Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (2 page)

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax.

Bishop looked at her and said gravely, “It could, of course, be dangerous—there’s that, too—if you can’t find Sheng Ti and have to sniff around Feng Imports.”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded, considered his words for a moment and then stood up and carried the pot of coffee into the kitchen. “It’s just eleven twenty-five,” she told Bishop. “If you’ll rinse out these cups and empty the coffee grounds—”

“You’ll go!” cried Bishop joyously.

She turned, smiling at him. “It isn’t raining in Hong Kong, is it? Yes I’ll go, and now, if you’ll excuse me—” She hurried upstairs, snatched her suitcase from the closet and crammed into it slacks, skirt and blouses, toothbrush, walking shoes and pajamas. Into
her purse she tucked her passport, quickly changed into a purple wool suit, chose a pink shirt and placed on her head a hat that was a garden of brilliant red and pink roses. She then sat down at the desk and reached for a pen to write Cyrus a hasty note.
There’s no way to reach you
, she wrote,
this is all terribly unexpected, Bishop is here—he hoped you would be, too—I’m off to Hong Kong in fifteen minutes, will phone, or you phone. I’ll be …
“Bishop,” she called, “where will I be staying and for how long?”

“Give it a week,” Bishop shouted back, “and we’ve booked you in the Hong Kong Hilton.”

… at the Hong Kong Hilton, back in a week, don’t forget how dear you are, love love love Emily
.

She read it over and added
P.S. DO not allow Mr. Lupalak to center bay window!
and then for just a moment she allowed herself to contemplate Cyrus’s reaction when he found her gone and read the note. She had promised never again to work for Carstairs without Cyrus going with her; on the other hand Cyrus had insisted that she never forfeit another assignment because of him.

“Won’t have you caged, m’dear,” he’d said. “Waited too damn many years for someone as full of surprises as you are. Don’t want to change anything about you.”

Dear Cyrus, she thought, how fortunate she’d been to meet him in Zambia, where he had been traveling with his daughter, Lisa, and where she had been looking for an assassin. Cyrus had saved her life, and then she had saved his, which at once provided grounds for a warm friendship, except that from the beginning Cyrus had made it clear that he had much more than friendship in mind.

This thought was interrupted by Bishop’s words
it
could be dangerous—there’s that, too
, and she nodded: yes there was always that. Finding and talking with Sheng Ti sounded a relatively small assignment but so had her trip to mainland China a year ago, except that no one had expected the KGB to be involved, nor had Carstairs envisioned murder, a runaway horse, a broken wrist or the long hours of interrogation she’d undergone by the Chinese Security Police. Still, it had all ended well, she reminded herself cheerfully; her wrist had mended nicely, Wang Shen had been smuggled safely across the mountains and out of that adventure had come the realization that Cyrus Reed was absolutely vital to her future and not to be put off any longer.

And now she had been married to Cyrus for ten months and she smiled as she looked around a room that was filled with a sense of his presence. She could only hope that he would understand that she was needed.

“I’m
needed
,” she said aloud, and resolutely folded the note and moved to lock her suitcase.

It was ten minutes to the hour when she carried her note and suitcase down the stairs, and seeing her, Bishop whistled.

“Do you water those roses every night? What a hat,” he marveled, “What a
hat!
”

“Thank you,” she said demurely, and proceeded down into the basement to explain to an astonished Mr. Lupalak that she was leaving and would not be back that afternoon, or for quite a few afternoons, that he must tell Mr. Reed there was a note for him in the usual place, and would he please not fail her about the bay window, it was to be
slightly off-center
. She returned to Bishop sighing. “I’m sure he thinks I’m leaving Cyrus,” she said. “For that matter I don’t believe anyone
in the neighborhood believes that we’re married, what with me being Mrs. Reed-Pollifax.”

Bishop grinned. “I could whip down and tell him I was at your wedding.”

Mrs. Pollifax gave him a mischievous smile. “No—everyone needs a bit of mystery in their lives, don’t you think? Let Mr. Lupalak believe what he likes.” With this she tucked the note for Cyrus in the refrigerator, removed her raincoat from the coat closet and at precisely twelve noon walked out into the rain to the car with Bishop, thoroughly prepared now for Hong Kong and wondering what it might hold for her in the way of adventure.

