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  ‘He’s dead, Bula. Didn’t you see it on the news this morning? Mystery man found with both his hands missing and his head shot off, up at Ballyvolane?’

  Bula looked around again, still half suspecting that this was a set-up. Then he turned back to the woman and said, ‘That was Manny? Serious? How do you know? Any road, what does it have to do with me?’

  ‘Block the whole passage, why don’t you?’ said a beery-breathed drinker who had just lurched out of the Mutton Lane Inn.

  ‘Oh, go and screw yourself,’ said Bula.

  ‘Hey, watch who you’re talking to, you fat bastard,’ the drinker retorted.

  ‘I said go and screw yourself. Are you deaf or something?’

  The drinker pointed at Bula and took an unsteady step forward, but the black woman raised her left hand in front of him and gave him a look that meant, Don’t cause trouble, can’t you see that there’s enough trouble going on here already? The drinker opened his mouth, but then he got the hint and closed it again, and weaved away down Patrick Street as if he were walking across the deck of the Cross River ferry.

  ‘Go on, Bula,’ said the young woman, nodding her head down Mutton Lane. As she did so, two gardaí came strolling past them, a man and a woman, so close that Bula could have reached out and tugged at the woman garda’s shirtsleeve, but he watched them go by without saying a word. He was here in Ireland illegally, and if the Garda Immigration Bureau found out that he was working for Michael Gerrety, without papers or tax being paid, he would be lucky if Mister Dessie only beat the dust off him. He had witnessed Mister Dessie punishing a cute young entrepreneur from Dublin who had tried to cheat Michael Gerrety on a property deal in Rochestown. Both his legs had been broken and he had suffered irreparable brain damage.

  ‘All right,’ he told the young woman. ‘I’ll give you five minutes, but that’s your limit, whatever it is you want to say to me. You’ve already spoiled my dinner for me.’

  He made his way down Mutton Lane, his cargo shorts flapping and sandals shuffling on the grey brick pavement, and the woman followed close behind him. He passed the doorway of the Mutton Lane Inn, which was so gloomy inside that it was lit by candles even in daytime, and he could hear a woman laughing so hysterically that she was almost screaming. Because the lane led directly into the English Market, he could already smell fresh pork and cheese in the air. Before they reached the market entrance, however, the young woman said, ‘Here, Bula! Stop! This doorway here.’

  Set in the right-hand wall was a flaking, maroon-painted door, with a tarnished brass plaque beside it: O’Farrell Furnishings.

  The woman took two long keys out of her waistcoat pocket and used one of them to unlock the door. Then she stepped back and said, ‘Go on, open it, and go inside.’

  Bula looked at his half-eaten Whopper. ‘And what do you suggest I do with this?’

  ‘Eat it. Or don’t eat it. It’s entirely up to you.’

  Bula hesitated, and then he dropped the burger on to the ground. ‘Whatever you want to talk about, it had better be fecking worth it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that, Bula.’

  Bula opened the door and stepped over the threshold, and the woman immediately followed him. She switched on the lights and then she closed the door behind her. As the fluorescent tubes blinked into life, Bula could see that they were in a narrow workshop, crowded with chairs and sofas, most of which were still only half upholstered, with white kapok stuffing bulging out of their criss-cross canvas webbing.

  The workshop had been built up against the Mutton Lane Inn, so twenty feet above their heads it had a high, lean-to ceiling with long spiderwebs trailing from the rafters. Along the left-hand side ran a long, cluttered workbench, and the wall behind it was hung with saws and chisels and pliers and mallets. In the corner stood a blue metal table saw. The air was pungent with the smell of varnish and glue, and Bula felt that every breath he took was thick with sawdust.

  ‘Right then, what’s this all about?’ he demanded. He checked his watch and said, ‘You have four minutes and not so many seconds left, although to be straight with you, I don’t know why I’m giving you any time at all.’

  ‘You are giving me time for two good reasons,’ said the woman, very calmly. ‘One, because you are burning to know why I want to talk to you. Two, you think it just possible that I really do have a gun, and you are not the kind of man who likes to take unnecessary risks.’

