Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  “The parrot!” she thought in astonishment.

  In her confusion she had forgotten the parrot, and remembering Olé she at once recalled the first Senor DeGamez with great clarity. “My store is named after Olé, not the other way around,” he had said. “My Olé came first, she has been with me twelve years.”

  My store … my Olé… yes, he had definitely referred to both of them as his. It was not so much that she had forgotten this as that today’s Senor DeGamez had not given her the time to think. Nor could she think clearly now for it was very close in this room and her head was beginning to ache. She stared at the cage and forced herself to think about it. The cage was here. The parrot was not here. “But if this is the Parrot Bookstore, and if the parrot belonged to the first Senor DeGamez …”

  There was something else, too, and she struggled to think of it. If the parrot belonged to the first Senor DeGamez, and the shop belonged to the first Senor DeGamez—there was a conclusion that ought to be drawn but Mrs. Pollifax found that she could not draw it. Something was terribly wrong, and not only with this shop but with herself, for her mind felt dazed, groggy, unable to reason or to reach conclusions. And it wasn’t the heat, she realized, it wasn’t the heat at all. It was the tea. Mrs. Pollifax had been drinking tea for years and it had never before left such a very peculiar taste in her mouth.

  “There was something in that tea,” cried Mrs. Pollifax, taking a step toward the door, but her words made no sound, her cry was only a whisper, and she took no more than the one step before she sank, unconscious, to the floor.

  Mrs. Pollifax opened one eye, dimly aware that someone was methodically slapping her face, first the left cheek and then the right. She closed her eyes and the rhythmic slapping began again. When she next roused Mrs. Pollifax made an attempt to focus on the face that loomed only a few inches away. “Fu Manchu,” she murmured wittily, and giggled a little.

  “You will wake up now, pliss,” said a disembodied voice.

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “Very well—except I don’t really want to, and certainly not when you keep slapping my face.” This time she made a distinct effort to open her eyes and keep them open, but the dismal sight that confronted her was not rewarding. She and the cheek slapper appeared to be sharing a small tar-paper shack that listed slightly to one side. A kerosene lamp hung from a rafter and sent grotesque shadows over the earthen floor and rough walls. There was a smell of kerosene and mustiness and wet earth. She saw no windows in the shack and the only bright new piece of equipment in the room was the lock on its door. Her eyes arrived at the cheek slapper and as she pondered him, too, she saw why she had burbled in her sleep about Fu Manchu: the man was Chinese. There the resemblance ended, however, because he was neatly dressed in Western clothes and looked like a serious and kindly young student.

  Then Mrs. Pollifax realized that her hands were bound tightly behind her with wire and she decided that the young man was not so kind after all. “Where am I, anyway?” she asked indignantly.

  “I wouldn’t bother asking if I were you,” said a voice behind her. The voice was male and very definitely American, and Mrs. Pollifax squirmed in her chair to look but discovered that she couldn’t.

  “We’re tied together,” explained the voice. “Back to back, wrist to wrist—very chummy. Farrell’s my name, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice?” said Mrs. Pollifax weakly.

  “I was only being polite, actually. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

  She said stiffly, “Mrs. Virgil Pollifax from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Look here, young man,” she told their guard firmly, “I know enough about first aid to tell you that you will presently have to amputate my left hand if you don’t allow it some circulation.”

  The man said calmly, “Soon you will eat and be given an opportunity to exercise the hands.”

  As he said this the door opened and a man walked in, and Mrs. Pollifax, glancing beyond him, saw that it was dark outside. Night already! “Then I’ve been unconscious all afternoon,” she thought in astonishment. Her eyes fell to the tray the man carried and she realized how hungry she was. The cheek slapper brought a pair of pliers from his pocket, and while he leaned over to free her wrists Mrs. Pollifax kept her eyes on the food, which consisted of tired-looking tortillas, two slices of dry gray bread and two cups of either coffee or soup. It was just as well that she had this to divert her because her captor was none too gentle; tears rose in Mrs. Pollifax’s eyes as he worked, and when her numbed hands were free she placed them in her lap and tried not to notice the blood trickling into her palms.

