Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (16 page)

She nodded.

“Enjoy!” And blowing her a kiss he went out, leaving Mrs. Pollifax to contemplate dinner and a welcome
early bedtime once she had written her note to Robin describing her discoveries of the afternoon.

But her day had not ended once she settled herself in bed that evening, for she had finally gained the time and leisure to consider the happenings of the past three days and to try and place pieces of the puzzle in juxtaposition. There were, for instance, a number of discrepancies that clamored for explanation, not to mention pieces that refused to fit as they should.

Should. Ought. Scenarios again, she thought crossly, which was how the mind persistently worked, using facts and assumptions left over from the past to draw conclusions that were frequently in error.

What was needed, she decided firmly, was to empty her mind of facts and to begin freshly, with nothing at all preconceived.

She did not immediately push it, however; she began instead to think of all that had taken place since she had arrived in Hong Kong … of her visit to Feng Imports, of Detwiler—charming and unctuous in his black silk suit with the gold cuff links—and his gift to her of a Buddha … of Mr. Feng, who looked like an ivory figurine himself … of Sheng Ti and Lotus and of the missing Alec Hao, of Mrs. O’Malley, and of her own whispered promise to the dead Inspector as she’d left the hut … and then she erased all impressions from her mind and waited.

When—sometime later—she opened her eyes it was to whisper, “But of course, how
blind
of me!”

She understood now why Detwiler hadn’t visited his home for two months, and she guessed why he had given her the Buddha. Picking up the phone, she dictated a
cable to Carstairs in Baltimore. When she had completed this she turned off the light, and before she could even wonder how soon her suppositions might be tested she slipped into a tranquil sleep.

M
rs. Pollifax awoke the next morning to the sound of a buzz ringing urgently in her ears and summoning her attention. She opened one eye experimentally, saw that day had arrived, opened the other eye and established from a glance at her clock that it was nine, and that it was not her alarm clock ringing. Reaching for the phone she was happy to discover that once she lifted the receiver the noise stopped. “Hello,” she said sleepily.

“This is Mrs. Pollifax speaking?” inquired a suave male voice.

Mrs. Pollifax at once sat up, suddenly alert, and assured the voice that yes, she was Mrs. Pollifax.

“This is Mr. Detwiler from the Feng Import Company, whom you may remember meeting several days ago?”

She did not mention that she had immediately recognized his voice. “Yes indeed,” she said warmly,
“and I have certainly been enjoying the Buddha you were so kind as to give me.

There was the briefest of silences and then he said, “Which makes it so difficult, what I must say, Mrs. Pollifax, for it is about the Buddha I am calling.”

Concealing her interest, Mrs. Pollifax said merely, “Oh?” while her eyes moved to the serenely glowing Buddha across the room.

“Yes, for it seems that I did Mr. Feng a
great
disservice when I chose that particular one for you, Mrs. Pollifax, it is a Buddha that was carved specially for a monastery in Kyota, Japan. It has taken some time to discover that it is this one I gave to you, and it is most embarrassing for me—I cannot tell you how embarrassing—but I must ask if you will return it to me. I will, of course, present you with another, this goes without saying, as well as with my deepest apologies.”

“How very unfortunate,” she murmured, as her mind raced over the implications of this and she began to feel very pleased.

“Yes it is. We have many Buddhas, as you know, and—I cannot tell you how sorry but I must ask if it can be returned to me here this morning so that it may be wrapped and shipped by afternoon. You could do this?”

There was an appeal in his voice of which Mrs. Pollifax was not unaware, but in any case she had already reached her decision. “Yes I can,” she told him cordially, “but I must tell you that I’ve only just waked up and am neither dressed nor breakfasted, so that I couldn’t possibly return it before eleven.”

“Apology must be heaped upon apology,” he said, but there was a difference in his voice now, a relievedness. “If I may expect you then at eleven?”

“At eleven, yes,” she told him gravely, and hung up
and sat still for several minutes, going over his words and nodding as she saw pieces of the puzzle slip into place. She did not question why Mr. Detwiler had made no offer to retrieve the Buddha personally; she had not expected it of him.

Dialing Robin’s suite she was relieved when he answered promptly. “Things are starting to happen,” she told him. “I’ve just had a telephone call from Mr. Detwiler. Can you and Marko come to my room?”

