Beg Me (13 page)

“I’m, uh, not in New York at the moment, Jeff. I’m in Lagos.”

“What are you in bloody Lagos for? These creeps are in New York, for crying out—”

“
Jeff.
This trip isn’t on your card. Okay?
No
charge to you. I’m pursuing a lead, and as a matter of fact, I just made a bit of major progress today. I’m flying back to New York in a day or two, so please just trust me, will you?”

From the Pacific Rim all the way to Lagos, there was this pause of simmering discontent, the silence that shouted:
I am your client, therefore your boss, and I like to know what’s going on because I always know what’s going on in my business, and right now I am not a happy bunny.

But Jeff Lee and I go way back, so naturally he was polite.

“I fail to see,” he said, keeping his voice well modulated and calm, “how it’s such an essential lead, yet you don’t consider it worth deducting from your expenses.”

“It’s complicated,” I answered weakly.

Shoot me now.

“Teresa…”

“Jeff, you are going to have to trust me. I warned you this couldn’t be done in a few days. It might even take a couple of months.”

“Months in New York, right? Not in Africa.”

“Yes, darling. In New York.”

More silence from Bangkok.

“I have names now, Jeff,” I offered, knowing I’d better deliver a scrap of hope. “I’m getting close.”

“Poor choice of words, Teresa,” he snapped. “I’ll buy that you’re close when you’re in the same zip code.”

Ugh. Just take it for now. It’s not like he could know what you’re doing and why. Look at it from his perspective.

Big sigh. “You really have names, Teresa?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Okay. Carry on, then.”

Click.

I had changed by the time Simon got back from an errand (a need to check in, he grumbled, with “certain suits” despite his freelance status) and knocked on the door of his own room. When I opened it, he stood in the doorway with a bottle of white rum and a plastic jug of cola.

I folded my arms. “Been a long time without shore leave, eh, sailor?”

“Am I that obvious?” he asked.

“Well, I can use a drink after this afternoon. What do you have planned for Sharett?”

“It’s taken care of,” he said, and when I looked at him in surprise, he added, “Nothing like that. But he is in a cell.”

“That was fast.”

He poured us a couple of drinks.

“All things considered, yeah, maybe. It just took a bigger bribe to the police than Sharett could ever match. Plus one of their stations has a nice shiny satellite dish on its roof now. They can watch FIFA in style. They’ll mark it in their expenses under
communications equipment.
”

“What is it you said earlier?” I asked. “‘Expediency devolves into farce’? It fits.”

I clinked our plastic cups together in a toast.

“You’re still sore at me for last time.”

“No, not at all,” I replied. “This case…It’s been dark since the beginning. My friend’s death. This Bishop creep—even if someone’s only borrowing his MO.”

“Maybe it’s just as well I showed up to lighten the mood,” he replied. “You know me. I take the work seriously, but I never take myself seriously. Neither do you—most of the time. I’ve missed you, Teresa. My last visit to London was way too brief.”

“You and me, Simon. It’s the work that gets in our way.”

“So maybe this whole thing is a cosmic hint,” he argued, pouring us both another shot of rum. “You know you have all the qualifications to be doing what I’m doing. I could put in a word, and you could get a contract just like mine. Freedom to turn down jobs you don’t like but enough pay to keep you from being broke like you are every three months. You could even stay based in London. Hell, you’re in Earl’s Court. It’s not like you have to jump on another Tube line to get to Heathrow.”

“What do I put down for the Inland Revenue?” I laughed.
“Paid Assassin?”

“Bet you write down interesting explanations already. Besides, that’s not the job—or the whole job. There’s more to it than that. Mostly it’s what you’re doing now.”

“So this isn’t a seduction?” I teased. “It’s recruitment?”

He got out of his chair, knelt down, and kissed me on my lips. It was soft and tender to the point of reverential, and I had the electric thrill of new arousal mixed with familiarity. It hadn’t been that long since I last saw him but long enough. His tongue pushed gently into my mouth, coiled with mine, and I felt his hands around my waist. They slid up to my breasts as we both stood up. We petted and fondled each other, making the slow-motion pilgrimage to the bed, and then the strangest thing happened. I grew impatient. No, it was worse than impatience. Nails on blackboard, white noise blaring, skin on fire. I said:
“No.”

