The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  Sandor cut the engine. "We walk now but you wait first," he said firmly. "I go find Bengziz Madrali. He is receiver of stolen goods—I make sure he receive you now."

  "How long will you be gone?" asked Mrs. Pollifax anxiously.

  He shrugged. "I have to find him first, then I know how long I'll be gone. If anyone comes, hide in the old khan." He was gone before Mrs. Pollifax could protest.

  "What's a khan?" she asked Colin.

  "An inn." Staring at the gate through which Sandor had vanished he said, "I rather like him but I can't think why."

  "That's very reassuring since we're completely dependent on him for the moment," Mrs. Pollifax pointed out. "Do you like Magda too?"

  His gaze left the gate to sweep the courtyard. "She seems pleasant enough when she's not drugged. But then she nearly always is, isn't she?" He brightened. "I say, that looks like a Hittite frieze propping up that door. Hand me my camera, will you?" He began to prowl through the litter around the door, keeping a respectful distance from the goat, who watched him with suspicion.

  "How nice to see you again!" Magda said cheerfully, crawling from the interior of the van to sit down beside Mrs. Pollifax on the top step. "Perhaps you can tell me where we are?"

  "We've reached Ankara." She noted that Colin had disappeared with his camera into the ruins of the khan and she turned to Magda urgently. "We've not been able to talk and you must realize that from my point of view this journey to Yozgat is on faith alone. What is it that we go to Yozgat for?"

  Magda hesitated. "I dare not say, not yet at least. But let me tell you this: I go to Yozgat to find the people who smuggled me out of Bulgaria and into Turkey." She was thoughtful for a moment and then she added quietly, "I do not know how you feel about gypsies. People hate and fear them. Perhaps you are not aware that in spite of—or because of—people's revulsion towards gypsies they were able to do a number of valuable things for the Allies during World Wax Two—those who were not wiped out by Hitler."

  "Gypsies!" exclaimed Mrs. Pollifax in surprise.

  "Yes. Some are nomadic and wander all over Europe while some have settled down, like the gypsies in Istanbul who live in what is called the Tin Village." She said almost shyly,"It is with them I hid when I first escaped Stefan and Otto and waited for you."

  Mrs. Pollifax said in astonishment, "Do you mean it's the gypsies who got you across the border into Turkey?"

  She nodded. "To be accepted by them is not easy, the Rom look on gorgios with deep contempt. But many years ago we worked together, I gained their trust, I learned their language, I know a few of them as true friends, and to know a few is to be accepted by them all. Yes, it was with them I crossed the border and it is to the Inglescus that I entrusted everything when I realized I was being followed. They promised to wait for me at Yozgat for a few days before they continued south to their rendezvous, a wedding later in the summer."

  "But this is remarkable," said Mrs. Pollifax, delighted. "You have your own private underground!"

  Magda's smile deepened. "You put it well. But please, you will remember the name Inglescu if anything goes wrong with me? Find them and say Magda sent you. They will understand."

  "But can they be trusted with what you left them?"

  "Yes," she said flatly.

  "I can't help wondering why you suddenly left your old life. You understand that I was told the whole story about you. Did they find this out?"

  Magda smiled. "No, they discovered nothing. I decided to retire."

  "Retire!" cried Mrs. Pollifax.

  "Yes, retire." At the expression on Mrs. Pollifax's face she burst out laughing. "But did you never think of people like me wishing to retire? I will no doubt be a shock to them —agents are not supposed to survive as long as I, they are supposed to die violently and early. But me, I have just gone on surviving—such an embarrassment!—and without even paying dues to the Social Security."

  "What will you plan to do?" asked Mrs. Pollifax eagerly.

  Magda shrugged. "I bring my own social security with me, as you will see. I have no plans except I wish to live a quiet life now, I want to plant flowers and watch them grow, feel sun on my face, think good thoughts, have real friends. I am tired of violence, of uncertainty and betrayals, of remaining always detached lest someone I grow to like must be betrayed, or betray me. Most, I am tired of acting the double part. This is how it began, I was an actress on the stage in Vienna, but who would guess I play the roles so long, day and night, on and on."

