by Mark Dapin
When the inquest was over, and a cretinous, unapologetic, we’ve-wasted-everybody’s-time open verdict reached, the Little Fish, like some demented cabaret artist with no fans and no gigs (I’m thinking here of Arnold Zwaybil) embarked on a tour of royal commissions, crooning his crowd-pleasing repertoire of lies.
What happened to the Little Fish’s business interests?
Christ, Anthony, for the first time in your life you’ve hit the nail on the fucking head. I didn’t even realise you were carrying a hammer. There was only one outcome of any historical significance to all these play-acting commissions and kangaroo courts: the Little Fish resigned from the heroin business, leaving the field open to the organised imbecile community in the shape of a succession of biker gangs up to and including the Cannibals MC.
In the light of all the unwelcome publicity, I also withdrew from formal involvement in all my remaining operations, with the exception of the training and recruitment of showgirls, strippers and whores. I became, if you like, a human resources manager, in a vertically integrated, people-centred organisation whose core strength was the quality of its staff.
Sad to say, in the years that followed I became distant from Ira, as she grew grey hair and saggy tits and began to affect a certain unattractive cynicism about the way her life had turned out (ie, exactly how she had wanted it). She pressured me to divorce my wife and leave my lovers, but didn’t realise that the only leverage she had ever possessed had vanished with the years.
I left her with a heavy heart and a heavier ballsack, which I lightened in the company of my Perth mistress, Amy Monk, who I imported from West Australia for that purpose. My little Sharon, tragically, felt that I had abandoned her, and this was the start of a long and wretched estrangement between loving father and beloved daughter, which concluded with her declaration, at the age of eighteen, that she wouldn’t join the family business as an office manager but pursue instead a so-called career as a blood-sucking, dustbin-diving, scandal-mongering journalist. Even so, I still loved her, as she had brought light to my life and laughter to my days. I was there the evening she graduated from university, in her cap and gown, clutching a certificate that gave her a licence to peddle half-truths and exaggerations and tip shit over the good names of progressive businessmen and far-sighted entrepreneurs.
In the 1980s, Anthony, the winds of change farted on me. As restrictions were gradually relaxed on drinking, gambling, prostitution and pornography, most of my activities became legal and accepted, although I personally gained precious little acceptance, let alone acclaim, for my trailblazing vision. With legality came a sharp drop in profits, since we were no longer able to charge a premium for services that any semi-squarehead could provide. Many businesses no longer required protection from the police, who could no longer threaten credibly to raid them because – all of a sudden – they weren’t doing anything wrong. My role as an intermediary diminished then finally disappeared.
The premier had long since lost his position, but the new Labor Party administration initially proved to be as sympathetic as its Liberal predecessors to the spirit that made Australia great. The people had chosen and, although initially I disagreed strongly with their choice, I saw it as my democratic duty to bow to their will and extend my program of political donations to include the newly elected government. In a departure from usual practice, however, I didn’t withdraw my patronage from the democratic opposition, and thereby rescued them from falling into the trap of opposition-for-its-own-sake. In this way, Anthony, the property development and leisure industries of New South Wales have become the backbone of the democratic process in our state. A seat on the local council was traditionally a thankless and unpaid sinecure. Without our financial injections, only the very rich could afford to waste their and everybody else’s time formulating imbecilic objections to clause 7B of subsection 5 of the 1978 amendment to the planning act of 1954, about which they knew two-fifths of fuck all. Political contributions from the business world have enabled even the humblest single-issue imbecile to afford to give a portion of his time to the public service, and walk away heavily rewarded at the end of a long hard lunch.
However, the governments that followed proved more difficult to deal with. The principle of practical expedience gave way to backward-looking notions of accountability, eventually leading to the creation of the vile Independent Commission Against Corruption, which – ironically but predictably – proved itself to be corrupt. It was staffed by fucking jacks, for Christ’s sake. What did they expect?