“What?” he protested. In a whisper. Quietly.

Something flicked a switch in me. Programming, call it what you will.

This was Simon. I knew him. I might feel danger with a new guy but not him. Yes, he was an assassin for hire, intelligence op—but he was a guy like most guys, and some won’t take no and are thugs, and then there are those who Mum raised well and who respect you. Simon had a pedestrian decency streak in him.

“Look, I’m sorry, I guess too much history—”

“Shut up,” I said hoarsely. And I pushed him. I actually pushed him.

“
What?
What did I do?”

Frustrated beyond belief now, I kissed him with savage forwardness, took his right hand and put it on my breast, and he fell back a couple of steps, overwhelmed. Still too soft, too accommodating. I shoved him hard again. He looked at me, bewildered, and I slapped him.

“Hey!” His eyes went wide with horror, and he went for the door. “Good-bye, Teresa—”

“No, wait!” I yelled, and I hurried around to get in his way.

“What’s your game?” he demanded, finally getting angry.

And my eyes pleaded with him:
Take me.
I took both his hands in mine, brought them to the top of my blouse, and used them like props, ripping open my blouse. At last he clued in. His fingers dug into the cups of my bra to lift my tits out.

We kissed all the while, one of my hands yanking his hair. We staggered back onto the bed, and I play-wrestled with him, the wrestling getting more violent, less an act. I felt his hand under my skirt trying to reach between my thighs, and I closed my legs. He sank his teeth into my breast, a sudden sharp nip that distracted me, and then he got one of his knees in as a block, his hand triumphant.

I twisted, panting, rolled onto my stomach. I pretended to hang on for dear life to the headboard as he stripped the rest of my clothes away.

“I want to see you,” he said.

“No.”

He laughed and tried to roll me over, couldn’t. I pushed my ass into the air, making an offering, and his finger expertly found my clit and touched my wetness. I heard him call my name once, a question, as I folded my left arm behind my back, trying to convey in pantomime what I wanted. He caught my wrist and held me fast, and I said, “Harder.” He gripped me harder, trying to mount me.
“Harder.”

And a dull ache started. The head of his penis entered me, and I moaned, but it wasn’t enough, not enough. “Come on,” I growled, a note of angry frustration in my voice, and his hand pushed my wrist a little until a jolt of electric pain shot up through my arm as his cock filled me up. He started a tentative rhythm, and I pumped my hips to urge him faster.

I had felt his dick harder than this, and I knew I was creeping him out but I couldn’t help myself. I moved a little to pop him loose, then fell on my back. His palms rested a brief moment on my knees as I tucked up my legs. As I saw his thick white cock begin to disappear into my pussy again, I made an inarticulate wild sound of protest and slapped his chest.

“Teresa!”

Moving my hips, keeping him hard, and the crossed signals were driving him crazy, my hands batting his chest and then a blow aimed at his temple. He caught it in time, both hands gripping my wrists and forcing me down. But even as his eyes reflected his horrified disbelief, I felt his cock tense into a steel bar, and I keened in gratitude. He had me good and pinned, even as I tried to bite him. He increased his rhythm, and I heard the wet slaps of our flesh, my heels close to touching on the small of his back.

Then he let himself go and lifted my left leg onto his shoulder, plunging deep into me, only to come out and thrust again like a battering ram. Wanting to hurt me at last…? The notion pushed me over the edge. My orgasm rippled over me. Skin still feeling like it was on fire. Had to come again—

As he slid off me, I turned on my side in a fetal ball and played with my clit, my mind stoking a furnace of memory. Arm pinned behind my back. Spanking. Bound. A fantasy of being tied up and Simon fucking me.
Uhhh.
Yes.
Yes
—

I came in violent shudders. When my muscles finally relaxed and I lay panting, poor Simon was leaned over me in the semidarkness, completely confused and feeling rejected.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

And I burst into a genuine sob, wrenched from my core. “Oh, God…I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“That didn’t feel like a game,” he said, his voice feathery, climbing with apprehension. “We’ve never done it like that, and I don’t think I like it. I could have hurt you, and I bloody don’t like myself doing that!
What is wrong with you?
You—you wanted me to pretend I was raping you?”

