That was a second after I heard the thump of a guy jumping on the hood of the car blocking the bus, his Uzi making the windshield explode.
The driver screamed, not because he was hit by any bullets but because of the shards of glass that tore his face to ribbons.
Now the tourists understood, huddling and crying in their seats. I watched the new arrivals point their guns at the Area Boys on the bus, and there were barked orders in pidgin English, the robbers scrambling to get off and get lost. They ran into the night, the driver still moaning over his slashed face.
Frightened, whispered Japanese.
German woman crying.
The bus still idling with a groan—a tired fridge past its warranty.
Then I heard a familiar voice announce with a tourist guide’s relaxed tone: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this robbery so that we can escort you back to your hotel. In the future, I suggest you double-check any such transfer claims by hotel staff and don’t pay attention to early-morning phone calls. I know you’ve had an unfortunate experience, but don’t let this put you off Nigeria. It’s a beautiful country, and most of the citizens are decent, hardworking people.”
Oh, no.
I sat up and waited for him to walk down the aisle to me. He was going to enjoy the moment no matter how I reacted.
Yes, I knew him, all right. Intimately. A lock of his blond hair fell across his smooth forehead, and his brows furrowed over those ice chips of blue. The angular curves to his face gave it an almost feminine softness, and he was one of the few English guys I knew who looked seven years younger than his age instead of older by a decade. Good genes. Good looks. Nice tan. Oh, hell.
“Simon Highsmith,” I groaned.
“Teresa Knight,” laughed Simon. “You of all people should know what to look out for in different parts of Africa.”
“What can I say, Simon? They caught me sleeping. Literally.”
5
Simon Highsmith and I had this bizarre relationship. He was a middle-class son of Purley who dropped out of medical school to become an aid worker in the Sudan, which is where I met him. We had fantastic sex, but I was a bit wary of his irreverent attitude. And then I was downright disillusioned when I learned that his sense of justice was slightly to the right of Dirty Harry’s.
I went home to London and became a snoop. Simon stayed in Africa. Until he popped up in London recently, right when I didn’t need him.
Couldn’t say I didn’t need him tonight.
“Are you still working for…?”
“Gone freelance.” He smiled proudly. “Less rules, more money. Now, if you come with me, I can give you a better ride than this busted-up wagon.”
His car. Simon drove at a moderate speed, keeping an eye out for the dogs or cattle that liked to wander out in the middle of the road in the darkness. So did the beggars.
“What are you doing here, Simon?”
“Come on, let me have my bit of fun, Teresa. I get to be clairvoyant. You are…Let me see. Hunting for a Jewish gangster by the name of David Sharett, right? Old merc from the civil-war days? And you’ve been asking rude questions about another bastard named Bishop.”
Amazing. “You are really getting your rocks off on this one, aren’t you?” I shot back. “Okay, I give up. How do you know?”
“Be flattered,” Simon told me. “These blokes didn’t hit your hotel by coincidence. Sharett got your message and wants you dead.”
“Just for asking about Bishop?”
“I don’t know, Teresa. Straight up. I’ve got a mole in Sharett’s operation—that’s how I learned about you. Incidentally, you’ve reaffirmed my faith in Sonny Nwidor.”
I didn’t get it.
“Sonny knows me,” said Simon with another Cheshire cat grin. “Sonny doesn’t know that you and I know each other. He tracked me down and asked me as a personal favor to look out for you. The real kick was my informant’s description of you about two hours before Sonny called, and me thinking, ‘Christ, that sounds a lot like Teresa….’Well, this’ll be fun. Here I am in town to ruin Sharett, and you can help.”
“But you’re really after Harry Bishop too. What for?”
“What’s your interest?”
“I asked first,” I said.
I could guess his already. As I’d learned recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa didn’t cover everybody—and not everyone in government corridors in Pretoria and Cape Town approved of the process. Many old enemies of the people had never got what was coming to them and were still trying to bleed the nation dry. Enter Simon Highsmith. After he and I lost touch, he became something of an avenging angel for the interests of a free democratic South Africa. And now he was freelance.
