by Mark Dapin
She asked if I’d noticed that all the out-of-town Cannibals had disappeared. She said they’d left a stack of weaponry with the Sydney chapter, but couldn’t find anyone to use it on. The hit team from Ink had left the country, flying to Moscow via Bangkok and Frankfurt. They had boarded planes on separate days, travelling on passports from the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Germany and Israel. Two of them were held by police at the airport, but they weren’t carrying anything connecting them to the shootings, and they were back home before Natural Science’s body turned up.
Her contact at the police station had got all this from a friend in the AFP. He was a really nice bloke. I ought to meet him. He lived quite near me, but in a much nicer flat. He had a very modern bathroom, said Siobhan, with a power shower.
Mendoza was angry and uncooperative, as he was whenever I tried to save his life. He paced around his living room, swearing and shaking, railing against the Maltese.
‘Torture and murder,’ he said. ‘That’s their hallmark. Cutting up the face: it’s a traditional thing. It comes from the Knights.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘It comes from whoever got his nose bitten off by Natural Science.’
‘A nose for a nose?’ said Mendoza. ‘That’s a theory.’
He smiled like a man with no enemies, and nothing to fear in the world.
‘You’re in danger here,’ I told him. ‘These people’ll finish what they started. You should get out of the country, maybe go to Israel.’
‘Really, Anthony?’ he asked. ‘I thought you said the hit team had gone back home to Malta.’
‘To Moscow,’ I said, ‘for fuck’s sake.’
‘You don’t know where they went,’ said Mendoza.
‘Whatever,’ I said, ‘but they aren’t retreating, they’re just rotating. There’ll be another team in the country by next week. That’s why you’ve got to leave now.’
‘Who said that?’ he asked. ‘Siobhan the shape-shifter?’
‘She’s got her sources,’ I told him, and he leered as if I’d said something dirty.
Mendoza sat in his favourite chair, in front of a glass cabinet filled with photographs of his wife and family. ‘I’m not concerned with predictions, Anthony,’ he said. ‘I’m only interested in facts. I want to know what happened to the schvartzer: why did he go to New Caledonia, and why did he come back? I want your friend Jed to fly there and find out for me. And I want him to leave this afternoon.’
TWENTY-THREE
[Holiday Inn, Victoria Street, Potts Point. 18.04.02. 2:03 pm.]
Development, Anthony: the premier was all about development – residential development, commercial development, business development. Sydney in the early seventies was like London after the blitz. The difference was, we hadn’t had a blitz, so the business community itself had to clear all the rotting old housing from the inner suburbs.
‘Development’: every race and creed on earth has development, except for the boongs, and look where it’s got them. Sydney was crying out for development. You could hear it in the wind blowing through the paperbark trees in Victoria Street, a demand to change with the times, to show the world that Sydney was a world-class city where residents could tower above their origins, in skyscrapers to rival anything in New York, and relieve themselves in ensuite bathrooms, perhaps pausing for a douche in the bidet.
There were many visionaries who understood the need to transform the urban landscape, including my good friend Sir Peter, who created the Monorail, a boon not only to those imbeciles who, through physical or mental incapacity, are unable to navigate the five-minute downhill walk from Town Hall to Darling Harbour, but also a gift to the entire city. Who can help but admire the way in which its futuristic lines paint smiles across the grim and tired faces of the handful of nineteenth century buildings that continue to pollute the visual landscape of our vibrant and forward-looking central business district?
The Sir Peter of Kings Cross was a German Jew named Willie Frankel. Willie knew all about development. He’d already developed his lingerie business into one of the largest in Australia, but the development that made his name, and secured his place in the history of this city, was Victoria Spires, the flower of Victoria Street.
There is something you should know about Willie: he was not a quitter. He was driven out of Berlin by the Nazis and thrown into a concentration camp, from which he escaped to Shanghai, the China of the Jews. From Shanghai he boarded a boat to Australia, where he had dreams of building an empire of underpants as large as the one his family had left behind in Frankfurt.
