Mânios Dumitrescu thought about that, with his eyes narrowed. Then he slowly folded up his flick-knife and held it tight in the palm of his hand.
‘Throw it on the bed,’ said the young woman. ‘Now, take off your clothes. All of them.’
He tossed the flick-knife on to the quilt and she immediately picked it up and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she stood back and watched him as he unbuttoned his shirt, baring his white concave ribcage and the long grey hairs that grew out of his nipples. He prised off his beige leather loafers and then dropped his crumpled grey trousers and stepped out of them. He was left in nothing but a pair of yellow-stained boxer shorts with black and white pictures of Felix the Cat all over them, and a pair of white calf-length socks.
‘Come on,’ said the young woman. ‘Everything.’
Mânios Dumitrescu let his boxer shorts drop to his ankles and trod his way out of them. Then he balanced on one leg after the other to roll down his socks.
He stood in front of the young woman completely naked, his pubic hair wild, his penis dark and diminutive, but he kept his arms folded defiantly across his chest and made no attempt to cover himself.
‘Go and sit on the bed,’ the young woman told him. ‘No, not here – over there.’
He went around to the opposite side of the bed and sat down, round-shouldered. The young woman picked up all of his discarded clothes between finger and thumb and tossed them out of the door on to the landing.
‘I curse you to death for this,’ Mânios Dumitrescu told her. ‘Trǎsni-te-ar moartea, sǎte te trǎsneascǎ!’
The young woman took no notice. She went over to the dressing table by the window, opened the left-hand drawer, and took out a pair of steel handcuffs.
‘Put your feet up on the bed,’ she told him.
‘So – I know what you plan to do,’ said Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘You plan to call back my girls, and then to shame me, in front of them! Look, here is your boss, no clothes, tied up like chicken!’
‘Put your feet up on the bed,’ she repeated.
‘Okay, whatever you like. But I tell you, this will make no difference! Those girls, they respect me! No matter what you do to me, they will still respect me!’
‘I know,’ said the young woman. She took hold of his hairy left ankle and clicked one of the handcuffs around it. ‘That is because you will beat them until they bleed if they don’t.’
She fastened his ankles together, and then she stood back for a moment. ‘Look at you now,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just look at you.’
‘All right, I look like fool!’ snapped Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘Well done! You make big boss look like tămpit!’
‘But you are not looking!’ insisted the young woman.
‘I do not have to look! I do not want to look!’
‘You are not looking!’
With that, she pushed him hard in the middle of his bony chest with the heel of her hand. He fell back on to the quilt and found himself staring up at his reflection in the mirror on the ceiling. For nearly five seconds he remained transfixed, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
‘That is you, up there!’ said the young woman. ‘That is Mânios the big boss man. Mânios who likes to hit women and cut people’s throats if they make him angry and treat little children like slaves. Look at you! You said you looked like a chicken! No, you do not look like a chicken! You look like a spider!’
Mânios Dumitrescu closed his eyes tight. After a while, through gritted teeth, he said, ‘Is that it? Are you finish with me now? What are you going to do now? Take photograph, yes, so that you can show them to all of my girls? Well, do it. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit for you and I don’t give a shit for anybody.’
The young woman sat down on the bed beside him. ‘That is exactly why I am here, Mânios. When somebody has no feeling for anybody else except themselves, they are a danger to the world. That is when the Avenging Angel has to visit them.’
‘Oh, and you are the Avenging Angel, are you? Ha! First negri angel I ever saw!’
‘Think whatever you like. But the Avenging Angel has to visit people like you to punish them for their evil. And more than that, the Avenging Angel has to prove that she has punished you.’
‘Ești nebun! Ești complet nebun! You are totally mad!’
‘No, not at all. In most countries in Africa, if somebody has been caught for doing wrong, and punished, it is always necessary to produce evidence to the authorities that the punishment has been carried out.’
‘What punishment?’
