Red Light (6 page)

Katie said, ‘I’ll have a word with Maeve Twomey.’ Maeve Twomey was her ethnic liaison officer and closely in touch with the various immigrant groups who had settled in Cork, especially the Poles and the Lithuanians and the Africans. ‘She can talk to Emeka Ikebuasi, he’s the big cheese in the Nigerian community. And that Somali, whatever his name is. Geedi something. The one who keeps jiggling up and down while he’s talking to you like he’s doing a rain dance.’

‘A rain dance, that’s rich. In Cork, how would you ever know if it had worked or not?’

As if to emphasize his point, rain lashed against the window, hard and brittle, and the hooded crows on the car parked opposite took to the air, as if at last they had lost their patience with being rained on.

Once O’Donovan had gone, Katie eased the lid off her coffee and opened the manila folder in front of her. This contained a list of all the charges they had brought against Michael Gerrety relating to his sex website, Cork Fantasy Girls, as well as his financial connections to at least seven brothels and three so-called massage parlours and fitness clubs, including the notorious Nightingale Club on Grafton Street.

Gerrety had contended that he had done nothing legally or morally wrong. By allowing girls to advertise on his website, he said, he was making sure that their business was all out in the open and they were much safer than if they had been obliged to rely on cards in newsagents’ windows or small ads in the local papers, or walking the streets.

Women’s and immigrants’ support groups in Cork had combined together to start a campaign called Turn Off The Red Light, the aim of which was to eradicate local prostitution and the trafficking of women for sex. In retaliation, Gerrety had launched Give It The Green Light, to fight for the decriminalization of sex work.

Give It The Green Light had produced posters of pretty, smiling women saying ‘I’m Happy In My Job – And I’m a Sex Worker’. If Gerrety hadn’t been making so much money out of prostitution, Katie could almost have believed that he was sincere.

She finished reading through the file and sat back. She knew that advertising brothels and prostitution was prohibited by the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act of 1994. But if a girl didn’t specifically offer sex on Gerrety’s website, was her advertisement in breach of the law?

And what if a man answered the girl’s advertisement and had sex with her, could Gerrety be said to be living off immoral earnings, since he charged her 200 euros a month to post it? Or could he protest that what two people decided to do together once they had met on a social website had nothing to do with him whatsoever? You might just as well prosecute an online dating agency for living off immoral earnings. Or the
Examiner
even, for running a lonely hearts column.

It was Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll who had insisted on charges being brought against Michael Gerrety. He was a deeply religious man and he despised Gerrety with a passion – he almost considered his disdain for the laws of brothel-keeping to be a personal insult. In Katie’s opinion, though, they had charged Gerrety prematurely, before they had gathered enough evidence that would stand up in court, and on reflection Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll had been inclined to agree with her. With his approval, Katie had set up Operation Rocker to dig out even more substantial proof that Gerrety was breaking the law.

She took her cup of coffee to the window and stared out of it for a long time. Only one street away she could see the tall greenish tower of The Elysian. It was seventeen storeys high and the tallest building in the whole of Ireland. It had been built in the boom days of the Celtic Tiger, before the financial crash of 2008, and even now almost half of its apartments and offices were still empty. The people of Cork had been quick to nickname it ‘The Idle Tower’, after The Idle Hour pub nearby. But there was one apartment that she knew was occupied, right at the very top, with a commanding view of the whole of the city, and that was where Michael Gerrety lived.

She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about little Corina, too frightened of punishment even to take a single square of chocolate – or of the girl who had been found with the headless, handless body in the bedsit in Lower Shandon Street, too terrified to leave the room.

It was raining almost insanely hard now, as if God were trying to wash all of the city’s sins away. Katie’s jubilation at John’s finding a job at ErinChem had subsided, and she felt flat. She almost wished she had given up on Cork and gone to San Francisco with him.

At least in San Francisco it wouldn’t be raining as if it were never going to stop.

Zakiyyah was woken up by the sound of somebody whistling and drumming a complicated rhythm on a tabletop.

