I appreciated the professional courtesy. I did want to be there.
I phoned Simon and told him that I had booked a flight to Portugal and for him to please get me a separate room at the hotel in Albufeira. “Understood,” he said, and hung up.
God help me for what I was going to make happen.
Albufeira. Gorgeous, sandy beautiful beach, and yellow, pink, and blue apartment blocks near the marina. They looked like a child’s rendering of a townscape. You heard the Algarve accent in the locals’ Portuguese but also a jarring sprinkle of British expat gossip, the newest homeowners whining about the DIY needed on their extensions. My friend Helena had been here, I seemed to remember. Lovely—the type of place where you shouldn’t have to struggle with your conscience.
For some, of course, there’s never a struggle. It’s just blue skies and warm beach and a white villa going for a steal at so many thousands of Euros outside the small town. For some, the best revenge is living well—after you’ve killed off your enemies.
I was very quiet riding shotgun in the convertible Mercedes Simon had rented, brooding behind my sunglasses as we drove out of town. We passed within sight of the Torre do Relógio, and here and there I thought I saw bits of old Moorish architecture. Then we were into the hills above the sea, and while it was another ninety-degree afternoon, a nice breeze cooled things today.
Simon misinterpreted my silence. He must have thought I was having mixed thoughts about confronting Bishop. Not at all.
“You didn’t have to come along,” he said gently. “I could have taken care of this.”
“I know. I appreciated the call.”
“You’re treating this job like a penance,” he commented.
“Simon, let’s not talk for a while.”
He knew enough to shut up.
We parked the car in the lot of a little survey spot overlooking the sea. Then we trudged up a hill for fifteen minutes to where Bishop’s gleaming white villa sat behind a gate. Both of us were mildly surprised that it wasn’t even locked, and we strolled in like a couple ready to knock on the door for directions.
As we made our way around to the backyard, our target stomped out of a greenhouse, a man in his late sixties with milky blue eyes and a weak jaw, wearing gardening gloves and a floppy khaki hat. He was bare to the waist, a farm-hand’s tan on his arms, his chest a sallow white like a sickly fish, potbellied and with tufts of white hairs.
“Who are you?” he barked. Northern accent sanded down over time from living in foreign parts.
Simon pulled out his 9mm Glock 18 and leveled it at Bishop. The old mercenary sighed and started to pull off his gloves.
“You don’t seem terribly surprised,” I said.
Bishop offered a faint smile. “I bought this house ahead of the boom, lived here ten years. You get sloppy over time. What? You expect me to beg for my life?”
“No,” answered Simon.
“Good! Because I’ll be damned if you get your fucking rocks off over that, mate.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” I asked.
It was almost as if he’d got word somehow and was resigned to us coming. Then he exploded that myth with a contemptuous wet laugh.
“I don’t fucking care!” And enjoying my surprise over that one, he took the floppy hat off his silver mop, wiped his brow, and explained, “I’ve made enemies. I’ve made lots of enemies! If not you then some other one would come. Oh, let me guess. You’re here to drag me to a tedious trial somewhere, yeah? But you’ll still give me three squares a day so your Kaffir masters look good and noble and just. Or you want to pop me off and make a big speech about how somebody I long forgot got hit ages ago. Yeah? Right. Get bent. I’m a professional. I did a job. Now get on with yours.”
I had no ready counter. You think about Nazis getting hunted down, evil that men do, appendix A through Z, and all the righteous philosophy becomes a soap bubble.
He was about to be executed, but he was going to rob us of any satisfaction of vengeance.
I didn’t expect him to beg or say he was sorry. I had actually hoped for anger, defiant rage. He wouldn’t give us that either.
You still kill the cockroach, even if it doesn’t protest.
“What is it, cancer?” Simon asked Bishop. “Got to be cancer. Something quite unpleasant like bone or prostate—not that any of them is a picnic.”
Bishop attempted a poker face. Failed. He blinked too many times.
