Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  Lake Scutari, she remembered from the book … two hundred square miles in size, a large lake, half of it in Yugoslavia.… The plane roared over the lake at low altitude and it gave her a queer sense of panic to realize that it must be looking for them. Of course—she had shot a guard and advertised their aliveness. In this quiet, pastoral countryside the sound of a gunshot would be heard for miles. Not many natives would own guns, the country was too poor, too barren of life to supply money for such a luxury. There would be no explaining away such a provocative noise.

  The plane disappeared to the north and the Genie stopped, one finger on his lips, one hand on Mrs. Pollifax’s arm. She and Farrell halted. The floor of the forest had been sloping upward so that it was higher than the water on their left, causing a drop that made it less accessible from land. Apparently the Genie had thought of something, for removing his shoes and tying them around his neck he began retracing their steps. Mrs. Pollifax waited. She wanted to sit, she wanted to fall to the ground, but she knew instinctively that Farrell couldn’t sit down—mustn’t, in fact, lest he never get up again—and an innate courtesy kept her upright. Presently, much to her surprise, she saw the Genie wading toward them along the shallows of the lake. He appeared to be searching for something and she looked away without interest, all curiosity deadened by the stupor of her body. Minutes or hours later the Genie was touching her arm, and she and Farrell followed him to the bank. He gestured toward the water, directing them to sit down on the bank and then jump into the shallows. Mrs. Pollifax did so, obediently and humbly. Then he was guiding them back a few yards toward an old tree that hung over the lake, its roots exposed and rotting. There was no beach here; the water lapped the eroded banking and over the years had brought to it an accumulation of debris. The Genie parted the branches of a sumac that had grown from the gnarled roots and said in a low voice, “It’s not particularly dry but there’s room here for three people.”

  “There is?” and then, “Will they think of it too?” Mrs. Pollifax asked anxiously, and then was sorry she had said this, for there was no safety anywhere in life, except as illusion, and she was surprised at herself for wanting a guarantee from the Genie. Perhaps it was her American blood, Americans were so very security-minded, or perhaps she was just too tired and stiff and afraid. But the Genie did not reply and she was grateful that he didn’t. Instead he pushed aside a stout log that had been caught in the flotsam and helped Farrell to kneel and crawl into the tiny cave under the bank. She followed, and the Genie squeezed in after her, taking care to bend back the branches of the sumac and to pull the log back to its original position.

  The little cave was not dry. The earth was wet but at least there were no puddles. The ceiling was too low for sitting; they had to lie on their stomachs, Farrell pressed against the earth, Mrs. Pollifax in the middle and the Genie nearest the outside. It was a curiously womblike place: dark, quiet and blessedly cool. Mrs. Pollifax felt her eyes closing. She knew there were questions unasked and things undone and yet her eyes simply would not remain open. Fatigue won and Mrs. Pollifax slept, not deeply and certainly not comfortably, but with a fitful, twitching, feverish need from exhaustion.

  She was awakened not so much by sound as by the awareness of danger that emanated from Farrell and the Genie, a stiffening of their bodies and a lifting of heads. She, too, stiffened and lifted her head from her arms to hear the roar of a motor nearby. Straining, she realized it wasn’t a plane but a motorboat, and running so near to the shore that it was a wonder its propeller cleared the bottom. She lay inert, terrified that at any moment some trace of them be seen. The boat drew level with their hiding place, passed them by and in its wake came the waves. Mrs. Pollifax had not thought of waves and in any case would not have considered them a threat. All motorboats caused waves, some large, some small. Waves rippled charmingly as they swept toward shore, and always they made lovely sounds as they met the beach. She had forgotten that here there was no beach.

