The Lioness Read online

  Also by Chris Bohjalian

  NOVELS

  Hour of the Witch

  The Red Lotus

  The Flight Attendant

  The Sleepwalker

  The Guest Room

  Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

  The Light in the Ruins

  The Sandcastle Girls

  The Night Strangers

  Secrets of Eden

  Skeletons at the Feast

  The Double Bind

  Before You Know Kindness

  The Buffalo Soldier

  Trans-Sister Radio

  The Law of Similars

  Midwives

  Water Witches

  Past the Bleachers

  Hangman

  A Killing in the Real World

  ESSAY COLLECTIONS

  Idyll Banter

  STAGE PLAYS

  Midwives

  Wingspan (originally produced as Grounded)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Quaker Village Books LLC

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph © Horst P. Horst/Condé Nast; scratches © Garder Elena / Shutterstock; lion © Vasya Kobelev / Shutterstock

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bohjalian, Chris, author.

  Title: The lioness / Chris Bohjalian.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021026598 (print) | LCCN 2021026599 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544825 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525565970 (paperback) | ISBN 9780385544832 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.O495 L56 2022 (print) | LCC PS3552.O495 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021026598

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021026599

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544832

  ep_prh_6.0_139899382_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Chris Bohjalian

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Safari

  Prologue

  Safari

  Chapter One: Katie Barstow

  Chapter Two: David Hill

  Chapter Three: Billy Stepanov

  Chapter Four: Benjamin Kikwete

  Chapter Five: Reggie Stout

  Chapter Six: Carmen Tedesco

  Chapter Seven: Terrance Dutton

  Chapter Eight: Felix Demeter

  Chapter Nine: Margie Stepanov

  Chapter Ten: Peter Merrick

  Chapter Eleven: Katie Barstow

  Chapter Twelve: Billy Stepanov

  Chapter Thirteen: Benjamin Kikwete

  Chapter Fourteen: Felix Demeter

  Chapter Fifteen: Reggie Stout

  Chapter Sixteen: Margie Stepanov

  Chapter Seventeen: Terrance Dutton

  Chapter Eighteen: David Hill

  Chapter Nineteen: Carmen Tedesco

  Chapter Twenty: Terrance Dutton

  Chapter Twenty-one: Benjamin Kikwete

  Chapter Twenty-two: Katie Barstow

  Chapter Twenty-three: Reggie Stout

  Chapter Twenty-four: Billy Stepanov

  Chapter Twenty-five: Carmen Tedesco

  Chapter Twenty-six: Terrance Dutton

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Katie Barstow

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Carmen Tedesco

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Benjamin Kikwete

  Chapter Thirty: Billy Stepanov

  Chapter Thirty-one: Carmen Tedesco

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my pod, literal and metaphoric, from 2020, the Year That Satan Spawned, and the first half of 2021.

  When I was hanging on by my fingernails, you gave me your hand. You are my safari.

  Grace Experience Blewer

  Victoria Blewer

  Julia Cox

  Robert Cox

  Todd Doughty

  Andrew Furtsch

  Joan Heaton

  Jenny Jackson

  Stephen Kiernan

  Gerd Krahn

  Laura Krahn

  Brian Lipson

  Khatchig Mouradian

  Hawk Ostby

  Monica Ostby

  Lisa Goodyear-Prescott

  Reed Prescott

  Deborah Schneider

  John Searles

  Stephen Shore

  Adam Turteltaub

  and (yes)

  Horton and Jesse

  Everything I learned, I learned from the movies.

  —Audrey Hepburn

  If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

  —Orson Welles

  THE SAFARI

  Registered Guest List

  MARRIED COUPLES

  David Hill: gallerist

  Katie Barstow: actress

  Billy Stepanov: psychologist and Katie Barstow’s older brother

  Margie Stepanov: homemaker

  Felix Demeter: screenwriter

  Carmen Tedesco: actress

  SINGLE GUESTS

  Terrance Dutton: actor

  Reggie Stout: Katie Barstow’s publicist

  Peter Merrick: Katie Barstow’s agent

  Team Leaders

  Charlie Patton: owner of Charles Patton Safari Adventures

  Juma Sykes: head guide

  Muema Kambona: second guide

  Benjamin Kikwete: porter and guest liaison

  Prologue

  Oh, I can’t speak for the dead. And I won’t speak for the missing. I can only tell you what I think happened. Others—the dead and the missing—would probably have their own versions. Blame, I can tell you firsthand, is every bit as subjective as truth.

