Red Light (11 page)

‘We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?’ said Branna, and stalked off along the corridor with her water-buffalo hairstyle bouncing.

As soon as he saw Mânios Dumitrescu appear out of number thirty-seven, lighting a cigarette as he came, Niamh’s son, Brendan, said, ‘Right, that’s it!’ and went for the front door. Niamh, however, caught hold of his sleeve to hold him back.

‘Don’t, Brendan! They’re not worth it, those people! They’ll bring you nothing but grief!’

‘Name of Jesus, mam, you’ve torn me shirt!’

He struggled to free himself, but she pushed past him and stood in front of the door so that he couldn’t get out unless he lifted her bodily out of the way.

‘I said
no
, Brendan! I’m not having you hurt for the likes of them!’

‘Oh, I see! So your man thinks he can threaten me mam and then leave his scabby Range Rover blocking up our front gate so that I can hardly get in for me dinner and that’s all right, like?’

Niamh said nothing but stayed where she was with her arms pressed against the side of the door frame, breathing deeply and staring steadily at Brendan as if she were challenging him to risk everything she had ever put into his upbringing – every cup of milk, every kiss, every song, every day by the sea.

They heard Mânios Dumitrescu’s Range Rover start up with a roar and a rattle of a loose exhaust, and then he was gone.

Brendan went back into the living room, shaking his head. Niamh lifted up his torn shirtsleeve and said, ‘If you take that off, I’ll sew it for you now. It’s a small price to pay, you know that. Those people will cut the tripe out of you as soon as wink at you. I’d sooner be sewing the shirt of a boy who swallowed his pride than standing over the grave of a boy who wouldn’t.’

‘Mam, you can’t let these people treat you this way. I don’t care what fecking country they come from, they’re tinkers, and I’ll not be having no fecking tinkers putting my own mother in fear of her life.’

‘Wash your mouth out and give me your shirt.’

Mânios Dumitrescu drove down to Pope’s Quay and then along by the river. He was slapping his fingers so that his heavy silver rings clattered on the steering wheel and singing ‘
Dragostea din tei
’,
which had done so well for Romania all those years ago in the Eurovision Song Contest, although he interrupted himself now and again to cough and sniff noisily up his left nostril.

He was feeling much more pleased with himself now. He had just received a phone call from his solicitor’s telling him that the circuit court hearing about his custodianship of little Corina had been brought forward until next Tuesday afternoon, and that one of the key witnesses to her alleged mistreatment had unreservedly withdrawn her evidence. Unless there were any dramatic developments, Corina should be back at home at number thirty-seven with him and his mother by Wednesday.

He sucked at the last of his cigarette and threw the stub out of the Range Rover’s window. He knew that he had only two or three left in the packet, so he stopped outside the Spar grocery halfway along McCurtain Street to buy himself some more, and some chocolate, too. For some reason, he had a craving for chocolate.

He was no longer than three or four minutes in the shop, but when he came out a garda was carefully tucking a ticket under his windscreen wiper.

‘Hey!
Hey
! What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Anybody can park anywhere in this street!’

The garda was large and placid, with blond eyelashes and a face like a pink boiled ham. He pointed to the Range Rover’s windscreen with his pen and said, ‘Nothing to do with parking, sir, although this street is a clearway between 4 and 6 p.m. Your insurance is three months out of date and you don’t have your NCT certificate on display.’

‘What? NCT? What is that? I am foreign visitor, I don’t need such a thing!’

‘You need to have valid insurance, sir, wherever you come from, and since this vehicle is over four years old and registered in Ireland, it needs to be tested. On this occasion, sir, I’m going to allow you to drive it away, mostly because it would be a fecking nuisance to have to call for a truck to tow it. But you must immediately insure it and test it as soon as possible and produce evidence of both at your nearest Garda station.’

Mânios Dumitrescu was so angry that his narrow nostrils flared and he squeezed the Kit Kat he was holding in his hand so hard that he crushed it. He had enough self-control, though, not to argue with a garda. He had done it before, once, in The Idle Hour, when he was very drunk. He had agreed then to pay an on-the-spot fine of 140 euros, so he hadn’t been given a criminal record – but after two gardaí had explained his legal rights to him behind one of the dockside cranes across the road, he had also come away with two black eyes, a perforated eardrum and a fractured thumb.

