Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (15 page)

“Aha,” said Mrs. Pollifax.

Robin, shrugging into a flawlessly cut black linen jacket, nodded. “Exactly. I can’t think of a better place for anyone engaged in the smuggling racket, for which the payoff could be one packet of diamonds from Detwiler
at Feng Imports—another little tidbit for His Excellency.” He saluted each of them with a smile. “I’m off … I wish you a delightful cruise in Hong Kong harbor—see you later!”

T
he harbor and the sky were sunless this morning and a gauze curtain of mist had swept over the mountains to soften and blur their shapes and obscure their peaks. A cold choppy wind blew across the water, and once aboard the launch Mrs. Pollifax shivered; a light had been turned off and without its radiance the brilliant tropical greens looked sullen; earthbrowns that had been invisible until now outweighed the greens in prominence, bringing a somber dullness to the landscape that was relieved only by the orange of a tile roof on the wooded hillsides or the snowy façade of a new block of high-rise buildings. A jolly Raoul Dufy had become a moody Turner.

Mrs. Pollifax had joined Ruthie and Mr. Hitchens not merely to sightsee for two hours; she had the more practical purpose of gun-disposal, and being in possession of a murder weapon, she considered the harbor an excellent place in which to bury it forever. She felt no
compunction about her illegal act, because at the moment she could think of no explanation for having the gun that would appease the police. But she admitted also to an interest in seeing Ruthie and Mr. Hitchens together; anything so unusual as two people accidentally meeting again thousands of miles from home tugged at her curiosity. The odds against it, she felt, were surely five million to one, and the coincidences of timing—of their being in Hong Kong on the same day, and of their arriving in the lobby of the same hotel at the same moment—thoroughly charmed her.

It had obviously charmed Ruthie, too, for she looked younger today and it was not entirely due to her wearing red slacks and a bright red shirt and kerchief; she looked transformed, as almost all women do when feeling courted. She called Mr. Hitchens “Hitch,” to which Mrs. Pollifax reacted with amusement and a faint sense of shock, for she herself couldn’t imagine calling him anything but Mr. Hitchens. She tried to picture what he might have been like when the two had met in high school, and she smiled as she set to work stripping him of his pedantic quality, enlarging on the boyishly delighted Mr. Hitchens who had crept out of the hotel by the rear entrance, adding a touch more shyness and removing five pounds and the hint of gray at his temples.

“What are you smiling at?” asked Ruthie, shouting above the wind and the sound of the engines.

They had taken places in the stern, away from the spray as the launch headed out into the harbor to thread its way among trawlers, sampans, pleasure boats, cargo ships and junks, but before Mrs. Pollifax could reply Mr. Hitchens shouted, “Coffee? They’ve opened up the snack counter!”

“Oh
yes
,” said Mrs. Pollifax with feeling, and as he
moved across the desk, staggering a little against the wind, she said, “I was just wondering what he was like when you met in high school.”

Ruthie laughed. “Oh—very serious and very bookish, and feeling that being psychic couldn’t possibly equal playing on the football team.”

“And you loved him.”

Ruthie gave her a quick, startled glance and looked just as quickly away. “Yes.” She hesitated, looking embarrassed, and then she said with a controlled lightness, “Do you think that—well, old fires can be rekindled?”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “I don’t see why on earth they should be,” she said. “I think it far more interesting—and a great deal more fun—to simply begin all fresh and new.”

Ruthie looked startled. “You mean—not try again but look for someone else fresh and new.”

Mrs. Pollifax touched her hand. “Not at all, and if we’re talking about you and Mr. Hitchens—and I can’t think who else we’d be speaking of—I mean that whatever drew you together once can certainly draw you together again now but I think it a great mistake to look at it as a continuation. After all, you’re different people now.”

Ruthie said ruefully, “What drew him to me, according to my therapist, was his looking for a mother. Except that he outgrew that and wanted to enjoy his lost youth with Sophie and then Rosalie.”

Mrs. Pollifax laughed. “What a pat explanation! Well, I rather think he encountered too
much
youth, from hearing him speak of it, and he just may have grown bored with motherhood after having to mother
them
. The young so frequently have no conversation, I
find, and for myself I cannot imagine anything more frustrating than living with someone who didn’t experience the horrors of the Kennedy assassinations, or even know who Clark Gable was.”

