Beg Me

by Lisa Lawrence

  “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.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Someone,” he hissed, pulling out a drawer of his desk and withdrawing an envelope, “sent me these.”

  They were photographs—but not like the shots sent to Ah Jo Lee in Bangkok. They weren’t bondage pics.

  The photos showed the beautiful nude body of a young black girl lying in bed, the hourglass of her form so lovely—contrasted with the bloody mess the killer had left of her face. She was unrecognizable. It looked like she had been beaten to death with a hammer.

  “What did the police say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know….”

  “What do you mean you don’t—”

  “I mean I ran out of that hotel room like a coward!” he answered. “I left Kelly maybe half an hour to go to the store! Someone set me up, and there’s no goddamn way I was going to stick around to take the rap! These photos they sent—they prove it was a setup.”

  “So if it was the cult, why didn’t you just go and talk to the police?”

  His voice cracking with anguish, he said, “Because I can’t prove anything. I don’t know it’s them for sure! Don’t look at me like that, Teresa. What was I supposed to do? I was scared shitless. Somebody was sending me a message—”

  He called my attention to one of the photos sent to him. It was a close-up shot—the killer had sketched in ballpoint pen the outline of a chess bishop on the girl’s thigh.

  “When my father was murdered in sixty-seven, someone drew a bishop just like this one on his arm. His killer’s fucking calling card!”

  A bishop. A bishop drawn on the girl.

  Just like the one drawn on Craig Padmore’s arm when he was shot in his apartment.

  I never mentioned that detail to Oliver.

  And back in London, good ol’ Inspector Carl Norton had told me that it wasn’t divulged to the public and press.

  “It’s impossible,” I said quietly. “Say your father was killed by someone pushing thirty in 1967. Say it’s the same guy who killed Kelly. That would mean this psycho running around is closing in on seventy.”

  Yes, I could have told Oliver right then about Craig Padmore, but I wasn’t about to throw gasoline on his fire.

  “I didn’t say I could explain it,” he argued. “But there is a link. You can see that, right?”

  Yes, I couldn’t deny it. There was a link.

  Mr. Bad Suit out of Bangkok had assassinated Craig Padmore and deliberately drawn the bishop symbol on his arm. So the person who hired him clearly wanted that symbol on Craig’s skin for someone else to see.

  Just as he did for this Kelly Rawlins slain in a hotel room.

  Find out what the bishop was originally supposed to mean, then maybe I’d learn why it was being used today.<
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  Great. To do that, I just had to solve a forty-year-old murder in an old war zone.

  It looked like I was going to Nigeria.

  4

  Before I caught my flight, my computer expert Jiro got back to me. Thrilled about the pirated DVD, by the way. “Danielle Tidemand,” as I suspected, had nothing to do with the address Oliver provided for the sarcophacan princes’ mansion. The house was actually owned in the name of a Danielle Zamani. Hmmm. Sounded Iranian, and it was. You plug Zamani into Google, and sooner or later someone comes back as a link that will help you guess ethnicity.

  Jiro’s e-mail reply offered a list of other properties in Danielle Zamani’s name, but what captured my attention was that nothing came up for Isaac Jackson. That wouldn’t have surprised me so much if it turned out that Jackson was an alias and Danielle’s co-owner was an Isaac Somebody. Nope. Nothing. The guy was a cypher. Playing it very, very safe by not attaching his name to the real estate. Which also meant he must trust Danielle a lot.

  Another fact to mull.

  I’d have to go digging into all this later, and I suspected it would still come down to me learning the most by getting inside. But Oliver wouldn’t help me until I solved his mystery first.

  Lagos. Loud. Crowded. Busy. Bustling. Did I say crowded? Something like thirteen million people in this city alone, and it felt like half of them were in the Balogun Market when I gave myself one day to decompress from my flight and play tourist.

  You step off the plane and instantly feel that gauze resistance of liquid tropical air—the same kind of brutal humidity I’d felt in Bangkok. Mosquitoes and sand flies. I was traveling first class on Oliver’s tab all the way, but no matter how posh the hotel, you still get a bucket for your shower, and the lights blew right as I was fixing myself up to go out. The joke is that NEPA in Nigeria doesn’t stand for National Electric Power Authority—it means Never Expect Power Again. I’m a strange gal. I keep putting myself in spots where I have to rough it, and I whine like a kid dragged on a camping trip through Germany’s Black Forest at Easter.

  People swirled around me now in the Balogun Market, many in Western clothes but just as many in traditional dress: men in buba and sokoto, a woman’s akede in its bright intricate folds, colors, and more colors. I passed a shop stand where all the staff members were gathered around a portable TV watching an ancient episode of Basi and Company, the old Nigerian sitcom, being replayed oddly enough on the incoming South African television channel. At another stand, a man was complaining to his indifferent colleague, slouching and trying to catch a glimpse of the show. “Mi za ka e? Komi? Ka zona acham—” Hausa dialect.

  Strolling around, I kept seeing the message This house is not for sale painted on the walls of homes or on the sides of apartment blocks. The concierge at the hotel later explained that it was a common scam to break into a house and brazenly “sell” it to a stranger while the owner was out.

  Babies cried as they cry everywhere. There were too many corners and streets where I saw gigantic heaps of rubbish—pigs and wild dogs poking through debris. It told you something when you passed shops that felt it necessary to post signs on the wall requesting Do not urinate here.

