"As American as San Francisco," he said, sending streams of blue smoke toward the ceiling from his horizontal position. "My mother was Spanish—I learned to speak Spanish before I knew English. And I got the wandering bug from them. They were both vaudeville people—dancers."
"How very nice," said Mrs. Pollifax, charmed by the thought. "I always did enjoy the flamenco. Did you live out of a suitcase?"
"Mmm, just about."
"Do you dance?"
"Only a waltz," he said cheerfully. "In me the talent came out in art. I was in the war very early, and when I got out I headed for Mexico to paint. It may surprise you to hear that I really do paint—off and on. By the time Carstairs found me I had already acquired just the reputation he wanted: half playboy, half adventurer, half artist."
"You have too many halves there," pointed out Mrs. Pollifax primly.
"You don't feel that exaggeration adds flavor?" he inquired.
Mrs. Pollifax struggled and lost. "Actually, I have been guilty of a small amount of exaggeration myself at times."
He chuckled. "I'll bet you have, Duchess, I'll bet you have. But lived a very quiet and respectable life in spite of it?"
"Oh yes," she said. "Very quiet and very respectable. My husband was a lawyer, a very fine one. My son is a lawyer, too," she added, and thinking back added with nostalgia, "Yes, it was a very pleasant and peaceful life."
Farrell turned his head to look at her through the gloom. He said tactfully, 'Think I'll have a little nap now, Duchess." Carefully adjusting his position to his wounded arm he left Mrs. Pollifax to her thoughts and pretended to fall asleep.
It was at mealtime that the new prisoner arrived. He was pushed in ahead of the trays and kicked ungenerously by Major Vassovic and apparently sworn at in the language of the country. A third cot was then brought in and placed along the third wall. Mrs. Pollifax was too busy feeding Farrell with a spoon to pay much attention, but while she ate her own meal—reluctantly putting away her playing cards to make room for it—she eyed the man curiously. He lay on his side, with his face resting on his two hands, but all that she could really see of him was a bristling, white, walrus moustache jutting up, and the top of a bald pink head fringed with white about the ears. It was a very elegant, splendidly Victorian moustache—she hadn't seen one like it since she was a child. She realized that Farrell, propped against the opposite wall, was also studying the man. He said suddenly, "My name's Farrell, what is yours, sir?"
The man's head shifted, aware of Farrell's voice, but his face remained blank and he said nothing.
"Speak English?" asked Farrell.
"Inglese?" repeated the man, and with a shake of his head added a jumble of words in a language that neither of them understood.
"He doesn't speak English—that's good," said Mrs. Pollifax. "What did we eat tonight, by the way?"
Farrell said broodingly, "Heaven only knows." He was still watching the stranger. He said suddenly, in a particularly meaningful voice, "Look at the candle!"
Mrs. Pollifax's glance went at once to the candle over the newcomer's head, and she frowned because there was nothing wrong with it, nothing to see but the one sputtering flame that gave little more than an illusion of lighting the shadows. Then she realized that the new man, who had been lying on his side, had thrown back his head so that he, too, was looking at the candle. How very curious, she thought, he had understood perfectly what Farrell said. It occurred to her that he was arriving in their cell just as General Perdido had announced that he was leaving for a few days, and she pondered the connection. Yes, it was quite possible; it would be very inefficient of the general to leave without making some arrangements to learn more about her and Farrell. The general would not care to waste time, and what better way to make time work for him than to place a spy in their cell to eavesdrop on them while he was gone? Apparently the general had unearthed another English-speaking member of the Sigurimi. She smiled at Farrell to show him that she understood his warning.
Tonight it was Lulash who came to remove their trays and he went first to Mrs. Pollifax after directing a quick glance at the new prisoner. "We are late tonight in collecting your tray. General Perdido had to be driven to his airplane."
Mrs. Pollifax saw that he had deposited two aspirins on her table and she gave him a grateful glance.
