Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  Mrs. Pollifax arose. “And now I’m going to excuse myself before I become welded to this chair. I think a small nap is in order before dinner.”

  “Oh, but I was looking forward to talking to you!” Court protested. “I have your postcards, too, you know.”

  They exchanged postcards and centimes but Mrs. Pollifax could not be dissuaded. “I’ll see you later,” she said, and left.

  As she entered the lobby she passed Marcel carrying a tray. “Madame, you dropped this,” he told her, extending a hand with a slip of paper in it before he walked through the door.

  On the slip of paper he had written: In room 153, Ibrahim Sabry. Egyptian passport, age 51. Owner small munitions factory. Religion, Islamic. Destroy. More later.

  Nine

  There was a film after dinner evening, at nine, and Mrs. Pollifax was reassured to see that Hafez was going to be allowed to attend it. “Oh, madame,” he cried in a raptured voice, meeting her in the hall. “Madame, a film!”

  His eyes shone. He tucked his hand into hers and led her into the dining room where a screen had been erected and the chairs rearranged in a half circle. “It is all in French but I shall explain everything to you—every word,” he told her passionately.

  “Where have you been all day?” she asked. “I looked for you in the garden, and I looked for you at dinner. Hafez, I’m terribly sorry if I upset things last night by trying to pay a call on your grandmother.”

  He turned and looked at her with huge eyes. “But, madame, I know now that you are a true friend. I think it was very kind of you.”

  “But you were in your room all day?”

  “Oh, that is nothing now. Look, madame, the picture is going to begin. I will translate.”

  He did indeed translate; he read aloud to her even the credits on the screen, and then as the story began he faithfully recorded every word. It did not make him popular with the handful of other people present, among them Ibrahim Sabry and the Palisburys. Mrs. Pollifax leaned over and suggested he lower his voice. “Oh, oui, madame,” he said, and for two minutes he did. Mrs. Pollifax decided the only way to restore tranquillity to the group was to withdraw. It was nearing her Flashlight Hour, anyway.

  “You can tell me the plot tomorrow, I’m going to leave now,” she whispered to him.

  His disappointment was huge, but glancing back from the door she noted that it was fleeting. He was once again immersed in the show, eyes round, lips parted. She smiled at his enthrallment. It was good to see him a child again. Court and Robin were sitting in the library talking, their heads close together; she waved at them and went upstairs.

  At ten o’clock, and feeling rather like Paul Revere, she went again to her balcony to signal that she had survived a second day at Montbrison. Again the car lights flicked on in reply and again she watched her unknown friend disappear down the hill. Still she lingered; it was warm this evening, with a feel of rain in the air. The lights along the shore of Lake Geneva were gauzy, like smudged yellow fingerprints on a dark canvas. She realized that she still had not seen the mountains that rimmed the lake.

  At 11:55, after practising her Yoga for half an hour, she checked the scintillator counter and tested her flashlight and prepared to learn what Marcel might have discovered. Closing her door behind her she moved softly down the stairs. Again the concierge’s station was abandoned; the elevator idled there, brightly lighted and empty. She descended to the ground floor. Marcel had not arrived yet but it still lacked a minute to the hour.

  It was awkward waiting here by the elevator in the brightly lighted hall. The doors to the garden stood across the lobby opposite her, two rectangles of opaque black glass shining like eyes. She felt extremely conspicuous. The ground floor was quiet except for the sound of water running in the Unterwasser Massage room next to the garden doors. There was no whistling tonight from the kitchen, which she would explore once she left Marcel. She moved away from the staircase toward the shadows behind it, and the movement was reflected in the glass doors, a pale wraith mocking her with perfect synchronization.

  She checked her watch; it was precisely midnight. The running water was annoying because someone would be coming back soon to turn it off and she could not imagine how she would explain her presence. The sound was insidious, like two gossips murmuring and whispering in another room. Otherwise the Clinic was silent and there was in this, too, an odd quality of restiveness. There was no sign of Marcel.

