment she succeeded in grasping the knob of the door and hung there, sending a last desperate glance at Court, who stood baffled and uncertain at the foot of the stairs. Then Fouad and Munir lifted her over the threshold and she was carried beyond it, down steps and up the driveway toward two cars that were blocking the entrance.

  The sheik jumped out of the nearer car, looking relieved. “Was it necessary to use my name?”

  “La,” said Fouad.

  “Isri.”

  They carried her, still struggling, past the small car—it was a red Volkswagen—and Mrs. Pollifax glanced inside and with a sinking heart recognized the figure collapsed on the rear seat: it was Madame Parviz. She was picked up again and hurried along to the black Rolls-Royce. Her hands were pushed behind her back, roped painfully together, and then she was shoved inside so roughly that she fell across the trousered legs of the man already occupying the back seat. There was something familiar about those trousers—they were purple, she saw in dismay—and as she was plucked from the floor by unseen hands and hurled into the seat Robin said grimly, “They caught me, too—about five feet from the edge of the garden. A Moody rout, I’d say.”

  Eighteen

  After leaving Mrs. Pollifax downstairs in the hall, Hafez had gone up to her room and locked himself inside with his grandmother. He had also locked the door to the balcony and drawn the heavy curtains. When he heard the footsteps in the hall he was sitting quietly beside the bed. He might not even have noticed them except that the steps paused at Mrs. Pollifax’s door and a board creaked. Hafez stood up to face the door, expecting at any moment to hear Mrs. Pollifax call, “Hafez?”

  But Mrs. Pollifax did not call. The quilted outer door was drawn softly open and he watched the knob of the locked inner door turn slowly to the right and then to the left. His heart hammering, he moved back to stand beside his grandmother. He heard a low, sibilant whisper and words spoken in Arabic. “It’s locked. Hand over the skeleton key.”

  It was Fouad at the door.

  Hafez’s heart thudded so violently that he thought it must surely burst through his shirt. “Grandmama,” he whispered, but his grandmother did not stir. He began to search for a weapon—anything, a pair of scissors, a paperweight—but there was nothing at hand. He thought of the pockets of his windbreaker jacket but he already knew their contents: several inches of rope, his tape recorder and spare tapes, a pencil and a few exotic stones collected for their color but not their weight. As the key rattled in the lock he backed farther and farther from the bed until he reached the door to the balcony and stood pressed against it. He realized with an acute sense of grief that he was going to have to abandon his grandmother. He had no alternative, it was either leave or be taken by these men and, if taken, there might be no hope at all for either of them.

  He slipped behind the curtains, tugged at the door and stepped out on the balcony just as the door to Mrs. Pollifax’s room opened. As the two men walked inside he climbed over the railing onto the ledge. The adjacent balcony was unoccupied and he crouched there a moment out of sight, trying to think how to escape. There were many exits on the ground floor but there was no way of reaching any of them without passing the concierge’s desk. Robin had gone for the police. The important thing was to find out what Fouad and Munir planned to do with his grandmother so that he could inform the police when they arrived. He had to find a way to keep an eye on the two men without being seen himself.

  In his eight days at the Clinic Hafez had followed the code of every ten-year-old: he had explored all the corners and unmarked rooms that adults accepted as out-of-bounds or of no interest at all. Now he recalled the dumbwaiter in the utility closet next to room 148 and he wondered if he could reach it without being noticed. He cautiously made his way along the ledge. At this hour there was no one in the garden below, and apparently the occupants of the rooms he edged past were still asleep. He reached the balcony of room 154 and climbed over the railing. The door stood open and he walked through the room to the hall door and peered out. The corridor was empty. Taking a deep breath he raced down the hall and ducked inside the utility room. Opening the door of the dumbwaiter he tugged at the ropes and brought the box up to the third floor,
climbed inside and began to lower himself hand over hand. It reminded him of the chute at the Castle de Chillon and he remembered Mrs. Pollifax saying that they must be resourceful.

  Well, he thought, they had been resourceful at the castle and they had not been caught. Now it was up to him to be even cleverer because he was alone.

