Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (19 page)

It was now that Mr. Feng chose to remove a small gun from his sleeve, and at sight of it Mrs. Pollifax gave him a reproachful glance. She would have much preferred to go on avoiding reality for a little longer, she simply wasn’t ready yet to confront the fact that she’d walked into a trap—one needed time to adjust to such matters, she thought—but of course the gun made this impossible.

“Out—quickly,” he told her in his quiet voice. “Leave the Buddha on the seat, we have five minutes, no more.”

Five minutes for what, Mrs. Pollifax wondered, but since no opportunity was presenting itself to flee she placed the package on the seat and allowed herself to be prodded through the open door of the tailor shop, considerably confused as to what Feng had in mind. It was a small shop; there was a man at a steam iron, four women seated at sewing machines basting sleeves into silk jackets, and two curtained dressing rooms. No one seemed surprised to see either Mr. Feng or Mrs. Pollifax; without so much as a word or a smile one of the women rose from her bench and went to stand beside one of the dressing rooms. She had a sullen, hard face and regarded Mrs. Pollifax without curiosity.

“You will strip,” said the woman.

“I will
what?
” said Mrs. Pollifax incredulously.

“Quickly,” she said. “Everything.”

Obviously she had been expected, and if she demurred there was Mr. Feng’s gun pressing into her back. Mrs. Pollifax went into the stall and stripped, handing out her clothing piece by piece; when this had been done
the woman entered the cubicle and subjected Mrs. Pollifax to an aggressive and not too gentle body search.

Well
, thought Mrs. Pollifax bleakly,
this is happening in obscure corners of the world every day and probably every hour, and it’s only right that I experience it to know how it feels. And how it feels
, she thought with rising anger,
is humiliating
. When it was over her clothes were handed back to her piece by piece, and without surprise Mrs. Pollifax found the homing device in the hem of her skirt gone. It was for this, then, that they’d made their stop, and as she was herded back into the car she thought of Krugg still waiting in Dragon Alley for her arrival, and of Robin and Marko presumably still listening for the sound of her Ackameter, which would now be sending out signals from a tailor shop.

But in this she was wrong, as she discovered when the taxi came to a stop in sight of the Man Mo Temple and Mr. Feng drew out the tiny electronic device and placed it in the palm of the driver’s hand. The man he called Carl left the taxi and she had to sit and watch him deposit the Ackameter at the entrance to the temple while she thought over and over,
Damn, they’ve thought of everything—everything!

It was at this moment that Mrs. Pollifax opened herself up to the reality of her situation and let it sweep over her with all of its monstrous implications: she had walked into a trap, but
not
the cozy little trap that she’d envisioned at Feng Imports, with Sheng Ti and Lotus nearby, and Krugg across the lane and Upshot watching in the rear. She was now in the hands of the terrorists, with all earthly help in the guise of Robin, Marko, Carstairs and the police denied her. She was completely on her own, destination unknown, outcome so uncertain
that she did not feel any insurance company would consider her life expectancy a safe risk against such odds.

And Cyrus was on his way … but she mustn’t think of Cyrus because under duress she was going to have to be very careful not to expose what she knew, and in this area Cyrus would be a distraction, representing all the delightful normalities of life that she loved and wanted very much to continue. She must, for instance, keep Mr. Feng and his friends from discovering that Interpol was involved, that Eric the Red had been seen in Hong Kong and identified, and above all that radio detection vans cruised the street now, listening for a signal from their transmitter.

I have to stay aware
, she thought,
I have to keep my wits about me
.

They had been negotiating narrow congested streets, sometimes forced to halt for crowds of pedestrians, street stalls and hawkers and trucks. Once in these labyrinthian lanes she thought they might be very close to Dragon Alley, but they were certainly in a very old section of Hong Kong where only Chinese lived, and a great many of them.

Abruptly Carl turned to the right into a lane scarcely wide enough for the taxi; he stopped, reached over and opened Mr. Feng’s door and a minute later Mr. Feng, still with gun, opened the opposite door to Mrs. Pollifax. She glanced once at his face, at the creped parchment of his skin, the benign and hooded eyes set too close together and she thought,
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much …
but of what? What passion behind those inscrutable eyes had led him to this?

