Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (6 page)

Sheng Ti nodded. “Everything hell now, bloody hell. Mr. Detwiler hit me. Very nasty all the time. Mr. Feng has to run things more and nasty, too. Mr. Detwiler take heroin now,” he said. “I see once—the long needle and white powder. He hit me
again
when I see.”

“Oh dear!” murmured Mrs. Pollifax with feeling.

“Yes.”

“But what do they have you stealing?” she asked.

“Passports,” he told her.

This was unexpected. “Passports?” she repeated. “Not money?” He shook his head, and fumbling for the rationale behind this she said, “How many? What kinds? From whom?”

Lotus answered for him. “He does not tell me all he does but I know this: they give him a very elegant suit and shoes and tie and they send him to the Government House or sometimes to the airport and twice I have seen the passports he stole. One was Bulgarian, one Canadian.” Sheng Ti spoke and she nodded. “He says he’s stolen eleven of them now for Mr. Detwiler.”

“Eleven,” murmured Mrs. Pollifax, frowning over this.

“I would not know anything if Sheng Ti and I had not spoken,” confided Lotus. “Everything is hidden, concealed from me, for I do invoices, letters, and dust the shop. But I have heard the quarrels between Mr. Feng and Mr. Detwiler, heard the sound of them at least, and—” She shook her head. “There is something very wrong. Sheng Ti would like to run away but they’ve taken all his papers and how can he go anywhere without papers?”

Mrs. Pollifax leaned forward and said earnestly, “Don’t let him run away, ask him please to stay and help. Because the people who sent him to Feng Imports
know
something is wrong—it’s why I’m here.

“And they will help you,” she said, turning to Sheng Ti, “if you help
them
.” She was remembering Bishop saying,
We’re prepared to offer him immigration to the United States but only if he gives fair value in return, it has to be earned, there has to be enough
. She dared not speak of it, for there was not enough, not yet. “Could you learn more?” she asked of Sheng Ti. “Could you follow Mr. Detwiler, find out where he goes, whom he
sees? If you can get information for me I promise you that you’ll have your papers back, and a new job, and schooling … I’ve been told I may promise you this. But first—first it has become terribly important to find out what’s happening at Feng Imports, and only you can do this.”

Sheng Ti frowned; he looked at Lotus, his eyes questioning, and then he gave a bitter laugh. “Why do I stop to think? I would do anything to get away, anything. And you give me hope?” He spoke to Lotus in Chinese and she nodded.

“He will do this. And I too if I can.”

“Good. They don’t suspect me—I don’t think—except why did they have me followed this morning after I left the shop?”

Immediately she was sorry she had mentioned this because Sheng Ti leaped to his feet looking terrified. “You were followed? Followed
here?
” he cried.

“No, this morning, after leaving the shop. I promise you no one followed me here tonight,” she told him.

“But they may still—I must go,” he said desperately. “Oh my God. Please—what is to be done?”

“Do sit down,” begged Mrs. Pollifax.

“No—let him go,” Lotus said. “Go back to number 40, Sheng, you haven’t slept for two nights, I will tell you later what she says.”

He managed a wan smile, but he left, nevertheless, after one anguished look of entreaty at Mrs. Pollifax.

“They have not frightened you?” she asked Lotus.

“No, but I am frightened for Sheng Ti,” the girl said. “He is afraid of being sent back to mainland China, where he’d certainly be placed in a labor camp this time. It is very serious to have no papers, you know?”

Someone knocked on the door and Mrs. Pollifax discovered
the atmosphere had so infected her that she, too, jumped and turned a startled face to Lotus. The girl went to the door and opened it an inch, speaking in Chinese to whoever was in the hall. When she returned, closing the door behind her, she said, “I sleep here with two other girls, I had to pay them to stay away but now they want to go to their beds.” She said anxiously, “You will have to go, but what am I to tell Sheng Ti?”

Mrs. Pollifax brought out her memo pad and wrote in it, tore out the sheet and handed it to her. “This is my name,” she told her, “and this is where I’m staying, and that’s my room number. Both you and Sheng Ti had better memorize this and burn it.” She shook her head. “We simply
must
find some other way to meet. Could one of you phone me tomorrow night at ten o’clock at my hotel?”