He said nothing more but snatched the ticket from under his windscreen wiper, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and headed along McCurtain Street to the traffic lights at the junction with Summerhill. When he got there, he tore open the Kit Kat wrapper with his teeth and a shower of chocolaty crumbs dropped into his lap.

‘
Pula mea
!’ he snapped, brushing them off his trousers.

Unnervingly close to his left ear, a strongly accented female voice said, ‘I would laugh, Mânios, if anything that you ever did could be funny.’

Startled, Mânios Dumitrescu twisted himself around, but whoever it was ducked down behind his seat so that her face was hidden. All he could see was the sleeve of a black leather jacket and the leg of a pair of black denim jeans.

‘Who the
fuck
are you and what you do in my car!’ he shouted. He started to unbuckle his seat belt, but at that moment the lights changed to green and a truck blew its two-tone horn right behind him.

‘Okay! Okay!’ he screamed, but the truck blew its horn again, and now the cars behind joined in, too.

He drove slowly up Summerhill, trying desperately to find a space to pull into the kerb, but it was a narrow road with a narrow pavement and the first hundred yards were bordered by the stony perimeter wall of Trinity Presbyterian Church. There was a bus stop fifty yards further up, but a 207 bus had just pulled into it, and the lay-by immediately beyond it, which served O’Donovan’s off-licence, was blocked by a council refuse truck.

Meanwhile, the truck that had blown its horn at him stayed only about two feet behind the spare wheel of his Range Rover, aggressively revving its engine.

Mânios Dumitrescu slowed down even more as he approached St Luke’s Cross, thinking he would turn left into Wellington Road and park outside the bookmaker’s. As they neared the junction, however, the woman behind him said, ‘Don’t even think about stopping, Mânios. Keep going. Go to the house where you were meaning to go anyway.’

‘Listen – who the fuck
are
you?’ Mânios Dumitrescu demanded, twisting around in his seat again. He slowed down almost to a standstill and this time he was treated to a deafening five-second blast from the truck. He turned back immediately and angrily stamped his foot down on the accelerator, so that he surged past St Luke’s Cross and kept on climbing up the Ballyhooly Road, his exhaust-pipe rattling like maracas.

‘Mânios – it does not matter to you who I am,’ said the woman after a while. In spite of her strong accent, she sounded quite cultured. She also sounded distracted, as if she were thinking about something else altogether, something much more important – or maybe somewhere else altogether, somewhere very far away, where everybody spoke like her.

‘So how do you know my name, hey?’ said Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘How do you know where I am supposed to be going?’

‘The Avenging Angel knows everything.’

‘And who the fucking
fuck
is the
what?
The Avenging Angel?’

‘Be patient, Mânios. Ssh! Don’t be in such a hurry to get to hell.’

‘What crap do you think you talk about,
scorpie
? What is to stop me from pulling over right up ahead here, then to drag you out of my car and throw you into road in front of bus?’

It was a long, steep ascent up the Ballyhooly Road and the green hills of the surrounding countryside were beginning to rise into view all around them above the grey city rooftops. Because of that, Mânios Dumitrescu had gained at least two hundred yards on the truck and it was no longer tailgating close behind him. Dillon’s Cross was coming up, where there would be space for him to park outside the pharmacy and heave this unwelcome intruder out of the back of the Range Rover. He was so angry he was doing that sniffing, head-jerking thing again, and that made him even angrier. When he was younger, his school friends had teased him by calling him
marionet
ǎ
, or ‘puppet’, whenever he grew angry.

‘I told you,’ said the woman. ‘Keep going until you reach the house where you wanted to go. Do not stop. Do not turn around again to look at me. I am here. You will be able to see me soon enough, and then you will wish that you had not.’

‘Well, all I say to you is fuck you,’ said Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘
Pizda m
ǎ
-tii!
’

They had reached Dillon’s Cross now and he could see a space on the opposite side of the junction where he could pull in, but the traffic lights had just turned to red and he had to wait.

