King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  I realised the idea wasn’t watertight when the Israelis deported poor Meyer Lansky back to the States in the seventies, but in the fifties the holy land looked like a solid-gold insurance policy for a man in my business. So I gave to every appeal, planted trees in the desert, had my name etched on plaques. I even thought about visiting Jerusalem, but the place looked like a sandy shithole. Good for Arabs, but that’s about it.

  It wasn’t until I began to bring joy to the older members of the Jewish community – Holocaust survivors and such – that I received a measure of respect from my peers, and this came about as a result of Deborah’s dinner.

  I didn’t feel that my wife would mix well with the regular patrons of the Ligato, so I posted guards at the top of the road to keep the mugs away. Instead, in my first act of kindness towards the frail aged, I organised and funded a bus trip to Kings Cross for the residents of the Moses Montefiore Home for the elderly in Hunters Hill. That night forty-six retired Jewish ladies dined with my wife and I at the Ligato, while Arnold Zwaybil, the Eastern Suburbs Frank Sinatra, sang ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)’ and ‘Three Coins in a Fountain’.

  Deborah realised that the gossip she had heard about the Ligato at the hairdressers and the Hakoah was just a bunch of lousy lies, and I was awarded my conjugal rights twice that night. Which was a post-honeymoon record.

  The Ligato didn’t last. The best clubs never do. They are a blip in history, a moment in time, an explosion of joy that can never be recaptured. I sold the building just before the Vietnam War, to Morrie the Magnificent and his able assistant, Ava the Sword Swallower. They ran it as a cabaret restaurant, then a short-time hotel, until Morrie passed away in the 1980s. Ava’s daughter still owns the place. You might have seen her as we came in, pushing her tits into that Scandinavian boy at the front desk. She put Ava in the Montefiore Home, where her talents, apparently augmented by the fortuitous loss of all her teeth and applied indiscriminately as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, made her the most popular inmate among male residents, visitors and staff members alike.

  Are we finished for the day?

  Yes, Anthony. You can go home now and pretend you’re a writer to the cockroaches in your kitchen and the silverfish in your shirts.

  A friend of mine’s asked for a favour. Do you remember Siobhan, who writes for the Irish Times?

  Stripper’s tits and eyes as brown as arseholes?

  Whatever. She wants to know if she can have an interview with you.

  An interview? Sure she can have an interview. I’ll interview her for a job at Aphrodite’s! I’ll take her up the fucking Patton! Interview me? Who does she think I am? Chopper Read? Just because I give an interview to one so-called journalist – who turns out, by the way, to be as much of a reporter as I am a Christian Scientist – does she think I’m going to talk to a fat whore’s hole full of them? Interview me? Yeah, we can do it on camera, in the room above the bar at the Hamilton Private Hotel. You tell her, Anthony, the only way she is going to get an interview with me is lying on her back and staring up at a blinking light on the ceiling. You got that?

  You want me to say you’re not doing interviews at the moment but you’ll keep her request on file.

  She can use my cock as a microphone and write notes with her tongue on my balls.

  [End.]

  EIGHTEEN

  The smell of melting cheese and baking dough made me feel like I hadn’t eaten for days as I kneeled beneath the low wall behind Pizza Gourmet in Rozelle, listening to scooters buzz into the car park and the delivery boys jog to the counter to pick up their orders.

  I had been waiting for half an hour with my knees jammed into my chest when one of the riders finally left his engine running. I wrapped a scarf around my face and secured it with a silly helmet that made me look like a biplane pilot. I had found it in a junk shop and, when I tried it on, a kid looking at a train set had called, ‘Where’s Snoopy?’, which was dumb since, as far as I can see, Snoopy and the Red Baron are the same dog. He should have asked, ‘Where’s Charlie Brown?’ or just shut the fuck up.

  I stepped over the wall and onto the bike, pushed it off its centre stand and took off. It was a bit of a thrill, being on a scooter again. It took me back to days I barely remembered, drinking Strongbow cider and smoking menthol cigarettes.

  The scooter carried me back to the Cross in ten minutes. I wished I had longer to play around with it, but it had a design that would make it easy to track down, especially if you knew it was being driven by a bloke in a stupid hat.

  I parked it in the street outside my unit block and draped it with a sheet of tarpaulin.

  Upstairs in my flat I kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed, looking at the ceiling. I remembered the day Helen and I had moved into the place, and how we had made love on the bed, then the table, the chair. Helen was always keen to involve the furniture in our sex life, perhaps because it was the thing she loved the most. Ah, that’s bullshit. To be fair, Helen had looked after me when I felt helpless. I wished she hadn’t slept with Jed, but it was not as if I had never slept with Jed’s girlfriends. I tried to reimagine the best time with Helen, the night she came home giggling after drinks at the sandwich shop. A delivery guy had muscled her into the storeroom, muttering all the things he wanted to do with her. He was good-looking, she said, tanned and strong, a man who spent all day lifting heavy boxes in the sun. She fancied him like fury, but she had come home to me instead and she wanted me to do everything he’d promised. We had four lines of coke and half an E each, and we stayed up all night, on the couch and the balcony and the kitchen benchtop. In the morning she admitted there had been no delivery guy.

