Beg Me (10 page)

He was, my friend had assured me, the perfect guy to seek out for perspective. He was a kind of amateur historian on the war, who played no favorites and who had accumulated tons of anecdotes and scraps of little-known intelligence. He was a rare bird—an Ogoni who had struggled hard for success when so many of his people still suffered as an ethnic minority.

“Not many of the Ogoni elite threw in with the Federalists during the war,” he explained. “I did. I’ll never be forgiven for that.”

But after years of watching how the Igbo—themselves a people treated as third-class citizens in the country—discriminated against the Ogoni, he didn’t have much faith in the compassion of an independent Biafra. And so he worked as a bureaucrat in a freshly captured piece of Biafra close to the fighting.

After the war he spent a decade abroad, winding up in Manchester, then came home and started a dry-goods store and built it into a lucrative chain. Now he was a man of influence in the Rivers State.

“The war—what a business,” said Nwidor with a wry smile and distant eyes. “I got to see some of the dispatches the Western reporters sent back to their newspapers. Such rubbish! If one white man got killed accidentally, he was front-page news! As for us…We had ridiculous propaganda bombarding us from all sides. The Biafrans kept saying it would be genocide if they lost, except that thousands of Igbos were alive and carrying on as usual in the rest of the country! Here, look at this…”

He showed me a fading but still legible Federalist propaganda poster in English. No photography, just art—which gave it a quaint, antique look like the old 1940s posters in the Imperial War Museum. A boot was stomping down on a bearded head. “That’s Ojukwu,” Nwidor explained. The banner read:
CRUSH REBELLION
.

“Many starved to death in Biafra,” he added quickly. “Of course they did. It was terrible and shameful, but the rest of the world thought this was the only story of the war. It still does. And neither side looks like a saint, believe me! In the beginning, the churches let their food go with arms shipments flown into Biafra, but there was little choice back then. Biafra knew the gunrunners succeeded best at night, so later they refused to move the flights for relief to the daytime. Imagine! The Federalists knew all this and tried to shoot them down. But do you know that even with the fighting, you could go to Umahia and see Biafran barristers? Yes, it’s true. There they were in their wigs and their black robes, handling cases for most of the war! I have seen wedding photos taken from a ceremony in Owerri—happy people celebrating while all this goes on. The picture of that time was always more complex…

“Foolish white men would rhapsodize about a new African sun rising—they ignored the corruption going on in the precious new state, the nepotism, all the old sins. A civil war is always full of contradictions. Many Yorubas thought of the war as just a squabble between Hausa and Igbo. But you know I met these peasant Yoruba men from the west who told me they were proud to fight for Nigeria. Imagine! I wonder what they feel now looking at what’s become of our nation?”

He shook his head in disgust, and stabbing out his finger at the coffee table, he asked me: “
Cui bono?
Who benefits? When it was over, the elite on both sides was still doing fine, and ordinary people on both sides had paid the price. And the West wonders why there wasn’t a bloodbath after? It was a
civil
war. As if we weren’t all sick of killing! Of course, we had to put it behind us! Oil lubricated all the rebuilding, and oil is behind so much of today’s mess. Wole Soyinka was right: Nigeria doesn’t need democracy—it needs therapy. For me, the war was like watching an older brother—a schizophrenic—lose his mind and slide against a wall, pounding his fist against his head again and again until the fever passes. Now this brother walks and stumbles around in his manic depression…”

He paused, and I didn’t say anything or pose a question for what seemed like a full minute. Then I told him what I was looking for—who I was looking for and why.

“I know this man,” said Nwidor, referring to Oliver. “I don’t know him personally, but I heard what he was after when he visited. I sent an associate to offer him information, and he became quite affronted and never contacted me.”

“I don’t understand.”

He smiled patiently at me. “Don’t you see? Your friend Oliver was raised as an American, and what he knows of his culture comes from his mother. His name is Anyanike—it’s Igbo. I am fairly well known around Port Harcourt, but it never occurred to him that an Ogoni who was on the Federalist side would tell him the truth! He is full of his certainties and hand-me-down prejudices.”

I showed him the pictures of the thigh of Kelly Rawlins, Oliver’s old lover, and told him how Craig Padmore’s arm had the same drawn symbol. A chessboard bishop—just like the one drawn on the body of Oliver’s father.

“Now I understand,” said Nwidor softly. “The son did not go into this when he came looking for answers about his father. He could have saved himself much expense and trouble.”

“What does it mean?”

“The bishop is for Harry Bishop,” he explained. “It was his symbol. Bishop was a mercenary who fought on the Federalist side.” His lip curled in disgust as he added, “The man was a sociopath. Practically all of the mercenaries were on both sides. We brought these men into our country to teach us how to kill better—and do you know? They taught us how to make the killing last. That was their best lesson.”

I listened as Sonny Nwidor rolled out the tale of the mercenaries for me, the foreigners who had a shell game in Nigeria all their own. London didn’t care that white Englishmen signed up to fight for the Federal side, mostly as pilots, since it was sending arms anyway. France backed an independent Biafra, so there were many French mercenaries on that side. Even then there were apparently no clear-cut ratios of nationality to allegiance, since money talked. So you also had Belgians, South Africans, Canadians, Egyptians, all thrown into the mix.

None of this stuff makes for good bedtime reading. The mercs who called blacks “fucking Kaffirs,” and the crazy ones, like the South African pilot who downed a bottle of whiskey and insisted he get his plane all shot up on each bombing mission. The other South African who taunted his targets with his radio alias, “Genocide calling.” These guys could get paid thousands each week either in Swiss bank accounts or sometimes fistfuls of U.S. currency.