During the war, he was considered an enemy alien, and therefore could not join the army, as you and I did, but nonetheless served with distinction as a draper and a mercer, putting his skills to work making parachutes for troops like me.
For clerks in the Pay Corps?
For troops, Anthony, for enlisted men who were prepared to work in any suitable capacity, provided such an opening could be found.
When Willie had become Sydney’s Underpants King, he felt bound to look for other opportunities to help develop his adopted homeland. Like so many visionary businessmen, he turned his eye to property. I didn’t suggest he build Victoria Spires, but I certainly supported the project, both with a generous line of credit and the loan of some of my best operators in the relocations industry.
Willie had gone through the proper channels to get approval for his development – he’d joined the Liberal Party and donated generously – and was entitled to believe he would be able to proceed.
At first there might have been a few legitimate residents of Victoria Street, battlers whose families had lived behind the railway station for generations, suffocated by the fumes and deafened by the noise, in nineteenth century squalor, with their houses falling down around their ears. These were Willie’s people, he understood them. He bought their worthless homes from their landlords, allowing them to leap to the very top of the waiting list for capacious villas in Mt Druitt and elsewhere. Lying journalists, such as Ham and Eggs and Sausage and Chips and Barbecue-fucking-Sauce, have since tried to paint the so-called Battle of Victoria Street as a conflict between the left and the right, but Labor and the Liberals were united in seeing the need for urban renewal and growth. The opposition came from people who were entirely outside the political spectrum.
Once the real residents had gone, Victoria Street was a kind of terra nullius, populated by anarchist squatters with no concept of land ownership. The anarchists screamed that the police were ‘fascists’, but it was they who were the real Nazis, depriving a refugee of his rightful property as surely as the Gestapo did in prewar Berlin. Willie was particularly angry that the anarchists had made common cause with the feminists, who had already been responsible for the downfall of one of his businesses when Frankel’s Beautiful Brassieres was forced to close due to the inexplicable outbreak of bra burning. Willie began to feel that all of feminist ideology was directed against him personally. First they burn bras, he warned, then they burn books, then they burn bodies.
Willie enlisted the aid of a prominent construction consultant who had adopted the nom de guerre Johnny Dracula, an unusual man who, in the tradition of his namesake, claimed to be a blood-drinking vampire from Transylvania. He was what is commonly described as a karate ‘expert’ (although I have yet to meet anybody trained in the martial arts who is not an ‘expert’) and a world karate champion (although I have yet to meet anybody prominent in the martial arts who was not a world champion). There is no doubt, however, that he excelled at kicking men in the balls, and if you are only good at one thing in life, it might as well be that.
He ran one of Sydney’s earliest karate clubs, and many of the doormen who worked in the Cross trained with him. Interestingly, although Johnny Dracula was an active member of the Labor Party, he was not a communist. I think you’ll find, Anthony, that few of the real refugees from Eastern Europe ever were. They had seen communism in action – the purges, the show trials, the indiscriminate executi
ons – and they vowed, to a man, never to allow a repeat of that bloodthirsty chaos on the beloved soil of their adopted homeland.
Willie and Dracula went about explaining to the last residents of Victoria Street that they were blocking a great and noble enterprise, and sped them on their way by removing their windows, roofs, doors and so on.
The jacks were equally eager to see the back of these remnants from another time and pitched in whenever they could with a crowbar or an opportune arrest. Fred Carol, now invalided out of the police force, coordinated the cooperation between the forces of law and business. In response, the residents set up an illegal, antipolice vigilante patrol, which went about intimidating real workers in the Cross, such as the bouncers. The anarchists called in their friends, the Maoists. You see, in those days, Anthony, there was a trade union in Australia called the Builders’ Labourers Federation, whose task was to make sure no builders’ labouring ever took place anywhere. The BLF put a so-called ‘green ban’ on development in Victoria Street, as if the shitty fucking workers’ cottages were rare patches of rainforest.
