Red Light

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I’d quite like one of those leprechauns,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘I could stand him in my window box, looking in, and pretend he was a peeping Tom.’

  ‘I don’t think your boyfriend would appreciate that very much,’ said Katie.

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I saw you talking to some young man outside the station the other day and giving him a kiss and I just assumed. I must stop jumping to conclusions. It’s not like me at all.’

  ‘That was my brother Liam. He came down from Wicklow for a few days to visit me. He’s a darling.’

  She started the engine and they drove out of the garden centre. As they did so, Katie turned around in her seat and said, ‘I want you to get a court order to go through Colin Cleary’s recent phone records as soon as we get back to the city.’

  ‘Really? On what grounds?’

  ‘On the grounds that he sold a weapon illegally which we suspect was used in the commission of three homicides, and which we also suspect may be used to commit even more.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  ‘You’re thinking that I’ll be breaking my promise not to take this any further?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ It had started to rain again and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán switched on the windscreen wipers.

  ‘Well, don’t worry about that. Three men have been unlawfully killed and no matter what trash they were, no Angel of Revenge had the right to take their lives, and that’s all that matters. I’m not going to charge Colin Cleary with any offence, but he who lives by the gun has to understand that he can just as easily die by the gun.’

  As they joined the N20 again, her mobile phone played ‘The Wild Rover’. It was Garda Ronan Kelly.

  ‘Your man left his house about fifteen minutes ago. He drove to Washington Street almost opposite the courthouse. He’s entered an address there and it’s one we suspect of being a brothel.’

  ‘Are you there now?’

  ‘Yes, we’re parked in Cross Street, but we won’t be able to stay here. There’s been some kind of incident in the Paul Street shopping centre and we’ve been called to attend that.’

  ‘That’s all right. See if you can drive past later and check if Mister Dessie’s car is still there. I’m just on my way back from Mallow at the moment, I’ll be there myself in twenty minutes tops.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán.

  ‘I’m not sure yet, but I’ll get Horgan and Dooley to go round there now and keep an eye on the place until I get there. Once you’ve dropped me off, you can go back to the station and get that application for a court order in motion. You have all the information you need, don’t you?’

  Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán looked across at her. It was barely raining at all now and the windscreen wipers were making a squeaky, rubbery noise. ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’

  Katie was busy prodding at her mobile phone. ‘What? Yes, of course I’ll be careful.’

  ‘She’s armed, don’t forget that.’

  ‘I know. But so am I. And she only has the one shot, while I have six.’

  Katie had the feeling that Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was going to say something else, but she didn’t. The sun suddenly came out and the car was filled with light.

  Thirty-one

  Zakiyyah’s sleep was disturbed by the sound of her bedroom door being opened and then closed again. She lifted her head from the velveteen pillow and frowned around the room, but there was nobody there. Mairead must have just looked in to see if she was awake. The sun was shining outside, but she was exhausted and she let her head fall back down. She was aching all over and she felt so sore between her legs that she didn’t even want to touch herself there. She knew that she smelled of stale sweat and rubber and semen and some strong musky aftershave that her last client had been reeking of, but she felt too weak to get up and take a bath.

  She closed her eyes. Outside her door she could hear Mairead clattering in the kitchen, and Lotus Blossom talking in her sing-song voice. Lotus Blossom never seemed to stop talking, except when she had a customer in her room, and even then Zakiyyah had heard her chattering and giggling.

  She could hear a man’s voice, too, mumbling like faraway thunder, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  She fell asleep and dreamed that she was sitting in her mother’s kitchen at home, while her mother was rolling out funkaso, millet pancakes. She was trying to tell her mother that she needed to stay at home for a while, but her mother didn’t seem to be listening and just kept on singing.

  It was then that she was woken up again by the sound of her door opening. She raised her head again and rubbed her eyes and blurrily saw that a large man was standing in the open doorway. She sat up and said, ‘I am so sorry, sir. What time is it? I had a very late night. Please come in.’

