The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Page 28

  "And you?" asked Reed, directing his quizzical glance at her. "Always travel alone?"

  "Oh yes," she said simply. "At least—"

  "At least you start off alone," he said with his slow smile, "and then collect people like a Pied Piper? Ah, here comes whatsisname. Dour fellow you rode out with."

  "Mr. Kleiber," she reminded him. "Willem Kleiber."

  Mr. Kleiber approached the fire hesitantly, sat down two chairs removed from Cyrus Reed and said distastefully, "There is a complete absence of running water here. Exactly how does one wash?"

  "The word safari," said Reed in an offhand voice, "means camping, you know."

  Lisa had turned at the sound of his voice. "There are shower pipes behind those reed fences, you know. Hot water too."

  Mr. Kleiber's nose looked, if anything, even more pinched; he had the most active nostrils of anyone she'd met, thought Mrs. Pollifax. "Anyone can walk in," he said coldly. "Anyone. There's no door, there's no roof."

  In a rather amused voice Steeves said, "I really don't think anyone would want to, you know. Try singing loudly while you're under the tap."

  "That's just what / did," said Amy Lovecraft, strolling into the circle and joining them. She was looking very elegant in snug black pants, a cashmere sweater and a short suede jacket. She chose the seat on the other side of John Steeves and sat down, placed a hand on his arm and smiled into his face. "I do hope we're on a first-name basis now so that I can call you John."

  "Please do," he said politely. "Have you met Lisa Reed?"

  "No, duck," she said and, leaning forward, gave Lisa a much less enthusiastic smile. "I've not met that lovely huge man over there, either."

  "We're both Reeds," Lisa said shortly. Tm Lisa and he's my father Cyrus, and that's Mrs. Pollifax next him."

  "Delighted, Cyrus," said Mrs. Lovecraft, giving him a warm smile and ignoring Mrs. Pollifax. "And here comes Tom Henry. I think it's super our having a doctor with us as well as a noted travel writer, don't you?"

  This was tactless, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and quite enough to antagonize the remaining men, but if she decided to reserve judgment on Mrs. Lovecraft for the moment she could welcome Dr. Henry wholeheartedly. He sat down next to her, crossed his legs, gave her a cheerful smile and said, "I hope dinner's soon, I'm starving."

  "About five more minutes," Mrs. Pollifax told him after a glance at her watch. "Or just enough time to ask what Homer meant when he said you're at a mission hospital. Does that mean you live here in Zambia?"

  He wrenched his eyes from Lisa Reed and turned to give her his full attention. "Yes it does—the hospital's over on the Zambesi River near the Angolan border. I came out from Canada three years ago and I'm sure all my friends expected me back in Windsor a week later."

  He gave her a sidelong boyish smile. "Needless to say I'm still here." "You like it."

  "Love it," he admitted. "So much so that I wanted to try a safari on my seven days' leave. There's so much about the bush I've been too busy to learn, and a great deal about wild animals I want to learn."

  "Including Homo sapiens?" said Cyrus Reed, leaning forward to enter the conversation.

  "Well, I see a good many of them," said Dr. Henry, smiling back, "but aside from several missionary families at the hospital it's been a long time since I've seen a group like this. I'd forgotten," he said dryly, "what a lot of nonsense people talk."

  Cyrus Reed smiled. "I agree with you completely." "What do you talk about at your hospital when you're relaxing?" asked Mrs. Pollifax.

  He grinned. "Oh—life, death, septicemia, who's due to boil the next drinking water, or what the village witch doctor said that day."

  Mrs. Pollifax laughed. "Scarcely small talk." "God, no." He looked chagrined. "Obviously I'll have to brush up on that." He smiled at Chanda as the boy walked into the campfire circle and came to stand beside him. "Bweleniko," he said. "Mwapoleni."

  "Kuntu kuli kusuma," the boy said, smiling. "Endita." Turning to Mrs. Pollifax he said, "Chanda talks Bemba but he speaks a little English now and understands it very well. When we first met I was struggling to learn Nyanga, and now I'm having to learn Bemba, and it all grows rather confusing. Chanda, you've not met this gentleman yet. He's Mr. Cyrus Reed."

