by Mark Dapin
Well, I . . .
Take the tape out of his machine, Lazarus. Smash it, unwind it, and make him eat it.
He can wash it down with Vitto’s fucking dishwater coffee, which cost me three dollars fifty and he hasn’t even touched a fucking drop.
[Ends.]
TWO
It took me ten minutes to walk from Mendoza’s Potts Point apartment, through Kings Cross, to the Times office in Darlinghurst. By the time I arrived, Spiegeleier had already taken Mendoza’s call. He was sitting at his desk, rubbing his head with his stubby fingers. He didn’t look up when I entered, but started to speak anyway, as if he were talking to his tie.
‘I was always concerned that you might be overqualified for this job, Tony,’ he said. ‘Now I have an additional worry,’ he paused to tap his pen, ‘that you are a fucking idiot.’
He took off his spectacles and laid them on his desk. They stared at me through empty eyes.
‘This isn’t the Sunday fucking Times,’ said Spiegeleier. ‘It isn’t even the Belfast Telegraph. We practise a different kind of journalism here.’
On the walls around the office hung mounted copies of Jewish Times front pages, with headlines such as YESHIVA BOYS VISIT ISRAEL and IT’S OFFICIAL! MELBOURNE HAS BEST BAGELS. Spiegeleier picked a page proof from his desk and wiped his weeping nose across a photograph of the Women’s International zionist Organisation.
‘We wanted to sell him some advertising, Tony.’
I said I was sorry, but Spiegeleier kept doing things with his nose and his glasses and his head.
‘What did you get anyway?’ he asked me.
‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘He made me eat the tape.’
‘You’d better watch you don’t get tapeworm,’ said Spiegeleier. He frowned at his joke. ‘Jesus Christ, Tony, Mendoza’s an influential voice in the community. He could get Shabbos moved to Wednesday.’
‘He’s a gangster,’ I said.
‘So who are you?’ asked Spiegeleier. ‘Eliot Ness?’
His desk phone chirped. He answered brusquely, and listened without comment.
‘That was the publisher,’ he said as he put down the receiver.
I turned up my palms.
‘Tell me,’ said Spiegeleier, ‘did you eat the protective plastic shell, or just the magnetically coated tape?’
I guessed it wasn’t a real question.
‘Let me take you for a drink,’ he said.
Spiegeleier initialled a pile of proofs and transferred them from his in-tray to his out-tray. He squeezed his feet into his soft shoes and stood up with a splutter and a sigh. I checked my email while I waited for him to arrange his glasses on his nose. He led the way down the corridor, past a map of Jerusalem and a poster advertising holidays in Eilat, dragging his left leg behind him.
Spiegeleier limped downstairs and past the Jewish War Memorial room, where twin marble slabs remembered the names of servicemen from two world wars. An arch above the tablets carried the words Your youngest and strongest shall die by the sword and among the Goldbergs, Berkovitzes and Steins was a cluster of Kleins.
We signed out with the security guard as we left the building. He was fat, young and unsmiling, and Spiegeleier believed he was an anti-Semite because he wore a uniform and carried a gun.
‘It must’ve been hard,’ said Spiegeleier, ‘being the only Jewish boy on the Belfast Telegraph.’
‘Nobody in Belfast was interested in killing Jews,’ I said.
‘Makes a nice change,’ said Spiegeleier.
On the steps outside, he lit a Winfield Blue and noisily sucked the reassurance out of it as he shambled down Darlinghurst Road towards the Coca-Cola sign, with his shirt front poking out of his fly.
‘You think you know Kings Cross,’ he said to me, ‘because you think you live here. But you don’t. Home is where your head is.’ He flapped a hand towards a pavement-surfing junkie. ‘She lives in Kings Cross. You still live in London.
‘Do you know why she’s swaying? It’s because she’s in tune with the undercurrents. She can sense the ground moving beneath her.’
‘You mean the trains?’
‘No, Tony,’ said Spiegeleier. ‘I mean the metaphors. She is being metaphorically unbalanced by metaphorically invisible forces. So are you. It’s just that you can’t feel them.’
