Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Page 18

  “What?”

  “I don’t think it’s wise to tell the sheik we know about the plutonium, do you?”

  “Good God, no,” said Robin. “Keeping it secret seems to feed his superiority. He’d probably kill us on the spot.”

  “That’s what I felt. But I can tell the sheik I replaced the two cans in the suitcase with two cans of peaches from the Clinic.”

  The glance Robin gave her was withering. “That’s a singularly uninspired idea and not at all up to your usual standards. Do you take him for a fool?”

  “But that’s exactly—” She stopped as the sheik returned, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. As he looked from one face to the other they all heard it: the sound of a helicopter’s blades beating the air at some distance away. Fouad opened the door. “Sayyid,” he said eagerly.

  “Allah be praised, he’s early. Munir—” He gestured toward the rug. “Pack up our things, we’ll be leaving in a few minutes. There’s no point in your killing them, Sabry will do it.”

  The sound of the helicopter filled the room; a gust of air blew in through the open door, lifting ashes from the fireplace and scattering them. The noise abruptly stilled, and a minute later Mrs. Pollifax heard the crunch of shoes on the pebbles outside. Her heart began to hammer sickeningly against her ribs. As Sabry entered the room she stood up and said in a clear loud voice, “I have something to say to you.”

  Twenty

  The sheik glanced at his watch. “Very well—say it, but be quick.”

  She lifted her head and said steadily, “There are only cans of peaches in your suitcase.”

  “I beg your pardon!” he said in astonishment.

  “For God’s sake,” groaned Robin.

  Her head went higher. “I think you should know that just before you brought me here I removed the two original cans and substituted two cans of fruit for them. The real ones are back at the Clinic.”

  He looked amused. “Which means that really we should not kill you yet, is this correct? Instead we should all drive back to the Clinic and play hide-and-seek again?”

  “Whatever you feel necessary,” she said calmly. “But I wanted to stress that if you kill us now you’ll be sorry later for very practical reasons, if not moral ones. You won’t know how to find the original two cans.”

  “That’s very true, of course,” he said politely, watching her face. “Munir,” he added briskly, “bring us a can opener.”

  “Now you’ve done it,” murmured Robin.

  Mrs. Pollifax waited. Munir went into the kitchen and returned bearing a small metal can opener. “Give it to her,” ordered the sheik.

  “Sayyid,” said Sabry in protest.

  The sheik waved his protest aside. “No, no, this amuses me, Ibrahim, let us see what she dares.”

  Munir handed Mrs. Pollifax the can opener and she moved to the table in the center of the room. Opening the suitcase she slowly removed the plastic bags of filler and then the layers of shredded newspaper. She had at least gained the middle of the room, and she hoped that Robin would realize this. Detaching one of the cans from its cage she set it on the table, gripped the handle of the can opener and bent over it.

  Abruptly a hand was placed over hers and she looked up into the cold dark eyes of the sheik. “That will be enough,” he said curtly. “You are a very good actress and it’s a clever trick on your part but do you really believe I would allow you to injure the contents of this can?”

  “But it’s only a can of peaches,” she protested. “How can I persuade you unless I open it?”

  “Shoot her, Ibrahim,” he said in a bored voice and turned away. “Kill her, she grows tiresome.”

  “You bloody coward,” cried Robin, stepping forward.

  “Back!” snarled Ibrahim Sabry, lifting his gun. His sharp command was echoed by a shouted command from outside the chalet and Mrs. Pollifax saw Robin stop in midstride. Everyone stopped, it was like a game of Statues, Robin with one foot off the floor, the sheik with arm lifted, Fouad by the door with his mouth open, Sabry four feet away from her with his gun leveled at her head. And when the scene unfroze, she thought, Robin would place his left foot on the floor, the sheik would lower his hand, Sabry’s finger would squeeze the trigger and she would die. The moment felt endless, she wanted to scream, “Get it over with!” and then she realized that what had turned them into stone was that all of the sheik’s men were inside this room but the voice had come from outside.

  “Ici la police.—–Sortez, les mains en l’air!” called the voice.

