The Lioness(5)

It was only when David met Katie again in California, years later, that he understood how mistaken he’d been and how profoundly he had underestimated her. She was a good actress at least in part because of the scars and wounds from her childhood, and because, yes, she had indeed seen those World War II veterans without arms and she had wept alone in her bedroom after she had watched the footage from the death camps in a newsreel at the cinema. She’d told him on their first date in Hollywood that her parents had distant cousins—third cousins, maybe even fourth, she really didn’t understand the genealogical terminology for relatives that many persons removed—who had been killed by the Nazis in Russia. They were dining in a dim, candlelit corner of the restaurant. They had been brought there through the back alley and then through the kitchen. It was the only way that Katie Barstow could have even a semblance of privacy. The head chef and a chief waiter had bowed deferentially, despite the chaos in the kitchen, as the ma?tre d’ had escorted them through the madness. But still, Katie had warned him that their pictures would be snapped the moment they finished dinner and left the restaurant, returning to the alley, where David had surreptitiously been allowed to park. She prepared him to squint against what she called a galaxy of exploding suns: the flashbulbs.

“Why Barstow?” he asked her, after the sommelier had uncorked the second Chianti. The fellow smiled without opening his mouth as he poured, the grin all lips and no teeth. “Your parents were never blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings, despite all that hearty Russian blood coursing inside them. Inside you.”

“No,” she agreed. “They were lucky.”

“My father thought it was madness, but he’s always been very clear: don’t underestimate the Russians. Not ever. The Soviets are much better at spying than we’ll ever be. He says they’re a far more insidious foe than the Nazis, who quite literally wore their horribleness on their sleeves.”

“Really? They’re that good?”

“According to my father,” he said. He knew not to tell her any more. At least not yet. He supposed that he’d take some suspicions to his grave. “So, tell me: why?”

“Why did I change my name or why did I change it to Barstow?”

He shrugged. “Both, I guess.”

“It was the studio’s idea. When they signed me. They wanted a name that sounded more vanilla.”

“More American.”

“I suppose. And yes: less Russian. Not Russian.”

“And they came up with Barstow?”

She sipped her wine and her lips curled ever so slightly—and there it was, the enigmatic smile that launched a thousand magazine covers. “I did. It’s that little city on Route 66. We drove through it when we were coming to California. My mother and I.”

“There are a lot of cities on Route 66.”

“Ah, but only one with an ostrich farm.”

“You went there?”

“To the ostrich farm? Yes! Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“An ostrich has three stomachs and only two toes on each foot. They’re seven feet tall and can run forty miles an hour.”

“Why not Katie Ostrich?” He had been kidding, but she seemed to think about it.

“The phonetics are wrong. And it sounds fake.”

But then she elaborated on how she loved movies in which there were exotic animals, and how even now she was a little jealous of Mia Farrow and Elsa Martinelli and Deborah Kerr because they had all filmed movies in Africa.

“Hatari is a terrible movie,” he’d said, afraid the moment he had spoken that he had offended her because she might know someone in the cast or the crew. Hollywood was a surprisingly small community. God, for all he knew, her friend Terrance Dutton was in it.

But she had agreed with him. “In all fairness, I’ve made some real stinkers, too. But think about it: Elsa was on the set with hippos and lions and—don’t laugh—ostriches. And the ostriches weren’t on a fenced-in farm in a part of the world where they don’t belong. They were in Africa, where they’re supposed to be.”

“You’ve never been to Africa?”

“No, have you?”

He hadn’t. He wanted to suggest that it would be fun to take her there someday, but the gallery hadn’t gotten off to a great start. It was barely holding its own, and the bank wasn’t about to extend a penny more credit: not to the business and not to him. And his parents certainly weren’t going to lend him the money: whatever the hell his father had done with the OSS and did now with the CIA—personnel, really?—it wasn’t lucrative. Even if it was important, you didn’t get rich beating the Nazis or trying to outwit the communists unless you were a defense contractor. His parents simply didn’t have the kind of cash that he needed sitting around. The two of them had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954 because his father’s responsibilities demanded that he be there full-time, but he hoped to retire in three or four years. He was now, at least ostensibly, in personnel and training. Nothing clandestine, he’d insist, a lot of paper pushing. But David suspected there was more to it than that. Mind control. Brainwashing. He’d overheard a little one time when he’d visited his parents in Washington, and he’d seen the manila folder his father had tried to hide in a newspaper after breakfast. Regardless, one moment his old man would be talking about East Berlin or Vietnam, and the next his vision of a little place on a golf course in Sarasota, Florida, where he and his wife could live out their days, always with a brooding aside about how little money he had been able to squirrel away. Apparently, it was going to be a photo finish to see what happened first, after he retired: he and his wife died or they went broke.