“No! No, I—”

“You want to play, you let me in on the rules, right? But I’m not going to break a limb or—”

“No, look, Simon, please—”

Oliver’s training. Fucking me up even though I had tried to brush it off. A big lie I had sold myself on how it couldn’t affect my own sexual desires and tastes, even though I had always pushed the boundaries. I
did
like getting tied up now and then. I didn’t mind the odd slap, giddyap. But, sweet Jesus, what was happening? Couldn’t I get off anymore without kink? Without it getting rough?

And the man in my bed at the moment had every right to be upset. No prebriefing, no talk about games—my unconscious wanted thrills, so that meant realism, and you can’t get complete realism with rehearsal. But I hadn’t told him that.

This wasn’t fair to him. Whatever else we were. Acquaintances? Casual lays? I don’t know if I could ever call Simon a friend after Sudan, and we had never approached a level of intimacy where I had wanted to confide in him. Until now. Because, Jesus, I needed to talk to someone about this.

If it were details of an art theft or some corporate murderer we were both hunting down, competing against each other, then I knew he could be utterly ruthless. He’d slash my tires to get a head start. But this was me getting smaller, my identity shrinking. He put his arm around me and listened.

“You can’t do it,” he said at last.

“I’ve done undercover before.”

“Not like what you’re suggesting. Look what it’s doing to you! You are one step away from those nuts who put plastic bags over their heads to get high when they come.”

“Thanks a lot!”

But Anna had been a gasper. The ligature marks on her neck.

“No joke. Look, suppose they do that shit? Suppose they do things that leave marks or
brand
you—”

“They don’t,” I cut in. “I’ve got my source—”

“This is the same source who hogties you and canes your ass, Teresa?”

I didn’t answer that. Instead, I kissed him tenderly and said, “You just go find Bishop. Leave the New York end to me.”

6

O
n the long flight back to America, I scribbled on a page of notepaper what I knew. It helped me to think, and I had little categories marked
Anna Lee,
then
Craig Padmore,
then
Kelly Rawlins.
Oliver’s father didn’t enter into the mix. That was a murder during war that happened forty years ago. The facts, intuition, common sense—everything told me Bishop’s “signature” was being used today by a copycat.

Okay. Anna didn’t have the bishop drawing. Our murderers had used a gang tattoo instead to throw the cops off.

The bishop
was
used on Craig Padmore’s body, but as my old friend Carl had admitted, the symbol meant nothing to the fine detectives at the Met.

So it was intended to send a message to someone else.
Who?
I scribbled down under Craig’s heading.

And the bishop
was
used on Kelly Rawlins’s body as an intended message for Oliver. But the message for Oliver was that this was a villain out of his past, the guy who had killed his father.

I thought I was starting to get the idea.

Oliver had warned me, Simon had warned me, hell, even Carl in London had warned me, that the people in this cult must use psychological manipulation. As Simon said, what could be a bigger bogeyman than the villain who had robbed you of a parent? Imagine that this bastard could come looming out of the past.

But: How did they even know about Oliver’s past? He must have mentioned it to one of them. It was possible, even logical, for them to try to complete a thorough portrait on everyone they decided to take into their confidence.

And: Why add this extra dimension of Bishop to his secret girlfriend’s murder? Wasn’t it horrible enough that Oliver came back to the hotel room to find her bludgeoned to death?

They had sent photographs of Kelly Rawlins just like they sent photos of a bound Anna to her brother, Jeff Lee. Why the extra thrown-in scare over Bishop? Just to throw off Oliver’s suspicion of the cult?

There was also the problem of Craig. He had a bishop drawn on his arm.

But a quick check with my good ol’ Inspector friend back in London confirmed for me that Craig Padmore’s parents were both alive and well, and his ethnic background had absolutely nothing to do with Nigeria’s civil war.

So who was the message for in his case?

For Oliver? How would he possibly know, being on the other side of the Atlantic?

The book. The book in French on the Vietnam War. Padmore had bought it from Oliver’s bookshop and had told Oliver it helped him. He was determined to bring the whole “group of psychos” crashing down.

