King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

Have you seen your black countryman, the absurdly named ‘Natural Science’?

  Not since the Cannibals’ memorial service. I thought you said he was working for you.

  Work? His kind don’t know the meaning of the word.

  What’ve you got against blacks?

  Who said anything about blacks? I’m talking about Poms.

  So when did you last see him?

  He was meant to be waiting outside Ava’s while you and I did our last recording, but when I came out he’d disappeared like shit down a toilet. Dror can’t raise his mobile, and nobody answers at his unit. Do you suppose he’s gone back to his tribe?

  If I bump into him I’ll let you know.

  Do that, Anthony. I’ve got Dror watching the door until he comes back, and that’s no job for a Jewish boy. But I don’t want you to concern yourself with the politics of race. After all, I am not, by nature, a political person, although I have counted many politicians among my friends.

  As a rule I don’t take sides in a quarrel unless I’m affected by its outcome. I might have a position on the recent street-fighting among Assyrians in Fairfield, for example, but no opinion either way about the wars in the Balkans. All my life, however, I have made an exception when it comes to communism, the most pernicious and treacherous idea ever to lodge like a tumour in the brains of men. If God had meant us all to be equal, Anthony, he would have given slopes the cocks of niggers and Paddies the brains of Jews.

  Look at what Castro did to poor Meyer Lansky. In a single stroke he obliterated every one of his business interests. He closed down Cuba’s casinos and nationalised hotels that had been built by capitalists, not communists. He stole from Meyer to give to the niggers and, of course, they wrecked the place.

  Despite what you might hear today, Anthony, from draft dodgers who have never – like you and I – put on a uniform and risked their lives for a cause, the Vietnam War was a justified conflict fought to protect the interests of legitimate businessmen. If we hadn’t stopped the Vietcong at Saigon, communism would have spread through South-East Asia like crabs in a whorehouse, and today we would be struggling to rebuild this great state in the ruins of the People’s Republic of New South Wales.

  In fact, the opposite occurred. On May Day 1965, the people voted out the incompetent communist Labor Party state government and voted in the Businessman’s Republic of Sydney and Beyond. At last our state had an Augustinian premier, who realised that the interests of the jacks and the informal business sector were not necessarily at odds. But our biggest stroke of luck was that we had a police commissioner of a similar mind. Crime fighting and criminality, Anthony, are two sides of the same coin – and the important word here is ‘coin’. In every conceivable circumstance, if a crim can make a buck out of a racket, a cop can too.

  The problem was that the system of bribes, kickbacks, sweeteners, cuts, jokes and pay-offs that every businessman paid to the police force and the Liberal Party had developed in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion, and there were now too many jacks biting crims for a slice of the same cake. Traditionally highly profitable enterprises, such as running a brothel, became barely sustainable in the face of taxes levelled by different branches of the police force, not to mention various standover men. Also, revenue didn’t always find its way to the top of the tree, due to the fragmentary nature of the tributary system.

  In addition, too many cops were seen with too many crims in too many clubs, creating the impression among the drinking public that the line between the hunter and the hunted had been obscured in some important way.

  The premier and the commissioner identified the need both for a consolidated payment system and a centralised business model. They were both family men and didn’t relish dealing with the dregs of society who habitually pollute the darker corners of what could broadly be defined as the ‘gratification industry’. They wanted to work with a man who had accountants rather than accomplices. They were both Catholics, but even the Pope couldn’t persuade them to sit down with that psychotic bunny-strangler McPherson when they could just as easily deal with me.

  We arranged a dinner at my home in Vaucluse – Deborah cooked her roast beef, as I recall – and nutted out the details of our agreement over four bottles of burgundy and a decanter of tawny port. Basically the jacks consented to cut in the middle man. I would become the intermediary between the underworld and the state, the bagman for police and pollies, the ambassador for Kings Cross to the outside world.

  Our most important task was to get rid of the last of the Malts. Gozo Joe was a dinosaur, and his kind were almost extinct. Most of his countrymen had moved on to legitimate business or, at least, employment, but Gozo Joe and a handful of irreconcilable imbeciles persisted in hooning girls, standing over market traders, running crooked card games and handling stolen goods. There was a nobility to their position that I couldn’t acknowledge at the time but am keenly aware of today.

