The Lioness(83)

“Go on.”

In a tone that balanced both sheepishness and pride, he said, “I’m Walt Disney.”

“And this is Disneyland?”

He looked down at his boots. “No. I shouldn’t have been so glib just now. This is most assuredly not Disneyland. This is a place where human beings, if they’re not careful, are going to die.”

“Then what did you mean? The scale of this world?”

He nodded. “Scale, yes. That’s a good word for it. Maybe even the best word. There’s nothing about this land that’s as small as a carnival or as predictable as a carnival.”

“Except those elephants. They were as predictable for you as clockwork.”

“Not really. I have hunches where we’ll see animals. I have experience. My team”—and he motioned at Juma, who was about ten yards away, pointing at the great pachyderms and explaining something to Carmen and Felix—“teases me about my sixth sense. Maybe I have one. But if I do, it’s only because I’ve been out here so many days and nights over so many years that I know what might happen. But I’m still just hoping to keep a lid on the chaos.”

“Was it easier? In the old days? I imagine the groups were smaller when you were hunting.”

“No. It was harder. I or someone in my care—a guest or a gun bearer—was more likely to wind up gored or maimed. Devoured. This is easier.”

“But not as much fun for you? True? Not as manly?” She regretted the last question the moment the three words had escaped her lips. She had meant it to be flirtatious and light: she was teasing him. But it was a mistake, and for a split second she felt it was the sort of horrific and demeaning thing her mother might say. God, was she channeling Glenda Stepanov?

“Hanging around with Katie Barstow and Terrance Dutton and Carmen Tedesco? How could that not be fun?” he responded, and she thought she had dodged his wrath. She hadn’t pressed a bruise, after all. Or he was just being gracious.

“You’re a diplomat, Charlie,” she said.

“Some mornings, I suppose, it isn’t easy for any of us to look in the mirror. Imagine running a fancy-pants gallery in Beverly Hills when your old man fought the Nazis.”

So, she had insulted him. There it was. Quickly she backtracked, a courtesy. “Seriously, we can’t be easy to manage. I didn’t mean anything by that remark. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

But Patton was a hunter, a creature who viewed himself as the very top of the food chain, even if his perch there depended upon a double-barreled .84-caliber rifle. He wasn’t easily mollified. And now she had shown him her belly. “Nothing to apologize for,” he said. “How is that gallery doing?”

“Thriving,” she lied.

Without looking at her, his eyes lost to the shadow of the brim of his hat, he said, “You’ll get an Oscar someday. You delivered those two syllables with utter conviction.”

“You—”

“I just know you’re footing the bill for this dance. That’s all I know. And I, Miss Barstow”—and she understood that he had chosen the title because he wanted to denigrate her husband—“overstepped my bounds. Please forgive me.” He doffed his safari hat to her and then called over to Benjamin to start rounding up the team. He (and once more Katie thought the words had been chosen for her benefit) wanted to “get this show on the road,” a reference to carnivals and traveling road shows.

She felt bad about what she had said, but she was also miffed that Charlie would respond by demeaning David. And she felt something else, the sort of inchoate unease that often precedes a thunderstorm and one attributes merely to the idea that the air is charged. How much did Charlie Patton really know about the finances of David’s gallery? And why? It wasn’t as if the Los Angeles Times or Curator or Galleria had written about the place’s struggles. Art galleries opened and failed all the time. David’s hadn’t been in the news. Had David been discussing his business travails here with Billy, his oldest friend, and Charlie had overheard something?

Yes, she thought, that had to be it.

The idea that he had failed to escape his worries, even here, dismayed her. She felt a stitch of sadness. And so when she climbed back into the Land Rover—the one that this time did not have Charlie Patton riding shotgun—she took David’s hand and squeezed it, ever the faithful, dutiful, and loving wife.



* * *



.?.?.

Katie was aware that her fingers were in pain—she had tried to scratch at Cooper’s face, to claw him—and somehow they had bent back. He had thrown her off him as if she were a kitten and pulled his pistol from his holster, and she put her arms across her face as she rolled in the dust because she knew he was about to shoot her, but then she heard that automatic again, and Cooper yelled, a thunderous roar. She looked up, and he was holding his right hand with his left, and she could see the blood waterfalling from his palm where once there had been fingers. He’d dropped his pistol, and she crabbed to the weapon and picked it up. She’d held pistols before on movie sets, but never one that was loaded. Not even one that was loaded with blanks. So, while the literal weight of the gun didn’t surprise her, the idea that this was a revolver with bullets gave it a heavier, more ominous feel.

She turned around now and there was her brother, standing with the assault rifle, and in his swollen face and half-shut eyes she saw incredulity. Shock. Glenn, the Russian who’d been guarding them, was on the ground too, maybe nine or ten feet away, and he was dead. She could see the way a line of bullets had cut a swath like a bandoleer across his abdomen and chest, turning his khaki shirt red and creating a stream of blood from which a dung beetle was running away like a child from a tsunami. The man’s eyes were still open, lifeless and glazed.