Lotus nodded. “Tomorrow night, ten o’clock.” Some of the anxiety in her face had cleared, leaving it grave and lovely again; she said shyly, “I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad someone knows, it’s been so lonely.” With one hand on the door she turned and added, “He will work hard for you now, too—you will see.” With the slip of paper tucked into her sleeve she opened the door and peered out. “Come,” she whispered, “you can leave through this building, through the kitchen. I show you.”

Once out on the street Mrs. Pollifax’s first reaction was to draw a deep sigh of relief and to admit how glad she was to leave the small dim room that had been filled—
glutted
, she thought—with Sheng Ti’s fear and Lotus’s anxiety. It was not a happy thought to realize that he must risk even more danger before he could be lifted out of Feng Imports; she would much prefer to
have carried him away with her to place on the next flight to San Francisco but this thought only reminded her ruefully of how spoiled Americans could be: Sheng Ti lived the precarious life of a refugee, still without papers or identity.

Her garden club, she decided grimly, was very definitely going to have to sponsor Sheng Ti—she would insist on it—and Lotus too, if their relationship continued. In the meantime she had to make sure that Sheng Ti survived physically … It was possible that heroin was the explanation for Mr. Detwiler’s sloppy reports to Carstairs’s department over the past two months but she did not like the sound of those eleven stolen passports. She shook her head over it; no, she did not like the sound of that at
all
.

Flagging down a taxi Mrs. Pollifax rode back to the hotel and entered this time by the front entrance, boldly, and once again rose in the elevator to room 614. Here she tossed her purse on the bed and went to the telephone where she dictated a cable to Carstairs at the cover address in Baltimore:
FRIENDSHIP RENEWED
,
WEATHER CLOUDY
,
EMILY POLLIFAX
. When she replaced the receiver she saw by her travel clock that it was half-past eleven, and reflecting on what a long day it had been, she crossed the room to her suitcase.

Drawing out pajamas and cold cream she suddenly stiffened as something hit her door with a violent thud.

With a frown she dropped the pajamas and moved to the door. “Who is it?” she called.

There was no answer.

Cautiously Mrs. Pollifax released the lock and the door flew open, almost knocking her down as a man fell into her arms with blood streaming down his face. As
she instinctively recoiled he slid to the floor and sprawled at her feet.

She stared down at him, appalled: it was Mr. Hitchens.

M
rs. Pollifax’s initial reaction was astonishment: one talked with people on planes; one might even share a casual breakfast with them, but following this one did not expect to see them again, and certainly not late at night bleeding on the floor at one’s feet. Accepting reality, however—for definitely Mr. Hitchens was
here—
she pushed the door closed and knelt beside him, one hand reaching out to gingerly explore what lay beneath his bloodmatted hair.

Wincing at what she found she sped into the bathroom for towels, returned with a wet one and a dry one, pressed the dry towel to the bloody gash in his scalp and applied the wet one to the lines of scarlet lacing his right cheek like deranged embroidery.

His eyes were closed but his lips had begun to move. “Something …”

She leaned closer to hear him.

“…  terribly wrong,” he whispered. “How … 
how …
”

“Don’t try to talk,” she told him, “I’ll call a doctor.”

“No,” he gasped, rousing at this and suddenly opening those strange silver eyes. “Not safe. After me. How—must find how …”

His eyes closed and he lapsed again into unconsciousness while Mrs. Pollifax stared at him and considered his words, weighing the gash in his head against his panic. She did not believe that he would die from the blow but on the other hand he might very well die from infection if unattended. His panic, however, she implicitly believed in; his very presence here proved that he was terrified, for this was, after all, the Hong Kong Hilton where every amenity was available, yet he’d chosen to come to her room. For that matter he could scarcely have come far, she realized, for no one could possibly have wandered through the hotel’s lobby in such a state without causing pandemonium.

It must have happened in his room, she thought, and—
not safe
, he’d said. Did he mean that he might have been followed?

She had closed the door but not locked it; now she jumped up to snap the lock but as it slammed into place with a
ping!
she became aware of movement outside in the hall. Her eyes fell to the door knob and to her horror she saw it turn slowly, silently, to the left and then to the right, accompanied by a subtle sound of metal probing metal.

