by Mark Dapin
She kissed the air with smoke rings. Helen was the only person I knew who still blew smoke rings.
‘How’s Jed?’ I asked.
‘He’s in New Caledonia,’ she said, ‘doing that job for your boss.’
She gazed out of the window at the Pussycat Bordello.
‘Do you ever think about what it was like before we came here?’ she asked. ‘We were happy then. Do you know why?’
‘You weren’t fucking my best mate,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Helen, ‘I was your best mate. Then we got to Australia, and all the fun went out of our lives. I came here for a working holiday, Slick. I thought we’d see Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef. I never realised we’d be stuck for a year in Kings Cross while you tried to change your career.’
It was nice to hear the sound of her voice. She dropped her Ts and rolled her Rs. I closed my eyes.
‘I already had a career,’ she said. ‘I worked in banks for eleven years. It’s all I’ve ever done since I left school, and you wanted me to come here and get a job at the NAB. What would be the point, Slick? Why wouldn’t I just stay in Aldershot and look at pictures of Australia?’
I watched her lips trembling gently.
‘Even when I found a nice part-time job in a sandwich shop, you were on my back all the time about earning my keep. I didn’t come here to earn my keep. I wanted to live in backpackers’ hostels and drink wine out of boxes. You went on at me all the time about being lazy. Who do you think did your shopping? Who do you think cleaned up after you? Who cooked your food? Who washed your clothes? You couldn’t even see me, Slick, because all you could see were these bizarre fantasies of yourself.
‘You’ve changed so much since I met you. When you first got out of the army, you just wanted to have fun. Now, all you want to do is work, but your jobs always involve some weird fucked-up lie. It was bad enough when you started pretending to be a Catholic, but a Jew . . . What were you thinking? You made me go to the synagogue, do you remember that? This is my once-in-a-lifetime holiday in Australia, and you took me out to St Mary’s Cathedral and Temple Emmanuel.’
I shook my head at myself.
‘I tried to support you, babe,’ she said, ‘because you’re a lovely, lovely bloke. You’re kind, you’re gentle, you’re good-looking, you’re funny. But you know what? You’re not a journalist. And you’re never going to be a journalist, because you can’t fucking write. It’s like me trying to be a model or something.’
She had tears in her eyes.
‘You could be a model,’ I said.
‘I’m thirty-one years old. You don’t become a model at thirty-one. You become a mum. Don’t you see what I’m saying?’
‘You want to have kids.’
‘Yeah, I want to have kids,’ she said, ‘but not right now, not in Australia, and not with a bloke who might wake up any morning and start acting like a Hindu or a Sikh. I want to have a holiday, then I want to settle down.’
‘With Jed?’
‘No, not with fucking Jed. Jed doesn’t even look at me. He just closes his eyes and thinks about that little slut he met in Thailand.’
‘So why did you go with him?’
‘You pushed me away,’ she said. ‘You wanted it to happen, babe. Admit it.’
Maybe I did. I don’t know. It seemed like a long time ago. Maybe I felt she was holding me back. Maybe I wanted to convince myself she was bad, so I could let her go. But maybe sea cucumbers have dance parties on the ocean floor. Who knows and who fucking cares?
‘There’s beer in the fridge,’ I said.
‘You’ve figured out how to use the bottle shop,’ said Helen, ‘but not the supermarket.’
She brought me over a bottle of Crown, opened one for herself and sat on the edge of my bed, drinking slowly.
‘What are you doing here, Helen?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘When you burst into the van with that daft purple helmet on, I thought you’d come to get me.’
‘But I hadn’t,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Helen. ‘You’d come to kidnap Jed, hang him upside down and torture him.’
I blushed, for a number of reasons.
‘Was any tiny part of that because of me?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I answered honestly.
‘Do you think you might sometimes jump to conclusions,’ she asked, ‘and take things a bit too far? Do you think, babe, you might be some kind of nutter?’
‘It’s the army,’ I said. ‘PTSD. I’ve got no impulse control.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Helen.
