Beg Me (8 page)

“The joke is on me. On all of us. Like any cult, there’s got to be a backstory, and I guess those of us who think we’re really smart fall for it harder. When I first got involved, our wise and powerful leader, Isaac, he laid this whole big legend on us. Said the wisdom of what and who we really are was rediscovered through this BDSM scene played in a temple on a vacation, spirits inhabiting him and his first submissive partner. Like there’s a kind of oral tradition to bondage, to the training of dominants and submissives for sadomasochistic relationships. That gets around the sticky issue of manuscripts or bibles or texts, doesn’t it? After all, if it’s all oral, passed down from
the Man,
can’t argue with it, can you?”

I didn’t say anything, letting him get through it in his own time.

“Thing is,” he went on, “I own a bookstore, you know? I can look things up. And I went through the stock I have on sarcophaguses of Egypt, all the technical archaeology stuff. There’s no variation on the word. Isaac kept saying to me, ‘Well, of course, they don’t got it. Why would you expect ’em to have it?’ And it wasn’t until I was out of the group that I figured out where he coined that name.” He rolled his eyes. “He took it from an old 1960s Marvel comic. He must have liked the
sound
of it. It sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Sarcophacan.”

“You ever hear of L. Ron Hubbard?” I asked gently.

Oliver winced. I don’t think he enjoyed the comparison. “Scientology.”

But all I commented was, “Hubbard wrote science-fiction stories. My brother likes sci-fi and comics, and he showed me how the first Dianetics stuff was published in a sci-fi magazine.”

“Terrific.

“The whole backstory thing, all the supposed legends,” said Oliver. “They really burned Craig when he started to look closely at them. He lost Anna, and that started his doubts, but then he started questioning it all. He was like me—ashamed that he’d swallowed this bullshit. I remember…Yeah. He was so bitter. I remember he said to me that everybody has skeletons, and he was going to go rooting around in Isaac’s closet but good. Find the man he really was.”

Huh. Maybe he had.

“You do know what he wanted that French book for, don’t you?” I asked. “The one about Vietnam.”

“Yes,” he admitted at last. “Isaac was kind of proud of his dad for getting this award over there in ’Nam.”

“What award?”

“I’m not sure what it’s called. Isaac told us his dad got this Medal of Honor thing from the Paris government because he helped evacuate these hang-on-to-the-bitter-end French colonial types. He saved them from, uh…from this resort community or something attacked by the Vietcong. Said a French general pinned it on his daddy’s chest.”

I had to smile at the audacity of this whopper. Not an easy thing to check from here, and I suppose that was the idea. After all, if Isaac had told them his father had got the Bronze Star or the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor or something, those were easy for an American to look up.

“And you bought this rubbish?”

Oliver turned defensive. “Hey, to be honest, I didn’t think about it too much. He told me all this when I didn’t doubt him at all.”

No wonder, then, that Craig Padmore had picked up a
French
history of Vietnam. He had tried to give Isaac the benefit of the doubt. But one dip in even the English history texts would have let him know it was impossible for any French general to have pinned a medal on Isaac Senior’s chest.

The last of France’s soldiers left Vietnam in 1956—years before the Americans even stepped into the picture.

Isaac, of course, could have come back and claimed that he was mistaken about this part of the story or that his dad remembered it wrong but that he still got a French medal somehow. But—

Big deal. This tall tale certainly wasn’t enough to ruin the cult leader and bring him down. It made sense that Craig had gone sniffing into the medal story, probably looking up anecdotes about the last of the French living in South Vietnam. But this wasn’t the revelation from the book that had “helped him” so much.

“Sarcophacan temple,” I muttered. Jeez. “Couldn’t this Isaac come up with something a little less obvious? I’m not taking the mickey—I mean, you checked it yourself and saw through it.”