  In the Unterwasser Massage room something dropped to the floor and Mrs. Pollifax stopped pacing and became still. An object had fallen but objects did not drop by themselves. She placed the jewel case in the shadow of the stairway and moved across the lobby to the door of the Unterwasser Massage room. There she hesitated, listening, and then turned the knob. The room was in darkness; she switched on her flashlight as she entered. Across from her the door that had led to Hydrotherapies was just closing. Its latch clicked softly and she saw the knob released from the other side by an unseen hand. She opened her mouth to call out but as she stepped forward the beam of her flashlight dropped and she gasped in horror.

  Marcel lay in the pale green tub, his eyes turned vacantly to the ceiling. Blood spattered the sides of the tub and ran in zigzag lines across his white jacket. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.

  “Oh dear God,” she whispered, like a prayer, and sagged against the wall. Turning off her flashlight she groped for a chair and sat down and gulped in deep breaths of air. He could not have been dead for long, perhaps only seconds before she had descended the stairs. While she had been hurrying down to meet him here there had been stealthy movements in the dark, small animal sounds and sudden death. There had not even been time for him to call out.

  The water still gurgled obscenely into the tub. After a moment—driven by a stern sense of duty—she switched on the flashlight again and crept back to Marcel. One trembling hand moved to his bloody jacket and waited but there was no flutter of a heartbeat, no possibility of survival. She rinsed the blood from her hand under the faucet and then found the spigot and angrily stilled the water.

  At once she knew that she had made a dangerous mistake.

  Her mind was clearing. Marcel was dead—murdered—and someone had left this room as she entered it.

  She switched off the flashlight and stood up. The darkness was engulfing, and with the cessation of running water the silence proved to be as taut and alive as a scream. Somewhere in the three offices that lay between her and the Hydrotherapies room this silence was shared by another human being. Someone else listened to the emptiness and knew he wasn’t alone: she had just told him so by turning off the water.

  Marcel’s murderer.

  She stood irresolute. Into the silence there crept the faintest stirring of movement in the next room, a whisper of cloth against cloth, of protesting floorboards. He was returning. Marcel’s murderer was coming back to see who was here.

  She shivered. She did not believe she had been seen or heard earlier. She had come downstairs silently. The stairs were heavily carpeted and on her feet she wore the heavy knitted bedsocks that Miss Hartshone tirelessly made for her every Christmas. She doubted that he even realized she had entered the room as he left it, but certainly he had heard the water stop splashing into the tub. He was coming back to learn who was here, and a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. For her.

  She looked around her. She was isolated in this small room next to the brightly lighted lobby. Behind the murderer, on the other hand, lay three offices and a gymnasium-size room, giving him considerable space in which to move about and hide. Apparently his curiosity outweighed his caution and he felt impelled to search and to identify. She did not care to explore the reasons behind his logic because if he discovered her, then she discovered him as well. She did not believe he would accept such mutuality.

  She must not be found here.

  Quietly she backed to the door by which she had entered the room. She opened it and assessed the distance across the
lobby to the staircase. Impossible, in such a bright light he would clearly see her before she gained the stairs. She turned back and pointed her flashlight at the door across the room, waiting for him to enter. A very small idea had occurred to her.

  Slowly the knob began to turn. Matching her movement to his she left as he entered, fleeing into the hall—but not to the stairs, she rushed headlong to the utility room around the corner and flung herself inside. There she ran her flashlight over the fuseboxes: they were labeled in French, in English, and by number. She tugged at the circuit-breakers for the ground floor and a second later saw the light under the closed door vanish.

  The silence was frightening. A door closed. Footsteps moved across the lobby to the foot of the stairs, and for that moment the two of them were separated only by the wall of the closet. She held her breath. He would be holding his breath, too, she thought, scarcely daring to expel it lest he miss some small, stifled sound. He was going to begin stalking her now like prey in an attempt to rush her out of hiding. And while they both waited, their thoughts screaming in the emptiness, he moved again.