Cults are paranoid by nature and necessity. Okay. If the devotees killed Padmore over what he learned, and Padmore got his book from Oliver…the cult might have reasonably concluded the two of them were working together.
And
had a third ally. Maybe this was who the bishop symbol was intended for—just in case there was somebody else, a third party. Or if Oliver somehow learned directly the details of Craig’s death.

It was guesswork, and I had all these loose threads. The bad guys had dredged up a ghost of the Nigerian civil war. And Craig Padmore had gone digging around into the Vietnam War. He’d been confident that something out of this chapter of history could bring down the leader of the cult, Isaac Jackson.

The two wars had nothing to do with each other. Except that, at one point, they were going on at the same time.

If there was another connection, I couldn’t see it.

Bishop. True, there was Bishop. After the Nigerian civil war ended, he had gone to Vietnam as a “consultant” for the southern forces and the Americans.

I pulled out my own copy of the French book—the same one Craig Padmore had bought from Oliver to try to confirm the purported heroism of Isaac’s father.

Helena—beautiful, reliable Helena—had got one of her staff to hunt down the French edition through Bibliofind and other antiquarian book sites, and, get this, she actually dispatched one of her escorts to bring the copy to Heathrow. To catch me before I flew out on my connecting flight to NYC. And a gorgeous courier he was too. Pity there wasn’t enough time to get to know him better.

Okay, the book. My French was rusty, but I muddled through. There were a couple of references to Bishop as one of the less than stellar advisers for South Vietnam. But then I remembered: Craig Padmore had not been interested in Bishop, had no reason to hunt through the text for him at all. No, he had found something else in here.

What had excited Craig Padmore so much?

I thought I knew the Vietnam conflict reasonably well, had to write a paper on it for school once, and I had relied heavily on Stanley Karnow’s big brick tome,
Vietnam: A History,
from my father’s impressive library in our house. The French book seemed to retrace the same ground as Karnow’s work, and I scanned through it, flipping through chapters on the rising drug use of U.S. soldiers, the overlooked marginal contribution of Australian and other foreign volunteers, how the American GIs took Vietnamese girls as common-law wives, the fall of Saigon and the aftermath, the economic boycott, and the struggle of the country to develop. On and on. There were a few lovely photos of buildings from the French colonial period that had survived the war.

I don’t get it, I thought. What was the key for Padmore in these pages?

I wrote down,
Book: What’s the big deal?

Then I flipped a page in my notebook and scribbled down
Oliver.
I had another puzzle.

If Oliver was the perceived threat, why not kill
him
in that hotel room instead of Kelly Rawlins? Or both? Dead certain is better than simply scaring the hell out of him and making him think he could be implicated in Kelly’s murder. They took a big chance he wouldn’t go to the police and admit to being in the hotel room. Dig around in either Oliver’s past or the girl’s and it might lead the cops back to the cult.

Come to think of it, since Oliver owned a bookshop, they could have dreamed up some crazed-addict holdup job to gun him down right in Bindings. It might seem implausible, but the cops might have settled for it, with their heavy case-loads. Why the girl, then?

As I mulled over all these notions, I glanced down at the page. Without realizing it, I had drawn the outline of a chessboard bishop.

Back in Bindings. Back amid the dusty bookshelves and wooden pews after closing time. I told Oliver all about Harry Bishop, about the last moments of his father—how an “associate” I’d accidentally met in Lagos and I were looking for the old mercenary’s final hideout. Oliver took the news pretty well. He reflected somberly for a long moment on his poor father’s grim end, and then he thanked me with quiet dignity for uncovering the truth.

Time to press him over the Sarcophacan Temple of Nubian Princes.

“Not yet,” he insisted. “You can’t go to them yet. I haven’t finished your training, remember? I told you you’re only at the halfway mark.”

“Damn it, Oliver! How long is this process going to take?”

“We made a bargain, Teresa—”

I
grrrred
frustration and snapped, “Right! Then give me something else. Make yourself useful another way.”

I dug into my handbag, remembering something I had forgotten to take up with him before Nigeria. Well, I actually hadn’t forgotten. I hadn’t wanted to then. He had been so fixated on his father’s killer, and I suspected he might unconsciously skew anything else he told me to keep me on that plane to Lagos. Now it was time.

