Read Online Mrs. Pollifax on Safari by Dorothy Gilman - Free Book Online Page A

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. McIntosh 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 changedor 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 McIntosh 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 façades. 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. McIntosh, 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 himthat 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