The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  In this manner the three of them descended inch by inch toward the valley, their cliff gradually changing in color from the luminous gray of dawn to a tawny gold as the sun discovered them. It was growing embarrassingly light when they reached the last slope, a charming easy hill of pebbles. They stopped here to catch their breath and to take stock of their surroundings.

  This was the rocky pasture, usually alive with goats, that Mrs. Pollifax had seen on her walks along the top of the cuff. It lay just above another pasture, and then another, each terrace tipping a little drunkenly toward the floor of the flat dry valley. There were no goats now, and Mrs. Pollifax's gaze moved westward, to the right, and she saw what had gone unnoticed before, the home of the man who tended the goats. She recalled from Lulash's book that in this country a hovel like this was called a han. It was a small, primitive building built of rocks taken from the hillside; there were no windows. Then she drew in her breath sharply, for a woman stood in the doorway of the han watching them, her figure almost lost in the shadows cast by the cliff.

  "What is it?" demanded Farrell.

  Wordlessly Mrs. Pollifax pointed.

  Farrell leaned on his crutch and slipped one hand into his pocket.

  "No," Mrs. Pollifax said slowly, "you mustn't shoot her. Anyway, she can't be alone at this hour, there must be others inside."

  "She's seen us," growled Farrell. "It's her or us, Duchess."

  "At least let's be sure she's alone," begged Mrs. Pollifax. "Then we could just tie and gag her if she's by herself, couldn't we? A gunshot would be heard for miles." Her sympathy for the woman staring at them was instinctive and, in these circumstances, irrational. Still she could not help herself.

  Farrell's hand left his pocket and he sighed. "Woman to woman, eh? Have it your way, Duchess—in for a penny, in for a pound."

  Nervously Mrs. Pollifax led the way toward the han.

  Eighteen

  The woman looked as ageless and stoic as the rocks around her, nothing but her eyes alive in a watchful, sunburned face. When she was perhaps two feet from the doorway Mrs. Pollifax stopped, smiled wanly and pointed to the top of the precipice. Then she pointed to herself and to FarrelL "Inglese," she said.

  The woman's impassive glance moved to the cliff above, returned to Mrs. Pollifax to examine her torn dress and Guatemalan jacket, roamed briefly over Farrell's crutch and the Genie's flowing garments. She made a sudden turn back into the han and Mrs. Pollifax's heart constricted. Then the woman paused, holding back the goatskin at the door, and gestured to them to follow. Again Mrs. Pollifax led the way, aware that Farrell's hand had slipped back into the pocket that held his pistol. It was like twilight inside, with a small fire burning in the center of the earthen floor. The first object that caught Mrs. Pollifax's eye was her purse lying on the ground beside the fire, and she realized that their progress down the cliff must have been observed for some time. The woman spoke to the two men squatting near the fire: the younger was a boy of fifteen or so, the elder a tall, well-built man with a fierce-looking moustache and smoldering eyes. The three spoke together for several minutes, not heatedly, but in disjointed sentences interspersed with reflective pauses. Mrs. Pollifax wondered if Farrell and the Genie felt as edgy as she did standing there and being discussed with no knowledge of what was being said. There were no chains holding them here and yet the fact that they had been seen by the woman gave her the power of life or death over them. Were they going to have to kill the woman and her family? "I'm too old and too soft for all this," she thought.

  Suddenly the man of the hart stood up and went to the door, pushed aside the goatskin and went out, causing Mrs. Pollifax and Farrell to exchange alarmed glances. The boy also jumped to his feet and brought stools from the shadows, gesturing to them to sit. "What do you think?" asked Mrs. Pollifax in a low voice.

  "I don't know," Farrell said, and limped to the door and glanced outside.

  The woman had gathered up three wooden bowls and was dishing into them something that resembled lumpy oatmeal drowned in oil. With a polite smile Mrs. Pollifax accepted hers and sat down. Farrell, too, came back and sat down beside the Genie. "I don't know," he repeated.

