Beg Me (12 page)

“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 up 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.

“Soldiers in battle are technicians,” said Sharett, coughing in a wet rasp. “Bishop, he liked watching amateurs. It reaffirmed his idea of what bastards human beings are. Lifted all the fucking responsibility off his shoulders…”

“And you went into business with him,” said Simon, not hiding his disgust.

The old mercenary was unrepentant, tendrils of blue cigarette smoke hovering around that dried, decaying skull. “In business, Harry Bishop is very responsible. I detest him for his greed—not his manners in war.”

Manners. Sharett didn’t like that Bishop was
vulgar.
He didn’t like Bishop’s enjoying his diversion of the massacre. He hadn’t cared about saving Anyanike’s life or the lives of the other Igbo. Sharett had simply felt inconvenienced.

How terrible it must have been to stand there on that lonely stretch of deserted outskirts, feeling your life soon to be forfeited because of a whim of sadism—rescue contemplated only because another man didn’t think you merited a bullet. The hate, the hate of an anonymous mob, building the many-limbed, many-headed butcher—we could wrap our heads around that, Simon and me. Those who watched and let it happen, despicable.

But Bishop. Bishop and this man. To
collect
more victims, to spitefully herd them toward their broken appointments with slaughter…

“Someone else wanted to know all this months ago,” said Sharett, yanking me hard out of my seething contempt. “A Yoruba who thought he was a big private detective.”

“And who was his client?” I asked, my voice hard.

Sharett laughed and spat. “He didn’t know himself. I upped my bribe, and he only knew she looked Arab or Indian. Spoke like an American.”

Danielle of the sarcophacan princes? Isaac’s duchess? Had to be. With her long black hair and exotic beauty she might have passed for a light-skinned Indian girl to strangers. She was, in fact, Iranian.

“I thought I knew what she was doing,” Sharett went on, “but when you showed up, you gave me different ideas.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What
did
you think she was?”

“Competition!” he said impatiently, as if I were being deliberately stupid.

“Drugs, Teresa,” Simon whispered gently.

“She and her Yoruba fixer were asking questions all over town about business,” complained Sharett. “I assumed she was scouting for how to move in on our markets.”

Drugs.

Okay, made sense, yeah. Nigerians aren’t typically drug users, and they don’t produce any drugs of their own, but Nigeria
is
a major hub for heroin trafficked from Asia into the United States. And smuggling dope into Lagos Airport was supposed to be so easy that it had become a notorious joke.

Simon had pointed out how much trouble and effort someone must have gone to to find out how Oliver’s father was killed.

But maybe it had been an incidental chore, one accomplished while Danielle was conducting other business. This whole sex-cult business might be about drugs.

And it gave a possible explanation for why they’d sent Anna’s brother the lurid photos. If Anna had stumbled onto their operation, they might have thought she was some kind of spy for Jeff’s drug empire. Ah Jo Lee, the rich dodgy Thai (actually Chinese) guy in Bangkok with his fingers into all sorts of pies. Surely he was into drugs too?

So the photos might not have been meant as a taunt at all—they could have been a warning.
Don’t fuck with us. Look what we can do to you and yours.

But that didn’t explain the Vietnam references.

I had Oliver’s jigsaw filled in, the mystery of his father solved. But Anna…I had gone to the States to solve Anna’s murder, and this side trip had dug up new questions that had to be answered back in New York.

Like why someone—presumably Danielle, by the sounds of it—had taken an interest in, of all people, Bishop’s past when she checked the Lagos drug pipeline.

None of these questions, of course, was Simon’s problem.

He stood over Sharett with his knuckles on his hips and demanded, “Where’s Bishop now?”

Sharett dug into his cigarette pack. Empty. He looked up at us, his face resigned to whatever punishment we had waiting for him.

“He comes out only once a year now. He’s living off the fumes of his myth.”

“Where?”

“Portugal. That’s all I know. He stopped trusting me with his specific address ten years ago.”

“We’ll find him,” said Simon.

We.
I didn’t contradict him.

Back at the hotel. I should have walked down to the front desk and put a deposit on my own room. I didn’t.

I had finished one of those oh-so-refreshing bucket showers and had a towel around my waist when my cell phone warbled in my handbag. I glanced at the name lit up on Caller ID. Oh, shit. This was going to be awkward.

Ah Jo Lee calling. Your client. Remember him?

“Teresa!”

“Hey, Jeff.”

“Listen, I’ve got a contact for you that might be useful. It’s all set up if you want to pop over to Chinatown at two. Corner of Mott and—”

“I won’t be able to make it, actually.”

“Oh. Right. Tomorrow, then. I’ll—”

“I won’t be able to make that either, Jeff.”

“Why not?”

Very quiet, very polite—but with just enough stiletto edge in it to remind you why you don’t like to work for other people.