“A call from Detwiler!” exclaimed Marko. “Be there at once.”

“No, slowly—I need five minutes to dress,” she told him, and hung up. But she did not immediately dress: she dialed room service, ordered breakfast for one and coffee for three before she exchanged pajamas for a jumper and blouse.

“What did he say?” demanded Robin when she opened the door to him and Marko.

“Softly, my friend,” said Marko, following him into the room. “Good morning, Mrs. P.!”

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. “Please sit down, both of you, because I’ve rather much to say to you. My breakfast’s on the way, and coffee for you, and I need both your help and your witnessing of something I must do before going to visit Feng Imports this morning at Mr. Detwiler’s invitation.”

“What?”
thundered Robin. “Of course you’re not going to visit Feng Imports, are you out of your mind?”

Marko, watching her, said, “Hear her out, my friend. One may ask why he makes this invitation to you?”

“Of course. It seems there has been a—a slight error with the Buddhas,” she said without expression, “and the one he gave me was designed especially for a monastery in Kyoto.”

“For heaven’s sake you don’t believe him, do you?” said Robin.

Marko, his eyes still on her face, said softly, “No, she doesn’t believe him, Robin. You are volatile this morning, stop pacing and sit!”

Mrs. Pollifax responded to a knock on her door and the waiter wheeled in her breakfast, bowed and went out. Pouring coffee, she handed each a cup, looked without interest at her egg, took a bite and poured herself a cup of coffee. “I told you I had much to say, and it will be in some detail, because the details are important to what I came to understand last night.”

“We give you attention,” said Marko, looking amused.

“I’ve come to the conclusion,” she told them, “that Carstairs has been all wrong about Mr. Detwiler, and therefore I’ve been all wrong about him, too.”

“And what makes you think that?” asked Robin suspiciously.

“Detail one,” she said, holding up a finger. “On my visit to Feng Imports on Monday it occurred to me at the time to wonder why Detwiler invited me into his workshop when Mr. Feng had already told me that he’d never heard of Sheng Ti. Mr. Detwiler was insistent that I join him in the rear, and there was a very sharp exchange with Mr. Feng about this, who was forced to swallow his anger. And two,” she added, holding up a second finger, “he insisted on giving me a very exquisite Buddha.”

Their eyes moved to the Buddha standing on the bureau. “A remarkably lovely one, yes,” said Marko, nodding.

“But a Buddha he now wants back,” pointed out Robin dryly.

“Yes, isn’t that odd?” she said lightly. “Detail three,” she continued. “He also asked to see the slip of paper on which Bishop had scribbled the address of Feng Imports, and looking at it he said—which for the moment I missed—‘You could have received this from only one source, no one else could possibly know of Sheng Ti’s presence here.” ’

“So why not?” asked Robin. “He’s worked for Carstairs for years, hasn’t he? He could very well have recognized Bishop’s handwriting.”

“Yes, I agree with you,” she said. “He
did
recognize Bishop’s writing—and
then
he gave me the Buddha, the Buddha he now wants back. I’ve come to the conclusion,” she said crisply, “that Detwiler is quite innocent of betraying Carstairs and the Department.”

“What?”

She nodded. “I think he deliberately sent wild reports during these past two months to draw Carstairs’s attention to him, and I believe he desperately hoped that someone would be sent to Hong Kong to investigate.”

“You’re kidding,” said Robin.

She shook her head. “When I arrived he knew at once—from my asking for Sheng Ti, and from the memo with Bishop’s writing on it—that I’d been sent by Carstairs.”

Robin, frowning, said, “Then what—?”

“I think Detwiler is in very grave trouble,” she said simply. “I wondered why I was followed only the one afternoon by the Man with the Attaché Case. I think now he wanted only to learn at what hotel I was staying because he
didn’t dare be heard asking that
. The Man with the Attaché Case was Detwiler’s man, and it was he whom Detwiler sent to burglarize my room the other night.”

“As I know only too well,” said Robin. “But for what purpose?”

