King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  But you are a killer.

  And who are you? Fucking Perry Mason? I’ll bet you’ve knocked more blokes than I have.

  So what happened then between you and Sharon?

  What didn’t happen? I said she was as bad as the jacks. She said most people wouldn’t take that as an insult because in ordinary families it was the police who were held up as role models, rather than gangster hoons who ran strip clubs and slept with a loaded gun under their pillow. (She was already prone to journalists’ exaggeration. Yes, I had a shooter in the house, but I stored it in the bedside cabinet. If I’d kept it under the pillow, I would have blown my own ear off.) I said, ‘How dare you call me a hoon?’ She asked me what I would call it. I said I was a protector.

  She said she had learned about me in her university lectures, and she felt ashamed to be my daughter, and the only thing she could do about it was try to make up for some of the terrible things I’d done, and she was going to start by putting that poor woman to rest.

  For fuck’s sake! It wasn’t me that had the bitch knocked! Why wasn’t she running up to Willie Frankel’s place on a Saturday night and disturbing his dinner and asking him who paid to put Anita King under the tarmac?

  So she threw her napkin in my face, got into the car that I had bought her and drove to Bellevue Hill. She got herself invited in to Willie’s house because she was my daughter, and that still meant something in those days, and she threw her tape recorder on the table and said, ‘Uncle Willie, tell me the truth: were you behind the disappearance of Anita King?’

  I sent Lazarus to fetch her, and she tried to knee him in the balls, but he managed to bundle her into her own car and drove it back home just like he used to do when she was seventeen years old. She said she hated him, and he was a bastard, and it was probably him who’d knocked Anita, because he had no morals, he only did whatever I told him, and I had no morals, I only did whatever I could get away with, and we were both fascists.

  When Lazarus brought her back into the living room, she was so hysterical he had to tie her to a chair. ‘What’re you going to do now, Daddy?’ she screamed. ‘Slit my throat and chop me up and feed my body into a garbage-disposal unit?’

  Do you know how many times I’ve heard this shit, Anthony? Can you imagine how boring it is for me?

  She calmed down a bit, so Lazarus untied her. Then she said she had been kidnapped – just like Anita (they were on first-name terms now) and probably by the same people – and falsely imprisoned, and she was going to the jacks, and if the jacks wouldn’t help her, she would go to the press – which was a joke, because she was the fucking press.

  Her mother started howling like a car alarm and begged her to let it drop, and I said I was sorry for what she had made me do to her and asked if there was anything I could buy her to make up for it, but that just set her off again.

  ‘You can’t buy me!’ she screamed.

  I didn’t want to fucking buy her. I already owned her. I wanted to buy her a new bag, or something.

  She left in tears, saying she never wanted to see me again, but she has been stalking me ever since. If ever there is a pack of journalists outside one of my clubs, I know exactly who will be at the front, waving her microphone like fucking bolas, as if she could throw it and cut me down. Whenever they need a head to talk about things that are best forgotten in the Cross, my own lovely daughter opens her gorgeous mouth – full of pretty white teeth that I bought for her – and spews vomit over the good name of her father, who once loved her with all his soul, and whose heart almost burst with pride on the day she first called him ‘Daddy’ . . .

  Jake, are you all right?

  [Ends.]

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I refused to sit in on sessions with Mendoza if Dror was guarding the door, so Mendoza sent him off to Granville to find some Mutineers. I sat at home with the old man, both of us tooled up, while he knotted all the loose ends of his life. I was fairly sure he wasn’t fucking Siobhan – just because she’d sleep with a fifty year old didn’t mean she’d go with an eighty year old – but if he was I couldn’t complain: I had my girl back. I missed Siobhan, though. I missed her talk and her smile. And her tits.

  Mendoza was stuck on the idea of Victoria Street. If it hadn’t been for Anita King deliberately getting herself murdered to stir up publicity for her gutter newspaper, Mendoza’s reign might have lasted another ten years.

  ‘And look what happens when I loosen my grip,’ he said. ‘Chaos, fighting in the streets, heritage buildings wrecked . . . Can anyone truly say the Cross was not a safer place in the days of Jake Mendoza?’