And after I explained “taking the mickey” and he said, “oh,” he folded his arms and offered, “Yeah, but I still bought it for a long time. It’s not the backstory that holds people, it’s what they do…. Isaac doesn’t come across as if he’s well educated. Don’t get me wrong—he’s smart. He’s goddamn cunning, and you see that right away. I could always tell he reads, but it’s like there are gaps for him. I don’t think he ever went to college. And he never told me where he went to high school.”

I mulled over that one. Interesting.

“Besides,” Oliver went on, “Danielle fills in all the blanks anyway.”

“Who is she?”

“Danielle’s his ‘duchess.’ There is only one duchess in the whole group, and that’s her, just like he’s the only duke in the group. He’s big picture, she’s fine details. Whenever there’s a squabble over the dorm-room living—they all live at the mansion—Danielle sorts it out. Be too embarrassing if they had to bring Isaac into it. Like showing Dad how petty you can be! She assigns the work tasks. She gives out allowances…. She’s their big S and M mother superior. Here—”

He tapped his computer and pulled up a digital photo. “They don’t like pictures being taken of them, but I managed to get this when everybody was chillin’ and cool about it.”

I looked. He pointed out a few of the devotees, gave names that meant nothing to me, then: “And there are Isaac and Danielle.”

Isaac Jackson was a handsome fellow with a skin tone of light copper, and he looked to be in his late thirties, early forties. With his head shaved, attention was drawn down to his large dark almond eyes, his sharp cheekbones, and to the finely trimmed goatee, blacker than Oliver’s and with no gray in it. He smiled for the camera, but there was something formal, something austere in his expression. He looked muscular too, his chiseled biceps revealed by his tanktop—they gave me a clue to an obsessive personality.

“He looks mixed race,” I commented.

“Oh, I wouldn’t bring that up to him or anybody.”

“Why not?”

Oliver frowned. “Isaac has his own distinctive take on race. He’s…You’ll hear all about it once you’re in. Don’t get the wrong idea—he doesn’t blame kids of mixed couples. It’s more his, uh, well, his crusade over the treatment of half-castes.”

“Half-castes?” I echoed.

“Yeah, he really calls ’em that.”

Not a term I’d expect an American guy to use, especially if he’s supposed to be sympathetic to the issues and the lot of mixed-race people.

In the photo, Isaac’s arm was around Danielle. Danielle, in charge of the “fine details.” Long black hair, green eyes, and something quite a ways east of Europe in the features, something exotic. White girl. She was beautiful. Best guess was that she was past thirty, but I’d bet she could pass with some people for a few years younger. Certainly gravity hadn’t started any ravages yet.

Reason I could tell was that she wore this peculiar green cotton garment—it looked like a costume for a porn flick about Amazons. One breast exposed, and very nice it was too. A little larger cup than mine, nicely defined small pink areola and nipple. And no one else in the shot seemed to care or be conscious of this, especially since one of the other girls, looking about twenty-one, very light-toned black chick, was nude.

“So these are Danielle and Isaac,” I said. “Give me her last name.”

“Tidemand,” he answered.

I laughed. “Really? Has she ever mentioned her father’s name?”

“Dolph, I think.”

I shook my head and chuckled. “Let’s try again.”

“What?” he asked defensively.

“Adolph Tidemand is the name of a famous Norwegian painter,” I explained.

And as he stared at me, I arched my eyebrows. Had he forgotten already? “You’re the one who found out I worked in the art world,” I reminded him. “She looks exotic, yeah, but I doubt she’s got much Nordic blood in her. Well, forget that BS name.”

“Okay, I’m gullible,” he admitted, shrugging. “What do you need her last name for anyway?”

“I want to dig into their financials and see what I can find out. How about the address of this mansion? I’ll work backward from there. You want to collect money on your enterprises, you have to come up with a real name eventually.”

I decided to e-mail my favorite computer expert, Jiro Tanaka, back in London (Japanese with a Liverpudlian accent). He had this magical talent for worming his way through databases in archives, and, sure, while you
can
shell out a few quid for a property-ownership search through agencies, I thought maybe I’d save Ah Jo Lee a bit on my expenses tab. Besides, my friend owed me.

