The Lioness(43)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN


    Margie Stepanov





Margie Stepanov, seen here smiling beside actresses Katie Barstow and Carmen Tedesco, may be a housewife, but in this lavender bridesmaid’s dress at Barstow’s wedding, she looked every bit the movie star, too.

—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964



It was, she supposed, late afternoon, by the way the sun had moved west: there were no windows in this hut, but the cow dung and mud had started to separate along one wall, creating a sliver of light. About two hours ago, one of the men had untied her and allowed her to pee, and then given her water and some sort of gruel. She had heard enough through the walls that she knew each member of their group had been marched out, one by one, and walked behind some brush and allowed (like her) to relieve themselves at gunpoint. They’d been given their allotment of water and a little of that porridge. Then they were brought back into their huts.

The cut on her stomach was painful, and she wished she could examine it. She wished she could see it. She tried to convince herself it was nowhere near the kid. Too high on her abdomen. She told herself it would have no effect on her baby. But she failed. Already, she feared, the infection was growing worse.

She recalled when they had all heard the first shots that morning. No one had understood the magnitude of what was occurring. She knew the term Billy used for that sort of underreaction: normalcy bias. We suppose the world will continue to spin the way it always has. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing isn’t, in fact, the cataclysm that it is. She was the first to scream, and for a moment, even in her hysteria, clearly Billy had supposed that she was panicking about nothing.

If only she had been…

Now she noticed a flashlight beam and saw one of the captors returning. It was someone new, someone she had never seen before—neither the driver nor the guard from the Land Rover who had brought them here. He knelt before the sleeping pallet on which she was restrained and shined the flashlight up on his face so she could see him more clearly. He had moonstones for eyes and dirty blond hair. He was good-looking, but she would have thought he was drop-dead gorgeous if it didn’t appear as if his nose had been broken at some point and left twisted and bulbous. God, she thought, poor Billy’s nose might look like that someday.

“Good afternoon,” he said, his accent tinged with Russian. At one point, perhaps, an hour ago, she had heard men speaking outside the hut in Russian. He smiled at her. Then he put the handle of the flashlight in his mouth and shined it on her ankles as he unbound them from the post. He scooted forward and untied her hands the same way.

“That should feel better,” he said. He was, she suspected by his carriage, the group’s leader, though how many people he led, she couldn’t say. There had to have been at least eight to ten of them at the camp that morning: two or three for each Land Rover, and at least three or four more to supervise the porters as they ransacked the site. But there may have been others. She just had no idea.

But now she stretched her legs and rolled her wrists, and it felt good. She wondered whether she should only speak when spoken to. That was how she had viewed her first foray from the hut, a few hours ago, when she had been taken outside to relieve herself.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” she said hesitantly.

“I gave your husband some aspirin. For his nose.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re pregnant, yes?”

“Yes.”

“One of my men told me. How many months?”

“Three.”

“The child making you sick?”

Child. It was a peculiar choice of word, and she attributed it to English being his second or third language. But was it really any stranger than the way she and Billy referred to their baby as the kid?

“No,” she said.

“Good. I’m untying you because I want you comfortable. More comfortable. But you can’t leave this hut unless we bring you outside. I hope you are all home soon, including your child.”

“So, this is a…a kidnapping?”

It was odd: now that the flashlight was pointed at the ground, she could barely see his face, and he could barely see hers.

“Yes, this is a kidnapping,” he replied, and there was a lightness to his voice. It was reminiscent of the way she had heard Billy laugh when he was confirming something for his little boy that was obvious to grown-ups. Yes, a starfish needs to be in the water to live. Yes, the sand does stick to our feet when we come out of the ocean. Yes, once upon a time you were as little as that baby. These were all things that Billy had said to Marc when they had been at the Santa Monica beach that summer.

“Are you…” she paused, worried that she shouldn’t be asking any more questions. Perhaps questions were like wishes in fairy tales and she’d been given her one and she’d used it. (No, that wasn’t right. If this were a fairy tale, which it sure as hell wasn’t, wouldn’t she have three?)

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Are you going to untie the others?”

“I untied your movie star friend.”

She knew that he was referring to Katie, not Terrance. A woman. She supposed that also meant the three men were still bound to the sleeping pallets. “Thank you for giving my husband some aspirin. Is he”—and, again, her voice wavered briefly—“in a lot of pain?”