Amazing Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  Now he stepped forward and spoke to Mrs. Pollifax in Turkish, his eyes a little amused as they rested on the wisps of hair that escaped her shawl. Before she had even faced the problem of replying his hand moved and he whipped back her scarves to expose her face. “Mrs. Pollifax, is it not?” he said carefully. “Precisely the woman Mr. Carstairs asked me to take care of—which I plan to do at once!”

  Mrs. Pollifax stepped back in dismay.

  “And your two companions would be Madame Ferenci-Sabo and Mr. Colin Ramsey of Ramsey Enterprises.” He lifted an arm and waved to someone across the street. “I am aware that you know karate,” he continued smoothly. “One move toward me and the gun that I hold under this newspaper will kill you.”

  “Wotthehell,” said Sandor, but whether he was shocked at being mistaken for Colin, or by news of the gun, it was impossible to guess.

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed. To get safely away from the searching Ankara police they had endured those seven uncomfortable hours on a bus only to walk into Dr. Belleaux’s waiting arms. It did seem unfair, and exactly the sort of thing to blunt initiative.

  “The car is coming—patience, please,” said Dr. Belleaux. “We have only a few streets to go, and I advise you to enter the car quietly.” He turned and looked at Colin, who stood paralyzed on the bottom step of the bus, gaping at him. He said sharply, “Hareket etmek—cabucak!”

  Colin closed his mouth—he had looked singularly stupid with it open—and to Mrs. Pollifax’s astonishment he snarled, “Evet, evet,” in a low surly voice and walked stiffly and angrily away.

  For a moment Mrs. Pollifax was incredulous and then it dawned upon her that Dr. Belleaux had not recognized Colin; he had looked for two women and a man and he had found them without realizing that four of them traveled together now, or that Colin was also a member of the party. Colin, bless him, had understood this perfectly, and at once.

  She and Sandor exchanged a long glance, and then the car drew up behind the bus and Dr. Belleaux said sharply, “Get in, please!” He held the door open. “No, Mr. Ramsey, sit in front, please, where I can shoot you if you prove difficult.”

  To enlighten confused Sandor Mrs. Pollifax said coldly, “Allow me to introduce you. I believe this is Dr. Guillaume Belleaux—you are, aren’t you?—the leader of the gang who tried to kill us on the road to Ankara.” The impact of this on Sandor was appreciable: she saw his eyes blaze before they went studiously blank. “The gentleman beside you,” she added tartly, “is Stefan, who works with Dr. Belleaux and abducts people and drugs them, too.”

  Ignoring her Dr. Belleaux leaned forward. “Leave now, Stefan, the bus will remain here for some time, I think. You know the way? That street over there, then left and a sharp right.”

  The car turned off the square, past a corner store whose signs read CIKOLATA—SIGARA—KOKA-KOLA (I can read that, thought Mrs. Pollifax numbly) and down a cobbled street that soon turned into a solidly packed dirt road of the most primitive type. “Where are we going?” inquired Mrs. Pollifax.

  “Not far,” confided Dr. Belleaux; his voice was friendly and gracious; he was obviously a born host. “It seemed wisest to rent one of Yozgat’s abandoned houses, while we waited for you. We have expected you, of course, and I guessed you would have to arrive in some kind of disguise, or not at all, with the police looking for you so assiduously. But of course the police have never known that you were coming to Yozgat. It gave Stefan and myself such a pleasant advantage!” He leaned forward. “To the right now, Stefan. When you reach the house drive the car around to the rear. I don’t wish it seen from the road.” To Mrs. Pollifax he said in a kindly voice, “I have a gun, you know. Several, to be exact. It is best if you understand now that there is nothing for you to do but relax and tell me all I wish to know. Then we shall understand one another—once you understand your situation.”

  They had pulled up beside a low, dusty stone house with a shuttered and empty look. The nearest house stood a quarter of a mile away. Stefan backed, and then drove up a rutted track to the back yard and cut the engine.

  Dr. Belleaux said, “Assim is inside—blow the horn once, lightly. We will tie their hands tightly for the walk into the house.”

