Lucky got me up early.  A breeze was streaming off the Atlantic, its vast grey waters visible from our room.  As I walked on the porch to await my breakfast, the warm sun, a warm breeze, and dazzling light from white walls all hit me.  I located a patch of shade to rest and await my breakfast.  

Instead of breakfast, a fat Chinaman through the hotel’s entrance.  Lucky had called him.  He worked at China’s embassy.  When he got to the room, he handed Lucky a Spyderco Police model and a compact FN 509.  He also turned over a compact Walther PPQ.  

Lucky decided it was time to dress, so she put on panties, skipped a bra, and put on a summer-weight suit that had enough pockets for her to arm up.  She strapped the Spyderco to her right thigh.  The FN went into a custom pocket on the jacket that kept it from printing. She put her Walther in a holster that she put behind her right buttock.  As she did this, I got the sad, indeed alarming, idea that she had not ordered us breakfast 

I was right. She stepped onto the balcony, whooshed me up, and put me in a carry bag.  “We eat later, darling.  I had to fight to suppress my desire to howl my pain.  Lucky was impossible in mission mode.

Meanwhile, a couple of bodyguards from the embassy showed up to guard the room.  She briefed them.  I had already learnt that since London she had begun to tell guards they must never play go for money with me. 

The driver and another guard sat up in the front seats of a Land Rover.  Lucky and I sat in the back.  We sped down streets of Lagos out to the bush.  It wasn’t too far.  I guess Binky would never have rented digs in an estate without an ample supply of boys at hand. 

We got to the estate in good time, considering that Lagos has a population of close to 24 million.  The place we got to had teak, banana trees, poison trees, acacias, water hyacinths, and oil palms.  It was handsome.  A pool in the backyard had a Gaboon adder sunning by it.  None of us cared.  We weren’t here to swim.

The inside of this large house with a huge veranda was of teak and tiles.  I noticed plenty of venting for AC, which I yearned to have turned on.  This area has a tropical climate.  The Floor was littered with papers and all manner of books and curios.  Near the door, the floor had a large blood stain where, I guessed, the irate mother finished Binky. 

Lucky sent her boys to search through the estate’s debris.  She plopped down on a zebra skin sofa in the living room.  She had spotted a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.  She had the cheek to ignore me. Where was my food?  Instead, of feeding me, she was fast into that book.  I did my best to push between her and its page, but she fended me off.  

In a short time, her men brought her sheaves from account books.  She put down the de Laclos to look at them.  Her men also gave her a flash drive and a laptop to read it.  Within 30 minutes, Lucy pronounced it bull shit.  “Could,” she asked, “the morons at Langley believe they had Binky’s real records?  Look harder!”  After a couple of hours of structural damage to the house, including searches for buried treasure, nothing turned up.

Lucky became peeved.  She complained that Binky was a sneaky weasel.

We left the estate.  I was still starving.  Lucky got us to stop at several farmhouses.  She wished to know where men that loved boys went for trysts.  At first, everybody pretended the idea of it was a scandal.  As soon as Lucky offered Franklins for knowledge of child prostitutes surfaced.  Lucky got an address for the poshest place $500 in bribes later.  

When we all got to the brothel, Lucky went directly in.  There was plenty of hooting. Suddenly, we heard screams.  A bloodied chap with peacock feathers sticking out of his bottom came flying out the door.  Lucky walked behind him.  She grabbed his tiny penga savagely, slapped him, then demanded with menace, her Spyderdo now in hand, to know where Binky was. 

She didn’t use Binky’s name.  She described him as a small, rolly-polly, white pervert.  When the snivelling chap claimed he didn’t know, Lucky hit him so hard he lost his upper central incisors.  Crying louder, he told her to check a particular room.  Lucky released him but instructed her guards to cane him.  “Not more than 4 whacks.  I mean it!.  Let him taste my mercy.”  She had clearly told her men, as if it was necessary the chap that the chap was aa gladiola.  They gave him 4 with gusto.

Despite the commotion, Lucky discovered Binky in the named room.  He was smoking opium.  A heavily painted naked boy was feeding him figs.  I had raced catch up, despite my extreme hunger.  When I hit the room, I saw that Binky had a sawed-off shotgun, a nice looking Beretta, to his right.  

“Hello, Lucky,” he purred.  “Would you care to touch some young, smooth flesh? Don’t be offended.  time has not coarsened you too much yet.”

Lucky stood with a hand on the handle of the PPQ over her right buttock.  She glared at Binky.

