Elusive Mrs. Pollifax
Page 7
Debby rustled the map. “Yes, there’s one at Zlatica. Isn’t it weird? There aren’t many in the whole country. Or cars either.”
Mrs. Pollifax said without expression, “There’s been a black Renault behind us on the road for some time. I think we’ll have the gas tank filled and let it pass us.” She’d first noted the car as far back as Elin Pelin, because of the clouds of dust it had raised behind them on that particular stretch of dusty countryside. Now, some miles later, it was still there and the coincidence made her uneasy.
Near Zlatica she pulled into the neat cement and grass compound decorated with flower beds and Nempon signs, and two husky women in blue overalls emerged.
“Oh, wow,” said Debby, collapsing into giggles.
“Sssh,” said Mrs. Pollifax, sternly, and after a clumsy exchange of sign language and a great number of titters and smiles, the gas tank was filled, the oil checked and bills counted. More important, the black Renault passed them and disappeared ahead.
The road carried them along the floor of the valley, the mountains on either side growing sharper as the haze cleared. They passed tiny thatch-roofed farmhouses, each with its yard neatly enclosed by fences made of woven twigs. Sometimes an old woman sat on a bench by the door, a spindle in one hand, a bundle of flax in the other. Once they saw a shepherd standing at a distance on a hill, his watchtower behind him, a marvelous leather cape across his shoulders. “He actually carries a crook,” Debby said in awe.
And then the fields turned into acre after acre of roses, entire hillsides dotted with extravagant pinks and yellows and scarlets. “This must be the Valley of Roses,” Debby announced after a look at the map.
“Debby, I’m thinking about that horrid man with the knife last night,” said Mrs. Pollifax abruptly. “Where did you learn to tackle like that, by the way? You were marvelous.”
“Oh that was nothing,” Debby said eagerly. “You should see me on the parallel bars and the ropes. I adore phys. ed., it’s the only subject I pass in school. What about that man? Do you think he had anything to do with Phil’s arrest?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pollifax honestly. “Debby, have you any idea at all why it should have been Philip who was arrested?”
“Of course not,” said Debby. “I wish we could stop at one of those rose places. Want a grape from the basket?”
“No, and you answered my question much too quickly,” she said. “Of course the answer wouldn’t be obvious. Tell me what you know about him.”
“About Phil?” Debby was smiling. “Nothing much except I think he’s just great. He digs Simon and Garfunkel–and Leonard Cohen–and he’s gentle and he listens.”
“Debby.”
“Hmm?”
“I didn’t ask how you feel about him, I’m trying to find out why he was arrested for espionage an hour after he arrived in Bulgaria. Facts.”
“Facts?” echoed Debby blankly.
“Yes, for instance, where does Philip come from? Where does he live? What do his parents do?” Mrs. Pollifax glanced into the rearview mirror at Debby’s face and saw its bewilderment.
“Oh. Well …” Debby began, and floundered. “I only met him three weeks ago,” she said indignantly. “Those things don’t matter.”
“They matter now,” said Mrs. Pollifax firmly. “Think. Concentrate.”
“If you want labels,” Debby said scornfully, “he’s a sophomore at the University of Illinois.”
“Good! An excellent beginning.” She realized that she was asking Debby to violate an unspoken code and she added very gently, “It’s this sort of thing, Debby, that could solve the riddle. More, it could help free him.”
Debby said promptly, “Well, I’ve got some of his books in my pack. Maybe he scribbled his address in one of them.”
Mrs. Pollifax heard rustlings and clankings and smiled as she saw Debby toss out a tin drinking cup, a hairbrush and an assortment of paperbacks. Debby said, “This one’s his–and this–and the Kahlil Gibran. Hey,” she shouted, “I found something.”
“Hooray,” said Mrs. Pollifax.
“It was stuck in the pages as a bookmark.” She handed Mrs. Pollifax a pocket calendar the size of a playing card, a familiar plasticized type distributed by banks and corporations at Christmastime.
Mrs. Pollifax handed it back. “Read it to me,” she said. “I can’t read it without stopping the car.”