  No one moved. The moment stretched out interminably. She stood dazed, not understanding the words and wondering why the voice sounded so familiar, wondering why a picture flashed into her mind of a sunny morning in a garden and an old man leaning on a cane, and then she understood that it was the voice of General d’ Estaing that she heard. She thought incredulously, the general here?

  And then a second voice called, “Come out with your hands high—the jig is up!”

  Robin’s voice. Robin’s voice on a tape recorder.

  “Hafez,” she whispered. He was alive.

  “What the devil!” cried the sheik, and at once the spell was broken. Mrs. Pollifax threw herself at Sabry and knocked the gun out of his hand. As the gun clattered to the floor she slashed at him with her other hand and he staggered to the floor. Turning she saw that Robin had hurled himself upon Fouad and was struggling for his gun. As she stepped back Munir ran across the room to pluck Sabry’s gun from the floor. He dropped it, bent to pick it up again and she kicked him. He grasped her leg and brought her down to the rug with him and they rolled over. The gun went off and sent a searing hot flame up her left arm. Just as Munir reached for her throat with both hands a figure in a long white robe rushed across the room and hit him over the head with a poker.

  Mrs. Pollifax sat up. Her head spinning dizzily and she felt a little sick. Madame Parviz was standing over Fouad and Robin was sitting on the floor brushing dust from his trousers. The sheik was nowhere to be seen, nor was the suitcase. Mrs. Pollifax stumbled to her feet, swayed a little, and made her way to the door.

  The sheik was climbing into the helicopter that sat like a bloated dragonfly among the rocks outside. She saw the blades begin to rotate, churn, and then blur, and as she limped to the top step the helicopter lifted from the ground and she and the sheik exchanged a long glance through the Plexiglas window. The helicopter turned, lifted, and soared away over the hill, and as its noise diminished she heard the tape recorder call over and over the jig is up the jig is up the jig …

  She sat down weakly on the top step and said “Hafez?”

  The droning mechanical words seemed to come from the solitary tree on the hillside. “Hafez?” she called again, louder.

  Hafez emerged from behind the tree. He hesitated until he saw her and then came bounding over the rocks toward her, a small intense figure radiating joy. “Madame!” he cried. “Oh madame, it worked!”

  “Hafez,” she said with feeling, “you’ve just saved our lives. However did you find us!”

  “Find you? But madame, I never left you,” he cried happily. “I hid in the trunk of the limousine. Don’t you remember you said we must all be resourceful?”

  “Resourceful,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, and frowned over a word that sounded familiar to her but held no meaning at all. “Resourceful,” she said again, and looked up at the sun which had suddenly begun to skid across the sky.

  Hafez gasped. “Madame—there is blood dripping on the stair!” His glance lifted to her arm and his eyes widened in horror. She heard him shout, “Grandmama! Robin! She has been shot!” and then, “Monsieur, she is fainting!”

  Someone leaned over her, words were spoken, she was lifted and carried to the car while over and over the tape recorder called out the jig is up the jig is up the jig is up the jig … In the darkness that followed she heard a strange variety of voices—Bishop’s first of all, but that was impossible because Bishop belonged
in America—and then she thought she heard General d’Estaing speaking, and Court’s reply, and then Dr. Lichtenstein commanded them to be quiet and there was silence. A long black silence.

  Twenty-One

  Mrs. Pollifax opened her eyes to find that she was lying in bed in her room at Montbrison. She stared at the ceiling, puzzled, and then her glance moved slowly down the wall, which an evening sun had striped with gold, and when her eyes focused on the face of the man seated beside her she said, “Whatever are you doing here!”

  Bishop looked up from a magazine and grinned. “Is that any way to welcome me? Good God, when I arrived this morning I thought I’d arrived in time for your funeral. Carstairs sent me. He had a strong hunch things were going wrong.”

  She said dreamily, “They went wrong for me in the right way. Or right for me in the wrong way.” She frowned. “Why do I feel so peculiar, Bishop?”