  I listened to this kind of thing for hours and didn’t even bother to turn on the recorder. I figured he was talking to himself anyway. Then one day, when I said, ‘Come on, Jake, you were a gang boss, not a fucking pastor,’ he said, ‘I was a pastor to my flock, Anthony,’ and I suddenly realised he cared about what I thought of him.

  ‘You’re the only one who knows the whole story,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘What’s there to understand?’ I asked. ‘Like you said at the start, it’s not rocket science.’

  ‘Not rocket science, no,’ said Mendoza, ‘but it is progress.’

  He thumped down his coffee and stood up. ‘We’re going to Victoria Street,’ he said.

  He walked more hesitantly than before, and fewer faces seemed to recognise him on the street. People in the Cross were less willing to meet each other’s eyes since the killings. They were in more of hurry to get to where they were going. Only Mendoza lingered and remembered.

  We stood outside Victoria Spires, an ordinary apartment block in a street of terraced houses. ‘This is it,’ said Mendoza. ‘This was the dream. In Willie’s eyes, it would have been four times this size – forty storeys high – and flanked by a similar building on either side. New York had is twin towers, but Kings Cross would have had three. Do you see, Anthony? Do you see?

  ‘Victoria Spires was the first high-cost housing for decent people on Victoria Street. As it rose, it dragged up the entire area. Thirty years ago this was a slum. Now it’s the heart of the new Potts Point. Financial planners live here, Anthony! Estate agents! Bankers! Bond traders! Advertising executives! In 1975 there was Ham and Eggs, squatters, drunkards and Anita fucking King.

  ‘Look at this street! The comfortable homes! The beautiful trees! None of this would’ve been here without Willie and me.’ He paused. ‘Actually, the trees possibly grew before Victoria Spires,’ he admitted. ‘And there might’ve been more of them.’

  He started to shiver, although it wasn’t a cold day.

  ‘You can’t stand in the way of something like this, Anthony,’ he said. ‘You can’t hold back humanity. But that’s what government tries to do. Do you know why squareheads love gangsters? Because we give them what they want. We gave them booze. We gave them sex. Now we give them drugs. And as sure as it’s legal today to serve beer after 6 pm, to sell your body to a stranger, or for a man to engage in a vile parody of coitus with another man, you, Anthony, are going to live to see the day when you can buy your cocaine from a pharmacist – just as you could anywhere in Australia before 1925. I’m not saying the country will be a better or a worse place for it, only that it is inevitable.’

  He held his fists clenched and quivering at his thighs, determined to make me understand his point.

  ‘History was on my side. I reached out to embrace the future while others clung to the past. Of course, all the fighting and the fires were pointless, but if they hadn’t happened, everything good would still be illegal, and Australians would be unable to enjoy many of the freedoms we take for granted today, such as strippers without pasties, and twenty-four-hour drinking.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with Anita King?’ I asked.

  ‘Jesus, Anthony,’ he sighed. ‘Haven’t you listened to a single fucking word I’ve said?’

  I phoned Spiegeleier at his office and the girl who had taken my job told me he was i
n Joe’s Cafe. He stood outside, a cigarette stuffed too deeply into his mouth, his feet tapping the pavement while his fingers played on his thighs. I coaxed him back inside, although his feet seemed to be trying to shuffle out again.

  I wanted to ask him about Victoria Street.

  ‘Was I there?’ asked Spiegeleier. ‘I don’t know. I was a different person then.’

  ‘What were you like?’ I asked.

  ‘I believed my own bullshit,’ he said. ‘I thought that I was brave, because I’d stand in front of police horses at demonstrations and run towards the fighting. That’s not brave. It’s knowing you’re a journo and nobody wants to bash you. I was brave like cops are brave. A cop in uniform can knock out a man who wouldn’t even blink if he was punched by a police officer in civilian clothes. Sometimes your profession gives you the edge.’

  He took hold of a spoon and thwacked it against the table.