  The young Chinese said, “Eat,” and he and the other man walked to the door, glanced back at them once, and went out. Mrs. Pollifax could hear the grate of the key in the lock. She turned at once to look for the man behind her and found him staring at her incredulously. “Bless my soul,” he said, his jaw dropping.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life. Damn it, where do you fit into this? No, don’t touch the coffee,” he added quickly, “it’s probably drugged.”

  Mrs. Pollifax regarded him with suspicion, his reference to drugs reminding her that not so long ago she had drunk tea with Senor DeGamez. Now she was less inclined to trust strangers. Nor was this man a type that she could approve of even though he was American; he had a lean, hard-bitten face—very hard, she thought severely, with a Hollywood kind of handsomeness about it that had grown worn from careless living. It was such a type face—such a ladies’ man’s face, she amended disapprovingly—that it lent itself to caricature. You could draw a perfect, deeply tanned oval for the face, square it a little at the jaw, cap it with an almost horizontal line of straight black hair, add an exquisitely slender black moustache to the upper lip and there was Mr. Farrell—tough, hard and an inhabitant of a world that Mrs. Pollifax knew would shock her: perhaps he even dealt in the drugs that he was mentioning so lightly. “But why?” she demanded. “Where are we, and who are these dreadful people?” The circulation was returning to her raw, chafed wrists and the pain of it brought fresh tears to her eyes. She picked up a tortilla and resolutely chewed on it.

  “These are Mao Tse-tung’s boys,” said Farrell. “Cuba is full of them now, you know.” He put a finger warningly to his lips and tiptoed to a corner of the room where he pressed his face against the boards. He came back shaking his head. “Too dark. But I definitely heard a plane land outside while they were trying to bring you back to consciousness.”

  “A plane?” said Mrs. Pollifax falteringly. “Then we’re at an airport? But what airport can this be?”

  He shrugged and sat down to resume eating his tortilla. “If the stars had been out I could have done some figuring. I think they’ve brought us to some remote part of Mexico where the Reds have staked out a secret airfield. I’ve heard they have them.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said stiffly, “You certainly seem well informed. How do you know all this unless you’re one of them?”

  He grinned. “Don’t trust me? Now that makes me suspicious of you for the very first time, Duchess. But I’m being abducted, too, in case you hadn’t noticed. Whisked away from a theater date with the beautiful Miss Willow Lee—the bitch.”

  “I beg your pardon!” gasped Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Sorry,” he said after one swift amused glance at her face. “But she is, you know. Very high connections in Peking.”

  Mrs. Pollifax was astonished. “And you were going to take her to the theater?”

  He grinned. “My dear lady, I knew all about her when I met her. What I didn’t realize until now—at least it’s beginning to dawn on me slowly here—is that she knew all about me too. Now just how did you land in this?”

  The question startled Mrs. Pollifax. She thought to herself, “I’m here because I carried geraniums to the rooftop one day, and because there seemed no purpose in my life.” And Mrs. Pollifax, who had been feeling a little frightened and very small, suddenly la
ughed. She thought, “I have no right to complain, I don’t even have the right to be afraid. It’s true that I haven’t the slightest idea of what’s ahead for me—and at my age this can be especially disconcerting—but I asked for a little adventure and it’s precisely what I’m having.” She felt at once calmed and unafraid. “I don’t think it really matters how I got here,” she pointed out to Farrell. “But I think I’m here because I walked into a little shop in Mexico City to buy a book.”

  Farrell was looking at her strangely. “Not El Papagayo,” he said slowly. “Not the Parrot Bookstore!”

  His face swam toward her and then receded. She heard him say in a thick voice, “Damn it, they must have put it in the tortillas.”

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded wisely. Just enough food to keep them alive, and then new drugs in the food to dope them again. Very clever, she thought, and this time took the precaution of carefully sitting down so that she would not fall to the floor. “I’m becoming quite experienced,” she thought proudly, and even smiled a little as the familiar blackness descended, blotting out Farrell and all consciousness.

  CHAPTER 6

  Carstairs had spent most of the morning of August 20 conferring with a State Department official about a revolution that had erupted in one of the small South American countries. His was the only department with a comprehensive file on the very obscure young man who had emerged overnight as head of the junta. He was able to tell the official that this young man was not a Communist. He was not particularly democratic either, but he was definitely not a Communist.