Ruthie laughed. “That’s refreshing, you almost make my doubts disappear.”

Mrs. Pollifax looked at her with a twinkle in her eye. “Doubts—or fears? You know,” she said, reaching over and clasping her hand for a moment, “I really think he’s seeing you with fresh eyes—he seems so astonished by it all—which leaves it entirely up to you. Did you make a very
good
new life? Oh thank you,” she said to Mr. Hitchens, who returned with three coffees in Styrofoam cups.

Ruthie said with pride, “Yes I did, I moved into a charming apartment in Boston, in a very old house; I began teaching a fifth grade instead of kindergarten, and I started traveling.”

“And has she traveled!” exclaimed Mr. Hitchens, leaning forward to join their conversation. “She leaves Saturday for Bangkok, can you imagine?”

Mrs. Pollifax sipped her coffee and listened to them talk of travel, and then of Boston, and she decided that all was well between Ruthie and Mr. Hitchens. When the proper moment arrived she made her way to the railing, opened her purse and casually dropped overboard the gun that had killed Inspector Hao. With that done, she settled down to the remaining hour of their cruise, to glimpses of white beaches at Repulse Bay and the city of sampans at Aberdeen, but her thoughts began to wander back to Feng Imports and to Mr. Detwiler, and she began to consider both of them from a new angle that startled her because over and over the question
persisted:
why hadn’t Detwiler visited his home for two months?

“Why Irma Blank!” exclaimed Mrs. O’Malley, a huge smile enveloping her face. “To think you’ve come back! How nice.”

“Hello,” said Mrs. Pollifax, smiling. “I found myself on the next street and thought I’d just stop in and say hello and—”

“And just in time for a spot of tea,” said Mrs. O’Malley in her rich, authoritative voice. “Come in, come in, I was about to pour meself a cup. Feet tired, dear?”

Deceit, thought Mrs. Pollifax, was really difficult with this kindly woman; after all, she’d had an excellent lunch of soup, steamed dumplings, bean curd and for dessert two coconut snowballs, and except for a stroll back to the hotel to change into survey clothes she had been sitting for most of the day. “Terribly,” she said with a sigh, “I’ll really have to think about that housekeeping you suggested, although I did very well today with my surveys.” She followed Mrs. O’Malley into the kitchen and as she sat down she placed her newspaper on the table, carefully arranged so that Alec Hao’s photograph was prominent.

“Oh, that dear boy,” said Mrs. O’Malley, catching sight of the newspaper as she poured tea. “The only son, too!”

“Oh?” said Mrs. Pollifax. “Did you ever—?” She paused, wanting to approach the matter obliquely but to settle once and for all if Alec had passed through this house after being kidnapped. “Have your paths ever crossed?” she asked.

Mrs. O’Malley, seating herself across the table, said, “Oh no, dear, for he’s been in college in the United
States, you know, doing very well, even graduating with Latin words after his name.”

Mrs. Pollifax stared at her in astonishment. “How—that is—I don’t recall reading that in the paper.”

“No, no,” Mrs. O’Malley told her soothingly, “it’s from his father I heard it, may God rest his soul. Really proud of him, his father was.”

“His father,” echoed Mrs. Pollifax. “You knew his father. The man found dead yesterday.”

She nodded. “Oh, many’s the night he’s been here for dinner, he and Mr. Detwiler being friends, yes. Such a nice man he was, too, the inspector, and how he loved my Beggar’s Chicken! It’s baked eight hours in a clay pot, you know—”

Mrs. Pollifax sat stunned: Mr. Detwiler and Inspector Hao friends? The two men had not only known each other but
were friends?
She felt herself reeling as she sat and allowed Mrs. O’Malley’s words to flow over her.

“—chicken stuffed with chestnuts, herbs and shredded cabbage and then wrapped in lotus leaves …”

Mrs. Pollifax wet her lips, which felt suddenly dry, and said mechanically, “It sounds delicious.”

“Oh, very special it is, yes,” agreed Mrs. O’Malley.

“You could open a restaurant then,” Mrs. Pollifax suggested. “That is, if ever you tire of keeping house for Mr. Detwiler.” The circle was growing smaller, she thought, struggling to remain steady in the face of Mrs. O’Malley’s casually imparted news. Two men in this strange confusion of clues had been in contact. Two points were converging: they had been friends, and at this Mrs. Pollifax began to feel a sense of excitement … Had the Inspector confided to his friend his growing suspicions of briberies and stolen passports, never
realizing that Detwiler was heavily involved in both, and that it would lead to the Inspector’s death? Or could it have been Detwiler who inadvertently dropped the clue for Inspector Hao that had begun the search that killed him?

