King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  ‘I’ll give you twenty for the four of us,’ said Dror.

  The spruiker shook his head, then rubbed it.

  ‘C’mon, mate,’ he said. ‘The girls need fifteen, and there’s five for the girl on the door and five for the book.’

  ‘What do you mean “the book”?’ asked Dror. ‘There’s no such thing as “the book”.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Twenty dollars each, and we’ll waive the book.’

  ‘Five bucks each,’ said Dror.

  The thin pimp stepped in.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll do you a favour: fifteen bucks each, take it or leave it.’

  ‘And what’s the favour?’ asked Dror.

  ‘Let’s just find a bar,’ said Siobhan. ‘I don’t know why we were going there anyway.’

  Leila agreed, and the girls started to walk away.

  ‘C’mon,’ said the spruikers in chorus.

  ‘Okay, here’s the deal,’ said the thin man. ‘You get a discount because it’s early and business is quiet. You get a discount because there aren’t many girls on yet. And you get a discount because you’re bringing in ladies with you. So we can do youse for five dollars each, but it’s now or never, boys. If you come back later tonight and ask to get in for five bucks, I’ll laugh in your faces. I’ll say, “Five bucks! You’ve got to be joking!” ’

  ‘He’ll say, “This isn’t Thailand, mate,” ’ his fat friend predicted.

  ‘It’s not Patpong,’ said the thin man. ‘Fuckee Suckee, two hundred baht.’

  This time we followed the spruikers up the narrow glowing stairs to a perspex window where a girl with a lazy eye sat writing in a diary. The thin spruiker whispered how much we had paid and added loudly, ‘Special discount.’ The fat one stood in front of Dror with his hand out.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Tip for us, lads. That’s how we earn our money.’

  The small bar smelled of uncirculated air and rotten carpet. A silent video of a woman masturbating played on a wall-mounted TV, while a skinny girl wilted on a pole for two American sailors: a black man and a farm boy.

  I tried to buy a drink from the bar, but the barmaid waved me away, then a tired blonde waitress with an empty stare asked if we would like beer or Jack Daniels. It was hard to adjust to artificial light. Siobhan stood with her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t bear to look. Dror dropped twenty dollars into the stripper’s pants, then turned away.

  ‘What do you think of the old man?’ he asked me. ‘There’s a lot of goodness in him, but he isn’t proud of it. He’d rather you only saw his cruelty. He thinks that makes him strong.’

  The Americans called for the stripper to turn around. Leila whispered in Dror’s ear. He passed her a closed fist and the two women went to the bathroom together.

  The black sailor asked the stripper how much she would charge to go upstairs.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ he asked her.

  ‘English?’ she said. ‘Fair dinkum. Jesus. I’m horny.’

  ‘She’s Russian,’ said Dror.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the sailor.

  Dror said something in Russian to the girl. She looked surprised that he’d spoken, but bored by what he’d said. She left the stage and came back with a slim brown-haired teenager in a glittering g-string, who grabbed the pole and shimmied for the sailors.

  ‘Are you with the Galaxy?’ Dror asked the black guy.

  ‘Are you a Russian spy, sir?’ the sailor asked Dror.

  ‘There are no Russian spies any more,’ Dror assured him. ‘We’re all on the same side.’

  ‘I heard that,’ said the sailor, as if he didn’t trust the source.

  ‘What’s your rating, sailor?’ asked Dror.

  ‘GM,’ he said. ‘Mean anything to you?’

  ‘I used to be a marine,’ said Dror.

  ‘A Russian marine, sir?’

  ‘No, sailor. I was with the good guys.’

  The music in the club swelled louder, as if the management were trying to direct our attention back to the stage, but there’s something tragic about cheap strippers, an injury that makes me want to look away. I felt happier talking to the Yanks.

  ‘Where’ve you boys been?’ I shouted to the farm boy.

  ‘We were in the Gulf last year,’ he said. ‘Enforcing the no-fly zones.’

  ‘Did you see action?’

  That was always the question.

  ‘Hell, yeah,’ said the black sailor.

  ‘You’re a gunner’s mate, yeah?’ I said. ‘You working on the twenty mils? The Phalanxes? What’s your rate of fire?’ I asked.