  He walked past the closet and down the hall toward the gymnasium, giving her just one fragile unguarded moment of hope. When she heard the doors to Hydrotherapies swing open she slipped out of the closet and raced to the stairs, snatching up the scintillator counter from the floor where she had left it.

  When she reached the Reception floor level her heart was thudding ominously and her throat ached from dryness. She felt almost sick with horror. She stopped to catch her breath and saw the elevator still idle; on impulse she entered it. For a second she hesitated over the panel and then she punched the button for the floor above her own. He must not learn which floor was hers.

  But he had heard the sound of the elevator in motion, for as she ascended with frustrating slowness she recognized the sound of feet pounding up the stairs below her. She realized he was racing up to cut her off, and his determination to find and identify her was terrifying. Slowly the elevator rose toward the fourth floor and slowly the doors opened. She stepped out. Another moment and she would be trapped unless—

  Robin, she thought. Robin had said he was in the room exactly above hers. She ran down the hall, found room 213, discovered the door unlocked and stumbled inside.

  Robin was sitting up in bed with a book on his knees. He looked at her in astonishment. “My dear Mrs. Pollifax,” he said, and then seeing her face he gasped, “My God, what on earth?”

  She shook her head, placed a finger to her lips and retreated into the darkness of his bathroom. There were advantages in appealing to a cat burglar, Robin responded at once by reaching for his bedside lamp and plunging the room into darkness. In silence they listened to footsteps walking down the hall toward the solarium. Softly the footsteps returned. After a short interval the elevator doors slid closed and the elevator hummed as it descended.

  Slowly Mrs. Pollifax expelled her caught breath.

  Robin went to the door and opened it, looked up and down the corridor and then closed and locked the door and walked across the room to draw the curtains of the window. Turning on a light he said pleasantly, “We’re having a party in my room tonight?”

  She left the darkness of his bathroom and found him rummaging in his wardrobe closet. “There’s a bottle of Napoleon brandy here somewhere,” he said. “Ah, here we are. Beautiful. I have never felt that cocoa measures up to brandy in a crisis.” He poured an inch into a bedside glass and handed it to her. “Drink it down, you look like hell.”

  She nodded gratefully.

  “And while you’re thawing out,” he continued pleasantly, “you’ll no doubt think up some outrageous lie to explain why you’ve been playing hide-and-seek with someone in the halls at this ungodly hour, but don’t—don’t try—because I won’t believe you. When you stumble into a man’s room in the middle of the night, looking as if you’d just seen a corpse, and carrying of all things that damn jewelry case—” His eyes narrowed as he sprang to his feet.

  “Robin!” she cried sharply.

  He picked up the box and carried it to the light. “Sorry, milady,” he said. “Curiosity killed the cat but never a cat burglar, as you call it. I’ve been curious about this thing all day, and obviously you’re not what you appear to be. Let’s see what you really are.” She sat mute as he opened the case. “Let’s see, if I designed this—oh, it’s very well done—I’d put the lock in one of these hinges, I think, and—” He triumphantly pressed the hinge on the right and removed the tray.

  There was silence as he peered down at what he’d unearthed. “Good God, not the Queen’s jewels. A—surely not a Geiger counter?” He stared at her disbelievingly.

  She sighed and put down the emptied glass of brandy. “As a matter of fact, yes. Did you really expect stolen goods?”

  He looked bewildered. “I don’t know, I expected something illicit, although you don’t look illicit. But a Geiger counter? What on earth are you looking for, uranium?” He thought he was making a joke.

  Mrs. Pollifax considered him, hesitated and then made a decision. “Plutonium, actually.”

  “Plutonium?”

  “Yes.” There was a welcome impersonality about plutonium. It did not bleed, it was a metallic object without hopes, dreams, fears, or a throat that could be cut. At the moment plutonium seemed much less dangerous than Marcel’s body lying in the Unterwasser Massage tub, and she did not want to speak of Marcel. She had sought sanctuary in this room, and Robin had saved her from being discovered and possibly killed. For this she owed him something, even truth, but if Robin was to be involved then let him be involved in an abstract without personality. Marcel’s murder was too dangerous to share.

