The Lioness(50)

“Make a sound and I kill you,” he told him. He didn’t recognize his voice: he sounded winded himself and more than a little crazy.

But the guy nodded sheepishly, gasping for air and curled up in a ball with his hands on his crotch. Beaten, it seemed. Absolutely beaten.

“Now stand up,” Terrance commanded. He didn’t move, and so Terrance repeated himself. “Get the fuck up.”

He rolled onto his hands and knees and gingerly pushed himself to his feet. “You’re Russian,” Terrance said. “Why the fuck have you kidnapped us?”

The fellow was quiet and rubbed at his neck.

“Tell me,” Terrance hissed. “Answer my question.”

The guard seemed to be formulating his response. But then his eyes moved just enough that Terrance could see them even in the dusk, and he gave Terrance a tight-lipped smile. He brought one finger to his lips, the universal sign to be quiet. For a second Terrance thought there must be a wild animal behind him, a leopard or a lion, but would that have made the guard smile? Not likely.

Which was when he heard the dual clicks, a sound he knew only from movies, but a sound he knew well: it was a rifle reloading. It wasn’t a big hungry cat over his shoulder, it was something that was, arguably, much, much worse.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


    David Hill





David Hill laughed when he was asked about the artists whose modern paintings grace the main room of his gallery. “Reefer madness, I call them,” he said, because they reflect a sensibility that can only be called marijuana chic. One critic who is particularly dismissive told us in confidence, “The people who would like them listen to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but they don’t have the thousands of dollars for paintings like these. Even Hill’s movie star friends—people like Katie Barstow—aren’t buying them.”

The one exception might be the lone painting in the show by the Russian defector. But even that has left us all wondering: is she really a defector or is she a spy? Now that could be the plot of Katie Barstow’s next picture!

—The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 1964



His knees hurt from being straight for so long and his shoulders ached from having his hands tied over his head. It wasn’t that they were stretching his shoulders so far: he could rest his hands on his forehead when he wanted. But, over time, they had grown sore. And the twine cut into his wrists if he moved his arms the wrong way. Had they restrained the others this way? What the hell were they thinking?

God, his father, who took pride in whatever the hell he actually did, never endured anything like this. He pulled strings, yes, but never the kind that cut into his own skin while he was kept tied up in the dark. Had he ever worked anywhere but New York or Washington, D.C.? No. Of course not. He might have moved spies around the chess board, or he might only have analyzed the findings of the chess pieces; either way, he wasn’t in harm’s way quite like this. Mostly, David suspected, he was involved with something shady involving brainwashing and drugs—or, to be precise, drugs to wash brains—and probably at the sort of distance that would always give him plausible deniability. That was the new CIA phrase, and he’d heard even his own mother use it.

But then, as far as David knew, his father had also never made the mistakes he himself had. Jesus Christ, he was an idiot.

He stared up into the dark, wondering where they had taken Margie. At first, he had thought it was Katie, but no, that was Margie he had heard crying. It wasn’t that he recognized her sobs, because he had never actually heard them; it was just that he knew they weren’t Katie’s.

But then, he’d never heard Katie cry either. At least not in real life. At least not like that. Thank God. But he had heard her cry in the movies.

He tried to stay calm by thinking about his breathing. Slow, steady inhalations. But as the sun was beginning to set, it was growing harder. He’d been bitten by countless mosquitoes that afternoon, and already the bites on his forearm were itching. He hoped the itch would be the least of his problems. In some ways, the bugs were the worst of the torture—worse even than the aches and pains from being restrained by his wrists and his ankles, and fearing the small animals that he was sure would emerge in the dead of night to gnaw at his flesh.

No, they wouldn’t make them sleep like this. Surely, they would untie them for the night, because no one, not even an idiot American, would try to escape in the dark in the Serengeti. He told himself they would come for him any moment now and feed him his supper, let him relieve himself outside, and then order him to stay in the hut until the morning. They wouldn’t bind him again. They wouldn’t bind any of them again. They’d post a guard outside in the boma, and the guard would sit by the fire and watch the huts to be sure that no one exited them.

But no one would. You’d have to be mad.

He wanted to call out to Katie to reassure her that they would be fine. He wanted to comfort Billy, because he supposed this must be a special kind of agony for him: David knew about the closet and Billy’s childhood demons. He wanted to apologize to Terrance, who wasn’t related to any of them and just happened to be one of Katie’s close friends and, thus, had wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But he knew that he couldn’t do any of that. He didn’t dare.



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