Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  “I’m not sure she has a dress,” said Mrs. Pollifax tartly. “She’s waiting outside, do you want to ask her?”

  He looked at her. “Just get her out before the news story heats up.”

  “In the meantime,” said Mrs. Pollifax, rising, “I assume that you’ll keep in mind that Philip Trenda, no matter what length his hair, is still an American citizen?”

  Eastlake gave her a long, level scrutiny. “Oh yes, Mrs. Pollifax, we will,” he said dryly. “We do our best for distressed American citizens even if they turn out to be criminals or bona fide spies. But it would be infinitely simpler if it was someone like yourself who had been arrested yesterday.”

  “Even if I turned out to be a spy?” asked Mrs. Pollifax with a pleasant smile.

  He looked at her pityingly, as if the poverty of her humor overtaxed his patience, and Mrs. Pollifax left with the feeling that she had delivered the last word, even if her audience didn’t realize it.

  At nine she and Debby dined together in the hotel restaurant. They had no sooner ordered when a waiter emerged who spoke primitive English–Mrs. Pollifax wondered where the management had been hiding him–and announced that Balkantourist was calling her on the telephone at the front desk.

  “That will be Nevena,” she said with a sigh, and left Debby to follow the man upstairs to the lobby. “Mrs. Pollifax,” she said into the phone.

  But it was not Balkantourist. “How do you do,” said a man’s voice, lightly accented. “This is the man from the shop you visited yesterday. About the brown sheepskin vest?”

  “Oh–yes,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax. “Yes indeed.” She was aware of two desk clerks at her elbow and she inched unobtrusively away from them. “I’m very glad to hear,” she said, but of one thing she was certain: this was not the same man she had spoken with in the tailor shop–the voice and the accent were different.

  “Our mutual friend has been called away,” continued the voice smoothly. “It is suggested you meet him in Tarnovo.”

  “Where?”

  “It is some distance. You have a car? It is suggested you leave tomorrow, Wednesday morning. It is a drive in miles of some one hundred fifty. A reservation has been made for you at the Hotel Yantra tomorrow night.”

  “Those two names,” said Mrs. Pollifax, fumbling for a pencil. “Again, please?”

  “Tarnovo. T-a-r-n-o-v-o. The Hotel Yantra.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax, baffled by such unexpected instructions. “But why?” she asked. “Is this really necessary? I don’t understand–”

  The voice was cold. “Quite necessary.” A gentle click at the other end of the line told her that she was no longer in contact with her mysterious caller. She placed the receiver back on the hook. With a polite smile for the two young desk clerks, she made her way quickly to the ladies’ room, locked the door behind her and removed a map of Bulgaria from her purse. Eventually she found Tarnovo–it was the center of the country.

  But why? she thought indignantly. Why must she leave Sofia and go driving halfway across Bulgaria, even if the country was only three hundred miles from west to east?

  She could think of only two reasons at the moment. The small gray man might not be one of Tsanko’s people. Or Shipkov’s message and his telephone call were both a trap and there was no Tsanko at all.

  Neither possibility was heartening. But she had come to Bulgaria to carry out an assignment and this was the first communication she’d received. If it was a trap, she was going to have to discover it for herself by following it through to the end.

  Carefully she tore up her written notes on Tarnovo and flushed them down the toilet. Returning to Debby she said, “I’ll be leaving Sofia too, tomorrow. I’m going to do a little touring of the countryside.”

  “Oh,” said Debby, startled.

  Mrs. Pollifax reached out and patted her hand. “But I won’t forget about Philip. I’ll keep in touch with the Embassy for as long as I’m in Bulgaria and if you’ll give me your address I’ll write every piece of news I hear.”

  But even as she reassured Debby she was thinking, Why Tarnovo? Why so far?

  It was upsetting, and she admitted to a distinct uneasiness.

  10

  A change of plan was not casually accomplished. The hotel had collected Mrs. Pollifax’s passport upon her arrival and in order to recover it she had to explain her plans to leave the next day. Balkantourist was telephoned, and an irate Nevena summoned again to demand what on earth she wanted.

