Amazing Mrs. Pollifax (3 page)

“All the way to Asia and back in six days?” said Mrs. Pollifax. “My dear Mr. Carstairs I shall almost be back in time for the Art Association tea on Sunday.”

“As a matter of fact by American time you will be,” he said. “You will experience the uncanny sensation of arriving here long after the tea should have ended, only to discover that they’re putting up the folding tables in New Brunswick. Ah here it is!” he exclaimed, and drew out another slip of paper. “I can’t foresee what will be needed, Mrs. Pollifax. All this has happened too quickly to consider possibilities, but I’m giving you the name of a man in Istanbul who can be trusted in case of emergency. He’s lived in Istanbul for a number of years, and you can rely on him to advise and help—but only if you have absolutely no other recourse. He’s very highly placed so for God’s sake be discreet if you go to him.”

“An agent?” inquired Mrs. Pollifax cheerfully.

Carstairs looked pained. “My dear Mrs. Pollifax, I do wish you’d not leap to such dramatic conclusions. He’s a noted criminologist, retired now, who writes and teaches. His name is Dr. Guillaume Belleaux. You will find the name of the university with which he is connected on this slip of paper, as well as his home address. There’s no need to destroy or hide this address, Dr. Belleaux is highly respected by the Turkish government as well as ours, and any tourist might legitimately carry his name. Now.” He smiled. “Got it all?”

Mrs. Pollifax was stuffing the envelopes into her fat purse. The book she placed under her arm. “I’m to register at the Hotel Itep,” she said, “and to present myself in the lobby at eight each evening until—hopefully—Ferenci-Sabo appears; I’m to give her passport and money, remember the name of Dr. Belleaux, and help Ferenci-Sabo in whatever way is needed.”

“Right—and then vanish.” Carstairs glanced quickly at his watch. “Now before we wrap this up are there questions?”

“Yes.” She said slowly, “You say there may be a leak somewhere, Mr. Carstairs. You’ve also—somehow and very mysteriously—set up a meeting with a woman who is a notorious Communist agent.” She hesitated. “Yet nobody has seen her, and your Istanbul agent was killed trying to meet her.” She looked at him. “Don’t you suspect a trap? Do you really trust this woman?”

Carstairs smiled faintly. “Quite true, Mrs. Pollifax, and this is why I insisted on briefing you personally.” He removed a slip of yellow paper from the attaché case and handed it to her. “This is how we were advised about the rendezvous at the Hotel Itep.”

Mrs. Pollifax took the proffered paper and read:

Mrs. Pollifax frowned. “Should I know what this means?”

Carstairs laughed. “On the contrary it took the coding department a number of trips to the archives to identify it and I don’t believe they would have decoded it yet if the names of
Red Queen and Black Jack hadn’t been included. This was a code—a very simple one invented for rendezvous purposes—used by a small group of agents working in Occupied Paris during World War Two.”

“World War Two,” echoed Mrs. Pollifax, utterly lost. “But this has the flavor of a period piece!”

“Exactly. Code 6—this one, if you note the time of arrival—automatically stood for rendezvousing in a hotel lobby, with a copy of
Gone with the Wind
if identification was necessary. Code 5 stood for a metro station—I believe a Bible was used there—and seven, if I remember correctly, meant a church, and always the seventh pew on the left. And so on—there were eight in all. Red Queen was an agent named Agatha Simms, unfortunately killed several years ago in Hong Kong, and Black Jack was the code name of another agent in that group.”

“And Alice Dexter White?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

Carstairs looked at her and then he looked down at the unlighted cigarette he held. “A very dear friend of mine which is how I come into this,” he said quietly. “A very remarkable woman to whom I twice owe my life, and with whom I worked during those war years.” He lifted his glance and regarded her with level eyes. “You are now about to join a very small and exclusive club, Mrs. Pollifax—only four living people know what I am about to tell you.” He tapped the yellow cable with a finger. “This woman is one of our most valued agents but Alice Dexter White is only her code name. Her real name is Magda Ferenci-Sabo.”