  I didn’t want to have Gozo Joe knocked – we had done so much to the bloke already – but experience showed me that he was the kind of man who wouldn’t negotiate until you put a bullet in him. The Little Fish and I visited him in a pool room where pool was rarely played, and explained to him in a mixture of languages – I was surprised to learn the Little Fish had picked up a sprinkling of Maltish – that we were not trying to take over his rackets but trying to make life easier for him. He would no longer have to deal with the vice squad, the racing and gaming squad, the consorting squad, et cetera. He would simply make a single monthly payment to an employee of the Little Fish, who would pass it on to me to deliver to the real bosses.

  I realised we were addressing an unreceptive audience when Gozo Joe pulled a sword out of his cane and slashed the Little Fish just below his left eye. As a former amateur fighter, the Little Fish was not a man to regard a physical assault personally, but nor was he one to take a blow without giving two back. He grabbed a pool cue and brought it down on Gozo Joe’s head. I don’t think anyone was surprised when the cue snapped but Gozo Joe was unhurt. For a moment I thought the Little Fish and Gozo Joe were going to play Errol Flynn and fence, but the Little Fish instead went for his piece. Gozo Joe got in first and skewered his hand with his sword. I didn’t, as a rule, carry a weapon in those days, and I was jumped by two Malts who held me over a table and tried to split my head open with pool balls, while the Little Fish grappled unsuccessfully with Gozo Joe. We copped a flogging that day, Anthony. I couldn’t see straight for six weeks, and the Little Fish had to have surgery on his hand. The next night the Malts broke into the Ligato and set fire to the recently installed kitchen, apparently believing I still owned the joint. That was the setback that induced Morrie the Magnificent and Ava the Swallower to turn their business from a restaurant into a hotel.

  It’s a funny thing, Anthony, but wherever there is a hole, some fucking imbecile will come along to fill it. Under the regime of the premier and the commissioner, the detectives of New South Wales had largely abandoned detecting in favour of bashing queers and fucking whores. So who should fucking well step up to fill their size-thirteen shoes but an unwashed mob of self-appointed cops from the gutter press.

  I was hounded and dogged by two journalists in particular: a woman named Ham and a man called Eggs. These two went after me like greyhounds chasing an electrified hare, and with just as much fucking success. They ran themselves in circles trying to get me for this job or that. They even went after the premier – an elected official of the land – and the commissioner – an appointed official of the land. I’d’ve liked to see them try that in fucking Russia. They wouldn’t’ve lasted five minutes.

  Eggs and Ham – kosher and treif – reckoned I’d set all the club fires myself, right back to the first one at the Patton, and they were convinced they’d got me fingered as the firebug when the Little Fish sent the Maltese pool hall up in flames. This wasn’t my idea – it was the Little Fish’s own freelance act of revenge – but I thought, If I burn down the old Patton building now, and coll
ect the insurance, everyone’ll think it was the Malts.

  So I sent the Little Fish to the Patton with a can of petrol and a cigarette lighter and – fuck knows how – he set fire to himself. His burning body acted as a torch that eventually sent the club up but, by that time, the jacks had arrived. Being trained detectives, they understood there was nothing suspicious about the blaze. Ham and Eggs, with no forensic expertise, came to the opposite conclusion and made it their business to hound a disabled war veteran with thirty per cent burns to one side of his body and only forty per cent feeling in his right hand. It was a moment of shame for journalists everywhere, and it was their vile slurs and groundless innuendoes which, I believe, finally pushed the Little Fish over the edge.

  While Ham and Eggs were out trying to raise reported crime figures and frighten elderly people in their homes, the jacks were reassuring the general public by underreporting offences and occasionally flogging citizens who insisted a crime had been committed when obviously it hadn’t, as was often the case with rapes and other so-called assaults against women.

