Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (13 page)

She was not alone.

Mrs. Pollifax opened her eyes and cautiously turned her head so that she could observe the room. The heavy drapes had not been completely drawn across the window, and a dim and eerie light from the street spilled across the floor. In the center of the room stood a man, his outline clearly discernible against the lighter patch of window. He was standing very still and Mrs. Pollifax at once recognized that stance, having experienced it
herself: in her sleep she must have turned over restlessly, or called out, and he had frozen, waiting for her to settle back again into sleep.

Mrs. Pollifax had no intention of settling into sleep, however. Through half-closed eyes she waited too, very awake now, very alert, her muscles tensing. A sheet and a light blanket confined her; as her intruder began to move again she slid one leg out from under the covers at the side of the bed, and when her foot met the floor she slowly followed it until she was free of the covers and standing.

Her intruder had now arrived at the luggage rack on which rested her suitcase and suddenly a pencil-thin ray of light carved a circle of illumination out of the darkness, hung briefly on the wall and then dropped to her open suitcase. As he leaned over it, Mrs. Pollifax moved toward him, thinking this was going to be unfairly easy if his back remained turned, and no challenge at all. She had just reached him when he stiffened, hearing perhaps the whisper of fabric or catching a movement in the mirror to his left but it was too late for him: Mrs. Pollifax was already behind him, centering herself, assuming her stance and turning her hand into a coiled spring that abruptly shot out now to hit him at the base of his skull. He gasped, reeled and started to turn, at which Mrs. Pollifax followed through with a heavier karate slash to the center of his neck, the first blow confusing him, the second stunning him and sending him unconscious to the floor. Her burglar had been rendered harmless.

Turning on the light Mrs. Pollifax was astonished to find that it was the Man with the Attaché Case lying at her feet, and this gave her pause:
not
a hotel thief, she thought, her mind groping for the implications of this and not liking them at all when she found them. She
knelt beside the man, felt his pulse, nodded and went to the phone and dialed Robin’s suite.

“Robin, there’s a man in my room,” she told him.

He said pleasantly, “For a moment I thought you said there was a man in your room.”

“I did,” she told him. “He’s here on the floor.”

“Again?”
he said incredulously. “Another?”

“What’s more, he’s the man who followed me on Monday afternoon—
he comes from Feng Imports
.”

There was silence while Robin also groped toward the implications of this.

“He’s unconscious now,” she went on, “and I’d guess that he’ll remain so for at least an hour, possibly two, but after that—”

“I’ll be right down,” Robin told her, and hung up.

She was waiting at the door for him when he hurried out of the elevator and down the hall, and she noticed that even at one o’clock in the morning, wearing blue jeans, he looked impossibly handsome and Savile Row.

“Where—ah,” he said, entering and seeing the figure sprawled on her rug. “Definitely karate this time.”

She nodded. “I woke up and he was—simply there. Or here. And he simply mustn’t regain consciousness in my room, Robin.”

“Absolutely not,” he agreed. “Conversation would be terribly awkward in such circumstances and he could resent very much your having knocked him out.”

She ignored this flippancy. “The horror of it—and it’s very discouraging to think about,” she told him earnestly, “is that whatever we do with him he’ll remember that I hit him, and Detwiler will be told, and it will completely destroy my amateur status.

“Completely,” he agreed.

“Unless,” she added, turning thoughtful, “unless we
could somehow discredit him. After all, he didn’t see me, you know … I crept up behind him but he didn’t actually
see
me.”

Robin’s eyes took on a mischievous glint. “Now
that
,” he said, “begins to have infinite and wondrous possibilities. He entered a dark room—”

She said excitedly, “Or the
wrong
room?”

“Exactly! In fact if we carry him off to just the right place he could be accused of imagining the whole thing, and no one need believe that he reached you at all! After all, how utterly improbable—how very outrageous!—that Mrs. Pollifax of all people would ever dream of leveling a burglar with a karate chop.”

She beamed at him happily, thinking how invigorating it was to work with someone whose mind moved in the same orbit as her own. “Of course we’ve not even considered why Detwiler sent him here, or for what—”

“Later,” he said. “Let us instead get him safely
out
, and bend our thoughts to
where … How
is no problem; we carry him between us—to the freight elevator, I suppose, which is becoming habitual—and it will be assumed he’s had too much to drink. But where? Let me think …”

Mrs. Pollifax watched him lean against the bureau and think. With a rueful smile he said, “The Tiger Balm Gardens would be a glorious place to dump him, he’d wake up to all those grotesque figures and have nightmares for weeks, but unfortunately it’s closed at this hour. A pity, but I think we must forego such creative possibilities and dump him somewhere in the hotel.”