  Reading the history of Nigeria, I had felt that strange muffling sensation, that silence of desperate helplessness that falls over my will like a shroud. Sapping strength, breeding apathy. It’s the kind I’ve experienced at times over my father’s homeland. Poor Nigeria. Yakubu Gowon forced out in a coup by Murtala Mohammed, Mohammed assassinated and replaced by Obasanjo, Obasanjo going back to his farm, and then the dark days of the ’80s, the liar Babangida and cruel despot Abacha, Obasanjo’s return, but still so much poverty and chaos.

  Yeah, you could say I have a problem with a country that’s blessed with everything it needs, including oil, and yet can’t feed itself. I have a problem with Sharia, strict Islamic law, as it’s enforced in the northern states. I have a big problem with places that stone women for adultery or declare fatwas on a twenty-one-year-old journalist like Isioma Daniel, just because she expresses an opinion over a Miss World pageant.

  One of the books that Oliver had added to my research stack was The Trouble with Nigeria. It was one by Chinua Achebe that I hadn’t read before. And as I got my bearings around Lagos Island, ignoring the street hawkers and passing prehistoric auto wrecks that had become home to clucking chickens, keeping an eye out for the local thug element—the “Area Boys”—I remembered a passage from the little book.

  There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character, Achebe wrote. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which is the hallmark of true leadership.

  I probably spent more than I needed to on a cab ride over to Awolowo Road, but I felt better after a lunch break at Munchies and an hour exploring the Jazz Hole, buying CDs and books for friends. It’s not like I would get to see much of the country. No, I wouldn’t get to hop over to survey the lost civilizations of Abomey, and I didn’t expect to lie on a beach on the Niger Delta. I was the fool who was on an all-expenses-paid time-travel journey, booking a flight to Port Harcourt to meet a valuable contact passed on by one of my London friends.

  Back in time. The war. The canvas was so bloody complex—and in the end, just bloody—that it was hard to make sense of it. Nigeria, as most Nigerians can tell you—with its myriad ethnic groups, its religious divides, and sheer scope of geography—barely makes sense anyway except as an economic construct, another political invention of the British.

  In 1966, the pervasive distrust of the vacillating government and corrupt political rot helped fuel an army coup and then countercoup, and ethnic tensions exploded into a massacre of Christian Igbos in the north. Igbos fled from north to east, and Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu in charge of the east told the non-Easterners to get out, as he couldn’t assure their safety. (Very cute, I thought sourly as I read this.) Then the patchwork quilt of Nigeria began to unravel even faster—but the truth was that secessionist feelings in the east had begun as early as the spring of ’66. By the end of May 1967, Ojukwu was proclaiming an independent Republic of Biafra.

  For the Federalist side, the argument was for “One Nigeria,” a country that would hold together and provide for all as it reaped the benefits of its natural resources. For Biafra, it was the case of an independent new nation determining its own economic destiny. Because at the middle of all this was oil in the Niger Delta.

  Here we go again, I thought as I read the source books, or, more accurately: Here we were before—and still are. There were bitter arguments before the hostilities over how much revenue from eastern operations should be paid to Enugu, the regional capital.

  You can almost see it coming, can’t you? Of course, Britain got involved—it owned a forty-nine percent stake in Shell/British Petroleum at the time. So it provided a good deal of arms to the Federalist side. Bizarrely enough, the Russians got into the act and also supplied Soviet MiGs to the Federalists, which just gave London another excuse to keep its hand in to prevent Nigeria from “going Communist.” Not that Biafra had terribly clean hands either, holding them out for help to apartheid-era South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portugal. France helped Biafra, while only four African nations actually recognized it diplomatically.

  That Biafra held out as long as it did is kind of amazing, even with the Europeans tossing everybody guns. At one point, the Biafrans even plowed through Benin City to get within almost a hundred clicks of Lagos, but it was inevitable that this tiny region couldn’t withstand forever the force of the giant.

  By 1968, things were at a siege stalemate, and that’s when my dad’s and my grandmother’s generations—when all the oblivious whites in England and America—first saw television pictures of starving African babies with bloated stomachs and flies buzzing around their eyes. I can remember vague impressions as a s
mall child of Ethiopia’s famine in ’84 and Bob Geldof, but Biafra came first. Biafra came with Frederick Forsyth and his journalistic outrage, and again with sanctimonious whites saying how things were so much better when they were in charge.

  In the end, Ojukwu had to flee as the fledgling country shrank, then shrank some more, and its forces eventually crumbled. There were not waves of reprisals or mass genocide as the West feared. Instead, all of Nigeria went into a kind of mourning period over a war that had no victors and no vanquished.

  The white correspondent John de St. Jorre wrote in his own history of the conflict that It was marvelous to see officers and men who had been facing each other over the barrel of a gun for two and a half years embrace and weep tears of joy…it may be that when history takes a longer view of Nigeria’s war it will be shown that while the black man has little to teach us about making war he has a real contribution to offer in making peace.

  Trouble is, I thought, that the problems that created the war haven’t gone away.

  Ken Saro-Wiwa railed against Shell, against how the oil companies wouldn’t share their wealth with the ordinary people and were polluting the environment, and the regime in power trumped up its incitement to murder charges, tossed him in a cell, and then hanged him. The Ijaw fight the oil companies now to protect their fishing villages, and on it goes. Orpheocon leads the industry in spills in the Delta.

  And there are still the great divides between Yoruba and Hausa and Igbo and Fulani and how many others, and if you’re Igbo and don’t have an Igbo guy in a position of influence then you’re out of luck, and if you’re Ogoni and you don’t have an Ogoni guy…and on it goes. I passed the barefoot poor kids in Lagos and wondered what the hell good it did that my heart broke for them.

  Africa, unite. Please. And make it quick.