Harry Bishop was certainly an appropriate target for retribution. When Biafra stopped making headlines, Bishop had gone to kill for the CIA in Vietnam, and after Saigon fell, he jetted off to South Africa to kill more “Kaffirs” for the apartheid regime.
Simon swerved the car to avoid a chicken. “Let’s just say there’s no official forgiveness for some of the old bastards. Bishop is a seventies’ Eichmann. But I’m mainly here for money.”
“You mean vengeance.”
“That too. But the financial end is the priority this time. My intel says Bishop went from camouflage hands-on wet work to white-collar investments. Did you know he was a consultant from eighty-six to ninety-two for Orpheocon?”
Orpheocon. He knew how I’d react to the name. Both Simon and I had suffered more than our share of run-ins with that oil company. But I had to stay focused.
“Come on, somebody worked long and hard for payback, and now their moment’s come,” I argued. “So they sent you to dish it out.”
“Yeah, but money really is part of it. My client’s decided that Bishop should be hunted down and stripped of his larger assets, if I can, ahem, persuade him to go away. So why are you here?”
I hesitated.
“Teresa, please don’t tell me you’re going to interfere with me doing my job on this one—”
“No,” I said quickly. “Actually, no.”
He was genuinely surprised. “This is new.”
“Not so much. I do believe there is genuine evil in the world, Simon, and some of these creeps have it coming. But before you collect Bishop, I need to find out some things.”
“Fair enough.”
He stopped the car, and I looked out and said, “This isn’t my hotel.”
“It’s a hotel, darling.”
“Yours?”
He smiled at me.
“Uh-huh,” I said, grabbing my bag from the trunk. “Just what are you expecting as an expression of my gratitude for the rescue? Darling.”
“Breakfast,” he laughed. “Let’s see if we can wake up the kitchen staff.”
Over eggs, I offered broad strokes about the case. I mentioned that it involved a cult, but I didn’t go into all the BDSM stuff, not then. It didn’t seem relevant, and…well, to tell the truth, I was embarrassed about it.
I didn’t want him giving me this look of morbid concern like Carl Norton handed me back in London. Bad enough that Simon peppered me with questions. Was it the Moonies? Was it these other guys who think they can levitate? No, no, and no, none of the major ones.
Then he settled down and listened politely, never interrupting, and as we talked, I felt myself getting lured into his spell of charm all over again. Simon could be very sensitive, insightful, wickedly funny. The last time he was in London, his presence had felt like an intrusion, but here I had the strangest notion that I was on his turf, if that makes any sense. Of all my white friends and acquaintances, male or female, he had arguably the best appreciation of African and “black” culture, not in an “oh, we’re all the same under the skin” obsequious liberal sense but in what it was like to feel displaced, alienated, to think in different ways. He had a genuine love of Africa that didn’t spring out of the old white paternalism—a true appreciation of a ri
ch history.
You could say I really liked Simon—except when he was killing people.
“Would you like to know what I think?” he asked gently.
“Go ahead.”
“You said this contact of yours—this Oliver—left the group. It felt dodgy and then some. Sounds to me like someone dug into his past for psychological manipulation, just to scare the fucking hell out of him and drive him away.”
“I’ve considered that,” I put in.
“Right, I’m sure you have,” said Simon. “But have you thought about the really twisted aspect?”
“What?”
Simon leaned forward, studying his glass of orange juice, thinking out loud. “There’s nothing more psychologically primal, that can get you right at the core, than digging up the bogeyman who killed Daddy. But isn’t that an awful lot of trouble?”
“I don’t follow,” I said. And I didn’t.
