by Peter Doyle
Late afternoon in the backyard, Stan sidled up to me holding out a joint. I took it from him, passed it back. Minor chit chat ensued. Then with elaborate casualness he said, “I hear you’ve been doing good business with the Captain. I’m guessing you’d have a bit of a bank by now. A little something that’s . . . not really doing anything for you?”
Fact was, I did have a few parcels of money stuck away, here and there, the beginnings of a sweet nest egg. My re-entry ticket to Sydney.
“Hmm, maybe,” I said.
Stan looked around – no one nearby. Moved closer. Lowered his voice. “I’m ready to work,” he said. Dig that word, seekers: “Work.” Underworld argot for any and all forms of breaking, entering, ripping, running, looting, shooting and derring-do criminality.
He went on, so softly I had to lean in further to hear him.
“Wanted to let you know. There’s something coming up. It’s big.”
“Yeah? How big?”
“The biggest.”
He looked at me. At that point I could have said: Spiffing. Wonderful. Hope it goes well. Bye bye. That would have been the shrewd, level-headed response. I flashed on that, for maybe a millisecond. Thing is, I was dead curious. Hungry too, I’ll admit it. So I asked him, just as he knew I would, “What?”
He leaned right in close and whispered, “The ANZ Bank in the city.”
“Yep, that is big.”
He waited a moment, then said, “And the Colonial Permanent Building Society at St Kilda.”
I said nothing.
“And last but not least, the payroll at Sunshine Pipefitters. It’ll be a big one.”
Mel was flabbergasted.
“Get it?”
“Like a crime spree?” I said.
“Right, but we hit them all on the same day at the same time.”
Mel, the Dumbfounded Kid.
“There’s one more thing. A little earlier in the day. A diversion. We’ll blow up the King’s Bridge.”
“I . . . It’s . . . But . . . How . . . Wha—?”
“We’ve been working up to this for a while. It was meant to happen later in the year, maybe spring. But now there’s this other business. It’s just too good a chance to pass up.”
The guy’s barmy, right? I knew that. But I asked, in my dazed, stupefied state, “What other business?”
“The Moratorium.” He let that sink in.
“You . . . do it on the day of the march? While the march is going on. When the police are busy.”
“Got it. Every cop in the fucking state will be at the march.” He smiled. Proud as you please. Preparing to paint his masterpiece.
Ooh, yes, my young scoundrels. This was serious A-grade, first-division, top-rank, move-over-Ned-Kelly-type criminal enterprise.
“Thing is, Mel, for something this big, we need a good bank just to get the thing organised. I’m looking for a financial backer.”
“Me?”
He smiled.
“How much?”
“There’s a lot to set up. It’ll take at least four cars and a truck. Some advance pay-offs and hush money. And we need to tool up.”
“Yeah. So how much?”
“We still need ten thousand to do it right.” He let that hang there. “You’ll get two hundred percent back on any money you put in.”
“All these people here today, they’re part of it?”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“All right, just hypothetically,” I said, “I put the money up, it all goes to plan. I get my payoff. Wonderful. But what if it goes bad?”
“You’d still get your two hundred percent back.” Looking me right in the eye. “You’d have my guarantee.”
“Let me think about it.”
Think about it I did, my larcenous young friends. It was a good investment, any way you stacked it. If it worked, I’d get my money. It went bad, sooner or later I’d still get my money. How so, I hear you politely enquire. I’ll tell you: Stan and Jimmy were old-school, my-word-is-my-bond-type brigands. A handshake deal with them was rock solid. That’s how their lot operated. Only a loser or a lagging dog would renege on a debt. It was all about reputation. So that money would be mine, sooner or later. Even if it turned to shit and they all went to jail, eventually they would make good.
But elsewhere another stew was cooking. Next day, I was mugged. In the middle of a drug deal. How do you like that? Happened like this. Late afternoon. I was waiting for Alex and Cathy in a little park in Carlton called Murchison Square. Not quite dark. A chilly breeze blowing. I had the drugs in my car, a block away.