"Also for you, to read in the English about my country." He spoke in a very low voice, and with his back still to the new prisoner he leaned over and slipped a book under her pillow. "It is the book, the one I told you about," he added reverently. "I carry it everywhere with me, it is even inscribed to me."
Mrs. Pollifax had to content herself with another grateful glance, for she dared not speak. Lulash moved away to Farrell's table and after removing his tray went out. With her table again empty Mrs. Pollifax arranged her cards for a new game of solitaire and played doggedly for an hour. Farrell was the first to fall into a restless sleep. Soon the stranger turned his back to the room and filled the air with rhythmic snores, and Mrs. Pollifax, growing drowsy herself, put away the cards and lay down.
The book that Lulash had placed beneath her pillow proved uncomfortable to lie upon—she had forgotten its existence as soon as Lulash went away. Since no one was awake to see her she brought out the book and opened it. It was an old volume; the first thing she noted was its copyright date—1919—and at sight of this Mrs. Pollifax was touched that it was still such a treasure to Lulash, and then she was disappointed because a book written forty-five years ago could not possibly be informative; too many wars had been fought since then, too many political parties gone from the scene, making the book a virtual antique. She thumbed through it, however, with a feeling of nostalgia, recalling books in her childhood with the same gray, sunless photographs, the same pictures of people in national costume, with the author himself posed artfully beside monuments and graves and on horseback. The book was entitled Albania: Land of Primitive Beauty, and it was written in the florid verbiage of the day. The plainest sentence in the book stated simply that in size the country was equal to the state of Maryland. Its last chapter ended with the words, "And so I bade farewell to the head of the clan of Trijepsi, leaving him by the leaping flames of his campfire, a real friend whom I must always cherish. Rough, yes; but a pearl among men, truly a chief among men." Mrs. Pollifax winced at the style and turned a few more pages to come face to face with a very clearly rendered black and white map. A map . . . she idly turned another page and then came quickly back to the map. It was a very good, clear map. There was Albania fitted neatly between Greece to the south and what would now be Yugoslavia on the north, and there was the Adriatic Sea. . . . Water, thought Mrs. Pollifax, feeling her way toward a thought not yet expressible. Thoughtfully she turned the map closer to the light and began looking for mountains, wondering just where they might be at this moment. In the south there was a thin line of mountain range facing the sea, but according to the description these were hardly fifteen hundred feet in height—the ones they had traveled through were higher and so she ignored these for the time being. The central part of the country was flat and open with the exception of one mountain rising out of the plains, but she and Farrell had been brought to a very long, high range of mountains and she dismissed this solitary peak. Her glance fastened on the north, narrowing as she spied the words North Albanian Alps. Farrell had said something about Alps, and the mountains to which they had been brought resembled Switzerland in their naked ruggedness. These mountains ran from east to west across the top of the country like a necklace—a necklace extremely close to Yugoslavia, she noticed—and, if the country was no larger than Maryland, they were not excessively far from the Adriatic Sea, either.
"We have to be somewhere in these mountains," she mused. She would have to begin reading the book tomorrow because in forty-five years the topography would remain the same. But still she lingered over the map. They had landed by plane in a town that was plainly old and well established, and after driving toward t
he mountains they had traveled for one or two hours by donkey. Would it be possible to figure out in what direction they had traveled?
"The sun," gasped Mrs. Pollifax. From the heaving, slippery back of her donkey she had watched the sun rise and spread across the valley in a flood of gold. Sleep left her as she concentrated on remembering. Yes, the sun had definitely risen in front of her and slightly to the right. Therefore they had been traveling eastward. If she reversed this, moving her finger westward, there was only one city, named Scutari, printed in bold print, that would be large enough to sustain a crude airfield. The other towns were all in small print—villages, no doubt, none of them large enough to drive through for a period of ten minutes. If it was Scutari where they had landed then they must be about here, she decided, scratching an X with her fingernail. It was a point astonishingly close to Yugoslavia, and surprisingly near the Adriatic, and across the Adriatic lay Italy....
