Beg Me (5 page)

I listened to Carl softly whisper the words of the title.
“…Indochine.”
It was an obscure volume about the history of the Vietnam War.

“The killer didn’t take it because the killer
couldn’t read French,
” I argued. “He didn’t know it was significant.”

“Teresa! Who says it’s significant? You don’t know what the guy could be reading it for. Come on, I thought you said his ex-girlfriend was Thai—”

“Chinese. Her brother lives in Thailand.”

“Whatever, mate. You said they used a Vietnamese gang motto written in Thai for her tattoo, right? That’s the most you’ve got for a connection. To a history book?” He handed the book back to me. “You’re reaching, love.”

I flipped through the book, looked at the front for an inscription. There was none. But there was a stamp from the used bookstore, a place called Bindings, and a receipt dated weeks ago.

“He didn’t buy this here,” I pointed out. “This was purchased in New York City.”

“Again: so what?”

“Hear me out, hear me out,” I said quickly, and I sat down at the computer and launched the browser. Luckily the cable company hadn’t disconnected Craig Padmore’s Internet yet.

Hooray. There was a website for the Bindings bookshop in NYC, Crown Heights to be specific.

“What do you think you’re going to find?” asked Carl.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

And I didn’t. But London is a city of bookshops. You can get practically anything here—you certainly don’t need to go across the pond unless you’re after something very obscure. And if Craig Padmore could read French, couldn’t he have got this book from dealers in Paris? A hint was the fact that Bindings
specializes in African and Afro-Caribbean history, African-American and Third World literature, African novels in Heinemann paperback editions.
Not the place you first think of for a French history of the Vietnam War. And believe me, that volume didn’t look like an impulse buy.

Peculiar, yes, but I still didn’t know what Craig Padmore was after.

It was your usual bookseller’s Web page: new releases, promotions for small-press stuff, sales on selected items, where to find us. Then I spotted it. I selected the photo on the Web page, copied it, and then zoomed in for a closer view.

“What do you see?” I asked Carl.

“Bookshelves.”

I minimized the shot and left the desktop with all the photos of Anna Lee he had opened a couple of minutes ago.

“Sharp eyes!” he said, astonished.

Because when I clicked and maximized one shot of Anna, we could both clearly see the familiar bookshelves behind her. The books on one shelf looked like they hadn’t even changed order.

She had been there.

And the killer didn’t want the police to know that. But he hadn’t paid enough attention—or maybe any attention at all—to the photos in the computer folder. It must not have occurred to him that it was a digital print.

Lack of attention to details. Or plain sloppiness. It had made the would-be assassin fail in Bangkok and forced him to kill himself.

He was no professional. Professionals don’t make those kinds of stupid mistakes, and no professional would have needed a regular mob punk for a backup partner. Mr. Bad Suit—whoever he would turn out to be when Interpol identified him—had murdered Padmore, had perhaps murdered Anna, and had tried to kill us. All to please someone else. He had committed his crimes out of a perverted sense of duty.

“So this bookshop is a front for something,” said Carl. “Maybe.” I shut down the computer, and we both moved to leave.

Carl paused at the threshold, wearing this peculiar look of euphoric satisfaction. I didn’t like it. It was as if he was about to laugh at me.

“Right, then. Very good.”

“What is it?” I asked as we hit the street.

“I just realized you’re not my headache.” He was positively beaming at me. “You’ll be off to America to dig into all this, right? You’ll be
their
problem, and I’ll be free!
Free!
It’s wonderful. Try not to cause a diplomatic incident.”

“That’s not very nice,” I said. “And there’s still Craig Padmore’s murder.”

“Planned, no doubt, by the same fellows shaking things up in Bangkok. We can check the latent prints and the wound patterns against what turned up in Asia. You said yourself—the guy who probably did it offed himself right in front of you.”

“True.”

“Okay, then, safe flight and have a wonderful time!” he said cheerfully.

“Carl—”

“Teresa, we have no leads. I was told to move on only yesterday, and you’ve just provided us with information making it an international case. Duly noted. Bravo! It’s great out in America—you’ll
love
it there. Dozens and dozens of law-enforcement agencies you can drive crazy with interfering, compromising evidence, talking to witnesses out of turn—oh, the havoc you can cause! Think of it, love. Let me give you the number of the British Consulate in New York. Now, they’re on Third Avenue, and when you get yourself arrested, as you most assuredly will, hopefully it will be at the nearest precinct to them and be more convenient when they bail you—”

“Carl. You’re mean.”

“Teresa. You are a walking war zone.”

“You going to tell your lovely wife to call me before I fly out?”

“Yes, and she says thank you for the silk. She’s using it for cushions.”

I turned to head for the Tube station. Carl called me back.

“Teresa. Be careful.”

I tried to keep things light. “I’ll be fine.”

“Teresa, we never talked about it,” he said with a soft note of apology in his voice. “That whole ‘strip poker’ thing…I figured it was none of my business whatever you had to do. But
these
people. This BDSM cult you’re talking about? They tie people up, Teresa. They like hurting people and getting hurt.”

“I don’t,” I said flatly.

“Fine, but the way this stuff is always talked about, lots of people
let
themselves get tied up. They…they must know a fair deal about how to mess with someone’s head.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said, and waved good-bye.

“Teresa?”

I turned back.

“When you’re done with that Vietnam book, will you drop it off for me at Met headquarters? I’ll need it back before you fly out. It’s evidence.”

Shit. Must have seen me slip it into my handbag.