I followed him down William Street, the highway to the city. He stopped at the corner of Lower Bourke. ‘This is where you’ll find the girls who fuck in car parks and cars,’ he said. ‘Across the road, at upper Bourke, it’s all Asian ladyboys. If you’re looking for a white transsexual – although I don’t suppose you are – they hold the corner of Lower Forbes, with the Islanders.
‘Other girls work in Liverpool Street, on Oxford Street and Victoria Street, all the way down to Yurong Street. At the end of Talbot Lane, there’s safe houses for girls who need somewhere dry and quiet to take a mug. Ten years ago, rent boys stood like parking meters along the wall, just south of our offices, one boy to every car. But the drivers were bashing them and one team was standing over the rest, and now you might see half-a-dozen at the weekend, come in from the bush to earn a bit of drug money.
‘The rent boys might have addresses in Bathurst or Parkes or Mount Druitt,’ said Spiegeleier, ‘but they live,’ he tapped his temples, ‘in the Cross.’
‘What’s your point?’ I asked him.
‘My point, Tony, is this is the Darlinghurst that Mendoza made. All these miserable men with tits and dicks, who sell their arses for heroin, sleep in the house that Jake built. People in the Jewish community don’t realise that. They don’t come around here, they don’t see the devastation. To them, Mendoza’s just the man who can get Johnny Farnham for their son’s bar mitzvah. That old crook’s the most popular uncle in Woollahra. You know why? Because chartered accountants like to introduce him as their kid’s godfather. It makes me sick.’
He headed back up the hill towards the Cross. It was late afternoon, light and bright, and the smackheads were wearing sunglasses.
‘Do you know the Southern Star Bar?’ asked Spiegeleier. ‘It’s one of Mendoza’s hotels.’
I had seen the pub, lodged between a gift shop and a bondage boutique, but never thought to have a drink there. With platinum fittings and laser lights, it looked like it was meant for younger people, or maybe astronauts.
‘I didn’t find it under Mendoza’s name on the land-title search,’ I said.
‘He did a land-title search for a story about a synagogue donation,’ said Spiegeleier to his god.
Spiegeleier tugged on his earlobe, and stepped in a puddle of kebab meat and salad.
‘The Southern Star Bar is owned by Southern Magen Holdings,’ he told me, ‘which is a subsidiary of Patton Hospitality which leases the building from Rosenblatt & Grandson, which is owned by Patton Hospitality which is managed by Amy Monk, who is a proxy for Mendoza. He rents out the building to himself. Patton Hospitality is the semi-legitimate arm of Mendoza’s empire.’ Spiegeleier talked quickly, as he veered around the pavement, looking at everything but me.
‘There’re nine strip joints on Darlinghurst Road between the El Alamein Fountain and the Coca-Cola sign,’ said Spiegeleier. ‘Mendoza owns six. He leases them to brothel keepers, who sublet one level to a lap-dancing bar and another to a porn shop, and run girls from the upper storeys. A lap dancer might pick up a mug in the bar and take him to a room, but that’s a transaction between two businesses – three, if she stops to pick up condoms and lube from the shop – and nothing to do with Jake Mendoza.
‘It never used to be like that,’ said Spiegeleier, wiping sweat from his forehead with his shirt cuff. ‘up until the eighties, Mendoza ran the clubs directly, but he got tired of all the royal commissions and paying off the crooked cops, so he franchised out his operation.’
Spiegeleier’s bald head looked like a ball of sweating cheese by the time we reached the Southern Star. His spectacles wobbled excitedly on the bridge of his nose. A Maori door
man with a head like a boulder stood aside to let us into the bar. Spiegeleier panted and pushed his way through a loose, yielding crowd.
‘Look, Tony,’ he said, ‘I admire you. You remind me a lot of myself when I was younger, although I was better looking. We all start out wanting to be Woodward and Bernstein, but we all end up as Spiegeleier and Klein.
‘I admire your integrity, your ambition and your talent. I even admire your misguided support for the Palestinian cause.’
Spiegeleier rested an elbow on the bar and asked what I’d like to drink.
‘Pint of lager,’ I said automatically.
‘You won’t get a pint in here, Dick Whittington,’ said Spiegeleier.
‘A schooner, then,’ I said, although I hated the word.
‘Me,’ said Spiegeleier, ‘I never drink.’
