Chopper Unchopped (128 page)

‘I like that, he treat me good. Then he take me to Netherlands, to Amsterdam. Two years window girl, then to London, then to Australia. I like it here and that’s it.’

Coco seemed to have run out of story.

‘What happened to the nice man?’ asked Suzi.

Coco answered, ‘Oh I marry him. He travel with me all the way to Australia.’

‘Well, where is he?’ asked Kid McCall.

‘Oh, he sold me to Karen, $25,000. Karen shot him and gave me the money. He was just a pimp. I’m free now, but I’m gonna stay with Karen. She’s a good lady, treats Coco good.’ Kid McCall gave Russian Suzi a sideways look and Suzi tapped her head with her finger. The Kid nodded. Poor Coco was quite mad but also quite lovely. She’d be okay with a bit of love and loyalty and attention and simple common friendship.

The Kid took the big Jamaican’s hand and kissed it.

‘You stick with us, Coco.’

The big black princess reached over and took the boy’s head and kissed both his eyes.

‘I’m gonna, baby. Where you go Coco goes.’

McCall was a bit taken aback at that remark.

‘Hang on,’ whispered Suzi. ‘Here they come.’

‘Shit,’ said Kid McCall. ‘There’s six of them. Who’s the moll?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Suzi. ‘There was only meant to be four of them.’

Suzi handed Kid McCall a .45 calibre gold cup automatic handgun.

‘Here kid, it holds seven rounds. Forget the .38 revolver.’

‘Nah,’ said the kid. ‘I’ll use both. I’ll whack the whole fucking six of em, that’s what Wild Bill Hickock would do.’

Coco Joeliene was sitting at the wheel of the Jag and Russian Suzi sat in the back. McCall was sitting next to Coco.

‘Okay Coco, start the car, do a U-turn in front of the pub and I’ll jump out. Go, go, go.’

The old Mark 10 Jag started on the first kick. Coco Joeliene gunned the motor, dropped it into gear and took off, leaning hard on the wheel and spinning the car around. It was like something out of the movies, which was fair enough, because they all thought they were in one. Angelo and Tony had their guns out as soon as the Jag’s wheels squealed. But before the car screeched to a halt Kid McCall was out the door and firing, with a gun in each hand. A slug from Tony’s gun hit the windshield of the Jag and shattered it but the bullet didn’t hit anyone. His next slug hit the Kid across the right side of the face, but then Tony Amato fell down dead. Carolyn Woods hit the footpath with a .38 slug through her neck.

Pino Castronovo, who didn’t carry a gun, was hit with a .45 calibre slug in the chest that shattered his heart.

Angelo Bonventre, who was shooting like a wild man and hitting nothing, fell with two slugs in the chest. Gaetano Mazzurco fell to the ground with two in his guts and Pauly Della Torre ran up Errol Street faster than he’d run for a very long time. Kid McCall took aim and dropped Della Torre with one shot in the centre of the back at 150 feet with his .38 calibre revolver.

‘Fantastic,’ said McCall. ‘Just like the movies.’

Mazzurco was still alive and Kid McCall sat back in the car.

‘Hey Suzi, do that thing with the neck again will ya. I want to see that again.’

Russian Suzi said, ‘Sure, Johnny’ and got out of the car, then walked over, bent down and took Gaetano Mazzurco’s head in her hands. Mazzurco looked at her and saw the beautiful face and the snow white blonde hair and said, ‘Help me please, help me.’

Russian Suzi ripped the head back and to the side. There was a cracking sound, like a door being hit with an axe, and Mazzurco lay dead. His eyes were wide open, and still registered amazement.

Kid McCall was really pleased with the savage-looking scar that ran across the right side of his face. He didn’t like the fact that he had a pretty, almost girlish, face. The scar did give him an older, more brutal, look. But the girls still thought he looked like a little cute kid, except that he now also had a cute scar. They didn’t tell him this because they didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

Poor Johnny couldn’t win.

News of the Limerick Castle shootings swept through the criminal world and the deaths of Angelo Bonventre and tough Tony Amato made headlines in the American papers.

Karen turned to Aaron Guzzinburg.

‘That’s the trouble with importing hired help,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ said Aaron. ‘They don’t get exported.’ They had a little giggle at this. It was a cross between Jewish humor and gunnie humor. Just the thing if you happened to run into Meyer Lansky.

