Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (13 page)

The general was being helped into a chair by the nurse. The Palisburys, she noticed, had already arrived and were establishing themselves under the poplar tree. The man in the wheelchair, Ibrahim Sabry, sat beside a table with a pink umbrella and read a thick newspaper. The same tableau was arranging itself but Marcel was missing. Fraser, too, had been snatched away from this tranquil garden scene and no one had missed him, just as few people would notice Marcel’s absence. And someone among these people was a murderer … someone here
knew
.

The glass doors swung open and a white-jacketed waiter came out bearing a tray. Seeing her he crossed the lawn toward her, picking up a small table as he came. “
Bon jour
, madame—your coffee!” he said.

Marcel had brought her tea yesterday with just such a flourish but now he was dead and in his murder lay the answer to a good many things if only she could find the right question to ask. “Thank you,” she said absently, and as the waiter left she went back in her thoughts to yesterday. She had hailed Marcel and asked him if he was a good actor. He had taken out his order book while she told him of her anxieties about Madame Parviz. He had not thought highly of them but he had agreed to look into them. And he had told her—just before Robin arrived—that he would have information for her at midnight.

He had been safe at that hour yesterday, she was sure of it.

She thought, Whatever Marcel did after I saw him in the afternoon must have taken him closer to something, turned him in a new and different direction, toward territory someone had marked off as forbidden. The question was, what had Marcel done between half-past three in the
afternoon and midnight, when he was killed? Whatever Marcel had discovered she must discover, too.

“I hate to disturb your thinking processes,” said Robin, strolling up behind her, “but I’ve been looking for Court and I can’t find her anywhere. Has she passed this way?”

“My thinking processes are behaving very poorly at the moment,” she said, “and no, I’ve not seen her. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

“I’d love one if you have a spare.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Look here, shouldn’t there be an air of repressed alarm here today, a few damp eyes, a policeman or two? I can’t help noticing that business is very much as usual.”

“I’ve noticed it, too,” she said, nodding. “It bothers me.”

“Yes, I thought it might. Of course things are very different for the rich, you know. They’ve got to be protected and they pay liberally for that when they come here. They’re not supposed to be exposed to anything viler than an enema. It makes life in such a place a complete conspiracy.” He grinned cheerfully. “At the casinos they handle it very tidily, you know. A chap blows out his brains after losing his last shilling and three minutes later you can’t even find traces of the blood. I should resent that very much if it were I, and come back at once to haunt them.”

“You’re being abominably flippant and you’re not cheering me up at all,” she told him.

“Well, then, I wish you’d—oops!” he said in a startled voice and ducked his head under the table.

Mrs. Pollifax looked behind her to see what had surprised him and saw walking across the lawn one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, which startled her, too, if for different reasons.
Gilbert Roland
, she thought, and then chided herself for such sentimental nonsense. Ibrahim Sabry was looking up from his newspaper and
smiling—yes, the stranger was heading for Sabry—but everyone in the garden was watching as well. The man was wearing a dark pin-striped business suit but this scarcely succeeded in scaling him down to life size. He was a figure out of an epic, tall, lean, proud, a beak of a nose set in a swarthy face, his eyes gleaming under straight quizzical brows, his smile a flash of white in his dark face. “Who,” said Mrs. Pollifax with feeling, “is
that!
”

Robin slid back into his chair looking sheepish but she noticed that he moved his chair so that he could sit with his back to the newcomer. She, on the other hand, moved her chair so that she could watch the stranger shake hands with Sabry.

“Reflex action—sorry about that,” confessed Robin. “I forget that people I’ve lifted a few jewels from really have no idea I’m the culprit. That’s Yazdan Kashan. Good Lord, I’d forgotten it’s Sunday—this is Visiting Day.”

“And you robbed that man?” said Mrs. Pollifax incredulously. “He looks extremely difficult to take anything from. Should I know who he is?”

“Well, I don’t want you fainting, my dear Mrs. P., but he’s a sheik, a bona fide sheik.”

“Ah,” she said with pleasure, “they really do exist then! But no longer, I take it, on the desert?”

