Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha Read Free

pointedly, “You
did
stop very suddenly,”
    The man’s glance was like an assault, rendering hera 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 themany 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 shookhis 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