  The water came with a rush, lifting the debris outside their hole and flinging twigs and leaves aside to sweep inside their tiny earthen cave. One moment Mrs. Pollifax was gazing at the entrance and the next moment she was totally submerged and without hope of escape as the water filled their cave from floor to ceiling. “This at last is the end,” she thought as she fought to hold her breath. As her lungs gasped for air she drew in the first water through her nostrils, found no sustenance in it and during the brief moment of panic that precedes drowning she arched her body for one last fight. The struggle brought her head up, and suddenly there came the near alien sensation of air entering her lungs again. Sputtering, choking and gasping she realized that the water had receded. She had just time enough to fill her lungs before the next wave entered. All in all there were six waves, three of them that filled the cave and three that came only to her shoulders before retiring. Then the surge of water desisted.

  They were still alive. Farrell lay on his side, with only a weak smile to show that he survived. The Genie was vomiting water, his shoulders heaving, and she brought up one arm—it was difficult in so confined a space—and patted his shoulder in commiseration. The Genie gagged once and rolled over on his back, an arm across his face.

  “Close,” said Mrs. Pollifax.

  The Genie only nodded.

  From far away came the sound of the airplane, its noise steadily increasing, and from above they heard the sound of men’s voices shouting, and Mrs. Pollifax conceded that the chase was on in earnest. Men called unintelligible orders above their heads, the launch came back, slowed for an exchange of shouts, then sped away sending fresh waves to torture them in their cave. The men along the shore moved away, their voices growing distant as they shouted back and forth in the forest, and as Mrs. Pollifax lifted a tired and dripping head a small lull occurred.

  “I’m hungry,” said the Genie.

  Slowly and stupidly Mrs. Pollifax realized that he had not shared in the small meal that she and Farrell had divided in the cornfield and she fumbled in her petticoats for food. Sadly she drew out a sodden piece of cheese and handed it to the Genie—the bread had completely disintegrated and not a crumb of it was found. The pistol, too, was wet, and drearily she remembered that pistols did not usually function after being submerged in water. She turned her head and watched the Genie munch his cheese, very slowly, to make it last, and then her attention was distracted by the sound of gunshots from far away. This confused her tired mind; she wondered if only a part of herself and of Farrell and the Genie had hidden here in the cave while their physical selves had gone on and on through the pines and if somewhere along the shores of the lake the general was capturing them now. She pinched herself experimentally and it hurt, and this reassured her that she had not become disembodied after all.

  “Must have caught some other poor devil in hiding,” Farrell said in a low voice.

  Mentally Mrs. Pollifax thanked him for reassuring her.

  The plane was returning, and the launch with it, and for the next ten minutes each of them fought mutely and individually to keep from drowning. Nor were there any lulls following, for it became obvious that a number of police launches had begun to patrol the shores of the lake. Whole centuries passed—what time had they crawled in here, wondered Mrs. Pollifax, at one o’clock in the afternoon, two o’clock?—and each century left her colder and wetter. In what other world had she yearned for cool water to drink and bathe in? Now she was sated with it, and she kept recalling an old saying that one should never wish too hard for something lest the gods bestow it.

  “Rubbish,” she thought with a sniff, and wondered if next she might become delirious.

  Then where patches of sunshine had illuminated the log outside and filtered through to the cave there was a deepening twilight. Farrell leaned across her and said to the Genie, “We have to leave soon.”

  She could no longer see the Genie’s face but his voice said blankly, “Leave?”

  Mrs. Pollifax turned her head back to Farrell. H
e said flatly, “Absolutely. I suggest we float that log that’s outside, and hang on to it all the way across Lake Scutari. If we’re lucky, if the wind isn’t against us, if we have enough strength, we might land in Yugoslavia.”

  Mrs. Pollifax marveled at his resilience, that he could make plans after being so nearly embalmed, and then she realized that ever since this journey had begun there had been one of them to carry them a step farther when the other two could manage nothing more. How very surprising this was, she reflected, and again she pulled herself together to help and heard herself say, “Yes, of course, that’s what we must do.” Eight words and each of them labored, but at least she had said them.

  “Police boats,” pointed out the Genie wanly.

  “We’ll have to watch out for them, that’s all. And if they have powerful searchlights—can you swim, Duchess?”

  “Feebly.”

  “The same here,” contributed the Genie.

  “Then we either hide behind the log, or under it, or—”

  Or be seen and captured, finished Mrs. Pollifax silently, and asked, “How far?”

