Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (6 page)

“Good God, have we been invaded?” asked Burke-Jones, strolling in from the solarium.

“Only by folk culture,” she told him. “I think it’s rather endearing.”

He shuddered. “Not to me. Look, I’m driving down to the village for cigarettes—I have my car with me here—and I’ll be gone only ten or fifteen minutes. Would you care to come?” He added casually, “I thought I’d ask Court, too.”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled faintly. “It’s half-past eight and I’m getting sleepy after losing a night’s sleep on the plane, I think she’s in the dining room.”

“Who?”

“Court, of course.”

Barely smothering a yawn she bid him good night and went upstairs.

She had left the doors to her room closed; there were two of them, a thick one padded with quilted fabric for soundproofing and an inner conventional one that could be locked. Both stood ajar now, and seeing this Mrs. Pollifax quickened her step. It might be only a chambermaid turning down the bed, or it could be Marcel.

It was neither. It was the boy Hafez, sitting in front of the glass-topped desk and hunched over something in his lap.

“Hafez,” she said indignantly, “you simply mustn’t walk in and out of rooms when people aren’t in them.”

His hands quickly returned something to the desk; whatever it was she heard it click against the glass top before he jumped to his feet to face her. “But, madame,” he said, “I have been waiting for you. You did not say if you decided to be my friend.”

“I would be delighted to be your friend,” she told him, “but friends always knock before they come into a room.”

“But, madame, I did knock,” he protested. “It’s just that I received no answer.”

“Because I wasn’t here.”

“But where else could I have waited?” he asked, a desperate note creeping into his voice. “Serafina would have been very angry, she would have taken me off to bed if she saw me in the hall.”

“Do you like Serafina?”

The child shrugged; whatever troubled him it was not Serafina. “Must you tell her I came inside?”

“No, but only because we’re going to be friends, except you simply mustn’t come in uninvited or we can’t be friends.”

He considered this and nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and astonished her by walking out and closing both doors behind him.

Mrs. Pollifax stood looking after him, completely baffled, and then she sat down at the desk whore Hafez had been sitting. Its contents were meager: a hairbrush, a jar of cold cream, a small bottle of aspirin, an address book, a lipstick, and the magazines she had read on the plane but not yet tossed into the wastebasket. She shared Court’s impression of Hafez’s intelligence and she did not feel that his visit had been entirely impulsive. She wanted to know which of these objects had caught his attention and which had clicked against the glass as he put it back.

She picked up the lipstick and examined it but it appeared untouched. She leaned closer to the aspirin and then she picked it up and held it to the light. She had bought it just before leaving, a small supply of twenty-five tablets in case of emergency. It looked only half-filled now. She removed the plug of cotton and poured the tablets into the palm of her hand. There were only twelve left. As she returned the bottle to the desk it clicked against the glass with a matching familiarity. Of course—glass against glass.

She shook her head. In a clinic where any nurse could supply aspirin, why did Hafez feel compelled to steal thirteen tablets, she wondered. Did he just—take things, like a
kleptomaniac? She sat and frowned at the bottle, exasperated by her bewilderment; she realized that she would have to make a point of meeting Hafez’s grandmother soon.

And then she found herself wondering what sort of grandmother would bring a small boy to the Clinic—a clinic of all places—when he ought to be at home playing with children of his own age. The old could be very selfish, she conceded, but it was possible the woman had no idea the child was disturbed.

I wonder, she thought idly, and glanced at her watch. It lacked a few minutes to nine and she did not have to signal with her flashlight until ten. Downstairs the yodelers were still at work, their lusty high notes penetrating the building, so obviously the social hour remained in force. I’ll just pay a neighborly call, she thought. I’ll make no judgments, I’ll just
see
.

Resolutely she left her room and walked down the hall to knock on the door that Hafez had entered that morning. Hafez opened the door and a look of utter astonishment passed over his face. “Madame?” he faltered, and astonishment was followed by alarm. “Madame?” he repeated.

