Stonedogs

by Craig Marriner

  Me: ‘Yep. How ’bout I phone my people in Wardrobe and book you lot in for an upgrade?’

  He bites his words off like Spandau fire. ‘Let’s get a few things straight, Jake: you or your boyfriends lip off once more and it’ll be the last thing you ever fucking say. Savvy? Second: on this property you’re out-numbered and out-gunned; if you’re planning on fucking around on this deal in any way or shape, you’ll be sucking Zyklon B before you’ve even smelt it. Am I understood?’

  Me: ‘Abundantly.’

  Helmut, squinting: ‘You taking the piss?’

  ‘Nein.’

  ‘Nine what, arsehole?’

  ‘Nein, Standartenfuhrer?’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about, bitch?’

  Mick: ‘He said no, he’s not taking the piss. Can we get on with things?’

  A second skinhead, glancing at his watch: ‘Yeah, we don’t got a lot of time, Helmut. Kaiser ordered us to have this gear cleared no later than 23.15.’

  Helmut, scoffing lightly: ‘All right, Bunter. If you’re intent on earning nursemaid stripes. Again.’ He levels an ominous finger at me: ‘But if this fuck here doesn’t re-examine his attitude, I’m gonna do it for him.’

  I’m taken by the crazed urge to challenge our Helmut, in front of his boys, to a one-on-one punch-up. I find his simply speaking in the same accent as me mortally offensive.

  Instead, with strategic emphasis: ‘You won’t get any hassle outta me, Helmet.’

  Helmut: ‘You’d better believe it, fuck-face. Now pick up your shit and fall in.’

  Hoisting sacks, we’re led through a front door that could hold a rabid sabre-tooth. Up a staircase, single file.

  Their three-storey pad appears to be a former office-block or something: long, thin-walled.

  Barry: ‘You know what, Helmet?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If this is how ya’s treat a party with whom you’re seeking to do mutually satisfying business, I’d hate to see ya’s down the main drag of a Friday, staunching up for the ladies.’

  Helmut turns, halting the procession on the stairway. Sneering: ‘Try not to cry about it, Elwood. It just fucks me off to let a bunch of outta-town poofters into our pad like this. Who knows who you’re liable to go squealing to. You wouldn’t believe the amount of hostiles around at the moment who’d pay top dollar for inside info about our base.’

  Mick: ‘It was your choice to do business here. Another location could’ve been jacked up piece of piss. Still could, really.’

  Helmut, squinting: ‘Yeah, you’d love that, wouldn’t ya, Half-pint? That way you fucks could’ve lined up the Rabble or someone and run a double-cross.’ Hackles rising: ‘Is that what’s going on here? You arseholes collaborating with the Rabble?’

  Me, chuckling darkly: ‘Whatever, bro. If you only knew how fucking funny that is.’

  Helmut, swelling further: ‘You fucking bet whatever, bitch! In here I’m the man, and what I say goes! And don’t “bro” me either: do I look like a nigger to you?’

  From further down the stairs: ‘Are they outta-towners?’

  Helmut: ‘Affirmative. Where’re you pink triangles from?’

  Mick: ‘Somewhere near Taupo.’

  Helmut: ‘Yeah? Well, you just make fucking certain no cunt from “somewhere near Taupo” hears a word about any of this. Ever. Cause if they do …’

  Me: ‘Yeah, yeah, we heard ya the first time, Helmet: you’ll string us up like a pack of baby-thieving gypsies.’

  Helmut, glaring: ‘One more word, tough guy. Please. Just one more. I’ll …’

  Bunter: ‘C’mon, Helmut! Kaiser said it was vital we transferred the hooch on time. We’ve still gotta weigh and check it all.’

  Helmut, lordly: ‘I’m not rushing this for any cunt. I’m commandant here tonight, and these cocksuckers …’

  Bunter: ‘That’s what I’ll report to Kaiser when he asks the reason we ended up late, then: because you wouldn’t rush for any cunt.’

  Flinching, Helmut ends the exchange, leading on.

  Down a hallway. I take in the place with a cursory eye. It’s been done up recently, that much is apparent: new carpet, wallpaper, curtains, light fittings. But rats’ll soil a mansion as soon they will a cage: the carpet appears yet to have seen a vacuum; rubbish piled along the walls; dirty washing scattered in heaps; the sickly smell of spilled hot stuff and vomit; holes in the walls, from slam dancing or other recreational violence.