They were sitting by the swimming pool of Guzzinburg’s South Yarra home. Karen had been staying with the Jewish hit man for the past week, keeping an extremely low profile. As the crow flies Collingwood wasn’t far across the Yarra, but she could have been in another country, for all anyone suspected. Which is where Guzzinburg’s two Hebrew helpers were, in fact. They had taken a plane for Palermo, Sicily, to do a little business. What, with short hours and frequent flyer points, it was a good job. Providing you didn’t get shot, of course.

THE Boss who controlled all others, at least as far as the Australian connection went, was Don Pepe ‘Little Toto’ Della Torre. The Jewish gunmen’s overseas assignment was to kill his grandson, Pauly ‘Peppe’ Della Torre, who lived in a seaside town named Marsala on the western end of Sicily. The two hit men would never return. You don’t kill a Mafia Don in his hometown and get out of it alive. But the two Jewish comrades, who both spoke Italian as well as French and German, had felt sure that all would be well when Guzzinburg kissed them farewell at the airport.

Guzzinburg, however, strongly suspected he’d never see the pair again. Oh well, he thought, that’s war. Sending them to kill Pauly Della Torre was more a message of psychological fear than anything else: from Collingwood to Sicily, with love from the Rabbit Kisser. Next time New York. Guzzinburg doubted the tactical logic but remained silent on the matter.

Aaron had never been much of a romantic, but now he found Karen Phillips in his bed every night teaching him things that would probably kill him. She was simply the hottest sex he had ever had – and she was paying him. He might have been a gunman, but he was a good Jewish boy at heart, and brought up to love a bargain, and it all seemed too good to be true. But Guzzinburg wasn’t swept away with love, just lust. If someone else came along and paid him more, he’d work for them. Until then, any time Karen spent checking out his circumcision with her tongue was a bonus.

From her point of view, playing the lollipop game with Aaron seemed a good way of securing not only the physical loyalty that cash was buying, but his emotional loyalty as well.

Poor Karen thought that love and a blow job was the same thing. She didn’t know any better. In the emotional gutter she lived in, where men visited their daughters-in-law twice a week in the brothels they worked in, where 16-year-old boys held their 14-year-old sisters down so that six or seven of their mates could gang bang them in return for a gram of heroin, in a world where sex and drugs and death seemed the norm, a blow job was the closest thing to love you’d get. Karen was attempting to secure Guzzinburg’s emotional loyalty in the only way she knew how.

In one way the cynical hitman was right, but in another he was wrong. Karen did have real love for the dead and love for the people who backed her in her war to the death. How could Guzzinburg or any one attempt to understand the Rabbit Kisser?

‘HOW goes the investigation, Westlock?’ Chief Inspector Graeme Westlock looked up. There, standing in the doorway of his fifth floor office in the St Kilda Road police complex was the Assistant Commissioner for Crime, Frank Doolin. ‘Very good, sir,’ muttered Westlock, scrambling to his feet.

‘Re these mental cases in Collingwood,’ said Doolin, getting straight to the point. ‘Running about the fair streets of Carlton shooting the olive oil out of our ethnic brethren. It just won’t do, Westlock. The bloody media seem to think it’s our fault. What they want to know, and therefore what I want to know, is just what are we doing about it?’

‘Well,’ said Westlock. ‘I thought if we waited for a while they would eventually kill each other.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Doolin. ‘Very droll. An attempt at comic relief, I’m sure. Ha ha. But what am I to tell the bloody media?’

Westlock thought about it for a moment. ‘Tell them we are hoping to make an arrest within 24 hours.’

‘Oh yes,’ asked Doolin. ‘And who are we arresting?’

Westlock smiled. ‘I thought the editor of the ‘Herald Sun’. He’s the one causing all the trouble.’

Doolin turned on his heel and started to walk away. But he couldn’t resist a parting shot over his shoulder. ‘One day, you’ll joke yourself all the way back to traffic duty Chief Inspector or the Lost Property Office,’ he said. ‘I just can’t decide which, yet.’ As the Assistant Commissioner walked away Graeme Westlock thought to himself, Frank Bloody Doolin, you precious old poofter, you wouldn’t know a crim if you woke up and found Ned Kelly sitting at the foot of ya bloody bed.

It was 9.15 at night. Graeme Westlock took the lift to the ground floor and walked around to the small park behind the police complex and sat on a bench. He needed a bit of air to clear his thoughts and let him do some thinking without stray Assistant Commissioners sneaking up on him.