  Mrs. Pollifax looked at her and was curiously touched. She thought of the Times biography which could not know or possibly describe—no one could—the complications or dangers which this woman must have met and mastered with intelligence and courage, and always alone. But she thought the story was written clearly in the lines of Magda's face: Those are good lines, she thought, lines of humor and compassion and deep sadness. And I heard her laugh—how did she escape corruption from ail this? Her hand went out to touch Magda's hand and squeeze it. "There is one thing," she said quietly. "Something that complicates our getting to Yozgat and to the gypsies."

  "Yes?"

  "Before I left Washington I was given the name of a man in Istanbul to whom we could appeal for help if we needed it. A very reliable person whose name is Dr. Guillaume Belleaux."

  "Yes?" said Magda with interest. "But that is reassuring."

  Mrs. Pollifax shook her head. "The house in which you were drugged last night—the house to which Stefan and Otto took you—turned out to be the home of Dr. Guillaume Belleaux."

  Magda's lips formed an O and her eyes widened. "Mon dieu but that is not reassuring! So this man is—but is he aware that you know this? Did he see you?"

  "Yes to both questions." Mrs. Pollifax shook her head wryly as she recalled her exit from Dr. Belleaux's house and the face briefly glimpsed across the livingroom. "He may not have seen Colin, no, but he and I looked at each other across the room. Briefly but memorably."

  'Then he is the one behind all this—he too plays the double game!" Magda reached out and gently touched Mrs. Pollifax. "It is a lonely business, this, is it not? I'm sorry. My God I'm sorry. But we must stay alive a little longer to annoy him, yes?"

  "Yes," said Mrs. Pollifax but she winced a little as she reflected upon the odds: they did not speak Turkish and they were moving deeper and deeper into Turkey's interior; the police, Stefan and of course Dr. Belleaux were looking for them. She did not even know if Sandor would return, and without him they would be almost completely helpless. She thought that he would come back but he was, after all, a man of doubtful character. Still, it was his temperament, not his character, that was in their favor: she was trusting to his curiosity and to his Machiavellian nature to bring him back, if only to arrange what would happen next.

  She looked up and waved at Colin who had wandered out of the inn. He said dreamily, "Just think, these same walls were standing when Tamerlane came through this part of the country." He patted his camera. "I think I got a wonderful shot of that frieze, and the old walls inside; I'm absolutely certain I didn't muff it. No Sandor yet?"

  "Here he comes," said Magda.

  Mrs. Pollifax looked up to see him loping through the gateway and she had to control her gladness at seeing this disreputable, grinning, filthy man. She thought that even if he shaved and bathed she would recognize him because he would still exude the same boundless joy in living and in outwitting whatever forces resisted him. He had obviously been busy for his arms were full of bundles.

  "I am back," he cried. "I have found Bengziz Madrali and he will help—there is much work to do, we go to meet him now but first—good Turkish peasant clothes so you will become incognito."

  "Become what?" said Mrs. Pollifax, staring with distaste at what appeared to be a week's laundry that he held out to her.

  Obviously he was conferring a great honor upon her. "For you ladies the baggy pants," he said. "Also the skirt, the shirt and the shawl that begins over your heads and goes everyw
here—I show you its workings." He stuffed them into her arms without sympathy. "And for you," he cried happily to Colin, "the moustachio—a good sweep of one—and a cap and trousers with holes in them. You will look like me, eh? Could anything be better?"

  "Oh nothing," Colin said dryly.

  "Then wotthehell, change now in the truck and we go. Is better Madrali never see you in your own clothes, he has a feel for intrigue, that man, and the roadblocks are up."

  Mrs. Pollifax had been halfway across the courtyard with her new clothes in her arms when he said this. She stopped. "Roadblocks?"

  He nodded pleasantly. 'Twenty minutes ago. Pfut— suddenly they are there. Police stopping everyone. Madrali hears everything, you understand? He says officially it is the new government study of traffic flow but he hears they look for specific peoples." Sandor beamed at them. "You do not wish to be specific peoples, do you? Incognito please—at once!"

