by Mark Dapin
‘You cold, Hymie?’ he asked. ‘Want me to turn on the gas?’
I told him I was fine. When he stood up to silence the television, I realised he was almost as tall as Giant, whose photograph sat behind a burning candle on a ledge behind the bar.
‘You were there,’ said Suicide.
‘Yeah, I was. He was a brave man.’
‘Some people are pissed at you, Hymie,’ said Suicide. ‘Reckon this was your fault.’
‘Mine?’ I asked.
‘Collectively,’ said Suicide. ‘Reckon we’ve been caught in a war over the holy land. Doesn’t matter to us who runs Jerusalem, but we’re the only ones dying. Explain that to me, Hymie. Conspiracy, maybe?’
He pointed to a photograph of Rabbit and Devil.
‘Lost three brothers,’ he said.
‘I lost one,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I heard that,’ said Suicide. ‘Heard a lot about you. Supposed to be a soldier, kicking up shit in the Cross, starting blues over fuck all. I was in the army, Hymie. A real army.’
There were pictures of Rabbit, Devil and Giant collaged on the walls and doors, riding their choppers, hugging biker girls, spraying beer on camera lenses. An arch of gothic lettering read CFFC.
‘Cannibals Forever,’ said Suicide. ‘Forever Cannibals. My problem: what were you doing buying a T-shirt from Ink in the middle of the fucking night, when you live around the corner?’
‘I didn’t want my girlfriend to see me,’ I said.
‘But she’d gone.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.
‘Take your T-shirts, did she? Cut them up? Psycho bitch.’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘My problem: security pictures of you walking down the street, no shirt, doing recon on Ink. Ex-soldier, looking for holes in our defences. Then a cunt with no shirt kicks over our hogs, steals our shotties, murders our brothers. Coincidence? New gang with no shirts?
‘We get the word that somebody’s coming after us, but not who or why. We try to find out – established channels – get back some drivel fucking bullshit about Mutineers repatching GraveDiggers. Everyone on the lookout for unpatched Mutineers, when shirtless Yids’ve been casing us for weeks.
‘And GraveDiggers’re not even a real fucking MC. Some weak dog lifted the name from a fucking seventies movie. Mutineers don’t give two fucks about the Cross, and Charlie Adami fought in fucking Vietnam with me, so he’s not going to fight me in Darlinghurst Road, is he?
‘My theory: Mendoza growing old, dribbling in his dinner, pissing his pants, can’t even get it up to rape the waitress. You – some sort of lost son, distant cousin, family hard man, Yiddisher Rambo – come out from your Jew-hole in Golders Green to take over the family business. First thing you see: biker goyim in the drugs trade. Should be one of your rackets, but Mendoza’s too slow to move. Can’t take on the clubs yourself, but think you can turn us against each other – thick-asshit bikers, what would we know? Attack us outside Ink, try to make us think it’s the Mutineers, hope we’ll wipe each other out, and Jews can step in over the bodies. Doesn’t all go your way. Your offsider – watch your back, Hymie, they’ll knife it every time – runs off with your goyish vagina, so you’ve got nothing to fuck. Then somebody has him knocked. My heart says you, but my head says these Russian cunts I’ve heard so much about but never seen since they come bursting out of a window behind me. So must be at least two factions in the Jew War, tribe of Fagin versus tribe of Shylock. Well, the Cannibals are going to step out of this, let you kill yourselves. We’ll ride up to Queensland. Why? I’ll give you six million reasons, although a more realistic figure might be four million, one and half million, or even none at fucking all because, if you look at it demographically, there are just as many reasons now as there were in 1939 – so what does that tell you, eh?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.
Suicide shook his head and laughed.
‘Why are you here, Hymie?’ he asked. ‘What do you people want?’
‘I heard you took a shipment of kit from interstate,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a very good price for anything I can use.’
‘Gelt, gelt,’ said Suicide, rubbing together his fingers and thumbs. ‘I might’ve known it’d be about gelt.’
