The Lioness(94)

“Any sign of the others?”

“Not yet,” said Charlie. “But none of them have shown up yet in Albertville. That’s where the ransom was supposed to be delivered.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “It could mean a thousand things.”

“But everyone else is alive, right? Katie and David and—”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “I hope so.”

She nodded and made the mistake of glancing out the plane window. She saw the rangers and the pilot carrying Reggie’s body: one had his legs and two had his arms and upper body. They were moving slowly in the heat. She looked away and finished off an elephant in a single bite, and then closed her eyes with her head in her hands.





Epilogue





Yes, I did go back to work. I was working again by the summer of 1965.

Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts, but I don’t know if even he believed that. After all, he went to Hollywood, and there is nowhere else in the world where people dream quite so much. I loved my years on the sitcom, and I wouldn’t have gotten the role if Rex hadn’t cast me first in that movie about the college professor who had a ghost in her house. Yardley. That was the name of the ghost and, of course, the movie. That was one of the only comedies Rex ever made, and it wasn’t very good. But it did get me cast in the TV series about the world’s most inept hospital. I had a great time as Nurse Crocker. (General Mills was a sponsor, but Rachel Crocker was a character before the show had a single advertiser. It’s one of those urban legends that my character was named after Betty Crocker as a wink to a corporation.)

Katie didn’t do another film, as you know. I don’t know what destroyed her more—and we talked about it, we really did—the way she felt responsible for so many people dying, or the way she felt David had betrayed her. She wasn’t a recluse, but it was pretty rare for her to appear in the tabloids or fan magazines by, oh, 1970. When I would see her, she never said all that much. I’d do most of the talking. We’d sit around the pool at that really exquisite house of hers and drink this iced tea she loved that came in a jar. Some people thought she was medicated into a stupor or she was living out some strange Norma Desmond reenactment, but she wasn’t. She was just the saddest person on the planet.

I mean, even sadder than Billy. Much sadder. At least he remarried. Katie never did and I never did.

For Billy, thank God, the third time really was the charm, although I think he and Margie would have been happy together for many, many years. And he had that bestseller, that self-help book. The Soul in the Dark. It was the perfect book for the early seventies, and it was so…so honest. So revealing. My God, for a month or two, people actually knew what the word oubliette meant. Telling everyone about that coat closet from his childhood? The way his parents treated him and Katie? Wrenching. And, let’s face it, the book was the closest thing we’ll ever have to a memoir of what happened in the Serengeti, even if it’s not precisely about that. He did his homework, that’s for sure. For years, the Johnson administration and then the Nixon administration covered up the Russian involvement. I read one book that claimed Nina Procenko was a double agent and worked both sides of the street, and another that said, yes, her defection was fake, but then we really did turn her. Either way, Billy worked hard to get the State Department clearances he needed, which seems insane when you think about what kind of book The Soul in the Dark was. But I think it was the first time that a lot of the real reasons for the safari nightmare were ever made public.

Still, it would be another forty years before we’d learn all that nastiness about MK-ULTRA. Do I have the name right? That crazy CIA plan to use LSD to brainwash people. “Mind control.” The things that David’s father did? The people he dosed and the people he tied up for days in the dark? When the writer of that book about it interviewed Katie, she told him the little that David had told her, but David Hill really didn’t know anything. He was…he was a child.

Sometimes, I can’t believe I’m the only one left. I think back on that night I spent in the baobab, and it’s like I’m in a parable or a fairy tale. Some beautiful and complex Maasai fable about the woman who lived a very long time because she burned down the tree that saved her life. Or, perhaps, the tale of the woman who used a tree to save her life—twice. And then killed it.

I don’t know.

As I recall, the tree was dead, which was the only reason I was able to set it on fire. At least I hope it was.

But I’m glad you asked. I have visions of the purple sky that night and when I am most fatigued they come to me, unbidden but not as unwelcome as you might suppose. I know there was all that talk about how we christened ourselves the lions of Hollywood, but I really do see myself in my mind as a lioness on that branch. (God, once upon a time they called Katie a lioness. Do you remember? Before he died, Reggie Stout called me that, and I almost wept.) Once more I am witness to that shooting star and I hear myself asking Reggie if he saw it too. Same with the azure sounds of the birds and the resolute snorting of the wildebeest. We all look forward—at least, I suppose, until you get to be my age—but how we see tomorrow is grounded so deeply in what we lived through just yesterday.

And it was only yesterday, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?