Then Simon had an inspiration. It was one of those moments when his character made any long-term association with him next to impossible. He went to dark places I could never—would never—want to follow, far darker than anything Oliver could imagine.
“You haven’t quite guessed the program, mate,” he said, keeping his voice casual. “This isn’t just an execution, this is also a robbery.”
Then he looked at me—it was a reflex for him to anticipate my dissent. Today I had none. I had come along, after all. I was here.
My objections had always been: Can we bring this person to trial? Can we expose a greater evil by hanging on to the bad guy? Would getting rid of him bring down a reprisal shit storm on the innocents?
“What do you bloody mean, robbery?” demanded Bishop.
I had no such qualms over this retired thug. I thought of all the domino lives crumbling in the decades of his career.
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Simon told him, and even though I didn’t know his plan, I had a pretty good idea. I’d seen enough. I nodded and started walking away, back toward the front of the house.
“Bishop,” Simon went on. “I just know you are sitting on a nice pot of assets with a smart rate of interest. You are going to sign over your remaining holdings to an account I give you. Call it a charitable donation. Oh, by the way, it’ll be used for child victims of land mines in Africa, in case you’re wondering. Now, you’re still going to die, but if you want to be a stupid stubborn bastard, it will take you longer, and I’ll still forge your signature….”
It was enough for me to hear Bishop’s growing fear. I didn’t need to see what was coming.
“Wait a minute, now, you just wait a minute!” Bishop was stammering.
“Keep in mind, Bishop, you need only one eye to be able to sign your name to documents. By the way, are you right-or left-handed?”
I heard Bishop still negotiating as I reached the front gate. I didn’t want to think hard about the mind that could dream up this brand of retribution.
Especially when it belonged to an off-again, on-again lover.
But so help me, I was grateful for his idea.
I sat in the car and watched the sea.
Maybe the hour and a half was to pull up banking records and passwords from the Internet. Search through desk drawers. Yeah, maybe.
Interesting thing about guns: They can be like car alarms—in a place with too much violence, no one pays attention. And here, where paradise is hardly ever defiled, no one recognizes the sound. Must be a truck backfiring.
I heard a single bang—then the flutter of spooked birds.
The road stayed quiet, and even the tiny figures on the beach below didn’t turn at the noise. After a few minutes, Simon walked down the hill and got in the car. We didn’t talk as we returned to the hotel.
We slept in our respective rooms that night and had breakfast together the next morning. Hardly chatted at all. Finally, he asked with a mischievous smile on his face, “Do you think it’s odd that we keep crossing paths, darling?”
“You’re my designated stalker.” Weak joke.
“Listen, whatever happened to you in New York—”
“Simon, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I tried not to sound so brutal. “New York was…” But I couldn’t finish the thought, and yesterday had sapped me of any strength to confide in him.
“I’m flying out this morning,” he announced. Then: “You know you don’t have to be on a case to pick up the phone.”
“That wouldn�
��t work.”
“Okay, how about this,” he said cheerfully, still trying to lighten the mood. “Next time I’ll get myself in real trouble—major, major shit. You come rescue me.”
“Are you saying I owe you for the bus thing in Lagos?”
“Not at all! I’m saying I might need you. You mean you wouldn’t race out to help if I was in major, major shit?”
“I’m sure I could have got out of that scrape if you hadn’t turned up, Simon. I would have thought of something.”
I smiled, pretending to tease him. Trying to stay brave and keep from falling to pieces.
He kept grinning at me. “You don’t do it as repayment of debt!” he said, making a big act of being offended.
“Then why should I come racing to the rescue?” I asked.
“You think about it,” he said, and munched down on a roll.
So I’ll admit here, because after so much death there has to be more truth, that, okay, yeah, I think if something bad happened to Simon Highsmith and he was in major, major shit, real trouble, yes, I’d probably come running to get him out of it. I probably wouldn’t even know why myself when the time came.
