Amazing Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

“You will come with me please to headquarters, to Santral Odasi.” His request lacked the courtesy of an invitation; his voice was authoritative, as was the hand he placed beneath Mrs. Pollifax’s elbow. He had also retained her passport, which he placed now in his pocket. She had no recourse but to go. As they walked out, leaving by the side door, she was just in time to see Colin shift gears, maneuver out of his parking space and drive away, his profile without any expression except boredom, as if he had at last relinquished all hope of dinner companions. He did not even see her.
    The officer behind the desk was in uniform; the second man, seated beyond him and introduced as Mr. Piskopos, was not. As Mrs. Pollifax seated herself she was aware that both men studied her coldly and clinically, as if to wrest from her who and what she was by psychic divination. She had the feeling that neither of them noticed her hat or her suit, or even the expression on her face, but looked beyond and inside, into motivation, into why her hands remained in her lap, why she gazed at them imperturbably and what she had to be concealing. Since at the moment she was concealing a great deal, Mrs. Pollifax practiced exorcising all memory of Carstairs and Alice Dexter White. She was an American tourist, she reminded herself, an American tourist …
    “I am an American tourist,” she said aloud in reply to the police officer.
    Her passport lay open in front of him. He said dryly, “We have suddenly this week so many visitors to Istanbul. All tourists. This woman you were speaking to in the lobby of the Hotel Itep … you were there to meet her?”
    “No,” said Mrs. Pollifax calmly. “I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Itep resting before dinner.”
    “But you were speaking with this woman, were you not?”
    “Oh yes.”
    “But you did not know the woman to whom you were speaking?”
    Mrs. Pollifax said truthfully, “I had never seen her before in my life.”
    “That is not the point,” said the police officer quietly. “Had you an arrangement to meet her, to speak to her?”
    “She came up to me and asked for money,” said Mrs. Pollifax firmly, “and I must say she looked as if she needed it.”
    “In what language did she accost you?”
    “English,” said Mrs. Pollifax, and suddenly realized the trap that had been set for her.
    “English,” he repeated politely. “In a Turkish hotel run by Turks, in the old section of Istanbul where few tourists lodge, a woman beggar comes up to you and speaks in English?”
    “She must have guessed I was American,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax.
    “Still, if she was only a beggar it is unusual that she could speak your language, is it not?”
    Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “If you say so, but why is all this so important? Who is she?”
    He looked faintly amused. He removed a square of cardboard from beneath his desk blotter and handed it across the desk to her, saying smoothly, “This is the woman to whom you were speaking.” It was a question, yet stated so artfully that it was also a statement; he left it up to her to dispute or accept.
    Looking at the snapshot he gave her Mrs. Pollifax saw that Mr. Carstairs and the New York
Times
might lack a photograph of Ferenci-Sabo, but that a very up-to-date one had begun circulating through Istanbul. It was certainly a picture of the woman she had met at the Itep, and a very recent one of her too. The eyes were half-closed, the face haggard and thin. Then Mrs. Pollifax noticed the dress Ferenci-Sabo was wearing, the same faded plaid, and she realized with astonishment that this snapshot had been taken of Ferenci-Sabo since she had reached Istanbul on Friday.
    Had it been taken at the consulate? she wondered. In the confusion of the woman’s arrival had someone really snapped her picture—or had it been taken of her
after
her abduction?
    She looked at the police officer curiously. Was it possible that the Turkish government could have