  “I want to drive into the country tomorrow and remain away for a few days,” explained Mrs. Pollifax.

  “You arrived only yesterday in Sofia.”

  “That’s true. Now I want to leave.”

  “Why?”

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed and embarked upon a story about meeting tourists that day who had told her Sofia was not the real Bulgaria.

  “They said that?” Nevena said suspiciously. “Who were they?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. But in any case you know I want to see the real Bulgaria and I was planning anyway to drive into the country before I leave. Now I want to go tomorrow.”

  “Yes? Well, then, Borovets would be good, very good. It is south of Sofia, they ski there big in winter. I make a reservation at Hotel Balkantourist in Borovets for your arrival there tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Pollifax opened her mouth to protest and then closed it. There was obviously no point in mentioning Tarnovo to Nevena if Nevena wanted her to go to Borovets. If she persisted, the reservation at the Hotel Yantra might be accidentally uncovered, too. At this moment Mrs. Pollifax clearly understood the frustration that caused small children to lie through their teeth in the face of authority.

  “Give me the manager, I speak with him,” Nevena said, and Mrs. Pollifax gladly handed the phone to him. At length he promised to have her passport for her in the morning when she checked out.

  “Thank you–nine o’clock,” emphasized Mrs. Pollifax, and decided that it would be infinitely simpler if she did not mention that Debby would be staying the night with her.

  Mrs. Pollifax set her alarm for a seven o’clock rising, determined to see that her young charge arrived at the airport on time; she wanted nothing to interfere with her new rendezvous in Tarnovo. She was pleased to note that at sight of a proper bathroom Debby made happy feminine sounds and dug out shampoo, soap and creams from her pack. It was possible, thought Mrs. Pollifax, that she would even wear a dress for the flight.

  On this pleasant note Mrs. Pollifax fell asleep.

  She awoke suddenly, with a rapidly beating heart. But this is growing tiresome, she thought, staring up at a man silhouetted beside her bed. He had half turned away from her and was holding an object up to the dim light from the window. He held it with one hand and with the other hand he stroked it. Eyes wide open now, Mrs. Pollifax saw that it was a knife he held. He was touching it, testing it, with a concentration that turned her cold.

  He moved with infinite grace. His speed was incredible. Mrs. Pollifax barely had time to roll to the edge of the bed. As she dropped to the floor she heard the ugly ripping sound of the knife slicing the pillow where only a second before her head had lain. Then with a second swift movement he turned toward Debby’s bed.

  Mrs. Pollifax screamed.

  It was a small scream, but it was effective. In the other bed Debby sat upright and turned on the bedside light in one fluid, competent motion that amazed Mrs. Pollifax. The light showed her assailant half-crouched between the beds, his eyes blinking at the sudden light.

  Debby didn’t scream. To Mrs. Pollifax’s astonishment she stood up in bed and with a wild shout threw herself at the man and carried him to the floor with her. It was the most surprising tackle that Mrs. Pollifax had ever seen. The young, she thought, must feel so very un-used.

  She stumbled to her feet to help. As Debby and the man rolled out into the middle of the room she saw the knife flash in the man’s hand and abruptly he jumped to his feet. Debby clung to his legs. He
viciously kicked away her grasp, brushed past Mrs. Pollifax, opened the door and fled.

  Mrs. Pollifax had never seen him before. Since she was unlikely to see him again tonight she turned to Debby, who sat on the floor rocking back and forth in pain, her left hand cradled between her knees and blood streaming down her face from a scalp wound.

  “Oh, my dear,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax after one glance at the bone pushing its way through the skin of Debby’s thumb and she hurried to the telephone. There she stopped, remembering that no one would understand her cry for help and that she’d already had a burglar the night before. She turned back. “Debby, we’re going to have to get you downstairs to the lobby,” she said fiercely. “Can you walk? Your scalp wound needs stitches, and your thumb needs a splint.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Debby said in a dazed voice.

  “Lean on me. And tell them you fell into a mirror, do you understand?”

