The Lioness(24)

“It is a violent world,” Billy agreed. “But the violence among the leopards and buffaloes? A hell of a lot more natural than the nightmare across the border in the Congo. I don’t know who’s more dangerous: Mobutu and his crew or those Simbas in the east—in that province that tried to secede.”

“Oh, they all hate us,” said Charlie, his tone flat. “Or at least they should. Trust me, I’ve lived here my whole life, so I know: we have earned their wrath. The UN has boots on the ground, but I’m honestly not sure how that will help.”

“And you know the Russians are involved,” Billy added. “You just know it.”

Charlie looked deep into the fire. “Yes,” he said. “We do know that. And as dangerous as a leopard or a buffalo might be? Nothing compared to the Russians—at least the crowd they send here. I know that, too. If I ever tell any of you I’m feeling…Russiany? Duck and cover. And pray.”

Then he raised his glass in a mock toast, stood, and said good night.



* * *



.?.?.

And now Charlie was gone, and she had no idea where.

And Juma was food for the jackals and vultures. Instead of driving them around in one of the two Land Rovers, seated behind the wheel in the front seat, he was but a corpse on the grass and splatter on the outside of the window. She felt a lurch in her stomach and wished to God it were morning sickness, and looked down at her fingers atop her belly. She had been mistaken: the cut wasn’t quite scabbing over yet. It was still oozing. And it stung. She gave Billy a small smile and shrugged. He reached again for the bandanna, but the damn thing was filthy and she shook her head.

Instead, she pressed her hands flat on the seat and raised her bottom slightly into the air. Then she used her fingers like tweezers to pull a shard of glass from the back of her khakis. It was the width of her pinky and almost as long. It was beautiful and sharp, an obelisk that caught the sunshine as it streamed into the vehicle. There was blood on it, too. She studied it, not taking her eyes off it until a mosquito landed on the back of her hand holding the glass, and she swatted the insect dead.





CHAPTER TEN


    Peter Merrick





Peter Merrick is not recognizable the way his clients are, such as Katie Barstow and Paul Sellars. But three of his clients took home Academy Awards last week, and the super agent’s face gets him a table at any bistro or brasserie he wants—including Musso and Frank, what might be Hollywood’s oldest restaurant.

—The Hollywood Reporter, April 7, 1962



Peter Merrick had grown up in Sacramento and hunted deer avidly as a teenager with his father and grandfather in Montana, most of the time using a rifle but once bagging a buck and another time an elk with his grandfather’s old-fashioned muzzleloader. It was his grandfather who’d first paraphrased Audubon for him, teaching him in that wonderfully gravelly voice of his that the outdoors isn’t a place given to boys or girls by their parents; nature is a place you’re borrowing from your kids. His grandfather believed that the slow walk in the woods or up the mountain was more important than whether you succeeded in tracking and dispatching your prey. He wanted his grandson to tread gently and kill cleanly.

Peter had been too young for the First World War and too old for the Second—at least for combat. He’d been in Southern California for twenty years in 1942, having gone south in 1920 to attend the new state university there, and months after Pearl Harbor was recruited by Jack Warner, who had somehow gone from running Warner Brothers to being a lieutenant colonel in the army, to join the FMPU: First Motion Picture Unit. By then Merrick was an agent with his own table at the Brown Derby (near Warner’s own table) and his own booth at Chasen’s. The FMPU took over the Hal Roach Studios, christened the complex “Fort Roach,” and began making morale movies and training films. Warner wanted Merrick because he knew the agent could help convince the likes of Clark Gable and Bill Holden to participate, and because—unlike almost everyone else associated with the project—he actually owned a gun and had discharged a weapon. He was also, Warner discovered, an immensely capable administrator. He got things done.

Now, as Merrick peered at the invaders (because, he thought, that’s what they were) from behind a thick baobab tree, watching them ransack the camp, he wished he had a rifle. The safari staff was working at gunpoint to load the food and petrol into one of the trucks. He wanted to say the white men were Russian, but he wasn’t completely sure.

In any case, he didn’t have a rifle. He owned two, and one was back in his bungalow in Santa Monica and the other in the lorry with most of Charlie Patton’s portable armory.

And what might be even better than one of his own rifles, if he had to be here in the Serengeti right now, would be the elephant gun that Patton had rented for him when he had taken care of his hunting license. The license allowed him twenty-five plains animals, ten rabbits, as many birds as he wanted, and a hippo. He had no plans to bring home anywhere near that many dead animals. He sure as hell had no need of a hippo. (God, how many people showed up to see the taxidermist at Zimmerman’s in Nairobi hoping to have the gargantuan head of a hippo dipped and shipped?)

He watched the men throw the bodies of the two dead rangers and the dead guide into the back of one of the lorries.

He wasn’t sure how he and Patton had gotten separated or where the hunter was now. Hadn’t they both gone behind this baobab to pee so the women could use the toilet tent before setting out for the day? But then all hell had broken loose, and so much was a blur.