“It says”–Debby held it up to the light–“in large letters it says TRENDA-ARCTIC OIL COMPANY, and under this in small letters, President, Peter F. Trenda, Headquarters Chicago, Illinois; Fairbanks, Alaska, and St. John’s, Newfoundland.”
Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “Good for you. I feel better.”
Debby’s voice was disappointed. “All it means is that Phil’s parents are rich. Filthy rich, possibly.”
Mrs. Pollifax glanced into the rearview mirror at Debby. “Even that’s a help,” she told her, and then her glance went beyond Debby to the road. A black Renault sedan had just driven out of a side road and was driving at some distance behind them.
11
The reached Shipka Pass shortly after noon, having stopped a few minutes to marvel at the Shipka Monastery, with its gold onion domes gleaming softly in the sun like an enchanted fairy-tale palace.
Once at the summit they parked the car in the broad flat parking area and Mrs. Pollifax stood a minute listening to the wind. “It sounds like the sea,” she said. “As if it’s swept thousands and thousands of miles without meeting any resistance.” She realized that she was also listening for the sound of an engine behind them, and when no black Renault appeared she sighed with relief. Turning toward the low stone buildings she said, “Let’s treat ourselves to a really Bulgarian lunch, shall we?”
“Great,” said Debby. “How far are we from that place you want to go?”
“About twenty or thirty miles. Not far.”
They lunched on cuzek patladjan and mishmash and misquette grapes under dark murals of the Battle of Shipka Pass. Mrs. Pollifax produced aspirin from her bag for Debby, whose thumb was beginning to throb, and they bought a few postcards in the lobby. While Debby lingered in the ladies’ room Mrs. Pollifax wandered outside just in time to see a black Renault sedan drive out of the parking expanse and head down the mountain toward Gabrovo and Tarnovo.
She watched it vanish with a worried frown. It was possible that another tourist might drive from Sofia to Shipka Pass along this same route, and at precisely the same hour, but it struck her as exceedingly odd that they reached Shipka Pass at the same time. She had stopped for gas at Zlatica, and had seen the Renault pass them, and then they had stopped at the monastery and had again seen the Renault pass. Yet the Renault had not reached the summit before they did, and now it was just leaving.
If that’s the same Renault, then we’re being followed, she thought, naming her fear. But by whom? There had been the small gray man in the gray suit, her mysterious burglar of the first evening, the man with the knife last night, and there was the remote possibility that Tsanko could be keeping them under surveillance. She couldn’t imagine Balkantourist going to such lengths to make sure that she reached Borovets. Remembering Nevena’s character, she thought that Balkantourist would have flagged her down two miles out of Sofia and sternly forced her back on the road southward.
I don’t like it, she thought, remembering that she was here on nothing but faith and a telephone call from a stranger. It was extraordinary, this abrupt order to leave Sofia and drive halfway across Bulgaria. Could Tsanko really be trusted?
She felt acutely lonely as she stood listening to the sound of the wind. Her only companion was a charming, waif-like child who was more likely to prove a liability in case of untoward circumstances. She herself felt un-accountably frail. She thought it must stem from the odd juxtaposition of the familiar and the sinister; no country so foreign in nature had the right to look so much like the American countryside of New England, with Queen Anne’s lace growing along the roads, popl
ar trees and spruces thickly lining the slopes, and mountains scalloping the horizon at a distance. It was not New England, but its very familiarity blunted all sense of real danger She had to struggle to remember that this was a police state and a country where almost no English was spoken. What was most provoking of all, the words were so cluttered with consonants that one couldn’t even guess their meaning. What could one do with a word spelled CBЯT?
“Hey–what’s the matter?” asked Debby, joining her, “You look spooky.”
“I feel spooky,” admitted Mrs. Pollifax with a frown. “I don’t know why, either, except I have the feeling we shouldn’t have stopped here for lunch.”
“It must be the ghosts of Shipka Pass,” Debby said. “You know–those twenty-eight thousand Bulgarians killed here fighting the Turks.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Pollifax lightly. “Shall we go now?”