‘Of course, it depends on what they have done. Maybe they didn’t manage to tap enough raw rubber, in the rubber plantation, according to their quota. Then again, it could have been something worse, like stealing somebody’s goat, or having sex with their own daughter. Or maybe something even worse than that, like you have done. You have murdered a few men in your time, haven’t you, Mânios?’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t have to listen to this mumbo-jumbo!’
The young woman reached inside her waistcoat and drew out a junior hacksaw, with a tubular metal frame and a finely serrated blade about six inches long.
‘My evidence that you have been punished will be your hand.’
Mânios Dumitrescu looked at the hacksaw, and then he let out a sharp barking sound, as if he had been trying to laugh to show his contempt but his throat had tightened with panic before he could let it out.
‘You are serious? You are going to cut off my hand?’
‘No, Mânios. You are.’
‘I told you. You are crazy! Why do you think I would cut off my own hand?’
The young woman gave the faintest of shrugs. ‘It is your choice.’
She lifted up the small grey pistol and pointed it at his groin. ‘If you don’t cut off your hand, I will shoot you between your legs and turn you into a woman.’
‘You joke. This is bad joke, yes?’
‘I think it is a very good joke, after the way you have treated women all your life. Now you can find out for yourself what it is like.’
‘You could kill me, shooting me there.’
‘Yes. But that would be a pity. What is the Romanian word for “eunuch”?’
Mânios Dumitrescu tried to sit up, but the young woman pushed him down again.
‘If you let me go now,’ he said, ‘I will make sure you have one hundred thousand euros in cash by the end of today. I mean it.’
‘I thought you said you were not rich.’
‘I am not, but I can lay my hand on money when I need to. I have friends.’
‘I told you. I am not interested in your money.’
‘A hundred fifty thousand euros. Two hundred thousand!’
The young woman stood up and carefully laid the hacksaw on the quilt next to his right hand. ‘You are right-handed?’ she asked him.
‘Two hundred fifty thousand! I swear it! I will get it for you by midnight tonight, in cash! Quarter of million! And afterwards no more questions!’
The young woman nodded towards the cheap, silver-plated carriage clock next to the dildoes on the bedside table. ‘Look, it is two minutes to three o’clock. When it comes to three o’clock, I will shoot you.’
Mânios Dumitrescu was breathing deeply now. He tilted himself towards her, hesitated for a moment, and then threw himself sideways off the opposite side of the bed. He dropped heavily on to the bedside rug, but snatched at the quilt and made a grab for the bedside table to pull himself upright. The clock and the lamp and the dildoes tumbled and clattered on to the floor.
He managed to stand up, but all he could do with his ankles fastened together was to try and hop towards the door, and after two awkward hops he realized that trying to get away was both futile and ludicrous, as well as being painful. The handcuffs had scraped the skin from both his ankles and they were bleeding.
He shuffled awkwardly back to the bed and sat down. During his escape attempt the young woman had r
emained where she was, unruffled, watching him with a remote expression in her eyes. As she had said at the bottom of Summerhill, if it had been anybody else but him, it would have been funny.
‘I think you have had your two minutes’ grace,’ she said. She came around the end of the bed and pushed him back down again, heaving his legs up on to the quilt. Then she stood back and aimed the small grey pistol directly at his scrotum.
‘You want to say one last word as a man?’ she asked him.
He closed his eyes and then his penis swelled up a little and a small fountain of urine rose out of it. It went on and on, drenching the pink satin quilt and trickling down his thighs. The young woman waited until he had finished, and then she said, ‘I wish your girls and your children could have seen that. You are disgusting. You hurt them all the time and think they deserve it, but when somebody threatens to hurt you, all you can do is piss yourself.’
She levelled the gun again, but he lifted both hands and said, ‘No. În numele lui Isus. Please.’
‘Too late, Mânios. Time is up!’
‘No!’ he screamed. ‘No!’