  Chanda stepped forward and shook hands with Reed and then, to their surprise, clapped his hands three times. "That's the Zambian greeting," explained Dr. Henry with a grin. "Chanda's given you only the modified version. When it's done properly it's repeated three times ... a handshake followed by three claps and then another round or two. Quite a ceremony."

  "Certainly feel thoroughly greeted," admitted Reed. Somewhat removed from them, Willem Kleiber said in alarm, "He's not—uh—yours, is he?"

  Tom Henry's smile was friendly. "He is now. He was brought into the hospital half-dead, his entire village wiped out by fighting on the Angolan border. Freedom fighters brought him in."

  Overhearing this, Lisa gasped, "You live there?" He nodded.

  "But that must be fascinating."

  "It is," he said, meeting her glance with a faint smile. At that moment a drum began beating to announce dinner. Mrs. Pollifax turned and saw that in the open-air dining room behind her a huge tureen was being carried in by a boy in a white jacket. She also saw Mr. Mclntosh standing on the step, hesitating between them and the dining hall. He had changed into khaki slacks over which he wore a white shirt open at the neck and a black V-neck sweater, and she wondered if he was going to appear late at every meal and leave early, like a shadow. Intuitively she felt that he was an intensely private, introverted man, but having decided this she wondered how: was it the manner in which he looked out from under his brows, head slightly bent? or was it that his smile, which was surprisingly sweet, never changed or wavered? He simply stood and waited, smiling, while they left their chairs and moved toward him, and then, still smiling, he turned and walked toward the buffet table and placed himself in line.

  With the arrival of Mclntosh Mrs. Pollifax realized the safari group was now complete and she wondered, not for the first time, which of these people could be an assassin. Now that she'd met them all she found this a very jarring thought because they all looked so normal, even wholesome, and certainly all of them were—well, explainable, she reasoned, reaching for a word that eliminated the existence of sinister motives and facades. She could not imagine any of them a professional killer standing in a crowd with a gun in his pocket, waiting, measuring, judging, whipping out the gun and firing, then vanishing into the crowd. In the first place, none of these people looked capable of such brutal violence, and in the second place she couldn't imagine any of them managing such a thing without being noticed.

  Cyrus Reed would certainly be noticed, she thought with an amused glance at him towering over the soup tureen. It was possible that without his goatee Mr. Kleiber might look sufficiently nondescript; it was also possible that Tom Henry was not a doctor at all. Mclntosh, she thought, would certainly melt into a crowd—he was doing so right now; John Steeves was too distinguished to melt, but she knew from his books that he was a genius at disguising himself.

  If Carstairs was right, she thought, one of them had to be wearing a devilishly clever mask . . . and then she recalled with interest Carstairs' telephone call to her the evening before she left New Jersey. She had assured him that yes, her passport had been returned safely to her and that yes, Bishop had explained the importance of the snapshots, and then she had asked him the question that had begun to exasperate her. "I realize this is an insane world," she had told him, "but can you please tell me why an assassin would go on a safari!"

  "Why, to meet someone, I imagine," Carstairs had said pleasantly. "Plan the next assassination, perhaps, or be paid for the last one. Certainly not for fun."

  If this was true—and Carstairs' suppositions nearly always proved sound—there could be two people wearing masks on this safari, each watching the others and wondering, as she was doing . . . and this meant that eventually they would have to g
o off together for a good little chat, didn't it? It occurred to her that if she was very observant and very discreet she might be able to do a little eavesdropping . . .

  Of course Carstairs had made it very clear to her that she was to do nothing but take photographs, and she planned to do a very good job with her picture-taking, but now that she thought about it, it seemed incredible waste for her to be here on the spot and not do a little spying as well. After all, it was taxpayers' money that was paying for her safari, she thought virtuously, and as a taxpayer herself she abhorred waste.

  Besides, she added, dropping all pretense at justification, it would be such fun to surprise Carstairs and catch Aristotle.

  CHAPTER

  6

  In the morning the safari officially began with the game-viewing excursion up the river before leaving for Kafwala camp. Mrs. Pollifax came to breakfast early and still a little sleepy, for it was barely seven and she'd not slept with any continuity. The walls of her cabin had rustled all night—she was convinced that some small animal lived in them—and at one point she had awakened to a loud animal cry, followed by a soft whistle and the pounding of feet. After this another fruit had dropped from the tree outside her cabin, and the reeds had begun to whisper again ... At breakfast Julian told her that animals roamed freely through the camp at night, that a hippo had been heard and that pukus, who liked the safety of the camp at night, made soft whistling sounds. It was just as well she'd not known, she reflected, or she might never have dared fall asleep again.

