The Lioness(84)

Billy ordered Cooper to sit down, but the Russian didn’t seem to hear him: he was too focused on the obliteration of his right hand. And so Billy yelled louder this time, demanding he sit down now, and he fired the gun aimlessly, discharging a couple of bullets with the tiniest squeeze of the trigger, at least two of which punched holes in the side of the Land Rover. This time Cooper listened. He sat. And it was then that Katie saw Terrance. His body was half on and half off an anthill the size of a steamer trunk, his life seeping from him in bloody brooks running downhill into the grass from his side and his stomach. She scurried over to him and rolled him onto his back and rested his head in her lap and then, as she and her older brother surveyed the carnage around them—the dead and the dying, and more real blood than all the fake blood she’d ever seen on a set—she wept.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


    Carmen Tedesco





“I think the animal I want to see most is the warthog. I once saw a movie with a couple of baby warthogs playing in a little watering hole, and they were like puppies,” Carmen told us. Imagine: one week you are Katie Barstow’s maid of honor in Beverly Hills, and the next you are on a safari in beautiful, magical Africa, watching warthogs frolic in the Serengeti mud. Carmen Tedesco is one lucky lady.

—The Hollywood Reporter, October 1964



The acacia offered as much shade as the baobab, and there were no animals lounging beneath its canopy or perched like acrobats upon its branches. The grass was cool, and it would be a fine spot to wait and watch the baobab burn. She had no idea how long the fire would last, but she had to hope it would send tendrils of smoke into the sky for hours. Or that the fates were going to smile on her now, and a search plane would be in the area at the precise moment when she needed one most.

The walk here had tired her, which she supposed had mostly to do with how little she’d eaten or drunk, how weak she was from her wounds, and the stress from the likelihood that she was going to die out here. After all, she hadn’t walked very far: she had always been able to see the baobab. But even the rifle felt heavy on her shoulder or in her arms.

Now she started back, wondering how in the world she would be able to bring Reggie to the acacia. And then, if somehow she could accomplish that task, scavenge sufficient brush and grass to ignite the tree. It just didn’t seem possible. And so she thought of that expression, one foot after the other, and told herself that, for now, she would make it back to the baobab and rest there for a few minutes. She could do that. She counted her breaths as she walked and tried to remain alert. She fantasized she was such a good shot that she could bring the rifle to her shoulder and shoot those fucking vultures that were waiting for Reggie—perhaps for Reggie and her both—to die. But that was childish. They were just being vultures, and if she were one of them, she’d probably be salivating over that pair of dying mammals, too. Hyenas and humans. What a feast.

When she reached the baobab, Reggie’s chin was against his chest, his back against the trunk, his wrecked arm in his lap. She collapsed beside him and closed her eyes while she caught her breath. She was sweating monstrously.

“How do you feel, my friend?” she asked.

When he said nothing, she wanted to believe he was sleeping. She told herself she might hear a small whistle or snore. She wanted to postpone what she knew in her heart was the truth as long as possible.

“Good enough to fall asleep,” she said. “That’s something. You need your rest.”

How long could she keep up the charade? Oh, until she died, too, she suspected. Until she was too weak to fight off the jackals or hyenas or leopards. The lions.

Maybe she should just put the barrel of the rifle into her mouth and make it quick. She’d been perusing the Hemingway African canon in her mind, so why not end it the way Papa himself had? Then there’d be no chance that she’d feel the pluck and yank as the Ruppell’s ate the flesh from her face and her arms.

But, no. She didn’t walk all the way to that acacia and back just to give up.

And maybe Reggie really was in a deep sleep. Dreaming of whatever it was that made him happy. At least she hoped they were happy dreams. Not dreams of Okinawa or the Serengeti. She knew that she herself had far more bad dreams than good ones. Dreams of anxiety and failure and postponement. If she lived, she’d have to talk to Billy Stepanov about that. What it meant that the nightmares outnumbered the pleasant dreams, and how that was the case for most people.

God, where was Billy right now? Billy and Margie and Katie and David and Terrance and Peter? Where was Charlie? Were all of them off the reserve and in some safe house somewhere? She supposed that wherever they were, it sure as hell wasn’t cushy. It wasn’t Katie’s place in the hills outside L.A. with that scrumptious swimming pool.

But it also wasn’t this.

Finally, she did what she had to do. She reached out her left hand and placed it against Reggie Stout’s chest.

And felt nothing.

She ran her fingers up his shirt to his neck and felt the skin there. It was cold. So were his cheeks and his chin beneath his stubble.

She opened her eyes now and lifted his head off his chest. She kissed him. She kissed his dead and lifeless cheek.

“I love you, Reggie,” she said. “I love you. We all did.”



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