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded, spooning up the honeyed grain but scarcely aware of its taste as her mind worried over the man's disappearance. He had consulted and then left Where had he gone? What had been decided by these three people? She felt again that her fate was no more than a slender thread loosely held by indifferent strangers, yet there was nothing to do but wait. She sat and waited, having no idea what to expect. It was the woman who made the next move. She walked to a chest in the corner of the room and began pulling from it an assortment of clothes. Astonished, Mrs. Pollifax wondered if possibly these people were going to help them. She turned to Farrell and saw the same look reflected in his face: the confusion of a suspicious and desperate man confronted by hope. The woman had taken out a shabby, cone-shaped felt hat that she now clapped on the Genie's head; then she held against Farrell the loose-flowing clothes and sash of an Albanian mountain man. To Mrs. Pollifax she handed two petticoats and a voluminous woolen dress with inserts of handmade lace. She gestured toward the blanket hung across one corner of the room.

  "Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Pollifax, beaming at FarrelL

  "Could still be a trap," Farrell said.

  "I refuse to think so," she told him loftily, and retired behind the blanket to wrestle with the voluminous skirts.

  A few minutes later they reassembled around the fire, their appearances strikingly changed. Because of his unshaven jaw, Farrell was clearly the most authentic of the three, looking as fierce and dangerous as a bandit. The Genie appeared much the same: small, birdlike, somehow transcending the absurdity of his costume. Mrs. Pollifax had no idea how she looked but she knew she felt very warm indeed under so many layers.

  The woman held out Mrs. Pollifax's purse to her, her fingers stroking the soft dark-blue calfskin. On impulse Mrs. Pollifax opened it, extracted the pistol and its clips, the compass, the map, the food and her pack of playing cards, and gave the purse back to the woman. "Keep it," she said, smiling. "It doesn't go with these new clothes. Ill use the pockets instead, there are so many of them. One in each petticoat," she told Farrell in an aside. She showed the woman how to zip and unzip the purse, a feat that brought surprise and then delight to die woman's face. Her smile was beautiful and Mrs. Pollifax realized that in years she was still only a young woman. She also pressed the Guatemalan jacket on her, hoping she would not wear it outside the han for a good many months.

  Now it was the boy who flung back the goatskin at the door, and Mrs. Pollifax saw that his father had not gone to report them but to assemble his goats for the day. He had driven them to the door, where they were milling about bleating rudely and with no sense of direction or intelligence. With his shepherd's crook the man prodded them even closer to the door. The boy turned to the three of them and with an eager face began explaining in pantomime what the family had decided. First he pointed to the cliff and crossed himself, grimacing, so that Mrs. Pollifax understood that General Perdido's mountain eerie was known and disliked in the neighborhood. Then he pointed to the sun and appeared to be emphasizing the need for them to go quickly, before men came to the han. In their new clothes—he pointed to them and rubbed a piece of Mrs. Pollifax's skirt between his fingers to prove he meant clothes—they might be able to reach the road unaccosted.

  "Road?" said Farrell, startled.

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. "It can't be seen from here but I've spotted it from the cliff. It runs across the plain from south to north about five miles from here, I'd say."

  The problem was in getting unobserved to the floor of the valley but the boy had not finished. The pastures around them could all be seen very clearly from the buildings above —a fact to which Mrs. Pollifax could testify—and someone might be watching, perhaps even with binoculars. Here the boy made circles with his fingers and squinted through them. Today his father had decided to
drive his goats beyond this pasture and down to the one nearest the valley. If Mrs. Pollifax and the Genie would become goats they could move with the herd and not be seen from above.

  "Become goats," said Mrs. Pollifax dazedly—obviously she had misunderstood his gestures. But again he dropped to his hands and knees, this time crawling into the center of the thickly clustered herd.

  "Good heavens," said Mrs. Pollifax faintly.

  Scrambling to his feet again the boy pointed to Farrell's leg and shook his head, seized his father's crook and placed it in Farrell's hand. The father in reply got down on his hands and knees.

