King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  That weekend the Little Fish brought his new mate Fred Carol in for a drink. I suggested to Carol that the Malts might be a bit unreliable and pointed to a number of shooting murders that could have been avoided if any sober person with half a brain had been involved. Carol said he would take Malts over Yids any day, because he knew where he stood with the Gozo boys. Jews were always conspiring, in his opinion. I said I could make more money for him and make less noise about it. He said he was not interested in any fucking jewbaggery.

  While all this garbage with the Malts was going on, I was trying to get married to Deborah, partly to please my own mother, who was very fond of her, and partly to get rid of hers, who had come to hate every hair on my head and considered me one step away from a goy because of my line of business. Ira, who had sophisticated tastes, helped me choose a ring from Alfie Diamond’s jewellery shop, and I presented it to Deborah over dinner at the Patton. She said she had always loved me and always would, and I promised to look after her for the rest of her life. However, I explained that, due to the nature of the entertainment industry, I would have to be away from home a lot – rehearsing with actresses, singers, choreographers, et cetera – and she said she was willing to do whatever was needed to make our marriage and our business a success.

  The next night the Malts broke into the Patton, blew the downstairs safe, stole the takings and tried to set the place on fire. I called in the armed robbery squad and had a word with their sergeant, Dynamite Danny Dawson, the fattest man I had ever seen. He used to sit on suspects and break their backs.

  Dawson had no love for Malts or Jews, but I gave him Darling – who was clean at the time – and a brown paper bag full of immoral earnings, and asked him to broker a truce with Carol and the Malts. All of us met – jacks, crims and imbeciles – to discuss terms at Vitto’s, which was a small place for a big man like Dynamite – he must have touched everyone there with some part of his body. I gave a speech about the long-standing friendship between Jews and Maltese, for which I relied heavily on historical fabrication, but pointed out that both people had their strengths and their weaknesses. The Malts had the muscle, we had the brains. If we combined, we would be unstoppable. Gozo Joe said something I didn’t understand, and Fred Carol said there was no reason for debate because he could force an agreement then and there. He suggested I might want to relocate my business interests to Palestine and leave the holy land of Darlinghurst to its traditional stewards, the Knights of Malta.

  I thought I had hired Dawson to be on my side, but he seemed to think I had paid him as an advisor. He pointed out the many business opportunities open to a man such as myself in North Africa, where he happened to have served during the war. This led to a happy discussion between him and the Little Fish about the whores of the Maghreb.

  In the course of these good-natured reminiscences, the Little Fish mentioned that the most accurate word to describe the prostitutes of the Orient might be ‘Maltese’. Gozo Joe, sensing insult, jumped up and slashed at the air in front of the Little Fish’s nose with a razor. The Little Fish grabbed Dawson’s piece out of its holster and shot Gozo Joe in the face.

  It cost me every penny of my savings to pay off the jacks, the Malts and Vitto, but it turned out to be money well spent. Gozo Joe retired. The armed robbery squad, the consorting squad and the liquor police all reached an arrangement with the Patton, by which nobody would have to explain what we were all doing in Vitto’s, how Dawson had lost his revolver, why Carol was consorting with Bass – who was supposed to have assaulted him – or how a criminal could get shot in the company of two senior police officers.

  In return for regular payments to three sergeants, I secured a number of variations on NSW licensing laws and a new source of security for the club. In essence I hired half the police force. It was the partial privatisation of an inert state-owned monopoly, whose functions were taken over by free enterprise on a user-pays basis. The jacks now had a stake in my success, and even my expansion.

  When Deborah and I got married, Dynamite Dawson took up two seats at the Great Synagogue. I don’t remember a lot about the day because I was still drunk from the night before. I don’t, as a rule, drink so much that I forget, but I was a club owner in his prime, holding his own bucks’ night on his own premises, and if I didn’t fuck the entire chorus line, it was only because I accidentally did a couple of the same girls twice.

