Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  “Yes. Are you free to work for us from August 3 to August 22?”

  “Why—oh, yes,” she gasped. “Yes, I’m quite free—I’d be delighted!”

  “Excellent. Have you ever visited Mexico?”

  “Mexico!” She looked positively radiant. “No, never. You’d like me to go to Mexico?”

  He appreciated the quick response; there had been no hesitation at all. “Yes. You’ll be paid the usual fee for courier work, and of course all your expenses will be taken care of while you are there. It’s quite simple. You’ll be an American tourist and use your own name. The job consists of visiting a specific place in Mexico City at a specific date, and for the rest of the time you’ll be on your own.” She was listening with a look of wonder, as if she could not believe her good fortune. He reflected that an extremely bad photographer had taken her picture; Miss Webster was not only right but perfect. “You can handle this?” he added with a smile.

  She drew in a deep breath and nodded. “That’s why I came, you see—because I thought I could.” She added quickly, “Yes, I’m sure I can handle it. I will do my very, very best.”

  “I think you will, too,” he said. “Look here, do you mind coming up to my office for a moment? I won’t have time to brief you this afternoon, and only my secretary can tell me when I’m free, but I’ll want to arrange an appointment with you as soon as possible.” With a nod Carstairs dismissed the guard outside the door and guided his companion toward the bank of elevators. “I’d like to wrap this up without delay. I’ll need you for at least an hour and my schedule this afternoon is quite hopeless. I could see you this evening but I think tomorrow morning would be better. Would that be convenient?”

  “It would be perfect,” she assured him, beaming. As they entered the elevator she had been fumbling in her purse; now she extracted a small white card and held it out to him. “I don’t believe you know my name,” she told him. “I always carry these with me.”

  Carstairs was amused, but he dropped the card into his pocket. The doors slid open at his floor and he grasped the woman’s arm to escort her down the hall. “Here we are,” he said. “Bishop? Ah, there you are. Am I free tomorrow from nine to ten?”

  Bishop sighed. “Are you ever? Yes, technically you’re free.”

  “Good. Nine it is then.” He held out his hand. “I’m terribly sorry to bring you back again but I always insist on very thorough briefings.”

  “I think you should,” she told him approvingly. “And really, you have been so kind. So unexpectedly kind. Thank you.”

  “Kind,” echoed Carstairs when she had gone. “She’s not only perfect but she appreciates my finer qualities. Well, Bishop, what do you think? I found my innocent tourist, didn’t I? In fact one so congenitally innocent that she’d baffle Mao Tse-tung himself.”

  Bishop’s jaw dropped. He said in a hollow voice, “Sir—”

  “What is it, Bishop, are you feeling ill?”

  “That was your tourist?”

  “Yes, isn’t she marvelous?”

  Bishop swallowed. He said, “As you entered this office, sir, I was just putting down the receiver of the telephone. It was Mason calling to tell you that Miss Webster has just arrived.”

  Carstairs frowned. “Webster? Webster?”

  “He sent a message up earlier, telling of Miss Webster’s delay. I forwarded it to the table-service room.”

  “I ate in the cafeteria.”

  “Now Miss Webster is here.”

  “Nonsense,” said Carstairs, “Miss Webster has just left.”

  “No, sir, Miss Webster has just arrived.”

  Carstairs began, softly and vehemently, to swear. “Then will you do me the kindness, Bishop, of asking Mason just who the hell was waiting for me down there in his interviewing room at two o’clock, and who the devil I’ve just engaged for this job? On the double, Bishop. I’ll be in my office.”

  He strode into his office and sat down. Gingerly, reluctantly, he drew from his pocket the calling card that he had been given and placed it on the desk before him. He read it and frowned. He read it again and reached for the photograph of Miss Webster. There was a very superficial physical resemblance between her and his tourist but he knew now that Miss Webster was not going to do at all. Miss Webster was a dehydrated and flavorless copy of the original. “Well?” he growled as Bishop returned.

  “Her name was Politick or Politflack, Mason can’t remember which, but they’d know in the lobby.”

  “Pollifax,” said Carstairs. “Go on. What brought her here?”

  Without expression Bishop said carefully, “Mason says that she came here to apply for work as a secret agent.”