  Bula nodded and sniffed and wiped his nose again. ‘You’re right there. About the gun, any road. Why don’t you show me? Then I might really be scared.’

  The woman took her right hand out of her waistcoat pocket and held up the small stainless-steel pistol that she had used to threaten Mânios Dumitrescu. Bula stared at it, and then laughed.

  ‘What the feck is that? A scuttering-gun? So long as you haven’t filled it with piss, that doesn’t scare me at all! I’m out of here! I don’t give a toss what you want to talk to me about!’

  The woman broke open the pistol and took out a black shotgun shell. ‘Look! It is a pocket shotgun. It is loaded with only one round, Bula, as you can see. But one round is enough to kill you, or to hurt you very bad.’

  She pushed the shell back into the chamber and clicked the gun shut. Bula said, defiantly, ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? That’s the most ridiculous gun I ever saw. Not that I ever saw one like that before.’

  ‘Well, I am not surprised by that. It is very new. It is called a Heizer. It is made so that you can carry it in your pocket and nobody knows you have it, unless they try to rob you or give you trouble.’

  ‘And that’s what you use to shoot Manny Dumb-arse?’

  The woman didn’t answer that, but continued to stare at Bula so intensely that he had to look away. Bula wasn’t easily scared. He had been brought up in the waterfront slums of Port Harcourt in Nigeria and he had always been bulky and loud and ready to punch the first person to upset him. It wasn’t the woman’s little pistol that disturbed him so much as the way she seemed to be looking straight into his soul. His grandmother had practised juju and he had seen how she could steal people’s spirits and make their lives unbearable, all without touching them, just by staring, the same way that this woman was staring at him.

  ‘You know a girl called Nwaha?’ the woman asked him.

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘In February, Nwaha was found drowned in the river.’

  ‘So what? They fish more people out of the river here in Cork than fish.’

  ‘You knew Nwaha?’

  ‘When was this? February? Jesus. I see new girls almost every day. How do you expect me to remember that far back?’

  ‘Nwaha was very beautiful. Nwaha had flowers tattooed on her hands and her wrists. Blue and red flowers. You would remember Nwaha if you had seen her.’

  Bula shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I remember her, maybe I don’t.’

  ‘If I say that I will shoot you between your legs if you try to pretend that you don’t remember her, will you remember her then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know that you remember her, Bula, but I want to hear you say it from your own lips. I want to hear you say, “Yes, I remember Nwaha, and yes, we made her become a prostitute, me and the man they call Mister Dessie, and Mister Dessie’s boss, Michael Gerrety.”’

  ‘Oh, no! Feck that! You won’t hear me saying that! Not in a lifetime! I might as well dig my own grave and lie down in it and bury myself!’

  ‘So you choose that I shoot you between your legs? Maybe that will help you remember?’

  She pointed the small grey pistol directly at the fly of Bula’s baggy cargo shorts. Bula couldn’t help letting out a short yelp of hysterical laughter, like a startled bull terrier, but then he lifted both hands in surrender.

  ‘No, come on, serious. You wouldn’t for real, would you?’

  The woman raised one of her finely plucked eyebrows. ‘Nobody can hear us in here. The furniture man, he
is away on holiday for five more days. I could shoot you and then leave you locked up here and nobody would hear you. What a terrible way to die that would be.’

  Bula said, ‘Fair play. You win. I admit it. I did know a girl named Nwaha. I wish I fecking hadn’t. We all wish we hadn’t, she was so much trouble. Mister Dessie said that he had to give her so much smack to keep her quiet that she cost him more than she ever made.’

  ‘She had the red and blue flowers tattooed on her hands and on her wrists?’

  Bula nodded. ‘That was the girl all right. The guards came around and showed us the photos from the mortuary and asked us if we knew who she was. Of course, we all swore blind that we’d never seen her before, and so they couldn’t prove nothing. But they were sniffing around our premises for days after and Michael Gerrety was throwing a rabbie about it.’

