The Lioness(8)

It was, predictably, a disaster. Half the apartments didn’t have candy yet or hadn’t baked treats. The half that did had to find them. And everyone could see that the two kids had been crying (or were crying). They could also see, despite Glenda’s charm as she explained to the neighbors as they opened their doors that the children would be busy tomorrow night at the theater (a lie), that she was a toxic mixture of mania and gin. She was a farce. The other adults were in their dressing gowns and bathrobes, but she was the mess. And when she brought the kids home around ten thirty, after knocking on perhaps fifteen doors, she was furious at what she viewed as their misbehavior and the way they had embarrassed her. She made Katie sleep that night back in her crib instead of her bed, and she placed the heavy wooden extender to the dining room table across the top so she couldn’t escape. She made Billy sleep on the floor of that terrifying coat closet. He was still awake when his father got home, but Roman knew not to rescue his children. Not when Glenda was in one of her moods.

The stewardess passed by Billy as they neared Nairobi, saw his eyes were open, and asked him if he would like anything. There was a slight whisper of French in her accent.

“All good,” he said, which meant, inevitably, that the plane chose that moment to pitch abruptly, and the drink on the passenger’s tray table across the aisle sloshed onto the white table linen. The other passengers who were awake craned their necks as one to stare out the windows. He was relieved that his glass was empty.

“Just a little turbulence,” the stewardess said to him, and she smiled in a way that was knowing and kind. She was no more than twenty-five years old, but she saw through him like glass. An idea came to him: the kind of person who became a stewardess would make one hell of a good therapist.



* * *



.?.?.

Margie had stopped shrieking now that they were in the Land Rover and Katie hadn’t said a word, at least not one that Billy had heard. David had said something about surrendering so no one got hurt, but Juma ignored him, ordering him into the vehicle. Now the guide was fumbling to get the car key into the slot, an uncharacteristic lack of competence, but the moment was brief. Billy looked around, unsure how they had wound up in the seats they were in because it had all happened so fast. But Katie was in the front seat, sharing it with the cooler and the toilet paper and the bags of nuts that Juma always stored there, David and Terrance were in the second row, and Billy and Margie were together in the third, Margie pressed against the right window. The engine started and they were fleeing. They were leaving behind, it seemed, Katie’s agent and her publicist, and Carmen Tedesco—Katie’s best friend in the world, the maid of honor at her wedding—and Carmen’s husband, Felix. They were leaving behind that hunter, Charlie Patton, and his mammoth staff: all those porters who boiled them water for the baths they savored in those canvas tubs, and barbecued the guinea fowl and Thomson’s gazelle that had been shot in some edge of the Serengeti where it was still legal to hunt, and brought to their tents their coffee and hot water first thing in the morning. They were running away like terrified zebras, racing like impalas that had spotted a lion.

And Billy didn’t care, because—whether it was pious or pathetic—all he cared about that moment was getting his wife and his unborn child out of there.

“Poachers?” Terrance asked, but Juma ignored him.

Their guide had just eased the clutch into gear and started to accelerate when the back window and one of the side windows of the Land Rover exploded and Billy felt the glass shards raining upon Margie and him, and something sharp slicing into the back of his neck, just above his shirt collar. Once more, his wife was screaming, and before the vehicle had gone very far—maybe twenty yards, maybe thirty—he felt the back of it wobble like a plane flying through a patch of (a synonym he noticed more and more pilots and stewardesses using these days) rough air. He told Margie to duck, and he may have shouted the word, wrapping himself over her crouching body as if he were a blanket. Juma tried to gun the Land Rover, but it was evident that one of the tires had been shot and he was riding on a rim. He stopped.

“Do we get out and run?” Katie asked.

“Can you outrun a bullet?” Juma asked in return.

Billy held Margie as tight as he could, hoping to quiet her because she was sobbing. Over and over, she moaned, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,” her body timorous and small.

“They won’t kill you,” Juma reassured her. “Stay here.”

Katie turned back to her guests in the second and third rows of seats, her eyes wide but unreadable: Billy couldn’t tell how deep was his sister’s terror, though on the surface she seemed a hell of a lot more stoic than Margie. The five of them watched as Juma climbed out the driver’s-side door of the Land Rover, his hands up as if he were acting—surrendering—in one of Katie’s movies. He was standing there, right beside the vehicle, when they all heard another shot and the glass window beside the door was awash in Juma’s brains and blood, a Rorschach of red, gray, and black, and the body dropped like a shot topi or eland or any of the other beautiful antelopes they’d seen here in the Serengeti. And somehow Billy knew—he just knew, even as his wife started once more to howl—that the poor son of a bitch had been killed by that double-barreled rifle that was meant to bring down game much bigger than a topi or eland. Juma Sykes had been all but decapitated by a goddamn elephant gun.