  Mrs. Pollifax thought the room looked exactly like a thieves’ den, and she discovered with some surprise that she felt delightfully at ease in such an atmosphere. Shadows leaned around the walls and across the ceiling from candles burning in their sockets and from the charcoal brazier on which their dinner of tel kadayif and pilaf had been cooked. On one whitewashed wall hung a picture of Ataturk in an unusually convivial, smiling pose. On the other side of the brazier, seated cross-legged on the floor with a tray on his lap, Bengziz Madrali squinted over the three cards of identity he was forging for them. Occasionally he grunted expressively as he examined his work through a jeweler's glass, and occasionally he flashed Mrs. Pollifax a smile laden with warm reassurance and admiration.

  "Your name is now Yurgadil Aziz," commented Sandor, eating noisily with his fingers from a platter and looking over Madrali's shoulder. "The other lady is Nimet Aziz, and he"—pointing a dripping finger at Colin—"is Nazmi Aziz."

  Lost: one Emily Pollifax, she thought, and glanced ruefully at the black baggy pants engulfing her legs.

  From the corner Magda gave an amused laugh. Her hair had been dyed brown from a bottle that Madrali had purchased in the bazaar; and then it had been washed and set in fat steel curlers that bristled gruesomely all over her head. She sat and smoked a Turkish cigarette with elegant fastidiousness, her hands moving gracefully but without any sign of being attached to her body, which had become lost somewhere inside her voluminous Turkish disguise. Near her sat Colin, loading his still camera with film for the passport photograph he was going to take of Magda when the curlers were removed and her hair combed. Catching Mrs. Pollifax's glance he said irritably, "Soon? You know I've got to develop the picture and then it's got to dry!"

  In appearance she thought he outdid them all. He wore shabby pinstripe trousers tied with a belt of rope, a vest too tight across his chest, a purple shirt and a pink bowtie. His sweeping moustache left him almost mouthless and because he wasn't accustomed to it he kept trying to look down at it, which caused his eyes to cross. He also complained that it itched. Yet in spite of all this he had acquired a definite air of distinction. In some indescribable manner his new identity brought out the fierceness in him that Mrs. Pollifax had noticed when she first met him but which she had assumed was a defense against failure, and against taller and more successful men. But freed of any possible competitiveness, and wearing the most absurdly shabby clothes, Colin was fierce. There was no mistaking it: there was a look about him of a mountain brigand.

  There is more of his family in him than he knows, thought Mrs. Pollifax with amusement. She stood up and walked over to Magda and felt her head. It was dry. Removing the curlers she said, "Mr. Madrali, you have the suntan make-up? You have the white backdrop for the passport picture?"

  "Evet, evet," he said, nodding. "Over there, pliss."

  Colin shook his head. "I still can't imagine how you expect to get her out of the country when we can't even get out of Ankara."

  "I go look into that now and make more questions," Sandor said, reluctantly putting aside his plate of food. "The new idea they come and go. Now I go."

  "Good. The white blouse, please," said Mrs. Pollifax, helping Magda out of her Turkish clothes and into her own navy blue suit.

  Sandor stopped and looked down at Magda. "Wotthehell she can't leave a country without a passport."

  "She has a passport." Mrs. Pollifax said calmly as she began applying tan make-up to Magda's white face.

  "Wotthehell, you forge those too?"

  "It's a very respectable passport," she told him, "and very legal. There," she said, applying lipstick to Magda. "I think she looks rather like a poetess or an undernourished actress, don't you, Colin?"

  Sandor went out, looking mystified. Colin said, "You're quite right, I wouldn't have believed it possible."

  Flashbulbs illuminated the room several times before its native dimness returned, and then Magda lay down and promptly went to sleep. Colin at once became tiresomely cross and nervous about developing the film, and since Mr. Madrali's English was severely limited and he was still engrossed in his forgeries, Mrs. Pollifax opened the door and walked out.

  The tiny house in which Mr. Madrali lived—or hid, as the case might be—leaned against the walls of the Citadel, even belonged to the wall of the Citadel, like something washed up against the sides of an old ship. Mounting the tamped down earthen path behind his house Mrs. Pollifax put back her head and looked up at the wall that had withstood a thousand years of earthquakes, pillage and armies, and then she looked down at the crooked, meandering alleys below, with their rows of primitive hovels dropping to the base of the hill. The sun was just disappearing behind the distant mountains leaving a blaze of glorious color in the sky but on the plains surrounding Ankara twilight had already fallen, and lights were beginning to glitter along Ankara's streets and avenues.

