Elusive Mrs. Pollifax (20 page)

“I’m curious, Georgi,” she said. “You’re very young. Why do
you
do all this?”

Georgi looked surprised. “They not tell you? My brother is one of prisoners in Panchevsky.”

“Oh–I’m sorry.”

“Life imprisonment,” said Georgi, nodding. “He is good communist, too, but he disagree with wrong party official, they search apartment and find notebook in which he records the correctness of our becoming freer, like Yugoslavia. They say this very bad, very revisionist.” He sighed. “He will not want to leave his beloved Bulgaria, but if he go–maybe things change a little in five, ten years, and he
return. Already my country is better now than before. No more–how you call it–bloodlettings? Purges?”

They descended a ladder into the cellar under the house. It was very primitive, no more than a large hole dug out of the earth for storing food. A few scorched herbs still hung from the ceiling. Under them Volko and Radev were checking off small shapeless packages like two earnest storekeepers taking inventory.

“Ah, Amerikanski,” said Volko, turning to smile at her. “Welcome! Come see what is done today.”

“I’d love to!”

“This Radev is very expert. Radev, tell her.”

“Not bad,” acknowledged Radev. “Here is ingenious short fuse, two minutes. This is for Tsanko, very powerful, but in small package, you see? We test two of these, they are so perfect maybe I go into business.” He grinned. “Here you see six gentler packages of explosive, also for pockets, almost no fuse, maybe five seconds. Two of them delivered today to Mrs. Bemish, two for you and me, four for Georgi and Kosta.”

“And the largest one?” she asked.

“Already it is wired to inside of truck. Heaven preserve the accidents, it is to go off with contact.”

Mrs. Pollifax drew a deep sigh of relief. “Well, then,” she said, looking around her, “everything appears to be going splendidly.” She beamed at them. She supposed that guns would have made their plan simpler; Tsanko’s hunting rifles had remained in Tarnovo and only Radev had a gun. She had expressed the hope that this would be a nonviolent raid, to which Boris had drawled, “For them or us?” “Both,” she’d replied, and he had snorted derisively.

At seven o’clock Volko quietly left–no one explained why–and Georgi spread a large square of cloth on the floor of the hut. There they ate dinner, literally breaking bread together from a huge loaf and washing it down with red wine. Across the tablecloth Debby caught her
eye and said, “Isn’t this great, Mrs. Pollifax?” She was eating with her fingers, her face healthily pink from the sun. There was nothing waif-like about her today. She’s using herself, she’s needed, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and wondered why so many people insisted upon happiness being a matter of ease.

Tsanko had still not arrived. “He and Volko go to big gathering.” Boris explained when she inquired about them both. “What you call party?”

“Party!” It seemed a most extraordinary time to go partying.

“We decide today–you are not here–that Volko not be with us tonight. We insist he preserve himself because he supply truck and explosives and needs the good story.”

“An alibi!” supplied Mrs. Pollifax.

“
Da
. Already he risk much. The police will learn in time where truck come from and they will be harsh. We have arranged for warehouse to be attacked, the locks broken, wooden boxes entered. By who nobody will know, but when they speak with Volko he will be very innocent. All night he will be at ceremony. Given,” he added with a grin, “for General Ignatov.”

Mrs. Pollifax laughed. “How clever of you all!”

“
Da
. How can head of security doubt the man who drinks with him, eh?” He glanced at his watch. “But Tsanko be here by midnight. You are nervous, Amerikanski?”

“Very,” she said.

He nodded. “None of us know, eh? One asks, is this to be died for?”

“And what’s your answer?” asked Mrs. Pollifax.

He smiled. “Is not worth dying for, no, but worth being alive to do.”

She nodded. “I like you, Boris. I like your skepticism, too.”

He shrugged, amused. “It keeps me alive, it entertains me. One must have entertainments, eh?”

It grew slowly dark, and then cold. They could show no lights except in the cellar and after an hour Mrs. Pollifax felt stifled by the smallness of the room and by the single candle that illuminated them. Debby and Georgi talked earnestly in one corner about their countries and their friends. Kosta, Boris and Radev were arguing heatedly in Bulgarian. Watching them, Mrs. Pollifax had too much time to recall her rashnesses, and the many people she had involved in this assault on the Institute, as well as the terrible risks they would all be taking before dawn. Yet given just one small opportunity to save a human life–and the factor of being in the right place at the right time–was there anything to do except try? One made a decision with the mind, she thought–with the cool logic of a chess player–and then it became necessary to grow to it, to curb the emotional protests, resist the longing to give up, to doubt, to flee. The real enemy was fear.

