Amazing Mrs. Pollifax (22 page)

“But you did?” suggested Mrs. Pollifax with interest.

Magda sighed. “One cannot control such matters, eh? It was only an encounter, a passing thing, it was all it could mean with me because by then I was vulnerable, my daughter a hostage growing up in Russia.” She frowned. “I have learned that one’s life assumes a pattern—call it karma if you will. At every turning point in my life I am always thrust back into this work, as if a firm hand insists upon it. It has not been my karma to be either wife or mother for long.”

Mrs. Pollifax said, “Perhaps it is now. As I understand karma—and the subject has interested me lately—a person can eventually work through to another level, isn’t this true? There are karmic debts to be paid, but if one manages them
well, and cheerfully, there comes a time when one moves on to a new level, a new beginning, a different karma.”

“You speak as if you feel this,” said Magda curiously.

Mrs. Pollifax laughed. “I can only tell you that suddenly—after quiet years of marriage and family life, and at my age, too!—I have entered a very dangerous profession. It’s preposterous, as if the page of a book had been abruptly turned over by the wind. Mistake? Coincidence? Accident? There feels more to it than that. Perhaps I enter your kind of life just as you leave it for something else now.”

“I could hope this for me,” said Magda soberly.

“Do keep hoping,” said Mrs. Pollifax, her gaze falling on Hu Ramsey with humor and a touch of mischief. She thought that just when life appeared to have no discernible pattern there could arrive a coincidence so startling that one could envision Forces tugging, arranging, balancing, contriving and contracting all the arrivals and departures of life. Magda and Colin’s uncle had met once, years ago: now they met again through the most absurd of coincidences in the center of Turkish Anatolia. Mrs. Pollifax chuckled; it was so statistically impossible that she thought it had to be an act of cosmic humor, even of cosmic playfulness.

It was growing dangerously light when a shout came from a wagon up ahead. Goru stood up and waved, pointed, and Mrs. Pollifax understood that they were reaching their destination. She looked again at the high cliff that she had been examining from a distance for some time; now it rose sharply above them on their right, appearing to almost touch the sky. Here and there holes had been punched through the cliff by a giant hand, like a great wall with windows in it. Mrs. Pollifax sat up, alert and interested.

In the rubble that spilled down from the cliff like lava she could make out the shapes of crumbling houses; the hill running up to the cliff was honeycombed with caves, holes and the ruins of abandoned buildings. The wagons ahead had already begun to turn and head up the hill through the debris in a circling, ascending line. “What a wonderful hiding place!” said Mrs. Pollifax. “Unless—” She paused doubtfully. “Unless it’s so good that it becomes the first place Dr. Belleaux looks for us.”

Colin shook his head. “Not the first. I’ve driven through this part of the country with Uncle Hu, and it’s even more dramatic further along. The rocks fairly jump out of the earth like weird stalactites. At Göreme they’re called fairy tale chimneys—the early Christians hid in those rock chimneys centuries ago, hollowing them out inside and carving air holes and windows. They left behind fantastic Byzantine frescoes on their interior walls. The whole valley is full of surprises.”

“Really? I wish I’d pinned the guidebook to my trousers.”

“You ran out of pins,” Colin reminded her.

The first wagon had reached the summit, and Goru had climbed out, looking small and doll-like against the great height of the wall behind him, and separated from the rest of them by the mountain of rubble. Their own wagon was lurching and slipping now as it followed the narrow rock-strewn path upward toward the top. Mrs. Pollifax clung to the sides of the wagon and prayed. Each time she looked ahead, a wagon in the line ahead had disappeared and she could only hope that it had safely reached Goru and been directed out of sight, and had not instead plunged into a hole or rolled back down the hill. They climbed higher and higher until Goru came into sight, suddenly his own size again. They had reached the top of the rubble, with the cliff above them.