He’d never let me live it down if I did, of course.
He was not the guy who becomes your husband and holds the basket for you at the A&P while you choose the right eggplants for dinner. If I ever ran into him again, a sure bet was that it would be in a shantytown of Haiti or a back alley in Marseilles or in another African market, probably with trouble on four wheels following.
I had met the one I could have shopped for dinner with. And then she was taken from me.
Simon said to me before he drove to the airport, “It won’t hurt less in the future, but after a while you think about their life more than their death.”
I didn’t know I’d been leaking my grief so badly.
He used a neutral their—didn’t know who it was I had lost. This was the first time he had ever worn his compassion so openly.
And I couldn’t even respond, just standing there while he got in his car and drove away.
AFTERPLAY
London. Didn’t tell anyone I was coming home. Three days after I got out of Heathrow, Helena swung by to water my plants and found me in bed at two in the afternoon. Big tip-off that I was in a terrible state. I hadn’t showered for a day. I was in my half-T and a pair of ratty panties, and I won’t even talk about my hair.
I was in this black hole, and I didn’t feel like climbing out, and I bloody well didn’t have to if I didn’t want, because Jeff Lee had paid me very well and I would be comfortable. So I had stayed in bed until Helena found me.
She asked, “Are you sick, darling?”
No. Staring at the wall, no. When I dragged myself out of the bed to politely make her a cup of tea, she noticed the remaining bruises and marks on my ankles and wrists. Of course, they’d fade.
“Darling, did you get…?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish it.
“No. No, nothing like that. Rough case,” I said, mumbling like a child.
“Can you tell me? Do you want to tell me?”
I looked at her. I was still stuck on: Can you tell me? No. Can’t. Not now.
Tell you about this beautiful girl I think I genuinely loved? Can’t debase her with stupid clichés like sweet and innocent, because she wasn’t, but she had a brilliance to her and a purity.
We looked at each other for a long moment. To be more precise, she looked at me while I stared vacantly out the window. All her questions sounded as if I were hearing them through a funnel, muffled, as if I had earphones on.
Can you tell me? Oh, God, I wish. I wish so much…
Helena’s become my best friend. And, like any best friend, she knows when to stop asking questions, which can be a way to satisfy stupid curiosity, and to just move on and help. She rose, went into the living room, and placed a couple of calls. I didn’t bother to listen. I was past caring.
Helena ran me a bath, and an hour later I was shuffling naked back to my bed (she had changed the sheets, said they were soaking with what must have been nightmare sweats), and then the doorbell rang. She buzzed whomever to come in. I was on a crying jag again in my bedroom. I barely recognized Fitz. He’d seen me naked before, and the state I was in, I was hardly enticing. Then Helena hovered over me with a glass of water.
“Take these, darling.”
“What…?”
“They’re just a couple of sedatives.”
I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, I was on my stomach, and Fitz was massaging a calf muscle, his thumb popping all the bubbles of tension out. He did more work on my back, and Helena said later that when he did a bit of craniosacral work on the back of my head and my neck muscles, I cried like a child.
Trauma, he’d explained to her. That was later. At the time, under his skilled fingers, I fell into a sleep that took me through the afternoon and late into the next morning.
I have no idea how Helena arranged to bring them both all the way to London. Maybe that’s the blessing of good friends. They take the trouble to get you what you need in your most desperate hour.
Busaba and Keith. All the way from Bangkok, finally getting their chance to see London.
Pretty obvious how they happened to show up now, but like Helena, they didn’t know the actual reason for my depression. Unlike Helena and every other English friend I had—so achingly self-conscious about avoiding The Awkward Moment—Busaba came straight out and asked me bluntly what was wrong. She and I were on the Embankment, and I stared out at the Thames, wondering whether to burden her with this.
“I miss someone,” I explained. “That’s all. Her name was Violet. She’s dead.”
