King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  The waitress brought over my flat white. This time I remembered to look at her face. She had auburn eyes and ochre hair, dark pink lips and creamy tanned skin. She smiled when she put down my cup, and her sandalwood perfume blended with the scent of coffee. It smelled like breakfast after sex.

  Another man came to our table, wearing a linen jacket and a pork-pie hat. Mendoza rose to shake his hand, and they spoke quietly in a foreign language, before the visitor scuttled away.

  Mendoza’s mobile phone buzzed. Lazarus picked it up and passed it to Mendoza. The old man pressed it hard against his ear and turned his head away from me.

  ‘No,’ he said, sadly. ‘I didn’t know. How many men do you need?’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve only got Lazarus, and he’s no good for that.’

  He covered his phone with a liver-spotted hand. ‘Anthony,’ he said, ‘I’m going to need you for the morning.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘He’s in,’ said Mendoza. ‘We’ll be over there in twenty minutes.’

  I stood to leave. Lazarus stood to stop me. Mendoza grabbed my wrist.

  ‘You’ll want to see this, Anthony,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  I guess I still thought I might get the story. I didn’t want to talk to Helen, and I had nothing else to do, so when Mendoza sent Lazarus to fetch his car, I swept my wallet and keys into my pocket and followed the old man to the kerb.

  Lazarus pulled up at the fountain in a black Rolls Royce Corniche with the numberplate Big 1, and held open the door until Mendoza and I climbed into the back seat.

  ‘Botany,’ said Mendoza to Lazarus.

  We cruised through the Cross with the roof down and the sun shining. Hookers and waiters whistled and waved. Mendoza acknowledged them with a brief, tight smile.

  ‘You like the waitress,’ he said to me as we turned into William Street, past shabby car dealers and a tired gym-equipment showroom. ‘I can get her for you. It’s what I do. I find out what people want, then I find somebody who has it, then I bring the two of them together.’

  ‘I don’t need your help,’ I told him.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘You have a girlfriend, after all.’

  Lazarus closed the roof as we went into the tunnel.

  ‘What language were you speaking to the bloke in the hat?’ I asked Mendoza.

  ‘Yiddish,’ said Mendoza. ‘Just Yiddish.’

  Mendoza imagined dust on his lapels, and brushed it away with his fingers. ‘That was Eddie Finkel,’ he told me. ‘“Slow Eddie”, we used to call him. Not that he was slow – although he has lost a bit of speed since he put on weight – but there used to be a lot of “Fast Eddies” around, and it just didn’t seem right for him. It worked out okay. People always thought he must be a bit retarded, so they underestimated him. He learned how to make use of that, and turned an obstacle into an asset. Did you ever have a nickname, Anthony?’

  ‘“Slick”,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s an unusual nickname for an “Anthony”,’ he said. ‘Normally, it’s “Slick Nick” or “Slick Rick”.’

  ‘I used to wear a lot of hair gel,’ I explained.

  ‘There are worse names to live with than “Mr Big”,’ said Mendoza, ‘Slick.’

  Lazarus crossed himself as we drove past the walls and towers of Long Bay Jail, then followed Anzac Parade towards Botany Cemetery. He parked the Corniche in a space marked Ministers only outside the funeral chapel complex. The buildings looked like the bone house at Verdun, bleached to cream in the Pacific sun.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a kippa on you, Anthony,’ said Mendoza. ‘At my age, you learn to carry one always.’

  He took an embroidered skullcap from his pocket, and Lazarus gave me a plain kippa from the glove compartment. We arranged them on our heads – Mendoza to cover his bald patch – and stepped out of the car. Lazarus lent me his black sports coat, which sat sternly on my pink polo shirt like a police officer wrestling down a drunk. When I fastened the buttons, something small and hard, like a hipflask, dug into my chest.

  Seven men and one woman were waiting below the stained-glass windows of the west chapel. With them stood the rabbi, a young man with an old man’s beard.

  ‘Ah,’ said the rabbi, ‘a minyan. Plus one.’

  ‘Lazarus is a goy,’ said Mendoza. ‘Only Anthony here is a haimisher Yid.’

  We needed a quorum of ten Jewish men to pray at the funeral. The rabbi shook my hand as Mendoza exchanged quiet greetings with claw-fingered turtles in well-worn suits.