He ordered himself an orange juice, carefully studied the arc of the barmaid’s breasts, squelched an eyelid with his fist, patted down an imaginary hair on his head, tapped his foot, scratched his nose and took a big gulp from his glass.
‘Cheers,’ he said, smearing a bright stain across his lip. ‘You’re fired.’
Spiegeleier waited in the bar while I drank a couple of beers, and I was grateful for that, then he shook my hand and said he hoped we would meet again under different circumstances; ie, with him not firing me.
The beer was swishing around my stomach like water in a washing machine, because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, except for a micro-cassette tape. I got talking to a South African sitting alone at the bar. I couldn’t tell if he was a good South African who had left because of apartheid, or a bad South African who had left because of Mandela. He could see where my questions were leading and tried to change the subject to rugby, which is a sport played by cunts.
Finally, I came out and asked him.
‘Are you a cunt?’ I said.
He picked up his brandy and Coke and moved to a table at the far end of the room, leaving me mumbling the things I wanted to say to death’s-head Mendoza and that idiot Lazarus. Silly old bastards, playing at being gangsters when they ought to be playing bingo. The Aussie Mafia? I’ve shit ’em.
Back on Darlinghurst Road, the sun was still shining. I was sick of the sun always shining, as if there was no such thing as weather. I had lost my job. It should be raining. It would be raining at home. I missed England in the soft light at dusk, with its chills and drizzles and evenings when you could watch your breath rise like cigarette smoke in the cold air. I was tired of Kings Cross, whether I ‘lived’ in it or not. You call this Kings Cross? I’ll show you a real Kings Cross, where you can get stabbed just for staring, or kicked into hospital for knocking over a drink. I’d had enough of Australia, where you can’t buy a pint or a balti and the chocolate tastes like paste. I’d been here nine months and nothing had gone right. I thought I could start again, but maybe there are no second chances, maybe shit sticks no matter how hard you scrub and you might just as well try to rinse off a tattoo.
The spruikers had started work outside the strip clubs, fatfisted men in tuxedos, trying to scoop up the football teams and stag parties and bowl them into the lap-dancing bars. A junkie outside McDonald’s asked me for two dollars for a cup of coffee. Across the road, a couple of big bearded men from the Cannibals MC were guarding their choppers outside the Ink tattoo studio. I nearly crashed shoulders with a lovely European girl with a caramel tan and glossy pink lips. A Japanese tourist asked me to take her picture, and I wondered what it must be like to be Japanese, travelling all around the world dressed for a game of golf.
I reached my apartment block but couldn’t find my keys. I buzzed Helen on the intercom. She said my keys were in my pocket, and she was right. A junkie tried to walk in behind me, but I elbowed him away. The lift was out of order, so I climbed two flights of stairs. I spent so long trying to line up my key with the lock that Helen came to open the door for me.
‘I’ve been sacked,’ I told her.
I fell onto the couch and stared at her. She looked shopsoiled and shameless, still in her pink dressing-gown at 7 pm.
‘Haven’t you even got up yet?’ I asked her.
‘Of course I’ve got up,’ she said. ‘I’m up now, aren’t I?’
‘Have we got any beer in the fridge?’
‘We’ve got half a carton of semi-skimmed milk that you bought when I asked you to get skimmed,’ said Helen, ‘and a piece of cheese that’s gone dry because you didn’t wrap it up properly. There’s half a jar of strawberry jam that’s gone mouldy because you never put the lid back on, and a takeaway tub of Thai sweet chilli sauce with two tiny bits of chicken floating inside, like bacteria. There’s also a box of chardonnay, because you put it back in there when it was empty.’
Her breasts trembled angrily inside her dressing-gown.
‘Spiegeleier said he’d pay me until the end of the week,’ I said.
‘Jesus,’ said Helen.
‘I’ve only been there a fortnight. I haven’t written a single story. He didn’t have to give me anything.’
Helen shook her head and went to open the cupboard over the stove top. She had to stand on tiptoes to reach it, and the fringe of her robe rode up to her hips. She pushed aside a box of pasta and a bag of rice and scrabbled around among the loose onions until she found what she was looking for.
She emptied out her handbag on the kitchen bench, pulled out her compact, opened it, racked up two fat white lines, rolled a plastic five-dollar bill into a funnel and passed the whole kit across to me.