  "Well, I never," breathed Mrs. Pollifax.

  Farrell was grinning. "You really ought to see your face, Duchess. Do you get the same message I do? From the cliff above it will appear that Mac here and his son are taking their herd of goats out, as they do every morning at this hour. One man and a boy going out, one man and a boy coming home. But going out I will be the goatherder while he joins you and the Genie and the goats—pretty damn noble of him, I have to add—and in some convenient place we are left behind."

  Mrs. Pollifax found herself wishing she were back on the ledge. On the ledge she had wished herself back in her cell. What, she wondered crossly, must she endure next? She made only one comment and it was succinct. She said clearly and irritably, "Damn."

  "Acquiring some downright bad habits, Duchess," grinned Farrell. 'They'll be blackballing you at the Garden Club this winter, won't they? Hurry now, I think they're waiting for you."

  The Genie was already crouched down among the goats, apparently undismayed by this new development; he glanced once over his shoulder, his eyes bright, twinkling and as interested as usual. Gingerly Mrs. Pollifax sank to her knees and crawled in among the beasts. "For heaven's sake move them slowly," she cautioned.

  Farrell grasped the shepherd's crook and the boy called out something in the high clear air and prodded the goats in the front. The herd, with Mrs. Pollifax, the Genie and the shepherd as its nucleus, began to move slowly out into the pasture.

  The boy did most of the work, running backward and forward to keep the goats in a tight cluster. But it was the tightness of the cluster that soon became Mrs. Pollifax's major concern, for although she had not crawled on hands and knees since she was a child—and never for any distance —it was the goats that proved especially unnerving. They stepped on her, they bleated alarmingly in first her left ear and then her right ear, they playfully nipped her, and over and above these hardships there was their smell. She had never thought of goats as smelling; she had never thought of goats at all, but of course no one bathed goats and this was the dry season. They had a particularly obnoxious odor, and she was surrounded by, and distressingly intimate with, an entire herd of them. From time to time Farrell and the boy would halt the procession so that the three humans in their midst could catch their breath, but Mrs. Pollifax found that catching her breath was the very last thing she wished to do. It was during these resting intervals that the goats butted her, licked her and stumbled over her. Nor was this all, for as the ground slanted more and more perceptibly the soft grass became thinner, to be replaced by pebbles that cut her knees, and once they left the shadow of the cliffs the sun beat down on them mercilessly. To walk on all fours was difficult enough for a child, but for a woman of her age it was quite mad. Yet as their queer progress continued and the time spent on hands and knees grew longer and less bearable all early reactions faded, even thought faded as Mrs. Pollifax's mind fixed itself upon the next rest when she could throw herself full-length on the earth, indifferent at last to how many goats stepped on her. The slow, gradual descent into the valley must have taken them an hour, but after a long time Mrs. Pollifax became aware that the herd had come to a standstill and that she was being lightly touched by a shepherd's crook. She looked up to see Farrell standing over her. "You can stand up now, Duchess," he told her. "We're hidden from the top of the cliff, we've reached the valley."

  He looked drained and white and Mrs. Pollifax realized that a shepherd's crook was not the same as a crutch; he must have had to place his weight on a leg broken in two places, poorly set and unmended yet, and all this on a rocky downhill terrain. Pity brought her to her feet. "Where's your crutch?"

  "The man has it."

  The Genie's head popped up from among the goats and he joined them looking so untouched and cheerful that Mrs. Pollifax began to feel almost hostile toward him. She took a step forward and almost fell, regained her balance and glanced furiously at her knees. But she had always been a gracious hostess; she tottered forward to wring the hand of the boy and his father who had helped them at so much risk to themselves.

  "Det," the man kept saying over and over again, pointing westward.

  Mrs. Pollifax recalled that this word meant sea, and nodded, smiling. Farrell also shook their hands and the Genie, odd little man that he was, went into his bowing and nodding routine. Then the man and the boy strolled away toward the goats that had fanned out across the pasture, and Mrs. Pollifax, Farrell and the Genie were alone.