She placed the book carefully under the mattress at her feet and lay down, almost frightened by the thought that the map engendered. "But how very difficult it is to dismiss an idea once it has presented itself to the mind," she mused. She would have to look at the map again more carefully tomorrow and read about the North Albanian Alps. Perhaps Farrell would have noticed landmarks she had missed. She tried to tame her thoughts, but it was a long time before she fell asleep.
Thirteen
"You may come out," said Lulash the next afternoon, standing in the doorway and speaking to Mrs. Pollifax. "General Hoong has said you may have a little walk for the exercise."
"How very kind," gasped Mrs. Pollifax.
Lulash said cheerfully, "General Hoong has wired for instructions about you. Everyone has wired for instructions about you. Now with General Perdido gone we only wait."
Mrs. Pollifax nodded and went to look at Farrell. During the night his temperature had flared dangerously and she was very worried about him. If he was to survive at all the bullet would have to be removed from his arm; for what purpose he must survive she did not know, but it went against all of her instincts to let a man die without making every effort to save him. He was flushed and drowsy and his appetite had vanished; his temperature must be 104 or 105, she judged, and he was not always lucid. Mrs. Pollifax leaned over him and said gently, "I will be back in a few minutes."
Farrell opened one eye and grinned weakly. "Have fun."
Before leaving Mrs. Pollifax went to her cot and picked up the Guatemalan jacket which an eternity ago she had worn when she left her Mexico City hotel room. She had lived in the same dress for six days and nights, and had passed the point of fastidiousness; but the jacket she guarded with feminine illogic. During the day it was spread carefully atop her pillow; at night it was folded across the table on which she played her card games—it had become almost a fetish with her. As she plucked it now from the pillow her left hand groped underneath for the book on Albania. She slipped it under the jacket and without even a glance at the Gremlin— this nickname had been bestowed upon their stool pigeon by Farrell—she walked out.
"Did you like my book, will you read it?" asked Lulash once they gained the hall.
She nodded with vivacity. She had already done much reading and she was in the process of assimilating some extremely interesting information. She had been wrong to think that a book written in 1919 could yield nothing pertinent; she had entirely overlooked the fact that political parties and wars could sweep like clouds across a country but leave its terrain untouched. Mrs. Pollifax was becoming very interested in Albania's topography and she eagerly welcomed a few minutes outside her prison to view it.
In the guardroom, as she passed through it, the key to the ammunition drawer had again been left in the lock.
Lulash led her outside. The sun, dazzling even to a normal eye, had an almost searing effect upon Mrs. Pollifax's eyeballs after the darkness of the cell, and she covered both eyes with her hands, gasping at the pain.
"Here," said Lulash, and gravely handed her his pair of dark glasses.
"Really you are so kind," said Mrs. Pollifax, and found that a few seconds after putting them on she was able to look around her without discomfort. They were not a great distance from the precipice from which Farrell had jumped. From here to its edge there were nothing but yellow rocks— boulders, stones, pebbles of every possible shape and size and texture, some worn smooth, others sharp and jagged. On their left the larger stone building cast a sharp black shadow across the stones, its edges as precise as if they were lines drawn with a ruler. On Mrs. Pollifax's right, not too far away, stood a hill of rock lightly screened by fir trees—it was from this direction that they had come. But Mrs. Pollifax was more interested in what lay in front of her. "I am to walk?" she asked of Lulash.
He nodded, and lowering himself to the bench beside the door he explained, "Better today if you walk within my eye, you understand? From there to there." With his hands he indicated boundaries.