  "I want you to meet Crispin now," Julian said as they rose from the breakfast table. "I will be staying at camp to make final arrangements for our trip at noon, and Crispin will take you game-viewing. He's assistant safari manager and he'll be with us for the entire safari."

  Crispin was not in uniform, and looked surprisingly like an eager schoolboy in his flowered shirt, dark trousers and sneakers. He had a long slender face and bright, interested eyes. He actually looked excited about taking them out game-viewing, and Mrs. Pollifax found this rather endearing.

  John Steeves said, "Crispin's even more English than Julian. What are your Zambian names?"

  "Mine?" Julian laughed. "You want it all at once? Milimo Simoko Chikwanda."

  Steeves grinned. "I'll call you Julian. And Crispin's?" "Wamufu Chinyanta Muchona." Steeves nodded. "Definitely Julian and Crispin." "I think so," Julian said in amusement. There was a charming picnic air about the excursion up the river. The sun was soft and golden, the river full of morning sounds, and they traveled on a splendid breakfast of bacon and eggs, sausage, toast and coffee. Mr. Kleiber, sitting next to Mrs. Pollifax, went so far as to confide that he would like to see a crocodile. Across the aisle Amy Lovecraft had blossomed out with a professional-looking camera loaded with all kinds of attachments that she tried to explain to John Steeves. The Reeds sat together in front, both looking sleepy; Tom Henry and Chanda stood in the stern of the boat and Mclntosh by himself in the bow; he too bristled with cameras and light meters.

  Abruptly Crispin called out to the boy at the wheel, gestured, and the launch headed across to the opposite bank, at which point Mrs. Pollifax lifted her camera and took a picture of the river ahead, managing to capture several profiles at the same time. She had already taken a snapshot of everyone climbing into the boat and no one seemed to have minded except Cyrus Reed, who had glanced at her reproachfully, as if he'd not expected this of her.

  "Hippo," said Crispin in a low voice, and pointed. Every head turned to the left, the launch slowed and they coasted toward a cleft in the tangle of roots and trees that lined the riverbank. Slowly they drew abreast of a dark, secret-looking inlet of water that flowed into the river, and as they reached this narrow tributary Mrs. Pollifax looked deep into its shadows and saw enormous shapes moving through the trees, and suddenly heard a thunderous roar as the first hippo plunged into the stream. Patches of sunlight glinted across monstrous black heads as the hippos floated and bobbed out into the river. She counted five, six, seven hippos and gave up counting at eleven. They kept coming, whole families snorting and cavorting with ponderous mischievousness, one of the bolder ones swimming out near the launch to give them all a curious stare.

  Mrs. Pollifax laughed, and when the launch resumed its trip upriver the others were smiling too and began to talk and move about the boat. Mclntosh peeled off his jacket and came to stand next to Mrs. Pollifax, his camera at the ready. Without his jacket, only a short-sleeved polo shirt remained and she thought it made him look rather flat-chested. His posture was not good but then, she thought forgivingly, it would be impossible for anyone to stand erect if they insisted on peering out at the world from under their eyebrows; a certain amount of slumping was compulsive. She noticed that his longish black hair badly needed a shampoo but the threads of white in it were dramatic against his tanned face.

  "I hope you don't mind," he said with his faint smile, and sat down on the edge of the bench next her, his eyes on the shoreline.

  "Not at all," she said. "That's a handsome camera you have. I've been admiring it."

  He glanced at her, his smile deepening, and told her what kind it was.

  "Lovely," she said, not understanding a word, and then with a bright smile, "Where do you make your home, Mr. Mclntosh?"

  "Pretty much out of my attaché" case," he said, smiling.

  "But you're American, aren't you?"

  "An American citizen, yes."

  "Then do you," she asked reasonably, "live in the United States?"

  "Not really," he said, smiling. "I come and go." He lifted his camera and snapped a picture of the riverbank, and then as Crispin called out "Egret!" he slipped away from her to the rear of the boat.