The bald man came to march me away, and muttered and swore as he pushed me to the door. When I stepped out of the Cannibals’ bunker and into the late-afternoon light, I was surprised to see my scooter was still there. There was an odd smell around it, though. At first I thought I must have ridden through something, then I noticed the pannier had been jemmied.
I lifted the lid, and inside lay a fat brown turd.
THIRTY-THREE
Mendoza and I met daily, in one of half-a-dozen units around the city, which he used to keep for his liaisons with showgirls, or offer to cops and politicians. We talked about his children, or I told him stories about Jed. We were marking time but enjoying each other’s company. The book was coming along well – I felt I had finally found my voice – but Mendoza was taking a long time to read my chapters. He’d begun falling asleep in the afternoon, and sometimes when he woke up he thought it was 1974, or 1956. We never got together at the same apartment twice, until Mendoza suggested we meet at the Centennial Park unit for the second day in a row.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘After today, everything will be taken care of. I will not have to watch my movements again.’
I thought I understood what he meant. I ran a finger over my tattoo, snorted coke from a CD case, grabbed my Heckler & Koch from the bedside drawer and jammed it in the small of my back. I dropped a Browning Hi-Power into my shoulder holster, strapped a diver’s knife to my ankle, and padded three hand grenades into my pack, along with a 40 mm grenade launcher, and a stripped-down M4A5 rifle. When I had put in my order for weapons with Suicide, he’d thought I was arming a team.
I was dressed like a traveller, in fisherman’s pants, a Singha T-shirt and sun hat, so as not to look conspicuous carrying such a large pack. I jogged up to Centennial Park, humming ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ like the rumble of an engine, burning energy to kill the excitement. This was the last thing I was ever going to do for Jed, my brother, my bright, shining friend. This was the end of everything.
The entrance to the apartment block was jammed open with a pile of shrink-wrapped Yellow Pages. The door to the unit was unlocked too. I opened it slowly and, as I did, a cosh came crashing down on the back of my head. It was Mendoza, hitting me with the new chapters of my manuscript rolled up like a club.
‘You are the worst writer in the whole fucking world!’ he yelled.
I rubbed my neck.
‘I told you to write more like you speak,’ he said, ‘but the word “fucking” is not an adjective in written English. You can’t use it to qualify a noun. You say, “The Little Fish was a fucking hard man.” What you mean is, “The Little Fish was a very hard man.” Except of course, you don’t even say that. What you have actually written here, Anthony, which I have managed to interpret based on what I consider to be the most likely meaning, is “The Little Fish was fucking a hard man.” I would quite understand this if you were referring to his gaping-arsed drag queen, but you are in fact describing him in relation to Gozo Joe Stone, the biggest cocksman in the southern Mediterranean hemisphere.
‘Do you even read through these pages once you print them out? No, don’t tell me, because I know the fucking answer. It’s written here, between the lines, like the only other parts of your manuscript that make any sense. I see you have followed my suggestion and employed a spelling-check programme, but you have accepted each of its judgments as if it were Sir Garfield fucking Barwick.
‘It’s bad enough that you misspell my name – in my own fucking biography, my testament, my memorial – as “Mindozer”, but halfway through you allow your computer to style me as “monomer”, then “misnomer”, then fucking “misdoer”! Tell me, please, that you’re trying to
be fucking funny.’
‘They’re just little things, though,’ I said, ‘aren’t they, Jake?’
‘I don’t have time to talk to you about the big things, Nick. It would literally take me the rest of my life. Come here.’
I stepped towards him. He took hold of me and hugged me, then stood facing me, with his hands resting on my elbows, bowing his head into my chest.
‘The Russians called,’ he said. ‘They made a final offer on the strip clubs and the brothels and the sex shops and the hotels.’
‘What did they offer?’ I asked.
‘One dollar. It’s what passes for a joke in the famously humorous Russian mafia. They pretend to negotiate while they change over their hit teams.’
‘So you do know it’s the Russians?’ I said.
‘Of course it’s the Russians,’ said Mendoza. ‘They sent a Russian to do a deal with me. I had Natural Science bite off his Russian nose.’ Mendoza chomped his dentures, like a shark taking a bite out of a surfer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘I’m ready to do what needs to be done, Jake,’ I told him.