Mrs. Pollifax caught her breath sharply. “Good heavens,” she gasped, “but this turns everything upside down!”

During the first hour of her transatlantic flight Mrs. Pollifax had time to consider the events of the afternoon, but she was not at all certain that this was to her advantage. Her head still spun from her briefing with Carstairs, and it was difficult to find some graspable point of view with which to organize all that he had told her. “You remain, principally, a courier,” he had said, “because I’m working on the assumption that once she has passport and money Ferenci-Sabo will know what to do. You may be called upon to help with a disguise, but she should be able to manage the rest herself. If by any chance it proves too hot for her to leave the country legally, this is when I recommend your approaching Dr. Belleaux.”

“Why did she use such an ancient code?” Mrs. Pollifax had asked, understanding better now the choice of
Gone with the Wind
.

“Probably it’s the only one she could recall from memory,” he’d said. “Codes were simpler, more primitive, then. In those days she was Frau Wetzelmann,” he added reminiscently.

“And you were Black Jack,” guessed Mrs. Pollifax.

“Yes,” he said quietly, and then, “Mrs. Pollifax, we don’t know why Ferenci-Sabo came to Istanbul, or how, but this is one ‘notorious Communist agent,’ who must be allowed to defect. Must,” he emphasized fiercely. “Not only for her
sake—and what we owe her—but for ours as well, because if ever she were forced to talk—” He shuddered.

Mrs. Pollifax shivered a little too now, and opened up the copy of
House Beautiful
on her lap. Up and down the aisle passengers were studiously reading about the woman that Mrs. Pollifax was en route to meet. What was even more unnerving she now knew a great deal more about Ferenci-Sabo than the New York
Times
, and this in itself awed Mrs. Pollifax. But on the whole, as material for reflection, it was all too overwhelming and after a while Mrs. Pollifax sensibly decided to stop thinking about it. Since by European time she would not arrive in Istanbul until late tomorrow afternoon she closed her eyes and presently slept.

Monday’s dawn had arrived when they reached London, and as Mrs. Pollifax disembarked from the plane she set her watch ahead, noting that at home she would be listening to the eleven o’clock news before retiring for the night—how very odd traveling was! After purchasing a small travel guide to Turkey she made her way into the waiting room to await the departure of her plane to Istanbul. She noticed that Henry Miles wandered about for a little while and then found a seat nearby, sat down and lighted a cigarette. They exchanged impersonal glances and then Miles endeared himself to Mrs. Pollifax by slowly, wickedly closing one eyelid and winking at her. Until that wink he had appeared curiously invisible, totally lacking in personality and content, as if he drew himself in flat chalk and then erased all but the outline. Now Mrs. Pollifax realized that a second Henry Miles walked, sat, stood and breathed inside that first Henry Miles, although a few seconds later, her glance returning, it was impossible to believe in that other personage, he looked so buttoned-up again.

The flight to Istanbul was announced, and Mrs. Pollifax boarded the plane and took her seat near the wing, with Miles several rows in front of her. This time she acquired a seat companion, and one who arrived breathlessly, with every male including Henry turning his head to stare at her. Mrs. Pollifax stared, too—she had never seen anyone quite like her before, which made the encounter educational as well. The girl was very young; she was dressed
in an incredible outfit of dramatic greens and purples crowned with a brilliant green stovepipe hat which she removed almost at once, displaying a flawless profile. Her eyelids and her lips had been painted white, her long eyelashes were ink black, and she wore her straight red-gold hair to the waist. Once she had settled her bag and her magazines she turned to look at Mrs. Pollifax with equal interest, gazed frankly at the wisps of hair escaping Mrs. Pollifax’s flowered hat, met her admiring and startled glance and smiled.

“Hello,” she said, adding with a burst of candor. “Do I frighten you? I do some of my mother’s friends—not that Mother has many pious friends but she does have tons of pious acquaintances, Daddy being an M.P.”