Poor Willie had nowhere to turn. He came to me to ask for help. I had sympathy for his cause, and great admiration for his enterprise, but I was not going to get mixed up in a murder blue just because some fucking Kraut owed me a quarter of a million dollars. Also, the trouble in Victoria Street had become bad for business. It was drawing people’s attention to things they didn’t need to know, and undermining their faith in the very institutions that kept them safe from harm. I advised Willie to settle things quickly and quietly, but instead he gathered all the jacks together, and all Dracula’s karate boys, a gang of skinheads and one fucking imbecile named Jack Brun, and flogged the whole street – the unions, the anarchists, the pensioners, everyone. Broke their fucking heads. It’s not how I would have done it, but it did the job.
During this long period of wasted energy, Willie became mates with the Little Fish and was sometimes seen in Aphrodite’s, chasing the easiest skirt in Kings Cross. The Little Fish had already done one job for him – a leader of the residents had been kidnapped and taught the facts of life – and I kept a close eye on their relationship, because a man can’t serve two masters, and I had a feeling the Little Fish was going cold on me.
There was a moll in the Cross named Anita King, whose father owned Kings Department Store on Liverpool Street. The old man liked to boast he’d brought the first escalator to Australia, but I reckon more blokes would’ve been up and down on his daughter. She was a big-mouthed, bed-hopping slag who was always poking her nose where it wasn’t wanted. Just your type of woman, Anthony.
She would probably have had a great future in the world of dry-goods retailing – or, for that matter, in the Pussycat Bordello – but she chose instead to make her way through life as a professional pain in the arse. She ran a so-called newspaper that I called No, because all it ever wrote was ‘no’ to this development and ‘no’ to that development. Willie knew the only way he could get the green ban lifted was if he bought off the BLF. Luckily, there were realists in the union who, although they may have been commos, preferred to fight another day than fight at all. Willie dropped them a quid and they dissolved the whole NSW branch.
But Anita King started fucking some union boss – the crane drivers or something – and he took over the BLF’s shitty campaign to keep Kings Cross in the nineteenth century. Willie tried to talk some sense into King, but it was her way or the highway, which was ironic, considering where she probably ended up.
Willie’s new best mate, the Little Fish, had become the biggest heroin dealer in the Cross, using my club as the centre of his own operation, and cutting me in on no fucking per cent whatever. I didn’t care because drugs as a business didn’t interest me. I couldn’t imagine there’d be much growth in a product that killed its customers, and then there was the problem with Big Stan, which I’ll return to later. But the Little Fish loved drugs, because he thought they would help him escape from my influence and build his own empire of lunacy, starting with Aphrodite’s.
The Little Fish told Jack Brun, who was night manager at the Roundabout Club, to bring Anita King in for a meeting. Brun made a couple of useless attempts to get her to the office – he had the idea you had to kidnap someone to transport them from Victoria Street to Darlinghurst Road – but she came off her own back when he rang to say the Little Fish wanted to buy an advert in her arse-paper for a businessman’s lunch he was planning, which was a bit fucking unusual since Aphrodite’s – like the Ligato – had no kitchen. Nobody has seen Anita King from that day to this. The jacks initially pursued two lines of enquiry. Number one: they interviewed all her communist lovers, to see which one of them had knocked her, or whether it was a conspiracy between all of them. Number two: they tested the theory that she might have staged her own disappearance in order to discredit the legitimate activities of pioneering property developers. It never occurred to them that the Little Fish might have been involved, because the Little Fish was paying them for things like that not to occur to them.
But the shit-raking, smear-mongering journalists – led, as usual, by Ham and Eggs – wouldn’t leave the story alone, so somebody had to cop it sweet. Jack Brun put his hand up and pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to kidnap the slut. The 1970s were truly a time of miracles, Anthony. The Little Fish could shoot the Iron Fist in the back in self-defence, and an imbecile like Jack Brun could conspire on his own to kidnap an heiress.
