Elusive Mrs. Pollifax Page 2

  She nodded. “Is the name Tsanko a first or a last name in Bulgaria?”

  “First, I think, isn’t it, Bishop?”

  Bishop nodded.

  “There is also …” Carstairs hesitated. “There is always the possibility that the message isn’t authentic, Mrs. Pollifax. I want you to remember that. If you meet with unforeseen circumstances, you’re to make a fast exit. Very fast.”

  “All right.” She was copying the message on paper, and without glancing up she said, “I go to this shop and order a vest and then wait to be contacted. When I’ve given this man Tsanko the passports do I ask for anything from him?”

  Carstairs frowned. “There’s no bargain involved here, and he’d have every right to be affronted if we insist on anything in return. But if the occasion arises–I leave this entirely up to you–we certainly wouldn’t mind learning more about a man named General Ignatov. What’s his complete name, Bishop?”

  “General Dimiter Kosta Ignatov,” said Bishop promptly.

  “You understand this Tsanko will probably know nothing. The press is state-controlled over there and the people aren’t informed about much of anything,” Carstairs explained. “But we’d appreciate your asking.”

  “I’ll be glad to.” Mrs. Pollifax completed her notes and handed Shipkov’s message back to Carstairs, who stood up. “But you’re leaving without finishing your coffee!” she told him.

  “We have to. There’ll be a helicopter waiting for us at your airport in”–he glanced at his watch–“ten minutes. But I must admit it’s been a real experience meeting you in your natural habitat,” he said with a grin. “As well as seeing your night-blooming cereus.”

  “Both the night-blooming cereus and I seem to bloom once a year,” she said, smiling and rising, too. “Mr. Carstairs, I shall do my very best in Bulgaria, I really will. You can count on me.”

  Bishop saw Carstairs open his mouth to speak, wince and close it with a snap. “Yes,” he said, and then, “We’ll be in touch.”

  “What were you about to say?” asked Bishop curiously as they descended in the elevator to the street.

  Carstairs said testily, “It wasn’t anything I was going to say, damn it. I just experienced the most incredibly clear memory–it came over me in waves–of how I worry about that woman when she’s away.”

  Bishop nodded. “Yes, I believe I pointed that out to you only a few–”

  “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s an ‘I told you so’ attitude,” snapped Carstairs.

  “Yes, sir,” Bishop said, grinning.

  3

  Mrs. Pollifax’s preparations moved along smoothly. The next day she announced to friends and family that she would be flying to Europe soon for a visit to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Her daughter in Arizona was appalled. “Mother! Your first trip abroad and you’re not going to visit Paris or London? You must visit Paris and London!” Jane tended to be somewhat managing, and Mrs. Pollifax braced herself for a long conversation.

  Before telephoning her son, Roger, in Chicago, Mrs. Pollifax also braced herself, but for a different reason: Roger was a very intuitive young man.

  “Bulgaria,” he said now with interest. “You pick the most surprising places, Mother. Not Switzerland, France, Scotland or Belgium?”

  “Bulgaria,” she said firmly.

  “We had the most interesting note from your neighbor Miss Hartshorne at Christmastime,” he told her. “She seemed to think that you’d been here with us for a week last summer, and that Martha had been quite ill.”

  It was not the non sequitur that it sounded; Mrs. Pollifax understood him at once. “How very odd of her to think that,” she said weakly.

  “Wasn’t it?” He chuckled. “Whatever you’re up to, Mother, I hope it’s fun.” And with that he blithely hung up.

  The gentleman named Osmonde arrived on Thursday at ten o’clock, and was thoroughly enjoyable. Mrs. Pollifax fed him tea and macaroons and was struck by his conscientiousness: he insisted first upon seeing, measuring and photographing the coat she would wear with the hat. “For the blending, the amalgamation,” he said vaguely, and she obediently buttoned herself into the quilted brown travel coat that she intended to wear on the trip.

  About the hat she was as doubtful as he. Every design that he sketched looked top-heavy and he agreed this would be a problem. “You’ll be carrying almost fifteen ounces in the hat,” he pointed out. “Distributed, of course. Pillbox? Derby?” He sighed. “It offends the aesthetics.”