She lifted her head from the bed and looked around. Her eyes were unfocused and her ears were ringing, as if she had fallen over and hit the back of her head. She was lying in a large gloomy room with sloping dormer ceilings that were blotched with damp. The carpet was a dirty bright green and fraying at the edges. Through the grimy windows at either end of the room she could see wet slate rooftops, so she guessed they must be three or four storeys up.

In the street below she could hear traffic and people’s feet pattering and clicking along the pavement, and somebody shouting ‘
Echo
!
Echo
!’ The man who was whistling and drumming was sitting at a table beside the door, bent over a newspaper, which he was reading with all the intensity of somebody studying an instruction manual. Every now and then he stopped whistling and drumming, sniffed, and turned a page. He was bald and bulky, a light-skinned African, wearing a yellow flowery shirt that was straining across his shoulders.

Zakiyyah said nothing, but sat watching him. She had no idea where she was or how she had got here, but she felt completely detached, as if she wasn’t really there at all, but was just dreaming about it. The smell of damp carpet wasn’t a dream, though, and neither was her headache, nor the stiffness in her shoulders and elbows, as if she had been sleeping in the same position for a very long time.

She thought she recognized the tune the man was whistling and drumming – ‘Sex Tape’ by Tamaya. They had been playing it in the Z-Club where she had been working on Victoria Island in Lagos. That all seemed so far away and long ago, and her home village near Shaki seemed to have shrunk even further into the distance. Her father had grinned at her with his three front teeth missing, but her mother had been weeping and she had repeatedly reached out to touch Zakiyyah’s face with her fingertips, as if she would never see her again as long as she lived. Her younger sister, Assibi, had been standing a little way away, staring at her in bewilderment. Why is Zakiyyah leaving us and going with those men? It had been a grey, humid day and she remembered the acrid smell of diesel fumes from the men’s Land Rover.

Zakiyyah’s left arm felt sore and she slowly rubbed it. She was wearing nothing but a knee-length sleeveless slip of pale turquoise satin, spattered with a few dark stains. She reached up and felt her hair, which was braided in its usual cornrows, with coloured glass beads. She was still wearing the pink glass bracelet around her wrist that her mother had given her on the day she had left the village. She had said that it contained the spirit of her
Orisha
,
her guardian spirit Ochumare.

The man at the table turned to the last page of his newspaper, read it intently, then folded it neatly in half and looked across at her. ‘So! You are awake at last?’ he said.

He had almost no neck, and his face appeared to be squashed so that his eyes had almost disappeared and his nostrils had spread wide and his lips bulged out. He reminded Zakiyyah of the wooden gods that her uncle used to carve.

He stood up and waddled over to her. ‘Do you know how
long
you been
sleeping
?’ He had the strangest sing-song accent, like nothing that Zakiyyah had ever heard before. It was half Cork, half Nigerian.

Zakiyyah shook her head.

‘Twenty-seven hours, near enough. Still, not really surprising considering the dose that Mister Dessie give you. You hungry? You thirsty? Bet you busting for a piss, right?’

Zakiyyah looked up at him but didn’t answer him. She didn’t know what to say. She had no idea who he was or what she was doing here or why she should have slept for so long.

The man lifted an iPhone out of his shirt pocket and tapped out a number, breathing heavily as he did so. As he waited for an answer, he gave Zakiyyah a wink and a thumbs-up sign and said, ‘You going to do good, girl. You
real
pretty, let me tell you that. And wow, them little diddies! You going to have them queuing round the corner.’

Zakiyyah touched her lips and said, ‘Drink? I can have drink?’

‘Sure, sure you can, what would you like? I got Coke. Or water. Or there’s Murphy’s if you feel like something stronger.’

‘Water,’ said Zakiyyah. She didn’t understand what he meant by the other drinks.

‘Just a second,’ the man told her. ‘Mister Dessie? Yeah. Bula here. Yeah. How’s it hanging? Well, the girl’s woke up now. Grand, from what I can tell. No, fine. No, absolutely fine. Yeah. Okay. I’ll see you in five, then.’

He switched off his phone and crossed over to the other side of the room, where he opened a door that led to a small kitchenette. Zakiyyah could see a sink with a Baby Belling oven on the draining board, and a window covered with a broken Venetian blind.

The man filled a red china mug with water and brought it back to her. He stood over her while she gulped it down, and then said, ‘More?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know what she wanted. She just wished that she didn’t feel so dizzy and unreal.

