by Mark Dapin
‘You’ll have to show me some pages soon,’ he said.
Dror came out of a Thai restaurant on the other side of the road. He looked as crisp and cold as a winter’s morning and wore a black skivvy that fitted his body like a sock, but when he smiled and spoke he was a country boy again.
‘G’day, Tony,’ he said, and passed me a menu. Inside was a clear plastic envelope the size of a tea bag, half filled with white powder.
Dror said he’d been interstate, checking up on certain individuals and organisations.
‘And how is my security?’ asked Mendoza.
‘Secure,’ Dror assured him.
‘No threats from the Italians?’
‘Not for twenty-five years,’ said Dror.
I thanked Dror and went to the library, where the coke nestled unhappily in my pocket, like a pistol asking to be fired. I knew I could skim a line off the top without Siobhan noticing, but if I started it I would probably finish it, then there would have been no point in having got it in the first place. At a quiet table near the reference shelves, away from the skippers and bumpers, I searched bound newspapers and magazines for stories about the Patton Club. On yellowed paper pressed between leather covers I found the memories of a lost nightlife, when men wore hand-painted ties and women nestled in furs, and every spine and smile was stiffened for the camera. I could almost hear the piano and smell the smoke of corona cigars.
By the time I had finished at the library it was dark and I was hungry. I ended up at McDonald’s on Darlinghurst Road, sitting by the window looking out on the Ink tattoo studio, where Rabbit and Devil were talking to a man who stood as tall as traffic lights, a storybook giant with knee-length boots, a leather jerkin and a white beard that hung from his chin like a plastic bag.
I picked the gherkin off my burger and stuck it to the window, where it looked like a patch on the giant’s jacket, or a big green target.
Everybody who passed the Cannibals glanced up at the giant then looked away.
Siobhan called to see if I had scored. I suggested we could meet in a bar, but she said McDonald’s would be fine. I bought myself a Coke that tasted like detergent. The shirtless shouter I had followed up the road a few weeks before was making his demented way past the bikers, who didn’t look up when he yelled at them. But instead of turning off at the alley, he took a kick at Rabbit’s chopper, sending the shotgun flying into the road. The bike went down, Siobhan walked into the McDonald’s, and the Ink tattoo studio exploded, as two men dressed in black jumpsuits and ski masks blasted out the windows from the inside and walked calmly onto Darlinghurst Road, shooting bikers.
Siobhan stood in the doorway. I thought she was in shock so I tried to pull her down, but she just stared at the shooters. I managed to drag her behind a pillar, but that was as far as she would move. The gunmen levelled their M4 Carbines at Devil, who was trying to point a pistol, and Rabbit, who was scrambling for his saddlebags, and blew their insides out. Two metres is a horrible range to take a bullet, although I don’t suppose there’s any nice range.
Caught without a weapon, Giant tried to throw a haymaker at a gunman. It was one of the bravest, strangest acts of violence I have ever seen. It was as if he hoped he could swat away the bullets. The gunman shot him in the throat and left a hole as wide as a drainpipe.
‘They dropped the door guard first,’ said Siobhan, ‘then the ugly one, then the big one. Their blood splattered over their own bikes. The ugly one reached for something and they blew off his hand. There are body parts in the street, as if there has been a bomb. People are screaming – the kind of people you wouldn’t expect to scream: nightclub bouncers and hard-faced streetwalkers. Everybody is throwing themselves to the ground, as if the ground is a neutral area that bullets can’t reach. Cars are screeching around and heading off against the traffic.’
I realised she was talking into a voice recorder.
My heart was thumping like old-school jungle. I was scared and thrilled, and alive in the moment. I wanted to throw myself in, to choose a side and take a weapon, and stand in the street blasting away at the enemy.
The gunmen were resting on the pavement with the confidence of killers, enjoying all the shouting, waiting for their pick-up, when the back doors of a white transit van burst open and half-a-dozen Cannibals leaped out, yelling and waving their weapons, angry and panicked, running into and away from the gunmen, pointing their four-tens at each other, at the street and at the sky.
The gunmen were onto them, rising without cover, laughing at the amateurs.
