Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Page 9

  Ten minutes later Farrell’s leg was set and Mrs. Pollifax, feeling shaken and a little ill, sat on her cot and watched Lulash bind the slats against Farrell’s straightened leg. After one enraged scream Farrell had lost consciousness again, and he was still unconscious. Lulash placed a hand on Farrell’s heart and then on his pulse, counting the beat. With a nod he came to sit down beside Mrs. Pollifax and mop his brow with a soiled handkerchief.

  “Would you like an American cigarette?” asked Mrs. Pollifax humbly. She brought from her purse the crumpled pack that Farrell had given her.

  “Thank you.”

  “We are both Americans,” said Mrs. Pollifax, with a nod toward Farrell. “Do you think—that is, is it all right for me to ask if this is Albania?”

  The guard shrugged. “We call it Shkyperi, which in your language would mean Land of the Mountain Eagle. But yes, it is called Albania.”

  “Where did you learn to speak such fine English? Do all the Albanians speak it? Major Vassovic does, and you.”

  “I was brought here two days ago because I speak the English. Before then I was in Sarande. It was the same with Major Vassovic, who came from Tirana. They went searching for those of us in the Sigurimi who speak your language.”

  “The Sigur—what?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

  “That is the name of the secret police in this country.”

  Mrs. Pollifax gasped. “That means that you—I mean—”

  He shrugged. “The time is very difficult here. Those of us who can read and write have two choices, to join the Sigurimi or not to join. Those who do not join can usually be seen on the roads any day. They smash rock. They carry rock. They have no hope.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “It sounds quite sad.” She looked at him with curiosity, studying him carefully because of his extraordinary kindness to Farrell, but unable to find anything in his face to explain him. It was a dark, secretive face with pointed features: black brows, a long, thin nose, a sharp thin jaw, a thin sharp mouth. She would not have taken him for a kind man or an unselfish one, and yet he had flouted orders to help a sick man.

  “It was not always this way,” he said. “Albanians are a proud, fiercely independent people. But without luck,” he added. “First the Turks ruled us, then the Russians, now the Chinese. Whatever the master the country stays the same. Poor, primitive, frightened too.”

  “You speak English so well,” she pointed out.

  His face brightened. “My cousin and I learned English as children from a man who had come here to write a book about the country. He was a travel man, you know. He wrote the book the year I was born but each year he came back to visit my father. It pleased him to teach us. He was friend to all the tribes, a very good man.”

  “Tribes?” said Mrs. Pollifax.

  He nodded. “You know nothing of our country?”

  “Nothing at all, I’m afraid,” she admitted.

  “The most beautiful country in the world,” he said firmly. “Here the rocks and the high mountains, below the flatlands, the valley, the rivers. And oh, the sea,” he added with nostalgia. “Patrolled now, of course. But the Adriatic is the most beautiful sea in the world.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Mrs. Pollifax quietly.

  “This man, this Mr. Allistair, gave us the book he wrote of my country. He loved it too.” He pinched out the cigarette and placed the butt carefully in the pocket of his shirt. “Your friend is stirring, I will find for him one aspirin.”

  He got up and opened the door to the hall and stood there, waiting. Mrs. Pollifax realized that he was waiting for her to accompany him. Surprised, she followed him out, quite touched by his trust. Once in the guardroom he began opening and closing drawers of the desk while Mrs. Pollifax stood beside him. She heard his murmur of satisfaction as he brought up a flask containing what looked to be brandy. While he attacked a new drawer Mrs. Pollifax’s glance wandered and came to rest, mesmerized, upon the gun rack behind the desk.

  The little brass key to the drawer in the gun rack was still there in its lock.

  What, she wondered, would people keep in the drawer of a gun rack?

  “If they put ammunition there they certainly wouldn’t be so careless as to leave the key in the lock,” she reflected. “It’s probably filled with paper clips or something idiotic. Except, why paper clips in a gun rack?”