“Have you ever seen this guy with your old friends?”

He gently took my cell and inspected the phone camera shot stored in memory. A dead face that belonged to a tall white man with dark brown hair and a dimpled chin, eyes that once glowered.

Mr. Bad Suit in Bangkok.

“Son of a bitch!” said Oliver, his mouth open in shock. “That’s Andy. He looks dead.”

“He is dead. Andy who?”

“Andrew Schacter. What happened to him?”

“In a second,” I said. “First, who is he and how do you know him? For a prince, he doesn’t look very Nubian to me.”

“That’s ’cause he never was a prince,” replied Oliver. “But I think he went way back with Isaac and Danielle somehow. He couldn’t fit into their ranking system—it would have made Isaac’s philosophy of superior Nubian males ridiculous. So he gave Andy an honorary rank of ‘squire.’ He was the group’s only male sub.”

I felt myself do a double take. “How did
that
work?”

“You’d be surprised! Andy was a kind of bodyguard sometimes for Danielle and Isaac, plus I think he handled anybody who gave ’em trouble in town. Kept a low profile, and all I could ever get were scraps of stories. But I know he was one mean SOB. Any prince who felt like putting Andy down or dissing him in public either got a private tongue-lashing from Isaac, or Andy taught them in a more
physical
way not to mess with him.”

“Charming,” I said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Oliver. “If Andy kicks some fool’s ass, that undermines the system too, causes tension. But you see, he knew his place. He always paid respect to the princes—never spoke to them as equals. It actually reinforced everything Isaac told them about the outside world. How they were better than white men, how they were better than most black men! Here was this mean, nasty cracker taking orders from a black dude, you know what I’m saying? He was a servant. And he only ever fought if somebody mistreated
the servant.
”

“And the sub stuff?” I asked.

“We all knew some of the princesses liked to switch, and since they couldn’t do that with the brothers, Andy came in nice and handy to be dominated. He was their outlet.”

Sounded right. There was a reasonable interior logic to all this. Here was this leader Isaac pumping up these guys to think they were superior Nubian princes, able to command and dominate women—how do you send a guy like that to Thailand to kill Ah Jo Lee? Besides sticking out of place, like I did, a Nubian prince might have the self-esteem and enough independent thinking to morally question killing someone.

But Andy Schacter, who craved being told what to do, who lived for cracking heads on his master’s say-so, had been a submissive, not a dominant, in terms of sadomasochistic relationships. And he was a fanatic. Obviously one with a shady past, which was how he knew where and how to recruit his Thai accomplice.

Andrew Schacter. I had a name I could pass on to Carl in London and to Ah Jo Lee in Bangkok. Hopefully it would bring more leads.

But I was still restless.

“Look, Oliver, as much as I understand the whole kinky ‘wax-on, wax-off’ training to prepare me in their mystical ways—and not that I don’t appreciate the orgasms, I do!—it’s high time I faced off with this Isaac character!”

“No,” he said, in that tone I’d come to recognize. “What I’m going to teach you next might help you survive Isaac.”

I sighed. I began to undress.

He smiled, clearly enjoying the obedience that had become almost second nature to me. “No, you don’t understand. I taught you how to submit for them. Now I’m going to teach you how to dominate.”

But I wasn’t going to learn to dominate
him.
Instead, he found me an appropriate partner. Victim?

He had a room fitted out in the basement of his home, just like the dungeon in the shop.

Funny. I could recite a list of everything that was in that dungeon room but barely anything about his personal living space. It had books, I know that much. A few Impressionist prints.

I could remember the smell of the dungeon. I could draw you a map with the dimensions.

I would never know my partner’s name. And as far as I know, Oliver never gave him mine. He had me wear a black domino mask of soft cotton that not only covered my nose but pretty much the top half of my face. I thought it was pretty clichéd at first, and then I discovered the power of anonymity in it.

Even now, months after the case is done, I sometimes have fantasies about that boy. I can see him in my mind’s eye, and I feel cursed. He looked like he was about twenty, his hair cut short, his face so smooth, a thin, toned build like Oliver’s—and his insistent hard erection the minute I stepped into that basement.