Beg Me (28 page)

Danielle stood by, watching them restrain me, and she wasn’t smiling smugly as she had in the park. I expected her to, but she didn’t, and that was also scary. I had caused her too much trouble.

She licked her lips, her mouth opening in an expression of mild wonder and her neck flushed a vivid red. I realized what was happening with her. They were planning to kill me but hurt me bad first, and it excited the crazy bitch. She was getting
turned on
by all the creepy ideas that popped into her head.

She walked up casually, like a bad actress in a B movie, and I seriously contemplated spitting in her face. She held up a leather cat o’ nine tails, let her index finger and thumb ride up the length of a single strand, and I saw the flash of metal at its tip. Oh, God.

With sudden sharp fury, she dug it into my thigh and tore it out, making me scream.

“Bitch!”

“Oh, I’m going to enjoy this!” she laughed.

She walked away and idly flicked the cat toward a corner—the whip crack had a metallic ring with the steel barbs. Panic was forcing a shudder out of me. I knew those barbs would rip my skin off in strips.

“And when my arm gets tired, Teresa, honey, I’m going to pass you around to the boys.”

“So I can take them to the next level, right?” I asked. “Show them what they’re really all about.”

“Sure,” laughed Danielle. “Whatever.”

“You won’t need Isaac after tomorrow,” I said, needing to get it in quick. “You’ll capture the whole market, and then you can finally indulge yourself out in the open with whatever guy you fancy.”

“What—what is she talking about?” asked Anwar.

“Forget it!” snapped Danielle. “It’s desperate bullshit to get out of here. She betrayed us.”

No explanation of how I had betrayed the group. Some fool story she must have fed them. They couldn’t all be involved in the drugs, and I’d bet half of them still thought we were playing out a scene.

She launched the cat o’ nine tails, and I dodged as best I could. The chain in the wall offered little escape.

One mercy, just one. Anwar moved forward on impulse to stop her, his hand breaking her stroke so that the zinging metal barbs flew past and missed. Most of them.

I yelped in agony. Two of them had made shallow slices across my left thigh and near my hip. I doubted I could take another lash.

“Wait, wait!” shouted Anwar.

“Is this a scene?”
I yelled to everyone. “This look like play to you? You think I’d give myself up for
this
?”

“Shut up!”
ordered Danielle, and to Anwar she said, “Let go of me!”

“Look who’s giving the orders,” I said. “You fine Nubian princes! You masculine wonders! You hear Isaac calling the shots?”

“You
will
be punished,” barked Isaac. “Whip her now.”

“Took you a while, oh, Great and Powerful Oz,” I sneered. Blood was trickling down my hip and thigh. “Why don’t you give it up and let ’em know who’s really in charge?”

Isaac began to rise from his throne. “I think I’ll whip you myself, you—”

“BUI DOI!”
I yelled.

It hit him like a shock wave. He slumped back into his chair as if I’d pushed him. Danielle froze and stared at me. Isaac stared at me. But Anwar and the others—they weren’t looking in my direction. They wanted to know what was going on.

Their gods were about to crumble right in front of them.

“What?” asked Eve Baker. “What did you just say?”

“Why don’t you explain it to them, Danielle?” I demanded. “After all, you’re in charge.”

She was seething.
“Shut! Up!”

I thought she might get two lashes in before someone intervened, and I steeled myself for the agony to come. But before she could raise the cat, one of the guys twisted her arm to stop her from flaying me alive. He tore the cat away from her.

I was panting hard, my body now covered in nervous sweat, still trapped, still chained, not out of trouble yet.

“
Why
are you listening to her?” raged Danielle.

“Tell them what you did to Violet,” I said.

I heard her name whispered around the chamber.
Violet.
What happened to Violet? Violet was gone. What was she saying?
Violet
—

“Teresa killed Violet! She stabbed her to death in the park!”

“You murdered her,” I said.

“You want people to believe that because you’re a crazy dyke!” she shot back. “You killed her out of jealousy for being with men! I was with Isaac in the house when you stabbed her in the park!”

Getting sloppy and stupid with her panic, trying to improvise.

“If you were here, how could you even know I stabbed Violet? Or where she was killed?”