  It was an interesting thought. If it was a drawer for ammunition a person could steal the key and hide it and later hope to come back and remove whatever was there. Then perhaps some use could be made of it, or a gun taken from the rack—

  She looked at Lulash, at his narrow back bent over the bottom drawer. Still watching him she took several steps backward, until she felt the gun rack between her shoulder blades. Fumblingly she tugged at the drawer and felt it slide open. Lulash was still leaning over the desk and she quickly turned and glanced down. She had been right about its holding ammunition: the drawer was filled with neat stacks of bullets, cartridges and clips, all of them unwrapped and accessible. She slid the drawer closed and placed her fingers around the key. Then she hesitated.

  “I can’t” she thought bleakly. “I just can’t.

  “Lulash would be blamed,” she realized. “It wouldn’t be fair. He would be blamed for its loss and punished and he has just set Farrell’s leg and now he is going to give him brandy and an aspirin.

  “I am an utter failure as an agent,” she decided with anger. “It should have occurred to me before that I would have to be ruthless and unscrupulous. These people are planning to kill me and still I can’t steal this key or so much as a bullet because this man has helped me and would be blamed for it.”

  Lulash stood erect, brandishing a bottle of white pills and smiling at her. Automatically she smiled back, her mind totally occupied with her defeat. Lulash found a paper cup and drew water from the cooler and she accompanied him back to her cell.

  “What goes?” asked Farrell shakily.

  “This gentleman set your leg,” she told him, patting his arm. “We’ve brought you some brandy for your nerves, and aspirin for your fever. Could you manage to sit up just a little if I help?”

  Farrell struggled to one elbow. “I hope I haven’t given away any state secrets. I have the feeling I’ve been talking like an idiot.”

  She smiled faintly. “Exactly like an idiot, but not like any friend of Mr. Carstairs.”

  “Thank God for that.” He swallowed some brandy, winced, and saluted Lulash with a wave of a hand. “Does he speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “The brandy isn’t bad. More?”

  “Aspirin next,” she said firmly, and placed one tablet on his tongue. “If you prefer washing it down with brandy we can dispense with the water.”

  “Loathe water,” he said, and gulped down two aspirin with huge draughts of brandy. “What are the prospects?” he gasped, lying back.

  “Dim,” replied Mrs. Pollifax dryly. “General Perdido has been in to look you over. You have considerably frustrated him by injuring yourself so badly, and he left in disgust.” She added in a low voice that Lulash could not hear, “It might be wise of you, when anyone comes in again, to continue talking as wildly as possible, and to see things crawling up and down the walls.”

  He whispered back. “That’s delirium tremens, not fever. You’ll make a bloody alcoholic out of me.”

  In a louder voice, and tartly, she said, “In your weakened condition, and with all the brandy you’ve just consumed, you will soon be in precisely that state.”

  Lulash slipped the aspirin bottle into his pocket and showed signs of leaving. Mrs. Pollifax arose and reached for his hand. “Thank you,” she said warmly, shaking it. “We both thank you very much.”

  “Is all right,” he said, nodding and smiling.

  When he had gone Mrs. Pollifax sat down abruptly on her cot, realizing how terribly tired she was. Farrell, watching her, said, “You look exhausted, Duchess, for God’s sake get some slee
p. I’ll try to limit my ravings for a while.”

  Mrs. Pollifax looked at him in the flickering eerie light of the candle and realized how very fond of him she was becoming. “It is comforting not to be alone,” she thought. She stood up and rolled back the mattress to arrange the slats around the two that were missing. “It has been rather a long day,” she admitted aloud, and lying down she fell at once into an exhausted sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  On the twenty-third of August Carstairs sat down in his office to review the Mexico City fiasco with a man named Thaddeus Peattie. Peattie came from another department; he was extremely interested in all matters concerning Mao Tse-tung and he was one of the few Americans to have personally known Raoul Perdido—they had met frequently in China during the war when Perdido was a member of Mao’s guerrillas and Peattie was a liaison officer between Chiang Kai-shek and the guerrillas.