  “But he tried to kill me!” cried Debby.

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “Yes,” she said, and for just a moment allowed herself to remember what it had felt like to be inches away from his knife. But what troubled her most of all in remembering was that the man had known Debby was in the room with her. There’d been no hesitation at all–and no light shown–before he’d turned from Mrs. Pollifax to the next bed.

  He had planned to murder them both.

  “I don’t think we can afford the police,” she explained. “Trust me, will you?” Releasing Debby she hurried into the bathroom. The mirror lining the sink was impossible to fall into, but there was a full-length mirror attached to the back of the door. Mrs. Pollifax grabbed Debby’s hairbrush and after several attacks succeeded in shattering the glass. “Let’s go,” she told Debby and they moved slowly out into the hall, a trail of blood taking shape behind them. The self-service elevator bore them down to the lobby, the doors slid open and Mrs. Pollifax carried her bloody companion into the lobby.

  The picture they made abolished any need for translations. The desk clerk shouted, rang bells, pressed buzzers; a potential hotel scandal provoked the same reaction in any language and any country. Debby was delivered into the hands of a doctor who arrived breathless and belt-less and still in bedroom slippers. The manager of the hotel followed, and then at last a representative of Balkantourist–but not Nevena, for which Mrs. Pollifax could be grateful.

  It was daylight before it was all over: the setting and bandaging of Debby’s thumb, the stitching of the scalp wound and the questions. It no longer mattered to Mrs. Pollifax how it had all happened. What began to matter very much was her departure for Tarnovo in several hours; this was, after all, the whole point of her being in Bulgaria. “I want to speak,” she told the Balkantourist representative firmly.

  “Yes?”

  “I am due to leave Sofia this morning in my car.”

  “Yes, yes, they have your passport ready to give you,” he said.

  “And the girl is to leave Sofia by plane this morning–”

  “No,” said the Balkantourist representative flatly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The doctor says no. The doctor is firm. The girl cannot take flight alone. She must be looked after twenty-four hours. She is tired–spent, you know? There is some shock. To wander alone”–he shook his head disapprovingly–“she would cry, maybe faint, go unconscious. She needs the comfort of a presence, you understand?”

  Mrs. Pollifax considered this; he was only too right, of course, but she couldn’t possibly delay her own departure. Yet if she couldn’t leave Debby here alone then there was only one alternative, and this dismayed her because she had no idea what lay ahead of her in Tarnovo. “Is she well enough to do a little driving in a car? In my presence?”

  This was queried of the doctor, who smiled warmly, nodding. Mr. Eastlake wouldn’t like this, she thought, but then Mr. Eastlake could be prevented from knowing about it. Tsanko wouldn’t like it either–if they ever made contact–and she was sure that Carstairs would be appalled.

  But she could scarcely abandon the child to a lonely hotel room for several days, and she could certainly not insist that Debby fly off to another lonely hotel room in another strange country. Her limitations as a ruthless agent had never been so pressing. Mrs. Pollifax sighed over them even as she said, “Good. She’ll go with me then.”

  Everyone looked extremely relieved, and Mrs. Pollifax realized that the hotel would be delighted to be rid of her. Just to be sure of this she asked that a basket of fruit be packed for their drive, and two breakfasts be sent to her room.

  It was exactly half-past nine when they drove away from the hotel, and considering the obstacles they’d encountered, Mrs. Pollifax congratulated herself on their leaving at all. Debby was curled up in the rear seat with orders to read road signs, remain quiet and stay warm. In any case Mrs. Pollifax had to concentrate for the first half an hour on getting them out of Sofia, with its maze-like streets leading into broad boulevards whose names all seemed to end in ev or iski. It was made more difficult by the fact that she wanted to go east on Route One toward Tarnovo, but she had been given detailed directions south, into artery number five, which would take her to Borovets. She was aware by this time of how few people spoke English in Bulgaria–and the perils of getting lost under such conditions–and so she simply followed her printed directions out of Sofia and then detoured north to Route One through a town called–incongruously–Elin Pelin. But all of this added miles to their excursion.