She couldn’t think of a response. And the devotees were watching.

“Listen!” I called out to the others. “I was with a police detective when Danielle phoned my cell and asked me to come to Central Park. He heard it! And Danielle and I are
both
on closed-circuit-TV footage from this afternoon—right where Violet’s body is.”

“That’s a lie!” she protested. “You know me! All of you know me! I was with Isaac.”

“Isaac will say whatever you want him to,” I scoffed.

“Isaac leads us!”

“Who do you think you’ve been working for all this time?” I asked the faithful. “Who do you think you’ve catered to? You buy that bloody nonsense that Isaac understands higher monogamy so he fucks only Danielle? You guys screw every girl here, and you never stop to wonder. You think Isaac
chooses
to be monogamous? What a
joke
!”

None of them could say anything. They were working it through. For the very first time, they were working it through.

“Big cocksmen!” I went on. “Big princes! When you finally, finally,
finally
get a chance to screw Danielle, you think you’ve won something. Score! She
played
you. Each and every one! What did you guys do? Some of you kept your mouths shut, and some of you actually got attacks of guilt and confessed to Isaac. Didn’t you? And lo and behold, the big man understood. Didn’t he? Instead of you walking out and thinking you got something over on him, he turned it around and made you feel like he was still smarter than you.
Again.
”

“You don’t know anything!” piped up Anwar. Feeling the shame like all the rest. “Isaac understands! He knows how a man—”

“He knows
nothing,
” I cut him off. “He knows what she tells him. You think it’s some higher morality that he lets you fuck his ‘wife’? Who are you kidding? You’re not special. You think you’re the only one? How many of you guys have actually had Danielle?”

It would have been comical if it weren’t so pathetic. Danielle couldn’t look any of them in the eye. I watched the girls. They wore the expressions of the betrayed. Their eyes said it.
What is this shit? What’s really going on?
Some were balling their small fists, others, ashamed of their gullibility, crossed their arms across their breasts. Even Eve Baker aka Kelly Rawlins looked mightily pissed.

“So who do you think really is in charge?” I pressed on. “News flash, folks! Isaac’s her
sub.
”

“She is my wife!” shouted Isaac. “She does as I allow!”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “So if you let her have every guy here, I assume it must be okay for you to indulge yourself once in a while, right?” I turned to the girls. “Be honest. Has any
one
of you ever slept with Isaac?”

They all looked to one another. And now the guys were watching the women.

“Either you’re a real saint or you’re something else,” I said.

“Everyone get out of here now!” ordered Isaac. “I should have kept this matter a private affair—”

“It’s too late!” I interrupted him. “They’re going to know all of it!”

He leapt out of his chair and charged at me. The others, even Danielle, were statues.

He was out of his mind with panic, and I don’t think he even knew what he wanted to do before he committed himself. He balled his fist and punched me in the stomach.

I tensed for this, but he hit me again, and that knocked some of the wind out of me so I dropped to my knees and dry-heaved a little. I heard the others gasp.

“They’re going to know, Isaac.”

“Shut up!”
he yelled. Pleading with me like an angry child. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

He slapped his open hands at my head, and they were all shouting at him. All I could do was try to protect my skull, but a few blows got through. It was genuine violence, not the ritual blows they had dulled their emotions to. Isaac’s hands were around my throat—

“Isaac!”

Anwar.

Isaac would have killed me in front of them. And still Anwar couldn’t bring himself to physically push his leader aside. But the revolt had started.

“Tell them what you are!” I yelled, still on my knees, not knowing if this would provoke another mad-dog rage.

“We’ll let you go,” said Isaac. “You can get out of here. We don’t need your trouble!”

“No!” shouted Danielle. “We can’t!”

“It’s too late for that,” I answered. “You two murdered Violet. And they’re going to know what you are. You’re one of them.
Bui doi.
”

“Don’t
you
…! Don’t you say…!” He couldn’t finish it.

“What is that?” asked Eve, her voice irritable, impatient.

“It means ‘children of the dust,’” I said. And every one of them looked blankly at me. Except for Isaac. And Danielle. “You don’t see it, do you? But Danielle did. She caught it, and she used it.”

They still didn’t understand.

I hadn’t either, not for the longest time.

