Mrs. Pollifax on Safari Page 5

  The sound of the boat had brought a handful of people down to the landing, all of their faces black. One in particular stood out from the others, a broad-shouldered young man in forest-green tunic and shorts. His smile as the boat reached the weathered gray dock was as broad as his shoulders, a brilliant slash of white that met and warmed two laughing eyes.

  "Welcome to Chunga," he said as the boat slid up to the wharf. "I'm Julian, your safari manager. If you will come in and register—?"

  Mrs. Pollifax was the first to enter the small office near the landing. Julian handed her registration forms and a pen and she brought out her passport and copied down its numbers. Over her shoulder Julian called instructions to the boy who had brought them in the boat, and a moment later she heard the sound of the motor on the water. "Besides the luggage," he explained to her, "there are two more guests coming soon from Lusaka."

  "Yes, I know," she said, "I met them."

  His huge white smile blossomed again. "Then you have already two friends, good. Moses takes you up now, you'll be in Leopard cabin."

  Moses wore dusty sneakers and bright-blue slacks. She turned and followed him up a gravel path. The reborn sun was meeting the horizon now, its light no longer clear gold but a hot amber that rusted the soil a deeper red. Along the path leaves crackled underfoot like dry parchment, and Mrs. Pollifax shivered in the sudden coolness. When they reached the cabin marked Leopard, Moses carried her suitcase up four wooden stairs and placed it beside the door, and then he stood and explained that there was a shower and pointed vaguely off into the distance. Mrs. Pollifax, her mind now on sweaters, blankets and hot coffee, shook her head, thanked him and scurried up the steps into the cabin. As she turned to close the wooden door behind her the sun slipped over the horizon with finality. Homer had been absolutely correct: it was just six o'clock.

  CHAPTER

  5

  It was dim inside the cabin. Two small screened windows were heavily shaded by the thatch roof but an electric-light bulb dangled over the night table and Mrs. Pollifax snapped it on. The pair of narrow beds looked oddly bridelike: they were sealed inside of white mosquito netting that flowed like bridal veils from the ceiling and were tucked firmly under each mattress, rendering each bed nearly inaccessible. Frustrated, she deposited her suitcase on the floor until she saw a luggage rack behind the door and placed it there instead, and then, looking around her she said aloud, "Well—I'm here."

  And so, presumably, was Aristotle, she reminded herself.

  It was incredibly, starkly quiet . . . Something fell to the ground outside her cabin; it sounded like fruit dropping from a tree. A faint breeze rustled the reed walls and then subsided, and she could hear the distant hum of a generator. Presently voices inserted themselves into this bottomless quiet; she heard a girl laugh, a man reply and recognized Cyrus Reed's voice: so he and Lisa had arrived. She opened her suitcase and quickly changed into a heavy sweater, combed her hair, checked the film in her camera and picked up her jacket. When she opened the door a lizard slid across the step and vanished under the cabin. Carrying her flashlight she walked down the path toward the water, hesitated, and then passed through an empty, brightly lighted bar into the dining hall. Just beyond its low wall a campfire was burning in the cleared area overlooking the river. A dozen chairs encircled it, and one of them was occupied by John Steeves.

  Seeing her he rose and gave her a quick, rather shy smile that lighted up his serious face. "I don't believe I know your name," he said, holding out a hand. "I'm John Steeves."

  "Emily Pollifax," she told him, shaking hands with him. "Do sit down. I love this fire. I'm going to sit as close as I dare because actually I'm freezing."

  "I know," he said, nodding. "It's really early spring here, and a rather late rainy season too, they tell me, which is why the roads haven't been graded yet. As perhaps you noticed," he said with a grin.

  She realized that he was much older than she'd thought at first. Everything about him was boyish—his relatively unlined face, his slouch, his vitality—except for his eyes: there was something haunted about his eyes, as if they'd seen too much. They were what her son Roger would call the eyes of an old soul, so that she now added quite a few years to her original impression and guessed him to be in his middle thirties.

  "Looking forward to the safari?" he asked, and Mrs. Pollifax realized that she'd been staring at him.

  "Oh yes indeed," she told him warmly. "And you?"

  He nodded. "Bit of a rest for me. Too much traveling spoils one for resorts and the really plush places."