  Now I thought maybe there was a delivery guy after all, but that just made the story even better somehow.

  At 6:45 pm, I went out to get the scooter. The limp tarpaulin lay in a puddle on the pavement, and my space had been taken by a Honda Goldwing. I kicked the tarps, got my foot caught in the fabric and nearly fell on my face. What was I supposed to do now? I dialled Mendoza.

  ‘Somebody’s stolen my scooter,’ I told him.

  ‘And what?’ asked Mendoza. ‘You think it was me? What did it look like?’

  ‘It was bright purple,’ I said, ‘with a signboard with a picture of a pizza on it.’

  Mendoza laughed. ‘Were you trying to impress a girl?’

  ‘I thought you’d know where the thief might try to sell it.’

  ‘There is no secondhand market for bright purple scooters with pizza signboards,’ said Mendoza. ‘Children took your pussy magnet, Anthony, and crashed it into a wall.’

  I kicked the tarpaulin again, even though it was already dead. I threw my stupid helmet on the pavement and it smashed into four pieces, which is what would have happened to my head, too, if I had worn it.

  The next day I went back to Pizza Gourmet. They had put a security guard on the car park and a handwritten sign in the window that said Delivery Drivers Wanted. Immediate Start. A big red-haired guy in a short-sleeved purple shirt was boxing pizzas behind the counter.

  I stood watching him, waiting for him to look up and speak.

  ‘Can I help you, mate?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve come about the job,’ I said, imitating his sing-song Scouse accent.

  He asked if I could ride a scooter and read a map, and whether I would work for two dollars a delivery. I said I could and I would.

  ‘I’ll need to see your driver’s licence and your tax file number,’ he said.

  I opened my wallet and shuffled my credit cards.

  ‘I didn’t bring it with me,’ I said.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

  ‘Kings Cross,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got plenty of customers up there,’ he said. ‘These are the best pizzas in the southern hemisphere. Where do you think’s the furthest we’ve ever been asked to deliver a Pizza Gourmet Supremo?’

  ‘New Zealand,’ I said.

  ‘Th
at’s right,’ he said. He sealed the lid on a box. ‘The driver only took it as far as the airport, of course.’

  He sprinkled grated mozzarella onto a stodgy base smeared with tomato paste.

  ‘You can start when we get our first delivery to the Cross. Drop off the pizza, pick up your licence, and we’ll be right.’

  I filled an application form with terrible lies, and he gave me a new-employees’ pack including a purple shirt, a fluorescent vest, a purple crash helmet and a laminated menu. He told me I could expect about ten dollars a night in tips, more on a Saturday. He said most of the managers at Pizza Gourmet had started off as delivery boys, and if I looked after my customers Pizza Gourmet would look after me. The company saw its drivers not as employees but as family. If I liked, I could call him ‘dad’. Then he told me that was a joke.

  At half past five, the orders started to come in, but we didn’t get one for the Cross until six forty-five.

  ‘Yeah, I know it sounds weird,’ said the manager. ‘We don’t do many like this, but he’s a regular. He orders the same thing at the same time every day. He just parks in different places.’

  The chef had already cooked the pizza: a Supremo with beef, mushrooms, capsicum, olives, pineapple and mozzarella.

  The delivery address was opposite Sax’s garden restaurant on Kellett Street. As I pulled up at the kerb I saw Mendoza slicing into a steak under the frangipani trees. Across the road was an electrician’s white transit van. I tapped on the back doors and Jed opened up.

  ‘Have I been looking forward to this!’ he said, and I punched him in the face.

  I was wearing my crash helmet with the visor down as I hit him left-right, right-left, right-right. He fell back into the van, landing on the mattress, where Helen was lying in a silk slip and knickers. Even while I was hitting Jed I noticed that one of her breasts was bigger than the other.

  Jed had a go back, but there is not much you can do against a man in a crash helmet and motorcycle gloves when you are lying in bed with your girlfriend – or his girlfriend – and he is headbutting you on the nose. He tried strangling me but I kept landing heavy punches and watching his stupid face come apart. I smashed him against the surveillance equipment, shattering his two TV screens. He got small fangs of glass stuck to his head; I rubbed them into his scalp.

  Helen was screaming and swearing at me, but I was used to that. The fourth time I headbutted Jed, I knocked him out. I pushed his face into the mattress, pulled a gimp mask on backwards over his head and fastened his hands behind his back with cable ties, ignoring Helen as she grabbed her clothes and ran out onto the street.

  I picked up the scooter and hauled it into the back of the van, almost crushing Jed under its weight, then slammed the doors, lifted the keys from Jed’s pocket and scrambled over into the driver’s seat.

  I drove towards Surry Hills, where I parked in a side street and stripped off all the electromagnetic signs. Jed kept about a dozen different ones in the back; I thought of becoming the cable guy – that was his largest sign, so it made the biggest change to the appearance of the van – but if you parked in a residential street homeowners would usually tap on the window and ask how much it cost to install Foxtel on a one-year plan.