  ‘They’re from the chevra kadisha burial society,’ Mendoza told me. ‘This is their idea of a day out.’

  ‘Whose funeral is it?’ I asked.

  ‘They called him “Mad Dog”,’ said Mendoza. ‘Or, rather, I called him that.’

  ‘Mad Dog McCoy was Jewish?’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ said Mendoza. ‘I thought research was supposed to be your thing – lifting the veil, looking beyond the obvious and so on.’

  We filed into the chapel and filled only the first two pews.

  ‘That’s the thing about nicknames, Slick,’ said Mendoza. ‘They’re largely alliterative or rhyming or traditional. A McCoy who showed signs of violent insanity might reasonably expect to be known as “Mad Dog”, whereas a Klein who began foaming at the mouth would more likely be called “Crazy”, or even “Killer”. I knew a “Killer Klein” once. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. That brings us to our fourth category of nickname: ironic.

  ‘There is also a fifth kind, which I would describe as “redundant”. For example, I have patronised the same tailor ever since the war: Solomon Solomons, known as “Solly the Yid”. The problem here is that the nickname adds no new information.’

  ‘You’ve studied this,’ I said.

  ‘Nicknames and aliases are an important part of life,’ said Mendoza. ‘A man may have one name to his wife, another to his girlfriend and yet another to the jacks.’

  Mendoza was interrupted by a short man, built like a giant, who tapped him on the shoulder from the seat behind. They bumped fists like rappers, and their signet rings rang as they clashed.

  ‘Beware of men who have no nickname,’ Mendoza told me. ‘This is Dror – just “Dror” – my head of security.’

  ‘G’day, mate,’ said Dror, like a Queenslander. When he pushed his Ray Bans onto his head, I saw he even had the sunshine squint. His lime-green eyes reminded me of the boys in Aldershot who used to play chicken with trains and grew up to have their faces slashed with Stanley knives and their noses broken by bricks.

  ‘Anthony’s a journalist,’ Mendoza explained, ‘but he’s here today to do his duty as a Jew.’

  The rabbi paced slowly to the podium, took his place in front of the draped curtains, and looked out into the large empty room. He wore a black skullcap like a hanging judge, a banded prayer shawl and a shirt buttoned up to his throat. He named the dead man as Moshe Maizel.

  ‘Moshe will be remembered as a memorable character by everyone who met him,’ said the rabbi. ‘I myself only came to know him in the last days of his life, but I do know he had a lot of friends,’ the rabbi looked around the silent hall, ‘not all of whom could be here today.

  ‘He was the first to admit that he wasn’t an educated man. He told me he was schooled at “the bluestone college”, by which he meant the university of life.’

  Mendoza shook his head.

  ‘He was not religious in the usual sense,’ said the rabbi, ‘but he told me he had lived by a code, and he’d never once violated that code. How many of us can say that? That we stayed true to our beliefs, without wavering or flinching, until the end of our days?

  ‘Moshe is survived by a wife and a daughter, and he will live on in their hearts forever. They tell me he was a wonderful husband and a model father.’

  Mendoza sniggered. He was the oldest person I have ever heard snigger.

  ‘After Moshe was discharged from the military in 1946,’ said the rabbi, ‘he had a long and varied ca
reer in many different businesses. He was always modest about his professional achievements, but he was a success at everything to which he turned his hand, and he will be deeply missed, both here in Australia and in his second home in Central Luzon.’

  The rabbi hung his head. Mendoza hissed an instruction to Lazarus, who murmured to the rabbi, who beckoned to Mendoza to take his place. Mendoza gripped the lectern with both hands, and spoke with sadness.

  ‘I didn’t know Moshe had passed until thirty minutes ago,’ said Mendoza, ‘so I haven’t had time to write a speech, but Moshe was one of my best friends. I’ve known him since high school. In that time, we have, of course, had our disagreements, but he never once lost my respect or my love. In a blue, he was worth ten blokes. I have so many great memories of Moshe, and I’d like to share just one of them with Moshe’s friends . . .’ he looked around him, ‘. . . and, of course, his beautiful wife, Cecilia Preciosa Bong Bong McCoy.’

  Cecilia looked to be in her mid-twenties, but her face was obscured by a giant pair of sunglasses.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell true stories about Moshe because, often, the other participants are still alive.’ Mendoza thought for a moment. ‘Although, often, they’re not. Even if, at the start of the story, they were.’