I shrugged. I mean, who could say really?
‘Do you know what I’ve been doing all this time?’ she asked.
‘Fucking Jed,’ I said.
‘I’ve been watching over you,’ said Helen, ‘like a guardian angel. Jed was watching Mendoza, but I was watching you. And you need a guardian angel, babe, because somebody’s trying to kill you.’
‘Me?’ I said. ‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’
‘I don’t know, babe,’ said Helen, squeezing my hand, ‘but he’s already tried twice and, when I came in he was waiting outside.’
We walked together slowly down the stairs. Helen had noticed the guy about a couple of months ago. Wherever I was, he went too. Jed thought it was a coincidence, but a coincidence happens twice, not every day. The first time he’d come to kill me, I was sitting outside La Fontaine, and he’d jogged past wearing a tracksuit. Once he’d made sure who I was, he came back in a T-shirt and board shorts, with a pistol stuck in the small of his back. Jed didn’t want to give away their position, but Helen climbed out of the van, doubled backed one block, walked up to him and asked if he wanted a girl. He said he didn’t, and tried to walk through her, but she blocked him and asked whether she wasn’t good enough for him. He said it was not that, it was just a bit early in the morning. She asked if he liked boys and he told her to get out of his way. When she wouldn’t, he reached for her shoulder and almost pushed her. Jed jumped out of the driver’s seat and yelled what the fuck did he think he was doing. He shouted they were both mad, and jogged back the way he’d come.
The second time, Jed had left Helen in the van, watching the window, while Mendoza and I talked in a private room at the Bellisimo. My stalker had followed me up the street, waited until I was inside, then returned clutching a man-bag. Helen tried to call me but my phone was turned off, so she stopped him again and asked if he was still too cheap to help out a working girl. He told her to fuck off or he would kill her. She asked how he would do that. He said he had a gun. Helen screamed, ‘He wants to shoot me, and I’m carrying his baby!’ and the bouncers and spruikers stirred in the doorways, and the assassin spat at her and ran.
I was holding the derringer in my hand as I opened the door into the street. I pushed Helen back against the wall and darted out into the patio, where Dror was standing, smoking a cigarette. He looked down, surprised, at my gun.
There was a loud pop. Dror dived behind the recycling bins. The bullet hit a drainpipe about a metre to my left. Amateurs. I thought about rolling, just to impress Dror, but I decided to zigzag instead. I caught up with the shooter in two zags. The recoil had made him drop the gun and he was scrambling to pick it out of a flowerbed.
I kicked him in the face. I recognised him, but I couldn’t remember why. He called me a bastard and lashed out without looking. I caught his arm, hauled him upright and threw him against the wall of the building. Dror was on him, with a pistol stuck in his temples. I jammed my derringer under his chin. Blood bubbled from his nose.
‘Do you know this bloke?’ asked Dror, shaking the prisoner.
I looked closer. Oh no.
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘he’s some kid I beat up at the Hamilton Hotel.’ The boy burbled blood.
‘What’re you doing here, anyway?’ I asked Dror.
‘I just came around to see if you fancied a drink,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe we could go out and
get into some trouble.’
An hour later, Dror had taken the boy away and I was lying in bed with Helen, kissing her neck as she stroked my hair. My clothes made a mound at the bottom of the bed, hers were folded over the back of a chair. It was good to smell her again, a perfume I had bought. I ran my hands down her thighs. She slid her tongue into my ear. I pulled her against me and felt as if I had found a missing part.
‘Go gently,’ she whispered, ‘go slowly.’
TWENTY-FIVE
[Holiday Inn, Victoria Street, Potts Point. 20.04.02. 2:04 pm.]
A man might have felt entitled to believe that once Anita King was dead, she would stop fucking around with his business, but the people’s collective of ratbag communist anarchist reporters, editors and commissars wouldn’t accept that the story was over and it was time they buried their suspicions about Willie and the Little Fish and got on with fabricating lies about the government. Ham and Eggs kept on trying to link me with the King case, because if Jake Mendoza was involved, that would explain everything. No wonder she fucking disappeared if I had anything to do with her. People I know disappear all the time, don’t they? Name me one, Anthony. Name me just one.