  ‘Three thousand rounds a minute, sir.’

  The girls came back sniffling, Leila was smiling. The two strippers danced together, almost rubbing, nearly touching, kissing the air between their faces.

  When the brown-haired girl handed Siobhan her g-string, Siobhan folded it neatly and left it on the stage like a parcel.

  ‘This isn’t fun at all,’ she said to me. ‘It’s sleazy and I hate it. Let’s go home.’

  ‘You girls got any friends?’ the black sailor asked.

  Leila laughed but Siobhan scowled.

  ‘I hate blokes like that,’ she said to me outside.

  ‘What, Yanks?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Blacks?’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid,’ she said.

  THIRTEEN

  [The Bellisimo Restaurant, 32 Orwell Street, Potts Point. 01-03-02. 1:46 pm.]

  In 1958, just when I had everything sweet as a nut, the Malts and the squareheads arced up again. The Malts shipped in some new blood from Rabat, and Gozo Joe Stone – who made more comebacks than Whispering fucking Jack – came out of retirement to lead them in the Cross. The problem with the Malts was they only had one idea. They broke into the Patton again – at 5 am, our quietest time – cracked the safe and tried to set the club on fire. I don’t know why they wanted to burn the place down. They call arson ‘Jewish lightning’, but to me it has always been Maltese safe-breaking.

  They didn’t get much, but they coshed one of my boys and left him paralysed down one side. I told the cops that the Malts had gone off with the weekend’s takings and I had no way to pay them. They sent Fred Carol to mediate. I hated that cunt. He came back with the Malts’ story, which was that they were all eating rabbit in Valetta at the time. I tried to convince Dynamite that Carol had teamed up with the Malts to keep the payroll for himself, but Dynamite was not going to turn on another jack on the word of a Jew.

  In the courts, Police Commissioner Amos, who turned a blind eye to Maltese crime, became obsessively concerned with who owned which pubs and where. This was a matter of great interest to the law-enforcement authorities in the 1950s, Anthony. Amos had already spent a great deal of salaried time and public money trying to get the Patton declared a ‘place of ill repute’ or some such rubbish. I mean, obviously a club is going to get a bad name if officials of his stature traduce its reputation in the fucking courts. According to Amos and his cronies – who I must have forgotten to pay off somehow – a number of hotels, which were apparently the property of various members of mine and McCoy’s families, were actually run by a nefarious partnership consisting of the two of us. We denied everything, of course, but our case was weakened somewhat by the fact that two of the nominated licensees were now dead, and another had joined the Rechabites temperance movement.

  In the end, I gave up my pubs but kept the club and went to war with the Maltese. We didn’t know how many Malts there were, or what they were capable of, or even what they wanted, but I figured that if one idea worked for them, the same thing might do for us as well. I arranged a meet with Gozo Joe at Aphrodite’s in Orwell Street – which, at the time, I didn’t own – but, at the last minute, found myself unable to attend and had to send the Little Fish along instead.

  Gozo Joe was sitting at a booth with Fred Carol when the Little Fish walked up to their table and or
dered three whiskies. He drank his whisky, then Stone’s, then Carol’s, then shot Gozo Joe in the face. Again.

  This time Fred Carol shot back at the Little Fish, which left Bass in a quandary, since you can’t shoot a jack but you can’t let a jack shoot you either. The Little Fish dived for Carol’s legs, took him down and clouted him until he lost consciousness and – miraculously – all memory of the incident. A similar amnesia struck every other patron and employee of Aphrodite’s, including Gozo Joe Stone, who believed he must have shot himself before he went out that night. It cost me more money than your grandmother could earn in a lifetime’s whoring, Anthony, but it brought peace to the Cross through an unexpected alliance between the Little Fish and Carol. Now that each had bashed the other senseless, they felt the kinship of the violently insane and became like brothers. The Little Fish even ended up as godfather to Carol’s youngest son.

