“My travel agent has us flying into Nairobi,” Katie said. “He didn’t trust that airport. I gather Pan Am doesn’t either.”
“It isn’t L.A. International, but it was fine. I felt perfectly safe. Long paved runway, a tower, a decent bar. What more do you need?”
“But wasn’t that the airport that a bunch of Tanganyika soldiers took over in January or February?” David asked. There was an eddy in his tone that left Terrance wondering if David knew something about the situation in East Africa that the others didn’t. Something clandestine. “According to my father—”
“No,” Judy corrected him. “That was Dar es Salaam. And it was January and it really wasn’t a big deal. They wanted better pay, that’s all. Nyerere—the new president—appealed to the British for some commandos, and it was over in hours. What does your father do?”
“He’s a Washington, D.C., paper pusher. Government. Personnel. Nothing interesting.”
“Well, Washington has a very jaded view of East Africa,” Judy said. “I suppose people there see it all through the prism of the ‘Soviet threat.’？”
David seemed to take this in, stirring his gin and tonic with his pinky. He licked his finger and then pressed, “Okay, the Congo. What do you two know about the rebellion there? Those stories about what the Simbas did to the nuns were sickening.”
“They should sicken you. They should sicken anyone,” observed Eva.
“But not going to Kenya or the Serengeti because of the nightmare in Stanleyville would be like not going to Chicago because there’s violence in Montreal,” Judy reassured them.
“Or steering clear of Madrid because someone was kidnapped in Paris,” added Eva.
“The Congo may get caught up in the Cold War, but I don’t see Nyerere allowing that to happen in Tanganyika,” Judy said.
Out of the corner of his eye, Terrance saw a woman pulling a Kodak with a black wrist strap from her purse and wondered if she’d take a photo of Katie. Of them. She’d need to attach a flashcube to the camera. She was with another woman and two other men, and he supposed they were tourists. “I hear the Soviets are back. I read in the paper they left a few years ago, but now they’ve returned,” he said.
“David used the word rebellion, and I guess that’s fine,” Judy told them. “But it seems to me, it’s more like a civil war.”
“Judy’s right,” Eva agreed.
“And the Russians?” Terrance asked.
“They’re there. But not in big numbers. And they’re not what you’d expect.”
“I’ve never met a Russian soldier,” Terrance told Eva. “I have no expectations.”
“Very sophisticated—the ones in the Congo. Cosmopolitan. At least that’s what I understand. Advisers, mostly. More like spies, some of them. Not a lot of foot soldiers. Educated, erudite, multilingual.”
“My father…” David began, and then he stopped. Terrance realized Katie’s fiancé was a little drunk. Was he catching himself before saying something he shouldn’t?
“Go on,” said Judy.
“Nothing,” he said. He motioned at his drink. “I forgot what I was going to say.”
The woman with the camera found a flashcube in her bag and held it up for the others at her table as if it were a gold nugget she’d panned in a river. Terrance watched her stand and approach their high-top. They all stopped talking at her arrival. There was an awkward beat where no one said anything, and then the woman opened her mouth and a tornado of words emerged, one long, sweet run-on sentence that she delivered without, it seemed, ever inhaling for breath.
“My name is Fiona Furst and I am writhing in guilt—really, I can’t believe I’m doing this—because I am interrupting you all, but, Miss Barstow, my family has seen most of your movies, I think, really, most of them, maybe all of them. And we are so happy you’re going to be married, and you have no idea what it would mean to my daughters to have a photo of you, but I’d only take it if you said it was okay and you didn’t mind.” Terrance couldn’t quite place her accent, despite the ample evidence she had offered, but something about it said Upper Midwest. He thought of his own family in Chicago.
Instantly, Katie said, “Of course. Would you like to be in it?”
Fiona Furst’s eyes went wide, and for a second Terrance thought her knees were going to buckle. But then she nodded. “Oh, my God,” she said, “oh, my God, yes, yes!” Her reaction sounded almost sexual, and Terrance had to look down at the burnished mahogany of the tabletop to keep a straight face. When he looked up, David was climbing carefully off the barstool and offering to take the picture of the woman and his fiancée. Fiona wasn’t sure, it seemed, whether to lean into Katie, and so Katie leaned into her, and there was that smile and the flashcube went off, and David started to return the woman’s camera. But Katie stilled his arm and said to Fiona, “You probably couldn’t tell from where you were seated, but with me are Terrance Dutton and Judy Caponigro, who you’ve also seen in movies, I am quite sure, and Eva Monley, who’s worked on some films I’d wager you loved a lot. Would you like a picture of all of us?”