I dabbled in a number of so-called respectable businesses, all of which worked on exactly the same principles as my previously unrespectable businesses. I met plenty of bigger crooks than ever found their way to jail, and some of them even had the fucking indecency to rob me. I had properties in Perth, Adelaide, Geelong, Melbourne, the Gold Coast, Goulburn and Sydney. I made a comeback in the music industry, managing artists who sang about as well as McCoy the German shepherd and fucked just as indiscriminately.
I dissolved my partnership with Izzy Berger when it turned out he’d been cutting me out of music-publishing deals and, one sad morning in spring, he found himself lying in an alleyway outside his office with a bass guitar broken over his head and a vinyl sandwich jammed in his mouth.
I made investments, and some of them failed. I took bad advice – sometimes badly motivated – and began to doubt my ability to read squareheads after having spent so much time in the informal sector. I started to feel old. I joined a gym, where I spent hours staring at twenty-three-year-old office workers in Lycra shorts, and imagining what was sweating inside them, and it made me feel older still. But I was a strong man, Anthony, and strong men don’t bow down to anyone or anything – not even age and time. I had become a distant figure, but I was known and respected in every cafe and club. People still came to me for favours, and I never had to buy a meal or a drink. I dyed my disappearing hair, used volumising shampoo, wore hats in all weather and became wary of looking in the mirror, because it was always my father’s face that stared back, with all its malice and venality. But I was not him and I never would be. He was the frightened peddler son of peasants, and I was still Jake Mendoza, the King of the Cross.
[Ends.]
TWENTY-SIX
Jed stepped off the plane from Nouméa with his Oakleys wrapped around his head like an Alice band. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Billabong shorts, and carrying a swollen bag of duty-free booze. I met him in the arrivals lounge and said, ‘Return of the Jedi,’ just like always.
I drove him back into the city while he told me the story that I’d already heard, in part, over the phone. He’d arrived in New Caledonia with the idea that he had to hire someone who was bilingual in English and Caledonian. He’d been surprised to find the locals spoke French, but it turned out he didn’t need any language skills anyway. When he showed them a picture of a six-foot-six black man with a gold tooth, anyone who had seen Natural Science – which was almost everyone – nodded and smiled. He stood out in New Caledonia as much as in Kings Cross, because it turned out the local aborigines were a dark mustard colour rather than tyre-black.
A Frenchman in a cafe told Jed he had seen Natural Science with an Arab, so Jed – who had taken a cultural awareness course in the army – went straight to a kebab shop. The Syrian behind the counter said the Arab was a Lebanese businessman from Sydney, and Jed bought a Syrian pizza. (‘Fucking rubbish, mate. No cheese.’)
Nouméa was so small that Jed figured if he sat at a pavement table for long enough, everyone in town would walk past, but he got distracted by French women wrapped up like Christmas presents and forgot to look out for Arabs. At a coffee shop near the kebab house, he learned the businessman was a nightclub owner, which gave Jed the excuse to visit all the city’s nightclubs in case the man had come out on a study tour. Jed eventually found a girl who had followed Natural Science back to his hotel. She was very small, apart from her tits. She said the businessman’s name was Mahmoud an
d he was the owner of Magic Circle. She’d had a drink with Mahmoud in the hotel bar and he had offered her a job as a hostess. Natural Science hadn’t said what he was doing on the island, but she had the feeling he might be acting as Mahmoud’s minder.
Jed took the name of the hotel then tried to chat up the girl, but after listening to his army stories for half an hour, she refused to speak to him in any language but French.
The next day he exercised his peculiar talent to find Aldershot wherever he went, and ended up drinking vodka for breakfast with two legionnaires in the worst bar in Nouméa. One of them was a Geordie and the other from Moscow, so they were both foreign to Jed, but at least he could understand when the Russian spoke English. They remembered Natural Science, who had turned up at the same ocean-front bloodhouse. The Geordie had wanted to twist a broken glass into his white eyes for looking like he thought he was hard.