  ‘State of you, la,’ said the man. ‘And you supposed to be seductive, like. Feck’s sake. You look like something the dog’s dragged in.’

  Zakiyyah blinked and focused her eyes and saw that the man was Mister Dessie. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and a jazzy purple tie, and chinos. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and he seemed to be playing with himself.

  ‘I am sorry, Mister Dessie. I was very tired and needed some sleep. My last customer did not leave until five o’clock.’

  Mister Dessie came into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. ‘That’s nothing at all to be complaining about. The very opposite, in fact. That shows you’re pulling the punters in, and if you’re pulling the punters in you’re earning the money, aren’t you, girl, and that means you’ll be paying us off all the sooner.’

  Zakiyyah was wearing nothing but an orange T-shirt with a picture of a tiger’s head on it, which she had borrowed from Lotus Blossom. She hugged herself and bent forward with her thighs closely pressed together. She didn’t like the way that Mister Dessie was looking down at her and fiddling even more ostentatiously inside the front of his trousers.

  ‘You know that part of my job is, like, quality control,’ he told her.

  She looked up at him. He was standing in front of the window and all that she could see was his silhouette. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘It’s simple. It’s the same as the quality control like they do in the supermarket – making sure that all of the produce is up to scratch. What I do is, I go around all of the girls for Mr Gerrety and check that they’re giving the punters value for money.’

  ‘My customers all said I gave them pleasure. One of them said the very best ever.’

  ‘Well, I’m delighted about that, darling. And you made a shitload of money yesterday, let me tell you – nearly eight hundred out of only seven punters. At this rate you’ll be getting your suitcase back before you know it.’

  Zakiyyah said nothing. All she wanted was her rabies shot, and then for Mister Dessie to leave so that she could go and have a bath. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but Mairead had told her she had a customer booked for 2.30 p.m. and then another about half an hour afterwards, and she knew that there would be more after that, all evening and most of the night. She had heard the phone warbling constantly as customers made bookings from the Cork Fantasy Girls website.

  She felt hungry, too, although she wasn’t sure that she would be able to eat anything after her experiences last night. Just thinking about some of things that she had done made her stomach tighten.

  Mister Dessie took off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, baring his pallid, mole-speckled paunch.

  Zakiyyah looked up at him and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You, darling. That’s what I’m doing. I’m just checking that you’re giving our valued punters the kind of satisfaction they expect. After all, we have our reputation to think of. We don’t want our punters logging on to the internet and saying that our girls are shite, do we?’

  He prised off his tan suede loafers and then unbuckled his belt a
nd dropped his chinos, pushing them off with his feet and kicking them across the floor. Now he was wearing nothing but pale blue Marks & Spencer’s briefs.

  ‘There you are, girl. I’ll let you take these off for me.’

  Zakiyyah looked at the angular swelling of his erection. Bile rose up in the back of her throat and she had to cover her mouth with her hand. Mister Dessie smelled of sweat and fenugreek, and she could guess that he had been out for a curry last night.

  ‘Come on, then, I haven’t got the whole fecking day.’

  She saw her hands rise up in front of her as if they were somebody else’s hands, and take hold of the waistband of Mister Dessie’s underpants. Those unrelated hands pulled the waistband downwards, over his white, cellulite-dimpled thighs, and down to his knees. Now his reddened penis stuck up in front of her, with a crumpled scrotum and thick black pubic hair. She could faintly smell urine and Savlon antiseptic cream.

  ‘How about a gobble to start with?’ he said, resting his hands on his hips.

  ‘You must put on a condom,’ said Zakiyyah.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. The punters have to wear condoms because you don’t know where they’ve been, or what they’ve been dipping their wicks into. But me, I’m family, and I’m FSAI certified. Besides, I like to see a girl swallow. What’s the point of a gobble if the girl doesn’t swallow?’

