Late one evening he was out in Dublin, searching for a victim, when he saw a woman walking alone along Dawson Street, near the Mystery Inc bookstore. Now come on, was that an omen right there or what? She had acid blond hair, a full figure, kind of reminded him of a few hookers he’d offed. But she was classier than a hooker; you could see that from across the street. A woman like her, some guy would pay a fortune to get back.
The pick-up was usually the tricky part. If you’re going to stuff a girl in a car, you had to move fast before she screamed her arse off. Or if you were going to lure her, you had to be clever, pour on the charm. But this woman turned the tables-she came up to him. Rushed up, more like it. Slide was baffled. This had never happened before. All his victims in the past had sensed the danger, the looming moment of truth. But this woman was fearless. Even ol’ Ted Bundy would have been confused.
She sized him up, smiled, went, “Hey, I’m Angela, wanna buy me a drink?”
The rest, as they say, was history.
Three
At four in the morning, nobody’s right.
Angela Petrakos had arrived in Ireland with big dreams, an engagement ring, and ten grand in cash. She also had a gold pin of two hands almost touching. The pin was her lucky charm, or at least it was supposed to be. She wore it everywhere she went, figuring the luck part would have to kick in eventually.
Her first day in Dublin she sold the engagement ring to a pawnshop and blew the proceeds in about a month. Then it was time to piss away the rest of her money. The ten thousand dollars had been Max’s “emergency fund,” a wad he’d kept hidden, with a roll of duct tape, in a shoebox in his bedroom closet since 9/11. Angela used to go to him, “What’s some money gonna do if they, like, drop the bomb?” and Max would come back with, “Who knows? I might have to bribe somebody to drive me out of the city or something.” Like he thought he’d simply drive through a nuclear wasteland. Had anything that bollix said ever made any sense? Had she really agreed to marry him? What the hell had she been thinking?
At first she stayed in the Clarence Hotel on the Quays in Dublin, and jeez, did that Liffey stink or what? The hotel was owned by U2, but had she seen Bono, or the Edge, or even a fucking roadie? Had she fuck.
When she’d arrived her money had seemed like plenty to get started with but hey, no one told her about this strong Euro. When she’d changed her Franklins, she couldn’t believe how it translated, almost cut her nest egg in half. And cash wasn’t her only problem. She’d been born in Ireland but raised in the States. In America, her accent was always recognized as Irish and a definite plus. Here they heard her as a Yank and kept busting her chops about Iraq. Like she sent the troops in. She didn’t even know where the shithole was.
One day she returned to her room and discovered her key card was no longer working. Beautiful, right? Bono was canceling world debt but not, it seemed, hotel bills. Leaving the hotel, down in the zero, she fingered the pin in her lapel. It was like a prayer she almost believed.
She needed more Euro and she wasn’t about to go looking for a job. After a string of bad jobs in America she’d had it with working. Besides, the demand for office assistants who typed twenty words a minute wasn’t exactly staggering. A man had always been her first step to money, to getting on track. Get a guy, get centered was her motto. The fact that men had fucked her over each and every time had slipped her mind.
She walked along Ormond Quay, passed the very fashionable Morrison Hotel. Unfortunately she didn’t have enough to buy a goddamn coffee in there. She continued, her hopes sinking as she watched the area take an Irish dive. Then she hit the fleabags, where the “non-nationals” were housed, and found the River Inn. It reminded her of some of the shitholes she’d seen on the Bowery and the Lower East Side.
The guy behind the desk snarled, “Money up front, no visitors in the rooms and…” The motherfooker gave her the look, sneered, added, “No clients in the rooms unless you want to pay extra.”
She was mortified, like the scumbag was calling her a hooker.
She roared, “You’ll get yours, you bastard.”
He would, but not in any way Angela could possibly have foreseen.
Angela’s room was shite, simple as that. When she turned on the light, the roaches scattered, as if they didn’t want to be there either. Cum stains on the bedspread-God only knew what the sheets looked like-crusted snot on the pillow cases, dirty towels thrown on the floor, and a turd floating in the toilet. Jaysus, good thing she wasn’t planning to spend very long-maybe, if her prayers were answered, not even a single night. Dressed to kill, in fuck-me heels, the micro skirt and the sheer black hose, she set out to score.
She went to Davy Byrnes on Duke Street. Her Lonely Planet guide-and fuck they got that right, she was as lonely as a banshee without a wail-said it was the watering hole for the yuppies, the moneyed young whizzers. Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” had unspooled in her head when she read that.
Well, the place had men all right-older men. Okay, she could do old, long as they had the moolah.
Guy in his fifties hit on her right away, said he was an accountant. His name was Michael. He was bald. He was barely five feet tall. But, most importantly, he owned lots of stock and property-including a place in the South of France-and, the clincher, he drove a Merc. Want to find a good man, find out what kind of car they drive. Michael gave her some shite about James Joyce drinking at Davy Byrnes. She thought, God, is that his line? She thought she’d heard them all, but a guy trying to win her over with Joyce was a brand new experience. Over the next year, she’d be hard pressed to enter a pub that Joyce hadn’t rested his elbow on. She’d sometimes wonder, when did he get the time to write all them impossible-to-read books? If he was drinking that much, no wonder the writing was so incomprehensible. And another thing, everyone in Ireland bored the ass offa her about him but no one had seemed to have actually read him. They’d seen the Angelica Huston movie and that was the whole of their Joyce expertise. Go figure.
She moved in with Michael pronto at his flat in Foxrock. No zip codes in Ireland, probably because the wild bastards couldn’t count. They uttered some neighborhoods in hushed tones, with the appendage Dublin 4, and that was enough.
Foxrock was most definitely Dublin 4 and Michael was lovely, as the Irish say, for a while. He took her out for nice posh meals, bought her silk lingerie from Ann Summers, Dublin’s version of Victoria’s Secret. Course, being a man, he bought stuff he liked that no woman would ever wear. She brought it all back, got the cash, building towards a nest egg. Good thing. Like so many times before, with so many other guys, he turned. Once they’d screwed you, once you were, as Irish men so delicately put it, well shagged, they lost interest. Michael’s personality turned too. Where was the accountant who’d seemed like an Irish version of Jason Alexander? All the weak bollix had ever hit was the books and now, now he was walloping her! The silver-tongued devil.
One night, after watching What’s Love Got To Do With It? and listening to Nancy Sinatra, Angela felt empowered and took off. Went right to an ATM and withdrew as much of Michael’s cash as she could. Angela’s rule: before you let a guy ride you, you get his account details. In his case, it was easy. The code for his ATM was JOYCE. She couldn’t make this shit up.
It was back to the River Inn and the sneer of the gobshite at the desk. So began a year of hell, the search for Mr. Right. There were ups and downs-mostly downs. Men supported her for a while, seemed to truly like her, but there was always a flip side. Married men told her they were single just to get laid, underage guys told her they were eighteen. One night, she was date-raped by a lawyer. Angela managed to get to the bathroom, grab a can of Lysol, and spray it into the cunt’s eyes, but she was starting to see a disturbing pattern here. She was a magnet for trouble. She was seriously thinking about packing it in, going to play for the other team. She wasn’t attracted to women, but she wasn’t attracted to a lot of the guys she was sleeping with either. Besides, it seemed like every guy she got involved with wound up hurting her. And it wasn’t just emotional pain. No, these men were leaving visible scars.