  “What will you do?”

  “The hat itself must be very light in weight, yet look heavy enough–complicated enough–to explain its odd bulk. Perhaps a wire structure with two-inch roses covering it?”

  Mrs. Pollifax winced.

  “A polyethylene motor helmet?” he suggested, pencil flying, and then after a glance at Mrs. Pollifax–her cheerful round face, bright eyes and unsubdued fly-away white hair–he sighed and discreetly put that idea aside. “Will you trust me?”

  “I don’t want to,” Mrs. Pollifax told him frankly, “but I’m due at the Art Association lunch in half an hour. I shall have to trust you.”

  He left with relief, carrying measurements and notes.

  On the following day there were fresh instructions from Carstairs–really Mrs. Pollifax had not felt so popular since she’d won a first prize for her geraniums.

  “We’ve come up with something to help blunt Balkantourist’s interest in you,” he said. “At least we think it may if you can wangle it. There’s a chap in Sofia you might try to hire as private guide on your arrival.”

  Mrs. Pollifax frowned. “I don’t understand. Won’t Balkantourist object to my doing this?”

  Carstairs’ voice was dry. “They’ll probably find it amusing. This man has worked for them on a number of occasions, but he drinks too much to be reliable. Our newsmen often use him when they pass through Sofia. His name is Carleton Bemish.”

  “Bemish,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, writing it down.

  “He’s an Englishman–an expatriate–who’s lived in Sofia for years and speaks the language fluently. He’s even married to a Bulgarian. Technically he’s a free-lance correspondent–does pieces for the London papers when there’s a Balkan crisis–but actually he’s one of those alcoholic hangers-on who can never go home again because of some tawdry scandal or another.”

  “He doesn’t sound very appetizing,” commented Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Of course not. From what I’m told he’d sell his own mother, but he’ll be a helluva lot easier to lose than Balkantourist when the time comes for you to make contact. By the way, we’ve decided you should rent a car for your stay in Sofia. That might entice Bemish, too–he doesn’t have one. Is your license up to date?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Try to get Bemish,” he said, and rang off.

  Mrs. Pollifax added his name to her list and continued her research on Bulgaria, impressed and surprised to learn that it had been free of Turkey’s oppressive rule for only some eighty years. It was the Russians who had helped liberate Bulgaria from Turkey, and it was the Russians who had liberated them later from the Nazis. It suggested a much more congenial relationship than she’d expected, and a difference from other satellite countries that intrigued her.

  There was one visitor to Mrs. Pollifax’s apartment, however, that she had not expected. She came home one afternoon to find her door ajar and the lock so jammed that she could not turn the key in it. Yet so far as Mrs. Pollifax could discover nothing at all had been taken. “But just see the lock,” she told the policeman when he arrived.

  “You’re sure nothing was stolen?” he said skeptically.

  “I looked very carefully while I waited for you,” she told him. “The only jewelry of any value is still in the box on my bureau. I have about thirty dollars in bills and small change lying here on the bookcase–in plain sight–in the Mexican pottery bowl. Even my television set’s untouched, and it’s portable.”

  “Odd,�
� said the policeman, looking as baffled as Mrs. Pollifax felt. “Let’s make a few inquiries. Maybe someone noticed a stranger on the premises. Your burglar may have been frightened away before he got inside.”

  The only person who had seen anyone at all in the hall that day was Miss Hartshorne, whose apartment lay across the hall. “Yes, I saw a stranger,” she said. “I’d been downtown, and was having a little trouble finding the key in my purse. So I took longer than usual, and the elevator door opened and …”

  Mrs. Pollifax was listening, as well as the policeman, and she smiled reassuringly at her friend. “But who was it?” she asked.

  “Oh, he couldn’t have been your burglar,” Miss Hartshorne said flatly. “He had such a good face. Cheerful. He was whistling as he came out of the elevator.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said firmly, “Grace, some of the most fiendish murderers have kind, cheerful faces. What man?”

  “The young man who was delivering your cleaning. He held it up rather high as he came down the hall. It was on a hanger wrapped in that transparent plastic, you know. He said ‘Good afternoon,’ and I said ‘Good afternoon’ and then I found my key, unlocked my door and went in. He walked on to your door.”