A couple of young blokes came walking up to me quickly. Leather jackets, hunched over. One of them in grubby white jeans. I could see they were nervous and I didn’t like it. I started away. “Mel! Wait.” They knew my name.
I paused. Shouldn’t have.
“I’ve got a message from Alex,” one of them was saying, closing the distance between us. That was it. Too late now. The other had circled around, and I saw the kid in the white jeans was holding a knife. I stopped. The other said “Jesus, put it away!” to his mate, then to me, “Sorry Mel, we just wanted to get, you know, a taste from you.”
“Fuck off!”
“Come on, Mel. Just give us what you’ve got and we’ll piss off.”
Another figure approached through the gloom. A big, rangy character striding towards us. Unseen by the punks. Psycho Barry. He walked straight into the one who was doing the talking with enough force to knock him flying. The one with the knife froze. Barry was grinning. He walked up to the kid, took his forearm, held it in two places, and carefully, effortlessly, broke it over his own knee. I heard it. The kid screamed and collapsed. Barry turned to the other, who was on his feet, already limping away. He turned back to the kid on the ground, now holding his arm and sobbing, and kicked him in the stomach. He picked up the knife and leaned over the kid. He was breathing fast, staring hard at the writhing kid.
A voice out of the gloom shouted “Barry!”
Alex was approaching briskly. “Barry! We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You set this up, you dog!” I said, as Alex got closer.
“I swear, Mel, I fucking swear I didn’t. They must have overheard me on the phone. They were probably planning to jump me, but I got caught up on Punt Road.” He looked around. “Barry, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Barry straightened up, then looked around. With obvious reluctance, he dropped the knife, kicked the kid once more, looked at Alex, then at me. He tapped Alex’s shoulder, none too gently. “Come over to my car.” To me, “You too. Quick.” I could hear the kid groaning as we left the park.
We walked in silence around the corner, a couple of hundred yards along Faraday Street. Barry stopped at a new-looking yellow Charger and said, “Get in.”
Alex was shivering – from fear or dope sickness, I couldn’t tell. Barry walked around the car and got in the back next to Alex, gestured for me to get in the front. As soon as Alex settled himself, Barry hit him hard on the side of the face.
Alex’s head bounced around a bit, then he put his hand to his smarting cheek and said, “Barrrry! Fuckin’ hell, man!”
Barry pulled Alex’s hand away and hit him again. “Shut up.”
He chucked his car keys to me. “Drive away,” he said.
Ten minutes later he told me to stop on a dark stretch behind a factory in North Melbourne.
I thought it best to start the conversation. “There’s been business between Alex and me,” I said to Barry. “I’ve been steadily paying him back that outstanding debt. I have the paperwork to prove it.”
Barry shook Alex, who was shivering worse than ever. “Is that right?”
Alex nodded, but without much enthusiasm.
To me Barry said, “How much have you given him?”
“Three thousand,” I said.
To Alex, “True?”
“Round about, yeah, something like that.”
“And
how much have you still got?”
Alex opened his mouth to speak, but Barry cut him off, “Don’t shit me.”
Alex paused, then said quietly, “A few hundred.”
“You,” he said poking my shoulder, “you’re in the shit.” He nodded towards Alex. “This one is the big bloke’s nephew. But you, you’re just some cunt.”
“Some cunt who has made partial restitution in good faith.”
Barry shook his head. “You knew he’d give the money straight back to you to buy gear. Any fool could see that. The boss will see that.” He let that hang there a few seconds. “He told me to tell you that whatever money you’ve already given Alex doesn’t count.”
“Hardly fair.”
“You and your slut robbed the big man’s nephew. Haven’t you wondered how come you’re not dead yet?”
I said nothing.
“Well, I’m waiting.” Barry was smiling.
“He wants money?” I said.
Still smiling, no answer.
“He wants smack?”
A slight tilt of the head.
“He wants money and smack?”
“You’re not just an ugly face, are you?”
PANIC IN ALBERT PARK
Barry dropped me back in Carlton, took Alex with him. I rang Cathy from a public phone, told her the news.