“I believe I shall go out and sit under a tree,” she told them.

“Don’t go far,” Debby called to her.

She was seated under the tree when Tsanko arrived, driving the van without lights across the untilled earth. He did not see her until she called out to him. He walked over and sat down beside her on the rough bench. “It is gravest concern to me how you are tonight,” he said. “You are well?”

“Anxious but well,” she said.

He nodded. In the darkness his face was dim, without dimension. “No moon, we are fortunate,” he said.

They sat quietly together, the sounds of the night encircling them: the shrilling of cicadas, the call of a whippoorwill, a murmur of rustling leaves from the forest. It was extraordinary how fond she had become of this man, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and she reflected upon how
few persons there were with whom she felt an instinctive rapport. There was never anything tangible about this. It was composed of humor, attitude, spirit–all invisible–and it made words completely unnecessary between them.

He said abruptly, “You have good life in America? Tell me of this. A
Cpeda
–Wednesday–for instance. What do you do on a Wednesday?”

“Wednesday,” repeated Mrs. Pollifax thoughtfully. “I wake up in my apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey–I have one bedroom, one large, sunny living room and a kitchen with dining space. The New York
Times
is on my doorstep and I read it with my breakfast.” It seemed incredibly far away and unreal. “On Wednesdays I wheel the bookcart at the hospital. It’s a very
quiet
life,” she admitted. “Except on Fridays when I have my karate lessons. And lately I’ve considered flying lessons.”

He looked at her, smiling. “For you this would be good, very good.”

“And I have grown a night-blooming cereus on my fire escape,” she added almost shyly.

He said quietly, “This is important. Why?”

She hesitated. “Because lately I’ve had the feeling we rush toward something–some kind of Armageddon–set into motion long ago. There are so many people in the world, and so much destructiveness. I was astonished when I first heard that a night-blooming cereus blooms only once a year, and always at midnight. It implies such
intelligence
somewhere.”

“And did it bloom?” he asked.

She nodded triumphantly. “At twenty minutes before midnight, the week before I left for your country.”

“Then there are still mysteries left in this world,” he said with relief.

“And your Wednesdays?” she asked. “I’m not allowed to ask about your Wednesdays? This is not a dialogue?”

He sighed heavily. “I wish you may, but no, I cannot,
even to you. This is sad because you have become very dear to me, Amerikanski.”

She said softly, “It’s like a problem in mathematics, I think. For me so much has been added by knowing you, and when I leave–if I am so fortunate,” she added wryly, “it will be with a sense of loss, of subtraction.”

“At such an age,” mused Tsanko, and chuckled. “As if the affections count years! But for me there has been a long time without feeling. My first wife and my little daughter die in 1928–no, not die, they are shot against the wall by the Orim. Murdered. There were three thousand people killed that night, arrested as suspected communists. My daughter had high fever, you see, and despite curfew Adriana wrapped our child in blankets and hurried to find doctor.” He shook his head. “My son survived, he is forty now. It was madness, we were not even communists then, But it made one of me,” he added.

“How terrible that must have been for you.”

“It was. Later I married again, when my son, Vasil, was a grown man–1945, that was. I was most political, and my wife was also political.” He shrugged. “That was bad mistake, we have been divorced many years, she is an engineer in Varna. Alas, the climate of Bulgaria is not good for love. But good for peaches,” he added with humor, bringing a peach from his pocket. “Please? For you.”

They sat eating peaches until Georgi came to the door and said, “There you are–it’s time to begin preparing for Panchevsky Institute.”

“Suddenly the clock moves too fast,” mused Tsanko. “Early in morning I have appointment I cannot avoid. I will not see you again. Everything has been said but this–please do not be killed tonight, Amerikanski.”

“Nor you, Tsanko,” she said, and they stood silently together for a moment.

