by Mark Dapin
‘You want to know the truth?’ he asked. ‘There was no phone call from my publisher. Mendoza has no influence left in the business world. I fired you, Nick, because I knew you were trouble. I’m sorry.’
TWENTY-NINE
[Seaview House, Greenknowe Avenue, Potts Point. 01-05-02. 2:34 pm.]
They had needed the Little Fish to bring me down, but they’d no-billed a shitload of drug dealing and at least one murder blue, just to ruin an elderly returned serviceman. Everyone reckoned he was being groomed to fit up another poor mongrel on the National Canine Authority’s shitlist.
Rumours spread like canine transmissible venereal tumour that the next target of the Little Fish’s denunciations would be a cop. The most likely candidate was Fred Carol because (a) he was the most evil cunt of them all; and (b) he was the only one left who could take a fall for all the dead blokes who couldn’t tell tales, like the premier and the police commissioner.
Fred Carol heard – because he had told it to himself – a rumour that the Little Fish was abusing prescription drugs and contemplating suicide. He tried to get permission from his handlers to visit his old mate at the dog pound and cheer him up with reminiscences of happier times when they both ran through the Cross, bashing and knocking blokes whenever they pleased. The Little Fish was not keen to see Carol but, in his isolation in the isle of dogs, he found himself missing the sweet smell of she-male arsehole, so he sent word that he would like a visit from Savannah Plains.
Bear this fact in mind, Anthony, should you ever be tempted to post your desperate cock into the nameless slot of a transgender abomination: a man with a trannie does not have a girlfriend, he has a lieutenant he can fuck. And a lieutenant can be turned like the pages of a book.
When Fred Carol heard through bent cops in the NCA that Savannah Plains had been to see the Little Fish, he went to find he/she/it in the Bottoms Up Bar of the Rex Hotel. In the old days he only used to go there when he fancied handing out a bashing, but he’d mellowed with age and, I believe, sometimes took it up the Patton himself. He bought Savannah Plains a Pimm’s and lemonade and said he personally had organised a whip-round among various identities in the Cross, and we had come up with the money to pay for his/her/its operation, so it could become whichever thing it was that it wasn’t to begin with.
In exchange, we just needed the Little Fish’s address. Savannah Plains had already moved on from the Little Fish to Johnny Johnny, a plastic gangster who was unhappy that Savannah had favoured the Little Fish with a conjugal visit. He persuaded Savannah that our deal was a good one, and once he-she-it had her cock put on or cut off, and her tits strapped down or pumped up, the two of them would live together as man and man, or wife and wife, or whatfuckingever.
That was good enough for Savannah Plains, who told Carol that the dog show was held at a kennel club in Victoria, in a motel on the highway between Warrnambool and Geelong. Fred Carol filled a bag with the prescription drugs he’d heard the Little Fish was abusing, picked up two of my boys and a bag of my money, and set off on a road trip that eventually led to the Little Fish’s well-documented suicide.
That was the last of the funerals until McCoy. I buried everyone in the 1980s, even my dear fucking father, who lived to the vile old age of ninety-four, just to piss everyone off.
Abie the fighter, the one who should have been the gangster, became a hotelier, but retired early and spent the last twenty years of his life looking after tate. The old man wouldn’t speak to me after the first royal commission, and he never reconciled with Saul after he married the shiksa. Saul died in an accident – an accidental one, not the other kind – without ever seeing him again. My mother passed away one winter when I was in the Philippines, so there was only Abie left for him.
One morning Abie called and said he thought tate was about to shuffle off, and if I had anything to say I should come and say it, because tate didn’t have the strength to push me away. Also, he thought that tate had something he wanted to let me know, but he was too proud to send for me after all these years.
Fuck him, I thought. Let him die with his pride. I didn’t need his apology. It was too late.