When the bar closed, Jed went back to their hotel room to help them clear out the mini-bar. They showed him a couple of pistols they had bought from local French soldiers, fired a half-a-dozen shots out of their seventh-floor window, and took the back legs off a dog.
Jed had many rare qualities, such as the ability to eat a balti chicken while standing on his head, but his only useful skill was that he could get as drunk as a legionnaire on leave but never forget his mission. They had all been going for eleven hours when the Geordie passed out while arm-wrestling the Russian, who fell asleep trying to help Jed learn the words to ‘Le Boudin’ (Jed, in exchange, taught the Russian ‘Agadoo’).
Jed stole a room key and a gun, and staggered off to Mahmoud’s hotel near Anse Vata beach, trying to sober himself up by taking deep breaths. He recognised the solid, bullet-headed man in the hotel restaurant and realised he had seen him around the Cross. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and a black suit that Jed called Zegna, but Jed wouldn’t know Zegna from Lowes. Jed bought a black coffee and watched Mahmoud eat steak washed down with burgundy. When he had finished his dinner, Jed followed him into the elevator and up to his room. As Mahmoud opened his door with his key pass, Jed jabbed the barrel of his pistol into his back. Mahmoud smashed him in the face with an elbow. Jed reeled, Mahmoud turned around and kicked him in the balls. At this point, two things happened: Jed realised how drunk he had been, and Jed sobered up. But by this time Mahmoud was holding Jed’s pistol in one hand and dragging Jed into his room with the other, while kicking him in the back of the neck.
Mahmoud shouted at Jed in French, which was like yelling in Latin at a cat, but when he shoved Jed onto his desk chair and pressed the pistol to his cheek, Jed was able to read his body language.
‘My name’s Jed,’ he said. ‘I’m a mate of Natural Science.’
Mahmoud hit him on the head with the handle of his gun.
This was the direct opposite of what Jed had hoped would happen. He had imagined Mahmoud sitting on a chair while Jed hit him on the head.
I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I had missed hearing Jed’s stories, which always went pretty much the same way: Jed makes plan, Jed fucks up plan, Jed takes a kicking.
‘Where is Natural Science?’ asked Mahmoud, stamping on Jed’s feet.
‘He’s dead,’ said Jed.
Mahmoud poked Jed in the neck with the gun, and that was the point when Jed realised it wasn’t loaded, since the legionnaires had wasted all their ammo on the dog. So Jed did a thing I had seen him do once before: he threw himself and his chair backwards onto the floor and kicked out like a donkey at his opponent’s knees.
They had a bit of a tussle, but Jed knew he was going to win because Mahmoud thought the important thing was to keep hold of the gun, whereas Jed realised it didn’t matter who had the gun. They grunted and pushed and twisted and punched, but Mahmoud could only use one hand whereas Jed had two. Jed eventually subdued him with the ‘Jedi Death Grip’, a move that was feared throughout our old regiment, particularly by men waiting in line for the showers with only a towel for protection.
Jed wrestled back the empty gun and pointed it at Mahmoud, and explained they both wanted the answer to the same question: what had happened to Natural Science. Mahmoud quickly became calm and tried to talk himself into a smaller target. He said he was just a nobody who ran an unimportant club that was owned by men from the same village as his father. He saw Natural Science as both a colleague and a friend, and when the chance came to save his life, he was glad to be able to help.
Mahmoud, like many others in the Cross, had become aware of a small Russian presence, whose intentions were unclear. The Russians had come to the Lebs and told them that Natural Science had disrespected one of their people by eating his nose, and they were going to knock him on the door of Mahmoud’s club. The Lebs knew they stood to inherit Natural once Mendoza was out of the way, and Natural was an asset to any security team, because he was not mad, weak or stupid, so they tried to bargain down the Russians and asked if they would let Natural Science live if they got him out of the country. The Russians agreed to grant him safe passage if he left immediately, and provided the Lebs did something for them in exchange. The Russians needed a bloke to go to New Caledonia for some sort of meet.
