Beg Me (9 page)

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.

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

B
efore 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 small 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.

Port Harcourt, the capital of the Rivers State, was a pollution-choked overpopulated blur to me. I remember a cacophony of pidgin English, the smiling young man at this latest airport with my name on a cardboard sign, and then I was being driven up Aba Road to the Old Township. A roadblock by the cops halfway prompted the inevitable forking over of
dash
—bribe money. In the distance the oil flares were sending up their plumes of black smoke, and I thought, Gawd, it’s a good thing I don’t live in the shadow of these poisonous giants.

Then I was taken into the Amadi Flats, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Port Harcourt, to be the guest at the mansion of Sonny Nwidor. A servant showed me in, and a smiling dark-skinned, round-faced man in his late sixties, his hair silver, his face wide with a cheerful grin, thrust out his hand and started the essential, all-significant Nigerian greetings.

“You are welcome!” he laughed, and led me into his house, asking after my family, after our mutual friend. Yes, our friend was doing great back in the UK. Yes, my husband was doing wonderfully at his art gallery. “
Always
say you’re married,” my Nigeria expert in London had warned me over the phone. “You don’t want to get into that huge debate! They’ll ask you for ages why you aren’t married if you say different!”

Nwidor beckoned his servant to bring coffee for both of us, and I was introduced to two of his youngest grandchildren, a lovely girl named Zina and a somewhat sullen boy whose name I quickly forgot. Then he winked at the kids, which was apparently the custom for telling them to leave, and said a few words to them that I couldn’t possibly understand—since he spoke in Khana. Soon enough I spotted through a window the little girl scampering in the yard outside, leading a braying goat around on a rope.

“I was told a little of what you want, but you must explain it to me yourself,” said Nwidor.