At one point at the wedding, when he was standing near the bar sipping a Manhattan （minus the cherry）， the bartender uncorked another bottle of champagne with a great pop, and a couple of the drunken guests clapped. A tiny, pretty woman with white-blond hair in cherubic curls, an actress whose name escaped him, extended her champagne flute like a street urchin, imploring the bartender for more. Terrance turned away and gazed at the dance floor, and realized that he was one of the only guests between the ages of twenty and seventy who was still sober. Certainly, the dancers were feeling no pain. Even Glenda Stepanov, the toxic witch who somehow had birthed a lovely creature like Katie Stepanov, was tipsy: she kicked aside her heels as she was twirled around the floor by Katie’s agent, Peter Merrick. And Terrance felt, as he did often, at once absolutely invisible and an awkward, flagrant outsider.
* * *
.?.?.
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here,” Terrance said to the guy behind him with the pistol and the rifle hanging off his shoulder. It was a trial balloon, an attempt at conversation. It couldn’t hurt to remind their captors that the five Americans in the Land Rover were human beings, too. At least that’s what he was thinking when he turned around and opened his mouth. Now that he’d heard his voice, he thought how being human didn’t necessarily help in the United States, and it probably wasn’t an especially compelling reason to keep someone alive here in the Serengeti. Nevertheless, when the guard just glared at him and said nothing, Terrance decided to press: “My name is Terrance. I’m guessing you don’t want to tell me yours, but I’m Terrance.”
“Stop talking,” he said in that accent, and then he leaned forward and placed the pistol against the side of Terrance’s skull. He continued slowly, enunciating carefully, though his accent never wavered. “Say one more word and your brains will be on the back of the seat ahead of you.”
He felt Katie’s fingers on his forearm, pressing hard into the skin. He got the message. He put up his hands in a sign of surrender, his heart thumping hard now in his chest, and the fellow pulled back the gun. He looked satisfied.
Outside the vehicle, no more than fifty yards away, Terrance saw a dozen elephants grazing, and one giant with great tusks looked up at the vehicle, no doubt trying to decide whether it represented a danger. Well, Terrance thought, not to you, old friend. Not to you.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Felix Demeter
Our inside sources tell us that Oscar-winning director Rex Demeter is no fan of his son Felix’s latest film. “He thinks he’s Ben Hecht, he thinks he’s Billy Wilder. He’s not. At least not yet. He thinks because I’m his old man he automatically has some writing chops,” Rex was overheard saying while holding court and savoring the lobster bisque at Fred and Wally’s on Wilshire.
—Movie Star Confidential, July 1962
Felix tried to stop shaking, but he couldn’t. He could feel the blood in his head, in his temples; he guessed he could feel it everywhere. He was hot and he was humiliated, but none of that mattered quite as much as the fact he was terrified and his body was trembling. Two of the men who had thrust them into the second Land Rover were in the vehicle with them, one driving and one in the back with a couple of guns. He had the taste of his vomit in his mouth, and there was a tendril still staining his shirt that he had tried and failed to swipe to the floor, and while it might not in fact have been stinking up the whole rig, he sure as hell could smell it. He supposed that Carmen could too. She was gently holding his hand and stroking it, but she couldn’t look at him—or she wouldn’t look at him—and he couldn’t blame her. But he hadn’t been able to help himself. He just hadn’t. He had seen people killed. Shot. There were those rangers. There was poor Juma. And maybe Charlie Patton. God, he had thought they were about to kill him （and he thought they still might）。
The two Land Rovers were starting away from the camp in a small convoy. Behind them, the camp was being ransacked. The attackers didn’t seem to be disassembling it; they were just taking the things they wanted or needed. His first morning in the Serengeti, Felix had supposed tearing down the camp would be a monumental task, but Patton had told him that with a good crew, the village could be created and taken apart in a couple of hours. （This was, Patton had implied, a good crew.） Three or four of the crazies from Russia or Romania or wherever had been ordering Patton’s African team around when the Land Rovers were leaving, and he had no idea whether the interlopers had the slightest idea what they were doing, but it probably didn’t matter: by lunchtime, they would have stripped the camp of its assets.