“Since we’re friends I thought I’d pay a brief call on your grandmother,” she told him cheerfully, and walked past him. “I trust she’s well enough to—but where?” she asked, seeing that she was entering an obviously unoccupied room. Her glance swerved to an open door on the left, and then to an open door on her right.

Hafez said, “But, madame—” His glance leaped anxiously to the left, and Mrs. Pollifax followed it.

Somewhere a man’s voice called out sharply in another language, and Hafez replied. There was the sound of glass falling to the floor, and an oath, followed by movement. Mrs. Pollifax reached the threshold of the adjoining bedroom and stopped. She had time to meet the shocked glance of Serafina, and time to glimpse the occupant of the bed in the darkened corner, and then she was seized from
behind. A man grabbed her left elbow, another her right elbow, and lifting her off the floor she was carried, still erect, to the door. It happened so quickly that her breath was literally taken away from her, and with it her voice.

“Ukhrujee,”
said the one burly attendant.
“Maksalamah!”

She was shoved roughly outside. Across the hall the man in the wheelchair sat and watched with narrowed eyes. She noticed that his hands gripped the arms of his chair so tightly that the knuckles were white. He muttered something, retreated and closed the door.

Mrs. Pollifax groped her way to one of the chairs lining the corridor and sank into it, shaken by the experience. After a few minutes she made her way down the hall to her room and closed the door behind her. She did not know whether to feel shocked, angry, or penitent. At the moment she felt a little of each and wondered which would triumph. “This isn’t New Brunswick, New Jersey,” she reminded herself, and then fiercely. “All right what could you expect, Emily? Of course they were outraged. Obviously the woman isn’t well and these servants or relatives, or whoever they are, have come to see that she has the best of care and of course they’re shocked to find a stranger bursting into the room without invitation.”

Of course.

So much for penitence.

The woman had lain in bed, very pale and fragile in her sleep: long braided gray hair, a slightly curved nose, a good jaw, eyes closed. Serafina had been sitting near her but half out of her chair at sight of Mrs. Pollifax. The two attendants apparently stayed in the farther room, and Hafez had been given the middle one. The grandmother, in the third room, had not even known of Mrs. Pollifax’s arrival—hadn’t even stirred—but the man in the wheelchair across the hall had known. It had never occurred to her that he might be a member of the party.

And Hafez … he had been astonished to see her, and
then alarmed, but he had made no move to stop her and as she had been carried out of the room she had glimpsed his face and he had looked pleased. Pleased by what, her coming to pay a call, or by her ejection?

She had expected—admit it—a querulous old woman, spoiled, vain, and doting on a grandson she needed but could neither entertain nor supervise. Instead she had found a still white face lying on a white pillow, and two angry attendants. She must ask Marcel; perhaps he could explain this.

She glanced at her watch and walked out to her balcony into a velvety stillness. Far below the lighted garden the lake was black and silent except for a lone steamer making its way to port; it trailed behind it ribbons of gold. It was peaceful here, it steadied her. The curving shores on either side twinkled with the lights of casinos and villas. On her left the adjacent hillside was no more than a brooding silhouette. She held her wrist to the light and checked the time.

At precisely ten o’clock she switched on her flashlight, counted to three, turned it off, then on, then off, and was startled and pleased to see that a pair of headlights sprang into life on the hillside. They illuminated the road like twin beams from a lighthouse so that she could see bushes, the trunk of a tree, the texture of the rough dirt road, and above all the angle at which the road dropped, and which the car now proceeded to follow down, dipping lower and lower until it vanished behind a stand of trees.

Whoever you are, she thought, it
is
nice to know you’re there.

In the garden below, one of the gardeners was turning off the spotlights hidden among the flower beds. One by one they died, and darkness joined with the stillness. The Clinic was being put to bed.

It was time for her to get to work, she realized, and time to forget her impulsive and abortive call on Hafez.

In Langley, Virginia, it was half-past
four in the afternoon and Carstairs was only finishing his morning’s work. He had begun the day with a tightly organized schedule but in midmorning the State Department had urgently requested a report on one of the smaller oil countries in the Middle East. It seemed the King of Zabya was celebrating his fortieth birthday on Tuesday, and a good many heads of state were attending the daylong festivities. Was the country stable enough for America to send the Vice-President, or should an expendable diplomat be dispatched in his place? Carstairs’s comments on this during the afternoon had become increasingly unprintable but the report had been completed and delivered: the Vice-President could be sent but he would have to expect boiled sheeps’ eyes on the menu.