  “You’ve just had a bullet removed from your arm,” he explained. “You were bleeding like hell so Dr. Lichtenstein gave you a whiff of something and removed it in his office. They don’t have an operating room here.”

  “Oh,” she said, and tried to make sense of his explanation, which seemed very odd to her until she peered at her arm and discovered it swathed in gauze and bound to a splint.

  “It’s still Monday—only seven o’clock in the evening,” he assured her. “Interpol has been here all day putting the pieces together and worrying like hell about you. They found a woman tied to a chair in room 150, and Marcel’s body in the closet of room 153. I take it you’ve had a rather busy weekend?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking back on it from a vast distance and then the distance abruptly telescoped and she struggled to sit up. “The sheik?”

  Bishop shook his head. “He got away. His private plane took off from Geneva airport at twelve noon.”

  “But the coup d’etat—?”

  “Firmly squashed—we think—but here’s Schoenbeck,” Bishop said, rising. “He’s the man who can tell you about it. Mrs. Pollifax, it’s high time you meet Henri Schoenbeck of Interpol.”

  Monsieur Schoenbeck advanced into the room looking a little shy, a little prim, his lips pursed but his eyes warm as they encountered hers. “And I, madame, am in your debt,” he said, giving her a long and searching glance as he grasped her right hand. He returned it gently to her bed. “It is my loss that we meet only now, madame.”

  “Are you the person to whom I signaled?” she asked.

  “No, no, that was Gervard.” His lips curved faintly into a smile. “It may amuse you, madame, to learn that after allowing you to become settled at Montbrison over the weekend we had planned to pay a call upon you today and set up a more suitable contact. We had wanted,” he explained, “to give you the weekend to become oriented. A plan, I might add, that has nearly cost you your life.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Pollifax politely, “it all appears to be over now, so there scarcely seems any point in post-mortems.”

  “Then allow me to tell you that I have just returned from the chalet on the Wildehorn. Burke-Jones and Hafez accompanied me, and on the way they told me a great deal of what happened. It may console you to learn that at this moment the sheik’s three men are entering a nearby prison.”

  “It consoles me,” she admitted, “but the sheik has flown away, I hear, with his peaches?”

  Schoenbeck frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “With the peaches.”

  Schoenbeck and Bishop exchanged glances. “Probably the chloroform,” suggested Bishop.

  Schoenbeck nodded. “The head becomes light.” He said gently, “There is no need to pretend any longer now, madame. I have been told that you tried to persuade the sheik that he did not have the plutonium but you are quite safe now, you know.”

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “I suppose there is something absurd about peaches, Monsieur Schoenbeck, but I can assure you that what I said was true. The plutonium never left the Clinic. It’s here.”

  “I think I believe her,” said Bishop in an astonished voice.

  “Never left the Clinic!” echoed Schoenbeck. “But then the French consignment—the French plutonium—is no longer in the hands of the sheik? Madame, if you would tell me precisely where it is—”

  Mrs. Pollifax ignored the question and instead smiled at him dazzlingly. “What do you think of Robin, Monsieur Schoenbeck?”

  “Robin? He has surprised me, that much I will say.”

  “If you mean Burks-Jones, isn’t he the chap you all suspected of killing Fraser?” asked Bishop.

  Schoenbeck looked pained. “Unfortunately, yes. Of all the guests at the clinic he persisted in remaining a mystery. It appears that the man is nothing less than a jewel thief.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said calmly, “Yes, and a very good jewel thief. I’m delighted he’s told you about himself but you must see that by being honest with you he’s completely ruined his career.” She looked at Schoenbeck sternly. “Is there anything you care to do about that M. Schoenbeck?”

  His glance moved to hers and he smiled faintly. “Yes, madame, there is, but I am wondering how you guessed it.”

  “It’s an idea that frankly occurred to me several days ago,” she said. “Perhaps you’re reading my mind, M. Schoenbeck.”

  “Mon Dieu, one hopes not!”

  “He’s tremendously efficient about picking locks and he enjoys working alone, he’s surprisingly clever in emergencies and he has gorgeous clothes.”