They had traveled only a few miles down the mountain-side when the brakes failed. The road was steep and curving, with a precipitous drop on the right and a precipitous slope on the left. As Mrs. Pollifax stamped helplessly on the brake pedal again and again the car only gathered momentum. Furiously she tugged at the emergency brake; for just a second it caught, lessening their speed, and then the emergency snapped under the strain and came away in her hand.
“What is it?” cried Debby.
“Brakes,” gasped Mrs. Pollifax, and clung to the wheel as they gathered speed and wildly careened around a hairpin curve. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the sheer, cliff-like drop on their right. Nothing on earth could hold their wheels on the road if they met a second curve like this. They would fly off the mountain into space and plummet to the depths of the ravine.
“We’ve got to crash,” she shouted. “Get down!”
The road briefly straightened. With all of her strength Mrs. Pollifax leaned on the steering wheel, pulling it toward the mountain side of the road. Every instinct in her body fought a crash. The wall of the mountain loomed near to the windshield and for just one second she stared straight into rich black soil lightly covered over with low evergreens, grass, the stunted trunk of a tree in a crevice, and then came the impact of metal against earth, terrible grinding noises, the splintering of glass and silence.
She opened her eyes to discover that she was still alive. “Debby?” she gasped.
From somewhere behind her Debby mumbled something unintelligible and her head lifted from the floor of the car. “I’m okay,” she said in a surprised voice. A second later she added with still more surprise, “But I think I’m going to scream if we don’t get out of here. Are we trapped?”
Mrs. Pollifax looked around her. The car had tunneled its way several feet into the steep hillside–she shuddered to think how fast they’d been going–and she was staring into a wall of earth. “We’ll break the back window,” she announced. “Open up the rear seat, they said the tools are under it.” Her hat was on the floor; she picked it up and placed it on her head again.
A few minutes later the last surviving window of the car had been broken with a lug, and Debby threw out her pack and crawled after it. Mrs. Pollifax followed less gracefully with her suitcase and sat down beside her next to the road. She realized that her hands were trembling badly, and she pressed them together in her lap. I hope I’m not going to faint, she thought.
“Well, are you going to sue the Volkswagen people or Balkantourist?” asked Debby indignantly. “We could have been killed!”
A dozen replies occurred to Mrs. Pollifax, all of which she discarded. It didn’t seem the kindest moment to tell Debby that their brakes must have been tampered with while they lunched at Shipka Pass. It was a miracle they were still alive.
She thought, I’ll tell her later, and she wished with surprising savagery that Debby had left on the plane this morning, broken thumb or no, for it was even less pleasant to realize it might be Debby someone was determined to murder.
Within the hour they caught a lift with a farmer who spoke no English but who nevertheless managed to express his genuine horror over their plight. He placed them in his battered truck, offered them peaches and cigarettes and drove them to Gabrovo. But not to a Nempon station; he took them to the police.
Well, thought Mrs. Pollifax philosophically, in for a penny, in for a pound.
The houses in Gabrovo were the same dun-colored stucco boxes they had seen along the way, the roofs of clay tile or thatch, the windows curtained with yellowing newspapers. The police, however, were quartered behind a wall with a gate, over which was suspended a neat black sign. From the main building just inside the gate jutted long low buildings forming a perfect square around a compound of grass and flowers in the center. Their Bulgarian friend went inside and came out with two policemen in uniforms of dark trousers and apple-green Eisenhower jackets. Presumably he had explained the condition of their car and its abandonment. Passports were shown, and after a brief interval another farmer was summoned who spoke some English–he had once worked a year in Kansas, he said–and he reported that the police were heartbroken at the situation of the American tourists. The proper authorities would be notified, the car towed to the nearest Nempon station and a message conveyed to them in Tarnovo when repairs had been made.
In the meantime–with the apologies of everyone concerned–there was nothing in town for them with wheels except a motorcycle.
“Motorcycle?” said Mrs. Pollifax doubtfully.
“Oh beautiful,” cried Debby ecstatically. “I know how to drive a motorcycle, I ride one lots of times at home.”
It was in this way that Mrs. Pollifax and Debby roared into Tarnovo on a motorcycle with Debby at the handle-bars, the luggage roped to the rear and Mrs. Pollifax squashed between them, one hand inside of Debby’s belt, the other clinging to her hat.
