by Mark Dapin
‘The problem with you Aussies is you can’t tell the good guys from the bad,’ said Ginger Meggs to Shorty.
They rode past the police post, where two men slept beside their weapons. Ginger Meggs sounded his horn and the startled police grabbed for their guns. They called out after him, a name that wasn’t Ginger Meggs – or perhaps it was just a word.
Ginger Meggs turned sharply and they were no longer either on the road or in the scrub. They were riding behind buildings, in the spaces between walls. Shorty knew they were heading the wrong way.
He put one arm around Ginger Meggs’ chest, and pulled the boy towards him, to show him his strength. The boy laughed and accelerated. Shorty threw his weight to one side, and almost toppled them both.
‘Jesus, Aussie,’ said Ginger Meggs, but he pulled up in a dark gap under a corrugated awning.
‘Get off the bike,’ said Shorty, ‘and give it to me.’
Ginger Meggs laughed again, but did as he was told. ‘Are you robbing me, copper?’ he asked. ‘Are you tickling me, walloper?’
Shorty gripped him by the shoulder. ‘Where did you learn to talk like that?’ he demanded.
Ginger Meggs turned away. Shorty put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Where’s your stick?’ demanded Shorty.
Ginger Meggs pointed to the scooter with a stiff arm and an open hand.
‘Under the seat,’ he said. ‘It’s re-tract-ab-le.’ He enunciated every syllable. ‘Formerly the property of the US Army. An Aussie mate passed it on to me. Swapped it with a Yank for a kangaroo feather. Those seppos couldn’t find their arse with both hands, eh? You could sell them the Harbour Bridge.’
Ginger Meggs made to reach for the scooter, but the cane was already in his hand, retracted in the sleeve of his jacket. He smashed Shorty around the head. Shorty backed away, his hands protecting his face, but the boy jumped at him, bringing down the stick onto his skull.
‘This is a lesson for you, Aussie,’ said Ginger Meggs. ‘Don’t take rides. And don’t give rides.’ With each word, he beat Shorty around the face and shoulders.
Then the boy pulled out a knife.
At that moment, Izzy Berger approached Nashville with his business card in Le Boudin.
EIGHT
Nashville returned to the bar with Shorty folded up in the back of a Lambretta taxi. He cradled his partner’s head in his lap. Shorty’s blood stained the cuffs of Nashville’s shirt, made them look tie-dyed, psychedelic, like the sleeves of the albums the hippie chicks bought in Haight-Ashbury, and Nashville never got to see. The driver progressed slowly, as if in a funeral procession. He hadn’t wanted to take the fare.
When the girls heard the Lambretta, they hurried outside. The night air was clear, and tasted clean. The sugarcane man fed stalks into his grinder, squeezing sweet juice from the stems. A bat sailed out of the mangroves, a lazy omen.
Nashville carried Shorty out of the Lambretta. The tall man was groggy but conscious and babbling, and he kept an arm around Nashville’s shoulder and let him take most of his bodyweight and carry him into the bar, where Baby Marie met him with a damp towel. She took charge of him like a nurse. She needed another person to look after, a distraction from the rumours she’d heard about the dustoff. Nobody could tell her the names of the men who’d been killed and, when she asked too many questions, the diggers thought she was VC.
‘I’ve been stabbed,’ said Shorty, coughing.
The lizard men in the bar were slothful and incurious. It was late and there had been many drinks. They were all edging closer to sex, using their tongues to catch flies. Baby Marie helped Shorty out of his shirt, her eyes searching his torso for wounds. She found a stripe of blood across his ribs from the whipping, and touched it lightly with her fingertip. There were other marks on his body, but they remembered footy games and tractor accidents, a fall from a horse and a wrestle with a cow.
‘Where he cut you?’ Baby Marie asked Shorty.
Shorty pointed to his pants.
Christ, thought Nashville.
