Fun City Punch (Joe Dylan Crime Noir, #5)

by James Newman

  HUMAN TWO: Indeed. Let's lower their cheese rations some more and raise the living cost again. Keep the buggers hungry, shameful and uneducated.

  HUMAN ONE: Here, here.

  HUMAN THREE: Here, here.

  Glasses clink.

  HUMAN ONE: Why don't we start a few more wars to kill off the young ones while we're at it? Throw in some security contracts; maybe take some territory. Fucking the rats is too easy, doesn’t get my blood up like it used to. We need a new angle.

  HUMAN THREE: How’s the Middle East looking?

  HUMAN ONE: It’s looking ready for another war.

  HUMAN THREE: Excellent. You arrange the civilian hits and I’ll finger fuck the media.

  HUMAN TWO: Beautiful. I love it when a plan comes together.

  And so it goes. Some of the audience leaves the theater with wither fatigue, disgust or boredom. Others sit staring open mouthed as the spectacle moves dramatically towards the showdown between rat and man.

  The Finnish netball team left the building as the rats were slaughtered.

  I made it over to the stage area as they were packing up. A youth with a ratty ponytail barked commands the floor crew. I walked over to him. “Nice show.”

  He looked me up and down trying to weigh up my credits. “You understood it?”

  “Well...”

  “I’m not sure I do,” he said. “It plays across the world, soon, us here, won’t have much concept of money anyway.”

  “But we have to watch whose credits we pick up.”

  He stared straight at me, “Are you recording?”

  “No, but I do freelance, I’ll be honest, I’m trying to find out about this kid, Kurt,” I watched the ponytail’s eyes flicker. “French, ex-pop star. Came to watch the shows. His family have retained me to find out what happened to him. I think I need to find out how to get down to The Resistance. I think you might be able to help me get there.”

  “I know who you talk of and he was never the part of any Push.”

  “Before he died they saw him staring down into the sewers. You and I both know what that means. He was part of The Resistance. He was thrown out. Thrown out because he had a metallic implant that may or may not have a tracking device installed. The implant I have in my head and the same implant you will have in your head if you don’t help me out here. It was too big a risk for The Resistance to take, but this time it is different. You feel guilty now, guilty and scared. Every time you come above ground, there’s the risk of being spidered, and when it happens, they won’t let you back down, with no or little credits they will take you to The Punch. Am I right?”

  “I can’t help you,” he said and walked away.

  But he had helped me.

  I had the conversation on the Whisper2000 clip.

  I knew he was part of The Resistance.

  Kurt hadn’t killed himself.

  Fun City had killed him.

  THIRTY

  FRANKIE THE RAT stared into Trixie’s eyes. “Now, I want you to show me how you paint. Take off your clothes and pick up the brush. Let your body be the brush, let your mind be the hand, let the city be the paint. Be one with your art. You will do whatever I say,” and here’s the best part, “whenever I say it.”

  Trixie walked towards the Tangerine painting, lifted it slightly from its place and replaced it for a new empty canvas. She took a brush and pallet and began to mix the colors. She removed her UP TO U T-shirt and unclipped the purple bra underneath it. She stepped out of her shorts. The Rat sat down on the sofa and watched with intense concentration as she began sketching shapes on the canvas.

  Trixie, hardly aware of the man in her apartment continued to paint spiraling patterns in deep blues and purples as the Rat walked towards the window and took in the view of the harbor and of the pier. “I kinda like it here,” he said. “I’ve always wanted a sea view away from The Eyes of the city,” he paced the room once and then sat back down on the sofa. “Now tell me, where is The Resistance tunnel?”

  She pointed at her painting. She was creating a map for him. He had to find a way of keeping her under his spell. Perhaps the scopolamine could work for days, weeks, even. He wasn’t sure. He had only tried the smash and grab approach before, but this woman was worth keeping. He thought of all the things he could do, the primal, lizard part of his brain reeling in lust. As she awoke from the first wave, he decided to keep her docile and malleable like the doped up tiger, Tim, at the tiger zoo.