B
oarding the plane in San Francisco for the second leg of her trip, Mrs. Pollifax found herself astonished once again by the hordes of people hurrying from point A to point B—or C or D—with such enormous fixity of purpose; a world one forgot, she remembered, as soon as one triumphantly arrived. She tried to think of a similar world outside and beyond ordinary life, urgent and capsulated and shed like a skin once left behind. Perhaps a hospital, she mused, where people also shared a great fixity of purpose and where they also, she thought wryly, moved from point A to point B—or C or D—experiencing a life totally removed from the outside world …

“Oh—I beg your pardon!” she said, treading on the heel of the man in front of her. He turned and gave her a chilling look; refusing intimidation, she said pointedly, “You
did
stop very suddenly,”

The man’s glance was like an assault, rendering her
a mere object that had affronted him. Tall, thin, immaculately dressed, a lean and hungry face with pockmarked cheeks and cold eyes—
not
a pleasant young man she decided as he turned into seat 21-A and she proceeded down the aisle to 48-B, relieved to see that 48-A was already occupied, and by a far more pleasant-looking gentleman.

The plane took off, banking over a sapphire blue harbor to head into the setting sun, and presently her seat companion turned to her and said, “Would you care to see my copy of
Newsweek?
”

By the second hour they had exchanged names—his was Albert Hitchens—and shortly after dinner they settled down to a long talk about psychic phenomena, for Mr. Hitchens, it turned out, was a psychic.

“It’s my dharma,” he said simply.

He was not a prepossessing man; he was scarcely taller than her own five feet five; his complexion was swarthy, his features nondescript and for a man in his forties his clothes were casual in the extreme—he was wearing faded jeans, a knit shirt and sneakers—but his eyes were penetrating and a very curious silver in color, which the darkness of his skin accentuated and turned almost translucent.

Mrs. Pollifax, adept at karate, experienced in Yoga and very familiar with Zen, merely nodded at the word dharma. “Although,” she admitted, “I do have trouble with the differences between karma and dharma.”

“Ah yes,” he said, nodding. “Dharma, you know, is the essence of one’s individual existence—one’s
work
, you might say—whereas karma, of course, is the force generated from past lives that determines our destiny in this one.”

The slightly pedantic tone apparently came from the
many lectures he gave; he was, to her surprise, a professional psychic, having written several books about it and having taught courses at colleges in the Boston area and having done considerable work for the Boston police in finding missing persons.

“Which,” he explained, three hours into their flight, “is why I’m going to Hong Kong. One of my former students at Boston University, a delightful young man of Chinese origin, cabled and telephoned from Hong Kong several days ago pleading for help in finding a missing relative of his.”

“And do you think you can?” Mrs. Pollifax asked with interest.

He said firmly, “There will be
something
.”

Mrs. Pollifax, glancing into his face, conceded that he was probably right because there was certainly something very unusual, almost otherworldly, about Mr. Hitchens’s eyes. “But how do you do it?” she asked. “I’ve only once met someone with such a gift—a gypsy—and there wasn’t time to ask. How do you begin? What happens?”

“It’s a matter of impressions,” he explained. “I can hold an object belonging to the missing person and it will tell me whether he’s alive or dead … Or sometimes I go into trance, perhaps, and receive impressions—pictures, actually—of where he can be found.”

“Impressions,” she murmured, and as a movement down the aisle caught her glance she said, “Tell me your impression of that man, the one returning from the men’s room.” It was the man on whose heel she’d stepped.

Mr. Hitchens obligingly followed her glance, narrowing his eyes. “Now that,” he said distastefully, “is as black an aura as I’ve seen for a long time.” He shook
his head. “A great deal of violence surrounds that man.”

“Inside or outside?” asked Mrs. Pollifax curiously.

“If a man is a killer of life,” said Mr. Hitchens with even more distaste, “does it matter how?”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “No, I don’t suppose it does. Actually I happened to walk down the aisle behind him and bump into him and his eyes tried to kill—no,
annihilate
me,” she told him.

Mr. Hitchens nodded. “A word whose root is
nihil
, meaning to reduce to nothing, to destroy. But tell me more of the gypsy you met, it interests me.”