  Zakiyyah saw her hand take hold of Mister Dessie’s penis and she shuffled herself nearer to him. As she did so, she glanced down and saw that he was still wearing his white socks. Mairead had told her that some Cork men wore white socks to show that they were IRA, or Republican sympathizers anyway. She found herself staring at his crimson glans and wondering how her life had possibly come to this. White socks, red penis. It was like some absurd nightmare. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth and leaned forward with her tongue sticking out.

  There was a sharp rattle of curtain rings, and then a woman’s voice said, ‘Stop. Leave go of him.’

  Zakiyyah opened her eyes. A slim young black woman all dressed in black had stepped out from behind the curtain where she hung her clothes. She had a red scarf tied around her hair and she was wearing a necklace made of seashells and animals’ teeth and claws. She was holding a small gun in both hands, and pointing it at Mister Dessie.

  ‘What in the name of Jesus?’ said Mister Dessie. He reached down to grab his briefs, which were still around his knees, but the woman snapped, ‘No … do not pull up your pants. Take them off.’

  Mister Dessie hesitated, but the woman took a step towards him and aimed the gun directly between his legs. ‘Take them off, or you will never need to wear them ever again.’

  Mister Dessie slowly removed his briefs, lifting one leg at a time. His penis was already drooping and even his scrotum had shrunk, as if his testicles were trying to hide themselves inside him.

  ‘I seen you,’ said Mister Dessie. ‘I seen you on the TV news. It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one killed Kola and that dumb-arse Romanian gom.’

  ‘Sit on the bed,’ said the woman.

  ‘Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it if I don’t?’

  ‘I will make a woman of you. How would you like that? I will blow off your manhood and then everybody will have to call you “Miss Dessie”.’

  ‘How the feck do you know my name?’

  ‘I know all of your names. I know all of you. Mawakiya, Mânios Dumitrescu, the one they call Bula, you, and Michael Gerrety. The others, too, who run your sex business, Bobby Devlin and Patrick O’Halloran and Razvy Cojocaru, but I am not concerned with them. Now, do what I tell you and sit down on the bed.’

  Mister Dessie reluctantly sat down, keeping both hands cupped underneath his belly. ‘Don’t think for one moment you’re going to get away with this, you bitch.’

  ‘Why? What will you do? Send Bula after me?’

  ‘That would be a start. Bula could fecking tear you limb from limb.’

  ‘I do not think so, Mister Dessie, because I did it to him first. The dead man who was found in Mutton Lane on Saturday? That was Bula.’

  Mister Dessie stared at her and his eyes looked even more bulbous. ‘That was Bula? Are you messing with me?’

  ‘No, that was Bula. Have you heard from him since Saturday?’

  ‘You fecking killed Bula?’

  ‘He cried before he died. He cried, and before I shot him in the face he asked for his mother.’

  The woman beckoned to Zakiyyah and said, ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Zakiyyah.’

  ‘Very well, Zakiyyah. You should go now and wash yourself. Take your clothes with you and get dressed in the bathroom. Do not come back into this room. Wait for me in the living room and I will come and get you when I have finished with Mister Dessie.’

  ‘I don’t know what the feck you have in mind,’ said Mister Dessie. ‘Whatever it is, you’re not going to get away with it.’

  From the hook behind the curtain, Zakiyyah quickly took down the only dress she had, which was light green with red roses on it, and out of the cardboard box on the floor beneath it she took a clean pair of white knickers. She had no bras and she had no shoes. Mairead had taken her only pair of shoes away from her. ‘You’re never going anywhere, girl. What do you need shoes for?’

  Zakiyyah padded barefoot along the corridor to the bathroom. Before she closed the bedroom door behind her, the woman took the key out of the outside of the door and locked it from the inside, all the time keeping her gun pointing at Mister Dessie.

