“For your dad, or for yourself?”
“Myself, of course.”
I yawned. “Y’know, this yarn is about as interesting as the story behind Le Corsaire.”
“How dare you!”
Bole-whatever-his-name-was strode straight over to Bruno’s corpse and snatched up the weight from the dead man’s hand.
“Now I’m going to return the favour by killing not just that evil reviewer’s only child, but her rude, highly unprofessional prick of a bodyguard.”
“My bad.”
“Bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken shoes. Remember that.”
“What’s the point? You’re going to crown me anyway.”
“True.”
The kook stepped slowly toward me. I still held tightly to the curtains and couldn’t raise my hands to defend myself.
“Modern man is so confused, Roy. It’s much better to work in the theatre — than in the horror of a world out there.”
“Whatever.”
That was when all hell broke loose.
Something fast darted out of shadows of a mocked-up grotto to my right, moving so quickly I couldn’t hope to keep up.
I don’t know when I realized the wildly whirling dervish was Mocha.
She hummed something familiar as she zipped, twisted, did a cartwheel — what was that damned tune? — and finally she somersaulted, catapulted herself into a handstand, scissor-kicked around Helpman’s neck, and stopped right there.
“Pas de deux?” she said, her cheeks flushed even under all the makeup.
Helpman’s eyes bulged, his head pinioned between Mocha’s calf muscles. I could see he was stuck, and she wasn’t about to let him go.
“Mocha,” I warned, “watch out for the weight of iron he has in his mitt.”
“Ta.”
The woman knocked the metal away across the floor. Then she leaned up close to her captive. The flexibility factor alone worried me — I had no hope of ever touching my toes.
“Ivan,” she murmured softly, fluttering her enormous false eyelashes, “now I know your real name, let me tell the other part of the story, the bit you missed. I’m your harpy.”
“What?”
“It was me. I wrote the bad review. The hack that destroyed your father.”
“Preposterous! What nonsense is this? That would make you somewhere in the vicinity of sixty years of age! It was your mother!”
Mocha laughed.
“Oh, I’ve lived for a very long time. One reason my ballet is so good. Lots of practice. What you don’t understand is that I’ve been doing this mother-daughter routine for centuries. Makes people less suspicious. By the way, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings — but your father’s movie really was awful.”
A second later the woman spun abruptly, pushing off the floor with her hands, and I heard a loud crack.
Helpman, or Boleslawsky, or whoever the fuck he was, fell down across Bruno the Magnificent. His neck was bent at an obscene angle, and spread-eagled together on the stage like that the two men looked like an arty religious icon thrown together for some exasperating stage-play.
“Jeez. The horror of the world is right in here, pal,” I muttered as I let go of the drapes and sagged.
Of course, Mocha caught me. This woman, I realized, was capable of anything.
“Roy, are you all right?” she asked quickly. “I heard everything. I’m so sorry I hid. I needed time to figure out my action.”
“Guessed as much. I’m a good timewaster. Besides, in the end there you more than made up for the faux pas.”
“I did?”
“Christ, did you ever.”
I leaned back against her shoulder and could feel the woman’s warm breath on my neck.
“I have a question, though — what’d you use on the bastard? Some kind of mixed martial arts?”
“Secret.”
She eased us both down to the floor and I sat there on my backside, positioned between two sensational legs in white tights that I’d just seen kill a man.
Which was when I remembered.
“Stockholm really was named after you.”
Mocha snuggled her face into my neck and granted me a kiss. “It was. Seven hundred years ago.”
“Ominous. You may be an elderly lady — yet you still manage to rock and have a town to call your own. Now, let’s get me to hospital.”
“You’re okay?”
“Never better.”
I leaned over, dizzy, grabbed the keys from a dead man’s pocket, and then gingerly stood up all by myself.
PART 3:
TOBACCO-STAINED OFFSHOOTS
I initially penned Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat as a four-page short story called ‘Il Desinenza’ when I was in my early 20s, and writing was still my single passion — this was before I got diverted, distracted and far too spread-out with music, the record label IF?, journalism, DJing, and generally having too much fun.
In 1992, and again in 2001, I fleshed out the story to manuscript form, and then shelved it on both occasions to collect dust.
Somehow I dragged the thing back out in 2007, wiped it down, and began writing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, the novel, with great help from my editor Kristopher Young at Another Sky Press — who also decided to publish it…with a wunderbar cover by American artist Scott Campbell (a.k.a Scott C). I’ve included his original concept sketch for the back cover below.
TSMG explores sci-fi/noir/dystopia and tells the story of Floyd Maquina, a seeker/detective of a near future in which Melbourne is the last remaining city on earth. Discrimination, environmental degradation and big business reign supreme, and Floyd, a lush, tries to save the day with help from his friends Laurel ‘Nina’ Canyon and Hank Jones.
After I published the novel (in April 2011) I wasn’t keen to venture back into the same terrain, but I loved the characters — so ended up organizing an anthology with Another Sky: The Tobacco-Stained Sky. This tome addresses the same post-apocalyptic/hardboiled world through the eyes of other writers and comic artists, as well as mine.