  My bride and I stood under the chuppah and signed the ketubah, I drank sweet red wine and crushed the glass under my shoe, then we danced. My mother cried and my father attempted to insert his ring finger in one of the bridesmaids. Deborah and I spent that first night at our new home, an apartment I had purchased near Centennial Park, then embarked on a honeymoon cruise to the South Sea Islands. During our time on the ocean Deborah put forward two suggestions to help me run my business. She believed I should get rid of Sylvia, Goldie and Darling, and also Tina’s Talking Tits. She felt they were lowering the tone of an otherwise classy establishment. In their place, she imagined, we could stage jazz acts and – this was her genius – female impersonators.

  I told her I would look into it, and also tried to negotiate some rules for our married life that were not covered by the ketubah. Although I was prepared to spend every Friday night at home, I couldn’t make a similar commitment on Saturday, or Thursday, and I would generally be away on business on Wednesdays also. Deborah pointed out that the distance between Potts Point and Centennial Park was not so great that most people would choose to spend a night in a hotel rather than, for example, take a taxi home, but I explained that the owner of a club never sleeps, particularly the owner of a club that was now open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. She agreed, in principle, for the time being, but I could sense there would be trouble ahead.

  When our ship sailed back into Circular Quay, Deborah was already pregnant with my son. I gave him the name of Daniel Mendoza, because I thought he would have the heart of a lion, but he proved a source of great disappointment to me, as well as tremendous pride. You might think the fact that I had impregnated my bride on the first week of our honeymoon would have scotched forever any rumours that I was impotent but, paradoxically, questions about my cock-power continued to be asked by the same imbeciles who maliciously claim that I am the father of my own grandson.

  Business was good for a while. I had a baccarat game going in an upstairs room at the Patton, and that kept Deborah and Ira in furs but meant I had to add the racing and gaming squad to my payroll. I’m not boring you, am I, Anthony? You seem a little distracted.

  Personal problems, Mr Mendoza.

  Anything I can help you with? I am something of an expert in affairs of the cock.

  I don’t think so.

  Well, feel free to come to me for advice if you change your mind. In the meantime, if you will do me the courtesy of trying to look just the tiniest bit fucking interested, I will tell you a story you can take home to your bachelor flat and wank on until your balls shrivel, okay?

  It started like this: Fred Carol, who seemed to have partially conquered his aversion to Jews, asked if I could throw a smoko for some of his big jack mates. I think one bloke was leaving and another was turning forty. Apart from the jacks, the only guests he wanted were whores – of which there were now about a dozen working the Patton – and showgirls. I arranged for a hall behind the Palmerstone Hotel to be made available and a few of my men to go along as minders for the girls. The evening opened with the showing of a program of movies that I had picked up from a bondhouse in Suva during a quiet moment in my honeymoon. They had been supplied – and, I believe, manufactured – by Vicky Raisins, a Maltese pornographer who still operates off the Old Kent Road. I lent the cops Big Stan as the projectionist and sent him along with two movie cameras in case one of them broke down. The films featured kidnapped molls hanging from trees, if my memory serves me correctly.

  The jacks loved them, so Big Stan continued to project them on the screen while the live performers took t
o the stage. Sylvia and Goldie did a double act with a dildo, then asked if any officers had brought along the tools of their trade and completed an imaginative cabaret routine with truncheons, handcuffs and an unloaded shooter.

  Goldie then offered the jacks the chance to go where their truncheons had just been. It surprised me they were not bashful about performing in front of each other, but I suppose some of them were queers with a point to prove, and others hadn’t had a fuck since the night they came back from the war.

  To save time, Big Stan suggested they play two-up. Sylvia and Goldie each took one in the back and one in the front, until all jacks had had enough, at which point the showgirls came on and danced the cancan with no pants.

  Every jack in the room agreed it was the best smoko since Dynamite Dawson got shot in the arse with his own piece, and nobody noticed that both cameras had been running all afternoon. While one was projecting, the other was filming. I got footage of Fred Carol riding Sylvia’s haunches with a smile on his face and a horsewhip in his hand, while his deputy filled her throat with jack juice.