  ‘This is fecking ridiculous,’ said Mister Dessie. ‘I don’t know what we’ve all done to vex you so much, but we must be able to work something out.’

  ‘You could bring my younger sister back to life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My younger sister Nwaha. You and your friends, you took my younger sister and you made her a prostitute. You hurt her, but most of all, you shamed her, and she could not bear that shame, which was why she took her own life.’

  ‘I never even heard of any fecking Nwaha. You can’t blame me.’

  ‘She was a beautiful girl with tattoos of flowers on her hands. You made her do what you wanted to do to Zakiyyah. You made her swallow.’

  ‘Feck’s sake. That’s – that’s what sex is all about, isn’t it? Men shoot and women swallow. That’s what makes men men and women women.’

  ‘Well, you are soon going to find out what makes women women. This gun is small but it is loaded with a shotgun shell and when I shoot you, you will have nothing left between your legs but rags. You make jokes about women with rags. Now you can find out what it is like.’

  Mister Dessie started to stand up but the woman straightened her arm to make it clear to him that she would pull the trigger if he tried to attack her, and he quickly sat down again.

  ‘What do you want, then?’ he asked her. He was beginning to sweat badly and the perspiration was sliding down his sides from under his arms.

  ‘I am Rama Mala’ika, which means Avenging Angel. I want revenge for my sister. You cannot make me believe that you do not remember her.’

  ‘Yes, well, maybe I do. Flowery tattoos on her hands. Yes. I didn’t know what her real name was. She was Desiray on the website. Look – I’m dead sorry that she killed herself. We try our best to look after the girls, like. Michael Gerrety insists on it. We put a roof over their heads and we feed them. They get protection from any punters who are langered, or abusive, or psychos. We supply them with condoms and we make sure that they get regular medical check-ups. There’s always going to be some girls who go on the game, that’s the way of the world. If you can’t stop them, at least take care of them, that’s Michael Gerrety’s motto.’

  ‘My sister Nwaha never wanted to be a prostitute. She wanted to be an artist.’

  ‘What more can I say to you? I’m sorry. I’ve heard that you accept compensation in Africa, don’t you, if somebody accidentally kills a member of your family, like runs them over or something? How about it
? I can pay you. I can pay you thousands. I have cash on me now.’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Life is not all about money, Mister Dessie. Whatever you think, people cannot be bought and sold.’

  Mister Dessie found it impossible to read her expression. She was unnervingly beautiful, so beautiful that she hardly looked human – as if she had been carved out of ebony and then polished and polished until her skin shone. Her eyes were heavily lidded and her lips were slightly pouting, but her face gave absolutely nothing away. Nothing that he could understand, anyway.

  ‘I will take another part of your body, if you do not wish to lose your manhood. But you will have to give it to me voluntarily.’

  ‘Name of Jesus, what the feck are you talking about? What part of my body?’

  ‘Your left hand,’ she said.

  Mister Dessie held up his left hand and stared at it as if he had never realized he had one. ‘My left hand? What? I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I want you to cut off your left hand and give it to me. If you do that, I will not turn you into a woman.’

  Up until now, Mister Dessie hadn’t noticed the metal hacksaw handle protruding from the right-hand pocket of her leather waistcoat, but now she lifted it out and held it out to him.

  ‘You’re asking me to cut my own hand off? Serious?’

  ‘You do not have to. I can always shoot you now and get it over with. It depends how you wish to live the rest of your life. With only one hand, or as a eunuch. It is no worse than the choice that you offered my sister.

  Mister Dessie looked at the hacksaw and licked his red rubbery lips.

  ‘I will give you five seconds to make up your mind,’ the woman told him. ‘One …’

  ‘How long’s he been in there now?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Over an hour,’ said Detective Horgan. He checked the clock on the instrument panel. ‘And … yes! … I’m happy to say that he’s overstayed his time on his parking meter by seven minutes. I can call traffic if you like and have them come around to give him a ticket.’