“In the hotel,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, and then, “Prop him up at one of the bars?”

Robin, grinning, said, “On a bar stool, with a Bloody Mary at his elbow?”

“Or there’s the basement,” she said, “or the kitchens. Or—no, wait,” she cried, “I’ve thought of something. The mall will be empty, won’t it?”

“The shops will be dark and closed but it’s still an entrance to the hotel, with probably a guard making his stated rounds.”

“Perfect,” she told him. “Let me get dressed now … trust me!”

When Mrs. Pollifax emerged, fully clothed and in hat, Robin was tucking a wallet back into their burglar’s jacket. “He does have a name, it’s Allan Chen.”

“I rather liked calling him the Man with the Attaché Case,” she admitted, “but of course he didn’t bring his attaché case tonight. Shall we take Mr. Chen away now?”

Slowly they staggered down the hall with Mr. Chen sagging between them, and were fortunate in meeting no one in the hall. The freight elevator descended and Mrs. Pollifax, recalling her numerous passages and exits through the mall, hoped that her memory was accurate. The doors slid open and Mrs. Pollifax peered out, uncertain just where the elevator had delivered them and explaining to Robin, “It’s between the shop selling magazines and the shop selling Chinese Buddhas.”

“What is?” asked Robin, leaning hard against Mr. Chen to hold him pinned to the wall. “Is the mall empty? He’s getting damned heavy.”

“I’ll reconnoiter,” she said, and left him to peer around the corner. Returning, she signaled to him. “It’s just to the right, and only a few paces, but do let’s hurry!”

“Nothing would delight me more,” said Robin, peeling Mr. Chen from the wall and receiving him into his arms. “What are we heading
toward?
”

“A machine … good heavens,” she gasped, “he
has
grown heavy hasn’t he, but—there it is.”

Robin stared in astonishment. “But what on earth is it?”

“You haven’t seen one before? It measures blood pressure—at home they seem to have them everywhere now, in movie houses, supermarkets, the oddest places … You sit on that bench and place that strap around your wrist and then you drop money into the slot and your blood pressure lights up on the screen just like a pinball machine.”

“How very amazing,” Robin said, staring at it, “and how much more creative than a mere bar stool.” He gently lowered Mr. Chen to the bench and Mrs. Pollifax wrapped and secured the strap around his wrist; tenderly they lowered Mr. Chen’s head to the shelf to forestall his falling across it, and then, consulting the machine’s directions, and before she could stop him, Robin dropped four Hong Kong coins into the slot.

“Robin!” she protested.

“Blood pressure a bit high,” he murmured, standing back to observe the flashing numbers.

“I doubt that mine’s exactly normal at this moment either,” she said crossly. “I’m hearing footsteps, Robin—hurry!”

“Yes,” said, Robin, retreating with her to the corner from which they’d emerged, “but Mr. Chen is safely removed from your room at last, and just look at our handiwork.”

Mrs. Pollifax turned and looked, and her last glimpse of Mr. Chen was of him slumped over the console, as if studiously and nearsightedly studying its directions, while the screen above him continued to flash 150/72 … 150/72 … 150/72 in bright red lights.

“For myself,” said Robin, ushering her into the elevator, “this has been a very educational interlude, which I think calls for a steadying drink. Have they replaced your brandy?”

“They replace everything, making little notes in their notebooks,” she told him.

“Good, because I think you could use one, too. I realize that you’re accustomed to men stumbling into your room at all hours of the night but you surely must be feeling the strain.”

“Actually,” she confessed, “I feel more like laughing.”

Robin nodded. “Definitely hysteria looms.” When they arrived at the sixth floor, he led her back to her room and poured them each a brandy. “All right, let’s do a quick probe here, bearing in mind that we meet for breakfast in only a few hours. Just what do you think has drawn Detwiler’s attention to you?”

She shook her head. “I’d know better if I could think what Mr. Chen was looking for in my room. I’m sure that I wasn’t followed today, and I’d swear that Detwiler had by now concluded that I’m harmless. The only possibility I can think of is that Detwiler phoned Mrs. O’Malley tonight and she described my visit and my appearance to him.”

