Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (11 page)

“Y
ou’re crazy,” Joe told her, climbing up the ladder out of Site Two. “A camel? And at night?”

She said tartly, “I can scarcely go by daylight, can I? We were lucky this morning, but another time we might be seen, and I want to do some serious digging. There was something about that fire … as if they’d just dumped things there, lit a few sticks and left. If the flames didn’t consume all of that passport then it’s possible the fire died away before anything buried deeper could be reached. There could be
more
to find.”

He said grudgingly, “Well, it’s true there’s not much kindling in the desert, just dried dung and bits of twigs. But you can’t go on a camel, it would take hours. They’re
slow.”

“Then I’ll walk,” she said stubbornly.

He looked at her with amusement. “Blackmail,
Khaleh
Emily?”

“Khaleh?”

“Arabic for ‘aunt.’ ”

“To be called a blackmailer shocks me to the core,” she told him.

“I’ll bet,” he said, grinning. “I suggest we borrow the Land Rover—okay, steal it once it’s dark—drive it within a few miles of the place, and walk.”

“We?”

“So I’m curious,” he admitted. “There’ll be a moon tonight, not full for two more days, but enough to find the way there without being conspicuous.” He added wryly, “Dr. Robinson likes you, and of course
I
impressed him by returning his Land Rover so punctually. He’s very stern about such matters. I can tell him you’d love seeing the desert in the moonlight.”

“What time?”

“Whether he says yes or no, about seven, once work stops?”

“I’ll be ready,” she told him. “What
do
they all think about Farrell limping into camp, bloody but unbowed?”

“I told them he fell.”

“Fell?”

“Off a wall.”

“And do they believe that?” she said incredulously.

“I doubt it,” he said, grinning, “but Dr. Robinson does. His head is where mine usually was—back among the Umayyads. Very scholarly chap.” His face clouded. “We’ve got to be careful; we all had to be cleared by the government here—had to be—and I don’t want Dr. Robinson to get into any trouble. I think tomorrow I’d better approach him about pitching a tent for you and Farrell outside the camp. A bit of dissociating, if you get what I mean: aunt and cousin guests for a few days, until my cousin recovers and all that?”

She smiled at him. “I do like you, Joe.”

He grinned. “The mischief I never got into, growing up, seems to be taking over at the ripe age of twenty-seven.”

“No mischief?”

He shook his head. “Both my parents were history professors, I never got around to rebelling, it would only have bewildered them. How can you rebel against parents who live in another century? My rebellion was taking up with the Umayyads.”

“The Umayyad,” she said. “When did
they
live?”

He said promptly, “They occupied the country in
A.D.
661, made Damascus their capital, and were overthrown by the Abbasids in
A.D.
750.”

“I see … and you were an only child?”

He nodded. “See you at seven, I’ve got Dr. Robinson to approach at dinner. The usual menu, of course.”

“Not for me,” she said, and went back into the tent to worry about Farrell, and to watch him carefully. Congratulating him on his escape was meaningless, she knew. She had once, in Hong Kong, undergone torture—she still carried the scars on her back—and she remembered very well the state of her mind when she’d been rescued; mercifully it had been temporary, but she knew that what Farrell needed now was the commonplace, a familiar face, work to do, and sleep to heal a mind still dazed by meeting with the worst that one human being could inflict on another.

He greeted her cheerfully, however, and knowing how resilient he was she was hopeful. “There’s food and water on the table beside your cot,” she told him. “I’ll be going out for an hour or two this evening. Since I’m posing as Joe’s aunt—and a mere tourist—it appears to be obligatory that I see the desert in the moonlight.”

If he suspected more, he did not say so. “Then tell Joe to be
quiet when he gets back because I plan to sleep and sleep and sleep.” He grinned. “Only way I can be of use to you by tomorrow. Sleep always does it for me.”

Whatever Joe said to Dr. Robinson proved successful. The Land Rover drove up to her tent at seven o’clock, and climbing in beside Joe she found herself sitting on a mound of cloth. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Djellabas,” he said. “Borrowed from Mustafa and Argub. As a joke, I told them. They’re in case we’re glimpsed from a distance.”