Hence a few TSMG-related short stories and a batch of comic art that cropped up in 2012. Come Out Swinging was one of the first, published online in July that year via the cool cats at Shotgun Honey.
A one-page graphic version of this story, with lovely pictures by British artist Andrew Chiu, will appear in The Tobacco-Stained Sky. I stuck a sneak-preview snippet in this book — just flip back to the frontispiece page at the beginning.
Come Out Swinging
I stepped up to the plate and moved to king-hit the bastard from behind.
Sure it was cowardly, but also a pretty nifty manoeuvre, done without a moment to second-guess myself or opportunity to nut out a different course of action. His head was unprotected, an obvious target dressed up in messy, straw-coloured hair. A neck thicker than my waist propped up that head — quite some feat given the extra girth I’d put on in recent months of alcoholic mayhem and loafing about on the couch.
At least this wasn’t going to kill him. No need to get blood on my hands, since the mitts were clean and I preferred them to stay that way.
Trouble was that the man apparently sensed me behind him, and second-guessed my intentions to boot. He ducked as I swung the gun, and I ended up glancing the handle off his scalp instead of getting in a heavy enough whack to knock him senseless.
Then, while I was off balance, he turned and grabbed me by the throat, huge fingers digging deep into my larynx, and a second later I’d been deprived of both the capacity to squeal and the ability to breathe. He lifted me up one handed, so my shoes no longer touched the ground, and I was ogling a human gorilla inches from my face, a dribble of saliva in the corner of his snarled mouth.
With his free hand he slapped me once, twice, a third time.
I was seeing stars, and other delusionary paraphernalia. It felt like this time, finally, the gig might truly be up. Thoughts shunted in between the sparkling stars, images of Laure
l, and Veronica, and what would likely happen to both if I gave up the ghost, pulling up the personal tent-pegs here and now.
I still had the gun in my right fist. I could pop him in the jaw, put a slug in his eye, get it over with, but something held me back. I wouldn’t call this a conscience — it was more like stubborn, idiotic madness.
Another slap knocked me silly. I could see specks of blood on the man’s chunky, enraged face. Not his blood. Mine.
So I swung at my own blood, right at a big splash of it on his forehead, lined up like a bull’s-eye. The gun barrel bounced off, but the man shook his head, like it hurt, so I tried again, and again. The fourth time rocked it — I fell flat on my bum, oxygen started pumping, and the gorilla stormed around me, like he was doing some kind of blind Indian rain dance, clutching his skull, screaming.
Then he barnstormed the wall, head first, and knocked himself out. He lay at my feet, unmoving. At least he’d stopped the over-dramatics.
My head was swimming enough as it was. I had to road test my voice, to see if it still worked. “Sleep tight,” I muttered. Nothing more sparkling came to me. The weak quip would have to do — even if I did have an audience.
Laurel was bound and gagged over in a corner, next to a widescreen TV, like she’d been placed there as a second-thought decoration. I went straight over, leaned down, and touched her cheek. Her eyes were wide, even the one on the left that was swollen and ringed with blue-black.
Without waiting for applause, I undid her wrists and pulled off the material jammed into her mouth. Laurel could deal with the feet herself.
After breathing deeply a few times, apparently relishing the opportunity, Laurel looked straight at me.
“You look awful. Do you always make it so hard for yourself, babe? You could’ve just shot him. You had ample opportunity. Jeez.”
I glowered at her. “D’you want me to put the gag back on?” I wrote Dread Fellow Churls specifically for the Crime Factory crew back in my hometown, Melbourne, since they were putting together a crime/noir anthology of Australian writers.
This was a pretty superb collection called Hard Labour, and was published in October 2012 with better pieces by Liam José, David Whish-Wilson, Leigh Redhead, Angela Savage, Adrian McKinty, Helen FitzGerald and other Aussies.
However, I’d finalized this story earlier on in the year, at the same time that I was writing a particularly hard chapter of my novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude.
This brushed up against the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese soldiers in China in 1937.
Since I wrote both pieces concurrently — and wasn’t sure either story would eventually see the light of day — there were crossovers in style, dialogue and content. They’re different yarns, yet the sampling (something I love to do in music as well) is clear.
Dread Fellow Churls is a prequel story based on Floyd and Nina from Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, and while Floyd is the narrator, it’s ‘Laurel’ who shines.
OzNoir, reviewing the anthology at Fair Dinkum Crime, nicely wrote that “Rounding out my favourites is Dread Fellow Churls by Andrez Bergen in which a drunk cop gets caught on a stake-out and has to rely on his partner to get him out; there is a distinct femme fatale feel to this. Dread Fellow Churls felt like a novel teaser rather than short story — left me wanting more.”
Dread Fellow Churls
You know, I have this theory that while oblivion is what you make of it, oftentimes it’s a superior dram to reality.
Take the following situation.
After some strolling about in a kaleidoscopic neck of the woods in which all was sugar, spice and pretty darned nice, reality placed a stiletto heel to my throat, kicked sand in my eye, and asserted itself.