By a curious freak of nature there was no rubble close to the cliff wall, and a kind of primitive, washed-out road curved up and down behind the houses that had once been built into the hill and inhabited. But as the wall had eroded over the decades—perhaps even centuries—the rocks and silt it sent down had fallen upon the houses, missing the small avenue directly under the wall, but leaving holes in the roofs that it did not completely demolish, and piling debris around the sinking homes. Along this primitive avenue the wagons had stopped, each in front of a ruin that still boasted a roof or half-roof while the men dug out rocks to allow their wagons inside. One by one Mrs. Pollifax saw the wagons backed out of view.

Their driver was Yule, who leaped down and began shouldering aside rocks—they were now the only wagon exposed.
Colin jumped down to help, and behind her Mrs. Pollifax heard a startled voice say, “Wotthehell!”

“Sandor,” she murmured, smiling, and turned.

Sandor was sitting erect rubbing his head but his eyes were on Magda and Ramsey. Mrs. Pollifax saw that these two were both awake and staring at each other with interest and astonishment; she had the impression that they must have been mutely observing one another for some time.

Colin’s uncle said abruptly, “You’re thinner. You never did care sufficiently about meals—no schedule at all. If you’d married me I should have insisted upon your eating. Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I which—marry you, or eat?”

“You should have done both, you know. I’ve felt damnably juvenile not marrying all these years, but there’s simply been no one to equal you. Why didn’t you marry me?”

“I had a daughter in Russia.”

“You could have told me, couldn’t you?”

“Never,” she said fondly. “You know you would have charged the Kremlin, Hugh, demanding she be brought to England—you would have gotten your head chopped off.”

“It’s France that has the guillotine, in Moscow I think it would be a firing squad,” he reminded her.

Sandor was grinning broadly. He climbed past them to Mrs. Pollifax. “She knows him too!” he said.

At that moment someone shouted, and Goru came running toward them looking visibly alarmed. Ramsey spoke to him in Turkish and looked appalled. “It’s the plane!” he shouted. “Get the wagon hidden! There’s a plane on the horizon heading this way!”

Two men appeared from nowhere and took away the horse. Five more men raced from a hole in the rocks and actually lifted the wagon over a wall of tumbling stone and into the cellar of a house. The wagon sustained only one casualty—a wheel fell off—but the miracle was that it had not happened sooner.

Their hiding place was not unpleasant. The brilliant morning sun fell through the half-ruined floor in lattice-work squares and stripes. There were stone walls on three sides of them, and half a roof over their heads but the front of the house had long since vanished, and from the shadows Mrs. Pollifax had a breathtaking panoramic view across the valley. It was like hiding under a porch that had been swept to the top of a mountain.

From here Mrs. Pollifax could see the helicopter move slowly across the valley in the tilting, gliding, oddly tipsy fashion that to Mrs. Pollifax confounded all laws of air flight. It drew nearer, disappeared behind the cliff and then suddenly roared down over their heads. For a full moment it hung suspended over them, a giant eye searching for one tell-tale slip, one unexplained shadow, one sign of careless movement. It was frightening. When it lifted and began to beat its way slowly down to the other end of the cliff Mrs. Pollifax realized that she had been holding her breath. She expelled it slowly, realizing that this could happen again and again during the day. It was not a happy thought.

Magda said suddenly, angrily, “I cannot take a plane tomorrow morning and leave Dmitri to this. Never.”

Mrs. Pollifax turned and looked into her face. The helicopter had affected her in the same way, delivering them all into a nightmare inhabited by birds of prey that swept down from the sky to look for them. “Yes, it’s time to make plans,” she said firmly. “Let’s go and find Anyeta. The plane is gone?”

Colin nodded. “It disappeared southward.”

“Good. We’ll talk.”

They formed a circle inside the cave in which Anyeta had taken refuge. “We move at dark,” Anyeta said. “Goru says that will be about nine-thirty tonight. It will be necessary to move slowly in order to be careful, and because the way is not familiar. Goru does not know where the aerodrome is at Kayseri.”

“I do,” said Hu Ramsey. “Fortunately it’s to the west of the town—on this side of it—so that there’s no need to go through Kayseri. Look here, if I went back and got the van—”

“I used up nearly all of the spare gas last night,” said Colin. “I’d calculate about ten more miles of gas are left in the tank. Twelve at most.”