  Perhaps he needed her with more life in her. Maybe she was good for a struggle. The possibilities were endless.

  She was so weak, so hopeless, yet so artistic and the rat intended to keep her that way.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE SUN set and I had nowhere to go but out.

  Through the Tunnel and out onto Happy Street.

  Stumble and you shall fall.

  Fell into the thick of it all, the main drag of Happy Street. I had a hunch that Kurt didn’t dig the scene, that he was looking for art in the most unlikely of places and then I thought that perhaps all art was found where it shouldn’t be discovered and that the true artists were the con artists on the street selling their old concepts to the lowest bidder.

  Hardened by the street, Trixie, Kelly, the bushy haired man in the night, they’d all let me down, and oh my god, Kelly was approaching me now in all that white hot pant glory.

  She came up close enough that I could smell her perfume and the dull scent of tequila; she grabbed my forearm playfully and smiled with her eyes. Portholes to truth, a mirror to the soul, a place of entry... Eyes reflect mistruths to the most seasoned actress such as Kelly. “Eyes do not lie,” I once told her.

  “Mine do,” she replied.

  “I have a message, from a friend,” she whispered, spun around like a ballerina on ice and handed me a piece of folded yellow legal lined paper.

  “Yeah, well tell her, I’m not interested.” Looked at her directly, the implant negative now. Yet a new fear gripped me, not a fear born of the brain, more a visceral trepidation, and tremors kept me from looking straight into her eyes. A cat sprung from one balcony landing on the next. Grey in color the animal continued its quest leaping from balconies and tight roping along railings before disappearing through a dusty window.

  “Not her, HIM,” Kelly said. “A man wants to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “The man-with-no-hands.”

  Nicknames based on physical appearances were common in Fun City. I had known a guy called Frog, a woman named Black Dog, and a child named Shrimp.

  “Here...” She handed me a piece of paper.

  “Thanks, baby, there’s something about you.” She was a cliché, she approached slowly at first like an ice skater testing the ice, and once you reached that perilous crust, you hoped it would break, for then you had the challenge of staying alive.

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said playfully slapping my cheek.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is too dangerous,” she said. “Far too dangerous.”

  “What’s dangerous?”

  “Just everything,” Kelly put a finger to my lips to silence me and disappeared into the night as suddenly as she had emerged, slipping into the neon like a cat, agile, aware, and predatory; watched her move through a maze of Koreans and glide behind the red-curtained entrance to the Sydney Bar. Remembered the night we had spent together, years ago, her intense lovemaking, her body firm and strong yet somehow delicate, the way she dressed in the morning. The maze of magical tattoos across her back and the universe in her hair had taken a part of me. A part I’d never gotten back. Perhaps Trixie was a version of her, perhaps they all were. Perhaps all women were the same. Perhaps we simply projected expectant personalities onto those we found visually attractive. Perhaps she was as cold and as calculating as the rest of them.

  The street returned to its normal decadent self. Kelly would strike a conversation with a stranger and drink tequila. Her ability to party astonished men o
f twice her size, somewhere inside her mischievous mind lay a switch that once pressed would cause her to remain happy and joyful until something or someone pulled the switch the other way and she would descend into spells of rage and anger. I marveled at the woman’s ability to skate between emotions while most men simply exhibited the same dreadful malaise day in and day out, only the most extraordinary circumstance roused them to reconsider their lives. Circumstances like death, disease, social digression they could handle. Waking up in a bathtub full of ice minus a kidney may cause them to step outside of their stupid artless lives and live for the present moment. Perhaps it was a matter of reaching rock bottom. Kelly had reached it. We had reached it together.

  Walked through a crowd of bikinied Gamers.

  Looked left.

  Looked right.

  Decided to go by myself.

  A sign above a hotel:

  THE PENNY BLACK HOTEL

  Mr. Dylan,

  Have you ever lost something precious?

  I have and I hope you can help me find it.

  Please visit me in room 207 tomorrow evening.

  The least you can do since I paid for your brief hospital visit.