  “Who knows?”

  Mrs. Pollifax turned to the Genie. “We still know nothing at all about you, you haven’t told us even your name.”

  “Smith will do nicely if you’d like a name.”

  Mrs. Pollifax found herself reviving and bristling at such an insult. She said coldly, “I don’t think it will do at all unless your name really is Smith.”

  “Nobody’s named Smith,” growled Farrell. “Not in my circle.”

  “Much, much better if you don’t know my name,” replied the Genie. “Better for you if you meet General Perdido again. Safer. He’d never appreciate your knowing.”

  “Can’t think why,” Farrell retorted.

  “I was thinking of next of kin,” Mrs. Pollifax told the Genie reproachfully.

  Something like a chuckle came from the Genie. “Bless you, they would have held the funeral for me two years ago. I’ve been dead a long, long time, Mrs.—Pollifax, is it?”

  “Yes,” she said, thoroughly puzzled by now. “Well, no point in arguing.”

  “Right, it’s time we go,” Farrell reminded them. “You want to stick your head out?”

  The Genie began pushing at the twigs and branches and dead leaves that had returned to the bank after the last wave, and presently he crawled out. Mrs. Pollifax knew when he left because he kicked her in the face as he went. She heard him stand up outside, dripping only a little, and a few minutes later he reached in to place an icy hand on her shoulder. “All clear,” he whispered. “There are a few lights on the opposite shore but that’s a distance of miles. No police boats to be heard or seen at the moment.”

  Mrs. Pollifax grimly began the job of moving a body that had lain on its stomach for half a day, and after considerable manipulation and experimentation she managed to climb to her knees and then to squeeze through the opening under the bank. Farrell followed slowly, pushing his damaged leg and homemade crutch ahead of him. The darkness they met was dark and opaque, broken only by a scattering of stars in the sky and half a dozen lights shining across the lake. The air was soft as velvet. The faintly abrasive murmur of a motorboat came to them from a great distance and as they stood there, listening, a fish jumped in the lake and drops of water scattered behind it. There were no other sounds.

  The Genie was wrestling with the log. It had the advantage of being large enough and high enough out of the water to give them sufficient cover, but on the other hand this had the disadvantage of making it harder for them to cling to it from the water. “Straddle it for now,” suggested the Genie. “We can paddle with our hands or feet and if a boat comes we can slip off and hide behind it.”

  But for three exhausted people to mount a wet, round log proved not only difficult but nearly impossible; Mrs. Pollifax began to understand the problems of the logroller. No sooner had one of them climbed on than the others fell off, and they finally brought it back to shallow water and climbed on at the same moment.

  “Everybody ready to set sail?” asked the Genie.

  “As ready as we’ll ever be,” sighed Mrs. Pollifax, thinking how hungry she was, how sleepy, how cold and bone-tired.

  “Damn it, let’s go,” Farrell said fiercely.

  Gingerly they paddled the log out from the shadows and into the breeze that had sprung up from the north, their destination Yugoslavia.

  CHAPTER 21

  In Washington, D.C., on the morning of that same day, Peattie notified Carstairs that he had received information from Peking concerning General Perdido. He would bring in the messages personally whenever Carstairs had the time to see him.

  “Come along now,” said Carstairs, and hung up. As he sat back and lit a cigarette his eyes fell on the calendar and he realized it was now eight days since what he called the “Pollifax Affair” had erupted. Eight days was a long, long time in the life of his department, and he reviewed the facts. They did not cheer him and when Peattie was ushered in he had to forcibly remove the frown from his brow in order to appear civilized. “Good to see you,” he murmured, half rising to shake his hand. “Dropping in doesn’t inconvenience you, I hope.”

  “Lord, no. The Operations Department always fascinates me. I suppose I’m hoping you’ll drop a few clues about how this is turning out.”

  “Badly,” said Carstairs dryly. “What have you come up with?”