The business community had a meeting and decided it was time to tip Ham and Eggs out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now, I’ll tell you a secret, Anthony: I always had a soft spot for Eggs. He amused me because, unlike virtually anyone else I have ever met, he was in no need of a nickname. He had a bald, bullet-shaped head and a fat, round stomach. He actually looked like eggs. Before I let the others set the gunnies on him, I offered him the chance to do business with us, but he spat in my face and left me with no choice but to allow events to take their course. Eggs took a little beating and lost interest in the case. Ham lingered on, like the rancid smell of swine. No one was game to bash her in case she became ‘another Anita King’, but the jacks took her in for questioning and confiscated all her notes.
Did that warn her off?
No, she wrote a fucking story about it. But what can you do? You can’t kill all the journalists, or there’d be nobody to report the football scores.
What happened to the Little Fish?
He was flush with Willie’s cash and came to me with an offer to buy Aphrodite’s. It was a good price and I would have sold, except I knew that would just be the start. He would set himself up in competition with me, and he would bury me, since he had the additional income stream of heroin sales to prop up his clubs. I offered him a partnership, on very favourable terms, but he turned me down. The problem with people in this business, Anthony, is they always want everything. I knew what was going through the Little Fish’s head. He’d knocked the Iron Fist and he’d knocked Anita King, and never even had to face a beak. He was a fucking koala, a protected species. He had a green light from the jacks – my green light, by the way – and a reputation as the hardest man in the Cross. Why shouldn’t he just knock me, his best mate and lifelong benefactor, for the sake of a fucking scumhole of a strip club? Then he and his hermaphrodite coconut could be the king and queen of the Cross, and rule over every gibbering imbecile junkie from the Coke sign to the fountain.
He didn’t have the balls to neck me himself, so he put the word out that he needed a gunnie. I sent one of my new boys to pose as a contract killer from Perth. The Little Fish offered him the price of a new Roller – my life for a fucking car – to shoot me in one of the apartments I had stashed around town in case I needed a room to take a girl, and my wife and mistress were not feeling their usual understanding, angelic selves.
His plan – if I can dignify his drooling imbecility with that word – was to kidnap a stripper I was seeing at the time (Bernadette Taylor – fake tits, real arse). He was going to have my boy put on Bernie’s stage wig and cocktail dress, ring my doorbell, and shoot me in my doorway before I saw through his kindergarten disguise. No doubt when the assassin reported back to him with shaved legs and a stuffed bra, the Little Fish hoped to bend him over and bugger him.
His scheme’s success – or lack of it – rested on the assumption that everyone was like him and believed the difference between men and women was purely sartorial. I think the part that made me the most angry, besides the insulting price of the contract and the low treachery of that mongrel dog, was the fact that, if he’d succeeded, I would have always been remembered as having been knocked by a fucking drag queen. It would have overshadowed all my achievements in the various branches of the entertainment and gaming industries, and my pioneering work for the causes of racial equality and the social acceptance of midgets.
While he was waiting for some suicidal imbecile to take up his offer to murder me (my boy declined due to other commitments), the Little Fish expanded security around Aphrodite’s. He fired every bouncer he thought might have had any loyalty to me and replaced them with shit-thick coconuts who were all muscle and no heart. When I went to the club to make my weekly collection, they told me the place was under new management, and barred my way in.