  “There hasn’t been a sign of Farrell or Mrs. Pollifax being smuggled into Cuba,” Carstairs said, offering Peattie and Bishop cigarettes. “This doesn’t for a moment exclude their being there. They could have landed at night in some secluded area and been whisked into solitary confinement or killed at once. But General Perdido hasn’t been sighted in Cuba, either. I think we can say without any doubt at all that Perdido is not in Cuba at the moment.”

  “South America?” suggested Peattie. “Mexico? Perdido is a Mexican by birth, after all. Need he have left Mexico at all?”

  “He’s not particularly welcome there,” pointed out Carstairs. “If he’s still there he would certainly be in hiding. What we want to know is where he would go if he left the country. Where’s that report from Belmonte?” he asked of Bishop.

  Bishop riffled through the pile of papers on his lap and efficiently extracted the needed sheet. Carstairs handed it over to Peattie. “It’s common knowledge that the Russians have used Mexico as a takeoff point for spies and defectors in this hemisphere. We know of two secret landing strips used by the Reds for smuggling people out. These strips,” he added pointedly, “are not entirely unobserved, as you will see by this report from—an observer, shall we say?”

  Peattie picked up the report.

  “As you will note,” continued Carstairs, “there has been some activity observed in this lower California landing strip. A plane—a four-engine prop—was reported landing there on the night of August 19. It was on this day that General Perdido closed the doors of the Parrot Bookstore and vanished from sight. It is also on this day that Farrell and Mrs. Pollifax visited the Parrot Bookstore and vanished.”

  “Mmm,” murmured Peattie, frowning. “This report says that two people were carried aboard this plane.”

  “Yes, carried. On stretchers.”

  “Definitely a Russian-made plane,” read Peattie aloud. “Markings thought to be Cuban.” He returned the sheet to Carstairs. “You say that our beautiful Miss Willow Lee has also left Mexico City?”

  Carstairs nodded. “Yes, but she left on a registered flight, destination Peking, and has already arrived in Hong Kong.”

  “Then it’s not likely that she and General Perdido were the passengers taken aboard that plane,” mused Peattie.

  “Not on stretchers,” remarked Carstairs dryly.

  “No, not on stretchers,” agreed Peattie with a quick smile. “Perdido is of course the key to this. If he’s involved—and from what you’ve implied this whole affair is big enough to interest him—then he’s the man to trace, of course. The two others, dead or alive, could be anywhere but are doubtless with him. Or were.” He stood up and walked to the map on the wall and stood before it, his hands locked behind his back. “I hate to say this,” he remarked. “At least I assume you’re grimly hoping to regain or trace these two agents of yours. But if General Perdido is not in Cuba—and surely by now he would have been seen there by someone—then I fear the general would have headed for Red China.”

  “This department does not grimly hope,” said Carstairs in a hard voice. “No, my dear Peattie, the names of Farrell and Pollifax have been crossed off ail earthly lists as far as we are concerned.”

  “Then I don’t think I understand,” said Peattie, returning to his chair and sitting down.

  Carstairs hesitated. “You might call our investigation fifty per cent precaution and fifty per cent conscience. We don’t want any international incidents growing out of it, for instance.”

  “You mean like the U-2 affair,” cut in Peattie dryly.

  “Right. We want to”—his voice softened apologetically—“we have to be sure these two people are dead. We have to have proof.”

  Peattie nodded. “I’ll send out feelers at once, of course. I think that within four days—a week at the most—I can tell you whether General Perdido is or has been in China.” He gave Carstairs a curious glance and said, “And the fifty per cent conscience—or isn’t that any of my business?”

  Carstairs sighed. “I’m thinking of Mrs. Pollifax. The late Mrs. Pollifax, I fear. You didn’t know her, of course. Perhaps I can give you a capsule picture of her if I tell you that she strolled in here one day and asked if we needed any spies.”

  Peattie looked at Carstairs in open-mouthed astonishment.

