The Lioness(63)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


    Benjamin Kikwete





“Some of my crew? Fathers and sons. The boys follow their dads into the wild. I view my cooks and porters and gun bearers—each and every man, whether he’s forty-five or fourteen—as if he were my own brother,” said Patton. “Trust me, they’ll take excellent care of that crowd from La La Land.”

—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964



The body, Benjamin’s grandmother had told him, will wither, but the soul is a flower that only blooms brighter with age. You can’t see the soul in a person’s eyes, as some people suggested, because they will grow cloudy and blind. Rather you see the soul in a person’s whole face. Look at the mouth (even one that lacks teeth, because teeth aren’t maps of either happiness or fortitude), and look at the nose and the rivers of lines in the skin, and (yes) look at the eyes. But see those eyes as only one part of the map of the soul.

Benjamin stared at each of the faces of the men in the lorry, trying to gauge who had the soul—no, who had the stomach—to throw themselves at the two men, one with a rifle and one with a machine gun. An AK-47. In some he saw fear, in others resignation. He wished he saw rage.

“Yes, I agree. You want to be a rhino, not a goat,” Muema was saying quietly to him, the older man’s lips barely moving. “But you need to think like a man, not a boy.”

“Waiting for them to shoot us all in a gorge? How is that manly?”

Muema tapped his temple with the tip of his finger and murmured, “This isn’t the moment. You’ll know your moment.”

You’ll know your moment. It was an expression Charlie Patton used. You’ll know your moment when to shoot, usually. But Benjamin had heard him use it in other contexts as well when he was speaking to guests. When it was your moment with a woman. When it was your moment to finish the gin. When it was your moment to leave.

And then, and it felt like a sign, the lorry stopped, and the two men with guns stood up and raised their weapons. He could feel it: his moment was coming. The driver climbed out and took a cardboard box from the passenger seat. He placed it on the ground, reaching inside and handing out to the prisoners in the back the bags of potato chips that Charlie Patton’s cooks had planned to make part of the lunch for the guests.

Benjamin opened his and nearly emptied the bag in a minute. Muema told him to savor them, and to take comfort in the fact they were being fed. This seemed further evidence that they weren’t going to kill them. But Benjamin wanted to be ready for what was about to happen next: he could visualize it all perfectly in his mind’s eye as if, yes, it was a movie. He saw the driver was planning to fill a pair of canteens from the water jug he had in the footwell of the passenger seat, and was likely going to bring those to the captives next. And that would be his moment. Insurrection. He would lean over the side of the lorry for the canteen, but instead of taking it, he would grab the driver’s wrist and jump over the side of the truck. He’d wrap his manacled hands around the guy’s throat. He’d use the driver as a shield and threaten to snap his neck. There were a dozen prisoners. Two men, even one with an AK-47, couldn’t shoot that many attackers before the swarm engulfed the lowly pair like a pack of wild dogs.

And now the driver was approaching, and so Benjamin angled his body and put both hands, though bound, on the side rail, and prepared to hurl himself onto his captor.



* * *



.?.?.

“You’ll know your moment,” Charlie Patton was telling this Russian colonel. The Russian spoke English fluently. Over the course of the past two days, Benjamin overheard that the fellow’s father had worked for Molotov in his second stint as minister of foreign affairs in the 1950s, and one result was that his son had gotten a cushy post for three years at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., and the official’s daughter had been allowed to exhibit her paintings in America. When Molotov’s star burned out in 1956, the children had already discovered the benefits—the colonel had used the word perks, a term that Muema had defined for Benjamin later—of living in America, even though the son admitted that he dutifully returned to Moscow within months of their father’s fall from grace. His sister, he said, had defected and remained in the United States.

Now Patton and the Soviet officer were talking about the moment when the colonel would collect his elephant. The plan was to head tomorrow into a part of the reserve where Patton suspected there would be a sizable herd. Viktor Procenko and his group already had bagged the other four of the big five: they had a lion head, tusks from a rhino, a leopard hide, and two sets of buffalo horns. Benjamin had just turned fourteen, and this was the first time he had accompanied his father as a gun bearer on one of Patton’s safaris. He’d met Patton before in Nairobi but had never traveled with him into the Serengeti.

The colonel was one of five communists that Patton had in his shooting party. Benjamin had heard them referred to as soldiers one day and advisers the next. Procenko’s eyes were a deep blue, and his hair had just started to recede. He carried himself more like an American than a Russian, in Benjamin’s opinion, a testimony both to his swagger and his refinement. He moved seamlessly between Russian and English, and even knew some Swahili, Kikongo, and French from the time he had served in the Congo. And, Benjamin’s father told him, Procenko was one of the few guests he had ever seen who was a better drinker than Charlie Patton.