Busaba nodded, her beautiful golden Thai features respectfully blank for a moment, and then she smiled a little sadly, and there was something in her almond eyes that told me she was quite perceptive. “Let’s go back to your home, and I’ll hold you,” she said.
Busaba borrowed my cell and called Keith. He would join us later. We got on the Tube and rode back to Earl’s Court station. Busaba asked if we could stop into a Body Shop close by, and I waited outside in the drizzle—couldn’t muster the interest to go in with her.
When we got inside my apartment, she made no sexual overture, merely whispered a suggestion that I should sit down and relax while she made us cups of tea. I sat down on the couch, halfway to catatonic, and barely noticed when she brought me a mug of chamomile and began to massage my feet with the tiny bottle of massage oil she’d bought minutes earlier.
I was pulled out of my reverie by the pleasure of strong thumbs working my heels, small hands gripping my arches. Hands not my own on my bare feet, and it stirred such a primitive core feeling, the special raw euphoria a child feels when held by a parent. Security. Safety. I thought of Anna. Violet. Busaba held my feet as I sat in the chair, and though clothed, I was more naked than I’d been in all the time in that house. I felt a sudden electric tingle in my spine, and then I burst into tears.
“Let it come,” she said. She said something else in Thai, forgetting herself for the moment, something consoling.
I grabbed a tissue, blew my nose, and then, with a brave smile, stroked her face. She urged me gently to sit back. She undid my slacks and peeled them off me, taking my panties with them. She stripped off her shirt and her bra and, like a small animal, laid her head in my lap for a long moment. The silkiness of her black hair on my thighs was pleasant, and as I looked down, I felt arousal over the lovely golden canvas of her smooth back, the divide of her buttocks coming out of her pants, a thin line of panty waistband.
Busaba nudged my legs open, and her hands urged me to slouch, presenting myself to her. I felt the softness of her breasts for a tantalizing second, and then her teeth softly sank down on the inside of my thigh. She knew exactly when to stop, when the sensation no longer captivated. She slithered up to me and kissed me, led me to the bedroom.
She casually pulled off my top and undid my bra b
ut didn’t bother to shed her pants, merely yanking her belt from its loops. We lay down on our sides, her behind me, spooning into me, holding me tight for a moment, until her fingers strayed down between my legs and began to play with my clit. I felt her crushed little breasts against my back. I sucked on one of her fingers as her other hand played with me and played, until all at once she urged me to roll facing her, and my vagina greedily took in three fingers, in and out with a furious rhythm, knowing exactly what to do as I sucked on her right breast.
Violently coming, convulsing in unbearable grief, but she didn’t relent; she took me up the curve again, my face already hot and tears streaming from my eyes, and I shuddered once more. With sudden inspiration, she ducked down, pushing my knees up, and her perfect pink tongue lapped and probed and flicked in a shallow depth in my vagina. She reared up, sitting back on her knees, powerfully erotic like that, naked to the waist in her slacks, and I gasped, “Come here.” I needed to suck her breasts. I needed all at once to steal my hands into her slacks and feel her bare ass. I hugged her close and kissed her, losing myself in her skin, her smell, unzipping her pants to take the back of my fingers and nestle them in slow stroking caresses in the wedge of her fur. A perfect triangle of trimmed black down framed in the V of her unzipped white trousers, shadow of a hip-bone across that golden terrain.
She was so generous, so loving. She was there for me, her own pleasure ignored. Only once did she seek satisfaction, and it was still for my sake. She got on all fours over me, and as her fingers brought me to another feverish pitch, she masturbated to keep me turned on. I watched her little white teeth bite her lip, watched as her thighs quivered, her legs starting to buckle. Her rhythm to pleasure herself held me spellbound, and then the wave of ecstasy forced her to collapse by my side with the smallest whimper, her eyes shut tight, my body racked with new spasms and endorphins flooding me in sympathetic unison.
Beg Me Page 26