Mrs. Pollifax forced down a scream.
Except I want to scream
, she cried silently, watching the knob twist back and forth,
“I wantoscream I wantoscream I wantoscream …”

The door opened and Robin Burke-Jones stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “I do hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said cheerfully, “I saw you cross the lobby a few minutes ago and—” His glance fell to the man lying at her feet. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “Been at your karate again? Who on earth—!”

Thoroughly shaken Mrs. Pollifax stammered, “N-not karate, it’s Mr. H-H-Hitchens, he just sort of f-fell into my room terrified of being f-f-followed, and then you—then you—”

Robin whistled. “And you thought—I say, I’m frightfully sorry. The thing is, I’m being followed, too, and I simply couldn’t afford to knock on your door and stand around waiting for it to open.” Regarding Mr. Hitchens with considerable fascination he said, “Chap needs a doctor, doesn’t he?”

She’d forgotten the crisp British accent Robin had worked so hard to acquire. “He begged me not to call one.”

“You know him, of course.”

“Scarcely this well,” she told him. “That is, we flew in on the same plane, where we had a very interesting talk about psychic phenomena—he’s a psychic, you see, he’s come here to find a missing person—and then we had breakfast together this morning, I think it was this morning although it seems forever ago, but I certainly didn’t expect to see him again.”

“And now he’s here.”

“Yes, now he’s here.”

Robin knelt beside Mr. Hitchens. “Nasty bash, this … someone did a damn good job on him, but if he could still utter words and all that, it’s promising. If he
was capable of talking how exactly did he explain his—er—impetuous arrival?”

Mrs. Pollifax closed her eyes and thought about it. “First he whispered ‘something terribly wrong … how … how’ and then when I told him I’d call a doctor he gasped ‘Not safe … after me … how … must find how …”

Robin stood up and gave her a thoroughly startled look. “Would you mind repeating that, word for word?”

Obligingly she repeated it. “Why?”

Robin’s eyes had narrowed. “And you say he’s here to find a missing person?”

She nodded. “What is it, Robin?”

Ignoring this he said thoughtfully, “I can provide a doctor who won’t ask questions and I think I’d like very much to stick around and hear what else your friend Mr. Hitchens has to say when he regains consciousness.” He walked over to the phone, dialed a number and stood waiting, smiling at her. “And to think,” he told her, shaking his head, “that I stopped in just to say hello and talk over old times! You know, such as how you rescued young Hafez and karate-chopped the sheik’s men and—hello, Chiang?” he said into the phone. “Three-oh-one here, I’m at the hotel; can you come discreetly to room 614—repeat, 614? Chap with possible concussion, unconscious at the moment, bad gash in the head, probably needs stitching … Right-oh. Good.” He hung up. “He’ll be here in five minutes. You know, it crossed my mind when I saw your friend here that it might be Cyrus, but you wrote us that Cyrus is six feet four, and this chap simply doesn’t extend that far on the floor.”

“He’s bird-watching,” she told him. “In Vermont.
Is this conversation making any sense? I had to leave in a great hurry and—”

“So you
are
on a job for Carstairs!”

She smiled. “A very small one,” she admitted. “Reconnaissance, you might say. Robin, what startled you when I quoted Mr. Hitchens’s words to you, and why do you want to hear what he has to say when he wakes up?”

Robin perched on the arm of a chair and looked at her. “I am naturally sworn to secrecy but considering that I owe you my lovely bride and my new job—what startled me, my dear Mrs. P., is that for the past two days I’ve been looking for a missing man who happens to be named Hao.”

It was her turn to be startled. “Named … You mean—you mean ‘must find how’ could be a name?”

He smiled. “In Hong Kong, yes. Hong Kong is filled with Hu’s and Hao’s and Yu’s and Wi’s … It could of course be coincidence—”

“And your name for this occasion is Lars Petterson?”

“Oh you know that, do you.” He looked amused.

“Actually it was Mr. Hitchens who told me at breakfast, he’d just seen you on Hong Kong television this morning before you walked into the restaurant.” She shook her head at him. “Third-richest man in the
world
, Robin?”

“Mmmm,” he murmured, grinning. “It was hoped that it might bring just the right kind of attention—or wrong kind, whichever way you look at it—my arriving with great fanfare and lots of money to invest, possibly very naïve and definitely a playboy.”