New York, New York. ‘Muhrrican with a capital M, which also stands for,
Mothuhfucka,
get
off
me, this is my street,
mine
! Honks, homeless, gridlock, and grittiness, if you can see past Mickey Mouse and the bright lights of Times Square. New York. Big. Shiny. Loud and lewd if you know where to look. One of my favorite cities. I treated myself to a generous lunch on Jeff Lee’s tab in a good restaurant on Sixth Avenue and tried to figure out a strategy for the bookshop Bindings.

If our killer didn’t want us to know Anna had been there, I couldn’t just breeze in and start asking questions. Carl could be right—it might be a front. I also had the minor puzzle of why her ex-boyfriend, Craig Padmore, should need a history of the Vietnam War (in French, no less) and from that particular bookshop. All of this was pretty tenuous, but since Anna had died in this city, I was obliged to take Manhattan.

I thought I could maybe just stroll in and be a regular customer, but on reflection I knew that wasn’t going to get me much.
Do you have
Histories of the Hanged?
Oh, good. You take Visa?
Wonderful, and I’m out the door, having learned nothing.

Then I thought of a third option, which was a bit lame but better than ten minutes’ worth of staring at shelves.

I walked across
the
bridge into Brooklyn, which—okay, I’ll admit—like so many other people, I usually just looked at on my personal jaunts. And, yes, I knew it was unfair to the borough. After all, you’ve got Prospect Park, Coney Island, and the Children’s Museum, which I was sincerely interested in (I’m that single female eccentric who also walks into Hamleys toy store without a child chaperone just to go check out the new dolls and the plush toys—mothers give me the dirtiest looks). I couldn’t see any of those sights today. I needed to jump on a train and make a beeline for Crown Heights.

The guidebook told me that this is the largest Afro-Caribbean community outside the Caribbean itself, and the shops and the energy of the district testified to that. Here and there, Latinos and Russians had staked a claim, and this is where black Americans lived in an uneasy truce with a substantial number of Hasidic Jews.

Only fifteen years back there were ugly riots here after a Jewish guy hit a little Guyanese boy and his cousin with his car. When the private Hasidic ambulance showed up, a cop ordered the ambulance to take the driver away and
leave behind
the kids, if you can believe that; the boy died, and the guy fled to Israel before he could be charged. The neighborhood nearly tore itself apart.

I found Bindings easily. It was refreshing to find a bookshop in America that wasn’t part of a chain. A few things that betrayed an individual owner’s touch, little idiot-syncrasies as I call them. Personal picks of staff that weren’t prompted by sales drives. Man, this place, you could scoop it up and plunk it down in Charing Cross Road, and it would have fit right in next to Zwemmer’s or Murder One.

The wood paneling was dark, the shelves overflowing, and you smelled dust even though the place looked clean. Instead of the ugly ’50s retro couches you get at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly or the nicer, plusher ones here in NYC at Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue, Bindings had these pew-like wooden diner booths. Browsing, it seemed, was tolerated, but you did it at your own risk on purgatorial furniture. I loved the place.

I saw only one staff person. You know what? When’s the last time you walked into a bookshop and actually witnessed one of the salespeople
reading
? I know, I know—they’re supposed to be at work. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into a bookshop and asked a question about a well-known author and been met with this adolescent, illiterate
blankness.
Please, please, I mumble under my breath, go work in Sainsbury’s, where you might at least recognize food. To me, if you’re reading the stock, that’s product endorsement.

And the guy with the volume in hand happened to be very good-looking. He was thin, but I bet he was toned under that black cotton turtleneck. His skin was a rich deep brown, and he had large dark eyes and a goatee with flecks of gray in it. He was reading with such intense concentration, I’m sure I could have shoplifted about twenty books in plain sight if it weren’t for the detector.

I liked the way his fingers stayed poised on a page in almost a caress. He seemed to be one of my kind, us quirky geeks who like to
smell
books, feel the texture of the old ones that were made out of decent paper, enjoy a binding that was sewn and not just glued. (Okay, yes, I admit to having one fetish.)

Finally he looked up and smiled, and I think he was the first guy I ever found attractive who had diastema—a slight gap between his two front teeth. Somehow on him it worked.

“Are you looking for something specific?” he asked pleasantly.

Stall.

“Umm, just thought I’d take a look around first.”

I did. He had an impressive stock of titles, especially the latest university press stuff on African history. But what caught my eye immediately was this large poster for a lecture by Ayann Hirsi Ali, the Somali feminist who used to be a Dutch politician.

“Wow!” I said. “Your owner impresses me.”

“Why?”

I tapped the poster. “Guts. You don’t worry about someone making a stink?”

Hirsi Ali had written
Submission,
the movie made by Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who seemed to revel in insulting people and religions.
Submission
is a searing indictment of the way some Muslims treat women. For his trouble, Van Gogh was gunned down, and the nut job who shot him stuck a knife in his chest with a five-page hate-mail letter threatening Hirsi Ali, Jews, and Western regimes.

The guy behind the counter leaned back and waved to the shelves. “Hey, I sell copies of
The Caged Virgin.
I sell the Koran, and I also sell Salman Rushdie. In fact, I sold
The Satanic Verses
when the whole shit storm started years ago. Disgusted the hell out of me when the other bookstores pulled their copies. And you know what? Not one threat. I had people filing in here asking for it like a teenager trying to buy a skin mag. I made a nice tidy profit that year. I’ll be damned if someone’s going to tell me what books I can’t sell.”

“So you’re the owner?” I asked needlessly. “You’re the one I’m impressed with.”

“I guess that’s me,” he laughed.

“What are you reading?”

He lifted up the cover so I could see. It was
Arrow of God
by Chinua Achebe.

“Ah. One of the sequels.”

“Well, you impress me,” he said. “Most people only know
Things Fall Apart.
” He extended his hand for me to shake. “I’m Oliver Anyanike. How ya doin’?”