She climbed out of the car to face a battered, faded-blue wooden door. The taxi backed out of the lane, Mr.
Feng held open the wooden door for her to enter, and even as she moved toward him she was calculating distance and strike possibilities, but he was too clever for her, moving adroitly out of reach as she passed him. Faced with steps and a gun behind her Mrs. Pollifax began to climb dark, narrow, tilting stairs that continued endlessly. No voice or sounds could be heard behind the few narrow doors she passed on the three minuscule landings; when she reached the top of the building a door opened and light spilled over the shabby floor and into her face, nearly blinding her after the dim halls.

“Take her,” Mr. Feng told the man who opened the door, and turned and went back down the stairs.

Blinking, Mrs. Pollifax stared into the face of the man confronting her and decided, quite reasonably, that she didn’t like it, resenting especially his look of Nordic wholesomeness. He was blond, clean-shaven and tanned and she thought he looked like any Hong Kong vacationer in his cotton turtleneck shirt, jeans and sandals except that he was wearing a gun-belt and levelling a gun at her, his eyes like cold hard blue marbles. She was pulled inside to enter a room crammed full of people and objects illuminated by brilliant fluorescent lighting overhead. The scene was chaotic: windows had been covered over with yellowing newspapers, sleeping bags lay everywhere, some of them occupied, and piles of cable lay on the floor like coiled snakes. Along one wall she saw rows of bottles and jars, a metal drum, a barrel, an assortment of wooden crates. At the far end of the room two men were using a blowtorch, their goggles turning them into Martians, the sparks flying to the ceiling. Three others were mixing and stirring something in a metal drum while two men leaned over what looked to be a radio, scowling and pointing and arguing. The
heat in the room was stifling; her nose wrinkled at the smells of hot grease, rotting garbage, sweat and something pungent that she thought might be gasoline and fervently hoped not.

The gun prodded her toward the left wall; she moved past a wooden crate and abruptly stopped, seeing with a mixture of dismay and relief that she was not to be alone. Two other guests had preceded her and were sitting on the floor, their wrists tightly bound together in front of them: Detwiler, and a young man whose face she recognized at once from the newspapers: it was Alec Hao.

As she rounded the corner Detwiler lifted his head and gave her a wan smile, half apologetic, half rueful.

“Good morning—or afternoon,” she said politely, and while she suffered her wrists to be bound with ropes—so tightly that unwilling tears came to her eyes-she kept her gaze resolutely on Alec Hao.

Once she was bound, the blond young man shoved her to the floor and she fell between Alec Hao and Detwiler, hitting her head against the wall in the plunge. Turning away with contempt the man strode off to another section of the room where she could see his head over the tops of the crates until he disappeared from view.

Detwiler turned his head to look at her. She said nothing—her head hurt and she wanted very much to rub it but of course she couldn’t—and it was not until she noticed the tears in his eyes that she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she told him softly.

“I can’t think why,” he said, struggling for dignity. “After all, I’m the one who—made the phone call. It was—” His voice trailed away shakily. “You brought the Buddha? Feng has it now?”

Mrs. Pollifax hesitated and then temporized by saying, “A Buddha, yes.”

He groaned. “They’ll kill me now they have it. You couldn’t know—didn’t—but it has a compartment inside—with plans—papers—as much as I knew, and—and—”

The ache where she’d struck her head was subsiding. She said in a neutral voice, “Just why did you want me to have the Buddha with its compartment and the papers inside, Mr. Detwiler?”

He shook his head. “I thought—I really thought that—at the right moment, you understand, I would telephone you—at your hotel—and tell you about it. Tell you what I’d hidden inside. I thought—” His nose was running and tears were returning to his eyes; with his tied wrists he dabbed ineffectually at his wet face.

Beside her Alec Hao said in a tired voice, “He’s running out of dope, they gave him more last night to keep him quiet—he was screaming his head off—but that’s a long time ago now. He needs a fix.”