Quyn and Tâm carried over a Chinese screen. They made a private space for Shorty in the corner of the bar. He sat on the edge of a table as Baby Marie kneeled in front of him, unbuckled his belt and helped him step out of his slacks. His legs were hairy, like all the white men, like every jungle ape. As Shorty gripped the tabletop, she eased off his boxer shorts, leaving him naked. His hands moved to cup his balls. Baby Marie turned him onto his side, to examine his buttocks. She found a vertical cut on the left side, the length of a matchstick and the depth of a scratch. It had bled lightly but was now dry.
Baby Marie picked up his pants and turned them over. A blade had cut into the seam of the pocket and sliced away the fabric, taking the flap of the pouch and everything that had been inside.
Shorty saw that he had been robbed, not stabbed.
‘How you feel?’ asked Baby Marie.
‘Like an idiot,’ said Shorty.
She wrapped her small hand in his.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Nashville say you an idiot.’
Tâm brought Shorty a laundered pair of Australian Army greens. The girls in Le Boudin could have outfitted a battalion.
Izzy Berger approached Nashville at the bar, and passed him a beer.
‘We found him, then,’ said Berger.
He felt the rescue of Shorty had taken place in two parts. The first – and arguably more important – stage of the operation had been executed by Berger himself, when he’d scouted the enemy position and located the missing soldier. Then Nashville had gone in to complete the rescue mission.
‘It’s a tough way for the big guy to start his tour,’ said Nashville. ‘In my first week, I had Natalie Susan Mitchell riding on my hips and her sister sitting on my face.’ Nashville bumped beer cans with Berger. He felt a mild debt to the little man.
‘What is it you want again?’ Nashville asked Berger.
‘I’m looking for an American MP,’ said Berger. ‘Timothy James Caution.’
Nashville crushed his empty beer can in his hand, partly out of surprise, but more for the simple drama of the gesture. ‘Is this some kind of fucking joke? Why do you want Caution?’
‘Because he’s the entertainment manager at your base,’ said Berger.
Nashville suspected he was being mocked.
‘We’re a unit of the United States Military Police,’ said Nashville. ‘We don’t have no fucking entertainment manager.’
‘It may just be an informal thing,’ said Berger.
The little man explained that he had come to Vung Tau to clear up a misunderstanding over a joint venture between Kings Cross business interests and the US Military Police. The two parties had organised a tour of South Vietnam by a talented disciple group from Sydney, Australia. The US end of the deal had been negotiated by a Sergeant Caution, who was regarded with respect by men whose admiration meant a great deal in the ‘milieu’, a specialist branch of show business in which Berger himself was highly regarded. On these men’s recommendation, Berger had arranged contracts and visas for the girls, and provided generous per diem expenses for a month overseas, while Caution had purchased their air tickets. Both the concert takings and the financial risk were to be split sixty-forty in favour of the Australians. Unaccountably, however, Caution and the girls had left Australia a day early, with all Berger’s money, and were now incommunicado.
Luckily, Berger felt secure in the knowledge he was dealing with a representative of the finest army in the world, which wouldn’t risk a public-relations disaster by ripping off an ally in a war which, even Berger was forced to admit, was not as popular at home as certain earlier conflicts in which the enemy had appeared to pose a more direct danger to Australia.
‘So where do I find Sergeant Caution?’ he asked. ‘And my twelve hundred dollars?’
Nashville laughed.
Berger frowned. Although he recognised that he himself didn’t cut a particularly imposing figure, he asked Nashville to understand tha
t the interests behind him were deadly serious.
Nashville bridled at the implied menace, but sometimes you had to let a man have his bluster – especially in a bar – because some guys had nothing else.
Shorty came out from behind the screen, draped over Baby Marie. Nashville envied him, despite the bruising.
‘Here’s your countryman,’ said Nashville to Berger. ‘Explain it to him.’
But Shorty ignored the man in the yellow hat, and spoke excitedly to Nashville.
‘I think it was the Mamasan,’ he said. ‘She did this to me.’
Nashville raised an eyebrow, characteristically.
‘You think the Mamasan is a boy on a scooter called Ginger Meggs?’ he asked.
Shorty wished he had a partner who took him – or anything – seriously. ‘No, he was just her messenger,’ said Shorty, ‘and the message was meant for you.’