Mrs. Pollifax at once told him about Anyeta Inglescu, a queen of gypsies, and they then settled down to an enthusiastic discussion of out-of-body experiences, faith healing, precognition, energy and predestination, during which—surprisingly—she learned that he, too, was to stay at the Hilton Hong Kong.

“Perhaps we could breakfast together when we reach the hotel,” he suggested.

“You’re not being met by your friend?” she said, startled.

“I chose not to be,” he said. “I want first to gather impressions—”

“That word again,” said Mrs. Pollifax, smiling.

“—rest for several hours, meditate and clear my head. My young friend is to call for me at noon, we’ll lunch and then get to work. But I find your vibrations quite energizing and not at all distracting,” he told her, smiling for the first time since they’d met. “Unless of course you have other plans?”

Mrs. Pollifax assured him that she had no other plans and that she would be delighted to have breakfast with him at the hotel, and following this they each fell into
naps, sleeping through a perpetual dawn and several time zones, until some hours later, reeling with jet lag, they walked off the plane at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong.

At Passport Control the man with the violent aura stood in line ahead of Mrs. Pollifax and she saw that it was a Canadian passport that he offered to the officer; at the luggage carousel he went off with only one very expensive-looking pigskin overnight bag. After that she lost interest in him, and following an interminable wait at customs she and Mr. Hitchens were released from the confines of bureaucracy to walk out into a clear, still-cool, fresh morning.

“Sunshine,” breathed Mrs. Pollifax happily. Not yet the gold of a tropical noon but a thin radiant silver light that ricocheted down and across the sides of gleaming buildings and scattered rhinestones across the blue harbor. “And there’s Hong Kong,” she told Mr. Hitchens, pointing across the water to rows of sleek buildings encircling the precipitous slopes of the Peak.

In the bright light Mr. Hitchens’s eyes had changed to the intensity of mercury against his dark complexion. “Very charming,” he murmured. “Like white cliffs in the sun.”

Presently a taxi was whisking them out of Kowloon and down into and through a tunnel, and when they emerged they were on the Hong Kong side. “Which,” Mrs. Pollifax reminded Mr. Hitchens, “is all that Britain will have left when mainland China takes back Kowloon and the New Territories in 1997.”

“Take back!” he repeated. “You must excuse me but I’m not aware—”

“Well—they’ve only been leased to Great Britain,” she explained. “I believe Hong Kong was settled back in the early 1800s—it all had something to do with the
opium trade—and then, being a very small island, only thirty-five square miles in size, and prospering mightily, it leaked over into Kowloon across the harbor, and later a lease was negotiated with mainland China for the New Territories. They tell me the Hong Kong dollar plunges every time Britain and China meet to discuss the changeover in 1997. China is insisting on an agreement this year.”

“So it’s all quite temporary—one might say like life itself,” mused Mr. Hitchens.

She smiled, finding him comfortable to be with, and feeling that his presence helped her to adjust to Cyrus’s absence, too; really, she thought, she had been growing quite spoiled without realizing it.

“But we could almost be in Manhattan,” protested Mr. Hitchens. “My white cliffs have turned into banks and office buildings and hotels! Except for the faces on the street—”

She smiled. “Yes, they’re different, Hong Kong’s population being 98 percent Chinese, but the attaché cases are exactly the same, aren’t they,”

“You’re certainly very well-informed,” he told her.

She did not mention that she had been briefed by Bishop on the long drive to the airport, as well as given a number of colorful anecdotes that might startle him. “Actually I’ve told you all the facts I know, and anyway it’s too beautiful a day for facts. But I was here last year, just overnight—”

“I’ve never been out of the United States before,” blurted out Mr. Hitchens.

His confession touched her as well as surprised her; she could remember only too well how disconcerting her own first trip had been, how dazzled and yet oddly insecure
she’d felt for the first few days, and she was suddenly very glad that she was breakfasting with him.

Their taxi swept up to the entrance of the Hong Kong Hilton, they were helped out and their luggage removed at once by porters. They made their way through the first level and then up to the huge lobby where Mr. Hitchens, registering, was given room 601 and Mrs. Pollifax, taking her turn, was given the key to room 614.