But then I thought, maybe there was a reason for what he did to me. If I knew, perhaps I would come to understand myself. So I went to visit him, in a Catholic hospice where he lay in bed surrounded by Poles. He looked like a shrunken angel, shrouded in a cancerous glow. When he saw me, he smiled, and some of the pain fell from his face.
‘Mayn zun,’ he said, ‘you came at last. I’m so sorry, mayn zun.’ Fat tears swelled in his malekh eyes. ‘I have always loved you,’ he said. ‘Come closer to me, Saul.’
‘It’s not Saul,’ I told him gently, ‘it’s Jacob.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Why aren’t you in jail?’
I sat by his bedside and tried to take his hand, but he pulled it away.
‘Tell me, tate,’ I said, ‘why do you hate me?’
‘Don’t call me tate,’ he said.
Then my father told me a story. It was the only story he ever told me. It should have been something special.
‘We come from Tetiev,’ he said, ‘a shtetl that is now a part of the Ukraine, a country bathed in Jewish blood. In Tetiev there were many pogroms in which the peasants rose up against the Jews. Before the revolution they called us capitalists; after the revolution they called us communists. At the bottom of it all they wanted to be left alone to live like pigs, but they could sense the world was changing – like rabbits, they felt it in the ground – and they blamed the Jews.
‘They came for us sometimes in small gangs, often in big mobs. They came with torches and pitchforks, the weapons of peasants. They came with scimitars and guns. It was like a party for them. They sang and they danced and they drank, like your goyim in Kings Cross, and they burned the synagogue with the Jews trapped inside, and they burned our homes with our children in their beds.
‘For some of them, there was no hatred. They simply saw the chance to steal from the Jews and rape our women. The peasants loved to rape. It was their holiday treat: a clean woman, without rabbit diseases; a woman who wore underwear.
‘I was a famous wrestler, a leader of our community. I organised a self-defence group, and we armed against the peasants. They said we were in league with the Bolsheviks. I didn’t know the Bolsheviks, but I prayed they would come. With each pogrom, our numbers grew smaller. I chose as my lieutenant a war veteran named Bickoff, who had lost everything, and we organised the others like soldiers, although in truth they were pedlars and bakers, butchers and woodsmen, tinkers and fools.
‘When the White Army and the renegade militia swept through Tetiev, there was fighting through the night. Some died, some survived. In the end, it made little difference. The things we had seen had killed us all. We lived on only for our children. I hid your brothers in a hole beneath the kitchen floor.
‘Word came that the Red Army was close by. I sent my lieutenant to meet their commander. He said the Bolsheviks would save us, but only if we first laid down our weapons. Theirs were to be the only guns in Tetiev. I sent our weapons out with Bickoff in a cart. I never saw him again. He sold them, he sold us.
‘The peasants came for us that evening and they attacked my home first. I fought them for hours, but they dragged me out into the street, tied me to a pole, stripped your mother and forced me to watch them violate her, time and again. They made her eat pork while they destroyed her. They made her drink vodka and swear in their language. They made her plead for them to continue. They forced my brother to violate her, then they took an axe to his head.
‘While they tortured us, other Jews rode to the forests where the Red Army was camped. You see, the peasants only wanted the leaders like me, the families who had stood up to them. If you slinked and hid, if you cowered and begged, they let you live, as an example of what the Jews were. If I were a smaller man, or a meeker man, my brother would have survived to see Australia with me, and my wife wo
uld have been able to smile and make light of life.
‘Our neighbours begged them to come into Tetiev and save us, but the Bolsheviks weren’t interested in dying for the Jews. It was only when they pledged the commander a ransom, money to buy the Reds guns and vodka, that they set off slowly for the shtetl. The peasants fled when the Red Army arrived. The Russians restored order but said there were to be no retaliations.
‘Some time later the Jews were freed to go. We put all we had left in the back of a cart and walked west to Poland, then on – we thought – to America. The peasants came out into the streets to watch us leave. As your mother passed them, they chanted the number of men who had violated her. They threw stones and their children ran beside me, kicked me and stole my cap.