“Don’t freak, Mel. I’ll come over to your place. We can use this.”
She arrived twenty minutes later. I banged up some speed mixed with the teensiest, weensiest little smidgin of smack, just this once, to help cool me out. Cathy had her regular blast.
We talked through the angles late into the night. The gist of what I’d gleaned from the psycho messenger was, the Greeks wanted to try their hand at heroin selling. Probably reasoned if grass and hashish were such good products, how much better would skag be? Except they didn’t know how to get started. I could help with that.
From my point of view it was a complete catastrophe. Or else it was the best thing to happen in a year. One of them. Get a fucking huge pile of smack and a pile of money, give it to the big man. If all went well, and the Greeks decided they wanted more, I would put them in touch with the Captain. Together they would then proceed to deliver narcotics to the people of Australia. And I would quietly slip out of it all, maybe with a little see-you-later bonus.
Of course the wily Greeks hadn’t specified exactly how much money and drugs they judged to be an appropriate square-up. Leaving that to me.
Cathy and I talked about possible ounces, even pounds, of heroin and whatnot, speculated as to how much money might be reasonable under the circumstances. We kicked around the other questions: should we let Craig the copper know that Barry was back? What would happen if we kept mum? Should we pull Stan and Jimmy in on this?
All through our discussion, I knew Cathy was itching to find out where I was getting the skag, but I wasn’t letting on. Finally she asked me outright. No way. Dig: I wasn’t going to give away the only bit of an edge I had in this whole sorry business.
We went to bed. It was sweet. United in adversity. I didn’t query the status of her and Stan, or her and Jimmy for that matter, or her and anybody. Tonight was cool.
She left in the morning.
That afternoon I went to see Jimmy and Stan and told them to count me in for the big knockover. I gave Stan a couple of thousand bucks right then. Didn’t leave me with much, but I was square with the Captain and could no doubt get the next package on tick.
Something else I should mention here: a regrettable disagreement with Bobby Boyd, who remains a good cat to this day but who took an uncharacteristically narrow and unforgiving attitude to my venture into the heroin business. He hadn’t minded the go-fast – hell, he’d been a major beneficiary – but he would have no truck with skag. Upshot was, my young troubadours, by the end of that week I was no longer an Oracle.
I didn’t mind too much. Had a good experience that Friday night playing with the Rods, the bequiffed and greasy-haired rock’n’roll diehards with whom I’d never stopped moonlighting. It was a dance in Geelong. The nineteen fifties all over again. People were dancing. With one another. Looking out from behind the piano, watching the smiling dancers, the ladies’ eyes closed as they whirled around the floor, I felt more a part of the music than I had in an age, like I was back in the game in some way. Even though your Carlton hipsters would’ve viewed this as some sorrowful, old-timey stuff, I knew it was the real, no bullshit, be-here-now thing. Hearken unto me, my little hepcats!
Next Monday there was a story in the Daily Earth News: “The New Heroin Plague.” By Clive the Fop. I’ll spare you the details – suffice to say, the Fop took a dim view. At least, pretended to. There was no mention of the many free lines, tokes, hits, tastes, blasts, etc. he’d copped from the evil drug sellers of Melbourne. Second column half way down, he claimed that smack was even making inroads into the traditional underworld, citing rumours that members of a certain gang of armed robbers were dabbling in it, maybe even running habits, and likely putting the proceeds of their robbery up their arms.
Then he quoted some Carlton idiot saying that heroin was the “existential drug” – the only drug, really, that’s why it was “favoured by poets, musicians, writers, dreamers and outlaws.” It finished with the Fop wondering aloud where all this high-quality gear was coming from. Over and out.
A potted version of the story turned up a couple of days later on page three of the Sun. All this and less than a week to go before the Moratorium and the big knockover.
I went to see Stan, half intending to get my money back. Found him at the East Melbourne house. He wasn’t interested in the Fop’s exposé, though. Right there at the front door, he hit me with, “Bloke named Barry. Bad bastard. From Sydney. What do you know about that?”