And like most mercenaries, Nwidor reminded me, they believed in perpetuating the job so the money tree kept blooming. That meant Biafra’s Uli airstrip never got efficiently put out of action with bombing raids, even though it was a simple-enough target and would have ended the war in one fell swoop. On the Biafran side, I went back and checked what Nwidor told me and found anecdotes about pay packets getting ripped off and incompetence on some of these guys’ parts. And then there was the stalemate aspect of Nigerians who fought hard and well on both sides and didn’t want to give an inch. (Despite the Europeans acting all superior and thinking they knew better than Africans about the art of war, Nigeria’s officers on both sides were often trained impressively, well enough to kick some ass.)

This, too, was fine with the mercenaries, who were happy to see the war drag on. Naturally, France, like Britain, used the mercs so they could play their own little version of Risk. On both the Federalist and the Biafran sides, these “foreign volunteers” fed their bankrupt legend with nicknames like Genocide, Johnny Thai, and The Brave.

And then there was Bishop: English, arrogant, blustering, and with dubious skill. Bishop, who was supposed to be there merely to train elite squads but who talked his way into commanding his own guerrilla missions. Bishop, who unrepentantly liked killing and was as ruthless with his own men as he was with the enemy’s numbers, including the innocent teenage boys who had signed up. Bishop, who liked to roar with laughter and say, “I live for death!” Gallows humor. Sick humor.

I live for death.

“I have a picture of him somewhere,” said Nwidor, rising with a grunt and moving to a bookcase. He dug out a volume with rough blue boards and a split spine and thumbed through to the photo inserts. “Yes. I thought so. There he is.”

A slightly blurry black-and-white group shot. There were several Biafran soldiers—don’t ask me about military ranks, because I know nothing about stuff like that. And leaning on them in a hail-fellow patronizing manner were two men, both about thirty, both mercs. Bishop’s light-colored eyes—probably blue—were made into gray in the old photo, his dark hair lank and wanting a cut, and he had a surprisingly weak chin, a build that was no huskier than any pension manager in the city. I suppose that didn’t matter, only what he could do with machine guns and such.

“Men such as Bishop are parasites,” said Nwidor. “Drifting from war to war. Nigeria. And after Nigeria, the big money game for his kind was Vietnam, so he and other mercenaries went there. Then it was Angola, and on it goes.”

“Do you know anything about Bishop killing Oliver’s father?” I asked Nwidor.

“No. I only know that Oliver Anyanike—Oliver Anyanike
Senior
—worked for one of the relief organizations in Benin, and he crossed Bishop somehow. However, I can give you the name of a man who was there and who can tell you where Bishop is now. You might get to Bishop before he hears you are coming. That is what you were sent to do, isn’t it? Kill the man who killed his father?”

I ignored this. “Bishop’s still
alive
?”

“Oh, yes.” Nwidor nodded. “And still hurting this country. Anyanike Junior was so very lucky he failed and went home. He had no idea whom he was trying to hunt down. Bishop is an old man like me, but the people he works with—bloodsuckers all. I hope you have brought many men with you.”

When I laughed nervously, he added, “We have bandits here who take over
oil rigs
and hold them for ransom, Teresa. There is no limit to the daring of our criminals. So imagine how much more efficient they are when they get well fed and well paid.”

I could have told him that I wasn’t here to assassinate Bishop any more than Ah Jo Lee had sent me to New York to assassinate the leaders of the sex cult. In both cases, I’d been hired to find out the truth. But you know that instinct you have when things are going to turn out differently from what you planned?

It was doing the creepy fingers along my spine, warning me I was about to wreck another china shop with all my bullish blundering.

You’ll handle it, I told myself. Sure you will.

Sonny Nwidor gave me a name. The man I had to go find was back in Lagos, and he wasn’t a Nigerian. He was another retired merc, an Israeli named David Sharett, who lived in a gated compound in one of the rich parts of the city. Sharett, he said, was one of the more persistent expatriate vampires of Nigeria.

“He is into everything, all the four-nineteen,” said Nwidor. The term 419 was slang for fraud, dubbed after its section in the Nigerian penal code. “Sharett has a sweatshop making false passports, he’s got credit-card scams, he’s got fellows bringing in drugs…As if we need a white man to help manage our crime! He’s a kind of lieutenant for Bishop, but he doesn’t mind bad-mouthing his boss, because if something happens to the old man, he takes over.”

“Okay, how do I reach him?”

Nwidor looked at me as if I’d gone mad. “You don’t! You talk to my contact, and it’ll get back to Sharett. Believe me, he’ll find you. You should emphasize that you only wish to talk about the old days of the war, nothing else. The man is not a fool. Ask him your questions, then get out of Nigeria on the next flight.”

It didn’t exactly work out that way.

I live for death.
That’s what Bishop liked to say.

When Sonny Nwidor told me that, it tripped an alarm in my head, and I went back over my notes—yes, I keep notes. I know I’m not a professional detective, but, hey, only a fool doesn’t write things down she might need later.

It was eerie, surreal.
I live for death
was the motto that was forcibly tattooed on Anna’s inner thigh in Thai characters—borrowed from a Vietnamese gang. One of the clues left to throw anyone off the fact that she had been involved with the Sarcophacan Temple of Nubian Princes.