  There were voices in the kitchen, waiters grumbling over the loss of electricity and the tediousness of a wood-burning stove. The dumbwaiter reached the bottom of the shaft and Hafez pushed open the door, stared at three startled faces and climbed out “Bon jour,” he said brightly, and walked past them to the door and outside into the maze of trellises that concealed the exit. This brought him to the greenhouse and he ducked around it, climbed the high bank to the road, ran across the road and took refuge in a clump of bushes from which he could see the front door.

  He hoped it was the front door that he should watch.

  He stared at the walls of the Clinic, thinking of all the people inside asleep but this only made him feel lonely. Even if they were awake, he thought, they wouldn’t know, and if by some chance they learned what was happening they wouldn’t believe. It was the first time he had understood that a conspiracy existed among the living to wall out and reject what was disturbing. It took special people like Mrs. Pollifax and Robin to understand, he thought, and he supposed it was because they were in someway outsiders. They had stepped out of the circle long enough to see the shadows. They had dared the loneliness.

  He felt a wave of infinite gratitude toward them and he thought, “I will be like them when I grow up, I swear I will.”

  A movement at Sabry’s window caught his eye. He saw the balcony door open and Fouad walk out, peer to his left in the direction of the road and then wave a hand. A moment later Sheik Yazdan ibn Kazdan strolled down the driveway and entered the Clinic. Several minutes later Fouad and Munir stumbled out of the door carrying his grandmother. They were obviously in a great hurry, which meant they must barely have made it past the concierge’s desk without being discovered. This was something the sheik must have arranged.

  Where are the police, wondered Hafez impatiently.

  The two men with their burden walked up the driveway past the greenhouse. As they came abreast of Hafez in his hiding place he ducked his head and began to move with them parallel to the road, taking care to walk carefully. At the top of the incline he saw two cars blocking the Clinic’s entrance drive, one a small red Volkswagen, the other a long black Rolls-Royce. Sabry emerged from the latter and helped the two men place Madame Parviz inside the Volkswagen. The three then stood beside the car, talking and smoking.

  Hafez had no paper but he did have a pencil. He drew it out, wet it with his lips and tested it on the inside of his nylon windbreaker. It wrote, and he carefully copied down on his jacket the license numbers of the two cars. He had scarcely finished doing this when the sheik came out of the Clinic. He and the three men began an argument, during which Hafez heard his name spoken several times, and then Fouad and Munir stripped off their jackets and stepped behind the cars. When they reappeared Hafez saw that they wore uniforms of some kind. The sheik opened the trunk of the Rolls and tossed their old clothes inside.

  Why didn’t the police come, Hafez thought desperately. He watched Fouad and Munir walk down the driveway in their matching uniforms and he guessed they were going into the Clinic now to find Madame Pollifax. There was no reason to believe they wouldn’t capture her, too, and then he would be the only one left.

  He would be the only one who knew—but what could he give Robin and the police except the license numbers of two cars that might have already vanished by the time they came? It was not enough.

  He had seen the sheik open the trunk of the Rolls and toss clothes inside. It was a large trunk, and he knew it was unlocked. Now the sheik had climbed inside the car and he and Sabry sat talking in the front seat. It was very quiet except for the low murmer of their voices and birds chattering in the tall trees.

  We have to be resourceful, Madam Pollifax had said.

  Hafez moved swiftly. Once behind the Volkswagen he slid to his knees and crawled around it to the back of the Rolls and crouched there. Ever so gently he lifted the door to the trunk and opened it half way. It creaked a little but the murmur of voices continued. Climbing inside he lowered it softly behind him and stuffed a corner of Fouad’s jacket into the opening to leave a crack for fresh air.

  Nineteen

  When the sheik’s car reached the village it did not turn to the left to head down the mountain, it turned to the right to begin a precipitous climb upward. Mrs. Pollifax looked at the sheik seated opposite her on the jump seat and said, “Where are we going?”

  His dark eyes were friendly as he smiled. “In due time we separate. I go far, madame, but you and the other two will go no farther than I wish you to go. You have been, you know, a very naughty lady.”

  That sounded patronizing and she told him so.

  His eyebrows lifted. “How so? You have been only a minor inconvenience, no more than a buzzing gnat. Can one give to a gnat obeisance or importance?”

  “I can’t speak for Mrs. Pollifax,” said Robin, “but I resent being called a gnat and a minor inconvenience, damn it.”