  Then Bishop brought him a carton of black coffee and a slip of paper from the teletype marked CARSTAIRS, URGENT. “Better have the coffee first,” he said dryly, and Carstairs gave him a quick glance before he picked up the message.

  It said simply:

  BODY IDENTIFIED AS RAFAEL DEGAMEZ PROPRIETOR PARROT BOOKSTORE, CALLE EL SIGLO, MEXICO CITY, FOUND DEAD IN CANAL LAST NIGHT AUGUST 19 OF KNIFE WOUNDS AND/OR DROWNING STOP POLICE ESTIMATE DEATH OCCURRED TWO DAYS EARLIER ON AUGUST 17 STOP INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY.

  Carstairs stared at the impersonal black letters and felt a hot rage grow in him. He knew that in time this rage in him would pass and that it would be supplanted, as it always was, by a cold and ruthless efficiency, but now he allowed himself this brief moment to mourn DeGamez, whom he had known personally. It was no way for any man to die and it was not always enough to remind himself that his people knew the risks.

  When he was under control again Carstairs lifted his head and said coldly, “I want the complete file on this. And the message—did it come from the Mexico City police or from our friend in Monterey?”

  “Monterey,” said Bishop, and slipped the file on DeGamez under Carstairs’ hand.

  “I want a direct wire to Mexico immediately to get this verified by the police. You know who to contact there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell them we have a definite interest in the man and want to be kept in touch. Oh God,” he added suddenly and explosively.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Mrs. Pollifax.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She was to visit DeGamez yesterday.” He picked up the telephone and barked an order for a connection to the Hotel Reforma Intercontinental, and Bishop went out, marveling at Carstairs’ memory. The man must have nursed along half a dozen intricate operations since first meeting Mrs. Pollifax and yet he had remembered precisely the date on which she was to pick up Tirpak’s microfilm at the Parrot.

  Five minutes later Bishop returned to verify the murder of DeGamez. Carstairs was still on the line to Mexico City, listening, giving orders in fluent Spanish and listening again. “Mrs. Pollifax is being paged at the hotel,” he told Bishop, hanging up. “Now get me Johnny at the Galeria de Artes in Mexico City.”

  Bishop presently came back with the report that he had talked with the man who swept the floors at the Galeria de Artes and Johnny had not come in to open the gallery that morning. Carstairs picked up the connection and began speaking. Had this happened before? When had the sweeper last seen the owner of the Galeria? Carstairs began looking grim.

  “Trouble,” said Bishop. He did not bother to make a question of it.

  “Trouble,” repeated Carstairs flatly. He deliberated a moment, and then said, “Take this down. TEMPERATURE 102 IN MEXICO CITY WORRIED ABOUT HEALTH OF AUNT JOSEPHINE SUGGEST COMPLETE REST IN HOSPITAL.” He wrote names on a sheet of paper. “Translate and send out at once, top priority, to these people.”

  “Right,” said Bishop, and hurried out. No lunch today, he was thinking, and wondered how stale the peanut butter crackers were that he kept in his desk for such emergencies.

  By two o’clock messages had begun filtering in from various points. Mrs. Pollifax had been paged but there was no answer. She was not in the hotel. She had not been seen in the hotel since the morning of the nineteenth when she had played solitaire in the lobby after breakfast.

  “Damn,” said Carstairs. “Bishop, get me the hotel again—I want her room checked by the hotel detective, everything in it gone over thoroughly. And try the Galeria de Artes again, I’ve got to reach Johnny.” He could not face the thought yet that they might have snatched Johnny too. Damn it, if that had happened then the whole thing had blown higher than a kite.

  The police in Mexico City called in to report that it was only by a freak accident that DeGamez’ body had been discovered at all. It had been weighted with cement and tossed into an abandoned canal which the sanitation department had just last week earmarked for drainage under a newly launched insect-control drive. DeGamez’ shop had been thoroughly checked. The peculiar thing there was that, although DeGamez had been murdered on the seventeenth, the Parrot Bookstore had been kept open until noon of August 19. They were looking into this and checking out descriptions of the man who had continued selling books there.