Mahmoud was the Lebs’ shitman, so they told him to close his club and sort things out. They suggested he buy Natural a ticket to Bangkok and send him to party with a bunch of Arabs and their whores in Pattaya for a month, until the Russians completed their business and went home. They also gave him the New Caledonia job.
Mahmoud didn’t want to go to Nouméa alone, especially when the big Lebs were so sketchy about what the Russians wanted him to do. He worried that his bosses might have promised his club to the Russians, and he was going to get knocked on the beach and fed to the sharks. He decided to take Natural Science with him as a bodyguard and leave him there for a while once his mission was over.
When Mahmoud got to Natural outside Ava’s, where Mendoza was telling me the bullshit story about Maltese bikers, he had the air tickets in his hand and a big advance to pay for his services, but Natural refused to leave the door until Dror came along and told him to disappear. Dror said he would personally look after Mendoza and explain to him what had happened. There was no need for Natural Science to contact Mendoza and, if he did, it might put them both in danger. Mahmoud and Natural Science flew out that evening and partied in Nouméa for a couple of nights, waiting for instructions that never came.
After a few days Mahmoud received an angry phone-call from one of the boss Lebs, who wanted to know what the fuck Natural Science was doing in New Caledonia. The big Leb said the Russians’ mission couldn’t possibly go ahead with Natural Science on the island, and Mahmoud should send him somewhere else immediately. He suggested Tahiti.
But Natural Science was bored. He missed the girls from the Magic Circle, didn’t like the French, and believed people would think he was a coward for running away, so he took the next plane back to Sydney, and that was the last Mahmoud had heard of him.
Jed told him how we’d had a tip-off and found Natural’s body, and Mahmoud broke down in tears. They hugged like brothers and apologised for trying to kill each other, then went back to the bar to drink to Natural Science’s memory.
The next morning Jed returned to the legionnaires’ hotel to give them back their gun. They were both still asleep, so they never knew it had gone. He woke them for breakfast, and they all went back to the bar for two days. Jed became their blood brother and an honorary member of the Foreign Legion, C18 and something called the Solntsevskaya bratva. On the fourth day the legionnaires realised their leave passes had nearly expired, leaving them only a short time to desert the Legion. It was a secret, said the Russian, but he would tell Jed: they had been offered jobs in Australia, working for a friend of his brother. The plan was there should be four of them, but the other two were stuck in a Legion prison. The Geordie and the Russian were supposed to pick up clean passports in Nouméa, but they had failed to meet their contact because they were always pissed.
When the Russian mentioned the name of their contact’s hotel, Jed realised they were supposed to meet Mahmoud. When he named his brother’s friend, he realised they were working for Dror.
So Jed came home.
‘And here I am,’ he said.
I asked Jed if he fancied a drink before he went back to his house. He said he fancied a drink before he woke up. I took him to the Hollywood Hotel, a pub in Surry Hills which was as similar to a Hollywood hotel as the New York restaurant was to a New York restaurant.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, mate. Helen’s moved back in with me.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Jed.
We knocked glasses.
‘Cheers.’
I made an appointment to meet Mendoza outside of our regular schedule. These days it was Dror who answered his phone and, unlike Lazarus, he said things like, ‘Mr Mendoza’s office, how can I help you?’
Mendoza said he had a busy day – although, from what I could tell, he didn’t actually do anything – and could only see me over dinner.
‘I hear you’ve got your woman back,’ he said. ‘That’s good news, Anthony. You were never going to get another one.’
I said nothing, just breathed heavily, like those obscene phone callers you don’t hear much about any more.
Mendoza suggested a table at a trattoria in Palmer Street, near the brothel he’d torched in 1972. He reserved a private room, where the walls were lined with cellared wines. The setting was decorated with flowers and candles and, when Helen arrived, he kissed her hand.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said. ‘You look beautiful.’