  The other Skins in residence seem under orders to keep a low profile: they’re nothing but voices behind walls. We pass several open doors, though: a room full of top-notch gym equipment; a giant TV Nasa would be proud of; stereo systems to have the deaf phoning noise control; a full-size snooker table; computer equipment; waterbeds; even a spa pool, for fuck’s sake!

  It seems that, like their mentors, the Skins are finding fascism profitable.

  Though I find it difficult to attribute all of this opulence to crime. They can’t be that good. Perhaps someone’s already financing the Skins for their own ends. Probably the same bastards who mapped their unification.

  These are the ones in direst need of wooden stakes. Of burial beneath cross-roads. Nationalist politicians. At least — for now — would-be politicians. Though current climes leave white extremists posing a lesser danger than those multitudes stirring the brown cauldron, the ‘patriotism’ of each is but a mask on the same creature: powerlust. A lust fully intent on exacerbating minor differences until, to enough lost minds, these distinctions appear the root of all evil.

  Let the claret then flow.

  In a progressive climate, if left to preach and recruit unchecked, racial extremists will in time weave a fate for a country to make asphyxiation at the hands of mad capitalists seem like good sex. No, we must hear the lectures of history and take the active approach: lop heads from the nationalist hydra wherever they should surface.

  Activists must be hauled from their beds by masked gunmen, driven to places ‘where the wolves fuck’, and handed shovels.

  Apartheid in Aotearoa? You should be so lucky, you shit-stirring pricks. Try ‘Einsatzgruppen, Kiwi-style’. For your ilk at least.

  At the head of the passage a hefty ladder leads into a loft.

  Helmut, starting up it: ‘Fall in, bitches.’

  Barry: ‘You dudes gonna give us a hand with these sacks, or what?’

  Bunter: ‘What do we look like to you? Forced labour?’

  Barry, muttering to be heard streets away: ‘Can you believe these pieces of shit?’ Dropping his sacks, he climbs to near the peak of the ladder. I follow him aways, and, with Mick at the bottom, we human-chain our wares into the loft.

  The loft turns out to be more of a hall, occupying the entire third storey. A long table runs the length of its centre, benches flanking it. Windows perforate the walls.

  And as we enter, the Brotherhood have all words knocked from us, the remainder of our escort surfacing unnoticed to our rear. For upwards of a minute we simply stand and stare, incredulity prising jaws wide.

  Horror crawling like skin-worm.

  The Skins have adorned their hall in Third Reich memorabilia. Enormous swastika flags of several designs. Banners of individual SS divisions — the leering Death’s Head of the Totenkopf; the eagle of the Waffen. Recruitment and propaganda posters — Nordic angels slaying red monsters, a smiling Blackshirt kneeling to blond children. Portraits of the mirthful monks themselves: the Austrian house-painter; the Bavarian chicken-farmer; several other pen-pushing demons. Inflated photos of blitzkrieg in action; of teeming rallies; of pits crammed with bodies; of firing squads; of smoking chimneys; of towns in flame; orchards of ‘bizarre fruit’ …

  At the head of the table an enormous brass throne takes pride of place, the eagle spreading wings at its back. In a case behind it, I notice Lugers — replicas? — and ceremonial daggers.

  As surreal as recent times have seemed, at this latest twist in the dream I begin to feel as if I should really like
to wake about now.

  The portrait on the rear of my eyelids is suddenly made more garish: a pair of almond brown eyes, wild black hair, a cute pixie’s nose …

  Barry, blithe: ‘Wow, you dudes are regular history buffs, aren’t ya’s?’

  I wish I could muster the will to flee this place; nothing good can ever happen for me here. But I’m too exhausted to fight the current.

  Mick appears in a state of near vertigo; I empathise only too well.

  We follow an ambling Barry toward the head of the table, along its rightward side, where Helmut stands beside the throne. Only now do I perceive the presence of a sixth skinhead in the hall. Slouched on the throne, he’s bigger than Helmut even, tall and solid, well padded in fat, head like a cannon-ball. Across one knee he cradles a pump-action shotgun. I imagine he believes the cold cigar in his mouth adds a rakish twist to the look.

  Helmut: ‘This here’s Larcho. He’s my security, so if you’ve got any tools in those sacks of yours, now’s the time to declare them.’