  Schoenbeck said dryly, “The clothes would do it, of course. As a matter of fact, madame, I am not such a fool as to allow such talent to slip through my fingers. I have already made certain approaches and he appears most interested.” He added ruefully. “I can only wish that young Hafez could work for Interpol, too. Now there’s a promising young brain.”

  “I think he prefers to become an astronomer,” put in Mrs. Pollifax. “Where is he?”

  “He and his grandmother are still talking to his father on the telephone, I believe, but he is anxious to see you when I have finished with you.”

  She shook her head in wonder. “It’s incredible how resourceful he’s been. If it hadn’t been for Hafez—”

  “Please,” Schoenbeck said firmly. “Please, it is better, as you say, to have no post-mortems. Allow me instead to conduct them and to brood over how near Kashan came to pulling off his coup and completing his matched set of plutonium.”

  “What will happen to him?” she asked.

  Schoenbeck sighed. “Very little, I fear. It is an unfortunate fact but—so far as I can see—no crime has been committed by the sheik except that of conspiracy, and this King Jarroud will have to deal with on a local level. The sheik paid others to kill for him, and it is they who will be punished. It is a pity but I think he will suffer only a little embarrassment and—one hopes—a few grave doubts that Allah personally spoke to him.”

  “Even when he planned to threaten the world with an atom bomb?” protested Mrs. Pollifax. “He said he had an army in the desert, and laboratories—and obviously he had a network of people available to him if he succeeded in stealing plutonium.”

  “We can only hope, madame,” said Schoenbeck, “but we have discovered that before he left Switzerland the sheik had time to make a telephone call to Zabya. I fear that we may find only empty laboratories—if we find them at all—and as for a secret army I suspect the sheik has already ordered it disbanded or moved.”

  “Moved!” cried Mrs. Pollifax in a dismayed voice.

  “Naturally he will not dare to try his coup d’etat tomorrow but he still has several pounds of plutonium, madame. Dreams die hard.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Pollifax.

  He nodded. “I am not overly optimistic that Kashan’s ambitions have been deflated. I can assure you that the sheik will be closely watched but I must tell you that the desert is enormous, madame, and much of it uncharted.” He sighed. “When I grow depressed—as one does—about the frailties of civilization and the absence of
saints, it is men like the sheik who give me patience. A number of governments muddling along give us a thin margin of error but it is nevertheless a margin against oblivion.”

  She said reluctantly, “He impressed me, you know.”

  Schoenbeck smiled. “But of course, Madame—the sheik would make the perfect anti-Christ.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Bishop, startled.

  Schoenbeck’s mouth twisted humorously. “You do not know your Bible? It is prophesied that after the Jews regain Jerusalem—as they did several years ago—there will come the anti-Christ, a man who will perform miracles for the people and bring peace to the world. And—how does it go?” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “ ‘And when the people shall say—peace and safety!—then suddenly destruction will come upon them as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape.’ Thessalonians, I believe.” He bowed to them and strolled toward the door.

  “Monsieur Schoenbeck,” Mrs. Pollifax called after him softly. “The plutonium is in the basement supply room, in the farthest corner hidden behind a sack of charcoal.”

  He smiled. “Thank you, madame.”

  “Odd duck,” said Bishop when he had gone. “On the whole, I believe Carstairs was a bit rough on him.” He, too, arose. “Well, Mrs. Pollifax,” he said, walking over to kiss her lightly on the cheek, “it’s time for me to fly away again. You’ve orders to stay through the week until you’ve thoroughly convalesced, you know. If you don’t, Carstairs will have my head for it.”

  “But I’m delighted to stay,” said Mrs. Pollifax, “and actually quite relieved that I may. Can you imagine Miss Hartshorne’s reaction if I should go back to New Brunswick with my arm like this?” She shook her head at the thought. “She’ll be very difficult, at least until Christmas. She’ll say it’s exactly what I deserve for spending a dull week in Baltimore visiting an old friend.” With a small twinkle she added, “Miss Hartshorne feels I lack a sense of adventure.”