12
Nothing had prepared Mrs. Pollifax for Tarnovo. It was built all over six hilltops of the Balkan mountain range and then repeatedly severed by the knife-cut wound of the Yantra’s deep gorges. Houses tilted absurdly on the edge of the cliffs, and at the base–far below–trickled the Yantra, reduced by time and drought until its stream barely covered the bones of its riverbed. The old town, isolated, seemed to brush the sky and the clouds. It had once been the capital of an ancient kingdom–the Second Bulgarian Kingdom–and the remains of its fortress still crenelated the top of Tsaravets Hill. A stone entrance gate connected Tsaravets Hill to the main street of the town. This gate had stood since A.D. 1185, the only means of reaching a fortress rendered almost inviolate by the river encircling its hill half a mile below.
The Hotel Yantra was a modest building on a steep, cobblestoned street. Inside the open front door of the hotel lay a dusty lobby with a dusty leather couch and a glass-fronted display case of souvenirs: costumed dolls; postcards; a few tubes of toothpaste, and cigarettes, including a dusty package of Camels.
“Pollifax,” she said to the woman behind the desk.
The woman offered pencil and paper with which Mrs. Pollifax obligingly wrote her name. The woman studied it and gave a sharp cry of recognition. She rang a bell, reached for a key and handed it to her along with a large white envelope.
Mrs. Pollifax opened the envelope and drew out a sheet of unsigned notepaper. On it was typed:
Tsaravets Hill is charming by moonlight. About 10 P.M. this evening, somewhere between gate and fortress.
Her heart beat a little faster at the message; she crushed the paper into her purse and turned back to the woman, who had reverted to sign language. Matching her gestures, Mrs. Pollifax described Debby’s need for lodging, too. Passports were submitted and they were shown to a room with two beds on the second floor.
“Again no screens,” commented Mrs. Pollifax, standing at the open window. Their room was directly over the front door and the cobblestoned street. She could understand why defenestration was the most customary form of assassination in the Balkans–there had been no screens in Sofia, either and her room had been on the sixth floor.
“Nonsense, there has to be water,” said Mrs. Pollifax, joining her. The floor of the tiny bathroom was painted a bilious green. There was neither tub nor shower stall, but high on one wall hung a shower spray with a drain under it. But none of the faucets yielded water. “I’ll go and tell them,” she said, and turned on her heel.
This challenge Mrs. Pollifax met by standing in front of the woman at the desk, wrenching open imaginary faucets and lifting her hands in dismay. The woman smiled and went to the telephone. A moment later she handed the receiver across the counter, gesturing to her to speak. “Hello?” Mrs. Pollifax said doubtfully.
“Yes,” answered a voice at the other end of the wire. “You the English speak?”
“I certainly do,” cried Mrs. Pollifax. “To whom am I speaking?”
“To Herr Vogel at Balkantourist hotel the street down. I visit here, some English I speak. The problem is what, bitte?”
“The problem is no water. Can you explain this to them here?”
“Ah …” The sigh was long and heavy. “But water there is nowhere at this hour, Fraulein. Between six and eight at night flows the water, you understand? Six and eight. In the morning flows the water seven to ten.”
“Let me write that down,” said Mrs. Pollifax despairingly. “But why the water flows—I mean, why?”
“A mountain town is Tarnovo, very high. Scarce is the water here. Did you see the jugs in the bathroom?”
“Jugs—yes.”
“You the water fill with them, bitte? Six o’clock.”
Mrs. Pollifax profusely thanked him, congratulated the clerk on her resourcefulness and went back to explain the situation to Debby, who was incredulous.
“It’s ten minutes before six now,” Mrs. Pollifax said. “I suggest we wait.”
Precisely at six there issued from the bathroom an assortment of hollow noises, belches, rumbles and at last a trickling of water. Ten minutes later the toilet could be flushed. By that time Debby was at the sink washing a shirt and Mrs. Pollifax filling jugs of water, after which they took turns showering. They dined downstairs, below street level on an open balcony overlooking the gorge, and after this strolled briefly through the streets of the old town.