He jerked his knees up into the foetal position. At the same time he groped frantically across the bed and picked up the hacksaw. He raised his left arm stiffly in front of his face, as if he were telling the time, and then he dragged the hacksaw blade across the back of his wrist, just above the stainless-steel bracelet of his Rolex. The tiny teeth ripped through his skin and into his flesh with a sound like somebody tearing a cotton handkerchief in half, and his face was instantly spattered all over with blood.
‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,’ he stuttered.
‘Go on,’ the young woman encouraged him. ‘Now you have started, you might as well finish. Maybe you will find it easier if you sit up, and take off your watch.’
Mânios Dumitrescu stared at her with bulging eyes, but he didn’t say anything, and when she helped him to swing his legs off the bed and sit up straight he didn’t struggle or try to lash out at her. He was trembling with shock and he didn’t even protest when she slid his watch off his blood-smeared wrist.
‘Go on,’ she coaxed him. ‘So far – look – you have hardly scratched yourself.’
Outside, the clouds must have been drifting over the sun, because the bedroom gradually became gloomier. Mânios Dumitrescu lined up the hacksaw blade with the cut that he had already sawn across his wrist, closed his eyes for a split second, and then dragged it again across the same line.
As he started sawing, he began to utter an extraordinary high-pitched howling sound, like a mongrel being run over. Even so, he soon seemed to realize that he was failing to cut hard enough or deep enough. After five backward and forward strokes he had sawn no deeper through the skin than the cartilage that connected the two bones in his forearm to the bones in his hand. He stopped, panting, as if he were trying to summon up more resolve.
‘Go on,’ the young woman told him. ‘If you don’t finish doing this, I will still shoot you, and that is my promise.’
Mânios Dumitrescu didn’t say anything. Still panting, he dragged the bedside table close up beside him, so that he could lay his left forearm on top of it. Blood was welling out of the groove that he had cut so far, but he managed to insert the hacksaw blade into it. He gripped the tip of his tongue between his teeth and started sawing again. This time, he sawed relentlessly, with harsh, quick strokes that tore right through the flesh and the tendons and the cartilage, and which forced the bones to separate.
Like a large red flower blossoming, runnels of blood slid in all directions across the top of the bedside table and then ran down its legs. Blood was dripping off Mânios Dumitrescu’s chin, too, because his crooked front teeth had almost severed the tip of his tongue. The pain he was feeling was nearly enough to make him black out, but he had suffered pain many times before in his life. During his early years in the Ferentari district of Bucharest, when he was selling drugs, he had been beaten with baseball bats and stabbed and once he had been whipped with barbed wire. No matter what they did to you, though, you never let your enemies realize how much they were hurting you, because if they did the bastards would have won, they would have humiliated you. What kept you focused through your pain was the thought that as soon as you had the chance you would do the same to them, only worse. That is what he thought now. I will get my revenge on this black woman, and the things I will do to her will make Satan go pale.
Mânios Dumitrescu kept on sawing until he had cut right through to the last shred of skin, and with each of the last few strokes his bloody hand flopped from side to side. Then, quite suddenly, it dropped off the table on to the rug.
His face was ashy-grey, all except for a crimson beard of blood, because now he had bitten off the tip off his tongue. He was shaking even more violently with shock – in fact, his skin seemed almost to ripple. In spite of this, he managed to lift up his left arm and brandish his stump in front of the young woman’s face. He had severed both of the arteries in his wrist, but because of the self-protective constriction of the blood vessels it was only dribbling blood at the moment, like a garden hose with a leaky washer.
‘There!’ he croaked, although he had to stop and cough up blood before he could say any more. ‘And you thought I do not have balls to do it! Futu-ti crucea matii!’
‘I will have to tie your arm up for you,’ said the young woman, quietly. A gold Japanese-style bathrobe was hanging on the back of the bedroom door and she went over and pulled out the sash from around its waist. ‘Otherwise you will bleed to death.’