  I showed the movie to my senior staff at the Patton, and told them if they ever had trouble with any of these officers – should they happen to recognise them with their clothes on – they should come directly to me. Fred Carol heard a rumour that the film existed and came storming into the club demanding this and that and generally signalling a return to his previously held position on the treachery of the Jews, but I assured him there was no movie, a position I maintained until the day he tried to betray me.

  I became known as the man to see if you were organising a smoko, and I began to throw small parties of my own. I invited the cream of my club’s patrons – for the most part, luminaries from the worlds of politics, journalism, the law, entertainment and armed robbery. I carefully sounded them out first, to ascertain their tastes and preferences, then tried to match them with others of the same frame of mind. There was no use inviting a screaming fairy to a party with Tina’s Talking Tits – although everyone seemed to get something out of that show – or a trueblue pantsman to an evening with Donald and Dave, two waiters at the Patton who served up less than they swallowed.

  As time went by, I came to cater for niche markets. I held parties for men who liked black girls, Asian girls, young girls and fat girls. Not all the sex was commercial. Some of it was simply the result of like-minded people converging for the first time. I was a harbinger of the sexual revolution, Anthony. I brought the sixties to the fifties. I encouraged the leaders of our society to throw off the shackles of their inhibitions and find out who they really were through the medium of fucking the arse off strangers. And I always made sure somebody was there, behind a mirror, inside a wardrobe or peering through a hole in the wall, filming every moment of their journey of self-discovery.

  What is that screaming outside, Anthony? It sounds like a nigger’s raping a kitten.

  [Ends.]

  ELEVEN

  I had never shopped for myself. I had never cooked a meal. I didn’t know how to make an appointment with the doctor, and I was not sure how to pay the rent. I kept finding stuff Helen had left behind: a magazine, a lipstick, a packet of mints, and I felt that if I gathered up everything I could put it together and make a new Helen who wouldn’t leave.

  When my home phone rang I thought it must be her, but it was Spiegeleier.

  ‘Are you offering me my job back?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a woman who wants to meet you.’

  ‘How old is she?’ I asked.

  ‘How old?’ repeated Spiegeleier. ‘Late twenties. Why?’

  We met at La Fontaine. I sat down with a coffee, watching a Chinese tramp rinse his dreadlocks in the fountain, and Spiegeleier waddled up, arm in arm with an Irish elf with Guinness-black eyes.

  ‘So you’re Billy Cobbett,’ she said.

  I laughed.

  ‘One of many,’ I said. ‘We changed the writer every couple of years, for security reasons.’

  ‘I used to love that column,’ said Siobhan. ‘It was the only good thing in the Belfast Telegraph.’

  ‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘I had good sources.’

  I spun a salt cellar and tried not to stare at the rise of her breasts.

  ‘Siobhan’s a friend of a friend,’ said Spiegeleier. I had forgotten he was there. ‘She worked on the irish Times in Dublin.’

  ‘Did you know Mike Gore at the Telegraph?’ she asked. ‘I used to go out with him.’

  That meant she slept with journalists.

  ‘How is Mike?’ I asked.

  ‘Still fucking half the news desk,’ she said.

  Siobhan was on a working holiday – ‘more holiday than work,’ she said; I imagined orgies by a pool – and stringing for papers in London and Dublin. Spiegeleier asked what I was doing, and I asked what he was doing. I lied to him, and he told me he was finishing a story – ‘a nice story, Tony’ – about all the new Russian restaurants in the eastern suburbs.

  He seemed embarrassed to talk about his job in front of Siobhan. There was even more rubbing and tugging and panting and squelching than usual. He kept trying to change the subject from journalism to sport, or the weather, or Australia’s many venomous snakes, but all she wanted to know was if he had broken any big stories.