  Larcho hauls himself up from the throne, fronts us from across the table, alongside his brethren. A bass rumble: ‘Did you frisk them, Helmut?’

  Helmut: ‘I was gonna do it up here. Bunter? Frisk …’

  Me, digging deeply for energy, feigning vexation well: ‘Hang on a minute, Wolfgang. You cunts have got the numbers, we’re on your turf, you’s have already brought one shooter to the party, and now you propose to give us a search? We came here to do a drug deal, man. Nothing else. We knew we were handing ya’s every advantage, and we decided “fuck it, let’s throw all our cards on the table, let good faith win the day”. So far you boys have repaid us with nothing but hostility. And now you wanna fucking pat us down?’

  My only true objection to this development is the thought of being fondled by these serpents. In this shrine to unreserved hate, avoiding the touch of the priests seems suddenly crucial.

  Helmut, sarky: ‘Yeah, that sums it up nicely. Search them, Bunter.’

  Larcho: ‘Second thoughts, Helmut, we really ain’t got the time to fuck around any more.’ To us: ‘Lift up ya shirts for me and we’ll call it quits.’

  Testily, we do as he says, showcasing empty hem-lines.

  Helmut: ‘Now turn out ya pockets.’

  Larcho: ‘No time, Helmut. I’ve got ’em covered. Just get on with it.’

  For a moment Helmut bridles at the insubordination. At last, though: ‘All right, bitches. Let’s do it. Show us what you’ve got.’

  Me: ‘It don’t work like that, Fraulein.’

  Mick: ‘Yeah, where’s ya Deutschmarks.’

  Helmut: ‘Fuck you, Half-pint. If you don’t …’

  Bunter interjects by lifting a duffel bag from the floor near his feet. He bangs it to the table, unzips it, gestures.

  It’s full of cash. New notes and old. Large and largish.

  Larcho, to us: ‘One of you boys get counting, one of you start emptying them sacks. Now.’

  Mick sits at the bag without prompt, as diligent a treasurer as ever.

  Barry hoists a sack, lecturing: ‘Six sacks. Ten-single pound bags per sack. Nothing in ’em but pristine seedless. But don’t take my word for it.’ He upends it across the table, pillow-size bags cascading around the skinheads, dropping at their feet.

  I follow suit. Reach for another sack, careful to touch none of the smaller bags inside.

  Mesmerised, Larcho hands the shotgun to Helmut and opens a bag, withdrawing a bud as thick as his forearm. He sniffs at it. Whistles long and low. Sceptical: ‘It’s all like this?’

  Barry: ‘Every last fibre.’

  Helmut, to underlings: ‘Check it thoroughly. All of it.’

  Wielding hand-held scales, Bunter begins weighing individual bags, handing them off to a colleague who quickly checks their contents; re-sacks them. They’ve done this before, hurtling through the task with efficiency.

  Unneeded, I wander into a near corner, with windows at each side. Frontwards, I’ve a view of the courtyard, the fortified fence, the dark wasteland beyond. Sidewards fronts the bare side of a windowless warehouse, some twenty-odd metres away. An alley of sorts runs between the fences of both properties, beginning at the road and giving onto what appears to be a derelict building site, a pair of hulking workshops at its far border. I know from Bum that another road can be accessed from between these.

  Looking down I notice the roof of the house’s high garage some three metres below me. From there I wonder how possible it might be to leap the barbed wire.

  Larcho, at my shoulder, dwarfing me: ‘What are ya looking at?’

  ‘… Anything to keep my eyes from this filth on the walls.’

  Growling: ‘Filth, ya reckon?’

  Distant: ‘Given the suffering behind it, suffering for the Krauts as much as anyone in the end, I don’t see what else you could call it. You guys could turn this place into a symposium on misguided youth, charge ten bucks at the door.’

  His stained teeth leer at me: ‘Misguided? We’re the only cunts with any guide. It’s traitors like you who let down our race. If more of you peaceniks’d open your eyes and see the siege our people are under, we could finally lift it, bring some decency to our shit-house world.’

  Weary: ‘In case you haven’t noticed, mate, our shit-house world is ruled and maintained by Aryan businessmen, and I don’t see them doing you or me too many favours. With those cunts tweaking the strings for profit, and stitching up all the common Joes, I fail to see how racism’s gonna pull us from the hole.’