“Consider how much trouble you personally are investing to piece together what happened to this bloke’s old man. You said it yourself. You have to track down old witnesses, go back forty years. Well, so did this other person! They had to cover the same ground. They went to a lot of effort to find out what happened ages ago, just to use a detail that would have an emotional impact, a real mind fuck on this Oliver.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I don’t know,” said Simon. He shrugged and sat back, poking his eggs with his fork. “I can tell you one thing. Your killer in New York wasn’t Bishop. He is pushing close to seventy. And all our information says he hasn’t set foot in America since 1994.”
“Is he avoiding the States or something?”
“As far as we can tell, he pissed off the Clinton administration somehow, though we’re not sure how. Bishop used to get around, of course: Africa, Asia, South America. Pick a bloody conflict and he either fired the guns, sold the guns, or acted as consultant on how best to slaughter people.”
“Sharett has answers,” I muttered.
“He likes to pull surprises,” said Simon. “What do you say we give him one of our own?”
There’s Hollywood. There’s Bollywood. And then there’s Nollywood.
Nigerian movies—usually shot on handheld video cams, meant for the television networks or the Idomuta market on Lagos Island. My guidebook claimed that about seventy new videos hit Idomuta each week. I watched a couple of these on MNET one evening, and…HBO drama, they’re not. Bad dialogue that made you groan when you weren’t laughing at the production goofs. Ugh. But what do I know? I turn on Sky back home, and it’s either dreary soaps or ancient Granada reruns or American imports—Hugh Laurie and his surreal American accent as the latest doctor hero.
As it happened, according to Simon’s intel, David Sharett was that special kind of criminal egomaniac who fancied himself a mogul. And lately he was trying to shake down one of the legit producers and take over his business in Surulere. So. Nollywood. We took ourselves down to the set of the producer’s latest film (nothing more than the parking area behind the company office) and arranged our own appointment.
After being nearly bused to my death in the wee hours, I relished the look on this short thug’s rubbery white moon-face when he thought his three strong-arming bodyguards would get him results today. Short version? The rifles used for the army scene weren’t props. (You’d think a former merc would guess that.) Forty seconds after the director called, “Action,” David Sharett was staring at his own potential firing squad.
“Expediency devolves into farce,” Simon remarked quietly.
Sharett, however, wasn’t laughing. The cold fish eyes zeroed in on me—must have guessed at least who I was. In a voice that sounded like whiskey poured on gravel, he said, “I suppose you wish to talk.”
We talked in the shade. He whined about the heat like any old man. You’re from Israel, I reminded him tartly. Maybe you don’t get the humidity, but the heat can’t be anything you’re not used to. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and called me a bitch. I’d heard worse.
His expression sure was funny when Simon responded with a chivalrous insult back in fluent Arabic.
“I ordered the bus for you, girl, because I thought you were with his operation,” growled Sharett, tilting his chin to Simon. He sat down on the rusting bumper of the producer’s car and lit himself a cigarette.
“My request was real,” I told him. “I do need to ask you about the war. And Bishop.”
“What is this sudden interest in Anyanike?” complained Sharett. “He was a fucking nobody.”
Simon and I looked at each other.
“How about you just answer the question?” demanded Simon.
“Huh, why not?” grumbled Sharett. “Bishop was supposed to be my business partner, ends up my boss. He’s a shit. He’ll deserve whatever he gets.”
Simon’s eyes were on me again, transmitting a clear message. It was along the lines of: This withered prune’s fooling himself if he thinks he’s getting the operation after Bishop’s eliminated.
“Anyanike,” I said. “Oliver Anyanike. Working for a relief organization in Benin and other places. What happened to him?”
“Bishop happened to him,” said Sharett, and spat on the ground. “I was there.”
Autumn, 1967. Ojukwu’s forces pushed boldly across the bridge over the Niger River into the Federalist-held midwest, capturing Benin, the southern river ports of Sapele and Warri, and naturally Ughelli with its oil. It was an astonishing feat of military daring, said Sharett, when you think about it. “The Biafrans had only about a thousand men, you know, most with hardly any training or decent weapons, a lot of these guys in civilian clothes because they hadn’t been given their uniforms, and, shit, I am telling you they came over in cattle and vegetable trucks.”