She had been right about the drugs, then, and obviously Detwiler was to be of no help. She was abruptly realizing, too, that in removing the papers from Mr. Detwiler’s Buddha she had given him an unexpected gift, and herself a great deal of trouble, for when it was discovered that her Buddha didn’t contain Detwiler’s papers the attention would at once shift from him to her. She sighed over the most deadly error that she’d ever made: the supposition that she would be taken to the import shop. Why hadn’t she and Robin and Marko copied out the contents of those plans Detwiler had made? It would have been assumed, then, that she was only an innocent bystander but, by substituting another Buddha she had in effect exposed and condemned herself, and
it would be she who was questioned and pressured. It was not a pleasant thought, not when it would be terrorists who would be doing the questioning …

She said to him, “You knew when we met who I was, and why I was here?”

Detwiler nodded miserably.

“Does Mr. Feng know this too?”

A sob escaped him. “Probably—I don’t know—don’t know
what
I’ve told him. He began—I think he said he began with small amounts of drugs in my food—at the shop, at lunch—months ago. And then—after a while I scarcely knew what was wrong, things blurred, and then he told me—told me—” He lifted his bound hands to his face and wept. “Told me I was part of his plan—and that’s when he brought out the needles and said I couldn’t go home.” He drew up his knees and leaned his head forward, gulping down sobs and shivering.

Looking at him Mrs. Pollifax tried to remember the suave and immaculate Detwiler she’d met on Monday, only four days ago, the man who had coolly asserted himself with Mr. Feng and had given her the Buddha. For weeks he must have been drifting back and forth between that man and this one, she thought, depending always on Mr. Feng for his rational moments. There were no gold cuff links or black silk suit today, the sandals he wore were torn and the cotton pants and shirt were wrinkled. She thought of his elegant house, of the elegant dinner parties that Mrs. O’Malley had described and she felt a stab of compassion for the wreck of a man beside her.

Alec Hao leaned forward to say accusingly, “Who are you, anyway? I heard you, I heard
him
.”

With a sense of relief she turned away from Detwiler. “I’m Emily Pollifax, and I believe you’re Alec Hao?”

He looked at her with astonishment. “How—?”

“From your picture in the newspapers—Mr. Hitchens has been very worried about you.”

“Hitchins! You know him? Did they get him too? Has he found my father yet?” His voice was eager but suspicion lingered in his eyes.

Bruises had turned his left cheekbone purple, his lips were swollen and one of his front teeth had been chipped, but he was young and resilient and he merely looked like a college boy who had emerged from a boxing match that had gone on for too long. But there was also anger in Alec Hao, the kind of anger that Detwiler had been incapable of sustaining, she thought, and this had preserved him so that she felt he could deal with the truth. She said gently, “Your father’s dead, Alec.”

He drew a long shuddering sigh, swallowed hard and nodded. “I guess I’m not surprised—not now. I think I stopped hoping three days ago. I mean, I’m surprised that I’m alive myself after being here three days.” His voice trembled. “Did they—was it fast?”

“Fast and I think unexpected,” she told him, keeping her voice low and calm. “He looked—surprised. It was a bullet in the temple.” Leaning closer she added, “They had planned it to look like a suicide; there was a scrap of paper with his writing on it, and the gun placed in his hand, but I removed them both.”

“You
saw
him?” he said, astonished.

She nodded. “Mr. Hitchens and I found him—the next morning—in the same hut where you were captured. Mr. Hitchens and I flew in on the same plane from San Francisco,” she explained, “and we had breakfast together, and so when he came back from the hut that night he was badly hurt and came to my room for help.”

“Then you’re a—a friend,” he said in surprise. “Not that it makes any difference now, but still—”

“I know.”

“
He
used to be,” Alec said bitterly, with a jerk of his head toward Detwiler. “He knew my father and they were friends but they got to him, Mr. Feng and these people. Don’t trust him, you mustn’t.”

“In the shape he’s in now, no one could trust him,” she said simply. “I do think, though, that he’s tried to do his best against frightening odds.”

He snorted at this. “You know him?”

“We—uh—have mutual friends,” she said, “which is why I called on him Monday, after reaching Hong Kong. But you—” With a quick smile she changed this subject. “They’ve been rough on you here?”

“Sort of,” he said with an attempt at a smile, “but it’s over now. They plan to take over Hong Kong, did you know that? I laughed when I heard it but I’m not laughing any more.” He jerked his head in the direction of the activity just beyond the wooden crates. “Know what they’re mixing over there?”