Just before the so-called ‘disappearance’ of Anita King, Willie paid the Little Fish a large sum of money to give his son, Felix, a start in the nightclub industry, in which he has never worked from that day to this. Up until the end of his life, Willie saw the Little Fish right for his help in getting Felix on the right track (I believe he is currently in prison in Thailand) and Jack Brun received a hefty sum, too, probably in return for some service he also supplied to Felix, such as reading him bedtime stories.
You were going to talk about Big Stan.
Ah yes, Big Stan. I had him managing the Pussycat Bordello in Darlinghurst Road, when the fucking place caught fire. As usual, the fucking journalists reckoned I was burning myself out, but why would I? The Pussycat burned down because Big Stan was an imbecile junkie who nodded off with a cigarette in his mouth and a newspaper in his hand.
He’d been on heroin ever since the GIs first brought it into the Cross, and I was the last to know. He got his supply from the Little Fish, which was another low act of treachery towards me. When Big Stan burned down my brothel, he tried to say it was the Malts, but one of his whores came to me with the truth.
I let Stan know how disappointed I was in him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Perhaps I should’ve let him carry on setting fire to my properties. If I had, he might still be alive today. From what I understand, soon after our conversation Big Stan returned to his unit in Elizabeth Bay and shot himself in the stomach. I agree with everything that was said at the time – it was an unusual way to commit suicide – but my theory is that it was not a genuine suicide attempt but a cry for help. And anyway, who expects somebody to die after they’ve been shot in the stomach? It’s bad luck, that’s all.
After Big Stan had ruined the top floor of my building, I tried to get the whole thing knocked down, but the fucking unions green-banned the fucking facade, just to piss me off. I saw the story regurgitated in all its inaccurate detail by a Siobhan Hughes, after the tattoo studio got hit. That wasn’t your doing, by any chance, was it? It wasn’t the product of your original research? You didn’t pass it on in exchange for the perceived promise of cunt at some unspecified future time?
I was helping another journalist.
Really? I didn’t realise your profession – not, of course, that it is your profession – had such collegial ethics. Talking of which, the story of Anita King should have ended there, but it didn’t, due once again to the stale obsessions of Ham and Eggs. Even though I had less than fuck all to do with anything that happened
to that woman, she caused me ten years of trouble from beyond the grave, or under the tarmac, or wherever she might rest.
The mystery of the disappearance of Anita King may cast a shadow over his legacy, Anthony, but Sydney will not soon forget the name Willie Frankel. There is even a mural to him in Woolloomooloo, in which Willie is pictured in a heroic moment of property development, examining his plans for Victoria Spires, flanked by his faithful lieutenant, Dracula, and our good friend Jack Brun, towering over the faded faces of Anita King and a Maoist who quite probably murdered her in a crime of passion.
[Ends.]
TWENTY-FOUR
I was lying on my bed, imagining what it might be like to have Siobhan bouncing on my lap and Leah sitting on my face, when the door opened and Helen walked in. I rolled into the quilt red-faced like a frankfurter in a hotdog.
‘I know what you were doing,’ she said.
She looked pretty. She was pretty. She had a lovely mouth.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I asked.
Nice legs, too.
‘This is my flat,’ she said.
‘Oh, so you’re here to pay the rent?’
She walked over to the kitchen and took a seat on the stool.
‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ I said, ‘but you stole all the mugs.’
She passed me my pants and I got dressed under the quilt, like a swimmer changing on the beach.
She lit a cigarette.
‘I don’t smoke in the flat any more,’ I told her.
‘Don’t you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You took the ashtray.’
She flicked her ash onto a dirty plate.
‘Can’t you buy anything for the house?’ she asked.
‘What do you care?’
‘I care about you, Slick.’
‘Nobody calls me “Slick” any more,’ I said.
‘My, your life has changed,’ she said. ‘Did you do a course or something?’