  M.

  How did the writer write the note?

  With a pen between his teeth?

  Did he even have teeth?

  How did he know Kelly?

  The writing looked like it had been written by a child’s hand.

  The man-with-no-hands, real name Jack Stern, was a phantom who navigated the Red Night Zone dressed in black shirt and trousers. I had seen him thrice. Once in the cigar bar where minor celebrities hung out and drank wine, breathed in cigar smoke and then with heads tilted back like stretching terrapins, blew the blue smoke toward the ceiling while the rock and roll band played Hendrix, Doors, and Steely Dan. The first time, the man-with-no-hands had been with two hostesses. One blonde with hair like Marilyn Monroe raised his wine glass while another dark haired with fingernails painted purple handled the cigar. Although the man was a dollar millionaire this act of extravagance and vice was not due to some kind of warped servitude, for the man-with-no-hands had lost both his hands in an industrial accident – the details were as hazy as the case. He needed constant attention.

  Why would a crippled millionaire choose to live in the sleaziest hotel in the world's m sleaziest city, and why, oh why would a crippled millionaire require the services of a burned out private dick in the city of sins? And why wouldn’t he buy himself a new pair of hands?

  Took the key from reception and rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. An old pool table, legs removed, blocked the corridor. Things like that happened in Fun City, objects and people appeared and then disappeared and nobody seemed to care where they came from or where they went. This was all part of the pantomime, a show without direction and with a cast that came and went as the years trickled by. This was how I had existed, finding lost things and putting in place support systems so that information or bodies wouldn’t be lost again. My training as an insurance fraud investigator, another lifetime ago in the Western Lands, such training is useless here.

  Outside the corridor, into the street, a woman gathering cigarette butts from the concrete, sucking them up into her mouth and lighting them up with a snarl of determination. Under a different set of circumstances, she might have been a ballerina, an airline hostess, or at least a girl in a bar. Time had worn her face away like Fun City acid rain wore away the brightness of streets signs and shop facades with that cruel, slow, steady, destructive determination that time and cigarettes couldn’t beat. She was as addicted as the rest of them were, smoking dog-ends in the street, pencil thin body in a dirty pink dress. I guessed she’d been in that dress for a while, and it weren’t the first time she had picked up poisoned dirt from the street and smoked it up. This was the allure and the reality of Fun City. Some came here and found gold and a house on the hills and a Mercedes Benz in the drive. The dream was out there and the dream fluttered by in all sorts of disguises for those willing enough to take the chance and chase the rainbow. With the right lies and the right thighs, the dream could be realized by some diligent malingering soul while others like this wretched beast were left with nothing left in life but to dig through the dirt, and smoke the city’s trash through tired and hungry lungs. Her wrinkled bitter eyes, thin painted eyebrows, her street addiction to nicotine as pathetic as the millionaire’s addiction to Honduran cigars and the latest sports cars. Yes. This was the problem with the lower classes of Fun City – they knew their place and stuck to it like the roaches gradually gathering in a short time motel. There were no aspirations for the poor to become actors, models, sports stars, or anything, as these were positions allowed only for the rich to entertain and enjoy. Forget it. She was beaten and there was no way up, only down. She knew it and the world knew it too. Down into the gutter where the dog ends festered, she must dwell with the shame she was unable to shed as a snake does its skin. She turned around and saw me looking at her through the window and perhaps a little too quickly reading my thoughts she pointed a bony finger at me and the movements of her lips spelled these three simple words.

  “You. No. Good.”

  Boy, I knew it. I fucking knew it well.

  But did she have to say it?