Bishop wandered into the office smothering a yawn, “Schoenbeck’s outside,” he said.

“I thought you’d left.”

“I’m leaving now. Schoenbeck’s flying back to Geneva in two hours, he wants to wrap things up before he goes.”

“Right. I don’t suppose there’s coffee?”

Bishop brightened. “As a matter of fact it’s the only thing that’s kept me intelligent, charming, and alive these past hours. Shall I bring in Schoenbeck?”

“
And
the coffee,” added Carstairs.

Schoenbeck was Interpol, a rather pedantic little man with a lined face. He came in now, murmuring a thousand
apologies for the intrusion and when courtesies had been dispensed with Carstairs offered him coffee and sat down.

“Gervard’s going to be in charge at the Lake Geneva end,” began Schoenbeck. “He’s the man to contact if anything comes up. I won’t be seeing you again, I’ll be in Geneva.”

“Anything changed?”

“My friend, everything changes,” said Schoenbeck. “It is the law of life. I have just learned that it is useless for me to go to England for any new interrogations, the Dunlap man committed suicide this morning.”

Carstairs swore gently. “How the hell could he commit suicide in a prison cell, wasn’t he being watched?”

Schoenbeck shrugged. “The cessation of life, my friend, does not take long. He hung himself swiftly with a bed-sheet. A frightened man, obviously. Suddenly more frightened of life than of death.”

They were both silent, contemplating this. “No,” said Carstairs, shaking his head, “more frightened of
them
than of us. Two ordinary working men, one in England, one in America, and nothing in common except they happened to work in a nuclear reactor plant—and succumbed to stealing two buttons each of plutonium.”

“There is another thing they had in common, my friend,” said the man from Interpol. “Both wanted very much to live—at least greed always disposes me to think thus—and both have killed themselves before we could discover any other links to this chain.”

Carstairs nodded gloomily. “And their widows are richer. Anything yet on the money?”

Schoenbeck shook his head. “Not a thing, except that—
voilà!
—each has a bank account that is magically bulging. It must have been dealt over in cash. A dead end.”

Carstairs sighed. “Well organized.”

“Indeed yes.” Schoenbeck, looking stern, put down his coffee cup. “It pains me, my friend, that we know so little, that all of it is based on scraps. We know that in each case
the plutonium was tossed over the wall during working hours by a workman. We learn that in England a green sedan was seen by a farmer parked beside that wall about the right time, and the same green sedan was seen twenty minutes after the theft parked in front of the village post office—”

“But Stokely-on-the-Merden
is
a small village,” pointed out Carstairs.

“Oh yes, small enough so that the postal clerk recalls a stranger mailing a crate to Switzerland that day to a clinic near St. Gingolph named Mont-something. But everything we have is based on the word of a farmer plowing his fields, two housewives gossiping in front of a post office and the vulnerable memory of a postal clerk.”

Carstairs smiled forgivingly at his friend. “You’re feeling discouraged, Monsieur Schoenbeck. How often do you have more solid leads? What do we ever work with but scraps and pieces? Yet the world lurches on.”

“It is my concern over its continuing to lurch that troubles me,” remarked Schoenbeck. “This is a dangerous time to have plutonium drifting about loose in the world, there is too much hate. Your agent is now joining ours at Montbrison?”

Carstairs glanced at his watch. “Yes, as a matter of fact she would have been there for some hours now.”

Schoenbeck nodded. “Good. We have discovered, by the way, a clinic called Montrose some forty miles to the south, and we are putting an agent in there as well, whom Gervard will supervise. We will, of course, continue to follow every small possibility concerning the two men who stole the plutonium. The dead can no longer speak but their friends have not lost that power. What I want from you, my friend—”

Carstairs lifted his brows. “More?” he asked with comic despair.