Shorty hoped his words would hang in the air, but Nashville waved them away.
‘I get it,’ said Nashville. ‘The zipperheads don’t like me driving their retard around, so they kidnap my retard and drive him around. Message received. Both from you and Natalie Susan Mitchell over here . . .’
He grabbed at Tâm’s ass. She scowled. Nashville squinted, as if that might help him see her better for what she was. But the clearer he viewed her, the more he wanted her.
I’m some world-class pussy-hound, he thought.
Nashville took Tâm by both hands, savouring another excuse to touch her.
‘Okay,’ said Shorty, ‘if it wasn’t the Mamasan, it must’ve been the VC.’
Nashville, about to take a drink, laughed the top off his beer. ‘The fucking VC now?’ he said, shaking his head.
‘He spoke perfect English,’ said Shorty, ‘like an Australian.’
Nashville rested his can. ‘There’s zipperheads that talk English,’ said Nashville, ‘and there’s zipperheads that talk French. When you’ve got to start to worry is when you hear a zipperhead talk Russian.’
Shorty turned away from Nashville, and bumped shoulders with the man in the yellow hat.
‘G’day,’ the man said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Izzy “the Deal” Berger. You may have seen me in Pix magazine.’
Shorty, for the first time since he was five years old, burst into tears.
‘He’s in shock,’ said Izzy Berger, knowledgably.
Berger put his arm around Shorty, and his lips close to Shorty’s ear, and whispered a story in a voice too low for Nashville to hear.
‘Listen, kid,’ said Berger. ‘My first night in this town, I didn’t know my way around. I got a room in the Grand, and it looked like a classy enough joint. I went down to the bar and bumped into a broad’ – Izzy Berger nearly always used American terms – ‘named Hong and I invited her back to my room to see my etchings, which I carry with me wherever I go. She took her massage oil out of her bag, I undressed and lay on my back. She tried to bring me off in her hand, but I’d given her five bucks, and that buys you a pair of shoes where I come from, so I told her I wanted the lot. She turned out the lights, bent over the bed, took me in her hand and guided me inside her.’
Shorty did not want to listen to Berger’s story, could barely hear it really. Berger found it difficult to continue, but seemed compelled to finish.
‘It was the finest ass I’d ever had,’ said Berger, ‘because it was an ass. When she’d finished, I turned her over to pat her pussy, and I discovered she was a man.’
Shorty vomited on the bar-room floor.
‘Yeah,’ said Izzy Berger, ‘that’s the way I felt.’
A cowboy with a bucket came to mop up the mess.
‘I chased Hong out of the room,’ said Izzy Berger, ‘down the corridor, back through the bar and out of the hotel. He was carrying his frock in his hands and I was just as God made me, except circumcised.’
Berger was barely addressing Shorty now. His audience was himself. ‘I stood in the lobby, yelling and screaming and threatening to find Hong and grease him. I even borrowed a piece from a Yank to do the job, but I was naked and couldn’t find a place to put it.’ Berger shook his head at his own foolishness.
‘Anyhow, it all came to nothing,’ he said, ‘as these things generally do, and you know what? I feel good about it now. I mean, it wasn’t as if he fucked me, right? It doesn’t make me queer. My ass is still as virgin as Mary’s when she rode her ass into Bethlehem. And a fuck’s a fuck, right? I mean, I can’t count it towards my score, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of either.
‘Do you see my point, kid?’ said Berger, his confession complete. ‘When we’re new to a place, we all make mistakes.’
Shorty turned to Nashville.
‘I want to go home,’ he said.
NINE
Everyone around Kings Cross, Sydney, agreed Izzy Berger was harmless to anyone but himself. They could see what he wanted to be – a gangster and an American – but he didn’t have the build for it, the temperament or the nationality. Underneath the yellow hat, Izzy Berger was true blue and, it was universally held, a nice guy. Sure, his mates sent him on futile or dangerous errands, picked his pocket, glued his locks, stole his watch and even, after one drunken afternoon in Aphrodite’s, sold his car, but he was accepted and, if not quite loved, then cheerfully tolerated by the men who mattered.