  Meanwhile, my own son, who was now six years old, was becoming something of a problem. His mother held that his presence in our apartment should be motive enough for me to come home every night, rather than the four out of seven to which we had agreed. She argued her point ferociously and, at times, hurtfully, until I realised there was only one way to rekindle our romance. I took her on another cruise, this time to Europe, and when we got there, we left Daniel in France with some family friends. I had intended to send for him after a month or so, but other matters got in the way and, unfortunately, I didn’t see my son again for two years. Daniel has never forgiven me for this small oversight, even though I bought him a toy gun and a pedal car on his return. He argues to this day that he was too big for the pedal car.

  With Daniel in France, I was able to devote all my energies to defending myself against charges of ‘scandalous conduct and outraging public decency’, which, like almost everything else I have ever been charged with, is no longer an offence. The details of this story are well known to everyone, but I will rehearse them once more for your book, Anthony.

  Pay close attention – forget Helen, who left you; and Siobhan, who only wants you for drugs – because these are the pages your readers will turn to. McCoy, my no-good brother Abie and I were having a drink at the home of a prominent property developer when it was suggested that the afternoon might be enlivened by some female company. I thought immediately of Sylvia, Goldie and Darling, who were not working that day, and sent my driver to their Potts Point rooms to pick them up. I directed him also to bring along some of the props from their stage act – dildos, cat-o’-nine-tails, cuffs and the like – and some instructional literature that had recently arrived from Soho. This was a largely selfless gesture, since I was sick to death of fucking these three whores and watching them impale themselves on various extruded plastics. A girl in a club has a commercial life of about eight months. These women had been around for almost eight years. It was all new to Abie, though, and McCoy, as usual, had fallen in love with Darling, so it did him good to see her roughed up by other men. It reminded him what she really was.

  The girls came in, dressed in plain frocks, which was something I rarely saw and found quite erotic. They did a slow strip down to their stockings and their Sunday-morning underwear, and started kissing each other on the tits. Abie loved that sort of thing, but when you have seen three tired molls dress up as dykes a dozen times, you feel there are other things you could be doing with your life.

  The property developer leaped on Darling, pulled her out of the threesome and pushed her head between his legs, and it was decided that she should blow us all while Sylvia and Goldie worked the double-headed dildo. This upset McCoy but, in a funny, way I think he enjoyed the pain. Our host wheeled in a couple of buckets of champagne and we toasted the girls, who rubbed their nipples with ice cubes and performed tricks with the corks that involved a quite extraordinary degree of physical control. Goldie, in particular, was a gynaecological gymnast and had chosen the only profession that suited her talents. Abie jumped the queue and started fucking Darling while she was blowing McCoy, which I swear brought tears to my old mate’s eyes, and I dipped the whip in water and practised a few cuts in the air.

  As a result of this one incident I have a reputation as a whipper of women, which is a bit like you making a name for yourself as a cocksman by climbing upstairs with one slutty barmaid on a quiet night in the pub. I won’t pretend I hadn’t whipped women before – or that I haven’t since – but the lash is only a side dish on the sexual smorgasbord, and my satisfactions come from more intimate contacts. On the other hand, I felt like giving McCoy’s whore a beating she wouldn’t forget in a hurry and, as soon as he and Abie were finished, I set to work with a professionalism that might easily be mistaken for enthusiasm. The girl didn’t object, beyond the usual shrieks and moans that enlivened her circus act, and the party continued for several hours afterwards.

  Back in the 1950s there were many crimes but few victims. Weeks later I was visited by the vice squad and informed that it was illegal to whip a consenting woman in a private home in the company of invited guests. I wonder which twisted soul sat up all night devising that particular statute, and what solitary gratification he drew from its careful wording. McCoy, Abie and I, and several other party guests who came and went during the course of the afternoon, all appeared in the Central Court to face the ludicrous charges.

  At first I couldn’t imagine who the jacks might call to testify against us, but it turned out to be Darling, who had gone to the police station of her own accord, only weeks after the alleged episode, to turn me in. Apparently McCoy had translated the words I used as I beat her. Ukrayner zoyne, he told her, meant Ukrainian whore in Yiddish. Russian, my arse. That cunt was from Kiev, and it seems I hurt her feelings more than her fat peasant’s buttocks.

