The Lioness(6)

“I haven’t,” David said finally. “Maybe someday. Africa. Imagine.”

“I’ll get there. Either because I’m making a picture or on my own.”

“Do you worry about all the revolutions? Central Africa, East Africa. I can’t keep the countries straight, but it all feels like insanity.”

“No. I don’t worry.”

He couldn’t decide whether she was brave or naive. The little he knew about Africa was what he’d read over the last few years in the newspapers, and he wasn’t sure he’d finished any one of the articles. “Congo. Kenya. Tanganyika,” he said. “They’re all a blur.”

“The Serengeti doesn’t change. Wildebeest don’t respect national boundaries. They don’t care about borders.”

“You’ve done your homework. I’m not sure I even know what a wildebeest looks like.”

“Imagine a very wise, very slender American buffalo.”

“Wise?”

“They have little beards that make them look like professors.”

“I never had a professor with a beard.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, and he realized that he had inadvertently pressed upon a bruise: the fact that she had not gone to college. Her mother felt she had wasted too much time on the stage and was already desperately far behind the Natalie Woods of the world. College was never an option.

“I have a neighbor with children, so I expect they’ll have an encyclopedia. I’ll stop by and look up wildebeest,” he told her, hoping to convey both that he had clear gaps in his education, too, and he was interested in the things that interested her.

“The wildebeest is less woolly and has much bigger horns than the buffalo.”

“You do know your exotic animals.”

“I do,” she agreed. Then: “If your neighbor doesn’t have an encyclopedia, I have the Pan Am guide to safaris, and it has some wonderful photographs.”

“Thank you.”

“I could bring it next time.”

He nodded. He very much liked the idea that there would be a next time.





CHAPTER THREE


    Billy Stepanov





“Katie lights up every room she’s in—and always has,” says her brother, Billy. Billy, though five years her senior, followed her to California, where today he is a therapist.

—The Hollywood Reporter, March 14, 1964



Someone was shooting, and Billy’s first assumption was that one of the rangers had spotted a lion and was firing into the air to scare it away. Or it was Peter Merrick, Katie’s agent. The older guy had brought a gun to go hunting when the photo portion of this safari was behind them. Maybe he’d seen something. Billy already imagined the rangers berating the fellow for discharging his rifle here in the reserve.

But when he turned, he understood. Or, at least, he understood something. This wasn’t harmless.

It was happening fast, and his wife, Margie, was screaming. There were at least three men, all white, and before Billy’s eyes—before all of their eyes—one of them mowed down the Black ranger who tried to intervene. The porters were falling onto the dry grass, not dead, but terrified, obeying the men with the guns who wanted them on their bellies on the ground right now. Right. Now. One of the men was pointing a double-barreled rifle, the kind that Charlie Patton had said was used to drop elephants, at Muema, the second guide, and motioning for him to join the rest of the staff and lie down on his stomach. It was the last thing Billy’s mind registered before Juma was pushing Katie and Terrance toward the Land Rover and David was dropping his camera. Billy followed them, trying to shield Margie as he herded her inside the vehicle too, his own bulky camera lens bouncing against his chest like a cudgel.



* * *



.?.?.

Only days earlier, he’d been on an airplane. A big one.

He was, in his mind, once more snuffing out his cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest of his seat, flipping down its metal lid, and gazing out the window at the moon. It was nearly full. Soon they would begin their descent into Nairobi. It was roughly three years ago that Dag Hammarskj?ld had died in a plane crash not far from here: somewhere in the Congo.

He glanced at Margie, and she was dozing in her seat, her sleep mask over her eyes. He adjusted her blanket, pulling it over her shoulders.

He liked the 707, though this one was a little long in the tooth. There was a stain on the aisle carpet, and the tray table pitched at an angle that had forced him to watch his scotch (and then his coffee) with care. This was their fourth clipper and their fourth leg, and the first where he hadn’t bothered to eat. He looked at his watch, which was still set to California time. He was so tired that it took him a moment to calculate what time it was in Kenya and remember how long it had been since he and Margie had left L.A. Finally, he figured it out: twenty-seven hours. They had maybe one more hour to go. That was it. Not a minute more. Thank God.

The trip had been a hell of a lot easier for his kid sister and David. They’d spent almost a week in France after the wedding and joined their guests at the gate at the airport in Paris, so this was only their second flight. They were also in first class. Katie was generously paying for everyone’s flights and everyone’s safari, but the first-class cabin on the two legs linking France and Kenya didn’t have enough seats for all of them, and so her other seven guests had only been in the front of the plane from Los Angeles to New York, and then New York to Paris.