‘The men in black are reloading their . . .’
‘. . . M4 Carbines,’ I said.
‘The bikers have cheaper, simpler looking . . .’
‘Shotties,’ I said. ‘Legal weapons. Farmers’ guns.’
The Cannibals had the numbers but no tactics. A gunman stepped contemptuously close to a fat biker, who was struggling to drop another cartridge into his weapon, and just blew his arm off. The side of the van looked like a butcher’s shop that had been hit by a storm.
‘All these pieces of meat,’ I said, under my breath. ‘This is how people are made.’
‘What? What’s that?’ asked Siobhan. ‘What did you say?’
‘The door guard was called Devil,’ I told her. ‘The ugly one was Rabbit. I didn’t see the giant’s patch.’
I was bouncing from toe to toe, breaking cover and taking cover, bobbing around the pillar like a buoy in the ocean. I was trying to pick the direction the gunmen’s back-up would arrive from, when I saw they were already there. The shirtless shouter had picked up and hot-wired a chopper. A blind busker, who I had noticed earlier but never seen before, was kicking another of the bikes into gear. It was impossible to make out either of their faces because their cheeks were smeared with street dirt. Men who had looked filthy and starving now seemed camouflaged and stripped of fat.
‘I think there are only three dead,’ said Siobhan to her machine. ‘Most of the bodies are still moving.’
The gunmen jumped on the back of bikes ridden by the beggars. As the first chopper revved past the transit van, the pillion passenger put a bullet through the driver’s-side window.
‘This is brilliant,’ I said.
Everybody started screaming, except for a few spruikers crying or laughing, and one man doing both at once. The police, who only had to travel two hundred metres, took five minutes to arrive. All that was left were shattered bikes and bikers, and the smell of spilled petrol and spent ammunition.
‘Are you going to file?’ Siobhan asked me urgently.
‘File what?’ I asked.
‘Copy. You know, a story.’
‘I don’t work for anybody,’ I said.
‘Well, help me then. Quickly. What else do you know?’
‘The bikers’ve been expecting a battle,’ I said. ‘You can imagine them training at their clubhouse, running through the bush with their shotguns, a bunch of fat, panting grease-monkeys playing at commandoes in the long grass. Fuck.’ I shook my head. ‘They didn’t know what hit them . . .
‘The other team could’ve come in the back way,’ I said, ‘but I doubt it. I’d guess they abseiled through the skylight. The building’s got an odd structure. What looks like the top floor is just a facade. The rooms behind it used to be a brothel, but they got burned out in the seventies. Mendoza wanted to turn the place into units, but the unions put a green ban on the deco frontage, so he trousered the insurance money and used it to buy a place on Victoria Street.’
‘Do we think the killers were a rival biker gang?’ Siobhan asked.
‘We haven’t got a fucking clue,’ I said.
TWELVE
Siobhan sang ‘The Croppy Boy’ as she cooked eggs on the stove top in the kitchen of her one-bedroom flat. I looked around at her bare traveller’s walls. She brought breakfast into bed and snuggled next to me, wearing my shirt.
I felt lucky and horny and trapped. Siobhan looked even prettier without make-up. I wanted to gr
ab her, but I also wanted to go home.
‘Do you do this a lot?’ she asked.
I told her this was the first time. Siobhan quizzed me about Helen, what she looked like, what she tasted like, what she smelled like. I said Baby Spice, white wine and heather.
‘Now answer those questions about me,’ she said.
‘Kate Moss, honey-butter and me,’ I said.
She asked what kind of girls I usually went for. I told her it was pretty much a buyers’ market.
We talked about the shooting. Siobhan had seen the bodies of murder victims in Dublin, but she had never watched anybody die. I said I had seen too many corpses in Belfast. She asked if I had covered any other wars, and I told her I had been in Kosovo. I kissed her eyes.
She wanted to talk about what it was like to be Billy Cobbett and write the gore ‘n’ gossip column the paramilitaries had to read to find out what they’d been doing. I said the hardest part was having to spend so much time with people you hated, egg-white toe cutters with pig-pink eyes. They all hid behind Cobbett’s anonymity to spread lies about their victims and try to get their rivals killed.