I took all the Little Fish’s sacked workers back into my organisation and doubled the number of men on my doors. They started selling heroin, but I let it go. My girls were happy to have a safe source of supply close by, and I noticed that when they were on the gear they were more susceptible to imaginative suggestions about how they might spend their working lives. This was when the midget shows really took off and, for a brief period, I was able to incorporate a German shepherd into some of the early morning performances. I named it ‘McCoy’ because (a) it was a mad dog; and (b) if he’d been around, McCoy would have married it to save it from a life of exploitation. McCoy the dog became a star of both stage and screen, appearing in classic loop movies such as ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’ (in which he was billed as ‘Diamond’) and ‘The Dog’s Breakfast’. These productions – my first professional work in the film industry, with paid actors and a skilled crew – were internationally successful, although it proved difficult to collect any royalties from overseas sales due to the distribution arm being the fucking Mafia. McCoy died of canine transmissible venereal tumour, a disease that showed alarming signs of spreading through my workforce, and I abandoned my cinematic ambitions in favour of clawing back my clubs. First, I went for the Roundabout Club.
I could have used various former and serving officers of the New South Wales police force to help recover what was mine, but many of them were still under unwarranted scrutiny from the sanctimonious, self-appointed jacks and beaks of the journalistic so-called profession, for their role in routing the various communes and soviets that had poisoned the air in Victoria Street. Instead, I turned to an old friend, a fellow club-owner and prominent member of Melbourne’s Sicilian community, who offered me the loan of certain of his specialists who had gained important professional experience in Palermo and Messina.
They turned up at the Roundabout Club an hour before closing and made a big thing about negotiating a group discount with the coconuts. They were supposed to be tourists from Italy, out on the razz, who didn’t realise the floor show was over and all they would get for the price of their entry was the right to pay five bucks for a glass of cheap spirits poured from expensive bottles and a chance to press up against the hairless arsehole of a cuntless chorus girl in the bar.
Once they were in, the wops started to make a noise about being ripped off, and the coconuts mobbed up like a rugby team to put them in their place. Then the toys came out and it was on for one and all. The coconuts called for help from further up the evolutionary scale, but their reinforcements never arrived, because my boys caught them at the corner with cricket bats and fence posts.
When we’d dealt with those bastards, we swarmed down to Aphrodite’s – and I’m not using the royal ‘we’ (although, as King of the Cross, I would arguably be entitled to do so), I was actually there, leading my troops into battle – where the Little Fish made his last stand with a few men he thought were good but turned to be as weak as coconut milk when the shit hit the fan. I even too
k down one of them myself, albeit with a gunnie at either side of me and a wrestler at my back. I should have knocked the Little Fish then and there, but it was like a fucking mardi gras on the strip, with all these drag queens and hoons chasing after us and screaming, and tourists taking pictures and jacks looking so far the other way that their heads almost twisted off their necks. The Little Fish lost two teeth from the unimpressive collection he’d managed to salvage from the boxing ring and the war, and no doubt the extra space made it easier for him to fill his mouth with big brown cock. All in all, it was a very successful evening. I’m not a man who enjoys violence, Anthony, unless it’s directed at my enemies.
The next morning the Little Fish vanished, and didn’t turn up again until the pointless inquest into Anita King, who was as dead and disappeared at the end of the proceedings as she was at the beginning. You might have thought, Anthony, that the coroner’s court would be concerned to discover how the Little Fish had knocked her and where he’d buried the body, but this would display a basic misunderstanding of the motivations of the legal establishment in New South Wales, which were (a) the destruction of the reputation of Jake Mendoza; and (b) see (a) above.
The Little Fish, under the protection of so-called ‘honest’ jacks – ie, they were in the pay of a different set of crims – took the stand in a suit he must have stripped from the body of Al Capone, and played the big-time gangster to an audience of gullible squareheads and vampire journalists. He said he didn’t know what had happened to Anita King after she left Aphrodite’s but, sad to say, the club that he happened to manage was, through no fault of his own, a den of sin and debauchery, where he was forced to keep two sets of books, one for the taxman and one for Mr Big. He named names – mostly mine, but also those of a few jacks he had a grudge against, and a couple of businessmen he’d met in his brain-fucked, arse-struck imagination. He told the court I bribed and blackmailed everyone, corrupted the course of politics, brought rain to family picnics on sunny afternoons in November, and made matzos out of the blood of Christian children. On the rare occasion when he was asked about the heiress, he repeated the legally proven theory that her departure was the result of Jack Brun’s conspiracy of one.