Mrs. Pollifax nodded, and limping over the uneven stones made her way to the edge of the cliff. There she began what she hoped looked like an aimless stroll back and forth but was in reality a reconnaissance. The valley especially interested her, and from this height she could look far across it. Some distance away she traced with her eyes the winding skein of a riverbed that ran from east to west across the plain. Between herself and the river she could see four small towns, clusters of buildings baking in the brutal heat. The floor of the valley was almost a checkerboard of symmetrical lines dividing field after field—or possibly rice paddies, decided Mrs. Pollifax, having already dipped into four chapters of the book. Off to her right—or to the west, if her reasoning was correct—a road ran toward her into the mountains, and on its surface she could see men at work, so tiny they resembled little black insects. Mrs. Pollifax turned to look at what lay behind her, beyond Lulash and the stone house, and her head had to go up and far back before her eyes found the sky—the mountain towered above her. She concluded that this stony cut upon which she stood, and into which the two fortresslike buildings had been inserted, was an accident of nature, the path of some long-ago landslide or avalanche that had killed the soil for every growing thing. But of one fact she was certain: there could be no efficient escape over the peak above them into Yugoslavia, the only possibilities lay to the west, along the route they had come, or below, through the valley.
Escape ... for the first time she acknowledged the direction of her thoughts, and having at last formed the word in her mind she took it out and examined it. Escape . . . the idea was quite mad—she admitted this cheerfully—but surely some effort had to be made? It struck her as extremely characterless for any human being to sit around waiting for execution. It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more?
She smiled and waved at Lulash and sat down on a rock near the cliff's edge, her back to him as she carefully removed the book from under her arm. She had already marked the map's page and now she opened to it at once. A valley, an alp and a river . . . yes, there was a river in exactly the right place. On the assumption that her directions were correct she quickly compared its location on the valley's floor with its location on the map.
"The River Drin," she exclaimed in a pleased voice, memorizing the name, "Drin . . ." About fifteen miles away, according to the scale of the map, and if her sense of direction was accurate then it flowed westward into the Adriatic Sea.
Walking back to Lulash she said pleasantly, "The city with the airport, is that Scutari, your capital?"
His face lit up. "Ah, you really did read my book. No, it is not the capital any longer, nor is it called Scutari now," he said. "Its name is Shkoder. But yes, that is where the airport is, in the north."
"You are a mine of information about your interesting country," Mrs. Pollifax told him with complete honesty. "I shall hope to learn much more from your book. F
orgive me, but I think I will go inside now, this sun—this heat ..." She placed a hand daintily on her brow, impatient to get inside and begin new calculations on her map.
Lulash jumped to open the door for her before he sat down again on his bench.
Considerably refreshed by her small excursion Mrs. Pollifax walked back into the ice-house coolness of the stone building, and closed the door behind her. "Oh—I do beg your pardon!" she said, discovering Major Vassovic kneeling in a corner on the floor. For one fleeting moment Mrs. Pollifax wondered if she had interrupted the major in prayer, but then she remembered where she was and put this thought aside. Curiosity drew her closer. "Is that some form of Yogi you're practicing?" she asked.
"Zott, no," he said heavily.
Mrs. Pollifax knew by now that Zott was a derivative of Zeus and a favored exclamation of the country; this much had not changed since 1919; and she nodded.
"The electric wire, there is only the one—ah! I have it!" The major climbed laboriously to his feet, and finding her still watching him he added, "For my heat brick. The electric is difficult here."
"Yes, it would be," she agreed. "How on earth do you get electricity? Surely not from the valley."
"Zott, no," he said, untangling the wire that ran from the floor to his desk. "We have, what do you call it, a big machine in the other building. But here, only the one wire."
Mrs. Pollifax brightened. "Oh yes, a generator. That's clever. And this is your heat brick?" She reached out and touched it. "Why, this is what we call a heating pad at home."
"Yes, for the back," he said, nodding. "These stones are hard to live with."
"Back?" repeated Mrs. Pollifax, puzzled.
"My back. Very cold, very sore."
Mrs. Pollifax understood at last "You mean a cold has settled in your back!"
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Page 10