Beg Me (11 page)

My casual reading had told me there were several Vietnamese gangs that borrowed slogans from the Vietnam War—their war for independence that started against the French and wound up dragging on for years with the Americans. These mottos were the kind that U.S. soldiers used to put on their helmets, like
Born to Kill.
I had no idea if Bishop coined this nasty turn of words,
I live for death,
but the coincidence was creepy enough.

It also prompted a question that I should have mulled earlier.

Okay, yeah, I got the part that they had tattooed Anna’s thigh to make it look like she was part of a Thai gang. After all, they reckoned she was Thai instead of Chinese because Ah Jo Lee was in Bangkok.

Here’s the thing. Nobody had stopped to think that Lee was a Chinese name and not a Thai one. But if they could miss a crucial detail like that for their cover-up,
how in hell did they even know what kind of Vietnamese gang motto to use?

Craig Padmore had been digging around in the history of Vietnam.

The tattoo on Anna’s thigh was a Vietnamese motto.

Bishop had done mercenary work in the Vietnam War after his Nigerian contract, Nwidor said.

So many Vietnamese connections, and here I was in Nigeria.

Yeah, but you made Oliver a bargain. And part of the trail did seem to lead here.

Lagos again. I phoned Nwidor’s contact and didn’t hear anything for a couple of days from David Sharett or anyone else, so I decided to go swimming.

Bar Beach, I quickly discovered, was out, unless I wanted to bathe in an oil slick. Off I went to Tarkwa Bay, which was a surreal experience in itself of sitting in a deck chair, looking out over the dubious water, and spotting an oil tanker that prowled so close to shore I thought I was expected to step out and slay the iron dragon.

Back in the city, three o’ clock in the morning. I was asleep in my hotel room, when there was a loud banging and a desk clerk shouted through the door: “Miss, we must evacuate! Please hurry.”

What?
Evacuate?

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Gas leak, miss. We will transfer you to another hotel. The coach is waiting!”

Gas leak…?

Bleary-eyed, I squinted through the peephole, then opened the door and saw a bunch of confused Japanese and Germans in robes and various states of undress. All of us obediently shambled out with our poorly repacked bags into an idling bus.

Suckers, each and every one of us.

Teresa, you stupid girl.

You knew enough not to bring your credit cards. Hell, you even followed your friend’s advice and contacted your bank, instructing them to do absolutely
nothing
if requests came in your name from Nigeria. You puttered around the city and Port Harcourt like a street-savvy veteran, and then you march like a lemming onto this bus now driving in the dark to nowhere.

The sleepy white tourists and Japanese muttered among themselves, all while the scruffily dressed gangsters stood near their driver and chatted and joked. Maybe their prey would clue in when the bus pulled to a stop.

The tip-off for me was the clothing—only one guy wearing a bellboy’s uniform, the rest in ordinary Western shirts and jeans. Plus there did happen to be that rifle stock—it was poking out from beneath the canvas bag in the luggage rack up front. But I noticed all this
after
I’d jumped aboard. Too late.

All the bills I had for my trip were in a thick roll of American in a shoulder money belt underneath my blouse, plus a stash of
naira
in my purse.

They’d relieve me of that in seconds.

Complain or resist, they’ll kill you. And the others.

Almost pitch darkness out there, so I had no clue how long I had to come up with a brilliant idea.

The bus lurched through a narrow alley of some anonymous district, and then all at once we were bathed in high beams. The coach braked suddenly, prompting one of the Japanese to mutter,
Kichigai,
or something to his wife, and the horn blast shook everyone out of their stupor. The windshield filled with light.

Uh-oh. Cops? Competitors? Who cared! It was an
ambush
—

“Get down!” I yelled in English.

Nobody listened.

That was a second after I heard the
thump
of a guy jumping on the hood of the car blocking the bus, his Uzi making the windshield explode.

The driver screamed, not because he was hit by any bullets but because of the shards of glass that tore his face to ribbons.

Now the tourists understood, huddling and crying in their seats. I watched the new arrivals point their guns at the Area Boys on the bus, and there were barked orders in pidgin English, the robbers scrambling to get off and get lost. They ran into the night, the driver still moaning over his slashed face.

Frightened, whispered Japanese.

German woman crying.

The bus still idling with a groan—a tired fridge past its warranty.

Then I heard a familiar voice announce with a tourist guide’s relaxed tone: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this robbery so that we can escort you back to your hotel. In the future, I suggest you double-check any such transfer claims by hotel staff and don’t pay attention to early-morning phone calls. I know you’ve had an unfortunate experience, but don’t let this put you off Nigeria. It’s a beautiful country, and most of the citizens are decent, hardworking people.”

Oh, no.