As calmly as before, with no sense of urgency at all, the woman said, ‘All I say to
you
, Mânios, is that you can curse me as much as you like. But curses I can brush away like flies. What
you
cannot brush away is the gun that I am aiming at the back of your seat.’

She paused for a moment, to allow this to sink in. Then she said, ‘I promise you that I do not lie to you, Mânios. If you try to stop before you reach 14 Glendale View, or if you turn around to look at me again, you will have more to clean out of your lap than chocolate biscuit crumbs.’

Mânios Dumitrescu adjusted his rear-view mirror, trying to see her face, but the sun was shining in at a sharp angle through the rear window of the Range Rover and he was dazzled. At the same time, the traffic lights had changed to green. The truck had caught up with him now and blasted its horn again to get him moving.

It took no more than three or four minutes for them to reach Glendale View, a terrace of eleven small houses, each of which stood at the top of a steeply sloping front garden. All the houses were painted different colours – pink, raspberry, green and grey, although two or three of them still displayed their original sandy-coloured pebbledash. Most of the gardens were crowded with green recycling bins and discarded building materials, but there were one or two small rockeries, and fibreglass plant pots, and even a concrete fountain like a cherub, although it dripped rather than splashed and its head was covered with a sinister blindfold of green slime.

‘You know where to park,’ said the woman.

When they reached the end of the terrace, Mânios Dumitrescu turned into a narrow alleyway and drove up to a small courtyard of dilapidated lock-up garages.

‘So what do you want me to do now?’ he asked. He switched off the Range Rover’s engine and sat in the driver’s seat without moving. ‘I only believe that you have a gun because you tell me you have a gun, and I am always cautious when it comes to taking risk with my life. But maybe you
don’t
have a gun.’

‘You want to try to run away, and find out if I am lying to you or not?’

‘I would prefer to beat the
cacat
out of you.’

‘Try whichever one you like.’

Mânios Dumitrescu didn’t have an answer for that. He sniffed, and then he gave an unexpectedly girlish sneeze.

‘Right,’ said the woman, ‘I am going to get out of the car now. I will stand back a little distance. Then – when I make the signal to you,
you
will get out of the car. Once you have shut the door you will drop your keys on to the ground. Then you will start to walk down the path and around the corner to number fourteen.’

Mânios Dumitrescu started to say something, but then he must have realized the futility of saying anything, whether the woman had a gun or not, because all he managed to come out with was, ‘How do I—?’

‘You will let yourself into number fourteen. The door is on the latch, not locked, if that is what you were going to ask me. You will go straight up to the big bedroom which is on the left at the top of the stairs. I will be very close behind you. You will go into that bedroom and stand by the window. Then I will tell you what I want you to do next.’

The woman opened her door and was about to step down from the Range Rover when Mânios Dumitrescu said, ‘So – are you going to tell me what you want me from me? I don’t even know who the fuck you are. Is this kidnap? You want money from my family? We are not rich people. You waste your time.’

‘It is not money I am looking for,’ said the woman. ‘You will find out.’

‘Is it drugs? If it is drugs, then what is all this circus for? I can get you all of the drugs you ever heard of, and I can get you some you
never
heard of.’

‘I am not interested in your drugs.’

‘Did you ever take LucY? I will bet money you never took LucY. Once LucY hit your brain, your whole life is change forever. You will fuck
anybody
, and it does not matter if they are pretty or ugly or thin or fat or nine years old or ninety, you will fuck them
all
and every fuck will feel like heaven.’

‘Mânios—’

‘Hey, why do you think all of the prostitutes take it? From February it was illegal in Ireland but I can get you all the LucY you want.’

‘I told you, I am not interested in your drugs.’

‘Then
what
?’ he raged, punching his thighs so that the biscuit crumbs jumped up. ‘I do not understand! You want a piece of my business?
That
is it, isn’t it? You want a piece of my business! I should of know! It is always the same with you
negris
! You are too lazy to start a business of your own, so you steal the business of honest people who work fingers down to their bones!’