Everybody wants something, and I’d recently scored Jiro a pirated DVD of the
Superman Returns
sequel. Picked it up in Bangkok—guess who gave it to me?

“This’ll take awhile,” I said, getting up from his computer. “You always wondered where their money comes from, now maybe we’ll find out.”

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

As I started to ask another question about Isaac, Oliver waved it away, saying, “That’s enough for now. I can brief you on all the stuff about them when you’re done.”

“Done with what?”

“We made a bargain,” he said.

“Your father’s murder.”

Go solve the mystery of that, and then he’d help me infiltrate the group. Get close to this Isaac and Danielle. Get payback for my friend Anna Lee.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll drive you back to your hotel. You’ll want a good night’s sleep before you get started.”

And like an obedient if slightly bewildered sub, I let him drive me back into Manhattan.

The next day when I dropped in to the bookstore, Oliver was minding the till by himself and had a stack of volumes on the counter waiting for me.

“You’ll need these,” he said.

He handed me
The Nigerian Civil War
by John de St. Jorre, saying, “This is very good, especially since it’s written by a white dude. Damn shame it’s out of print.” Then he piled on the new memoir by Wole Soyinka, and I quickly returned the paperback
Sozaboy.

“I’ve read it,” I told him. “What are you giving me these for?”

“Background,” said Oliver.

“What’s the connection? You haven’t told me where to start.”

“I’m telling you now. Biafra, 1967.”

The spell of submissive obedience was broken. “You must be joking! Are you kidding me, Oliver?”

“We have a deal,” he insisted.

“Which you made me agree to blind!” I reminded him. “I thought your dad was maybe mugged or something here in New York—and recently! Five years ago at best!”

“Well, he wasn’t. He was a medical aid worker during the civil war. Look, Teresa, I
have
money. I will
pay
your expenses to fly out there for a couple of weeks and look around. Three years ago I tried to look into it myself, but I’m a bookseller, I’m not one of those
CSI
guys.”

“Neither am I! That’s just it, Oliver, nobody is. That’s
television.
Wake up! I’m not a real detective. I just do favors for people, and they pay me. I snoop around sometimes.”

“You’re the closest thing I’ve got for the job,” he said. “Do me this favor.”

“You’re asking me to try to piece together what happened forty years ago in an African war zone! It’s impossible! Witnesses forget, people are scattered over time, they’ve died or don’t want to talk. And I’ve never been to Nigeria—”

“Okay, I can see you need some additional incentive,” he snapped irritably, and I didn’t know if he was about to revert to his domination persona. I clasped my hands together, instinctively adopting a submissive posture.

He looked astonished for a second, then decided the best thing to do was to make no comment. Instead, he told me, “You think I left because I didn’t like what I was changing into, and you’re right. But…You don’t know. Someone else was murdered before Anna.”

“Damn it, Oliver! Why didn’t you tell me this before? Maybe it would have—”

“Because it’s gonna sound crazy!”

“Try me.”

He paused a moment, as if summoning the strength to roll out the tale. “When I was thinking of leaving the group, when I got disillusioned with them…I started breaking the rules behind their backs. Little things. And you’re not supposed to focus all your attention on one princess.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah. A girl of about twenty-seven. Her name was Kelly Rawlins. She had a real good job, securities broker at one of those big firms.”

He fished out a picture of her from his wallet. Pretty girl, mocha complexion, oval face framed by short hair, large eyes, nice smile.

“We started to see each other outside the group. We had regular sex—no whippings, no bondage, no kink at all. It was amazing to feel it normal again. We loved each other—at least, I loved her. We thought we were pretty careful. One weekend we both slipped away from the group, so she rented us this hotel suite in a two-star in midtown. Kelly said she felt like ice cream, and I went out to get it from a Baskin-Robbins. When I came back, she was murdered.”