‘Look,’ said the man. ‘Mister Dessie’s going to be here in a minute. He’s a good man, Mister Dessie, so long as you do what he tells you. You understand me? He will always treat you right and give you all the stuff you want, so long as you work hard and don’t give him no trouble.’

‘I always work hard,’ said Zakiyyah. ‘I never give my boss no trouble.’

‘In that case, you and Mister Dessie will rub along fine.’

Zakiyyah looked around the room. ‘Where is this place?’ she asked him. ‘They tell me I am coming to work in a club, dancing, like Z-Club.’

‘Well, that’s right. Kind of. I think you have one or two financial things to sort out first. Mister Dessie will tell you all about it.’

‘But this is Ireland?’

‘Yes, girl. This
is
Ireland.’

Zakiyyah shook her head again, but it still wouldn’t clear. ‘I don’t remember coming here. I came on a plane?’

‘No, you came on a ship. But don’t you worry about it. You’re here now, girl. Your new life starts here’

‘I still can’t think.’

‘Like I said, don’t worry about it. Mister Dessie won’t be paying you to think.’

‘What about my clothes? Where is my suitcase?’

‘Mister Dessie will sort out something for you to wear.’

‘But in my suitcase was not only clothes. I have pictures of my family. I have other things. My make-up. Things that my friends in Lagos gave me.’

The man went back to the table, picked up a red and white carton of Carrolls cigarettes and lit one. Smoke blew out of his wide-apart nostrils as if one of her uncle’s carved wooden gods had come to life.

‘All that kind of thing, you’ll have to ask Mister Dessie about all that. Me, I’m just here to keep an eye on you.’

‘But I want to get dressed.’

The man looked amused. ‘I don’t think you’ll be worrying too much about that, darling. Not in your line of work.’

Zakiyyah stood up. Her head was gradually beginning to feel clearer. She had been promised a nightclub job in Ireland, as a hostess and dancer, just like her job at the Z-Club. Her manager, Benjamin Bankole, had been talking to an Irishman who had visited the club. He had called her into his office and asked her if she wanted to make ten times as much money as she was making in Lagos.

The Irishman had been standing next to her manager’s desk. He had been fat and balding and wearing a sweat-stained shirt with palm trees and monkeys on it. He had grinned at her and said, ‘Who knows, girl? You wait till my friend Michael Gerrety claps his eyes on you. You could even be famous.’

She still wasn’t clear what had happened after that. She could remember packing her suitcase. But then the Irishman had come round to the house where was staying on Oluwole Street to pick her up and told her that she needed a rabies inoculation before the immigration authorities would allow her into Ireland. Luckily enough, he had some vaccine with him.

She remembered sitting on the side of her creaky bed and baring her arm for him, but that was all.

‘I need toilet,’ she told the bald African man.

‘There – through there,’ he said, pointing to a door opposite the kitchenette.

Zakiyyah went into the cramped windowless lavatory and closed the door, although there was no lock on it. The wooden seat was loose and the cistern was gurgling. This wasn’t how she had imagined Ireland at all. She had imagined a dark, plush club with twinkling lights and smartly dressed customers. She had imagined dancing between the tables and beaming men tucking banknotes into her garters, just like they had at the Z-Club.

At first she could urinate only in fits and starts, but then it seemed as if she were never going to stop. She still hadn’t finished before the man opened the toilet door without knocking and said, ‘How long are you going to be, girl? Mister Dessie’s here!’

There was toilet paper, but nowhere for Zakiyyah to wash her hands. She came out of the toilet and started to cross the room towards the kitchenette. She was only halfway there, though, when a loud, twangy voice said, ‘And where the feck d’you think
you’re
going? Come here, girl!’

She stopped and turned. A podgy man in a grey double-breasted suit was standing in the middle of the room, with his hands deep in his jacket pockets and his legs spread apart. He had black wavy hair which was short on top but curled over his collar at the back in a mullet. His eyes were bulbous and his nose was an odd bifurcated blob and his lips were red and rubbery. He wore a wide red zigzag necktie but it did nothing to hide his belly, which hung pendulously over his belt.