Sharett, I thought, nicely forgot that during this military miracle there was a coup going on among the midwestern Igbo officers in Benin, which helped drain the resistance when the Biafrans rolled in. Or so I had read.
“But then we beat them back,” Sharett went on. “That was one of my earliest operations. I’d come out of the Six-Day War in Israel, helped beat those Arab fools who didn’t have one decent general among them, and I was…what? I’d been in Africa about a month. The Biafrans looted Benin before they left, and Bishop and I were rolling on to secure Warri to the south. Now, this you must understand—it was the civilians rounding up the people before we arrived.”
“What people?” I asked.
“Igbos.”
Six hundred Igbos still left in Warri. Their stores were plundered, and the police stood by and did nothing. The killing started on a Friday, mostly by members of the Urhobo minority tribe but with the occasional Yoruba pitching in, and still the Federalist “liberators” did nothing. Simon asked about the Hausas.
“No, they didn’t take part,” said Sharett matter-of-factly.
Ordinary people. They hacked their neighbors to death, the old mercenary reported as he smoked away. More than three hundred, perhaps more than even four hundred Igbos slain before the police rounded up the few who were left and shoved them into a prison until the community’s bloodlust passed. But Bishop? And Anyanike?
“Anyanike got word somehow of similar massacres happening in other towns. He was a medic for this church group. It was…Oh, I forget what it was called, as if it fucking matters! He led a whole group of refugees east, trying to catch up to a Biafran column. I was with Bishop when his reconnaissance force intercepted them. I’ll never forget what he said. It was clear Anyanike was in charge—he bandaged everyone’s wounds, dispensed the water or the food those wretches had. And Bishop, big ox of a man back then, he steps up to him, claps him on a shoulder, and booms out, ‘Where you think you are going, Sun-eee Jeem?’”
Sharett paused to light himself a fresh cigarette.
“Huh, there was no reason for it,” he continued. “I even told Bishop myself. I said ‘They’re not soldiers, Harry. What do we give a shit for?’ Ach! He came u
p with this nonsense that they could report the troop strength for a Biafran counteroffensive. It was bullshit, of course.”
I listened as he went through the chilling details. Anyanike had tried to negotiate. Then he tried a bribe. Then he lost his temper and argued and begged. All while the terrified refugees waited, stonelike, not knowing their fate. A Nigerian army lieutenant ordered them to turn around and head for Warri, but they didn’t move. This infuriated Bishop. To think they were waiting for Anyanike to give the order instead of listening to his officer!
“He pulled out his sidearm and shot him dead right there. He said, ‘Now you know to move your arses.’”
The refugees turned around and made the long trudge back to Warri. Where the blades were waiting.
The limbs piled up in that grim afternoon.
There is an anticlimactic atmosphere to an arm chopped off and hanging like a turkey bone from a shoulder, said Sharett. Vivid startling red, of course, as expected, but also the draining of sense from the victim’s eyes. Shock. Frozen mute horror and the loss of sanity. The expression is practically mirrored in the face of the killer.
A stench like metal, only it’s blood. Staining pools of depravity. Then mosquitoes and flies buzzing in the shameful silence.
Bishop had watched all this, and he allegedly embarrassed the soldiers by his conduct. They didn’t care about the Igbo, but they were disgusted that the Englishman had an erection while the massacre proceeded.
Anyanike…Bishop had drawn his sick little emblem of the chess piece on the murdered medic’s arm, Sharett explained, before they marched back. When Bishop was yards ahead, the soldiers chose to second-guess their commander. One of them took a blade to disfigure the medic’s head and torso. Better that word spread that Anyanike was one of the victims of the rampage in Warri. So the confusion over his death resulted in his contradictory wounds and the fact that his body was nowhere near the other victims. Police photos were taken, but the case was unsolved, like so many during the war.
Until now.
Beg Me Page 10