Robin grinned. “Not when they belong to one of the world’s richest families, although I think he still spends a good bit of the year with his people. But not in a tent. Kashan’s at least a generation away from all that, it was his grandfather who rode camels with the wind. Kashan’s father discovered he was encamped on some of the world’s richest oil fields in the Middle East, and Yazdan’s the new breed. Went to Oxford, as a matter of fact, and then became a playboy and left jewels lying around carelessly—at least he was damned careless in Paris when I ran into him in ’65.”

“And now?”

“Now he’s nearly forty and I hear he’s a nut on religion and doesn’t leave jewelry around. He reads the Koran instead.”

“He’s not reading it now,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax. “He’s come to Montbrison to visit Mr. Sabry. What country is Mr. Kashan from?”

Robin gave her a quick glance. “Frankly I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid all those deserts are one big blur to me.” He sighed. “I suppose I should feel sentimental about the chap—he was my first really big job and it went off like peaches and cream and gave me no end of confidence.”

“Which deserted you rather abruptly a minute ago,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax.

“Well, I told you it was my first major job; I had to remind myself for months afterward that he could afford the loss.” He added indignantly, “I hope you don’t think I became a criminal
easily
.”

“Not at all,” she murmured, “but there must be some way to make an honest man of you.”

Hafez walked slowly across the lawn toward them and when he reached them twined one arm around Mrs. Pollifax’s chair and hung on it. “There’s going to be Wiener Schnitzel for lunch,” he confided. He addressed this information to Mrs. Pollifax but his gaze rested on the two men under the pink lawn umbrella.

“Do you know Mr. Sabry, the man in the wheelchair, Hafez?” she asked, watching his face.

“Yes, madame, he has the room across the hall from me.”

“But did you know him before you came to the Clinic?”

He shook his head. “No, madame.”

She hesitated and then she added, “And Mr. Kashan, the man visiting him, do you know him?”

Hafez’s eyes blazed before he dropped his gaze to the ground. “I know him,” he said tonelessly.

“Is he from Zabya then?”

“Yes, madame.” He lifted expressionless eyes and added, “I will go to lunch now, I think.
Bon jour
.”

Robin watched him leave and then lifted an eyebrow at her. “I must say that was a strange bit of dialogue. You sounded rather like the Inquisition.”

“And Hafez like a robot,” she said thoughtfully, “which means, I think, that we just had a fairly important conversation.”

The sheik lunched with Ibrahim Sabry
in the dining room. Their heads remained close together at the table as they engaged in energetic conversation, frequently with gestures, but all of it too muted for Mrs. Pollifax to overhear. Court arrived a few minutes after Mrs. Pollifax, calling breathlessly across the tables, “I’ve been playing the organ again. Will you be in the garden this afternoon?”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded; she had no intention of being anywhere else. For the genuine convalescent there was the gift of shapeless time: naps, sunbath, small walks, massages, but she could scarcely call herself convalescent and time was working against her.

It was, therefore, in the garden that Court found her after lunch. “I want to talk to you,” she said, striding toward her across the lawn. “I have to talk to you. Do you mind awfully?”

Mrs. Pollifax had been watching Sheik Kashan wheel
Sabry into the gazebo; the wheelchair was barely narrow enough to fit through the door so that for a moment the structure shuddered threateningly. It was not the sturdiest of gazebos, anyway, being fashioned entirely of bamboo. Now Sabry was safely within, and the Sheik had seated himself at the round table inside and was pulling papers from an attaché case.

She turned her attention to Court just as the girl slipped into a chair beside her. “I’m available,” she told her, smiling.

Court looked close to tears. “I came back from the village this morning,” she said, her voice trembling, “and I packed my suitcase and then after lunch I went up and unpacked it again.”

“For myself I’m not that fond of packing,” put in Mrs. Pollifax mildly, “but I daresay it’s a form of exercise.”

Court grudgingly laughed. “I’m sounding the idiot, of course.” She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose. “I thought perhaps if I talked to you—I simply don’t know what to do, I ought to leave, I know it, but—”

Mrs. Pollifax said gently, “Perhaps if you’d tell me just what seems to be the matter—”

“Oh,” said the girl angrily, “I don’t want to fall in love again, that’s what’s the matter. And of all people with
him
.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Pollifax, enlightened at last. “We’re talking about Robin. Are you about to fall in love with Robin?”