“How possible is that on a scale of one to ten?”

“A scant one,” she told him. “Mrs. O’Malley hasn’t heard from him in two months.”

“Then what’s in your suitcase that he was about to search? Or your purse, for instance, or—”

He stopped and he and Mrs. Pollifax stared at each other. “The gun—the Beretta,” she said. “I’d forgotten about it, do you think he was after the gun?”

Robin frowned, looking puzzled. “The gun would
certainly tie Detwiler to Inspector Hao’s murder all right. That would mean someone had to be watching our arrival at the hut this morning—or yesterday morning—which wouldn’t surprise me, in which case they’d know that one of us walked off with the murder weapon.”

“But why me? Why would they think I’d have the gun?” protested Mrs. Pollifax. “It could have been you or Mr. Hitchens just as easily, and they simply
couldn’t
have seen me pocket it. And why would they want the Beretta back
now
, when the only fingerprints on it are mine? It doesn’t feel right, Robin.”

“Nor to me either,” he said, “but you’d better get rid of the blasted thing soon, anyway.” He sighed. “I think some sleep is in order, don’t you? Court tells me that one of the integral sayings of Zen Buddhism is, ‘Do the best you can and then walk on.’ Well, we’ve done the best we can tonight, so let’s walk on. Think you can sleep?”

She aborted a yawn and smiled at him. “You must tell me more sometime soon about Court’s interest in Zen … Yes, I can sleep—after I’ve propped a chair against my door, dragged the night table in front of it, and laid a few other ambushes.”

He nodded and absently kissed the top of her head as he passed. “I’ll let you get on with it, then. See you at eight!”

He made his exit, leaving Mrs. Pollifax not only to rearrange furniture but to ponder again what she might have done to lift Mr. Detwiler’s suspicions of her.

W
hen Mrs. Pollifax arrived at Robin’s suite the next morning at eight, Mr. Hitchens was already there. “Sssh,” counseled Robin, opening the door to her and pointing to Mr. Hitchens, who sat upright on the couch with his eyes closed.

Mrs. Pollifax tiptoed in and sat down, seeing that in one hand Mr. Hitchens held the fragment of newspaper bearing Eric the Red’s photo.

He said now, his eyes remaining closed, “You gave me this slip of paper without showing it to me, and the impression I get very strongly is that it’s the picture of a man, and—it’s really strange—I feel that I’ve seen this man before. This piece of paper has been handled frequently by someone who wrote a word on it somewhere, in a very heavy scrawl, and I can only tell you that the word was written in a mood of anger and frustration.” He opened his eyes. “You hoped I might come up with
a date—I’m sorry.” He saw Mrs. Pollifax and smiled. “Good morning!”

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully.

“You can look at it now,” Robin told him. “The word written there is WHEN, as you can see. You’ve absolutely no answer to that scribbled ‘when’?”

Mr. Hitchens shook his head. “No, because whoever wrote it didn’t know the answer, and I can only pick up what he or she knew at the time.” Glancing down at the picture he said in astonishment, “But this is the man we saw on the plane!” He looked at Mrs. Pollifax. “You remember? You pointed him out to me, you’d stepped on his foot!”

Mrs. Pollifax beamed at him happily. “So you recognize him, too. We found it yesterday in Inspector Hao’s house—which quite frankly we burgled after leaving you—and it’s he who scrawled the ‘when’ across the photo … Alec’s father.”

“Good heavens!” said Mr. Hitchens.

Robin nodded. “Yes, and having jeopardized my job by insisting on three men being flown in last night, all on the strength of Mrs. Pollifax recognizing him, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you confirm its being the same man.”

“But—who is he?” asked Mr. Hitchens, puzzled. “And you’ve not found Alec, what
have
you discovered? And three men being flown in for
what?
”

Robin turned to Mrs. Pollifax. “Care to take this on? I’d like to hear it said out loud to see if I’ve gone mad or am only too sane.”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. “It’s grown much bigger than a missing man and a murder, Mr. Hitchens; we think we know what Alec’s father discovered that led to his being kidnapped and then murdered. The man you and
I saw on the plane is the same terrorist who directed the Cairo assassination and the French hostage affair, and now he’s in Hong Kong.”