  Dror nodded and tapped his foot.

  ‘Anyway, this happened in 1959, when Izzy Berger and I brought Frank Sinatra to Australia – although what Izzy had to do with it, other than get his name in the paper, I’ll never understand – and Frank was having a party after the show in the old Patton Lounge in Kings Cross. Technically, I think, the address today would be Potts Point.

  ‘So Moshe is working the door for me, and every moll in Sydney is trying to squeeze in through the gaps, when up walks a shiksa who’s stacked like a cruise ship. I mean, she’s got balconies on her. She’s the sweetest thing Moshe’s ever seen – except, he later told me, his lovely wife, Cecilia Preciosa Bong Bong – and she’s rubbing herself against him, whispering into his cauliflower ear, “If you’ll introduce me to Frank, I’ll do anything you want for a shilling.” “Are you any good on your knees?” asks Moshe. “I’ve never had any complaints,” says the shiksa. “Okay,” says Moshe, “I’ve got three very short words for you: pave my yard.” ’

  Dror, Cecilia and I laughed. The men from the burial society set their faces like tombstones, and Mendoza stepped down from the podium.

  ‘The widow is Jewish by association only,’ Mendoza whispered. ‘He met her in the Philippines.’ He coughed into his fist.

  The pallbearers carried the coffin into the graveyard, where the Jewish section was hemmed in on three sides by Greek icons and angels. The flatbed graves were crowded together and there was barely room to stand between the rows of headstones. Most were engraved in English and Hebrew, but there were those inscribed in Russian, cut from black marble and shining like dark stars, etched with pictures of young men in their Red Army uniforms. They died at eighty years old in Sydney but were remembered as twenty year olds in Moscow, proud and frightened, ready to go to war. Lazarus walked among the Russians, pausing to look into each set of bullet-hole eyes.

  On the rise of the hill, looking out at the container ships moored off Port Botany, we swayed and prayed as Moshe Maizel aka Mad Dog McCoy was lowered into a fresh hole, and we took our turns to shower the casket with a shovel load of dirt.

  Mendoza drew a deep, trembling breath, and wiped his eyes with his silk handkerchief.

  ‘He was the last one,’ the old man told me, ‘and now there’s no one left but me.’

  FOUR

  A mourner with a nose that hung like a hound’s ear touched Mendoza lightly on the shoulder and asked, ‘Will there be sandwiches, Jake?’

  ‘Salt beef like they serve in heaven,’ he promised.

  The old men split off into two small circles, comparing Moshe’s funeral with other recent events, such as Fritzy Lieberman’s stone-laying ceremony and the Jewish ex-servicemen’s Anzac Day march.

  ‘In this world of maggots and dogs,’ Mendoza said to me, ‘a bloke who’s staunch is more valuable than pearls. And Moshe was solid as a rock. He wouldn’t let his mother into his house without a warrant.’

  Cecilia danced between the knots of men, accepting their condolences and inviting them back to her home. As she reached Mendoza he wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her towards him. He rested his hand below her ribcage, like a tango partner.

  ‘I wasn’t there for Moshe at the end,’ Mendoza told her, ‘and for that I will never forgive myself.’

  ‘He spoke about you often,’ said Cecilia, smiling sadly, ‘and all the things you used to do when you were young. They were golden days for Moshe. He never forgot them.’

  ‘I know he was never happier than when he met you,’ said Mendoza. ‘You were the light at the end of his path.’ Cecilia let a tear drip out from under her sunglasses.

  ‘He was a lovely man,’ she said. ‘I’ll miss him so much.’

  ‘We’ll all miss him,’ said Mendoza, ‘even those like Anthony here, who never actually met him. But what makes me fucking sick – and please pardon my use of language that was alien to you during your employment in Angeles City – is all the low dogs who didn’t turn up today. Moshe was a true mensch. He’d help anybody – pollie or punter, junkie or judge – and now they’re all too busy to see off a man with a heart as big as WA and, I’ve heard it said, a shlong to match.

  ‘Where, for instance, is Hymie the Bookie?’ Mendoza demanded of everyone at the funeral.

  ‘Dead,’ said a mourner. ‘Five hundred turned up for that one.’

