Mrs. Pollifax on Safari by Dorothy Gilman

bed and began a frenzied hunt.
    Still there was no cartridge. Be calm, she thought, and sat down on the bed in the middle of bright sweaters, cold creams, slacks and sneakers, but there was no evading the fact that the film was missing. Yet she’d packed it this noon at Chunga camp before coming here, and several minutes later when the boy had come for her suitcase she’d reopened the bag to add her toothbrush, and the exposed film had still been there: she could see it now in her memory, sticking out of the pocket of her folded bush jacket. And since her suitcase had been locked during its journey to Kafwala there could have been no accident that would jar open the suitcase and scatter its contents. The film had been locked inside her suitcase when it left Chunga, and her suitcase had remained locked until she had opened it half an hour ago to extract a bar of soap for her bath. She’d reached inside without looking because she knew exactly where the soap was, but she’d had to unlock the suitcase to do so, and the lock had not been tampered with then …
    But if the film wasn’t lost—and it couldn’t have been, she thought grimly, going over and over it—then it had to have been stolen, and stolen while she was taking a bath.
    She sat without moving, allowing the shock of this to catch up with her, and it was a very real shock, with implications that left her a little dizzy. How frightfullyarrogant she’d been, she thought, dashing about taking her snapshots so openly while all the time someone on this safari didn’t want to be photographed. Someone had allowed her to snap as many of them as she pleased, and then her film had been quietly taken away from her. She had been discreetly and firmly put in her place.
    Score one for Aristotle, she thought.
    Brazen, of course, but so easy … an empty room with only an inside bolt on the door and no way of locking it on the outside, her suitcase unlocked and she in the bathtub …
    A flicker of anger stirred in her, grew, and at last triumphed over her alarm: it appeared that she now had a definite adversary, faceless, nameless and observant. She could assume that her burglar knew nothing about her except that she preferred faces mixed in with her scenery, but her unknown antagonist was clever, she knew that now. He had moved in early, counting on her not noticing, counting on her being a dithery, rather silly woman addicted to snapshots. He would do better next time, she thought, to leave an unexposed film behind him, because even silly dithery women noticed when too many exposed films disappeared.
    But in the meantime she had lost twenty valuable pictures, and unless she could outthink her burglar she was doomed to see her completed films picked off like flies. It was also disturbing to realize that her collection was reduced to the six or seven snapshots still in her camera … or had these been tampered with too? The camera still registered seven snapshots on its gauge, and the cartridge looked untouched, but just to be certain she removed the film, put in a fresh one and dropped thehalf-completed one in her purse. The sealed boxes she hid: one in her totebag, one in the toe of a sneaker, the last inside her purse.
    Defiantly she decided that she would continue her snapshot-taking with an enthusiasm certain to annoy her adversary, but it was time now to turn to her lapel-pin camera. She had worn the latter pinned to her sweater and by now her companions must be accustomed to seeing her wear it, incongruous as it looked with casual clothes. She would continue to wear it doggedly.
    Still shaken by her discovery she repacked her suitcase and locked it. As she left her room she found Cyrus Reed opening the door of the room on the other side of the arcade. He turned, looking genuinely surprised. “You’re there?” he said. “Good, we’re neighbors.”
    Even if it was he who had stolen her film, she thought it might be wise to mention her discovery of its