“Damn,” said Uncle Hu mildly. “Colin, you know how far away the van is. Where would the nearest petrol station be?”

“Nearest to the van, you mean? Kirsehir definitely. But if you’re thinking of retrieving it to get Magda to the aerodrome then you’ve got to remember that the search for the van may not have been called off yet. The license may still be on their lists. Someone’s bound to stop you again, as they did at Yozgat, and that’s perfectly all right if you’re alone but if you ever had Magda and Mrs. Pollifax with you—” Colin shook his head. “Kaput. Finis!”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “He’s quite right. I think Magda
must
get to the aerodrome by wagon, the van’s too conspicuous.”

Magda looked pensive. “I’ve no reservation for the eight o’clock flight, or even for the London flight. What if there is no room for me?”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “We must organize this very very carefully. Like generals plotting a battle.”

“Gung ho and all that,” suggested Colin, grinning.

“Exactly. Goru, you say you don’t know where the
aerodrome is. I think someone must go and find it—now, while it’s daylight.”

Anyeta translated this to Goru, who replied. “He will go himself,” she said. “Alone. He will take a horse and find the best route for the wagons, also.”

“There’s another possibility,” went on Mrs. Pollifax. “Magda wants to know that Dmitri will not become involved in this. She also needs a reservation for the flight—it would certainly be reassuring to have one for Alice Dexter White clear through to London—and Mr. Ramsey has his van to retrieve, which has in it roughly enough gas to get to Kirsehir.” She lifted her gaze. “Mr. Ramsey, if you could take Dmitri with you and reach that van sometime today, then you could drive it to Kirsehir for gas, and telephone the airport in Kayseri for Magda’s flight reservations. You could also provide a—well, a diversion. Kirsehir looks quite removed from Kayseri on this map. If the police should stop the van you’d have with you only a small boy picked up on the road. You’ve already been checked out at Yozgat—it’s possible you wouldn’t be taken to jail again. You could then drive on to Ankara.”

Ramsey shot her a quick glance. “Quite right, of course.” He looked distinctly unhappy but it was to his credit, thought Mrs. Pollifax, that he did not protest leaving Magda. He was a man who could accept necessity.

“You would do that?” Magda said hopefully. “Hugh, I cannot tell you how grateful I would be.”

“Of course I can do it,” he said crisply. “Dmitri, you’ll try me out next as a companion?”

“Must?” he said in a dispirited voice to Magda.

She spoke to him gently in Russian and he listened gravely, then with growing brightness. “Da,” he told Ramsey, nodding. “I go. I am—how you say—gung ho?”

“Good boy,” Ramsey said, ruffling his hair.

“You will need a horse and a guide,” Anyeta told him. “Yule will go—he knows where the van is hidden, and he can bring the horse back before night. Anything else?”

They all leaned over the map to pinpoint their present location, the best route to Kirsehir for Ramsey, and the precise area of the Kayseri aerodrome. “Don’t head south,” Uncle Hu warned Goru. “The police have a station here”—he pointed—“at Inescu. As you can see, that’s a little too near for comfort.”

Goru nodded and stood up.
“Allaha ismarladik,”
he said.

“Gule, gule,”
said Uncle Hu, shaking his hand.

Mrs. Pollifax was busy thinking. “Magda will need sleep and food today,” she told Anyeta. “Near the end of the day I’ll fit her into my American clothes, which she can wear under her Turkish ones” Was there anything else, she wondered, mentally ticking off the plans. Magda would still be very weak. If they could reach the airport while it was still dark a wagon could deposit Magda very near to the air terminal without such unconventional arrival being noticed; she could peel off her Turkish clothes, leave them behind in the wagon and walk into the terminal as Alice Dexter White, American tourist. If her reservation had already been made by telephone then she need only pay for it—automatically Mrs. Pollifax felt for the wad of money pinned to her baggy pants and nodded—and then walk through Customs to the lounge.