“We are of different cultures on the outside,” he said slowly, “but inside we are alike. If only you were born
Bulgarian, Amerikanski, we could change the world! You will remember, eh?”

“On Wednesdays,” said Mrs. Pollifax gravely.

He laughed. “On Wednesdays, yes,” he said, and very formally leaned over and kissed her on each cheek.

It was dark and silent in the vicinity of Panchevsky Institute. Only the building itself glowed with light. At five minutes before three o’clock Mrs. Pollifax sat in Assen Radev’s farm truck that was filled with honking geese in the rear. She was wearing a shapeless cotton dress, a shabby sweater and over her head a bandanna tied at the nape of her neck. On her shoulder was pinned a card bearing unintelligible letters that supposedly read:
I AM A MUTE
. “Well, Mrs. Pollifax?” said Radev cheerfully.

She was not quite so cheerful, but she guessed that he was a man who thrived on danger, and therefore his interest in life increased in proportion to the nearness of death. On the whole it was not a bad way to approach Panchevsky Institute, she thought. She glanced at her watch; Radev glanced at his and nodded. “We go,” he said, and headed the truck down the street and around the corner into Ordrin Square. Ahead of them, a block away, she could see the walls and the front gate of Panchevsky Institute.

At the top of the hill on Persenk Boulevard, Georgi checked his watch. “One minute to go,” he said to Kosta in Bulgarian. “You think we come out of this alive, comrade?”

“Who knows?” said Kosta with a shrug. “It’s better to be all dead than half dead.”

On the opposite side of the wall, on narrow Ordrin Street, Debby sat beside Boris in the van and shivered from cold and nervousness. “I feel a little sick,” she told Boris.

He said very gently, “It’s the waiting, you understand. It grows better when there is something to do, you will see.”

“It’s one minute before three o’clock, Boris,” she said, looking at her watch. He nodded, climbed out and began to unlock the rear door of the van where the ladder was hidden.

Tsanko had crossed Persenk Boulevard and now he strolled along beside the high wall, one hand in his pocket fingering the bundle there. Reaching the middle of the wall, he checked his watch, kneeled as if to tie a shoelace and inserted the bundle tightly against the wall. A match flared. When he straightened he began to walk very swiftly, almost running toward a van parked diagonally across the road, near Stalinov Avenue. He appeared not to notice the large truck soundlessly moving toward him down Persenk Boulevard on his left; it gained momentum as it neared the bottom of the hill. Tsanko had just opened the door to the van when the outer wall of Panchevsky Institute erupted, a portion of it bursting into fragments. The sound of the explosion followed a second later, just as the massive truck rolled through the broken wall and entered the courtyard.

Half a minute later came the sound of the truck’s crash, followed by a second, louder explosion.

At the gate Assen Radev was saying, “You may not be expecting two dozen geese for your kitchens, but they are your dinner today. Hell, what do you want done with them? Who’s in charge? I tell you they are ordered for this morning.”

The guard pointed to Mrs. Pollifax, and Radev said carelessly, “She belongs at the collective, I’m taking her back. She can’t speak, she’s a mute.”

A second man casually joined them and with a wink at Radev spoke persuasively to his companion; it was Miroslav, earning his bribe. The guard fingered the papers with annoying slowness and then nodded. “Take them into the inside court, they can kill the geese there, idiot. But be fast.”

Slowly the truck from the collective inched through the gates and then through the second iron gate into the courtyard. “You see the stairs?” said Radev in a low voice to Mrs. Pollifax. “On the right. The door to each floor is kept locked, but the stairs are clear and go up to the top floor.”

Mrs. Pollifax nodded. She climbed out and opened the tailgate at the back of the truck. Two dozen geese stared at her, and with a furious motion she gestured them outside, scattering them as they fluttered to the ground honking in outrage. A moment later came the sound of the first explosion.

Boris and Debby heard the sound of the first explosion as they waited in Ordrin Street, the ladder half out of the van. It was dark on the street, but noonday on the top of the wall, and Debby was thinking about Mrs. Bemish and the lights. If Mrs. Bemish couldn’t reach them–or damaged them too late–what on earth could they do?

“Set up the ladder,” Boris told her. “I’ll go first and
you follow. Watch the ropes–nothing must tangle them! Do it as we practiced all day.”