As for Berger himself, he felt he was American in every way except the obvious: he wasn’t born in America, and he didn’t live there. But that, he reasoned, was simply an accident of fate. His father, Hans Berger, a noted recording artist in Berlin, had fled Hitler in 1936, when it was still possible to leave Germany with a Stradivarius in a suitcase.
Hans’s mother, his father, his uncles, his brothers and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. This was a story often told to Izzy when he was growing up, the point being a man had to know when to leave. Hans kept a violin in a valise under his bed for the rest of his life.
Izzy Berger was raised in an Art Deco apartment on Macleay Street. He earned pocket money as a shabbas goy, pressing elevator buttons and turning off lights for orthodox families in nearby buildings. As an adult, he would boast he’d been the only Jewish shabbas goy in Sydney, but there was at least one other.
At school, Izzy was beaten up by Protestant boys for being Jewish and Jewish boys for being German. A junior rugby-league footballer named Simon Sleeth forced his head into the toilet, slammed down the seat and flushed it. He did this every morning for a term because, he said, Berger was shit.
Sleeth was six foot tall with fair hair and a firm jaw, and looked to Izzy like Chesty Bond. As he was both popular and feared, Sleeth’s judgement of Berger was broadly accepted by the rest of the school, including Berger himself, who wanted only to be Sleeth’s mate and walk with him through the playground spitting gum.
Sleeth, instinctively gifted in the arts of cruelty, amused himself by offering Berger his approval in exchange for humiliating and shameful acts, ranging from minor sexual favours to eating Sleeth’s cigarette butts. But Sleeth generally withdrew his patronage either at the moment he complied or, worse still, at the point where Berger publicly agreed to his newest degradation. Only joking, Jewstick! What kind of shit-dick Yiddelsky would do something like that?
So Berger stopped going to school, and spent his days hiding from his parents and his tormentors in Darlinghurst Road. He ran errands for a German-Jewish prostitute, and became a brothel boy in his early teens. He felt comfortable around prostitutes because they didn’t judge him for being short and slight and Jewish and German and shit. Berger, in turn, saw each girl as a tragedy worthy of sympathy, rather than a victim to be exploited.
Izzy Berger had learned to read and write music before he could read and write English. He could play a little piano and passable violin, and he taught himself guitar. Hans hoped one day father and son could perform together, in classical concerts at Sydney Town Hall. But Berger was a child of rock ’n’ roll. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran sang
his anger, pain and lust. He formed a dance band named the Ice Bergs (and briefly called himself Ice Berger) and played popular concerts around the eastern suburbs of Sydney. The Ice Bergs were in great demand for bar mitzvahs, until all four members and their roadie were beaten up by a bunch of swimmers who accused them of stealing their title. From this, Berger learned to legally register the name of any band with whom he came into contact.
The Ice Bergs were robbed by club owners, promoters and a record label. They sold out the big dances and had a hit single in Melbourne, but they rarely saw a penny of the takings or the profits. From this, Berger learned the money in music was in management.
When Berger tracked down a particular promoter who had simply fled the club with the door money at the end of the night, the man held a paring knife to his throat and threatened to cut out his Adam’s apple. Berger contacted some men he knew who worked as sitters in a brothel in Kings Cross, who paid a visit to the promoter and set his house on fire. They recovered Berger’s money, but kept it for themselves. From this, Berger learned you needed muscle in the business world, but you also needed to keep it under control.
Berger watched from the coffee bars as Kings Cross gradually fell under the control of a gang with no name, a group of Jewish returned servicemen with connections to corrupt cops, led by a man named Jake Mendoza who was no taller – but much broader – than Berger’s father. From this, Berger learned that short people could succeed in the milieu, even Jews.
Berger was twenty years younger than the new hard men of Darlinghurst Road, but there were things he knew, and small assistances he could offer, that made him useful to them. He amused them by being Jewish and talking quickly, and always having a scheme. They backed some of his more outlandish plans with insignificant amounts of money, for the simple joy of seeing him fail.