  Since there were no other witnesses, I assumed Darling was the public and it was her decency that was supposed to have been outraged, which was a half-arsed fucking joke if ever I heard one.

  As if that were not enough, Darling persuaded another moll to say I had banged her by the back entrance, in the Patton the week before. I was accused of ‘an unnatural offence’, which is now considered neither unnatural nor an offence, based on an event that gave birth to the briefly popular expression, ‘taking it up the Patton’.

  On my initiative certain police officers, among them both the armed-robbery squad’s Dynamite Dawson and the licensing cop Fred Carol, took statements from Darling, even though there was no prima facie case that an armed robbery or a breach of liquor-licensing laws had taken place. During the course of their interviews Darling realised she had been mistaken in thinking she had been whipped and fucked, and could actually produce witnesses to say she had been shopping for a hat on the morning of the alleged outrage.

  Also, the deluded moll who had complained of my ‘unnatural’ behaviour towards her realised that she had forgotten to move to Perth, an omission she remedied within days of the charges being laid. She started a new life in a suite at the Singapore Hotel, my pub in Canning Bridge, WA, where I would often take her up the Patton in later years.

  In order to stay out of Long Bay I had to invite the vice squad to become associates of my organisation too. This put a considerable strain on my financial resources, since I was now paymaster to every cop outside of the lost-dog squad. I suffered only one other prosecution in the 1950s, for giving cash prizes at a game of housie. I need hardly remind you such actions are no longer illegal, and how I got lifted for that one I just couldn’t fucking tell you.

  Can I ask you something about more recent events, Mr Mendoza?

  You can ask me anything, Anthony. Think of me as a father figure.

  I was in the Cross when the bikers were attacked.

  Is that so? What did you see?

  A well-planned operation. A lot of shooting.

  Indeed. Indeed.

  What was going on?

  If I knew, Anthony, your little selkie maiden would be the first to hear. I would bring the information to her myself, and reap the rewards of h
er gratitude by taking her up the Patton, a club I used to own on Orwell Street, which is now this romantic Italian restaurant.

  I have never had much to do with the bikers. They strike me as neither kosher nor treif. What kind of crim wears a jacket linking himself with every one of his known associates? And why do they bother with the motorcycles? It’s like the Mafia pretending they are united by a common interest in bocce. Also, for me, a beard belongs on a rabbi.

  There have been biker wars on the strip before, but everything had been peaceful for years until last night. But that is the way it goes, Anthony – war and peace, armistice and ambush, partition and expulsion: in Kings Cross, as in the world outside.

  Ask me about Frank Sinatra, Anthony.

  Tell me about Frank Sinatra.

  Ah, Frank. What a singer! What an actor! What a cunt! In the late 1950s I teamed up with a young fellow named Izzy ‘the Ham’ Berger, who made my acquaintance by pretending to have met me before. He wore a green blazer, a waxed moustache and a yellow trilby. He looked like a Jewish leprechaun. He came up to me at the Patton and shook my hand, and told me it had been years since our last discussion about Sinatra, but he felt things were finally coming to fruition.

  Berger was a dreamer and a liar and an absolutely fearless conman, but he really did know somebody who knew Frank Sinatra. I had my contacts in the Sicilian community check out this third party, and within weeks I was on a plane with Berger, heading for Las Vegas, the Kings Cross of the desert. Ira travelled as my assistant, although it’s possible I neglected to mention this to Deborah, since it was impractical to make my wife privy to all my various business arrangements.

  When Deborah discovered I must have been away in Nevada when Ira fell pregnant with her daughter, Sharon, she was at first jubilant, because she calculated that I couldn’t be the father. When she realised that Sharon had been conceived in Nevada, she had a mental breakdown and took to her bedroom for several months, emerging only to cook the Shabbos dinner and supervise other domestic chores.

  Sinatra was an associate of Lucky Luciano, among others. Through Berger’s surprisingly useful friend, and my own distant connection with Meyer Lansky, we were able to arrange a meeting, in which Sinatra agreed to play concerts in Australia provided we paid him a sum of money beyond which I had ever heard spoken of before, and guaranteed him three women a night, including – and he was specific about this – at least one full-blood native woman, and a pygmy from Borneo.