The Lioness(79)
Eva had just turned forty, and she’d been working as a location scout, script supervisor, and production manager on films set in Africa for a decade and a half, including King Solomon’s Mines and The African Queen. Last year she’d shifted gears and worked with Preminger on his epic The Cardinal, which was set (it seemed) on every continent except Africa. Judy, a little younger, was an actress who might have been a very big star—Terrance knew that she was often compared to Gina Lollobrigida, and he saw it in her wonderful sultry eyes, and that thick mane of (tonight) umber-colored hair—but after she went to Kenya to film The Missionaries, her priorities changed. She fell in love with Nairobi and put down roots there. Kept her last name professionally, Caponigro, but married a Brit who had acres and acres of coffee plants. She still worked, just not often and not in the sorts of leading roles casting agents might have expected of her once upon a time. It was rumored that both Eva and Judy had been lovers of Robert Ruark, a big-game hunter and novelist whose fame was so evident—at least in the minds of his publishers—that some of his books used only his last name on the front cover and spine, the type so elephantine it dwarfed the titles. Katie Barstow had heard the two women were in town at the behest of Preminger, who was contemplating a new adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She invited them for drinks because next month was her honeymoon safari and she thought it would be interesting to hear what Monley and Caponigro had to say about the “situation” right now in East Africa. (Situation was the word that was sometimes used by the press, a polite euphemism for upheaval and slaughter.)
Over the summer, Katie had told Terrance a little bit about what David’s father did: something heroic (or at least important) with the OSS in World War II. Now he was with the Foreign Service, whatever that was, and David’s parents had moved to the capital. She’d said that David’s father had expressed some reservations when David had outlined the safari itinerary, but he hadn’t been sufficiently alarmed to encourage them to postpone the trip or change their plan. And, Terrance supposed, David’s father would know. Nevertheless, Katie thought it would be worthwhile getting reconnaissance from two people who had spent serious time in East Africa.
“Kenya isn’t the Congo,” Judy was telling them. She pulled an olive from her martini and popped it into her mouth. “And neither is Tanganyika. Good Lord, the Serengeti is nothing like the Congo. Tanganyika is as safe as, I don’t know, Canada. I’ve even flown in and out of that new airport in Kilimanjaro.”
“My travel agent has us flying into Nairobi,” Katie said. “He didn’t trust that airport. I gather Pan Am doesn’t either.”
“It isn’t L.A. International, but it was fine. I felt perfectly safe. Long paved runway, a tower, a decent bar. What more do you need?”
“But wasn’t that the airport that a bunch of Tanganyika soldiers took over in January or February?” David asked. There was an eddy in his tone that left Terrance wondering if David knew something about the situation in East Africa that the others didn’t. Something clandestine. “According to my father—”
“No,” Judy corrected him. “That was Dar es Salaam. And it was January and it really wasn’t a big deal. They wanted better pay, that’s all. Nyerere—the new president—appealed to the British for some commandos, and it was over in hours. What does your father do?”
“He’s a Washington, D.C., paper pusher. Government. Personnel. Nothing interesting.”
“Well, Washington has a very jaded view of East Africa,” Judy said. “I suppose people there see it all through the prism of the ‘Soviet threat.’?”
David seemed to take this in, stirring his gin and tonic with his pinky. He licked his finger and then pressed, “Okay, the Congo. What do you two know about the rebellion there? Those stories about what the Simbas did to the nuns were sickening.”
“They should sicken you. They should sicken anyone,” observed Eva.
“But not going to Kenya or the Serengeti because of the nightmare in Stanleyville would be like not going to Chicago because there’s violence in Montreal,” Judy reassured them.
“Or steering clear of Madrid because someone was kidnapped in Paris,” added Eva.
“The Congo may get caught up in the Cold War, but I don’t see Nyerere allowing that to happen in Tanganyika,” Judy said.
Out of the corner of his eye, Terrance saw a woman pulling a Kodak with a black wrist strap from her purse and wondered if she’d take a photo of Katie. Of them. She’d need to attach a flashcube to the camera. She was with another woman and two other men, and he supposed they were tourists. “I hear the Soviets are back. I read in the paper they left a few years ago, but now they’ve returned,” he said.
“David used the word rebellion, and I guess that’s fine,” Judy told them. “But it seems to me, it’s more like a civil war.”
“Judy’s right,” Eva agreed.
“And the Russians?” Terrance asked.
“They’re there. But not in big numbers. And they’re not what you’d expect.”
“I’ve never met a Russian soldier,” Terrance told Eva. “I have no expectations.”
“Very sophisticated—the ones in the Congo. Cosmopolitan. At least that’s what I understand. Advisers, mostly. More like spies, some of them. Not a lot of foot soldiers. Educated, erudite, multilingual.”