  There was still nothing from the Galeria de Artes.

  “Get me the police again,” he told Bishop. “I want Johnny’s apartment searched too. Tell them he lives behind the Galeria.”

  More reports came in. The hotel detective had done a competent job at the Hotel Reforma Intercontinental. The chambermaid reported that on August 19, at her usual hour of eleven, she had arrived to clean the room that Mrs. Pollifax occupied. There had been a number of serapes hung over chairs, and there had been two books on the bureau that the maid remembered picking up to dust. The hotel detective, checking it today, found the books and the serapes gone. Clothes belonging to Mrs. Pollifax still hung in the closet but linings had been slit open in two coats and the clothes ruined. Her suitcase, the mattress of her bed and the pillow on it had also been slit with a knife and hurriedly searched.

  “Hell,” said Carstairs, looking haggard.

  At four o’clock the police reported again. They had searched Johnny’s apartment behind the Galeria de Artes. Nothing had been touched except a small safe in the kitchen. This had been tidily blown open with nitroglycerine.

  Carstairs swore savagely. “They’ve got Johnny then,” he said. “Johnny and the code as well. More telegrams—take them down. REGRET TO INFORM YOU AUNT JOSEPHINE DIED …” He paused. “Bishop, Code Five is clear, isn’t it? All right, REGRET TO INFORM YOU AUNT JOSEPHINE DIED 5 O’CLOCK KINDLY VERIFY ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THIS AT ONCE.

  He now had to face the fact that they might have caught Tirpak too. “Get Costa Rica,” he told Bishop. “There must have been some kind of contact set up between Tirpak and our chap in San José. Someone’s got to know where Tirpak is. We’ve got to break silence and locate him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Mexico City police were back on the wires at five o’clock to report that they now had descriptions of the man who had been running DeGamez’ shop for two days. He was short, of Spanish extraction, had receding black hair, was clean-shaven, well dressed, wore glasses and showed a gold tooth on the left side of his jaw when he smiled. No one in the neighborhood had ever seen him before.
/>   The description made Carstairs thoughtful.

  “Recognize him?” asked Bishop.

  “God, I only hope I’m wrong. Get me File 6X.” It arrived and Carstairs scowled at two pictures of the same man, one an enlargement showing him standing in a crowd next to Mao Tse-tung, and the other a candid snapshot taken secretly in Cuba. “We’ll teletype these to Mexico City and have them shown for identification. Take away the glasses,” he said, holding a picture up to Bishop, “and who do we have?”

  Bishop whistled. “Good God!”

  Carstairs nodded. “Our brilliant and ruthless old friend General Perdido. Mao’s hand-picked man for his South American operations—the one person who’s responsible for bringing Castro closer to Red China than to Red Russia.” Now he knew they must have found Tirpak; he could feel it in his bones. “There’s only one very feeble hope,” he said at last. “General Perdido was in Cuba last week, wasn’t he?”

  Bishop was glancing through innumerable reports. “Seen there on August 15.”

  Carstairs said slowly, “He just might take one of them—Johnny or Tirpak or Mrs. Pollifax—back to Cuba with him. General Perdido has always enjoyed his little trophies. I’ll shortwave descriptions to agents in Cuba.” He glanced at Bishop and smiled faintly. “For heaven’s sake, go and have lunch or dinner or breakfast or whatever it’s time for, Bishop. You can bring me back some fresh coffee and a chocolate bar.” The door closed behind Bishop and Carstairs lit a cigarette, relieved at being alone for a few moments. Tirpak … DeGamez … Johnny … he thought about them, his face like granite as he weighed all the angles. From the point of view of the department it meant failure, of course—a clean sweep for the other side, an utter rout, eight months of invaluable work gone up in smoke, no microfilms and three top agents missing and presumed dead. But it was in the broader sense that it cut more deeply. He thought of the years that DeGamez and Johnny had spent in carefully building up their respective reputations in Mexico City as cover for their real work. They had been good, very good. All of this was gone now, swept away overnight, the work of years wiped out.