‘And what do you think needs to be done?’ he asked me.
‘When they come for you, we’ll get them first.’
‘There is no “we”, Anthony,’ said Mendoza. ‘You’re fired.’
He picked up a Samsonite briefcase from the floor and opened it on the table.
‘There’s a hundred grand in there,’ he told me. ‘Spend it on wine, women and song, but be sure to allocate the smallest portion to song. Never manage a recording artist, Anthony. You’ll get no thanks from anyone.’
I looked at the money, laid out like loaves in a baker’s oven. Strapped to the lid of the briefcase was a manila envelope.
‘Inside is the video of you and Leah,’ said Mendoza, ‘and also the micro-cassettes containing the recordings of our interviews. There are no copies of the film or the tapes in existence.’
‘We’re not beaten, Jake,’ I told him. ‘Look what I’ve got in here.’
It was my turn to open my bag.
‘Jesus fuck!’ said Mendoza.
I put the grenade launcher aside, dropped both pistols on the table and began assembling the assault rifle.
‘Take the nine mil,’ I said. ‘It’s yours anyway.’
Mendoza weighed his pistol in his hand and smiled.
‘I’m eighty-one years old, Anthony,’ he said. ‘And you expect me to kill someone? I would be taking from them more than they could ever take from me.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t expect you to kill anyone or not kill anyone, but I don’t expect you to die like a dog when you could live like a man. How many people will they send after you, Jake? Two? Three? We could hold off the fucking SAS with what we’ve got here.’
‘But for how long, Anthony?’
‘I don’t know. An hour. Ninety minutes, maybe.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘In the long term. In the future.’
‘You mean: can we beat the Russian mafia?’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about this.’
‘Fucking God preserve us,’ said Mendoza.
‘Obviously we don’t have the resources to take them on globally,’ I said.
‘“Obviously”,’ said Mendoza.
‘But I really believe we could drive them back to Moscow.’
‘Listen to Napoleon,’ said Mendoza.
‘You’d rather listen to that cunt Dror,’ I said.
‘Dror has been working for the Russians for seven months,’ said Mendoza. ‘If I listen to him, I learn what they want me to think, and I know to do the opposite. But the day Dror turned dog, I knew it was over for me. I started to put my affairs in order. I began the preparations for my book, and I waited for the writer to arrive.’
‘So you always knew it was Dror?’
‘Life is like the Malts, Nick. It throws the same shit at you every time. It’s always the lieutenant. They are never satisfied. They can never wait.’
‘I’m gonna fucking get Dror,’ I said.
‘“Get Dror”,’ repeated Mendoza. ‘You have nothing to “get Dror” for. He didn’t deliberately target your friend; he didn’t even know he’d be there. Dror knew I was suspicious of him, so he organised an attempt on his own life to throw me off. Fucking idiot.’ Mendoza laughed. ‘It’s what they always do.’
I said I wanted revenge. He said that Dror had started off as a good man, and so his own treachery would destroy him.
‘Betrayal gnaws on the intestines,’ said Mendoza, ‘makes offal of your kidneys, takes bites from your heart. He will be at the funeral, pretending to grieve, knowing he is lower than the lowest mongrel dog. I know what I’m talking about, Nick. I was there when they buried the Little Fish, gripping limp hands and wishing them all long life, handing out money to the caterers and that fucking drag queen. There are better ways to settle these things when you are dealing with friends, but at the time you are too caught up in the logic of the situation to realise there is a path between kill or be killed, to remember that we write our own rules. This comes to us with age and, when it does, we know it’s over. It will catch up with Dror in the end.’
I shook my head.
‘Will you be coming to my funeral, do you think, Nick?’ he asked.
‘There needn’t be a funeral,’ I said.
‘Oh, there has to be a funeral,’ said Mendoza. ‘It might as well be mine. My wife is dead. My mistress doesn’t love me. My daughter doesn’t speak to me. Lazarus, they tell me, is unlikely to come out of hospital. As for my son . . . pah! All I had left of my life was my story, and now it’s told. I’ve written my own eulogy, Slick. I’m ready to die.’