  Over in Palmer Street, Gozo Joe was not cooperating with the new order. Although he continued to pay his protection money to his traditional bagman, he refused to hand over a cent to my representative or participate in any way in the new, streamlined insurance scheme. In addition, he was flogging my boys wherever he found them, and reports of some of these attacks were polluting the press, which was putting pressure on the police to ‘solve’ them, even though they had no effect whatever on the average squarehead or his virginal wife. I’m a reasonable man, Anthony, and I was prepared to continue – although not accelerate – a series of tit-for-tat assaults until honour was satisfied and an uneasy peace reigned, at which point we could finish off the Malts once and for all as soon as they dropped their guard.

  Fred Carol couldn’t come at that. He was the shithouse rat who had covered their backs for more than ten years, but now he wanted them wiped out in an afternoon. The jacks were planning to do it themselves – just swoop on the pool hall, blow them all away and plant guns on the bodies – but I had to remind them the pool hall had burned down and nobody knew where the Maltese met any more. They could go into the brothels shooting and they might hit a sitter here and there, but most likely they would just murder a couple of molls and have the press after their blood for the sake of another headline. Besides, I said, they didn’t have to knock them all. If Gozo Joe disappeared, the rest of them would cooperate themselves out of existence.

  When Carol expressed doubts, I was forced to show him a print of a movie made during a certain celebrated smoko behind the Palmerstone Hotel and, on 28 May 1968, Gozo Joe Stone climbed into his silly fucking ute outside his wog mansion in Bellevue Hill, turned the ignition key and blew the shitbox to pieces. The explosion tore off his right leg. It had fuck all to do with me and even less to do with the Little Fish. His own Maltese lieutenant had given him up to Fred Carol, when he finally figured out that Gozo Joe was making all of them a target. That night, Fred Carol had the run of all the girls in the Pussycat Bordello, and enough champagne to celebrate VE Day. Because it was VE day. Victory in East fucking Sydney.

  I see you are furrowing your brow in an imitation of thought, Anthony. You are attempting to wonder, When did Mr Mendoza acquire this Pussycat Bordello, and could it be the same Pussycat Bordello I see every day from the window of my dirtbox behind the cop shop? The answer is both yes and no. It’s the same business, but it’s not in the same building.

  The Vietnam War, Anthony, was the war to end all wars in Kings Cross. From the moment the heroic American troops first set foot on the strip in 1967, every one of my businesses tripled in value. The marines wanted to drink all day and stoke warm pussy all night, and I was the man who could help them. It was my patriotic duty to get them drunk and fucked, so they returned to the battlefront refreshed and revitalised, ready to kill all those men, women and children who cravenly threatened the United States from the safety of their rat-infested hamlets in the Mekong delta.

  Like the Second World War, the Vietnam War was fought in many nations, on many fronts. Sydney’s property developers – myself included – constituted the anticommunist front in Kings Cross, while the foul-smelling ranks of journalists, feminists, anarchists, trade unionists, whistleblowers and squatters were the local Vietcong. They might’ve beat us in Vietnam, but we flogged the shit out of them in East Sydney, I can tell you.

  The premier, the commissioner and I were all of the opinion that nothing was too good for the brave men who were fighting to preserve our freedoms in a far-off land. If there were any remaining restrictions on businessmen operating in the Cross, they were abandoned like a stripper’s knickers. And strippers were, at last, permitted to throw off their knickers and mingle with the crowd. Everywhere was open all night, everyone was for sale, and all the prices were in US dollars. There were blues around the fountain every evening as the heroes prepared for the great battle that lay ahead.

  The Yanks liked a drink, but they also brought with them heroin and marijuana. These pioneering soldiers were your soul mates, Anthony. They flew in from South-East Asia with a cargo of drugs and unloaded them on the Cross. For a while they had their own gang, selling dope to the hippies in the jazz clubs: they told them it would make them play like John Coltrane. Sadly, however, most of the early dealers met their fates in Khe Sanh and Hue.

  Unfortunately, the fighting couldn’t go on forever. The premier retired from the government of New South Wales in January 1975, and four months later the Vietnam War ended with the victory of the Vietnamese people over their own best interests.

  It’s interesting to note, however, that more than four decades after the confiscation of Meyer Lansky’s business interests in Cuba, there are whores on every corner of Havana. This goes to show that totalitarianism can never stamp out the human spirit, and commerce will always rescue the economy in the end.