  “What on earth made you think he went to my door?” asked Mrs. Pollifax. “Did you actually see him?”

  Miss Hartshorne looked reproachful. “No, but I knew he was going there because he was carrying your coat, Emily. That quilted brown raincoat you wear. The new one. I could see it very clearly through the plastic.”

  Mrs. Pollifax looked at her thoughtfully, and then at the policeman, who had written all this down, and who now thanked Miss Hartshorne for her help. She did not say anything. She went back alone into her apartment to wait for the locksmith, but she remained thoughtful for a long time because she had not sent her quilted brown coat to the cleaner. She opened the closet door and looked inside. The coat hung there without any transparent wrappings. She took it out and examined it, then put her hand into each pocket. From one she drew out a wrinkled handkerchief with the initials EP, and from the other a bus token. She carried the coat to the window and studied it more carefully in the sunlight, but nothing appeared to be different. She put it on and observed it in the mirror. For a moment she thought it might be a shade longer than she remembered it, and then she chided herself for imagining things. She returned it to the closet.

  But still it remained something of a mystery, not totally to be dismissed and apparently not to be solved until Miss Hartshorne changed her mind about its being this particular coat she’d seen.

  A week later Mrs. Pollifax left for the Balkans wearing the coat and her new custom-made hat. She had misjudged Osmonde. He had produced a marvelously imaginative hat, and just the kind that she enjoyed most. It was an inflated, cushiony bird’s nest made out of soft woven straw with a small feathered bird perched at the peak. It was true that it had a tendency to tilt, but Mrs. Pollifax skewered it sternly in place with three stout hatpins.

  “You what?” said Bishop incredulously. He had been on vacation for a week–his first vacation in five years–and he had returned only the day before. Now a cable had arrived from Bulgaria that was utterly mystifying to Bishop. It lay on the desk between them in Carstairs’ office. It read:

  COAT FOR 10573 CLEARED OKAY AND IN POSSESSION, WILL PROCEED AS DIRECTED.

  10573 was Mrs. Pollifax’s file number.

  Carstairs sighed. “I told you, it’s this damn economy drive. Upstairs insisted. Budgetwise, it took two experienced men a week to forge those passports, and then there were Mrs. Pollifax’s travel expenses, not to mention Osmonde’s bill for the hat. As they pointed out Upstairs, we get nothing but good will out of sending eight forged passports into Bulgaria. It’s not enough to justify the expense. I was told this flatly. I had to share my courier.”

  Bishop said accusingly, “This cable is from Assen Radev.”

  “Yes, by way of Belgrade, Frankfurt, London and Baltimore. It came out with his weekly delivery of pâté de foie gras.”

  Bishop’s coldness turned glacial. “Radev’s one of our nasties–you know that–and you’ve always sworn you’d keep Mrs. Pollifax out of the heavy stuff.”

  “I told you this was not my idea,” Carstairs reminded him irritably. “They had to get some things to Radev, I had already engaged Mrs. Pollifax and briefed her for a simple courier job. What could I do? Radev has been sent Mrs. Pollifax’s original coat. A duplicate coat was made–an exact copy, but fitted with the papers–and smuggled into Mrs. Pollifax’s apartment. They’re doubling up assignments everywhere.”

  “Then perhaps you can explain why the hell you didn’t tell Mrs. Pollifax she’s going into Bulgaria loaded for bear!”

  Carstairs sighed. “Because she only goes through Customs ‘loaded for bear,’ as you call it, and as soon as she’s entered Bulgaria, Radev will quietly exchange coats with her. She won’t even know about it. I decided that was wisest. She’s only an amateur, you know.”

  “I’m surprised you remember that,” Bishop said bitterly. “I think it’s shocking you didn’t tell her. I suppose you’ve considered the possibility that Radev could have a heart attack before he can switch coats–or get clipped by a car?”

  Carstairs said evenly, “Traffic is extremely light in Sofia, and I understand the rate of cardiac seizure in Bulgaria is very low. Something to do with all that yogurt they eat.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re losing your usual sense of detachment, Bishop.”