  Carstairs opened his mouth, closed it and stared incredulously at Bishop. “Impossible,” he said at last. “Nobody just walks in asking to be an agent.”

  “Mason was most emphatic—and still quite shaken by the incident.”

  A full minute passed, and then the corners of Carstairs’ mouth began to twitch and he threw back his head and roared. When his laughter had subsided to a chuckle he said, “Unbelievable. Preposterous.” But he had reached a decision and he knew it. “Bishop,” he said, “it’s unorthodox even for this unorthodox department, but damn it—order an immediate, top-priority security check run on”—he consulted the chaste white card on his desk—“on Mrs. Virgil Pollifax of the Hemlock Apartments in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I want the results before eight o’clock tomorrow morning. And when you’ve done that, Bishop, start praying.”

  “Praying, sir?”

  “Yes, Bishop. Pray that she’s never unwittingly contributed to subversive organizations, voted Socialist or entertained a Red bishop for dinner. After that,” he added flatly, “you can tell Mason to send Miss Webster home.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Flight Number 51 loading at Gate Four.… Flight Number 51 … to Mexico City loading at Gate Four.…”

  Mrs. Pollifax found her seat on the plane and sat down feeling suffused with an almost unbearable excitement. For days she had been practicing the inscrutable look of a secret agent, but now she found it impossible to sustain; she was far too enraptured by the thought of her first visit to Mexico and her first trip anywhere by jet. And it was just as well, she told herself sternly, for Mr. Carstairs had emphasized that she was not a secret agent but an American tourist. “You are to be yourself,” he had told her firmly, and had added, with a faint smile, “If I thought you capable of being anyone else I would never have given you this job to do.”

  Mrs. Pollifax had listened to him with shining eyes.

  “You will arrive in Mexico City on the third of August and you will check in at the Hotel Reforma Intercontinental. The reservations were made an hour ago, in your name. You will be Mrs. Virgil Pollifax, visiting Mexico for three weeks, and you will behave like any other tourist. Where you go is entirely up to you. You will be on your own completely, and I assume you’ll visit the usual tourist places, Taxco, Xochimilco, Acapulco, and so on—whatever is of interest to Mrs. Virgil Pollifax. But on August 19, without fail, you will visit this bookstore on the Calle el Siglo in Mexico City.”

  He handed Mrs. Pollifax a slip of paper. “I want you to memorize this address before you leave the building,” he said quietly, and Mrs. Pollifax’s heart beat a little faster.

  “You will not see me again but you will be visited once before you leave by one of the men in my department who will make certain you’ve forgotten nothing.”

  Mrs. Pollifax had looked at the words on the piece of paper.

  El Papagayo Librerí (The Parrot Bookstore)

  Calle el Siglo 14,

  Mexico City

  Senor R. DeGamez, Proprietor—Fine Books Bought & Sold

  Carstairs had continued, “On the nineteenth of August you will walk into the bookshop and ask for Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.”

  “The nineteenth,” Mrs. Pollifax repeated eagerly.

  “The gentleman there, whose name as you can see is Senor
DeGamez, will say with regret that he is very sorry but he does not have a copy at the moment.”

  Mrs. Pollifax waited breathlessly.

  “Whereupon you will tell him—with the proper apology for contradicting him—that there is a copy in his window. You will then go to the window with him and he will find the book there and you will say, ‘I think Madame Defarge is simply gruesome, don’t you?’ ”

  Mrs. Pollifax repeated the words under her breath.

  “These identifying phrases are a nuisance,” Carstairs told her. “The gentleman will be expecting you about ten o’clock in the morning, but it is always wiser to have a double check set up for you both. Your asking for A Tale of Two Cities and your reference to Madame Defarge are the important things to remember.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “And that’s all?”

  “That is all.”

  “And whatever I’m to bring you will be in the book?” she asked, and instantly covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh dear, I should never have asked that, should I.”

  Carstairs smiled. “No, and I would not in any case tell you. Although actually,” he added dryly, “I can in all honesty say at this particular moment that I don’t know myself what he will give you. You will of course—as soon as you have paid for the book—leave and not return again. There will be nothing more asked of you but to continue your sight-seeing for two more days and return by jet on the twenty-first. You will receive your tickets and reservations by mail within the next few days, as well as the tourist card necessary for entering Mexico.”