Siobhan had just come out of a year-long relationship with a political correspondent who was working for a PR firm while he tried to write his novel. He was a nice guy, but he didn’t know what he wanted. He kept photographs of his ex-girlfriend under his bed. Before that, she had lived with Mike Gore, who used to keep his real-life ex-girlfriends under his bed.
She asked how I’d come to be on the Belfast Telegraph. I said I’d been following a woman, but she had shaken me off. Siobhan ran a finger over the tattoo on my biceps – two hands clasped above the words Slick, Jedi and mates. It looked to her like a Claddagh ring. The lines had thickened and the colours faded over ten years. I told her I was planning to have it lasered off.
The Irish Times rang to say they had used her copy, but they needed a local angle. Were any Irish backpackers injured? Were any of the bikers Irish? We decided to walk to the Cross and see what we could pick up. I fought Siobhan for my shirt. She rented a unit in a shabby Art Deco building near Taylor Square. Most of the other tenants were gay men, which meant she always felt safe. The lift was broken, so we walked out through the fire escape. She told me Mike Gore knew Spiegeleier in the 1970s, when Gore was a junior reporter and Spiegeleier was working in London. Gore had a lot of respect for Spiegeleier as a journalist and couldn’t understand how he’d ended up on the Jewish Times.
Siobhan didn’t know much about Jews. She’d never had a religious experience – ‘Catholics don’t, generally,’ she said – but she felt it would be like an orgasm, only darker.
I liked talking to her. She was clever and funny, and I was glad I had stayed. By the time we reached the Coke sign, we were holding hands.
The strip was closed from Bayswater Road to Llankelly Place, but the pavement on the west side was open and crowded with photographers, pushing against the police barriers and shouting questions. I asked a young guy which paper he was from. He answered me in Italian, another boy shouted in French: the crime scene was an outing for the backpackers’ hostels. Siobhan found a gap-year couple from Dundalk and interviewed them, while suntanned Swedes took pictures of the forensic team at work, and Japanese office girls posed by the bloodstains. A man with a handlebar moustache rattled up in a mobile hotdog stand, and the morning felt like a street party, until the Cannibals arrived.
They came up from the railway-station escalators, wearing their colours like soft, battered armour. The first dozen or so men were from the Sydney chapter, but they were followed by Cannibals patched in Brisbane, Melbourne and Bathurst. The highways must have been crowded last night.
The Cannibals fanned out to the north and south, made two walls of black leather and marched at the tourists, who had nowhere to move but backwards. Siobhan and I were caught in the sudden retreat. She lost her footing and tripped into my arms.
I tried to turn around, so I would at least be walking forwards, when a voice called my name. A big hand reached out to me and Natural Science pulled me into the entrance of a street-level sex shop called ‘The Lash’.
‘Get inside, Slick,’ he said.
I dragged Siobhan along behind me. When tourists tried to follow, National Science raised his wide, open palm like a stop sign and sent them crab-walking back into the crowd. All the shops and clubs had put extra men on the doors. Every organisation was muscling up. The Lash was run from one of Mendoza’s premises, and the old man had supplied guards to protect the property.
‘The Cannibals are holding a memorial service for their brothers,’ said Natural Science. ‘They’ve demanded all the sex businesses close for an hour.’ He laughed. ‘They were a lot scarier two days ago.’
Nobody knew what might happen, so Natural Science was running a security team that included lookouts on the rooftops and informers in both the cops and the bikers.
‘I didn’t know Mendoza could still mount that kind of operation,’ I said.
‘It ain’t the old man,’ said Natural Science, ‘it’s Dror. He loves this shit. We’d all be wearing uniforms if it was up to him.’
The Lash was brightly lit and overstocked with thousands of X-rated DVDs, classed from ‘Anal’ to ‘Wrestling’. Among all the normal fetishes, Siobhan managed to find a film of Germans shitting on Asians. She held it up.
‘Pornography?’ she asked. ‘Or art?’
‘There’s no need to buy that one, love,’ said Natural Science. ‘Slick’s already got it at home.’