“It’s an ugly, pejorative term for mixed-race kids from the Vietnam War,” I explained. “Isaac’s father was a black American soldier. His mother was a peasant girl from a village outside Saigon. The man did his best to try to get his wife and their baby out, but they got caught in the bureaucracy….”

The rest of them stood spellbound as Isaac retreated to his chair. To escape, he would have had to shove past the gauntlet of his followers, who were seeing him properly for the first time. But that wouldn’t save his face.

Anwar moved toward me as if he were sleepwalking, unlocking my chains.

I looked at Isaac. “You grew up there. You’re fluent in the language, of course. How do I pronounce your name, anyway? The one your mother gave you.”

He couldn’t answer me.

“That’s why you hate Asians so much, isn’t it?” I demanded. “That’s why the drugs are supposed to be blamed on the triads, right? Because they treated you like shit, this little brown boy who was a half-caste to them, and they treated you worse than dirt.”

“Oh, my God,” whispered one of the girls.

Isaac’s head made a slight palsied shake, his eyes dark bottomless chasms of loathing and secret pain. “You all talk to me about what it’s like to be put down. You—don’t—know—
anything!
”

He was pitiful. But I couldn’t pity him. He disgusted me, not because of what he was but because of the result. He let it define him in the worst way imaginable: He stewed and stewed and turned himself into a killer. It could be understood but not tolerated.

“Oh, so we’re supposed to compare suffering and you win?” I sneered. “That gives you a license to kill and cheat and screw people over? Fuck you!”

Anwar stared at him. “Isaac, you’re
Vietnamese
?”

Isaac laughed cruelly, a laugh at himself as much as at Anwar.

“They wouldn’t call him Vietnamese over there,” I explained. “In their culture, children like him, especially black kids, are treated like shit. He lived in the worst poverty, was on the lowest social rung, always.”

I ran it down quickly. How the young Isaac had once had his arm broken in a savage beating by other kids in his village. The names he would have been called. Too black for Vietnam, and feeling like a complete alien when he was among his brothers in the U.S. Too many scars on his psyche to just live, to just
be.
The name, his Vietnamese name, had helped Chen and me uncover it all.

How he had first applied for an immigration visa to the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, and how he had got an astonishing letter that dared to tell him he didn’t have sufficient
Amerasian features
to be allowed into the United States under the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987. How an obliging “auntie”—probably in cahoots with a corrupt official at the legation—had bled him out of thousands of dollars for a visa.

“So you come to the States, and you change your name to your dad’s so no one will know,” I went on, staring him down. “But you’re still so full of self-loathing. Let me guess. You were sexually abused as well, weren’t you?”

“No,” he whispered. Too quickly.

“Yes, you were. It explains a lot. You were spoken to like a thing, abused, mistreated. You’ve never had real loving intimacy with anyone in your life, have you? What happened, Isaac? You learn about the power dynamics from relying on prostitutes? It’s only natural. Because you grew up thinking that if anyone talks to you, if anyone gets close, they must
want
something. So you’ve learned how to manipulate people.”

“I’m not like that,” he said weakly. “That is not what my philosophy is—”

“Your philosophy!” I sneered. “You don’t have a philosophy.
She
has a philosophy—” I pointed at Danielle in the corner, who was trying to look smaller and smaller.

“You’re the bad boy she found on a street corner, Isaac. She’s the true master manipulator. And she saw your potential. As a
tool.
As a
front.
Because nobody’s sophisticated enough when it comes right down to it, are they? Not over sex, and not over power. Not yet. Everyone needs a king. The girls want a fantasy, and the guys want an alpha male wolf to defer to. And your big chip on your shoulder is how she keeps you under her thumb.”

“No…No…” Chanting it in denial.

Fathers. That was the missing link between Nigeria and Vietnam. Oliver and Isaac. The devastating ruin to families caused by war. Danielle knew all about Jackson Senior and probably overheard Oliver confiding about his dad to Isaac. When she discovered what happened to Anyanike, she saw the opportunity to screw around with Oliver’s head to keep him in line. She knew what had worked with Isaac, what haunted her lover, so she must have reckoned that a father’s ghost would prove just as effective with Oliver.