Westlock was aggrieved. He could do without men who had fought their way up the police ladder with a knife and fork and a Masonic handshake suddenly screaming at him to personally end the biggest gang war in Melbourne’s history since Ripper Roy had ran riot years before. He was no fool. He knew Karen held the key to the whole shooting match. But where was she? I know you’re out there, Karen, he mused. But where?

While all this was running through his head, a car pulled up about 20 feet from where Westlock was sitting. It was an expensive 1993 Mercedes Benz 500 SL. A man stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked over towards him. With a car like that, he could almost have been a stockbroker. He wasn’t.

‘Hi ya, Graeme.’

Westlock blinked and looked up. ‘Hello Aaron,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Long time, no see.’

Guzzinburg sat down next to the policeman.

‘Well?’ said Westlock. ‘Is this a social visit, or business, or just an accident?’ He somehow doubted it would be an accident. Guzzinburg had a habit of knowing exactly what he was doing. The only accidents around him happened to other people.

‘Well,’ said Guzzinburg pleasantly, the way a dangerous man can afford to be. ‘It’s business that may involve an accident.’

‘I’m listening,’ said Westlock. He was all ears, unlike well-known author and wildlife expert Chopper Read.

Guzzinburg sighed a long sigh and said, ‘As our dago friends are so fond of saying on all them mafia movies, “Business is Business”.’

‘Get to the point,’ said Westlock. ‘Where is she?’

For Guzzinburg, the tide had turned when he received a phone call from Sicily. He had listened in stony silence to a description of how his shadowy Jewish companions had made it to Palermo and then to the town of Marsala. It was no coincidence that soon afterwards Don Pepe ‘Little Toto’ Della Torre and his wife, his son and three of his grandchildren were shot dead. The Jewish hitmen had not returned to Palermo, but travelled overland to the southern end of Sicily to the seaside town of Licata, on the Gulf of Gela, and from there hired a boat to Malta. But after only 36 hours in Malta they were both machine gunned to death as they drank coffee outside a cafe in the town of Valletta.

The phone call was simply to let him know that the hands of the Della Torre family were attached to very long arms. Guzzinburg knew then for sure that it was no longer a local gang war between Collingwood and Carlton. It had taken on much larger, darker proportions, and it made him very thoughtful, indeed.

Aaron Guzzinburg always played the odds, and the odds as he saw it were now against Karen Phillips and her drunken collection of street fighters, gunmen, psychopaths and bloodthirsty whores. It was time for him to swap sides and survive. It was the smart thing to do.

It was the only thing to do.

KID McCall walked out of the tattoo studio on St Georges Road, North Fitzroy. He had his leather jacket on but under it his left arm from the shoulder all the way down to the finger tips of his left hand was covered with a dark blue spider’s web tattoo, just like Micky Van Gogh and Raychell Van Gogh once had, and just like the one the Rabbit Kisser had. The Kid had another tattoo on his neck. It was the motto of the French Foreign Legion, ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien.’ I regret nothing.

It was true. Johnny didn’t regret anything. In fact, he was in hog heaven. He was on his way to pick up some jewellery he had on order: two thick 18-carat gold chains, 120 grams of gold in each, and with a solid gold engraved medallion on the end of each chain. On one medallion it read ‘Coco Joeliene loves Kid McCall.’ On the other it read ‘Russian Suzi loves Kid McCall.’ The chains were to cost $4000 each, but to Johnny the girls were worth it.

He was also to collect a Rolex watch for himself for a rather reasonable $5000. And a big gold chain, the same design as the others, which read ‘Coco Joeliene’ on one side of the medallion and ‘Russian Suzi’ on the other. This was another four grand.

The Kid had $18,000 in his pockets to pay for his little shopping spree. Hankster the Gangster had delivered what was supposed to be 20 grand to his mum’s place. The money was to be given to Karen, but when he counted it there was 38 grand in the bag. Mistakes were always being made with drug and whore money. Shit, Karen collected 100 grand a month in drug and moll money at various addresses. She didn’t even count it. Everyone robbed everyone.

The Kid had heard a story once about a big roll of cash being flushed down a toilet by a speed freak who was so out of his brain with paranoia he thought the flat he was in was about to be raided any minute. It took him an hour to flush all the money, and when someone did knock on the door later that morning he shot himself in the head rather than be taken alive.

He was a little hasty. The bloke at the door was the plumber who had come to unblock the dunny.