  As she stood transfixed the last notes of a muezzin's chant reached her ears from below, sounding phantom in the high clear air, and Mrs. Pollifax thought, / must remember this moment, and then, / shall have to come back and really see this country. Yet she knew that if she did come back it would be entirely different. It was the unexpected that brought to these moments this tender, unnameable rush of understanding, this joy in being alive. It was safety following danger, it was food after hours of hunger, rest following exhaustion, it was the astonishing strangers who had become her friends. It was this and more, until the richness of living caught at her throat, and all the well-meant security with which people surrounded themselves was exposed for what it truly was: a wall to keep out life, a conceit, a mad delusion.

  She was still standing there when Sandor walked up the steep path. It had become quite dark; she realized with a start that she had been standing there for a long time. "Is that you?" he said, peering at her. Little squares and stripes of light lay behind him on the path, formed by the shuttered and open windows of the surrounding houses.

  "Yes," she said. "Where have you been?"

  He said buoyantly, "I have biggest good luck! The twice-a-week bus for Yozgat leaves at dawn. It will be hot, cheap, very crowded. I went to Taksim Square

  to be sure— already the families sleep there waiting."

  "Bus?" said Mrs. Pollifax wonderingly. "But won't the police be stopping the busses too?"

  "When you see the busses you understand," he said cryptically. "Only Turks take them—tourists never!—and they buy tickets distantly ahead. But wotthehell, for big price I get four tickets to Yozgat."

  He said modestly, "For a little extra I come too. You need me for the translations."

  She turned and looked at him gratefully. "Oh yes, we do need you, Sandor, but I scarcely dared hope—Aren't you wanted by the police too, Sandor? Who are you really?"

  "A scoundrel," he said with a grin. "Who are you, really?"

  She laughed. "Obviously I ask too many questions."

  "That you do, yes." He shrugged. "Be comfortable, don't itch. It is like a story of Nasr-ed-Din Hodja who went through the East many hundreds of years ago. His stories live
everywhere. One of them is that Nasr-ed-Din was walking a road one dark night when he saw three men conning toward him. 'Oho,' he thinks, 'they may be robbers' so he jumps over a wall and hides behind a rock. The three men see this and are curious and they too jump over the rock and go to him. 'What is wrong?' they ask. 'What are you doing here?* And Nasr-de-Din sees the truth of it— that they are not robbers— and he says, 'Oh gentlemen, I will tell you why we are all here. I am here because of you, and you are here because of me.'"

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. "A most philosophical parable. Are there more of them?"

  "Evet. Another story is that Nasr-de-Din said he could see in the dark. Someone said to him, That may be so, Nasr-ed-Din but if this is true why then do you always carry a candle at night?' Nasr-de-Din said, 'Why, to prevent other people from bumping into me !' "

  Mrs. Pollifax laughed delightedly.

  Sandor took her arm. "More I tell you another time. Please, go inside now before we are heard speaking English. Tomorrow at dawn we go to Yozgat."

  11

  Having Been Officially Hired as their guide, Sandor took them over with stern authority. He allowed them to sleep until three o'clock in the morning and then he prodded them awake. "For you to be real peasants you get up now. You will do rest of the sleeping in Taksim Square

  , please. Like others."

  The three of them arose stiffly from their floormats. They would have to wash on their way down the hill, at the public well, Sandor told them; Madrali was bringing them tea and fruit for their breakfast. They would also be carrying their lunch on the bus with them—it was already packed in a basket: two jugs of water and the remains of their evening meal. He produced a small cardboard suitcase that looked as if it had been possessed by a dozen other people first Into this Mrs. Pollifax packed her suit for Magda to wear, and Colin added a number of spare reels of film. His cameras he insisted upon carrying in a string bag. Mrs. Pollifax again checked her pantaloons for the wads of money and Magda's passport, all secured with large safety pins. Her flowered hat was presented to Mr. Madrali with instructions to dispose of it, as well as her useless, emptied purse.