The Lioness(74)

* * *



.?.?.

It was still dark inside the hut when they came for him, waking him roughly, but when they brought him out into the boma, he saw the morning sky was rolling in like the tide. There was a shimmering band of orange to the east, and for a moment he studied the silhouettes of tree branches, some pendulous and some haggard, all potentially lethal. You just never knew here.

He could see by the light of the fire in the center of the boma that Terrance had been beaten too, his eyes slits, one cheek swollen, and a gash on his chin. Had he ever played a boxer? If so, his was that face after a fifteen-round TKO. But Katie, thank God, looked fine. Tired and scared, but it didn’t look like she had been hurt. Neither she nor Terrance was bound, and Billy was relieved that they didn’t seem to have any plans to tie him up again, either. The guard told him not to speak—not to say one single word. Billy nodded, supposing that Margie and David would be escorted from their huts any second now, but when a minute or two had passed and there was no sign of his wife or his friend, he started to grow anxious.

“Where’s Margie?” he asked. “And David?”

Instead of answering him—or, perhaps, it was an answer—the creep jabbed him in his back with the butt of his rifle, hitting with surgical precision the spot that was most wounded and tender, and sending him to his knees with a gasp. He looked up, a beaten dog, confused, and one of the other Russians came over to him and squatted like a baseball catcher in front of him. He spoke very quietly.

“Your wife is fine. But she had a miscarriage. She’s safe. She’s in a house outside the reserve with running water and clean sheets. Do you understand?”

He absorbed the news: his wife was alive, their baby was gone. The kid. No, the kid wasn’t gone. Gone was the wrong word. The kid was dead.

But Margie was safe. No, she was alive. Again, words. There was a difference, and the difference mattered. She wasn’t safe. None of them were safe. “You’re sure she’s okay?” he asked, the short sentence catching in his throat.

“Yes. Completely sure.”

“But the baby—”

“The baby’s dead.”

He thought how he’d never told Marc that he had a half sibling on the way. He hadn’t told his ex-wife yet, either. He felt another of those ripples of pain in his back that caused him to grimace, and the Russian seemed to mistake the flinch for grief. “Be a man, Billy Stepanov,” he said. “You can have another baby when you get home.”

“It was my back,” Billy said defensively, but now he was sniffling back tears. He didn’t want to cry, but he could feel the tears rising up inside him as readily as the bubbles floated up from the bottom of Katie’s pool when he and Marc had played there just a couple of months ago and made faces at each other underwater.

“I see.”

“And David?” Billy asked, fighting hard not to choke when he voiced those three short syllables.

“We had to shoot him. He’s dead too.” The Russian spoke so casually that the awfulness of the revelation took a moment to register. He’d revealed the fact that they’d murdered David Hill—Billy’s brother-in-law and his oldest friend, a boy he’d grown up with in New York City—with the same offhand ease an airline gate agent might tell a passenger they’d be boarding the plane a few minutes late.

“Why?” Billy stammered, but now he was weeping. He could feel the wetness on his cheeks and his nose was a melting glacier, as his earlier conjecture came back to him: perhaps this whole thing hadn’t begun because Katie was a movie star. David’s father was CIA. So, perhaps, David himself was, too, the son joining the “family business” just as Katie had. And these Russians knew about David and that was really what mattered. Billy recalled that Russian defector. Nina Whatever. The painter. Maybe David or David’s father had orchestrated the defection, and this was some sort of payback.

Either way, now his friend was gone. Just…gone.

“Why?” the Russian repeated, his tone calm and Socratic. “Because he did something stupid. But, to be honest, he was always going to be an inconvenience. I have a feeling he didn’t know enough about the things that might have made him valuable alive and knew too much about things that made him too dangerous to live.”

Billy looked across the boma at his sister, and it was clear that she had absolutely no idea. Her hair was even brushed. But, still, he had to ask. He had to be sure. He sniffed back a runnel of mucus and gathered himself as best he could. “Does Katie—”

“No. Your sister doesn’t know. It didn’t make sense to tell her since she needed to look her best for a Polaroid picture. She needed to be happy to write a note for us.”

“A note saying—”

“Saying you would all like to go home, so please pay the fucking ransom.”

“And Terrance? Did you tell him?”

“Your Black actor friend? Yes, he does know. And he has been instructed—as I am instructing you—not to tell your sister. Are we clear, Billy Stepanov?”

He rubbed his eyes and wiped his face with his fingers. “Where does she think David is?”

The guy was exasperated, and for a moment Billy cowered like a dog that feared a beating, a mendicant about to be rebuffed. But the Russian just rolled his eyes. “With Margie Stepanov,” he said. “With your wife. This morning I told Katie that her husband had a fever and we wanted to take care of it before it became something serious. We told her that we sent him to the same safe house as your wife, where one of our doctors can look after both of them.”