  Larcho: ‘Don’t go branding us racist, pal. Don’t you fucking dare. We’re not racist. How can we be? We draw no distinctions at all between yids, coons, dagos, sandniggers, wops, kikes, spiks, kaffirs, spades, or nig-nogs … We see them all as equally worthless. Now, get back over here with your girlfriends where I can cover your arse.’

  Bored, Detective Constable Troy Wilkinson sits in his car, half-heartedly debating the merits of a third flick through the sports pages. He’s worried his interior light might attract undue attention. But then again, it’s fast approaching time when he’ll have good reason for being here no matter who happens to notice.

  He checks his watch again; it’s moved perhaps a minute since he last looked.

  Uniforms’ll be here soon.

  He hopes they won’t be early. Remembers they’re never early. Yet one couldn’t be too careful, and the Skins are still entertaining whomever exited that car.

  This is obviously the business the Skin hierarchy had promised him would be concluded and cleared by zero hour. Judging from the car that had pulled through the gates, and then exited just as quickly, apparently discharging most of its crew — and freight? — the deal involved low-life druggies, or some other form of pond scum. Small fry. Troy hadn’t even bothered noting the Torana’s licence plate.

  But if the Skins dallied for whatever reason, and their guests left in view of the uniforms, or if a Skin car departed too late bearing contraband, Troy might find himself unable to retard his search-crew’s instincts. This could interfere with the script dangerously; cost him a payday.

  Or worse.

  He tries to relax. After all, the uniforms aren’t due for ten more minutes.

  Mick’s a born coward. The uncertainty of entering into physical altercations with strangers frightens him witless. The very idea of placing himself at the whim of so much potential chaos is something Mick simply cannot countenance. And he’s the first to admit as much. Indeed, he sometimes takes a certain pride in the fact.

  Sure, there are times when he’s wished he had it in him to fly boldly into brawls, take some stupid prick right the fuck out, sup on the glory and camaraderie of later. But when he thinks of all the shit he’s avoided through a strong sense of self-preservation, Mick finds it hard to mourn his innate proclivities.

  But now he’s beginning to find them a little difficult to locate.

  Ironically, this scares him some.

  He knows where he last saw them. Ta
kahera’s wooded ‘carpark’. But some of them had fractured when he faced down superstitious dread and entered the hearse. The rest had snapped over the course of the drive.

  Only they had done more than snap, hadn’t they?

  For the drive had been prolonged enough to scoop together the splintered pieces and bake them to powder. Because for thirty-odd minutes Mick had had thrust in his face the extremes of violence, and the extremes of terror. Corpses riding in his taxi, alone with him, had screamed in his ear the fact that there are fates in this world far worse than copping a hiding.

  And his passengers had simultaneously hollered an allusion to a second fate, this equally appalling, not least because it had dangled above Mick’s head, suspended by a rope millimetres thick.

  Life imprisonment.

  The sheer vehemence of the realities at the core of his nightmarish assignment had for the duration of the drive acted on Mick like a drowning; had left his former dreads looking positively frivolous, a notion that endured.

  How else had he found the will to agree to come here? Jesus, agree to it? If Gator hadn’t, Mick would’ve suggested it.

  Nazism occupies an especially black pedestal in the corridors of Mick’s dread. Though he’s Jewish by little more than surname — has more foreskin than Dirk Diggler; has trouble spelling ‘synogogue’ — this link with the persecuted past has always been enough to fuel his treacherous subconscious.

  But as for the Skins themselves — their bluster, their ideology, their dead eyes — the terror Mick once felt for their like is eclipsed now by contempt.

  Arranging the cash into thousand-dollar bundles, he wonders if there isn’t an element of self-destructiveness in this newfound daring: the stoicism of the Tommy at the trench-lip, his ‘superior’s’ whistle but seconds away.

  Though this act of counting the money — this tangible remuneration of their losses — serves now to melt Mick’s guts somewhat, banish a little of his leaden expectation — his pragmatist’s belief that, no matter what they do, he, Barry and Gator will soon be serenaded by the fat lady.

  Mick has worked part time from an early age — delivering papers, serving burgers, pumping gas — and he knows the value of a dollar. Indeed, some claim that if coal were inserted in his ring he’d shit diamonds in a matter of minutes. He prefers it couched in terms less vulgar: economical; provident.