  [Ends.]

  TWENTY

  The biggest mistake I made while I was looking for Natural Science was taking a couple of Es from Dror. If it wasn’t for that, the next few days might’ve turned out differently, although Siobhan was always going to find out in the end.

  I started asking around for Natural Science at his gym. One thing I noticed when I was a private investigator is that some people will answer any question you put to them, just for the sake of having a conversation. A big gay bear with a beard told me he often used to train with Natural, and thought he had gone on holiday to Thailand. When I asked what had given him that idea, he said he assumed he must be on holiday because he hadn’t seen him in the gym, and he’d guessed he’d gone to Thailand because that’s the sort of place people go. Somebody else said Natural was in Thailand too, but their source turned out to be the bear.

  Natural Science was popular among the spruikers and pimps on the strip. The bouncers said they hadn’t seen him, but he had disappeared before. He had a girl in Brisbane, someone said, and another in Surfers. At the Hamilton Private Hotel, where he sometimes worked the door on weeknights, the receptionist said he thought he had gone looking for Leah. A lot of people had a thing about that girl, he told me.

  There was nobody in the office at the Magic Circle Club, but a tall man with a voice full of orders walked over from the other side of the road when he saw me ringing the doorbell.

  ‘Club’s closed,’ he said. ‘Manager’s gone on holiday.’

  He had that cold anger that bikers like to pretend, as if somebody has just knocked over their Harley.

  ‘Do you know Natural Science?’ I asked him.

  ‘Big black fella?’ he asked. ‘Long arms, flat nose? Sharp teeth?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Have you tried the zoo?’

  Lady Lash was being photographed by a Japanese tourist in her sex shop, posing with a blow-up doll. She said she had seen Natural last night, but it turned out that was in a dream. Luckily, however, she had psychic powers. She showed me a photograph of Na
tural at the Lash Christmas Party, naked except for a dog collar, and after a few moments rubbing his cock, she could see he had surrendered to the feminine side of his nature and shacked up with a leatherman at Mardi Gras. She let me take the photograph away – I cut off the head and gave her back the rest – so I at least had something to show to people.

  I rang Jed, hoping Helen wouldn’t answer, which she didn’t.

  ‘Do you remember the black lad who battered that bowlegged bloke from Carlisle at the Reccie, the day you got nicked for cottaging?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean the day I got arrested at the Cottage,’ he said. ‘For fighting. Yeah, I remember him. Called himself “Biology” or something like that.’

  Jed knew somebody from Aldershot who was a mate of the Fleet boys. I rang him and he gave me a number for Natural’s sister. She said he was probably diving the Great Barrier Reef, because she had seen a programme about it on TV. She asked me to tell him to call her, as she wanted to sell his CD player.

  I imagined a woman the size of Natural, with skin like a seal and hips as fat as floor cushions. She said his real name was Orpheus Randall, and the easiest way to track him down was to find a white woman on her knees and look who was behind her.

  I felt a fuzzy sort of responsibility for Natural because he was from Fleet, and nobody but Mendoza and I seemed to care that something so big had vanished. It was like the Coke sign had come down in the night, or somebody had run off with the fountain.

  I ran into Spiegeleier drinking coffee with the last of the joy boys in Joe’s Cafe on Victoria Street. I gave him Natural’s picture, which he set close to his nose.

  ‘He doesn’t look Jewish,’ said Spiegeleier, then began one of his lectures about what I didn’t understand about the Cross.

  ‘Kings Cross is a place people go to disappear,’ he said, ‘but it’s also a place people disappear from. It’s a vortex, a void, a vector. You see a girl on the street every day for a month, then never again. Bad things sometimes happen, for sure, but far less often than you’d think. Most of the time they wake up one morning – in a hotel room, in a hostel or on the street – and they’re not driven by the rhythms any more. They clean up, they recover, they make peace with themselves and they move on. This friend of yours, maybe he was hiding from something, and maybe that thing got him but, more likely, he grew tough enough to face it. The Cross doesn’t always cut you down, Tony. It can just as easily build you up. It might crush the weak, but it makes strong men stronger.’