  Of course, I am also confident that the missing will never be found: the Serengeti is vast and it’s been years. Years. But Africa is changing. One never knows. Someday it’s possible that some of their bones—a femur that is recognizably human or a skull that was clearly a woman’s or a man’s—will be spotted beside a dirt road where a jackal or hyena or magnificent lappet-faced vulture decades ago finished off what a leopard or lion didn’t. Just think for a moment of the age of the fossils and remnants of ancient man that have been found a little south of where we were in the Olduvai Gorge. Mary Leakey began piecing together the Nutcracker Man only five years before we were there when she saw what looked like two teeth in a jaw. Nutcracker Man lived two million years ago. We went there and (most of us, anyway) died there in 19
64.

  So, perhaps a ranger will discover the bones while tracking a poacher. It could be just that ordinary.

  But let’s be clear. This story was never about Western, privileged tourists or local Maasai or Tanzanians. It was never about rich or poor, Americans or Africans. We were all just people, and most of us had no idea what was happening. We had no idea what to do. We made the best decisions we could, but think of who we were and where we were. The mantra for most of us? Just stay alive. See if, somehow, we might see the sun rise one more time.

  Safari

  CHAPTER ONE

  Katie Barstow

  Hollywood royalty gathered Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Katie Barstow wed Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill. The two of them left afterward for Paris and then the wilds of Africa on a “safari.” Rumor has it that the actress is bringing along an entourage into the jungle that will include her brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Margie Stepanov; her agent, Peter Merrick; her publicist, Reggie Stout; actress Carmen Tedesco and her husband, Felix Demeter; and Katie’s friend and co-star in the still controversial Tender Madness, Terrance Dutton. The little group has nicknamed themselves the Lions of Hollywood—though anyone who knows Katie Barstow or has seen her on the screen understands that she is the lioness in charge of this pride.

  —The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964

  She was watching the giraffes at the watering hole after breakfast, no longer as awed by their presence as she’d been even four days ago, when she’d first seen a great herd of them eating leaves from a copse of tall umbrella acacia, their heads occasionally bobbing up to stare back, unfazed and not especially alarmed by the humans. Their eyes were sweet. Their horns were the antennae on a child’s extraterrestrial Halloween mask. The inscrutable creatures were wary of these humans, but they felt no need to flee.

  They’d just finished breakfast and were still at their camp. Her husband, David, was on her left, and her brother, Billy, was on her right. Both had their cameras out. Terrance was sitting nearby with his notebook on his knees, sketching the creatures. Katie had known that Terrance was as talented a visual artist as he was an actor—her husband loved his paintings—but she was still stunned by how quickly and how remarkably he was drawing the animals they saw. The eyes of his elephant had broken her heart. Earlier that autumn, when they were still in L.A., David had said it was only a matter of time before he could risk giving the man a show. (“He’s a movie star,” she told David when she heard the hesitation in his voice. “He’s a Black movie star,” David had reminded her, and while he was only acknowledging the backlash he might face from some quarters, she had still felt the need to remind him it was 1964, not 1864. His gallery’s fiscal foundation couldn’t possibly be so weak that it couldn’t withstand blowback from racist critics and so-called connoisseurs.)

  The group, all nine of them and their guides, were about to climb into the Land Rovers and start the drive to the next camp, a journey through the savanna that would take three hours if they didn’t stop, but would, in fact, take seven or eight because they expected to pause often for the Serengeti’s great menagerie of animals. You just never knew what you would see and where you might detour. Yesterday, they had been particularly lucky. They had witnessed the great wildebeest crossing at the Mara River: thousands of wildebeest and zebras storming down the sandy banks into the water and attempting to reach the grass on the other side.

  There were five giraffes this morning, three with their legs splayed awkwardly as they stretched their long necks down to the water to drink. She felt a small pang of guilt that she was taking for granted her witness to their presence, animals over fifteen feet tall—their legs alone were taller than she was—with their cream-colored coats and those iconic tawny spots. She wondered at the way her mind was wandering instead to the differences between coincidence and synchronicity. Her brother, a psychologist, had been expounding on the two words over breakfast in the meal tent.