I stepped inside and Stan closed the door. Jimmy came out of the kitchen. I could see there were three or four blokes in there; smoke, beer bottles, fish and chips. Jimmy pulled the door closed
Stan and Jimmy were waiting for my answer. I wasn’t sure how much Stan knew about the messy events in the house at Bondi the night of his escape from Goulburn Jail. Cathy should have told him, but she always had her own ways of doing things. He looked at me, gerried that I was hesitating.
“I know about the rip. Cathy told me. And we know Barry is in with the Sydney Greeks. We need to know if he knows about our job.”
“How could he? No, of course not.”
Jimmy said, “The cunt knows something.” Looking hard at me now, jerking his head up aggressively. “Well?”
“Barry and Greek Alex fronted me a few months ago. Tracked me down to my place. I bullshitted them. Barry left. The Greek stayed in town. Then Barry turned up again last week.”
Stan and Jimmy looking very serious now.
“But it’s not about, all this . . .” I gestured around the room. “It’s about the Sydney rip. Really, it’s about the Greeks wanting a smack supply. Nothing to do with your job.”
“How do you mean, you bullshitted them?” Jimmy, sceptical.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ on a bike, I thought. My desperate gobbing off back then, my heist-novel riffing about robbing the lottery office. So obviously far-fetched that Alex had politely not mentioned it in our subsequent dealings. I’d thought it was forgotten. But maybe Barry had got a whiff from somewhere else that made him think again about my tall tale, put two and two together.
So I told them. When I finished, Jimmy sighed, long and deep, looked at Stan, who was deep in thought.
“I did jail with Barry,” Stan said, “Parramatta. Years ago.” I waited for the explanation, but none was forthcoming.
After a few more seconds Stan said to Jimmy. “We can’t do anything now, too near the job. We just play it by ear. Cut him in if we need to. Deal with him later.” Something else unspoken passed between the two of them – oh, my little peaceniks, you don’t want to know!
Astute observers of human behaviour among you might be wondering just how w
ell your trusty correspondent was dealing with all this aggravation. Truth is, not well. I’d never stopped taking speed, and I couldn’t remember the last proper night’s sleep I’d had. Despite what I’d resolved earlier, I was using the smack now, too. Mixing it with the accelerant. The term “emotional roller-coaster” comes to mind. But I wasn’t paying for any of the dope, and I had access to so much of both varieties, my own chipping wasn’t making any real difference to the profits.
Day to day, I was still doing plenty of goey biz. With Bikey Vic. Who was also part of the team on the big knockover. Yeah, I haven’t mentioned that yet. Well, like me, Vic had been brought in as an investor. He and his bikey gang mates had a pretty good bank by then. But Vic was itching to get actively involved in the armed robbery caper. Jimmy and Stan had come to trust him, even like him, tough little bastard that he was, so they’d let him in.
I’d made a point of not asking questions, but Vic had let it drop that he and a couple of mates had been assigned a task that was very near to their nihilistic hearts: they were to handle the explosion on the King’s Bridge. They could get hold of explosives – Vic hadn’t said how, but I guessed the Boy Wonder might have something to do with that.
Vic had also taken to horning the odd line of hammer and tack, which was strictly non-U for your bikey brigade, but we’re only human, right?
Anyway, Vic was a reliable cat, and I’d always liked his company. So when he came to my flat one night after dark, highly agitated, and said, “There are two blokes sitting in a car outside,” I took notice. After turning the lights out, I drew the curtain and peeked through the window. The street was quiet. A plain Holden was parked back a bit from the street light. I couldn’t see shit.
“Did you come in the front?”
Vic shook his head. “Round the back. Seen them before?”
In truth, my little scoundrels, for some time now I had been seeing suspicious loiterers, and more than once had the feeling cars were following me – I’d put it down to a return of my drug-induced discombobulation. A grain of salt, renarda renarda. Fact was, I’d spotted that same car outside twice in the past week, but my cooler-headed self had prevailed, reasoning, why the fuck would they be looking at old Mel, really?