Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha Read Free Page A

me more of the gypsy you met, it interests me.”
    Mrs. Pollifax at once told him about Anyeta Inglescu, a queen of gypsies, and they then settled down to an enthusiastic discussion of out-of-body experiences, faith healing, precognition, energy and predestination, during which—surprisingly—she learned that he, too, was to stay at the Hilton Hong Kong.
    “Perhaps we could breakfast together when we reach the hotel,” he suggested.
    “You’re not being met by your friend?” she said, startled.
    “I chose not to be,” he said. “I want first to gather impressions—”
    “That word again,” said Mrs. Pollifax, smiling.
    “—rest for several hours, meditate and clear my head. My young friend is to call for me at noon, we’ll lunch and then get to work. But I find your vibrations quite energizing and not at all distracting,” he told her, smiling for the first time since they’d met. “Unless of course you have other plans?”
    Mrs. Pollifax assured him that she had no other plans and that she would be delighted to have breakfast with him at the hotel, and following this they each fell intonaps, sleeping through a perpetual dawn and several time zones, until some hours later, reeling with jet lag, they walked off the plane at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong.
    At Passport Control the man with the violent aura stood in line ahead of Mrs. Pollifax and she saw that it was a Canadian passport that he offered to the officer; at the luggage carousel he went off with only one very expensive-looking pigskin overnight bag. After that she lost interest in him, and following an interminable wait at customs she and Mr. Hitchens were released from the confines of bureaucracy to walk out into a clear, still-cool, fresh morning.
    “Sunshine,” breathed Mrs. Pollifax happily. Not yet the gold of a tropical noon but a thin radiant silver light that ricocheted down and across the sides of gleaming buildings and scattered rhinestones across the blue harbor. “And there’s Hong Kong,” she told Mr. Hitchens, pointing across the water to rows of sleek buildings encircling the precipitous slopes of the Peak.
    In the bright light Mr. Hitchens’s eyes had changed to the intensity of mercury against his dark complexion. “Very charming,” he murmured. “Like white cliffs in the sun.”
    Presently a taxi was whisking them out of Kowloon and down into and through a tunnel, and when they emerged they were on the Hong Kong side. “Which,” Mrs. Pollifax reminded Mr. Hitchens, “is all that Britain will have left when mainland China takes back Kowloon and the New Territories in 1997.”
    “Take back!” he repeated. “You must excuse me but I’m not aware—”
    “Well—they’ve only been leased to Great Britain,” she explained. “I believe Hong Kong was settled back in the early 1800s—it all had something to do with theopium trade—and then, being a very small island, only thirty-five square miles in size, and prospering mightily, it leaked over into Kowloon across the harbor, and later a lease was negotiated with mainland China for the New Territories. They tell me the Hong Kong dollar plunges every time Britain and China meet to discuss the changeover in 1997. China is insisting on an agreement this year.”
    “So it’s all quite temporary—one might say like life itself,” mused Mr. Hitchens.
    She smiled, finding him comfortable to be with, and feeling that his presence helped her to adjust to Cyrus’s absence, too; really, she thought, she had been growing quite spoiled without realizing it.
    “But we could almost be in Manhattan,” protested Mr. Hitchens. “My white cliffs have turned into banks and office buildings and hotels! Except for the faces on the street—”
    She smiled. “Yes, they’re different, Hong Kong’s population being 98 percent Chinese, but the attaché cases are exactly the same, aren’t they,”
    “You’re certainly very well-informed,” he told her.
    She did not mention that