‘Nine months after the pogrom, you were born, Jacob. Your mother wanted to spear you in the womb, but I couldn’t allow that. You might be the son of Ukrainian pigs, but you might also be my brother’s son, my nephew. As you grew up, and you drank and stole and fought like the goyim, it became clear you were the child of savages. Each time I saw you I remembered Tetiev, and I felt such terrible pain in my heart, such violent anger in my breast, such hatred for you, and I know your mother felt the same. When we wrestled I hoped to strangle you, or break your neck, but you grew up strong, Jacob. You are a tough man, like a peasant and, like a peasant, you chose to live with pigs.
‘Leave me now,’ said my father. ‘If I have wronged you, I ask you to forgive me. If you are my brother’s son, I ask you to understand me.’
I took the arm of a nun and I left him in his bed embalmed in self-pity. There was a hotel close to the hospice and I stopped by for a drink. I ordered a vodka – I never drink vodka – and I tried to put words to how I was feeling. Nothing. I felt nothing. When I’d had time to consider all that my father had said, I realised he had set me free. I’m the son of my mother’s rapist and my uncle’s murderer. How could I expect to be any better than I am?
And that was the year you were put away?
Yeah, that’s right: the year of shit.
In the end, despite all the smears and insinnuendo, the only thing they could get me for was tax evasion. ‘Tax evasion’: what a fucking joke. I’d been paying taxes to the jacks all my working life.
You look around Kings Cross, Anthony, and you tell me where my taxes go. You show me what the government is doing for the heroin addicts, the homeless, the street kids or the boongs? Where is the affordable housing? Where are the social services? All I see is misery and pain. I was charged with tax evasion, but I was tried for all the suffering on the strip: the drug dealing, the suicides, the runaway children and all the bodies in every gang war. After six weeks I was found guilty of being Jake Mendoza, the King of the Cross.
I did seventeen months inside – nearly a year and half in a green fucking T-shirt – and every moment was wasted. The Bay was run by the usual alliance of bent screws and imbeciles, and for about five minutes they shit themselves that I might try to take over their weak fucking rackets. They thought that Jake Mendoza – a millionaire fifty times over, the man who brought Frank Sinatra to Sydney and invented striptease – might try to muscle in on their homebrewing scam, or have my lover smuggle drugs into prison in her tokhes.
I told them they could do whatever they wanted. I couldn’t give a fuck who was the hardest man in A Wing, or whatever fucking wing it was. I had bodyguards to make sure no one ever gave me any trouble but, truth be told, most of the crims in the Bay didn’t care about an old man either. It was in prison, Anthony, that I realised my time had passed.
Many people came to visit me, including a rabbi. He was the rov charged with visiting all the Jewish prisoners in Sydney, and since I was all the Jewish prisoners in Sydney, we spent a lot of time together, developing his understanding of certain card games. The rabbi sent Henry Aaron, the treasurer of the Great Synagogue, to see me and we became firm friends, based on a mutual interest in my money. It was Aaron who eventually talked me out of five million dollars for his fucking steeples, although I made him wait thirteen years for it.
Deborah and Martin visited me every week, as did Ira, although on different days. Daniel bumbled in from Vegas and bored me with his egotistical babble. Sharon came only once, and my heart sang when I saw her beautiful brown hair and her black, shining eyes. She sat across a table from me and opened up a notebook. There had been a new development in the Anita King case. After a decade and a half of amnesia, Savannah Plains had remembered that the Little Fish had knocked the bitch after all. My daughter wanted to know if I had any comment to make.
That night I took down her photo from the wall of my cell.
I did what I could to help the time pass. At Christmas, I organised a special show featuring Angelica Angel and the classic cast of ‘Girls Girls Girls’. On my birthday I ordered a Chinese meal for everyone in the wing. The radio announcers raged against me. How dare prisoners look at men wearing dresses, or eat egg-fried rice, when it had been proven in court that they had dodged their obligations to the ATO?
