“Which, I suppose, will be easier than a rhino.” In truth, Benjamin hadn’t thought the rhino had been all that difficult to find and kill. They’d had to crawl a long while on their bellies, but the creature had never known what hit him. Never turned and charged. Procenko was a good shot.
“Don’t underestimate an elephant, Viktor.”
The colonel raised an eyebrow. “I told you, Charlie Patton: I always know my moment.” Then he leaned over and clinked his glass against the hunter’s and said, “Drink up. That bottle won’t finish itself.”
* * *
.?.?.
But Benjamin did not jump. He didn’t hurl himself over the side of the lorry and attempt to wrestle the driver to the ground. He would have; he knew in his heart he would have, despite the reality that his hands and ankles were bound. It wasn’t cowardice that kept him on his rear in the back of the truck. It was Muema. The guide had listened to him and knew he was planning something, and with a strength that momentarily caught him off guard, Muema had grabbed his left wrist in both his hands and held him so firmly that he couldn’t rise to his feet. Muema had pressed him into the base of the cargo bed.
And now the moment had passed. Muema gave him the canteen and Benjamin took one swallow, what he supposed was his share of the warm, coppery water, and then passed it to the next man.
“You shouldn’t have stopped me,” he told Muema.
“You would have been dead in a heartbeat.”
“Well, we may all be dead in a few hours. What difference does it make?”
Muema shook his head. “No, they’re not going to kill us.”
“Don’t try and reassure me.”
“I’m not. They just fed us—”
“To keep us calm with false hopes.”
“I was listening to those two,” Muema said, and he nodded at the guards in the back of the truck with them. “They were talking about Shinkolobwe.”
Benjamin shook his head. “I have no idea where that is.”
“It’s a mine. Or was a mine. Uranium. It’s in the Congo.”
“And you think they’re taking us there?”
“It’s far, so I don’t know. Maybe the Simbas have gotten control. But if not to Shinkolobwe, then to a place like it. Another mine that the Simbas have taken. Maybe one closer.”
“To put us to work.”
Muema nodded. “The Soviets talk a good game when they speak of the rights of workers, but when it comes to a uranium mine on this continent? We have no rights. We’d be better off mining diamonds or gold in South Africa.”
“My grandfather mined gold. It nearly killed him. It ruined his back. He was never the same, he told us.”
“Uranium is worse. If that’s what they want us for.”
“So, we’d be Simba slave labor.”
Muema brought his bound hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. “Or Soviet slave labor. I don’t know. I just know that this wasn’t our moment. This wasn’t your moment. You’ll have another chance. A better chance. We all will.”
The driver took back the canteens, climbed into the truck, and they started off. Based on the sun, they were driving southwest, which might indeed mean the Congo and the violent world of the Simba rebellion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Katie Barstow
These are all actual “baby” pictures of Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, and Katie Barstow. Perky little Katie dressed up for Halloween as a pumpkin? Her mother, Glenda, says it was one of her daughter’s favorite nights of her life. The child loved that costume so much, Glenda told us, that one year she insisted on going trick-or-treating in it on October 30—the night before Halloween. “Our neighbors laughed and laughed and thought Katie was adorable. The cookie and candy haul was insane,” said the proud mom.
—Teen Screen, July 1962
She was crying because she was going to die, she knew this now, she was sure of it, and her ass was wet from peeing her pants, and in the blackness of the hut she could smell the toxic cocktail of her urine and the damp earth beneath her pallet. Where had she smelled something like this? That fucking Halloween pumpkin costume. Her brother the shrink would say this was a manufactured memory—a memory someone had crafted from the stories of other, usually older people—but she knew it was genuine. It was her earliest memory. She knew the shame of trick-or-treating on the wrong night in a blob of orange fabric and cotton ticking that reeked like a dirty diaper in August. In hindsight, the stink was more Proustian than the reaction of the neighbors in the building: her recollections of their confusion and annoyance might have been manufactured from her conversations later with Billy and David and other people who lived on the same elevator line in the massive apartment.