The Lioness(47)

He was taking small comfort from the fact that he was pretty sure Billy had heard the Russian yelling and the jeep or the Land Rover driving away, but nothing else. Margie’s hut was beside his, but Billy’s hut, thank God, was farthest away. It wasn’t likely that the woman’s husband had heard her sobbing; he hadn’t made the connection between her cries and the commotion. He probably thought she was still in her hut too.

With some of the Russians having left—including that new guy, their leader—Terrance supposed the odds were even better if he could take down the one now waiting for him to unzip his fly. How many guards remained, including this character? Two? No more.

So, this might be his best shot. His one shot. And he’d heard Charlie Patton say often enough their first days here in Africa that when you had your one shot in the Serengeti, you damn well better take it.



* * *



.?.?.

The group from L.A. had caught up with Katie and David at the airline’s gate at the airport in Paris. Terrance had seen people gawking, some with adoration for Katie, some a little annoyed that this contingent from Hollywood was garnering such attention from the boarding agents and the stewardesses who were soon to strut down the jet bridge ahead of the passengers and prepare the cabin. They had at least an hour until they’d board.

Usually people in France cared less that he was Black, though he knew the French had their own issues with pigment: Algeria had only clawed its way free of France two and a half years ago, and both countries had been badly scarred by the war—though, inevitably, it was the Algerians who had lost more. Much more. Now, however, as he watched a few people get out their cameras, he decided to give them all a treat: when Katie stood on her toes—a ballerina almost en pointe—to kiss him, he turned toward the crowd with their Kodaks and put his hands on her shoulders exactly the way he had in Tender Madness. They kissed on the lips in that scene, though the kiss itself was cut. Of course. As was the rest of the scene. But these travelers who were shooting them now would look at their prints after they had been developed and recall that scandalous moment from that controversial movie. Terrance Dutton and Katie Barstow, together in real life! Kissing—and Katie on her honeymoon! Surely the gossip was true! Surely!

“My God, you look wonderful,” she said to him. “You’ve been traveling forever, and you still look fantastic.”

“So do you,” he told her. A white woman’s lips on his cheek; a Black man’s hands on her shoulders. Merely salacious and newsworthy at a Paris airport in 1964. But years ago, back in Tennessee, it would have gotten his grandfather killed. It would have gotten his father, at the very least, beaten. God, the things they whispered about Dorothy and Preminger, and that was Hollywood just a couple of years ago.

When they pulled apart, he shook David’s hand, and then the honeymooners started inquiring about their first two flights and how they were bearing up. After all, they still had a long way to go. And while the seven new arrivals in France had spent much of the last day traveling from California, the newlyweds had been walking the Seine and savoring Notre Dame. Sleeping late in their suite at the Hotel Lutetia. But, almost as one, the guests from America all said they were fine, though Billy Stepanov, ever solicitous, wanted to find a seat for his pregnant wife, and Peter Merrick wanted to find a bar.

“There’s one about six gates down,” David told the agent. “We have time. I’ll join you.”

And, just like that, the sexes separated, as if this were a Gilded Age dinner party, where the men went to one room to drink and smoke, and the women to another to…to do the exact same thing, minus the cigars and the serious booze. The six men left Katie and Carmen Tedesco and Margie Stepanov in orange Naugahyde seats at the gate, where they insisted they were content, and went to the lone bar in the concourse. Terrance and Peter took over a corner of the ebony balustrade near the window so they could appreciate the sun, both standing, while the other four men took the last empty table. Terrance ordered a martini and Peter a shot of Johnnie Walker, neat. There Terrance asked the agent about his plans to stay an extra week in Africa with their safari leader, Charlie Patton.

“I figured, what the hell?” Peter answered. He had both his forearms on the bar, the fingers of one hand around the glass, and, as he often did, Terrance saw a sketch or a painting—in the man’s big fingers beside that squat tumbler of Scotch, and the reflection of the glass on the bar. “I used to hunt. Not much lately. Not at all in the last three years.”

“Suppose you kill a lion. Will you have the head shipped back to L.A.? Is that still done?”

“That’s a big supposition. Bagging a lion? Might be above my pay grade.”

“A zebra then?”

“Ship the skin back? I doubt it. Maybe if my ex-wives didn’t hate me, I would: have it turned into handbags for them. When I hunted in America, it was to be with my father and my grandfather. Be outside. In the wild. The woods? A cathedral for my grandfather. And I actually like deer. The taste. I have very fond memories from my youth of eating venison at my grandfather’s in Montana.”

“From a deer you shot.”

He nodded. “Or one my grandfather shot. And Charlie Patton? He’s a legend. He used to hunt with Hemingway. Taught Robert Ruark a bunch. So, when I heard that he was the outfitter that Katie had booked, it seemed a natural.”