  Behind her Amy Lovecraft leaned forward and said, "He's impossible to talk to, isn't he? I couldn't even get a direct yes or no from him on whether he's married. I mean, surely that's something you could answer yes or no to? A man either has a wife or he hasn't."

  Mrs. Pollifax turned to smile into her vivid sapphire-blue eyes. "You have a point there, although of course these days such matters are sometimes—"

  "What's more," said Mrs. Lovecraft, lowering her voice, "I don't think Mclntosh is his last name at all."

  At this Mrs. Pollifax turned completely to face her. "Good heavens," she murmured, "really?"

  Mrs. Lovecraft nodded. "When we registered at Chunga," she said, her voice becoming conspiratorial, "I was standing next him and I caught a glimpse of his passport. Mclntosh is his first name. There was an entirely different name following it, something that began with an M too, but I couldn't make it out. And," she added indignantly, "I've never seen an American passport with the last name first. Julian may have accepted him as Mr. Mclntosh because he doesn't know, but take a look at your own passport sometime: the last name doesn't come first."

  "Amy," called Steeves from across the aisle, "you wanted to see some impala, take a look over here."

  Mrs. Lovecraft jumped up, leaving Mrs. Pollifax to digest this interesting piece of information. Not a sensible woman, thought Mrs. Pollifax, watching her leave; stupid of her to go about saying such things, indebted as Mrs. Pollifax was to her for the news. She might have thought it exposed Mclntosh, but it also betrayed her spitefulness at being ignored by him. She wondered if Amy Love-craft's life had been difficult: she was a very attractive woman and must once have been lovely, but so very often beautiful women grew up lopsided or didn't grow at all. She thought there was a curious hardness about her, as if her beauty was a deceptively rich topsoil, thinly spread

  over rock. . . . Finding that no one was looking in her direction, Mrs. Pollifax reached into her purse and surreptitiously examined her passport. Mrs. Lovecraft was absolutely right: there was no juxtaposition of names, the given name came first.

  "Having fun?" asked Cyrus Reed, walking up the aisle.

  "Oh yes," she said, beaming at him, and then, thinking of what Mrs. Lovecraft had just told her, she added, "and I'm learning so much, it's
really so educational."

  At midmorning they stopped briefly at an abandoned ferry crossing where the remains of a road cut like a knife through the tall grass. Crispin allowed them to climb out for a moment and walk a few cautious paces down the road. "But not far," he said firmly. "Not without a guard."

  "Why should we need a guard?" protested Mrs. Pollifax.

  "It's dangerous."

  She looked out upon the peaceful scene, at bright petunia-like flowers blooming by the roadside, at a landscape empty of all movement, and she was incredulous. "But it looks so safe!"

  Tom Henry grinned. "It does, doesn't it? But we're near the river, you know, which means if you left the road you might stumble across a crocodile sunning itself in the mud. Failing that, there are puff adders, pythons, black mambas and bushwangers, not to mention the possibility of a rhino or hippo who might be in an ugly temper."

  "Oh," said Mrs. Pollifax, taken aback.

  Crispin said, "You treat many snake bites at your hospital, Doctor?"

  "Maybe not so successfully as your village medicine men," said Tom, "but we save a few. Speaking of medicine men, it's certainly humbling to realize that people here evolved their own vaccine centuries before we did in the laboratories."

  Crispin said modestly, "We are in the position to learn, you know. We see the mongoose fight with a poisonous snake, he is bitten, he runs to a certain bush and eats the leaves and lives. The medicine man studies all these signs."

  Steeves said, "And which do you visit, Crispin, when you feel ill?"

  Crispin grinned. "I would go first to the medical doctor," he said, his eyes laughing, "and then I would visit the medicine man just to be sure."

  "Covering all your bets," chuckled Dr. Henry as they climbed back into the boat.

  Lisa, standing on the bank next to Mrs. Pollifax, said in a low voice, "Care to bet whose arms Mrs. Lovecraft is going to fall into?"

  She had misjudged her, however; Amy Lovecraft graciously accepted Crispin's hand, stepped onto the bow of the boat and remained there for a long moment, her profile turned to the sky, before allowing John Steeves to help her inside.