  A coincidence, he had said, was the fact that there were nine Americans on this photo safari, and last month two had been caught in the same end-of-the-world traffic jam that brought freeway traffic to a standstill before the Beatles’ appearance at the Hollywood Bowl: Katie’s husband and Katie’s agent. Though David Hill was nearly thirty years younger than Peter Merrick, the idea that they had turned off their engines and stood smoking Lucky Strikes on the highway beside their cars at almost exactly the same moment near almost exactly the same exit had still been fascinating enough that it had broken the ice their first night in the Serengeti, and led David and Peter to bond in ways that transcended the generation and a half that separated them. (It also gave them something less awkward to discuss than the reality that Katie Barstow, their more obvious commonality, made dramatically more money than either of them, or that they were two big, strapping men who depended upon the earning power of a one-hundred-pound woman with a childhood more freakish than fairy tale who was barely five feet tall.)

  Synchronicity was something more profound, a connection that suggested a higher power was at work. In this case—on this safari—it was the idea that on their second afternoon in the savanna, one of their guides overheard two of the guests discussing Katie’s latest film and the MGM lion that was the first thing a person saw in the theater, and on a hunch drove the Land Rover to the far side of a tremendous outcropping of boulders, one of the kopjes not far from their camp, and there they were: a female lion and four of her cubs. Regal and proud, the cubs content, all of them lounging in the grass beneath the trees that grew beside the rocks. Even when the second vehicle had roared up behind the first so that everyone could see the animals and snap their photos, the mother lion had done little more than yawn. The cubs looked on a bit more intently, slightly more curious, but since their mother wasn’t alarmed, they merely rolled over, stretched their small legs with deceptively large paws, and found more comfortable positions in the grass. The two Land Rovers were barely a dozen yards from the lioness.

  “Katie?”

  She turned now toward David.

  “I think we need to bring a few home,” her husband said, motioning at the giraffes at the watering hole. “And a couple of zebras. We’d never need a lawn service.”

  “The zebras would certainly help. But giraffes don’t eat grass,” she reminded him. They’d just bought a ranch. Or, to be precise, she had just bought a ranch. Thirty acres. It was near Santa Clarita, north of the valley. She’d considered buying something in Malibu, but she’d grown up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a theater kid born to theater parents, and now that she was—and the words simultaneously made her bask and cringe—a movie star, she wanted to steer clear of the mod world that these days marked the sands: the beach houses with their massive windows, circular fireplaces, and Peter Max paintings against the crisp, white walls. She imagined someday she might have a horse. Or horses. One would be lonely. She’d ridden horses in two different movies and enjoyed the experience. She’d felt horrible when she’d watched her stunt double put the animal through some terrifying gallops and then send it to its knees after the creature was, supposedly, shot.

  “Point noted,” David agreed.

  Beside them, Billy was photographing the giraffes with a camera that had a lens so stout it looked to Katie like a club, and his wife, Margie, was staring at the giraffes through binoculars so delicate they reminded Katie of opera glasses. Billy was thirty-five, David’s age and five years her senior, and Margie was thirty-three. Margie had found out she was pregnant in August, and her doctor had thought morning sickness alone was a reason why she shouldn’t go on the safari, but she was game. Said she wouldn’t miss it. This was both her brother’s and Margie’s second marriage. Billy had a four-year-old son at home from his first, but Margie had left no children in her wake when her previous marriage had imploded. Katie knew that she was supposed to want children, and speculated sometimes what it meant that she didn’t. Perhaps sh
e was too ambitious. Or immature. Or selfish. Perhaps it was her hatred of her own parents, who had made her career possible, and yet had also been mercenary and mean and fake. And, yes, cruel. They had not been cruel to each other, which in hindsight was rather surprising, but they had been cruel to Billy and her. (Billy, however, had borne the brunt of the abuse. Most of the real horrors had been inflicted upon him, and it was their mother who was behind the lion’s share of that carnage. How Billy had become who he was, rather than whoever was strangling all those women in Boston, was a mystery to her. But, thank God, he had grown into a pretty gentle therapist instead of a pretty violent monster.)

  Katie’s team at the studio, her publicist, and her agent all expected that someday soon she and David would have a baby. And most of them had mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, at thirty she was already outgrowing “starlet”: how many more times could she play the ingenue? Besides, now that she was married, it would be unnatural not to have a baby. What would her fans think? On the other hand, most of her entourage disliked the idea of her taking time off, given the box office bullion of everything she touched. Even Tender Madness, her movie with Terrance, had done well, despite the inference in one of the scenes at the mental hospital that the pair had kissed after the cut. (They had, though the moment had wound up on the cutting room floor.)