  "You travel a great deal, then?"

  He nodded, extended one lean leg and poked at the fire with his shabby boot. "Write travel books," he said.

  "Steeves," she mused. "I'm afraid—"

  "I know," he said with that sudden blaze of a smile that so transformed him. "People never remember authors' names."

  "Tell me the titles of your books, then."

  "Mmmmm . . . Lost in the Himalayas, At Home in the Andes, followed by Over the Chinese Border and One Hundred Nights in a Mongolian Yurt."

  "But of course," she exclaimed. "I read Over the Chinese Border and enjoyed it tremendously. You disguise yourself and live among the natives."

  He grinned. "You might say disguise is the main ingredient of my success, yes. A bit of the actor in me, you know, I love fooling around with makeup. Actually I began as an actor, but it's much more fun applying it all to dangerous situations."

  "You like danger?" she asked curiously.

  "It certainly beats the humdrum routine of ordinary living," he said ruefully.

  "Yes," agreed Mrs. Pollifax, smiling faintly. "The exhilaration. The things one learns about oneself. The total immersion in the moment."

  He looked at her in surprise, as if he'd not expected this from her. "You seem to have experienced something of it—" His glance moved beyond Mrs. Pollifax and he stopped speaking, a curious expression on his face. She turned and saw Lisa Reed walking toward them, her father just emerging from the dining hall behind her.

  Steeves rose to his feet, looking impressed. "I say—good evening. You weren't on the bus with us, are you in the safari group too?"

  Lisa had changed into bluejeans and a denim shirt and in them she looked younger, more vulnerable, her fashionable leanness replaced by a fragile quality. It occurred to Mrs. Pollifax that she was blushing; certainly her gamine face had turned a darker color but her voice when she spoke was impersonal. "Yes, we came by car from Lusaka. I'm Lisa Reed."

  "And Cyrus Reed, parent," added her father. Sinking into the chair beside Mrs. Pollifax he smiled at her and said, "Good to see you again."

  Steeves looked pleased. "Americans, are you? I do wish you'd sit down over here—I've not met an American in years. Perhaps you can explain to me what's been happening in your country."

  "Lisa can if anyone can," said Reed. "A biased account, naturally."

  Steeves flashed his quick, radiant smile. "But all accounts are biased, surely? You had something called a watershed affair?"

  That won a smile from Lisa. "No, no," she said, sitting down next to him, and began speaking with quick gestures, her face very serious, her slender hands cutting the air with incisive slashes.

  Her father turned to Mrs. Pollifax. "Thought you'd like to know, by the way, that someone was asking for you at the hotel when I checked out."

  "Asking for me?" gasped Mrs. Pollifax. "Was he tall, with dark hair and blue eyes and—"

  Reed shook his head. "Zambian. Short black chap. Dressed in a kind of—well," he said, looking pained, "it had hibiscus all over it. Or bougainvillea. That sort of shirt, with black trousers and sneakers."

  Puzzled, Mrs. Pollifax said, "And you're quite sure he was asking for me!"

  "Clearly," nodded Reed. "Couldn't help but overhear. Asked for your room number, the clerk said you'd already checked out, he left."

  "How very odd," said Mrs. Pollifax, frowning. "There's that advertisement, of course, but it
won't be published in the Times of Zambia until tomorrow morning."

  Her companion nodded. "Unless the typesetter knows someone who knows someone who knows your friend. Or perhaps the travel bureau sent a chap along to make sure you'd gotten off on time." With a gesture toward the other two he said, "Damn glad to see there's someone young and male for Lisa."

  Mrs. Pollifax wrenched her thoughts away from the mysterious man at the hotel. "I thought," she said, "that your daughter blushed when she saw him."

  His brows lifted. "Thought so, did you?" He turned and gazed at Lisa with interest. "Amazing I missed that."

  "You were standing behind her."

  "So I was. Seems an engaging fellow, Steeves."

  John Steeves was certainly being very attentive, thought Mrs. Pollifax, glancing at the two across the campfire: those haunted eyes of his were fixed intently on Lisa's face as he listened, his quick smile occasionally transforming their sadness. It was a rare person who listened like that, reflected Mrs. Pollifax, and thought it a quality difficult for any woman to resist.

  "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 go 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.