  “There–we have reached Route One at last,” she announced as they bounced onto a paved road. “Thank heaven that route numbers look the same in any language.”

  “Route One doesn’t feel any better,” Debby said, sitting up and looking around her. “What are these roads built of?”

  Poplars lined the road, and beyond them stretched fields that carried the eye to the mountains on either side, still clouded by morning haze. The valley was green and rolling, punctuated by tidy haystacks at symmetrical intervals, and here and there low-lying walls of intricately worked stone. They passed a hay wagon and a farm truck and then no one.

  “Of stone,” said Mrs. Pollifax in reply. “Rather like those farm walls. You can see it here and there where the macadam’s missing–a parquet affect.” Waving a hand toward the mountains on their left, she added, “We cross that range further along, at Shipka Pass, where something like twenty-eight thousand Bulgarians died fighting the Turks.”

  “Twenty-eight thousand?” repeated Debby disbelievingly.

  “You’ll find it on the back of the map, translated into French, German and English. It says there’s a monument and a restaurant there. They fought in the dead of winter and when they ran out of ammunition they threw rocks and boulders down the slopes at the Turks. There were eighteen survivors.”

  Debby whistled. “That beats Custer’s last stand. Twenty-eight thousand and they didn’t even win?”

  “I don’t think they’re on the winning side very often in Bulgaria,” said Mrs. Pollifax tartly.

  Debby said, “That’s dramatic, you know? I never thought about the places I hiked through this summer.”

  “Rather a waste. What did you think about?”

  “Finding other kids. Looking for a piece of the action. That sort of thing.”

  “Do your parents know you just wander about picking up rides and people?”

  Debby emitted a sound like “Ech.”

  “Do they even know you’re in Bulgaria?” she asked in a startled voice.

  This time Debby’s comment sounded like “Aaaah.”

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “Debby, if we’re going to be traveling together I really think you’ll have to enlarge your vocabulary. I’m sure you’d much prefer to be with people your own age, but for a few days we’ll have to accept this situation and lay down some ground rules. Later you can explain what ‘aaaah’ means, but what on earth is ‘ech’?”

  Debby looked resentful. “Dr. Kidd doesn’t ask things like that. He’s my psychiat
rist and he wants me to be spontaneous.”

  “Well, I’ve nothing against psychiatrists or spontaneity,” retorted Mrs. Pollifax, “but I do think clear communication simplifies life a great deal. Now. What does ech mean?”

  Debby laughed. “It sounds so funny when you say it.”

  “It sounds funny when you say it, too. What took you to a psychiatrist, by the way?”

  “I run away a lot,” Debby said vaguely. “And I get attached to too many boys. It upsets my parents. Dr. Kidd says I get devoted to people because they’re not. Dr. Kidd says they are, but I don’t believe it. How can they be when they never say no and are scared of me?”

  Mrs. Pollifax deftly supplied her own translation. “You mean you haven’t written your parents at all since you left America?”

  “That’s right,” said Debby. “I’m giving them a restful summer.”

  “But don’t they mind not hearing? Don’t they worry?”

  “You know,” she said a little wistfully, “I wish they did sometimes. Just once in a while. They really don’t know what to do with me and they always want me to be happy. I’m too old for summer camps now so they said I could go to Europe on my own. Dr. Kidd said maybe I’ll find myself by doing it.”

  Mrs. Pollifax was silent and then she said lightly, dryly, “I see. Rather like a lost-and-found department.”

  But Debby had grown tired of the subject. “I wonder how Phil is today. What’s at this Borovets place we’re going to visit, or are you going to say I’ll find out soon enough?”

  “You would if we were going there,” Mrs. Pollifax told her. “But we’re not, we’re going to Tarnovo.”

  “For Pete’s sake why?”

  “Because I’ve never had any intention of going anywhere else,” said Mrs. Pollifax reasonably. “Debby, look at the map and see if there’s a gas station at Zlatica, will you? You’ll find tiny red automobiles printed on the map wherever one can buy gas.”