  He paused. He was becoming highly stressed, and it was very warm and stuffy in the workshop, so that his bald head was dripping with perspiration and he could hardly catch his breath.

  ‘You’re not recording this, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no need to,’ said the woman. ‘I am not going to report this to the guards.’

  ‘You’re not? Well, that’s one relief!’

  ‘No, Bula. I have no need to report this to anyone. I am the judge and I am the jury, and I am the executioner, too.’

  ‘Well, that’s what you think. But what I think is, you’ve had your five minutes, and I’ve had enough of this shite.’

  Bula leaned slightly to the left, and then feinted to the right, and then suddenly lurched forward and made a grab for the woman’s right arm. As he did so, however, one of his sandal buckles snagged in a rucked-up length of upholstery fabric that was lying on the floor and he stumbled.

  The woman fired and there was a deafening bang. The shotgun shell with its three defence discs and its twelve BB shots blasted into Bula’s bare knee from less than six inches away. His kneecap exploded and the scarlet flesh was ripped away from the top of his tibia and his fibula. Blood sprayed all over the hessian covering of the couch right behind him, and Bula pitched back on to it, too shocked at first even to scream.

  He seized the arm of the couch, trying to heave himself upright, and then he looked down and saw his knee and shouted, in a high, hysterical voice, ‘Look what you’ve done to me! Look what you’ve fecking done to me, you witch! You’ve blown my fecking leg off!’

  The woman opened up her pistol and pinched out the empty shotgun shell with her fingernails. She loaded it with another and snapped it shut. Only then did she look down at Bula’s ruined knee. His lower right leg had been almost completely severed, so that his right foot was pointing inwards, as if he were knock-kneed. Bright red blood was rapidly soaking the couch and dripping on to the floor, and amongst the tatters of muscle and dangling tendons his bones were glistening white.

  ‘You’ve blown my fecking leg off,’ he repeated, but very much quieter this time, almost reflectively.

  ‘I gave you enough warning,’ the woman told him. ‘And you did admit to killing Nwaha.’

  ‘What? It wasn’t me who pushed her into the fecking river! None of us did! She threw herself in! Now call me an ambulance before I bleed to death here!’

  ‘I know she threw herself in. There were witnesses. But why did she throw herself in? Tell me that.’

  Bula struggled to unbutton one of the pockets of his cargo shorts so that he could tug out his iPhone. As soon as he had done so, however, and punched his code into it, the woman stepped forward and snatched it out of his hand. She slung it across the workshop so that it clattered against the opposite wall and dropped out of sight behind the chairs.

  ‘I need an ambulance!’ Bula shouted at her. His face was already taking on the pallor of a death mask, modelled out of wax. ‘Look at this blood, it’s pouring out of me!’

  ‘I warned you. You cannot say that I did not warn you. But you did not believe that I would really shoot you, did you? I am not a liar like you and Mister Dessie and everybody else who works for Michael Gerrety. I am not a liar like Michael Gerrety himself.’

  ‘Please, look, I’m sorry! Whatever I’m supposed to have done, I’m sorry! Just call an ambulance for me. I can’t stop this bleeding, and it hurts, for the love of God! It hurts like all fecking hell!’

  ‘But you attacked me, Bula. I shot you only to defend myself. Nobody is going to blame me for shooting you.’

  ‘Who cares? Call for an ambulance. Please, please, will you call for an ambulance!’

  ‘What do you think Nwaha said when she was taken by three men at once? Do you think she said please? Three men, all at once! Did anybody take any notice of her saying please?’

  Bula said nothing. He was gripping his bloodied thigh in his right hand, just above his shattered knee. With his left hand he was trying to pinch his severed artery between finger and thumb, but it was too slippery for him to be able to keep it squeezed together.

  The woman watched him for a few seconds, and then she said, ‘Very well. I will stop you from bleeding to death. But only so that you do not escape your punishment.’

  ‘Oh Christ, do whatever,’ said Bula. His eyelids were flickering and his chest was rising and falling as if he were breathing his last. If his knee hadn’t been giving him such excruciating pain he might have lost consciousness. Dully he watched as the woman went over to the workbench and came back with a ball of fine sisal twine and scissors.