“Joe,” she said, “I’m discovering new depths in you by the hour.”

He laughed, and they set off in the direction they’d taken that morning, headlights shining until—with a glance at his compass—he announced, “Here’s where we start walking.”

The moon was high in the sky, shedding a soft and hazy light that outshone the stars. The air was cool and refreshing, so cool that Mrs. Pollifax was glad to pull on the old brown djellaba woven of wool.
Borrowed car, borrowed djellaba, and borrowed spoons for digging
, she thought, and found it quite pleasant, walking in the night. “I wonder if we’ll see any lights at that camp,” she murmured.

Joe shook his head. “Doubtful. No electricity. They could have a generator but it’s more likely they’ve kerosene lamps, as we do, and those earthworks are too high to see
them.”

She had left her purse back in Amy’s tent, but Joe had borrowed a small burlap sack from the storeroom. When at last they sighted the hill in the distance they began the job of looking for the darker circle of charred earth. For this the moonlight was of little help and they lost a precious twenty minutes before Mrs. Pollifax stumbled across it, and at once
she sank to her knees, spoon in hand. She dug while Joe kept watch, and without heed to what she uncovered she dug deep, spading everything—sand, pebbles, debris—into the sack that Joe held open for her. Extending the search beyond the fire she left a sizable hole behind her into which Joe made a hurried attempt to kick pebbles and earth.

When at last she said, “Enough!” Joe slung the bag over his shoulder. “This must be how grave robbers feel,” he said as they walked away, not slowing their pace until the hill melted into the horizon, no longer visible.

When they returned to Camp Five it was nearing eleven o’clock and the site was dark except for the soft glow of lanterns set among the tents. A guard was asleep on a bench outside the field office, and roused at the sound of the Land Rover. Joe called out a few words in Arabic and he lay down again, satisfied.

“What we need is a hand screen,” Joe said. “To sift the wheat from the chaff. Tired?”

“No,” she lied. The cut on her temple had come to life and was throbbing, and she was beginning to realize that she had arrived at the camp roughly forty-eight hours ago and that she, like Farrell, had endured a difficult trip. With her normal energy depleted she was drawing heavily now on reserves.
Or adrenaline, bless it
, she thought, but was not about to admit it. “I’m fine,” she told him. “I could never sleep without knowing if we found
something
. Where’s that hand screen?”

Joe found one left on the ground near Site Two. They carried the sack and the screen to a nearby lantern and sat down beside it. “We do this sort of thing every day—tirelessly,” said Joe, dropping handfuls of dirt and pebbles across its surface.

“Paper!” cried Mrs. Pollifax suddenly. “Look, scraps of white paper!”

“I’m looking,” Joe said. “What do I do with them?”

She unwound her white headscarf and he gathered together the scraps of paper and dropped them into it. When they had emptied the burlap sack they had culled a neat pile of scorched and torn pieces of paper. “Except, alas, no passport,” she mourned.

Joe reached for a crumpled sample from the collection and whistled faintly through his teeth. “No passport but there’s an American here
somewhere
. Look at this!”

He handed her one of the scorched remnants and by the light of the lantern she saw English print, something torn from a book, and leaning closer she read,
Poems by Emi
—and below it,
I Was Hun
—Fire had eaten away the rest, leaving its ragged edge brown with singe.

For a moment, tired and sleepless, Mrs. Pollifax thought she was going to cry. “English,” she whispered.

Joe, plucking out another scrap said, “Hey—there’s more English and this one’s written by hand; it says ‘taught to be incons …’ ” He looked at the quantity of scorched papers and shook his head. “This is going to be like gluing together shards of Ommayan pottery!” One glance at Mrs. Pollifax’s face in the light of the lantern and he forgot their contraband. “Good God,” he said with a gasp, “you’ve lost your bandage and it’s starting to bleed again. You must be exhausted, we should never, never have—You need sleep.”

“I—I think you’re right,” she said with a wry smile.