He rubbed his hands together.
‘Tell me you will come,’ he said.
‘I’ll come,’ I promised.
‘Make a friend of Dror,’ said Mendoza. ‘Help him with his grieving. Tell him you know how it feels to lose a man you love. Tell him how highly I thought of him, how warmly I spoke of him, how I thought of him as my son.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said.
‘That will be our revenge on the mongrel dog maggot cunt.’
Mendoza poured me a whisky from a cut-glass decanter.
‘The famous Russians!’ snorted Mendoza. ‘Do you know why I set Natural Science on their messenger like a dog? So it would end like this.’
I asked if he was sure that they would come for him today.
‘I had until midday to accept their offer,’ he said. ‘My deadline has expired.’
His mobile phone beeped. He glanced at the screen.
‘A text message,’ he said. ‘Dror is worried about me. He wants to know where I am.’
Laboriously he stabbed each small key with his right index finger, tapping his address into the phone.
‘There,’ he said, and sat back and lit a cigar.
‘I’m an abomination,’ he said, ‘a monster who should never have been born. We kill our own, Nick, that is the law of history.
But there are no Jews left here to knock me. I pass on my legacy to the Solntsevskaya bratva, as Phil Jeffs left his to me.
‘Write my story, Nick,’ he said. ‘But write it so my grandchildren don’t have to believe it was me. Change the small details: my name, the date of my birth, the suburb where I was born, the names of my clubs . . .’
He looked at me and through me.
‘Give the story a point,’ he said. ‘Give me some motivation other than the love of money and the pursuit of cunt. And have me die younger, and braver. And do something about that mad fucking jock, will you? But before you start,’ he said, ‘get somebody to help you, someone who knows how to write.’ He coughed. ‘You fucking imbecile.’
We sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the road. When Mendoza heard a car pull up outside the apartment, he raised an eyebrow. He drew back his curtains and looked down. I lifted my rifle to my shoulder, Mendoza shook his head. I smiled and shrugged, put down the gun and pour
ed another whisky.
Mendoza left the apartment with his Webley in his hand. I knew he was not going to use it. He just wanted to make sure the Russians shot him.
THIRTY-FOUR
I rang Helen to tell her I wouldn’t be home for a while. She said thank you, fuck you, and have a nice life. I opened the window to let fresh air into the flat. I smelled restaurant grease and burger waste, exhaust fumes and beer. I shaved and stretched, lingered in the hot shower, and splashed myself with aftershave that Jed had left behind. Suddenly I could only smell the life of my dead friend. I had to sit down, breathe deeply and slowly, and remember he was gone.
I would never see the Jedi again, put up with his mad driving or listen to his stupid stories. Nobody was ever going to phone me at three o’clock in the morning and tell me he’d just fucked a girl until she squirted. Nobody was ever going to back me up and let me down like he did.
Jed was not a killer, not the way I was. He was not even a soldier, really. He hadn’t been brought up to do what we did. He was just a big, lovely Aldershot boy with a smile that could draw your pants to your ankles, bend you over a coffee table and part your legs like an alcopop. I smiled, shook my head and raised a mug of tea to Jed in heaven.
I had bought a black shirt to wear under my black suit, and hid my eyes under a pair of Ray Ban Aviators. I polished my black boots like a wingnut and trimmed my black stubble for the second time that morning. I sat at the kitchen table, reading a book about the pogroms in Russia, until the car arrived. I didn’t recognise any of the old men inside. We were silent as we drove in convoy through Oxford Street to Woollahra’s Chevra Kadisha.
Reporters and TV crews were kept out of the chapel by a team of Maori bouncers wearing black yarmulkes and led by Lazarus, who stood unsteady but proud. We shook hands at the door, and it felt as if I were holding him upright. By his side was the boy Jordan. He took everything personally and now felt that his enemy was whoever had shot at us, and wanted to kill them like he had hoped to kill me. We needed men like him in the organisation, I decided.