  She nodded. “What happens when I come home? What about Customs?”

  Carstairs smiled, saying gently, “That need not concern you. Let’s just say that we will be aware of your arrival in this country, and there will be no problems for you. None at all.”

  “Oh.”

  “In the meantime I must emphasize that you are a tourist who happens merely to be dropping in at the Parrot Bookstore. I want you to think of it that way.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Pollifax said sadly, and as Carstairs lifted his brows inquiringly she added, “It doesn’t sound dangerous in the least.”

  Carstairs looked shocked. “My dear Mrs. Pollifax, there is always risk—we discussed that—but if there was the slightest element of real danger involved I can assure you that I would never allow an amateur to be sitting here in my office. This is what we call simple courier work, and in this case your amateur status is especially useful. I know that I can trust you to follow directions intelligently—”

  “Oh yes,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax.

  “And out of it you will have a very nice little vacation in Mexico. We will both be satisfied.” He stood up, smiling lest he might have sounded reproving, and added, “Bishop will now show you to a quiet corner where you can memorize that address. I hope you weren’t insulted at taking a lie detector test?”

  “Oh no, it was terribly interesting,” she told him, beaming.

  “Good. Nothing personal, you understand, it’s routine for everyone, even our clerks.” He had held out his hand and shaken hers. “I won’t be seeing you again, Mrs. Pollifax—have lots of fun.”

  She shrewdly suspected that he had used the word fun deliberately, to rid her of any lingering fancies concerning her trip. Well, she didn’t mind; she was going to have fun. Her suitcase was fairly bursting with tourist literature on Mexico City and its environs, and Miss Hartshorne had insisted upon giving her three rolls of color film. “As a bon voyage gift,” she explained, “because you will just adore having slides of your trip, they’re the perfect souvenir for your Memory Book.” Miss Hartshorne had insisted also upon coming to her apartment to instruct her, and had left telling Mrs. Pollifax she just knew she would come home with perfectly marvelous pictures of Mexico that everyone in the apartment house would enjoy viewing.

  Mrs. Pollifax’s daughter had received the news with dismay. “But Mother,” Jane had wailed over the long-distance wires, “if you wanted to do some traveling why didn’t you tell us? You could have come out here to Arizona. I’ve hired Mrs. Blair to take care of the children while John and I are in Canada. If I’d only known—we’d feel so much better if it could be you, and the children just love it when you come.”

  “It’s just a little trip I thought I’d take for myself,” Mrs. Pollifax told her gently, and wished her daughter a happy vacation in Canada.

  Her son, Roger, on the other hand, had visited Mexico in his student days, and he told her that she must eat no green stuff and be terribly careful about the water. But there was a great deal more of his mother in him than in Jane, and he had added, “I was getting worried about you, Mother, you haven’t erupted in years. Godspeed and all that. See you at Christmas and if you get in a jam send me a wire.”

  Dear Roger, she thought as she fastened her seat belt. She leaned forward to glance out of the window and saw a great many hands waving from the deck, and she fluttered her own with animation. As the plane began to taxi toward the runway Mrs. Pollifax thought with jarring abruptness, “I do hope I’m going to like this.” Sunlight caught a wing of the plane and the glare momentarily blinded her; then with a nearly overwhelming burst of sound the landscape beyond Mrs. Pollifax’s window began to move with dizzying speed, it blurred into a streak and dropped away. We’re in the air, she realized, and felt an enormous and very personal feeling of accomplishment.

  “We’re airborne,” said the man sitting next to her.

  Airborne … she must remember that. People like Miss Hartshorne knew things without being told, and, after all, nothing was an experience unless there was a name for it. She smiled and nodded and brought out the latest copy of Ladies Home Journal and placed it in her lap. Presently, because she had not slept at all well the night before, Mrs. Pollifax dozed.…

  As the plane banked and turned over Mexico City, Mrs. Pollifax peered down at its glittering whiteness and thought how flat the city looked, horizontal rather than vertical, and so different from New York with its skyscrapers rising like cliffs out of the shadows. A moment later Mrs. Pollifax was infinitely relieved to discover that landings were more comfortable than takeoffs, and presently she was breathing Mexico City’s thin, rarefied mountain air. All the way to the hotel she kept her face pressed to the window of the taxi, but when she spied her first sombrero she gave a sigh of contentment and leaned back. Never mind if most of the women looked sleek and Parisian and the men dressed exactly like Americans—this was Mexico because she had seen a sombrero.