Well, at least she had established once and for all—and this had troubled her—that Alec Hao had never passed through Detwiler’s house after being kidnapped, but she admitted that she was appalled by the fact that they had been good friends, Detwiler and the dead Inspector.

“And Mr. Feng, did he come to dinner here, too?” she asked.

Mrs. O’Malley shook her head. “Oh no,
he
was never invited.” From her dismissing tone Mrs. Pollifax deduced that he was not considered dinner-party material.

They continued their gossip for another half an hour. Mrs. Pollifax struggled earnestly to maintain her role of Irma Blank, but it was difficult, and when she at last excused herself she felt drained. At the door she said, “I’ll not be in the same neighborhood tomorrow but it’s been a real pleasure, Mrs. O’Malley. No news yet, I suppose, of your employer’s return?”

Mrs. O’Malley’s eyes brightened. “Now would you believe it, he sent word by the delivery boy this morning—the lad what brings his laundry—that it’s the last he’ll be needing done, as he hopes to be comin’ home late next week.”

“Late next week,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, blinking at this second staggering piece of news. “Oh, how very nice …” and thanking her again for tea, Mrs. Pollifax walked to the street feeling that she had come here to fish for a minnow and had instead pulled in two whales.

* * *

Mrs. Pollifax found Marko alone in the suite when she reached it, and when she had told him her news he nodded thoughtfully. “So …” he mused, “so it is possible that late next week it will all be over and Robins’s instincts were right, we have arrived for the conclusion, not the beginning of it.” He shook his head. “We now—how do you call it—batten down the hatches?”

“Yes, and where is Robin?”

“Of that I have not the foggiest,” Marko said, with a glance at his watch. “It is already past four … He spent the morning with the Governor, and he’s no doubt meeting now with the head of Hong Kong’s special police unit, to brief him and to arrange for a radio-detection van—”

“Tell me about those vans,” said Mrs. Pollifax.

Marko perched on the edge of the couch. “Gladly, but I will have to make it brief because I have the four-thirty-to-midnight shift at Dragon Alley, and for telling Robin of your grave discoveries you must leave a note to him. For the van there is a driver and the truck is a closed unit, bristling with aerials inside that are operated by two men who turn the aerials with great care, ready to pick up any activity. Once there is action they plot the course of the coded signals they are picking up, turning those aerials until they cross and pinpoint the location of secret radio transmitters.”

“I see. And then they have found the hiding place!”

Marko smiled wryly. “Only sometimes, and only if they are very very quick about it, because anyone sending code signals transmits for a very short time—two and a half minutes and they are beyond the safe limit.”

“That’s not very helpful, is it,” she said indignantly.

Marko laughed and reached over to pinch her cheek
affectionately. “No of course not, but why should they be helpful? After two and a half minutes they are vulnerable to anyone who might wish to find them, who might even—consider!—send out radio-detection vans to comb the streets and listen. In this game nothing is easy, and one mistake—” He lifted a hand and ran a finger from left to right across his throat.
“Finis?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax, watching him lift his jacket and slip a gun into his holster. “Any news from the men watching Feng Imports?”

“Nothing. I do not myself think we will see Eric the Red there again, and where he is hiding I would give my right arm to know.”

“Surely not your right arm,” she protested. “Isn’t that rather exorbitant?”

“You think so? I will tell you,” he said, pausing in his preparations. “I will tell you of my cousin Gena Constantine who was eighteen years old three years ago, very eager, very fresh and lovely, with a cockeyed sense of humor. You understand not all women in my family are lovely—some are fat, some have moustaches, but Gena was special.” Without expression he added, “And then one day she walked into a bank in Paris and a bomb goes off, and after that there is not much remaining of my cousin Gena, not even to bury.”

“Oh, Marko,” she breathed.

“So I do not like terrorists,” he said simply, and picking up a book—Mrs. Pollifax saw that it was Lecomte du Noüy’s
Humnan Destiny—
he placed it in his knapsack and said, “Now I am ready. And you—you are maybe a little excited about your Cyrus on his way?”