“Have you ever climbed Kilimanjaro?” Reggie asked him. He presumed the answer would be yes. He was just making small talk.
“No. I tried, but I got sick at around eighteen thousand feet. Too much altitude,” the young man said.
“Eighteen thousand feet? You were so close!” said the actress. “You were only thirteen hundred feet from the summit! That’s heartbreaking!”
The ranger was tall and slender, and Reggie supposed he was even younger than he looked. He might not even be twenty. “Reaching the summit? Wasn’t worth dying.” He was smiling.
Reggie turned toward Carmen. “You know the height of Kilimanjaro?”
“I told you: I know lots of things I’ll never need. You watch. By the end of this safari, you’re going to think I’m wasting my time as an actress.”
“Oh, I’d never think that.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be the first.” Then she raised an eyebrow and said to the ranger beside her, “I think you showed excellent judgment. You are absolutely right, and I was absolutely wrong: tagging the top of a mountain isn’t worth anyone’s life. I’m not sure even Hemingway scaled Kilimanjaro, and he used its name in that short story of his.”
The ranger nodded, and Muema joined them. “Hemingway,” he murmured thoughtfully.
“Have you read him?” she asked.
“I have. Have you read Chinua Achebe?”
Reggie had heard of the African writer but knew nothing about him. Would Carmen surprise him yet again by having a paperback copy of one of the man’s books with her on the safari?
“No,” she said. “Should I?”
The guide shrugged good-naturedly. “Start with Things Fall Apart. It may give you a different appreciation for Africa. When I read Hemingway? I see only a…a foreigner’s view of this land. I don’t see the people I know. I see only the people who come here.”
“White people?” Carmen asked.
There was a moment when everyone went quiet: Reggie knew Carmen had meant nothing audacious with her two-word question, but he could see how she had put the guide in an uncomfortable position. So, Reggie thought he would jump in and joke about the hubris of Western tourists to take the guide off the hook, but Muema said placidly, “Yes. The people who came here long ago and stayed and the people who come here now and visit. The thing I think you will enjoy about Achebe? You will see instead the people who have been here forever. You’re meeting the animals on this safari. Oh, you’re meeting me and Juma and Benjamin. But with Achebe? You’ll meet lots of us. And you will meet us”—and here he grinned in a fashion that was almost mischievous—“when we aren’t simply trying to keep our clients from getting eaten.”
* * *
.?.?.
And now Carmen’s husband, Felix, was no longer whimpering: he was vomiting. It was either the actual sight of a man’s head all but shot from its body or the ramifications of what the guide’s decapitation might mean for all of them, but Felix had now gone from simpering like a little boy to disgorging his breakfast onto the ground, his back rippling like a moving snake as he heaved. One of the men who had shouted at gunpoint to lie down put his foot on Felix’s back to flatten it and pointed the rifle at his head. He was wearing what might have been military-grade hiking boots.
He shouted something about Felix to one of his associates, who laughed, and this time the language—not merely the accent—definitely sounded Russian. Reggie even thought he heard a word that he knew from Carmen’s picture about the Romanovs: mertv. Dead. And so Reggie had every expectation that poor Felix was about to get killed too. But then that very ranger who hadn’t made it to the top of Kilimanjaro, a young man who might still have been a teenager, appeared from behind the green dining tent, his own rifle at his shoulder, aiming. He might have shot one of their attackers; he might have shot the guy whose boot was pressing Felix’s spine into the earth. But he was dropped first, when another of their assailants fired at him, ripping a line of holes through his uniform shirt from his collar to the buckle of his belt.
CHAPTER SIX
Carmen Tedesco
Starlet Carmen Tedesco laughs about it now, but she admits that when her sister cheerleaders trapped her in a locker in ninth grade and called her “brainiac,” she felt like an outsider. “It was just a hazing initiation, a rite of passage,” she says, sounding a wee bit like a college professor, “but back then? I felt like a sardine that nobody much cared for.” Nevertheless, she credits the moment with turning her from sports to the stage. She left the cheerleading squad and auditioned for the school musical. “I wanted nothing to do with cheerleaders and athletes after that,” she told us. “Nothing at all.”