  ‘When they came for Anita King, it showed that even journos weren’t safe,’ he said. ‘Even heiresses weren’t safe. They were going to do whatever they wanted, to wreck the city and murder the residents, and nobody could stop them because they had paid everybody off. It’s funny, the squatters called themselves anarchists but the developers were the real anarchists. They didn’t believe in rules. They made their own laws. And they were going to get away with it.’

  He slit a packet of sugar and poured the powder into an empty coffee cup.

  ‘But I didn’t understand that at first,’ he said. ‘I thought, Those bastards have crossed the line. They killed a journo. Now the rest of us’ll make them pay. I got all the usual phone calls in the middle of night, from men who’d hang up or say one word, like ‘dog’ or ‘dead’, but I’d been taking those calls for five years and if they could scare me like that I would’ve just left the phone off the hook.

  ‘I snooped around the Cross, but I did it in plain sight, walking the strip with my notebook, interviewing anyone who would talk. I didn’t find much out, but the fact I was still asking questions disturbed the people who wanted to pretend there was no story because there was no body.’

  He took off his spectacles and looked through the lenses backwards.

  ‘I got called in to see Mendoza,’ he said, ‘sitting on his throne in his office. He was an impressive-looking man in those days. He was never big, but somehow he stood taller than everyone around him. He said, “I’m sorry to hear you journalists believe you’ve had a death in the family. I’d like to make a donation to the memorial fund.” And he offered me five hundred dollars to fuck off back to London.

  ‘I said I was staying until I found out who had killed Anita King. He told me ninety per cent of murders were domestic, and if she was dead – which he didn’t believe she was – she had probably been knocked by the leader of the crane-drivers union or the BLF official she had been fucking while he was out stopping his members from driving cranes.’

  He bit his own shirt collar.

  ‘Mendoza sent for me again. He said he wanted to do an interview, but it would be off the record. I came in with a set of questions, but it turned out he was going to interview me. He asked, “Why are you doing this to Willie Frankel? You’re both Jewish.” That surprised me, because I didn’t think of myself as Jewish in those days, I thought I was a socialist. Judaism was just an accident of birth. Socialism was what I’d chosen for myself, just as Frankel had chosen capitalism and murder.

  ‘Mendoza asked me what I thought the goyim would think of the Jewish people if I kept on printing gossip and speculation about Willie, who, like my own father, was a refugee from Nazi persecution, and had come to Australia only to be persecuted again by the press.’

  Spiegeleier spat out his shirt collar but started to undo the buttons around his belly.

  ‘Mendoza told me that some questions don’t have answers, such as what became of the dinosaurs and why are they not mentioned in the Bible. He told me journalists shouldn’t try to play God and insert a brontosaurus into the Garden of Eden, because even if that were more historically accurate, it would bring us no closer to understanding the miracle of creation. He said he respected my perseverance and offered me a job as the chief publicist of his music business, with special responsibility for an act he called the “Eastern Suburbs Frank Sinatra”. I said I’d think about it, but I couldn’t see there was much room to improve on the New Jersey Frank Sinatra. He said, “Imagine if Frank were Jewish.”

  ‘When I finally got out of his office, a man in the street punched me three times in the face, breaking first my glasses, then my nose. I lined up at the emergency ward at St Vinnie’s, thinking, I’ve got the bastards. Do you see? I still wasn’t scared.’

  Alarmingly Spiegeleier took off one shoe.

  ‘I worked with a photographer, Jack, who was as brave as a lion, or at least that’s what we told each other. He thought ex-cops were behind Anita’s disappearance, whereas I believed it was the psychotic Scotsman who – for whatever fucked-up reasons of his own – Mendoza has recently started referring to as “the Little Fish”. But in the end it didn’t really matter whose hand had held the pickaxe handle: it was the climate of corruption that Mendoza had created that made her murder possible. Willie Frankel was just a weak and stupid opportunist who took advantage of that.