  “Detachment! I don’t even dare ask what’s hidden in that coat–”

  “It’s better you not,” Carstairs assured him gravely. “This isn’t Sears Roebuck or Gimbels, you know. We’re heels in the CIA, Bishop–outcasts and sinners and heels. Try to remember that.”

  Bishop’s lips thinned. “Outcasts, yes. Sinners possibly. Heels obviously. But I thought we were at least gentlemen,” he said coldly, and walked out, closing the door sharply behind him.

  4

  Mrs. Pollifax sat in the Belgrade air terminal and waited patiently for TABSO to announce its flight to Sofia. She was quite ready for departure. The wild gray cliffs of Yugoslavia, its friendly people, the incredible blue of the Adriatic had relaxed and charmed her, but now there was work to do.

  She had arrived early because she enjoyed watching departures. The planes for Frankfurt, Budapest, Dubrovnik and Brussels had been announced and had presumably left. Now she guessed all the remaining travelers were bound for Sofia, and her glance returned to a group of young people who occupied the corner of the lounge. She had been covertly observing them for some time, certain that two of them were Americans. She had expected them to leave on the plane for Brussels, but they were still here. They were bare-legged, tanned and long-haired–boys and girls alike–and instead of luggage they carried dusty packs on their backs.

  They looked as though they were quarreling now, and as she watched, one of the girls lifted her voice and said furiously, “But I told you! All of us don’t want to go to Bulgaria, can’t you understand?”

  “Debby, you’re shouting.”

  “Why shouldn’t I shout? I feel like shouting!”

  Mrs. Pollifax frankly eavesdropped.

  “Phil, for instance–and me, too,” the American girl said. “And last night Andre admitted he wasn’t all that interested either.”

  Her anger appeared to be directed at the stocky dark young man who seemed to be in charge of the group. He looked less a student than the others, older and harder. Now he gesticulated in reply. “We have the visas, yes? You think it easy to get visas to Bulgaria? Why the hell not?” His was an accent Mrs. Pollifax found difficult to pinpoint–Yugoslavian, perhaps. In any case he sounded insulted by this revolt, and very angry indeed.

  “But none of us really thought they’d give us visas!” flung out the American girl. “And Phil’s got dysentery, and I just think it’s–”

  “We voted, didn’t we?”

  “Nikki and Debby, stop arguing,” sa
id the French girl flatly, and they all looked at her, and the ginger-haired English boy threw her a kiss and the third girl laughed and said something in German that caused them all to laugh.

  All except the American boy named Phil, who picked up his knapsack and carried it to the bench beside Mrs. Pollifax and sat down.

  “Trouble?” asked Mrs. Pollifax cheerfully.

  He turned and stared at her and she in turn looked at him. He seemed a very nice young man. Disreputable, of course, in those filthy jeans and all that untidy black hair, but his eyes were a marvelous shade of intense blue and the height of his cheekbones gave his face an interesting shape.

  The boy nodded; she had been approved. “We’re getting damn sick of each other,” he said bluntly.

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “It happens. Have you been together long?”

  He shrugged. “Some of us. But we were doing fine until Nikki came along. I’m beginning to hate his guts.”

  “That would be the bossy, dark young man?”

  “Yeah, that’s Nikki,” he said, and they both stared across at Nikki, whose back was turned to them. “He showed up in Dubrovnik two weeks ago. Debby I met in Vienna–she’s great–and she’d already met Ghislaine in Paris. Erika and Andre joined us on the road later, but Nikki–”

  “Obviously the executive type,” said Mrs. Pollifax sympathetically. Noting the expression on the young man’s face she added sharply, “Are you all right?”

  “Damn dysentery,” he said. His face had gone white and he leaned over in pain, guarding himself by hugging his stomach with his arms.

  “But haven’t you medicine for it?”

  He shook his head. “I lost it yesterday, but Nikki’s feeding me his.” He lifted his head and said with a little laugh, “Maybe I’ll have to go along to Bulgaria with him just to stay with his pills. Actually I’m here only to see them off. I don’t want to go to Bulgaria. No–I can’t make up my mind.” He laughed savagely. “Mind! I don’t have any mind, it’s gone all groggy.”