  When the door shut behind them it closed out all sunshine. Not even the shutters betrayed lines or threads of light. They stood in darkness until Dr. Belleaux lighted a candle, and then a lantern. “In here,” he said and they were pushed into one of the two back rooms.

  This was a room like a shed; obviously animals had once shared it with humans during cold winter nights. The floor was of beaten earth; a pile of old hay still filled one corner and there was a strong smell of must and manure. Once there had been a rear door but it had been bricked in but not whitewashed. Three straight wooden chairs occupied the center of the room; one by one they were tied to them, first their hands behind their backs and then their ankles. When this had been accomplished by Assim, whose face was sullen and cruel, Dr. Belleaux beckoned his helpmeets into the other room and Mrs. Pollifax could hear them speaking together in Turkish in low voices. She said softly, “Magda—you are all right?”

  Magda lifted her head and wanly smiled. “For the moment, yes. But to come finally to Yozgat, to be so close—” She stopped.

  Sandor said in a voice choked with rage. “You understand even I have heard of this Dr. Belleaux. I am still shocked, still in a daze. There must be the way to get free. Must!”

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “Such as what?”

  “There’s Colin.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said gently, “What can he do? He doesn’t even know where we are.”

  “Surely something!”

  “What?”

  Sandor was silent and then he said angrily, “I don’t know!”

  “He doesn’t know where we’ve been taken,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, “and if he did, what could be done? He is alone, completely inexperienced and unaccustomed to violence.”

  “Since meeting you he has seen a little,” pointed out Sandor dryly, and as the voices broke off in the other room he said, “We cannot just die like trussed pigs, there has to come a moment, just one—” He was silent as Dr. Belleaux reentered the room.

  “Ah there you are!” said Dr. Belleaux, as if he had absent-mindedly misplaced them. “We have just been consulting on the arrangements. I have an interest in a small archaeological dig not far from here—you will be buried there tonight.” He chuckled. “In a few years you may be dug up and acclaimed a real archaeological find!”

  “Very amusing,” said Mrs. Pollifax tartly. “And Mr. Carstairs? What will you tell him?”

  Dr. Belleaux smiled charmingly. “Why, that I searched everywhere but that you and your little party had vanished from the face of the earth!”

  “He really cabled you about me?” Mrs. Pollifax asked curiously.

  Dr. Belleaux leaned against the wall and looked down at her in a friendly fashion. “Oh indeed yes, just last evening, and giving a very full description of you—which of course proved at once how dangerous you are to me! He had cabled me earlier about Henry Miles, naturally, but failed to mention you. It was fairly simple to dispose of Miles as well as the first chap whom I believed Miles was replacing, but I really had no idea who you worked for. When you stole Ferenci-Sabo from under my very nose—in full view of my friends—I still had no idea you worked for Carstairs, can you imagine?”

  “How stupid you must feel,” she agreed pleasantly. “For how many years have you been a double agent?”

  “It scarcely matters,” he said modestly. “Actually I’ve been what is usually referred to as a ‘sleeper.’ That is, held in abeyance for something truly worthwhile. Although I won’t say I’ve not taken advantage of my privileged situation to cast a few stones,” he confided charmingly. “An innuendo here, a lifted eyebrow there—” He obligingly lifted an eyebrow. “But Ferenci-Sabo’s defection was big enough to bring orders for me to capture her at any cost, including my usefulness as a friend of the Americans and the Tur
ks.” He smiled. “However—happily for me—the cost looks very small indeed. By tomorrow I can look forward to resuming my very pleasant life in Istanbul again. For now, however,” he concluded, his voice changing, “I must get to work.”

  “Hain,” growled Sandor.

  “What does that mean?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

  “It means traitor,” said Dr. Belleaux indifferently. He walked over to Magda and stared down at her. “Now what I should like to learn first,” he said firmly, as if he were interviewing her for a job, “is just why the Americans have been brought into this, and how they were contacted. I find that—shall I say very suspicious?” He continued looking at Magda. “Lift your head!” he demanded sharply.

  Slowly Magda lifted her head. “I want you to talk,” he said in a suddenly cold and chilling voice. “You will tell me why and how you contacted Mr. Carstairs. You will tell me where are the papers you brought with you, and why you insisted on coming to Yozgat.”