I sat up and waited for him to walk down the aisle to me. He was going to enjoy the moment no matter how I reacted.

Yes, I knew him, all right. Intimately. A lock of his blond hair fell across his smooth forehead, and his brows furrowed over those ice chips of blue. The angular curves to his face gave it an almost feminine softness, and he was one of the few English guys I knew who looked seven years younger than his age instead of older by a decade. Good genes. Good looks. Nice tan. Oh, hell.

“Simon Highsmith,” I groaned.

“Teresa Knight,” laughed Simon. “You of all people should know what to look out for in different parts of Africa.”

“What can I say, Simon? They caught me sleeping. Literally.”

5

S
imon Highsmith and I had this bizarre relationship. He was a middle-class son of Purley who dropped out of medical school to become an aid worker in the Sudan, which is where I met him. We had fantastic sex, but I was a bit wary of his irreverent attitude. And then I was downright disillusioned when I learned that his sense of justice was slightly to the right of Dirty Harry’s.

I went home to London and became a snoop. Simon stayed in Africa. Until he popped up in London recently, right when I didn’t need him.

Couldn’t say I didn’t need him tonight.

“Are you still working for…?”

“Gone freelance.” He smiled proudly. “Less rules, more money. Now, if you come with me, I can give you a better ride than this busted-up wagon.”

His car. Simon drove at a moderate speed, keeping an eye out for the dogs or cattle that liked to wander out in the middle of the road in the darkness. So did the beggars.

“
What
are you doing here, Simon?”

“Come on, let me have my bit of fun, Teresa. I get to be clairvoyant. You are…Let me see. Hunting for a Jewish gangster by the name of David Sharett, right? Old merc from the civil-war days? And you’ve been asking rude questions about another bastard named Bishop.”

Amazing. “You are really getting your rocks off on this one, aren’t you?” I shot back. “Okay, I give up. How do you know?”

“Be flattered,” Simon told me. “These blokes didn’t hit your hotel by coincidence. Sharett got your message and wants you dead.”

“Just for asking about Bishop?”

“I don’t know, Teresa. Straight up. I’ve got a mole in Sharett’s operation—that’s how I learned about you. Incidentally, you’ve reaffirmed my faith in Sonny Nwidor.”

I didn’t get it.

“Sonny knows me,” said Simon with another Cheshire cat grin. “Sonny doesn’t know that you and I know each other. He tracked me down and asked me as a personal favor to look out for you. The real kick was my informant’s description of you about two hours before Sonny called, and me thinking, ‘Christ, that sounds a lot like Teresa….’Well, this’ll be fun. Here I am in town to ruin Sharett, and you can help.”

“But you’re really after Harry Bishop too. What for?”

“What’s
your
interest?”

“I asked first,” I said.

I could guess his already. As I’d learned recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa didn’t cover everybody—and not everyone in government corridors in Pretoria and Cape Town approved of the process. Many old enemies of the people had never got what was coming to them and were still trying to bleed the nation dry. Enter Simon Highsmith. After he and I lost touch, he became something of an avenging angel for the interests of a free democratic South Africa. And now he was freelance.

Harry Bishop was certainly an appropriate target for retribution. When Biafra stopped making headlines, Bishop had gone to kill for the CIA in Vietnam, and after Saigon fell, he jetted off to South Africa to kill more “Kaffirs” for the apartheid regime.

Simon swerved the car to avoid a chicken. “Let’s just say there’s no official forgiveness for some of the old bastards. Bishop is a seventies’ Eichmann. But I’m mainly here for money.”

“You mean vengeance.”

“That too. But the financial end is the priority this time. My intel says Bishop went from camouflage hands-on wet work to white-collar investments. Did you know he was a consultant from eighty-six to ninety-two for Orpheocon?”

Orpheocon.
He knew how I’d react to the name. Both Simon and I had suffered more than our share of run-ins with that oil company. But I had to stay focused.

“Come on, somebody worked long and hard for payback, and now their moment’s come,” I argued. “So they sent you to dish it out.”

“Yeah, but money really is part of it. My client’s decided that Bishop should be hunted down and stripped of his larger assets, if I can, ahem, persuade him to go away. So why are you here?”

I hesitated.

“Teresa,
please
don’t tell me you’re going to interfere with me doing my job on this one—”

“No,” I said quickly. “Actually, no.”

He was genuinely surprised. “This is new.”

“Not so much. I do believe there is genuine evil in the world, Simon, and some of these creeps have it coming. But before you collect Bishop, I need to find out some things.”

“Fair enough.”

He stopped the car, and I looked out and said, “This isn’t my hotel.”

“It’s
a
hotel, darling.”

“Yours?”

He smiled at me.