‘Get that up your Jewish nose,’ she said, and – just for a moment – I was in love with her again.
THREE
Two weeks later it was another pointlessly sunny morning and I’d had enough of everything. I left Helen snoring lightly and went out to get a paper. I was trying to decide whether to buy it or steal it from the library, when I saw Mendoza sunning his charcoal Armani suit, drinking coffee at a table outside La Fontaine, the cafe that overlooked the El Alamein Fountain.
‘Anthony!’ he called.
I waved vaguely, and walked on. He beckoned Lazarus from the table behind and sent him lurching after me.
Lazarus was tall and wide with long, thick arms. His nose had been pounded back into his head and his brows beaten over his eye sockets, almost closing his eyes. He must have been at least sixty-five years old. I let him catch up with me alongside a white Telstra transit van.
‘The old man wants to buy you a coffee,’ he said.
‘Forget it,’ I said.
Lazarus blinked, and blocked my path with a raised hand. I sidestepped and he followed, as if we were line-dancing. He grabbed my shirt and I pitched myself forward, smashing my shoulder against the side of the transit van. From Mendoza’s distance, it would have looked as though Lazarus had pushed me. I dropped my head and hit the van for a second time, butting it so hard I made a dent in the bodywork.
‘There’s no need to kill him!’ shouted Mendoza, and Lazarus, puzzled, let me go.
‘You’re a big man,’ I told him, ‘but you’re out of shape.’
We walked back to Mendoza’s table, where the old man handed me a napkin to dab the cut on my forehead.
‘Sit down,’ he told me. ‘It’s no use trying to fight Lazarus. He’s the best there is.’
Mendoza filled his suit like a skeleton. A gold Rolex hung loosely from his left wrist, and a Star of David signet ring weighed on his right hand. He was polished and shaved, massaged and trimmed, manicured, perfumed and tanned, and almost dead.
‘So, Anthony,’ said Mendoza, ‘what are you doing with yourself these days?’
‘Get fucked,’ I said.
Mendoza arched an eyebrow.
‘I didn’t tell your employer to fire you,’ said Mendoza.
‘Well, they did fire me,’ I said.
An oval-faced waitress came over, with soft white down on her thin brown arms. Mendoza asked her for a flat white and a cappuccino. She silently spelled out the wo
rds as she jotted them on her pad. He smiled slyly, as if he’d passed her a message in code.
A moist and panting flabby man, with sagging arms and cheeks like rump steaks, noticed me from the pavement and shuffle-jogged over to our table.
‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘What happened to my story? You said it would be in the paper this week.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said carefully.
‘You’re from the Catholic Herald,’ he said.
‘Sorry, mate,’ I said, ‘you’ve got me mixed up.’
‘Anthony worked on the Jewish Times,’ said Mendoza, like a proud mother.
‘I wouldn’t be talking about my business to the Jew Times,’ said the flabby man.
Mendoza cocked his head.
‘I make christening wear,’ said the flabby man.
‘Good business?’ asked Mendoza.
The flabby man shrugged. ‘Everyone born’s got to have a name,’ he said. ‘When’s my story going in?’
‘You’ll have a struggle getting it into the Jewish Times,’ said Mendoza.
‘I don’t get the Jewboy jokes,’ said the flabby man. ‘What am I missing?’
‘Manners,’ said Mendoza.
The flabby man stared at him. Lazarus stared back.
‘You can leave now,’ said Mendoza.
The flabby man experimented with looking insulted and angry but settled for puzzled and misunderstood. He waddled off down Darlinghurst Road, glancing in the windows of the kebab shops and cafes. When he thought we couldn’t see him, he crossed the road and doubled back to a sex shop.
Mendoza held out his hand and Lazarus passed him his phone. He rang a number on speed dial, and said, ‘Hello, Dennis? You’ve got a sweaty white maggot coming down in about five seconds. Blue shorts, red nose . . . Yeah, that’s him. Whatever he tries to buy, switch the disc with My Girlfriend’s Got A Cock, eh?’
Mendoza passed the phone back to Lazarus, who laid it on the tabletop and smirked.
‘Mr Fathead moves from one unusual misunderstanding to the next,’ he said.