  They were standing in the center of a dried-up brook bed at the base of the last terrace. Behind them rose scallop after scallop of rocky pasture culminating in the towering cliff above. In front of them stretched the flat dry valley, already shimmering in the morning heat. To the south, barely visible, lay a cluster of objects that might be tall rocks or a village. There were almost no trees. "Well," said Mrs. Pollifax doubtfully, and then because it all seemed so overwhelming she suggested they sit down and rest.

  "Not on your life," said Farrell flatly. "They must be combing the mountains for us, they'll be getting to the valley next."

  She nodded wearily. There seemed nowhere to hide in this naked countryside and she was bone-tired but they had come this far and somewhere to the west lay a road. She glanced at the Genie and he vivaciously smiled at her. Farrell, following her glance, sighed heavily. "Not a brain in his head, is there? You certainly picked a lemon, Duchess."

  She frowned. "I don't know, sometimes there seem to be flashes of intelligence there."

  "An intelligent man would be tired or scared stiff. All this guy does is smile."

  "But the Chinese are always polite, aren't they?" pointed out Mrs. Pollifax. "He may be just a little eccentric."

  "Eccentric!" barked Farrell. "Well, we're stuck with him, anyway. Let's get moving."

  They clung to the security of the creek bed, knowing without mentioning it that although they wore native clothes they were still three in number, and it was three for whom the general would be searching. The sun was searingly hot, for it was at least midmorning, and Mrs. Pollifax's knees did not grow any more reliable. She stumbled along in the prison of her woolen dress and two petticoats, the old numbness reasserting itself. She longed for water—they had none—and for something green to look at, anything but this tawny, rocky, dusty hot August landscape around them. She was aware, too, of Farrell's hobbling as she plodded. Only the Genie had the resilience to give the appearance of a man out for a morning stroll. She was beginning to feel very sorry that she had liberated this annoyingly tireless man.

  They came in sight of the road very suddenly, so suddenly that Farrell, glancing up, gave a sibilant hiss through his teeth and dropped quickly to the ground behind a rock. The Genie promptly imitated him and Mrs. Pollifax gratefully sat down beside them. The road was still some distance away, perhaps half a mile, but it was overrun by men. These men, wearing the striped suits of prisoners, were spread out along the road for nearly a mile, listlessly splitting rocks and carrying them to the roadbed. What was most alarming was the number of guards posted near them; she could identify them because they were seated on the rocks with rifles across their knees, and several of them were sprawled in the shade of a large black car. The road ran in a straight line across their path, vanishing in the south against the horizon, while in the north it lifted gradually to begin a spiraling toward the cliffs from which they had escaped. This was t
he road by which the general had come from the airport, but with so many people rimming it the road might as well have been an insurmountable wall. "What can we do?" whispered Mrs. Pollifax helplessly.

  Farrell ran a dusty hand across his eyes. He was terrible to look at with his week's growth of beard, bloodshot eyes and a dreadful pallor that was new today. Mrs. Pollifax noted that his hand trembled and she shuddered at what he must be enduring. He said in a cracked, furious voice, "What rotten luck, well have to wait until dark to cross the road. Spend a whole bloody day here without water? God."

  Dear Farrell, she thought, poor Farrell, and then she glanced beyond him and stiffened. Her look of horror caused both Farrell and the Genie to look too. Men—half a dozen of them—were crossing the plain behind them, clearly visible in the brilliant sun and less than a mile away. What had first caught her eye, however, was the flash of a mirror that was shortly answered from a tree-lined foothill up on their right. The search for them was underway, obviously a methodical daylight search leaving no margins for error, one group combing the cliffs, the pastures and the foothills, another group taking the valley. She wondered if they had already been seen, she wondered if the message flashed from the bill was in fact reporting three suspicious shapes crouched beside a rock.