The first thing my cranky perception took in was a beige linoleum floor a few inches from my nose. As bland as that may have been, it was hardly disconcerting as I’d been in this position countless times before. What followed, however, threw me: tiny waves of spearmint that serenaded my way and made me flinch. I loathe spearmint. Give me peppermint anytime, but spearmint lays me low.
I was then yanked up with some object, hard and cold, poking about in my mouth. I assumed it was the stiletto. As the haziness cleared and the headache kicked in, I precariously balanced on two feet.
That deed accomplished, comprehension, or a distant cousin, sauntered up and slapped me about to clear the remaining fragments of oblivion. In instant retrospect I wish it hadn’t.
I’m greedy. I adore my nirvana, lethe, insensibility, unconsciousness — however you prefer to dub it — but on this occasion snapping out of the bliss was a wee bit different.
I was propped up in a kitchenette with no clothes on, my hands tied behind me, and a gun barrel stuck in my kisser — none of these inconveniences, to my knowledge, volunteered. I could be wrong. After my screwy focus righted itself I stared along a metal muzzle, past the slide, over the rear sight, and straight into a single open eye in the middle distance.
While I was blinking rapidly that peeper over there walked the same beat at a lethargic pace. The iris was a faded variant of the bean-shooter between us. Grey. I couldn’t check it against its partner as the other eye was closed — something to do with taking better aim. I don’t understand why one needed to target at all in this situation. You could throw on a blindfold, yank back the trigger, and still spray half my noggin across a wall.
“Not a nice situation to be in. Not a nice way to be found. Eventually. In the nud. Embarrassin’,” the man said. Turns out his mouth was as lazy as his eyeball.
“Speak up, son. You’re mumbling.”
Mark this down as a disposable line, intended to sound blasé but instead coming across desperate — more bluster than bravado. In any event, if anyone in this room had elucidation issues it was I, given the firearm’s placement.
My triggerman was chewing on something I assumed to be gum. Spearmint gum. Yep, the smell made me queasy, but I put down the current nausea to the gun rather than the gum. Alternatively, p’raps, it was his presentation.
The bugger boasted a garish ‘70s body shirt, all Technicolor swirls, that hurt my head more. This shirt was open to the chest, revealing a bunch of twisty stray silver hairs. Despite the fact he was losing the other hair up on his head, this man was vain enough to apply a comb-over to bamboozle short-sighted folks. There were minor jowls spilling over the collar and all up he wasn’t a handsome chappie. Still, there was something striking about him, a kind of magnetism. Probably it boiled down to his choice in kitchen utensils.
“Good work, Shitlock.” A lip curl made best friends with a leer above disorganized teeth as he leaned forward, spearmint breath and all. “You found me.”
“Better I hadn’t,” I decided around the gun barrel.
The man tossed back his head and was roaring a laugh or laughing a roar, I’m not sure which description best applies. Either way it wasn’t pretty, and thankfully it was short. After shaking himself free of the fit, the goon stuck his free hand in his left pocket to snake out a blue polyester wallet, which was placed on the kitchen bench. This wallet had a name, “The Dude,” embroidered in pink across one side. It flopped next to a coffee mug covered with pictures from the dated 1960s stop-motion Christmas movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s funny what pointless details you make out when you’re staring death in the mush.
“Yo, you still with me?”
The pistol did a bit of tea-bagging around my palate and almost knocked out one of my molars. I think oblivion had been creeping back in. This guy was having none of that.
“So, I’m going to show you something. Something I keep, for special occasions.”
“Like this one?”
“Like this one.”
“Let me guess,” I grumbled as best I could, “pictures of the grandkids.”
My gunsel spittooned a comic “Tsk, tsk,” tilted his head to one side, and sighed thereafter. “Goes to show. There I was, beginning to have great faith in you as a detective.
Goes to show, right?”
I tried to say something but it came out slurred, so the man kindly removed the impediment to my speech.
“That’s the thing about faith — it tends to leaves you disappointed,” I said. I’m not sure this rated highly in the speech stakes.
“Mm-hmm.”
The man obviously concurred. He stared at his gun, and gave it a quick wipe-down with the gaudy shirt.
“For fuck’s sake. You know that’s disgusting? You’re drooling all over the thing. You’ll get it rusty. I’ll have to grease it down after all this with machine oil and a clean rag. Give it the kind of love and attention I’d never waste on any woman. So, where was I? Oh, yeah. Showing you something. Right?”
“Apparently.”
“Apparently. Keep the comedy coming, Alcho-Boy.”
Don’t ask me what he assumed I thought was funny. “Apparently” didn’t ring amusing to me. Nothing made particular sense as my head pounded in tandem with my hammering heart. Comedy was sitting on a backburner some place very far from here.
Keeping his weapon pointed my way, the man grabbed The Dude and unfastened its catch to open the wallet up with a show of great ceremony. He removed a strip of photographs, perhaps half a dozen in all. Just when I thought my grandkids deduction had reclaimed for me Holmes’ deerstalker, I looked at the pictures. Instead of showing cute children with baby teeth missing and a little league trophy or two, the happy-snaps displayed women without hands, without feet, screaming in pain and misery or just plain dead — trophies of the arsehole that grinned at their corpses.
The arsehole now bee-lining a similar grin my way.