I had an almost spiritual experience in the Bay, Anthony. I realised that, while the body can be confined within four walls, so can the soul. A man cannot soar free of his surroundings. He is the physical embodiment of his ideas, nothing more or less. When you are in prison, you are in prison totally, and anyone who says different is a fucking imbecile. Without the company of women, you might as well be dead.
So many people died while I was inside, including Willie Frankel and both Abie and my sister Dora. I was given leave to attend their funerals, and it was almost more than my heart could stand. I had buried my enemies, my friends and now my family. It seemed as though there would never be an end to my loss. When I got out, ready to begin my life again, I buried my fucking wife. We were going to cruise around the world, Anthony. I was going to make everything up to her. She could sit on the QEII playing poker machines all day, and in the evenings we would dance to the piano man in the Chart Room. We would be together every night of the week, even Thursday and Saturday. But she died, Anthony. She went to join the others, and left me alone with my grandson and the ghosts.
The premier’s wife died, too, and she willed all the money I had collected for him to the RSfuckingPCA. The funny thing was, Gozo Joe did the same thing. You explain to me what that means, Anthony. You tell me what it says about people.
It’s all over now, Jake. You don’t have to think about it any more.
I see the dead every day in Kings Cross, Anthony, at the places they used to eat and drink and dance and fuck. I pass Big Stan in the mornings as he hoses down the pavement in front of the Pussycat. I tap my hat, but he looks through me, as if I were the phantom. I shout to McCoy as he scampers like a puppy dog after a hard-faced Asian whore, but he never turns around. Gozo Joe Stone stands on one leg outside the cafe that used to be Sweethearts, drinking Turkish coffee and smoking Sobranie Cocktails. The Little Fish calls me into Aphrodite’s, but when I go to follow him he disappears. Willie Frankel, standing in the shade of a gum tree on Victoria Street, beckons me to look once again at his wonderful plans. At home Deborah haunts every room, and Abie sits by my side at the dinner table on a Friday night. I cut him a slice of challah. He says the blessing as she lights the candles.
But do you know what is the worst? The most terrible thing in my whole fucking life? Sometimes I walk past a builders’ skip and I see a piece of wood or metal, and from the corner of my eye it looks like a leg or an arm. I hear a cat mewing, or a baby crying, and I think there is something small and helpless trapped in there, so I run to rescue it, but when I peer over the lip of the skip, there is nothing there. Sometimes, if I’m careless, I walk over newly laid bitumen, and as the ground softens under my shoes I think I feel fists pounding under the pavement and, buried deep underground, I make out the muffled voice of Anita King, pleading for her life.
Of course I killed her, Anthony. We all did.
THIRTY
We invited Jed around to dinner, b
ut at first he didn’t call us back. I thought he must be sulking and not want to see us together, but he turned out to be in hiding. When he finally turned up at the unit, he was carrying a kitbag stuffed with clothes.
Helen cooked him steak and chips. It irritated me that she knew he liked it medium rare. As we started on the beers, Jed said, ‘I’ve been talking to the Russians. They want everything. All the drugs, all the clubs, all the whores, everything. They came here looking for a partner. They watched everyone. They had people following the Lebs and the Cannibals, just like they had us shadowing Mendoza. They chose Mendoza because they thought he was the most reliable operator, but he told Natural Science to bite off their bloke’s nose. Now they’ve got the bikers out of the way and done a deal with the Lebs, they’ll be coming for Mendoza again.
‘They offered me a job,’ said Jed, ‘but I’m leaving. I’ve had enough of this fucking country. I want to get out of here before the legionnaires turn up.’
‘Yeah,’ said Helen, ‘let’s all go home.’
We each opened a fresh beer.
‘How are you two getting on anyway?’ he asked.
‘Good, yeah,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’