“Uh-huh,” I said, grabbing my bag from the trunk. “Just what are you expecting as an expression of my gratitude for the rescue? Darling.”

“Breakfast,” he laughed. “Let’s see if we can wake up the kitchen staff.”

Over eggs, I offered broad strokes about the case. I mentioned that it involved a cult, but I didn’t go into all the BDSM stuff, not then. It didn’t seem relevant, and…well, to tell the truth, I was embarrassed about it.

I didn’t want him giving me this look of morbid concern like Carl Norton handed me back in London. Bad enough that Simon peppered me with questions. Was it the Moonies? Was it these other guys who think they can levitate? No, no, and no, none of the major ones.

Then he settled down and listened politely, never interrupting, and as we talked, I felt myself getting lured into his spell of charm all over again. Simon could be very sensitive, insightful, wickedly funny. The last time he was in London, his presence had felt like an intrusion, but here I had the strangest notion that I was on his turf, if that makes any sense. Of all my white friends and acquaintances, male or female, he had arguably the best appreciation of African and “black” culture, not in an “oh, we’re all the same under the skin” obsequious liberal sense but in what it was like to feel displaced, alienated, to think in different ways. He had a genuine love of Africa that didn’t spring out of the old white paternalism—a true appreciation of a rich history.

You could say I really liked Simon—except when he was killing people.

“Would you like to know what I think?” he asked gently.

“Go ahead.”

“You said this contact of yours—this Oliver—left the group. It felt dodgy and then some. Sounds to me like someone dug into his past for psychological manipulation, just to scare the fucking hell out of him and drive him away.”

“I’ve considered that,” I put in.

“Right, I’m sure you have,” said Simon. “But have you thought about the
really
twisted aspect?”

“What?”

Simon leaned forward, studying his glass of orange juice, thinking out loud. “There’s nothing more psychologically
primal,
that can get you right at the core, than digging up the bogeyman who killed Daddy. But isn’t that an awful lot of trouble?”

“I don’t follow,” I said. And I didn’t.

“Consider how much trouble you personally are investing to piece together what happened to this bloke’s old man. You said it yourself. You have to track down old witnesses, go back forty years. Well, so did this other person! They had to cover the same ground. They went to a lot of effort to find out what happened ages ago, just to use a
detail
that would have an emotional impact, a real mind fuck on this Oliver.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know,” said Simon. He shrugged and sat back, poking his eggs with his fork. “I can tell you one thing. Your killer in New York wasn’t Bishop. He
is
pushing close to seventy. And all our information says he hasn’t set foot in America since 1994.”

“Is he avoiding the States or something?”

“As far as we can tell, he pissed off the Clinton administration somehow, though we’re not sure how. Bishop used to get around, of course: Africa, Asia, South America. Pick a bloody conflict and he either fired the guns, sold the guns, or acted as consultant on how best to slaughter people.”

“Sharett has answers,” I muttered.

“He likes to pull surprises,” said Simon. “What do you say we give him one of our own?”

There’s Hollywood. There’s Bollywood. And then there’s Nollywood.

Nigerian movies—usually shot on handheld video cams, meant for the television networks or the Idomuta market on Lagos Island. My guidebook claimed that about seventy new videos hit Idomuta each week. I watched a couple of these on MNET one evening, and…HBO drama, they’re not. Bad dialogue that made you groan when you weren’t laughing at the production goofs. Ugh. But what do I know? I turn on Sky back home, and it’s either dreary soaps or ancient Granada reruns or American imports—Hugh Laurie and his surreal American accent as the latest doctor hero.

As it happened, according to Simon’s intel, David Sharett was that special kind of criminal egomaniac who fancied himself a mogul. And lately he was trying to shake down one of the legit producers and take over his business in Surulere. So. Nollywood. We took ourselves down to the set of the producer’s latest film (nothing more than the parking area behind the company office) and arranged our own appointment.

After being nearly bused to my death in the wee hours, I relished the look on this short thug’s rubbery white moon-face when he thought his three strong-arming bodyguards would get him results today. Short version? The rifles used for the army scene weren’t props. (You’d think a former merc would guess that.) Forty seconds after the director called, “Action,” David Sharett was staring at his own potential firing squad.

“Expediency devolves into farce,” Simon remarked quietly.

Sharett, however, wasn’t laughing. The cold fish eyes zeroed in on me—must have guessed at least who I was. In a voice that sounded like whiskey poured on gravel, he said, “I suppose you wish to talk.”

We talked in the shade. He whined about the heat like any old man. You’re from Israel, I reminded him tartly. Maybe you don’t get the humidity, but the heat can’t be anything you’re not used to. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and called me a bitch. I’d heard worse.

His expression sure was funny when Simon responded with a chivalrous insult back in fluent Arabic.