The Lash was operated by a fat woman with six rings in her lower lip and black polish on her nails. She had a nose like a pig and ears like a cat, but she smelled like a nurse.
‘Slick, this is Greta,’ said Natural Science. ‘They call her “Lady Lash”.’
‘I nail men’s balls to wooden boards,’ she said. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
Lady Lash passed me a business card, advertising bondage and erection at the First Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Street.
‘I rent out dungeons by the hour,’ she said.
‘I’ll call you if I need one,’ I said.
‘Be sure to,’ she replied, as if it might actually happen.
Siobhan picked out another DVD.
‘Diarrhea Bukake,’ she read. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘Don’t look,’ warned Natural Science, ‘or it’ll haunt your dreams.’
Natural Science talked to his men on a two-way radio, and I wanted a radio too. I love protocol and code words. I wanted to get up on the roof and look down and report back, to be a part of the drama.
The door rattled as Dror unfastened the locks, then jogged in from the street, wearing a tight black silk shirt, tailored trousers and toe-capped shoes.
‘I’ve spoken to the Cannibals’ president,’ said Dror. ‘They’ll be finished in ten minutes.’
He noticed me and Siobhan.
‘What’re you two doing in here?’ he asked. ‘Spicing up your love life already?’
Siobhan needed to file her copy, but the internet cafes were all blockaded by Cannibals. Lady Lash said she could have used the shops inventory computer but it wasn’t connected to the internet. It wasn’t connected to the inventory, either, because the book-keeping was done by hand.
‘We do have one terminal that’s online,’ she remembered.
‘Anything with a keyboard’s fine,’ said Siobhan.
‘It’s coin operated,’ said Lady Lash. She pointed to the cubicle next to the front desk and passed Siobhan a roll of paper towels.
‘You might want to wipe the screen down first,’ she said. ‘And put something over the chair.’ Siobhan opened the door.
‘And try to breathe through your mouth,’ said Lady Lash.
Siobhan came out of the cubicle after ten minutes, which Lady Lash said was ‘about average’.
Dror offered to buy us lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and invited Leila, the oval-faced waitress from La Fontaine, too. She had str
ong legs that lifted her taller than Dror, and I’m not sure if she knew she was on a date. I sucked grilled meat off a stick while the others chewed slivers of raw fish. Dror ordered sake and told a funny story about a bloke he knew who had got his cock stuck in a bottle. We moved from rice wine on to whisky, and washed it all down with Sapporo Dry. The owner wanted to close for the afternoon, but Dror racked up white slug lines on the table. The owner asked him not to do that in here, but Dror said it was okay, he was protected.
‘Let’s go to a club,’ said Dror.
‘The clubs are shut,’ I said. ‘It’s only four o’clock.’
‘No,’ said Dror, ‘a strip club.’
‘Why would I want to go to a strip club?’ asked Siobhan.
‘Come on, it’ll be fun,’ said Leila.
‘In what way “fun”?’ asked Siobhan.
‘You can look at naked women,’ said Dror, ‘and think about them afterwards.’
Siobhan wrinkled her nose.
‘Have another line,’ said Dror.
‘Please leave now,’ said the owner.
After the coke, everybody wanted to carry on drinking.
‘We might as well go to a club,’ said Dror.
I gave Siobhan my arm and we stumbled onto the strip. The police were still working behind their barriers, but the bikers had gone, and the spruikers were out, dressed in shabby dinner suits, their lapels embedded with razor blades.
A fat pimp and his thin, long-armed buddy stood under a pink neon sign saying Baby Dolls, as if they had been placed on the wrong shelf in a toyshop.
‘Let’s check out the competition,’ whispered Dror. ‘This place is run by Lebs.’
Dror and I walked in front of Siobhan and Leila, so the bigger spruiker could steer us towards the doorway.
‘Come on, fellas,’ he said. ‘Fuck shows, suck shows.’
They started to walk into the club, as if their charisma would suck us in behind them. Dror stood his ground on the pavement. The fat pimp looked back and pretended to be surprised.
‘How much is it?’ asked Dror.
‘Twenty-five bucks,’ said the pimp.