  The sheik laughed. “Well said, Burke-Jones, I’d feel the same way myself. Your face is familiar to me, by the way. Have we met?”

  “Paris—’65,” Robin said shortly. “Le Comte de Reuffe’s weekend party. Gabrielle’s ball. The races at Deauville.”

  “Ah yes, I remember now. Have you news of them?… ’65 was a gay year, it lingers in my mind like vintage wine on the palate. I understand that Jackie has married?”

  “Twice since then,” said Robin.

  Mrs. Pollifax only half-listened. She was looking around her as the road narrowed and the houses thinned. They were moving now up a steep slope through thick dark woods, they rounded a curve and suddenly they were at the top of the mountain on which Montbrison rested. But this peak was negligible, no more than a foothill, a step-pingstone to what lay beyond, for they were surrounded by even higher peaks that merged into other, taller mountains stretching ahead like an endless cyclorama. Patches of forest broke up the quilt pattern here and there, and each seam of green on these lower slopes boasted a small village or cluster of chalets. Far off on another rock projection Mrs. Pollifax could see a tiny train chugging along like a slug, its smoke almost transparent against the pale blue sky.

  “No, I can’t believe that,” Robin was saying. “Really I can’t Gabrielle a nun? I thought she married Roger.”

  It was too civilized for Mrs. Pollifax. “Where are we going?” she asked again.

  “No, no, it was Danielle who married Roger,” protested the sheik.

  This name reminded Mrs. Pollifax of the film on Saturday evening—the heroine’s name had been Danielle—and this in turn reminded her of Hafez, who had promised to confide the plot to her and had never done so. She realized that she was very frightened for him because he had been guarding his grandmother, and Madame Parviz was in the car behind them. What had happened to him? She recalled her impressions of the back seat of the Volkswagen and what she had seen in that quick glance inside. There had been only the one crumpled figure with head against the window and eyes closed … but if they had found Madame Parviz they must have found Hafez, too and he was not in the Volkswagen. If they had killed him—“Where is Hafez?” she demanded.

  The sheik turned to look at her with interest. “Hafez?” He shrugged. “I don’t think we need to worry about Hafez.”

  “I should like to worry,” she told him.

  Again he shrugged, this time with a pleasant smile. “But Hafez is—shall we say, expendable?” Over his shoulder he called, “Ibrahim, are we nearly there?”

  “We are nearly there, Sayyid.”

  Expendable, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and felt a little sick.

  They had been climbing all the time and now they had reached a bald, wind-swept plateau which r
an like a spine across the mountain they’d left to the mountain ahead. Patches of thin grass grew wherever they found a little earth but there was little earth that had not been swept away by the winds. Mrs. Pollifax looked out of the car window and down, and caught a glimpse of Lake Geneva far, far below. The car slowed, and up ahead she saw a seam in the stony earth, a narrow cart track winding off toward the stony knob of a hill to the right. The car turned off the paved road and jolted and leaped across the ground with the Volkswagen following behind them.

  They approached the knoll on a bias, winding around boulders and fields of dead earth littered with pebbles. There were no trees, they must be too high for trees, decided Mrs. Pollifax, and she began to feel the total hopelessness of their situation. It would be better to take each moment as it came, she told herself, and acknowledged for the first time that not many moments might lie ahead.

  The car cleared the knob of the hill and Mrs. Pollifax looked ahead and saw a chalet, a weatherbeaten, closed-up Alpine cottage perched absurdly up here among the rocks and the clouds, its shuttered windows overlooking what must be a spectacular view of the country miles below. A single stunted tree was its only companion. As she watched, a cloud of mist drifted lazily toward them across the stony meadow. It obliterated the gnarled old tree, stroked the chalet with long ghost-like fingers and then swirled toward them. A moment later it had surrounded the car, damp and sunless and gray. When they emerged from its clutch the car had reached the chalet.

  Robin peered out. “I say, this doesn’t seem up to your standards as a pied-à-terre,” he said, still playing the bon vivant.

  “This?” said the sheik, startled. “Oh my dear fellow, this was rented only last evening when it became apparent that you and your friend were becoming nuisances. A pity, too, for it amused me to use the Clinic.”