  ‘So there I am walking down the strip with Jack, with a big white bandage across my nose just to ensure anyone could recognise me, and we’re suspecting everyone and everything, and linking the cops to the crims and pollies to the pros, and we’re thinking the worst thing the thugs are prepared to do is to hit us in the schnozzle, and that’s just an occupational hazard for hardened street fighters like us, when suddenly everything goes black and I’m choking and I’m falling, and I can hear Jack’s muffled shouting as we’re lifted off the pavement and thrown into the back of a car. There’s a bag over my head and they smash our skulls together, for a joke, and rebreak my nose. Then they tie my hands behind my back and the joke is one of them hits me in one place – like, say, my chin – while the other kicks me somewhere else – for example, my shin – so I never know how or where they’re going to hurt me next. It was terrifying. I was helpless, with a mouth full of blood, and I didn’t know who they were or where they were taking us or if anybody had told them when to stop. The only good thing I could think of was if they were going to kill us we’d be dead by now, but I knew even that wasn’t true because sometimes it takes a long time to kill somebody, especially if you haven’t got guns, and sometimes they want to do it slowly to make an example of you, and sometimes you just die because a beating gets out of hand, and Anita might have been killed while she struggled against being kidnapped, so what the fuck did I know about whether we’d be dead by now? If anything, they probably weren’t going to kill us in a car – they were going to take us somewhere and do it there. They pummelled my groin and I pissed myself, and I heard them laugh because Jack had done the same thing.

  ‘They drove us around in circles for a while, and I thought that was a good sign, because they didn’t want us to know where they were taking us, which meant they were going to let us go. The driver braked hard, so my face slammed into the seat in front, and they dragged us out of the car, pushed us through a door and threw us down some steps. While I was on the ground, they kicked me in the stomach and the face and I felt the life start to seep out of me, in the blood and the piss and the tears. I remember thinking, I wish I’d’ve had more women. Preferably at the same time. I made a joke to myself while I was dying, and for years I tried to take comfort from that, to convince myself that they hadn’t broken my spirit, but they had.

  ‘I said, “Please, please don’t. Please let me go.” Not even us, mate. Just “me”. And a voice said. “You wanted to know what happened to Anita King. How much more do you want to know?” And I said, “Nothing.” They said, “There’ll be no more fucking questions, then, cuntly?” And I said, “No. It’s over.”

  ‘After that, they beat us up a bit more, just for the fun of it. The
ir last kick burst my eardrum, and I haven’t been able to hear properly since. Then they pulled us up the stairs and untied our hands. They marched us out of the building and shoved our faces against a brick wall while they took the hoods off our heads. I heard a pistol click, and they told us to look straight ahead for five minutes, and if we turned away from the wall, we were dead.

  ‘Jack collapsed, but I counted to five hundred before I bent down to help him. I didn’t have far to carry him to the hospital. They’d left us outside the back door of Kings Cross police station, and I could see my blood smeared on the door handle.’

  He took a sip of his coffee and dribbled it down his open shirt onto his chest.

  ‘I resigned my job that day,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have the stomach to be a journo, if that was what it involved. I went drinking for five years. I was in the Matthew Talbot, sitting in my own soiled pants, when a volunteer found out I was Jewish and sent around someone from a Jewish care organisation to pick me up. They dried me out and put me back together but, even when I was whole again, I had all these tics, like I can’t stop raising my glasses or pulling on my nose or stroking my head or pursing my lips, and I’m still not continent, Tony. I have to wear a nappy.’

  ‘My name’s Nick,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, so I heard,’ said Spiegeleier. ‘My name’s Daniel Eggs.’

  He said he had been born Spiegeleier but had anglicised his name – which means ‘fried eggs’ in German – when he turned eighteen. He wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, and he thought eggs would make a better by-line. When he recovered from his sickness, he reclaimed his name and briefly joined the Hasidim, waddling up and down Bondi Road in a loose black suit and a Borsellino hat. It wasn’t until the nineties that he felt strong enough to go back to journalism. He started on the Jewish Times as a junior reporter, at forty-five years old, but quickly became the editor. It was a political position, he said. It was about pleasing all of the community all of the time. But the stories were simple and colourful and sometimes life-affirming, and the phone never rang in the middle of the night, and nobody had ever tried to warn him off a story until I stepped into his office and brought all the helplessness and terror back into his life.