‘What do you care?’ He nodded down towards his detached hand, lying on the rug. ‘There! There is your proof that you punish me! That is what you wanted! Now you go! Get out of my life!’
‘Lie down,’ said the young woman.
Mânios Dumitrescu tried to resist her at first, but he was in too much of a state of shock and much too weak. He let her push him back flat on the quilt and then use the gold sash to tie a half-knot around his wrist, tighter and tighter, until the blood stopped flowing altogether.
‘Press your thumb on there and keep it there,’ she told him. She went into the small en-suite toilet and came back with a toothbrush, which she twisted into the sash and wound around like a clock key to make a tourniquet.
Mânios Dumitrescu lifted it up to look at it, and said, ‘You want me to thank you for this?’
‘Wait until I have finished with you, Mânios, before you think of thanking me.’
‘Finished with me?’ he said, and for the first time that afternoon there was genuine dread in his voice.
The young woman walked around the bed and used a folded copy of yesterday’s Echo to pick up his severed hand. ‘Yes, good,’ she said. ‘This hand is proof that you have been punished. But … we have to provide two proofs. One for God, and one for the police.’
‘What?’ he said, blurrily. For a few seconds his eyes rolled up into his head and he was unconscious. The young woman laid his severed hand down on the dressing table and waited patiently for him to come round. When at last he did, about three or four minutes later, he stared at her as if he couldn’t think who she was. Then he held up his bloodied stump, with its toothbrush tourniquet, and stared at her in horror.
At first he did nothing but pant, but she could see from his face what he was thinking. Oh God, don’t let this be real. Oh God, please don’t let this be happening to me. With his right hand he even managed to make the sign of the cross, and after a while she heard him whisper. ‘Oh, Isus va rog sa ma salveze.’
She went up to the side of the bed and looked down at him. ‘I need one more proof of your punishment. But you cannot give me that proof yourself. I shall have to take it for you.’
He let his head drop back on the quilt and looked up at her dully.
‘When I have done this,’ she said, ‘I promise that I will give you peace.’
He still said nothing. She wasn’t even sure that he could hear her.
‘I am going to
cut off your other hand now. Do you understand me? They always say that the devil finds work for idle hands. But if you have no hands, Mânios, you cannot get up to any more mischief, can you?’
The bedroom suddenly filled up with sunlight again. Mânios Dumitrescu half closed his eyes and tried to persuade himself that he had died, and gone to heaven. The trouble was, he couldn’t imagine that heaven smelled like this, of blood and urine and Estée Lauder perfume, or that heaven could be such agony.
‘Alo, salut, sunt eu, un haiduc …’ he whispered, from the song ‘Dragostea din tei’. Hello, it’s me, an outlaw …
Eleven
Katie parked her Fiesta on Anglesea Street right outside the front entrance of Garda headquarters, instead of in the main car park. A warm breeze was gusting as she got out of the car and almost blew away the folder of evidence she was carrying.
She had parked here because she would have to go straight back out again as soon as she had dealt with any outstanding messages and eaten the cheese salad sandwich she had bought in Marks & Spencer’s. She had made an appointment that afternoon with Cois Tine, a charity that supported immigrant African women. She was hoping to find somebody there who could help her to get through to Isabelle. Cois Tine in Irish meant ‘by the fireside’ and the charity’s whole purpose was to make African women feel that they had a place of warmth and safety to go to, where they could tell their story and make friends.
As she crossed the pavement, her attention was caught by a man standing on the corner of Copley Street, no more than thirty feet away. Although it was so warm and windy, he was wearing a long black raincoat with a pointed hood, and goggles like an old-fashioned motorcyclist. A tatty grey mongrel was sitting beside him, its fringe intermittently blowing into its eyes.
Katie stopped for a second and narrowed her eyes and stared at him, but because of his goggles she couldn’t be sure if he was looking back at her. He made no move to walk towards her or to cross the street. He just stood there with his raincoat flapping in the breeze.
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