  ‘Such sandwiches,’ remembered another.

  ‘All right, so why can’t Freddy Freed be here? Or Plastic Sam? Or the Human Dartboard?’

  ‘Freddy’s buried over there,’ said a mourner, pointing.

  A man with short legs and a large head stepped out of his circle. ‘There were two men known as “the Human Dartboard”,’ he said. ‘The goy overdosed on heroin in 1986; the Yid was run over by a cement truck. Plastic Sam passed away in August.’

  Mendoza examined him intensely, as if surprised that small people could speak. ‘It’s a talking book,’ he said. ‘The Yiddisher Book of the Dead.’

  We drifted back to the car park. Mendoza offered the rabbi a ride.

  ‘It would be an honour,’ said the rabbi. ‘Tell me: this woman who laid the paving in Moshe’s yard – did she do a good job?’

  Most of the old men drove Volvos. Cecilia had a Volkswagen Beetle which, in her sunglasses, she slightly resembled. Parked two spaces behind the Corniche was a white gravediggers’ transit van.

  Mad Dog McCoy lived the last years of his life in a two-bedroom unit in Maroubra, where nobody knew him as either Moshe or Mad Dog. The neighbours called him ‘Muscles’ because he kept a dumbbell and bench on the balcony and lifted weights every morning until his eightieth birthday. He gave up, he told them, to leave him more energy to make love to Cecilia.

  We were met at the door by Cecilia’s mother, Gloria, who had flown over from Luzon when Moshe fell ill, and Moshe’s three-year-old daughter, Maria Graciela Rivka.

  Mendoza looked over at the table of sandwiches and cakes that Gloria had prepared, and sent Lazarus to Bondi to pick up pastrami and a dozen bagels.

  ‘It’s the custom to serve round food,’ Mendoza explained to Gloria.

  I sat with Dror on Moshe’s bench on the balcony. In the distance, over red rooftops, we could see the ocean.

  ‘I used to want to be a journo,’ said Dror, ‘but I couldn’t spell. So I joined the military instead.’

  ‘The Australian army?’ I asked.

  ‘The Australian army, the Israeli army, the Russian army,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same.’

  ‘And now you’re in Mendoza’s army,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re a journalist,’ he said.

  We both looked out to sea.

  Lazarus called us inside for a glass of Johnny Walker. The old men from the
chevra kadisha each ate one salt-beef bagel and drank a cup of tea, then continued their journeys back to Dover Heights and Vaucluse. Mendoza played peek-a-boo with Maria Graciela Rivka, but he was watching Cecilia all the time.

  ‘I would like to do something for you,’ he said to Cecilia, and wrote her a cheque for the funeral. ‘Please accept this gift from a friend who considered himself a brother to Moshe,’ he said, ‘and, by extension, a brother-in-law to you.’

  Cecilia kissed him on the cheek.

  The rabbi said it was a pity there were not more men like Mendoza, who were prepared to share the fruits of their labour with the rest of the community. He told me Mendoza was highly regarded, and I should be proud to call him my boss, then he asked for a lift back to Maroubra Synagogue. He had another funeral in the afternoon, but the whisky had made him woozy and he hoped to take a nap before lunch. Mendoza hurried to leave. He hugged Cecilia and had Lazarus give her his card.

  On the drive down Anzac Parade, Mendoza said, ‘Does the Philippines have one of those cultures where the brother-in-law inherits the widow, I wonder.’

  We dropped the rabbi off, leaving Mendoza as the holiest person in the car.

  ‘Now,’ he said to me, ‘you have seen the real Jake Mendoza: a valued and valuable member of the community; a busy man who is willing to drop everything to attend to his religious obligations; a tough man, who is not above shedding a tear at the memory of an old friend and is, in fact, happy to pay for the funeral and a reasonable quantity of refreshments; a confidant of widows and rabbis; a comfort to children . . . Why don’t you write a story about that?’

  ‘Because I don’t work for a newspaper any more,’ I told him. ‘You lost me my job.’

  ‘I could get it back for you,’ said Mendoza. ‘It would only take one phone call.’

  I ignored him.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Spiegeleier,’ he said. ‘He tells me you’ve got a reputation, you’re a great writer, you worked in Northern Ireland. Surely it can’t be difficult for you to find another position.’