“You know,” continued Binky, while stroking his boy’s buttocks with his left hand, “my twin brother Beau was such a careless man.  I never take up with a boy in a place like that estate without bribing his mother.  In poor countries, a mother’s love is fungible.  Beau never figured that out.  Now he’s dead.  Of course, I blame Putin and his ridiculous moralizing, a popular method to grandstand in Africa.  The hoi polloi love the self-righteous.”

During this time, I was uneased by Binky having followed the great Randy Newman’s advice.  Binky had.  Aside from a pith helmet, he hadn’t a stitch on but he had left his hat on.  Being a fat man, he also was sweating like a pig or horse on a hot day on the track.  You could see rivulets of sweat running down his short, pudgy legs to his feet or splashing onto the floor.  

Lucky later told me that if she had not wanted Binky’s records so bad, she’d have shot the motherfizzucker dead right there and then.  In the background, I could hear Master Peacock screaming from his caning.  Perhaps somebody was tending his wounds.

“Where are the records?”  Binky’s answered by tapping his skull.  “Good bookies have good memories.”  Thus pretended Binky.  

Lucky would have none of that.  “Do you expect me to believe the likes of Lord Caligula will trust his cut to invisible books kept in your head?  Where are the books?”  

“Oh, you mean the accounting.  Swiss banks have those books in vaults.  But you can’t expect me to just write down the names of all my clients by name.  Who buys what is a trade secret.”

Lucky exploded at that answer. Faster than a champagne cork, she hopped on the coffee table before Binky.  Before he could touch his Beretta, she had kicked him in the forehead.  The blow put an end to his buttock fondling.  The naked, smooth, well-painted, big-eyed boy jumped back.  His cries sent another shaved boy wearing just a codpiece scurrying in to see what was up. What he saw of Binky made him turn tail and flee.

Lucky was standing on the couch with Binky under her.  Her right foot was obstructing Binky’s airway.  “Will that help your memory?” she hissed.  He waved a sign of submission.  When she moved her foot, he began trying to kiss her feet, which earned him two resounding kicks to his gynecomastic chest.

Between gaps, Binky managed to ask, “If you’ve got that out of your system, let’s plan.  I suggest we get out of here whilst the getting is good.  if we make it to Ibadan, we can drive to Abuja in about 9 and a half hours.  Abuja has the Nnamdi Azikwe Airport, the best in the country.  Be forewarned.  The road from Ibadan to Abuja is dangerous.  A lot of criminal elements prowl it.”

Lucky broke out laughing. “And you imagine those criminals are more dangerous than me and my gang? ” 

Binky didn’t lose a beat.  “Constance.  Friends told me Constance was coming.  They weren’t sure why.  She had a meeting in Langley is all I know. She won’t expect you to go elsewhere by way of Abuja.  We’ll confound her.”

I doubted Constance was so easy to confound.  However, Abuja had a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt that connected to Zurich.  Abuja also had a lot of diplomats, meaning opportunities to mooch rides.  

Lucky made the command decision.  After that, we headed out.  I must have looked panicked.  We left Binky’s room after Lucky summoned a few boys to carry him to our car.  We emerged from the room into a lounge with a big bar.  I understood why Binky got no help.  Lucky’s guards stood in the room smiling and smacking their own palms with canes. 

On the floor, I spotted a brawny Nigerian with his head cracked open.  Another Nigerian lay on the floor looking rather badly beaten down. Everybody else was at the bar, drinking and trying to pretend that nothing had happened.  The gods were kind because Lucky remembered me.  She asked what food they had that would appeal to me.  I got some local fish chopped into tiny pieces.  At this point, I think I’d have eaten a rat if they had tossed it to me.  Ordinarily, I don’t care for rat.  The shit on them is off-putting.

All the same, I liked the fish.  I ate fast.  In a jiffy, we all sat in the Ranger Rover with tubby Binky tossed  with a thud into the back. He groaned

Everything seemed to go well.  We rolled down the highway.  Once we had been several hours on the road from Ibadan to Abuja, five armed men blocked our progress.  I’m unsure what they wanted, as Lucky declined to even start to negotiate, nor were her guards. 

What happened next? I can only say that Lucky was the first to step out of the Range Rover.  She held a FN 509 in one hand and her Walther PPQ in the other.  her guards stepped out pronto.  I hid in the back seat.  I don’t know what happened.  After about 10 shots, it was all over.  We were rolling again.  Lucky and her boys started telling jokes about how “wide-eyed with surprise” the wussy highwaymen looked.  “Nigeria has lots of armed folks with no respect for law, eh boys?”  He guards pretend pistols of their hands.  They agreed with her.  Several hours later we were on the outskirts of Abuja.