  She tucked her gun deep into her waistcoat pocket and then she knelt down and tightly tied up Bula’s artery. When she had finished her fingers were smothered bright red, but the blood had stopped squirting.

  ‘If you think I’m going to thank you for doing that, you’ve got yourself another thing coming,’ said Bula, as the woman went over to the sink and rinsed her hands.

  ‘I do not want your thanks,’ she said, using an offcut of raspberry-coloured velvet as a hand towel. ‘Soon you will be cursing me for saving your life. Soon you will be praying for me to kill you and put you out of your misery. Soon you will be wishing that it was you who had drowned in the river.’

  ‘I still need an ambulance. If a doctor doesn’t stitch this leg up soon, I’m going to lose it.’

  ‘First, you have to be punished for what you did to Nwaha, and all of the other girls you have hurt so much.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and losing my fecking leg isn’t punishment enough?’

  The woman looked away for a moment, absent-mindedly fingering the bones and the shells and the claws that made up her necklace. Then she turned back to Bula and said, ‘You talk about punishment? Nwaha died, and what had she done to deserve that? Not only that, she was not given the burial ceremony that she should have been, according to our beliefs. She was not dressed in cotton robes, and none of the traditional songs were sung. I do not know if she is lying with her head towards the west, as it should be for a woman. All I can say is that she was at least buried in black earth, and not red, and that is only because all of the earth in this country is black, like the hearts of the people who live here. She was not given a second burial, either, which means her spirit will come back to haunt us.’

  ‘I told you before,’ croaked Bula. ‘I didn’t push her in the river. None of us did. She jumped in, of her own accord.’ He took two or three more wheezing breaths and then he said, ‘You don’t have any fags on you, do you?’

  ‘Fags? Oh, you mean cigarettes. No. Smoking is so bad for your health.’

  ‘Would you believe it, I’m not particularly worried about dying of lung cancer right now. Come on, I’m gasping. I think there’s a nobber in my pocket if you can get it out for me.’

  The woman ignored him. ‘Now is the time for you to choose your punishment. I am giving you that much, which is more than you ever gave to Nwaha.’

  ‘Well, thanks for nothing.’

  ‘I can shoot you between your legs, like I said I would do before.’

  ‘Hey, what? You said that you wouldn’t do that if
I told you that I knew Nwaha.’

  ‘No, I did not say that. I said that I would, if you did not admit to me that you knew her. I never said that I would not, even if you did admit it.’

  Bula said, ‘You can’t do that to me. Look what you’ve done to my leg already. I’m going to be a cripple now, for the rest of my life. Now you’re going to make me into a gelding, too. What kind of a fecking sadist are you?’

  ‘I told you what I am. Judge, and jury, and executioner, too. Do you think I like doing this? I hate being in the same country as you, and those vermin you work for, let alone being close enough to smell you. But, like I said, you can pick your punishment.’

  ‘Nobody would have their balls shot off for choicer, would they?’ said Bula. ‘So what else is there?’ He winced, and squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment, and then he said, ‘God almighty, my leg hurts. Can’t you just call me an ambulance? I’m dying of the pain here.’

  ‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’

  ‘What difference does that make? Left-handed, if you must know.’

  ‘Then instead of me shooting you between the legs, you can choose to cut off your right hand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It is your choice, Bula. Which would you rather lose, your manhood or your hand?’

  Bula sat on the couch for a long time, breathing deeply and slowly in his effort to control the pain in his knee. The woman stood watching him, and he knew that she was serious and that she wasn’t going to let him go until she had punished him, one way or another. He had seen too many gang members being punished in Port Harcourt to think that she wanted only to frighten him. He had seen ears cut off, noses cut off, even a woman’s lips cut off, so that they had fallen into her lap like the red rubber ring from a pickle jar.

  ‘So, what is it to be?’ the woman asked him, at last. ‘You are lucky that I brought you here. In fact, that is the whole reason I brought you here, so that your punishment could be quick and easy for you.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Bula.