“For the Buddha, of course,” she said. “It took me far too long to see this because I was still assuming that Detwiler was completely in control at Feng Imports. He simply had to get the Buddha back, and when the burglary failed he was reduced to this morning’s phone call to get it back. Nothing made sense until I began last night to shift all the facts around—juggling them, so to speak: the fact that Detwiler hadn’t been at home for two months, which seemed inexplicable … the strangeness of that Monday morning visit to the shop … that ridiculous burglary … the fact that he and Inspector Hao had been friends … Once I stopped viewing Detwiler as a traitor all the pieces fell into place and I realized the trouble he’s in: Detwiler’s being held prisoner—he’s an unwilling victim—at Feng Imports.”

Marko said, “Good God, are you suggesting—?”

She nodded. “Who but Mr. Feng? A little blackmail applied to Detwiler about his spying activities, the introduction of drugs to weaken his will and gain control—Sheng Ti was very positive about the drugs … It was important that Detwiler give me the Buddha openly, as an act of generosity, but I believe that under duress he’s now been forced into admitting to Feng what he did, and it’s been demanded of him that he get it back.”

“By Mr. Feng,” Robin said in astonishment.

She nodded. “Yes … What, after all, do any of us know of Mr. Feng?”

Marko said, “What do
you
know of Feng?”

“A shadow figure,” she said. “A man who runs a shop that’s a cover for Detwiler’s intelligence-gathering activities. A man who gives the impression of being defeated by life, and resigned to life’s passing him by,
yet by the time I left the shop such an impression had completely vanished. I thought him cold and manipulative—shrewd, too, in the way he examined me—and hostile.”

“But to be mixed up with
terrorists?
”

Mrs. Pollifax shrugged. “We simply don’t know why yet, but—why not?”

Robin whistled. “Obviously immediate inquiries into Mr. Feng are in order, which I must say will be easier now that we’ve made personal contact with the special unit last night. But where does the Buddha fit in?”

“Very firmly,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “If I’m right about Detwiler, then the Buddha is the only reason that he risked Feng’s anger by overriding him and taking me into the back room—and if Feng is the supplier of his drugs then it was a reckless and very brave move on Detwiler’s part. I think at some earlier stage of events, before he became so dependent on drugs, Detwiler had hopes of doing much more. When I arrived he was having one of his good days and he did what he could.”

Walking over to the Buddha she picked it up and carried it to Robin. “There has to be something important about the Buddha for Detwiler to have gone to such lengths to give it to me. I hope it needn’t be broken, it’s so
very
lovely …”

“Good God,” murmured Robin, staring at it and looking thoroughly jarred.

Leaning forward Marko said, “It would be more than one could hope, but—
mion Dieu
, if it has secrets—” He joined Robin on the couch, his fingers moving lightly over the figurine. “I would guess the headpiece, wouldn’t you? It is the only part of the Buddha that does not look to have been carved out of the same piece of
ivory.” Drawing a pocketknife from his pocket he said, “Let
me
.”

Mrs. Pollifax winced as he inserted the knife at the base of the lacy headpiece. He applied pressure on the left side where it met the Buddha’s shoulder, and then he removed the knife and applied pressure to the other side.

Abruptly, with a snapping sound, the headpiece was released from the clamplike tension that held it to the figure, and it flew to the floor.

“And there,” she said proudly, pointing to the cavity carved into the head, “is Detwiler’s hiding place. He
is
a friend.”

“With something inside,” Robin said softly.

“Yes,” said Marko, and extracted four tiny slips of tightly rolled up paper. “The gods are smiling,” he added as he flattend them out. After a glance at the first two he handed them to Mrs. Pollifax. “These I should not read; they appear to be the true reports Detwiler did not send to your superiors, and have something to do with foreign ships in Hong Kong harbor.”

“But not this one,” cried Robin, snatching up the third slip of paper. “Names, Marko,
names—
listen!” He read them aloud: “Eric Johansen—that’s Eric the Red. Xian Pi—he’s new. Charles Szabo—oh, we know him all right. Jan von Damm. John Yonomoto. Hoban Holloway—he’s a killer, that one. Miguel Valentos, John D’Eon, Carl Eberhardt, Henri Duval and Angelo Gregorio.”

“Eleven,” nodded Mrs. Pollifax, “to match those eleven passports.”

“The whole damn roster of the Liberation 80’s group!” exclaimed Marko.

“But there’s more—this is unbelievable,” said Robin. “It has to be notes on their plan of attack.”