Amazing Mrs. Pollifax Read Online Free PDF Page A

Athens, and Mrs. Pollifax watched Mia reline her lips and eyelids with white, and comb her long hair. As the plane touched earth and taxied down the runway Mia looked at Mrs. Pollifax with huge eyes. “Do you realize we may never meet again?” she said in dismay, and was suddenly a very young child.
    Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “But it’s so very nice that we’ve met at all,” she said warmly.
    Mia laughed. “There I go, being greedy again—you’re much the wiser.” Standing, she leaned over and impulsively kissed Mrs. Pollifax on the cheek. “God bless,” she said warmly, and placing her stovepipe hat securely on the top of her head she walked down the aisle, every eye on the plane fastened just as securely upon her receding figure.
    Mrs. Pollifax watched her go. She thought she left behind her a very definite fragrance—not of an orchid in spite of her exotic green and purple appearance, she reflected, but something rather sturdy and British, like a primrose. Yes, a primrose, decided Mrs. Pollifax, and with a little smile brought out her travel guide on Turkey again, and settled down to read it.

CHAPTER 4
    Mrs. Pollifax landed at an airport whose name she could not pronounce, and went through Customs in a state of numbness. Not even a glimpse of her first mosque or the delicate spire of a minaret roused her from this alarming sense of detachment; she was experiencing now the effect of crossing two continents and an ocean in the space of a day. She remembered that she had been contacted by Carstairs at two o’clock on a quiet Sunday afternoon, she had left the United States less than two hours later, and she had been in flight for seventeen hours, with a brief stopover in London. In America it would be Monday morning and she would be preparing to shop at the A&P, but instead she was in Istanbul and it was four o’clock Monday afternoon, all of which produced a bewildered weightless and unattached feeling: it was difficult to realize that she had reached Istanbul, or how, or for what purpose. As the airline bus carried her toward the city there was added to her blurredness a steady cacophony of noise: horns honking, donkeys braying, and vendors shouting.
    When Mrs. Pollifax reached the Oteli Itep and registered at the desk, showing her passport, it was five o’clock. There was no sign of Henry, which reminded her that they were in Istanbul now and there would be no more reassuring winks. The desk clerk himself showed her to her room on the second floor and left her staring, mesmerized, at the bed.
    And the bed really was enchanting. It was mounted on aplatform that made it the focal point of the room, it was covered with a brilliant scarlet afghan and what was more it looked voluptuously soft. Mrs. Pollifax moved toward it with longing, every bone of her body still in protest against the reclining seats into which she had been fitted for so long. She reached up to her flowered hat, fumbled for its hatpin and then hesitated. She remembered that in fewer than three hours she must take up her post in the lobby with her copy of
Gone with the Wind
—it was why she was here—and by that hour she must be alert and rested. She had already done a great deal of sleeping on the plane, and another nap could only leave her woolly-headed. A more sensible idea would be to find something to occupy and clear her mind. She thought of food but she was not hungry enough to spend the next hour in dining, and in any case she would prefer breakfast to dinner, her appetite being still on American time. Yet somehow before eight o’clock she had to recover a degree of perception and awareness, and enough vitality to think clearly.
    “A walk!” she thought. “A good brisk walk!” It was the perfect idea, jewel-like in its simplicity and wisdom after so many hours of tedium. She wondered if the bazaars would be open at this hour, doubted, and immediately suffered a loss of motivation until she remembered Mia Ramsey’s