  “No,” said Magda.

  Dr. Belleaux began to hit Magda across the cheekbones, methodically and viciously, and Mrs. Pollifax closed her eyes so that no one would see the tears she wept for Magda. Back and forth went the hand—one, two, one, two—but in his savagery Dr. Belleaux had miscalculated Magda’s stamina. Her head suddenly went limp—she had mercifully fainted.

  “Bastard,” shouted Sandor.

  Dr. Belleaux turned toward Mrs. Pollifax, and as she realized that her turn was next she closed her eyes again. A sudden picture of her sunny apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey, flashed across her mind and she thought, Is anything worth all this? and then she opened her eyes and met Dr. Belleaux’s gaze steadily. He stood over her, eyes narrowed, fist lifted, and she prayed for courage.

  CHAPTER 12

  Stepping down from the bus Colin was appalled at the sight of Dr. Belleaux in conversation with Mrs. Pollifax. It jarred all his senses; he had not glimpsed Dr. Belleaux at his house in Istanbul but he recognized him from newspaper pictures, and it was a shock to see him in the flesh, and here of all places. His second reaction was one of wild relief: everything had to be all right after all, Mrs. Pollifax had been wrong about Dr. Belleaux, and Dr. Belleaux had come to tell her so; and then he realized that this couldn’t be so, the man had no business meeting them here in Yozgat, and as his eyes dropped to the newspaper that Dr. Belleaux held in such a peculiar position he instinctively realized there was a gun hidden there. It was all very disappointing and unnerving, and for a moment he thought he was going to be ill. He stood frozen to the bottom step of the bus while behind him voices rose in protest at his blocking the exit.

  The protests inevitably drew Dr. Belleaux’s attention; he turned, saw Colin staring and spoke sharply to him in Turkish, telling him to get moving, to go away. Colin was astonished to remember that he was in disguise, and was even more astonished to realize that he had not been recognized. He stammered, “Evet—evet,” and walked away from the bus and then across the street.

  There he stopped, suddenly aware that he had nowhere to go. He realized that Mrs. Pollifax and Magda and Sandor had just been captured, and he felt an acute sense of loss. It seemed incredibly unjust after all they’d gone through. He thought dimly of shouting for the police and then he remembered that in joining Mrs. Pollifax he had placed himself beyond such conventional avenues of complaint. This was a chilling thought. There was no one at all to help—no one except himself, of course, and there was nothing he could do. Nothing at all. He saw Dr. Belleaux lift his arm and wave to a man seated in a parked car, saw the driver nod, turn the car and drive up behind the bus. Over the top of the car he saw the heads of his three friends as they climbed inside, and he heard the doors slam. Then the car pulled out and turned down the street next him. It passed quite near but the shades had been drawn in the rear and he saw only the driver. It was Stefan.

  At that moment Colin understood that he was about to see his three friends vanish from sight—he would never know where they went, or see them again. He suddenly found this even less tolerable than his panic.

  Furiously he glared at the people around him: wraith-like, ancient men slumped half-drowsing on benches in the shade; a woman dispiritedly sweeping with a twig broom; a boy pulling a loaded donkey across the road, the bus driver loading the bus with what looked like a sack of mail. At the corner he saw a narrow, fly-specked cafe open to the square—one sign said CIKOLATA—SIGARA; another advertised KOKA-KOLA. His glance fell to three old and dusty bicycles leaning against the wall, their owners apparently inside the shop. The car had just turned into the street beside that shop; a cloud of dust rose as it vanished.

  Without thinking, and purely from instinct, Colin ran across the street, snatched up one of the fallen bicycles, mounted it and peddled madly down the street into which the black car had turned. There were shouts behind him but he ignored them and peddled faster. He couldn’t see the car but he knew it was there because its dust filled his nostrils and choked his throat. He had no idea where he was going, or even why, he knew only that he musn’t be separated from the group in the car.

  He became increasingly aware that he was being pursued, and the shouts following him annoyed him. He peddled past low rock walls, a dusty vineyard, little houses with peeling stucco until the cobbles came to an end and he faced two unpaved roads. As he hesitated his most immediate pursuer peddled up beside him: it was, of all things, a girl, who proceeded to upbraid him in a flurry of noisy Turkish.