He helped her to her feet, gripped her arm and escorted her to Amy’s tent. “I’ll take these scraps with me—I’m rather good at jigsaw puzzles—and see what sense I can make of them. I’ll do it with a flashlight outside my tent so I won’t wake Farrell.”
He added crossly, “You should have told me; I should have—Oh damn it, sleep. All
day
if you want,
Khaleh
Emily.”

“Thank you,” she told him gravely, walked into the dark tent, glanced at a sleeping Amy, found a blanket and without bothering to remove her clothes lay down and at once fell asleep.

I
n Langley, Virginia it was ten o’clock in the morning when Bishop picked up the telephone to hear that Amman, Jordan was calling: that would be Rawlings, of course, in their Jordan office. “Hold on a minute,” he told him. “I believe he’s on another line.”

He buzzed Carstairs and then walked into his office to see whether he was ordering lunch sent up from the cafeteria, or was still talking with Jacob Mboro in the Sudan. There had lately been a number of calls to and from the Sudan and Bishop, curious, and knowing little about the country, had looked it up in their library. Carstairs had been more helpful. “Largest country in Africa,” he said. “Underpopulated and needy. To simplify, draw a line roughly across the middle, at Khartoum: the top half is Arab, and mostly Muslim; the bottom half of the country are the natives, Christians or animists, and they want autonomy. Call it civil war or guerilla war; it’s been going on for years.”

He opened the door in time to hear Carstairs say, “Good, I’ll see what I can do,” and cut the connection. Seeing Bishop he said cynically, “I must be getting old. Life was so much simpler when half the world backed the Soviet Union, and the
other half lived in terror of the Soviet Union. Remove the Cold War and internal conflicts multiply in countries by the week.”

Bishop said meekly, “Rawling’s on line one from Jordan, sir.”

“Ah yes, Rawlings,” he said, and to Bishop, “I’ll want this recorded, turn on the machine, will you?” Turning to line one he said, “Carstairs here.”

Bishop sat down and waited for further instructions.

Rawlings, young and still fairly new to the Middle East, said, “Yes, sir. I want you to know this call’s being scrambled.”

“That bad?” said Carstairs lightly.

“Well, it’s from Damascus, sir, it just came in. The usual way.”

“Yes?” Carstairs’s voice was no longer flippant but deadly serious. “Talk.”

“From A-511, sir, code name Omar. The following message to be forwarded to you. It begins, and I quote, ‘Carpets not selling well, two sent to Palmyra.’ ” He hesitated, and then continued, “ ‘Fareeq killed at Palmyra—have confirmed, reconfirmed, and verified assassin unknown to police. Assassin mingled with group of tourists and escaped.’ That’s it, sir, end of agent’s message.”

Showing no immediate expression, Carstairs said noncommittally, “Thanks, Rawlings, I’ll keep in touch.” He hung up and exploded with a “Damn and damnation!”

Bishop, frowning, said, “Fareeq? I don’t recall an agent named Fareeq.”

“Not under that name, no—you’ll find him in our top
top
classified secret file.” Carstairs added savagely, “He was one of our most trusted surviving informants over there, and a
damn fine man—and he’s dead? He was never a man to be careless … the question is why, and by whom.”

Bishop said doubtfully, “Can you really
believe
he wasn’t killed by the police?”

“If A-511 says not by the police then it was not by the police. Omar has connections, he’s reliable. Which means, who killed Fareeq and why, and what the hell was he doing in Palmyra?”

He reached over and switched on the machine and listened again to Rawlings’s message from a world away. “Two rugs sent to Palmyra,” he murmured, and then, “Oh God.”

“What?”

“It has to mean he’s made contact with Mrs. Pollifax and Farrell and he sent the two of
them
to Palmyra, presumably to meet Fareeq.”

“And now he’s dead.… Was he under surveillance, do you suppose?”

Carstairs shook his head and said drearily, “So far as I know, Fareeq has never been under suspicion, and he’d be too clever to be followed and not know it. It’s more likely that it’s Pollifax and Farrell who were being followed, which is fairly normal procedure over there, and Farrell and Pollifax knew this.”