“Parliament!” said Mrs. Pollifax rapturously.

“You’re American!” exclaimed the girl. “What fun! Yes, Daddy’s in Parliament, and I’ve just become a model, isn’t it wonderful? It’s terribly exciting. I hope to be an actress, but I think modeling’s a marv way to begin. I’m on my way to Athens for a job. Tony and the cameras are already there—they’re doing me in autumn clothes against the Acropolis and all that.”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax, beaming, and then, “I’d forgotten we stop at Athens. I’m going all the way through to Istanbul.”

The girl’s face lit up. “I say, that’s wonderful! My brother’s there. If I’ve time after the assignment I’m hoping to fly over and see him.” A faint shadow dimmed her preposterously radiant face. “At least I hope he’s still there,” she added darkly. “He has such an awful time with just—well, just the
mechanics
of living. It’s unbelievable.” She sighed and tucked her young chin in the palm of her hand.

“What does he do in Istanbul?” asked Mrs. Pollifax, intrigued by her concern.

“Well, he’s been given a job with Uncle Hubert,” she explained. “But of course you wouldn’t know what that means unless you knew my family. It means, translated, that everybody’s simply given up on Colin—my brother—and nobody knows what else to do with him.” She frowned. “I suppose every large family has one.”

“One what?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

The girl hesitated, and then said angrily, “Somebody who just doesn’t fit, you know? And that person knows it and grows up—well, grows up feeling
invisible
. And it turns into a vicious circle because it’s so desperately easy not to notice someone invisible, but nobody understands this.”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled faintly. She decided she liked this girl. “You’re fond of him then. But being fond is a form of understanding.”

“Oh I understand what’s wrong,” the girl said earnestly. “But not how to help. Colin has no confidence, just no confidence at all, and because of this he absolutely bristles with hostility. He’s gotten battered, you know? He’s very precise by nature but he can’t find anything to be precise about, if you know what I mean, and this is infuriating for him and he loathes himself. But although I understand all this I’m very bad for him because he brings out the maternal in me. I’m a Moon Child, you see—born under the sign of Cancer, and simply seething with motherly instincts. He hates that. Quite rightly, too—he’s terribly intelligent, of course. Oh I do hope I’ll have time to stop and see him, but I despair,” she explained dramatically. “There’s never enough time. It’ll rain, and the filming get held up for days—things always happen like that in this business.”

“You could write to your brother then,” suggested Mrs. Pollifax comfortingly.

The girl turned her head and stared wonderingly at Mrs. Pollifax. “Write?” she repeated blankly, and Mrs. Pollifax understood that she had stumbled upon a word utterly foreign to this girl and her generation.

“It’s a way to keep in touch.”

“In touch,” repeated the girl musingly. “Yes, we do rocket about a great deal, my friends and I. But still I know what you mean. I think ‘in touch’ is a beautiful expression, don’t you? And yet I do feel in touch with Colin always, even when I never see him.”

“Then you have something very rare and wonderful,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax. “A bond.”

The girl nodded, beaming now. “You do see it, don’t you. But what takes you to Istanbul, and why Istanbul?”

Why indeed, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and announced that she was going to do a little sightseeing, and also meet a
friend there. “An old friend who has been exploring the Middle East,” she added firmly.

“But that’s marv,” said the girl. “Oh I do wonder if—how long will you be in Istanbul?”

“Until Saturday morning,” said Mrs. Pollifax calmly. “I wonder if I can guess what you’re thinking.”

The girl laughed delightedly. “Of course you can because you’re a dear, I can tell, and probably psychic as well. But you know, Colin just
might
be useful to you, having been in Istanbul for four months. And if I shouldn’t have the time to fly over to see him—it’s vital Colin feel that somebody cares—”

“Being a Moon Child,” said Mrs. Pollifax gravely.

“Well, I truly can’t help it, can I? And nobody else cares, not really, except in a generalized family sense, and only when something goes hideously
wrong
, if you know what I mean. Of course I shouldn’t want to burden you—”