  Despairingly, in English, he cried, “I can’t understand you, I don’t understand a word!”

  The torrent went on and then suddenly, her lips open, the girl stopped in mid-sentence, her eyes enormous. “But you speak English! You’re not Turkish!”

  “Yes, I’m English, and I’ve lost my friends, they’re in that black car that drove down this street, and I’m terribly sorry to have—” He too stopped in mid-sentence. “But I say—you speak English too!”

  She said impatiently, “I go to college in Istanbul. But what are you doing in such clothes? Are you a sociologist studying our customs? You are dressed like a peasant!”

  “I must find that car!” he said urgently.

  “The car went to the left, do you not see the dust?” she said calmly.

  He peddled a few feet and turned. “Look, I’ll return your bicycle, I promise you. Or come along if you doubt me, but I have to follow that car!”

  “I will go with you,” she said firmly.

  They peddled together up the road to the left. Houses were set close together in a long row like small boxes; a rivulet of dirty water ran down one side of the road in a hollowed-out trough. The street turned at an angle, displaying another length of soiled houses and dirt road and Colin had to swerve to avoid a goat. A donkey brayed from under a dusty tree. Here and there sat worn men; there were no women to be seen. The houses thinned, and he saw no car but at the last house on the road—isolated and at some distance away—there still lingered a faint cloud of dust.

  “They are in that last house,” the girl said. “Why are they staying there? It has been unoccupied for years. Are you sure they’re in there? I will wait while you go to the door.”

  Colin climbed down from his bike. “It’s not that simple,” he said, turning to look at her and discovered that it was a mistake to look at her a second time. His first impression had been of a slightly plump and rounded young woman with a bland and candy-box sort of prettiness. Between first and second glance all clichés had vanished: she was exquisitely lovely. Her face did belong on a candy box: one of those fragile old Victorian boxes that dripped paper lace. Her skin was flawless, her lips full, sensual and pink, her eyes huge, round, heavily lashed and a curious shade of vivid blue that by contrast brought to life the very ordinary shade of brown hair. He frankly stared. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Sabahat Pasha. What is yours?”

  “Nazim Aziz,” he said absently.

  She laughed. “What? But you are not Turkish!”

/>   He flushed. “Actually it’s Colin Ramsey but—oh hang it all, do go now,” he said, parking his bicycle against a crumbling wall. “I’m going to walk the rest of the way.”

  “Go?” she said, and laughed. “How can I ride two bicycles back to town? And why do you not ride up to the door and make sure your friends are there?”

  “Damn,” he said, and looked at her helplessly, at her wide naïve eyes, and warm sympathetic mouth. How could he possibly explain the situation to her? It was impossible.

  “Something is wrong,” she said, watching him. “You are in some kind of trouble.” The laughter had gone from her eyes, leaving them grave.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But it’s not a police matter,” he added hastily. “They’re all Americans, and calling the police would—well, prove very embarrassing.”

  “Americans!” she exclaimed. “Americans here in Yozgat? Oh but I would love to meet them! What brought them here to Yozgat? Are they also studying the customs?”

  “We came to—” He stopped. With extraordinary clarity he suddenly remembered why they had come to Yozgat, and it occurred to him that help might be available after all. He said excitedly, “Sabahat, tell me. Are there gypsies camping in or near Yozgat?”

  She looked startled and then thoughtful. “There were a number of them camped just outside of town for a few days. I know because they read the palms of many of my friends. But I hear they left yesterday, going south, and now there is only the man with the dancing bear.”

  “And is he a gypsy too?”

  The girl laughed. “But of course—only the gypsies have dancing bears!” She looked at him, puzzled. “But he is very dirty, very soiled,” she pointed out.

  “Do you know where he stays?”

  She nodded. “Beyond the mosque, on the road leaving town. I have seen his wagon. Also his dog.” She shivered distastefully.

  He said recklessly, “Please—if I ride the bicycle back to town with you, could you direct me to the road leading to the gypsy with the dancing bear?”