  “Yes. Well.” Peattie put on his reading glasses. “It seems that General Perdido has been in Peking, yes, but he did not arrive there until August 24, five days after the kidnapping of your Mrs. Pollifax and Mr. Farrell.”

  “Five days after,” mused Carstairs, frowning. “Was anyone with him?”

  “No one, he arrived quite alone.”

  “Hmmm. So presumably Mrs. Pollifax and Farrell were not taken to Cuba and not taken to China, either.”

  “Also, and this you may find interesting,” went on Peattie, “he arrived in China on a jet that collected him in Athens.”

  “Athens!” exclaimed Carstairs, visibly electrified. “Athens?” He leaned forward and briefly swore. “The Mediterranean—the Balkans—I never thought of Albania, although why on earth he’d take them so far—”

  Peattie nodded and went on. “He remained in Peking until the middle of the week, leaving yesterday in a private plane, destination unknown except that a very reliable informant tells us the plane was heading for—care to guess?”

  “Albania?”

  “Right. But your friends were not with him, and have apparently not been in Peking at all.”

  Carstairs stubbed out his cigarette. “No, obviously not. Albania …” he repeated with a shake of his head. “Anything else?”

  Peattie smiled with the pleasure of someone holding a very interesting card up his sleeve. “Yes, a little something more. I took the liberty of—well, after all, since Albania has become the prodigy of the Chinese Reds it has naturally fallen into my province and so I went ahead, that is—”

  “That is, what?”

  “I made inquiries. General Perdido did land in Albania last night, his plane came in at Shkoder, whereupon the car that met him took off immediately for the mountains.”

  “Very interesting indeed,” said Carstairs. “So on the twenty-fourth, five days after the kidnaping, the general flies from Athens to Peking, remains a few days and then flies to Albania.” He frowned. “It could mean a great deal, it could mean nothing.”

  Peattie nodded. “We know frustratingly little about Albania since the Red Chinese moved in, but there have been rumors that somewhere in the North Albanian Alps there is a building, a very primitive building, a very primitive stone fortress originally built by bandits, where a few very top-secret political prisoners are kept. The countryside is almost inaccessible: cliffs, gorges, crags, landslides, you name it, and the mountain people are a clannish bunch. Still, the rumor persists that such a place exists, and it was into these same mountains that the general disappeared.�
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  “Who’s the informant?” asked Carstairs idly. “Reliable?”

  “An Orthodox Christian priest,” said Peattie. “You may or may not know that the churches have been closed and desecrated in Albania. Our friend’s mosque, for instance, has been turned into a bar and his own existence is precarious. Not too long ago he was put to work for a month on a road gang that repairs and builds roads in the north, and it’s there he heard stories about this place.”

  “Any chance of pinpointing its whereabouts?” Carstairs was already out of his chair and crossing the room to the wall map.

  With a shrug Peattie joined him. “Anywhere from here to there,” he said, tracing the line of the mountains in the north. “We know the road ends about here,” he added, “but of course that doesn’t mean anything, the roads are constantly coming to a crashing halt in these countries and life still goes on, by mule, donkey, bicycle, oxcart, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Carstairs shook his head. “There’s not a chance in the world they could still be alive, not a chance, but is there any way of confirming the fact that they were taken there? That they were killed there?”

  “Very difficult making inquiries,” Peattie said. “Take weeks, I’m afraid. Foreigners, of course, are immediately suspect and the few allowed into the country as tourists see very little. A good many Albanians are connected with the secret police, by membership, through relatives or marriage—the usual trick, you know, to keep the citizenry terrorized. I’m not sure …” He hesitated and then said firmly, “I’m very sure the agents we have over there wouldn’t be allowed to endanger themselves for the sake of—”

  Carstairs bluntly completed the thought. “For the sake of two agents who have been at the mercy of General Perdido for more than a week. Quite right, I wouldn’t allow it myself.”

  Peattie very pointedly looked away and added, “I think I should tell you that this mountain eyrie has a most unsavory reputation. My informant tells us that those who are Catholics cross themselves when it’s mentioned. It’s spoken of in whispers, and said that no one has ever left it alive.”