  “Interpol is in this,” she told him gravely, “and my government is in this, and yours, too.”

  He shuddered. “That’s a bit thick.” He stared ruefully at the scintillator counter in his lap. “My God, I’ve opened Pandora’s box, haven’t I? You’re involved with my mortal enemies and I’m sitting here listening to you.” He shook his head. “Damn it, I wish I’d allowed you to think up that outrageous lie.”

  “You didn’t give me time,” she reminded him.

  “Plutonium … It would have to be stolen plutonium, of course.”

  “Yes. Presumed to have been sent here.”

  “Pretty damned clever sending it here.” He began to look interested. “Not a bad drop-off point at all. I don’t have to ask what your precious authorities are afraid of, of course, but they’re not going to relish your telling me this, are they? Why did you?”

  She thought about this a moment, a little startled herself at her openness. “I find no evil in you,” she said at last, very simply. “It’s true that you have a somewhat distorted sense of morality in one area but I’m looking for someone with no morality at all. Someone”—she shivered—“completely amoral, without scruples or fear or compassion or decency.”

  “Here?” he said in astonishment. “Among the patients?”

  “Perhaps.”

  He looked at her. “So that’s why you were relieved to find me only a thief. And tonight? What did you find tonight? Who was it out there?”

  “I wish I knew. I wish I’d had the cunning to find out.” The memory of Marcel intervened and she steadied herself. When she replied it was casually. “I was downstairs on the ground floor when I found myself playing cat-and-mouse with someone in the dark. I reached the Reception floor and the elevator was standing there and so I slipped inside, planning to walk down a floor to my room, you see, but I could hear whoever it was running upstairs after me, so I was cut off and—”

  “And popped in here.” He studied her face shrewdly. “If that’s your story I won’t do any more prying, but to be perfectly frank with you that little anecdote doesn’t begin to match the look on your face when you burst into my room. Do you think whoever it was is still out there waiting for you?”

  He had caught her off guard; she realized that she’d not
thought of this yet.

  Robin shook his head. “You don’t have a poker face tonight, Mrs. Pollifax, I frightened you with that question.” He regarded her curiously. “All right, I said I wouldn’t pry but let’s proceed as if you’ve stolen the Queen’s jewels and the police are lurking. Can you manage a drop of eight feet on a rope?”

  She brightened. “Over the balcony?”

  He looked amused. “Yes, my dear Mrs. Pollifax, but don’t look so eager. Have you ever before gone up or down a rope?”

  “Yes, once in Albania—” She stopped. “Oh dear, I am tired, I should never have said that.”

  He looked her up and then down, taking in her height, her weight, her flyaway hair, the voluminous robe and woolly bedsocks, and he grinned. “I didn’t hear you say it. I wouldn’t believe it if I did hear it, especially knowing that Americans are not allowed in Albania. Who would believe it anyway, I ask you.” He removed a coil of efficient-looking rope from his suitcase. “Mountain climbing rope,” he explained, patting it lovingly. “The very best. By the way, there’s nothing to this, there’s no ledge at all on this floor but a perfectly splendid one on yours below so there’ll be something under you all the way. I’ll go first and check you out.” Over the coil of rope he studied her and frowned. “You know, it terrifies me discovering who you are, but it’s equally alarming to think your superiors may have sent you here alone and unprotected. I daresay it’s the most absolute affrontery to offer my services but if anything comes up—” He looked embarrassed. “Well, hang it all, I’m already indebted to you, and if you should need a gentleman burglar—”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that,” she said warmly.

  “Oh?” He looked startled. “Well, do keep it in mind, then. By the way, is your balcony door locked?” She nodded and he added a circle of keys to his belt. “Full speed ahead then.” On the balcony he tied the rope to the railing, fussed over the knots, tested the railing and glanced up. “All set?”