  Carstairs nodded. “A comfortable little woman in her sixties, with a charmingly direct way of going about things. Asked Mason if there was something she could do for us. Rather like volunteering for work at a charity fete. Hellishly innocent and naïve, but so patently right for the tourist I needed that I gobbled her up, so to speak.”

  Peattie gave him a sympathetic glance. “I see,” he said quietly. “She knew the risks?”

  “Oh yes, she knew the risks. But she left without indoctrination, without training, without a cyanide pill.”

  “Fortunes of war,” pointed out Peattie softly. “Necessity is a ruthless mistress.”

  Carstairs sighed. “No one knows that better than I, but I haven’t been sleeping too well these past three nights. From a practical viewpoint it’s she who could become the international incident—she is so clearly usable, because of her innocence. But what is far more likely—”

  He stopped and Peattie said wryly, “Don’t torture yourself, my friend—don’t.”

  “I try not to,” Carstairs said with a bitter smile. “Let us say very simply that I must now think of plausible telegrams to send to the woman’s relatives explaining why she is not en route home from Mexico at this moment, and that eventually—once her death is substantiated—I must arrange some plausible death for her in Mexico.”

  “Stevens is working on that now,” put in Bishop. “A boating accident has been suggested, with no body recovered. Either a chartered boat off Acapulco or a freak drowning at Xochimilco. Mexico is being very helpful.”

  “How nice,” said Carstairs sourly. “Then her son and daughter will hold a memorial service for her and have her name cut on a stone in the family plot and say ‘What a way for Mother to go’ and they will never guess how their mother did die, or for what purpose, or know that half a dozen people in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City worked over the details, making their mother’s death palatable and acceptable to them.”

  “I get the point, you needn’t labor it,” said Peattie gently. “But you must know by now that inevitably there’s one person for whom one feels unusually responsible.”

  Carstairs nodded, a faint smile on his lips. “I ought to know that by now, Peattie. Rum job, what?”

  “Rum job,” agreed Peattie, and stood up. “I’ve got the picture now. I can promise you information, positive or negative, within the next week. I wish it could be sooner but China still moves pretty much by oxcart in spite of Mao’s boasts to the contrary.”

  “Thanks—we’ll take anything we can get.”

  When he had gone Carstairs lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair and gave Bishop a weary smile. “I don’t know whether you saw the message that came in late last evening or not. Tirpak is dead. A knife in the back in Guatemala about a week ago, the identification jus
t made.”

  Bishop sighed. “What you’d call a clean sweep then. No, I haven’t had time to catch up on last night’s communiques.”

  “They make lively reading—there’s even more,” added Carstairs wryly. “Our photographic-supply friend in Costa Rica processed all the information that Tirpak brought him, and duly burned the papers. It took three days to get all of Tirpak’s documents on film. There were six microfilms, but here’s the sad news: Tirpak gave no indication of how these films were going to be conveyed to Mexico City, or in what form. Whatever he did next with them was done secretly. According to our friend in Costa Rica Tirpak picked up each microfilm with a pair of tweezers, dropped them one by one into a plain white envelope, and left.”

  “Ouch,” said Bishop.

  Carstairs nodded. “Three days later he was murdered, but he must have started moving them toward Mexico City before then. What he did with them is anybody’s guess but I would assume he planned to insert them into something printed—say a letter or a book.”

  “You do think the microfilms reached Mexico City then.”

  Carstairs nodded. “Tirpak would have seen to that even at the cost of his life. He was that kind of man. What he couldn’t have realized was just how closely he was being followed and watched—and just how closely those microfilms were being watched. Yes, I believe they reached Mexico City. They reached the Parrot Bookstore and DeGamez was killed because of them.”

  “So General Perdido has the microfilms then.”

  Carstairs frowned. “They’re lost to us in any case, Bishop, but I’m not so sure that General Perdido has them, either. Take a close look at this timetable of events I’ve written out—see if it suggests anything to you.”

  Bishop took the memo and read:

  August 17: probable date of DeGamez’ murder

  August 17: General Perdido poses as DeGamez and installs himself at the Parrot Bookstore