“Love,” said the girl scornfully. “And he’s so much like Eric.” She shivered. “I can’t bear that.”

Mrs. Pollifax understood that there was going to be nothing rational about this conversation and adjusted herself to the fact. “Eric,” she said pointedly.

Court’s chin went up. “I
could
say that Eric abandoned me in every capital in Europe. As a matter of fact I
will
say it because it’s what he did. I’ve been so careful,” she
explained, “I’ve gone to such lengths to avoid entanglements. I’ve dated only simpletons, frauds and ridiculous creatures I couldn’t possibly care about, and then I come here and—” She turned to Mrs. Pollifax angrily. “Last summer there wasn’t anyone here under forty. Not a soul. And this summer—I’m disintegrating,” she wailed. “I’m usually so poised, so calm, so—so—”

“Controlled?” suggested Mrs. Pollifax, handing her a fresh handkerchief. “You haven’t told me who Eric is, by the way.”

“My husband,” said Court, blowing her nose again. “Or was,” she added, wiping her eyes. “I married him when I was eighteen and we were divorced when I was twenty and that’s eight years ago. Mrs. Pollifax, I do want you to know I had no intention of crying.”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “One seldom does. So you were married very young, and it wasn’t a happy marriage, and now Robin reminds you of Eric?”

She shivered. “The pattern’s terrifyingly similar. Robin’s so
attractive
, and there’s all that charm and he doesn’t work for a living, which means no character at all. What he does have is too much money and too much experience—he’s been everywhere, done everything, and known everybody—and that’s just how it was with Eric. They’re both playboys. I hate love,” she announced, and after a second’s pause added ruefully, “It
hurts
.”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “I daresay you’ve gotten the worst of it out of your system now and we can talk. But really love has nothing to do with hurt, you know, it’s we who supply the wounds. Which—if I may risk offending you—seems to be just what you’re doing now.”

“Given the circumstances, how?” demanded Court.

Mrs. Pollifax said dreamily, “I’ve often thought the Buddhists are quite right, you know, when they say the root of all suffering is desire. We’re so full of greed, wanting this or that—to love or to escape love, to be this or be
that, to possess this or that. What do you think you’ll accomplish by packing your suitcase and bolting?”

“I won’t be hurt.”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “I wonder if you can be sure of that. Of course you know very little about Robin but I wonder if you can be absolutely certain he’s just like Eric. When you find out more about him there may be a few—well, surprises,” she said, honestly enough. “For that matter you may not fall in love with him at all. Whatever makes you sure the future will be exactly like the past?”

“I don’t know.” Court shivered. “I don’t know. But he—well, you see, he kissed me last evening in the library, while the film was being shown—”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Pollifax, nodding.

“And—” She lifted her chin angrily. “And I thought—all right, I’ll say it—I thought how wonderful it would be to marry and—and even have children. Which I can assure you was the furthest thing from my mind when I came here.”

“Of course if you run away,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax, “you can’t possibly have a baby.”

“No,” said Court miserably.

Mrs. Pollifax patted her affectionately on the arm. “What you need, I think, is a little bit of Zen.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “Zen—tremendously refreshing. There’s a great deal to be said for letting life just happen.”

“Without
control?
”

“That’s it, you see—without control.”

“But—but that’s
frightening!”
cried Court.

Mrs. Pollifax laughed. “On the contrary, it’s much less painful than fighting every step of the way, and so much more delightful than trying to arrange life like a table setting, which one can never do, anyway. Really it’s quite exciting to see what will happen along next,” she added.

“At your age,” said Court cautiously, “there are still surprises?”

Mrs. Pollifax beamed at her forgivingly. “Frequently, I can assure you, some pleasant and a few not at all pleasant, but of course one can’t have the one without the other. It’s impossible.”

“Oh,” said Court.

From the path behind them Robin called, “So there you are! I thought my two favorite ladies had vanished into thin air.” He pulled up a chair and smiled at Court. “Where have you been all day?”