  I lay back on the bed and listened to the gentle hum of the air-conditioning flowing through the Penny Black room. When listening carefully enough to an air-conditioning unit, it can sound like a symphony orchestra, the rise and fall of the rattling components like strings and horns carefully arranged by a man with more time than money. Rattling from hotel room to hotel room, picking up cases here and there, two changes of underwear and a cassette Morphology recording was all I had. And I’d had it in room 303 as I lay on the bed and stared at a framed picture, a print of an old English village scene. A thatched cottage with fields and clouds in the background. It could have been a Constable but I couldn’t be sure. The music from the bars outside rose into a compost of noise as sound systems battled against sound systems I closed my eyes and fell into that unmistakable void. Inside the implant began to make a sound, a dull hum like the sound of a flying insect flapping its wings in the dark oily nigh. I opened my eyes and reached for Ajarn’s translation of the ancient text. The words and the pictures blurred into one as my eyes closed and sleep took over.

  Two centipedes grappled on the dusty grounds of a stone temple somewhere far away in the mountains where the man-with-no-hands watched on as if he had an interest, perhaps financial, in the victor. Two women both naked from the waist up, stood and admired each other’s beauty making remarks and gestures here and there as they watched the centipedes in combat. Dark skinned large of breast, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, animal skins wrapped around their waists, the women pouted and displayed similar composures. The man-with-no-hands smiled like a barracuda. One of the women pointed her forefinger at her head and spun her finger in slow deliberate circles, the universal gesture of madness. Implanted madness perhaps? Whatever it was, it flickered between dream chapters leaving the dreamer wondering during snatches of slight return. Semi-wakefulness if the device, the implant, was operated by remote control. Or perhaps the sex and violence dreams were a way of venting out the tensions caused by the implant. Perhaps the device only worked on the conscious mind; fell back into it and as if to prove the point the dream switched sets on the old family home. Father had just packed a bag and left. Nine years old, yet I sensed that adult feeling of foreboding as my mother came out of the bedroom, where she spent every day sleeping through a dark depression. She sat down next to me and placed a clammy hand on my shoulder. Stopped playing with the Lego bricks and looked into her glassy eyes. Last night’s make-up smudged eyeliner and cracked foundation. “It’s just you and me now, Joe. Father’s left.”

  I awoke in a sweat frozen with the reality of it all.

  Dream replicates reality exact in such moments. Perhaps dreams are controlled, manipulated, prerecorded, whe
n a dream stops becoming a dream, we wonder for what reason did that dream stop. Was the manipulator of the dream narrative privy to my, our, history?

  Where were my mother and father now?

  Shower.

  Shave.

  Several chapters of remorse and the old man’s book,

  The man-with-no-hands awaited such questions.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “WE LIVE in a decadent age, Mr. Dylan,” the man-with-no-hands smiled like a shark might, if the shark had been waiting in the shallows, for a paddling infant. I looked at the man. His face was like a car crash. You couldn’t take your eyes away from it. His mouth simply a mess of blackened tombstones left to decay in an abandoned churchyard, a testament to what might have remained of his mind. Well, he could hardly brush them (the teeth, I mean). His large paunch hung over his thighs covering his upper legs, a disfigured beast, an injured animal that had learned much by its suffering; knowledge that sat darkly in the recess of his mind, the man-with-no-hands was at once the most wonderful and most disgusting man to have ever sat before me. His eyes did not focus on me, nor the child who sat to the other side of the room playing Bach’s D minor on an electric keyboard. His eyes panned across the Penny Black room, the television, the print painting of the Hay Wain. The child aged ten or eleven, played with both hands steady and looked directly at me our gaze fixing for an uncomfortable period before she smiled and returned her gaze to the keys. Recognized her from somewhere, one of the street shoeshine kids, perhaps, the image of a child who had been robbed of a childhood, forced to make adult decisions while most children listened to teachers, played games, laughed, ate TV dinners, safe and secure in their own sanitized bubbles yet ready to explode into limitlessly hopeful youth. These thoughts were, as all thoughts are, raindrops, mainly for the birds.

  The child had the piano and the child had her hands.

  And the man-with-no-hands had the child.

  He continued: “The age is decadent, yes it is. An age where one feels the greatest love with a stranger is a danger to the control apparatus. That first bloom of passion one feels before one knows their name, their age? Do you understand? I mean who wants to lay familiar? I for one do not want to lay a familiar person. It would be like sexual intercourse with my mother, don’t you think?”