  ‘Tony’s your man for that,’ said Spiegeleier. ‘He was my organised-crime writer.’ Spiegeleier wrapped his fat arms around his belly and held his breath, as if he were trying to squeeze himself smaller. His bald head turned puce, and I had to jab him in the thigh to remind him to breathe. He expelled all the stored-up air in a shivering blast through his nostrils, whinnying like a carthorse.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to the office now,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you two to reminisce about life in the cold countries.’

  He shook my hand, kissed Siobhan on the cheek – a little bit further to the left and I would’ve chinned him – and bumbled off to attract abuse from homeless people.

  Siobhan looked at me the way I was looking at her, like there was something she really wanted and only I could give it to her.

  She said she was disillusioned, which was a pity for someone with such nice tits. She had become a reporter to give a voice to the voiceless but had ended up on the city desk, rewriting press releases from multinational corporations. She had hoped she might redeem herself in Australia by writing about the plight of Aboriginal people. So far the London papers hadn’t shown much interest in her social justice journalism, but they had flown up her up to Darwin when a boy was eaten by a crocodile, so at least she was getting to see the country.

  Mendoza and Lazarus sat down behind us, at their usual table. They saw me but didn’t show it. Mendoza often ignored me in the street, like a one-night stand the morning after, embarrassed by the intimacies of the night before.

  I would’ve liked to carry Siobhan to bed, and slip into the shower with her the next day, and take her out for breakfast to this cafe, and run my fingers lightly up her thighs. She fixed her eyes on mine, as if she were thinking the same.

  ‘Dan said you used to come to work looking like you hadn’t slept since Christmas,’ she said.

  I scratched the back of my neck.

  ‘He thought you might know where to get hold of some coke,’ she said.

  Oh.

  I told her I would see what I could do, and watched her leave with familiar disappointment. Mendoza was watching too, as he spoke on the phone. He finished the call as I approached his table.

  ‘Cute,’ said Mendoza, ‘but you let her go.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I thought your luck had changed,’ said Mendoza. ‘You haven’t had much going on since blondie left, eh?’

  I sat down.

  ‘How did you know about that?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw her go,’ he said. ‘She got into a cab with your television. Just there.’ He pointed.

  ‘You were watching my flat?’ I asked.

  ‘I was sitting here, h
aving a coffee,’ he said, ‘while you were getting shickered at the Hamilton.’

  Mendoza was distracted by the sight of a dwarf on a skateboard, circling the rim of the fountain.

  ‘I feel sorry for midgets these days,’ he said. ‘They used to have all kinds of opportunities: midget wrestling, Santa’s elves, strippers’ little helpers, dwarf bowling . . . These days, it’s all banned. You can’t even call them midgets any more. It’s as if they don’t exist. A lot of midgets tend to kill themselves. One day, I’ll tell you about the real Mr Big. That fella had a shlong like a baby’s arm, and arms like babies’ arms too. Women loved him. Up to a point.’

  The dwarf did a kickflip off the library steps, landed cleanly and cruised off.

  ‘What was it that the colleen wanted, Anthony,’ asked Mendoza, ‘that you weren’t man enough to give her?’

  ‘A gram of coke,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you help her out?’ he asked. ‘It’s the quickest way into her pants.’

  ‘I don’t know where to get it.’

  ‘Get it where you got it before.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Lazarus,’ said Mendoza, ‘call Dror. Anthony needs to anesthetise a woman before he operates.’

  As Mendoza cut into a slice of chocolate cake Lazarus folded away a Russian tabloid.

  ‘Lazarus has a new wife,’ said Mendoza. ‘She’s from St Petersburg. He bought her on the internet. It was the best fifty dollars – including postage and packing – he ever spent, wasn’t it, Lazarus?’

  Lazarus scowled.

  ‘And, as a special present, today he has bought her a newspaper.’

  Lazarus rang Dror and grunted and snarled.

  ‘How’s the book going, Anthony?’ asked Mendoza.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a classic.’