  I steered the plain white van down the driveway of the First Presbyterian Church and around the back of the building, where the graves had been removed to make way for parking spaces marked by headstones. I pulled up in a spot reserved for the undead.

  The back entrance to the church (marked rear entry) was a dark timber door. It was dragged open by Lady Lash, wearing a studded dog collar and rubber underwear, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I need somebody to help me with a slave,’ I said.

  ‘So bring out the gimp,’ said Lady Lash.

  ‘I think the gimp’s asleep,’ I told her.

  She grabbed Jed’s feet while I lifted him by the armpits, and we carried him from the van. The church smelled of lubricant, bleach and semen. Jed was beginning to wake up, so he was able to take some of his own weight as we walked him down the steps and into the vault.

  ‘You can have the third chamber,’ said Lady Lash, ‘the Freezer, but I’ll need it back in an hour.’

  The Freezer was sandwiched between a medieval dungeon and a padded cell and was decorated like an abattoir with a rail of meat hooks along the roof.

  We propped Jed’s body against a wall.

  ‘Will you need any lube?’ asked Lady Lash.

  Jed made a funny strangled noise under his mask.

  ‘I think we’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘Can you help me string him up?’

  Lady Lash looped a chain around Jed’s ankles and lowered the meat hook to the ground. We fastened it to the shackles, then I supported Jed’s body while she cranked it up like a carcass, until he was suspended from the ceiling.

  Lady Lash went back upstairs, and I took the mask off Jed.

  ‘You’ve gone fucking mad,’ he shouted, and I realised that in all the years I had known Jed I had never seen him upside down.

  ‘Fucking let me down,’ he demanded.

  His face was badly cut. I punched him in the stomach.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘You’re cuntstruck. I don’t even want her, mate.’

  It was hard to understand exactly what he was saying because of the position in which he was hanging, but I could tell he had the wrong idea.

  ‘This isn’t about Helen, Jed,’ I said. ‘It’s about you shooting at me.’

  ‘What? In Kosovo?’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, Jed. Last week, in William Street. It was like fucking Belfast on a bad night.’

  I punched him again and he puked blood.

  ‘I’ve no fucking idea what this is about,’ Jed shouted. ‘You fucking delivered my pizza. Then you punched shit out of me and, when I woke up, you were talking to some woman about how you were gonna fuck me.’

  ‘I’m not gonna fuck you, Jed,’ I said, ‘but you are fucked. Who are you working for?’

  ‘The Russians again. The same Russians.’

  ‘What’s the job?’

  ‘You figured that out three months ago when you started head-butting my van. I’m watching Mendoza.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Why do you fucking think? Because the Russians want him watched.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘Absolutely fucking nothing. An old man who has dinner with strippers and lunch with you.’

  ‘It was the Russians who shot at us, though, wasn’t it?

  Jed shook his head, which made his whole body wriggle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just their shitman. But I know they had a team come in from overseas to do a job. I had to pick them up from the airport.’

  ‘How many?’ I asked.

  He coughed into his own nose.

  ‘Four,’ he spluttered. ‘Let me down, Slick. All the blood’s running to my head.’

  ‘If you didn’t shoot me,’ I said, ‘you set me up.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any fucking set-up,’ said Jed.

  ‘Did you give them my position at the motel?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were there,’ said Jed.

  ‘There was a white van outside the flats across the road.’

  ‘Have you any idea how many white vans there are in Sydney?’ asked Jed. ‘I can hardly find mine in a fucking car park. Anyway, I was nowhere near William Street.’

  ‘So where were you?’

  ‘Parked up an alley off Ward Avenue. I didn’t think anything important was going to happen, so I was just, you know . . .’

  ‘So where were you?’

  ‘I didn’t think anything important was going to happen, so I was just, you know . . .’

  ‘Fucking Helen in the back of the van?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a cunt, Jed,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re a fucking idiot,’ he said.

  I could have hugged
Jed, but that would have meant rubbing my face on his cock. I called in Lady Lash to help me get him down.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘you went a bit hard on the poor gimp.’

  ‘I love it,’ said Jed, rubbing his ankles

  He looked at his face in the big gothic mirror – a purple hood over one eye, his lips slit and swollen, his nose knocked across his cheek – splashed himself with unholy water, made a sign of the cross and said, ‘Drink, soldier?’

  Jed drove his van up William Street to the Cross. As we passed the apartment block opposite the motel, I saw the white van was still outside, and relaxed my grip on the pistol in my pocket.

  We started off drinking in the Goldfish Bowl, but ended up in the Southern Star. I was hugging Jed and ruffling his hair in the pokie room at midnight when an ex-con with roses tattooed on his throat asked Jed if he thought he was hard, coming into a pub like this with a face like that. Jed said he should have seen the other guy.

  ‘I’m the other guy,’ I said.

  The next thing, Jed had him in a headlock and I was on the ground, wrestling with his mate. It was just like old times.

  NINETEEN

  [Aphrodite’s, 2 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross. 27-03-02. 2:05 pm.]

  Have you seen your black cunt [coughs]?

  What are you talking about?