  The hotel proved luxurious beyond Mrs. Pollifax’s dreams—almost too much so, thought Mrs. Pollifax, who would personally have perferred something native, but she recalled that the choice was not hers, and that this was where tourists stayed. “And I am a tourist,” she reminded herself.

  Mrs. Pollifax had arrived in the late afternoon. She dined early at the hotel, had a lukewarm bath and, sensibly, retired at nine. The next morning she was first in line for the tour bus that promised to introduce her to Mexico City. On the tour she fell into conversation with two American schoolteachers, Miss Lambert and Mrs. Donahue, but in spite of exchanging pleasantries during the trip she was careful to note each street sign they passed. When the tour ended Mrs. Pollifax had learned the location of the Paseo de la Reforma, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palace of Justice, the National Pawnshop and the Zocalo; she had made two new friends and learned a great deal of Mexico’s history, but she had not discovered the whereabouts of the Calle el Siglo. Both Miss Lambert and Mrs. Donahue warned her of the change in altitude and the necessity of adjusting gradually to it. She therefore went no further than Sanborne’s that evening, where she ate dinner, admired the lavish gifts in their showcases, and went to bed early again.

  The next day Mrs. Pollifax bought a map and after an hour’s study set out to find the Calle el Siglo and the Parrot Bookstore, for she was conscientious by nature and did not feel she could relax and really enjoy herself until she knew precisely where she must present herself on August 19. To
her surprise she discovered that the street was in walking distance of the hotel, and that it was a perfectly respectable side street already found by the tourists, whom she could identify by the cameras strung about their necks on leather thongs. She wandered almost the length of it, and when she saw the Parrot Bookstore across the street she blushed and quickly averted her eyes. But that one swift glance told her that it was neither shabby nor neglected, as she had somewhat romantically imagined, but a very smart and modern store, small and narrow in width but with a very striking mosaic of a parrot set into its glittering cement façade.

  On the following afternoon, returning to the hotel with her two friends after a visit to the National Palace, they found themselves momentarily lost and Mrs. Pollifax steered them all up the Calle el Siglo, saying with a ruthless lack of conscience that it was a direct route to the hotel. This time they passed the door of the Parrot, and Mrs. Pollifax glanced inside and took note of the man behind the counter. She thought he looked very pleasant: about her age, with white hair and a white moustache that was very striking against the Spanish swarthiness of his skin. Like a grandee, she decided.

  During the week that Mrs. Pollifax spent sight-seeing in Mexico City she found the opportunity nearly every day to pass the Parrot Bookstore. She did not seek it out deliberately, but if it proved a convenient way to return to her hotel—and it often did—she did not avoid it. Once she passed it in the evening, when it was closed, in the company of Miss Lambert and Mrs. Donahue. Once she and Miss Lambert passed it in the morning when Senor DeGamez was just inserting the key in the door, and twice Mrs. Pollifax passed on the other side without giving it more than a glance. She realized that she was beginning to think of it as her shop, and to feel a proprietary interest in it.

  When Mrs. Pollifax had enjoyed Mexico City for a week she bid her new friends adios and went by bus to Taxco, where for several days she wandered its crooked, cobblestoned alleys, looked over bargains in silver, and sunned herself in the market plaza. She then returned by way of Acapulco, stopping there overnight. Everywhere she went Mrs. Pollifax found people charming and friendly, and this spared her some of the loneliness of traveling alone. On the bus returning to Mexico City she was entertained by a widower from Chicago who showed her pictures of his six grandchildren, and in turn Mrs. Pollifax showed him pictures of Jane’s two children and Roger’s one. From the gentleman’s conversation Mrs. Pollifax guessed that he was a professional gambler, but this in no way curtailed her interest—she had never before met a professional gambler.