Chapter 27.
The ‘Pole-to-Pole’ strip-club, advertised, ‘free drinks’ in bright red neon. The small print, in handwritten day-glo, read, ‘free with every lap dance’, only legible, when the funk of bulk-bought perfume hit me. The doorman, was a junk food poster boy. His spherical body perched on a white stool, made him look like a giant leather coated Chuppa-Chupp.
“I’m Harry. I’m here to see Max.”
He slapped the door open.
“Go straight through. Take the stairs beside the women’s toilets at the back, behind the stage. His office is upstairs. He’s expecting you,” Chuppa Chupp blurted, like he was playing back a recording.
A very fit, leggy, twenty-something, wrestled with a strippers pole to the sounds of AC/DC’s, ‘Hell Bells’. She slid down the pole to the slow grind of Angus Young’s raw guitar riffs, stretching her limbs and body into graceful geometries. It was too early for regulars and too quiet for anonymity. A sole customer, bantered to a bored barman, while eyeballing the blonde writhe on stage. A few crumpled dollar bills were slim pickin’s, even in slow trade. The blonde finished her pole routine and clacked off the stage in her six inch high heels.
“She sure knows her way up and down a pole,” the punter said, in an out of town accent. The barman noticed me. He pointed a lemon, skewered with a knife, to the back of the stage. A narrow stairway, patch-worked with badly lit photographs of girls, climbed to a single door. He appeared – all six-foot-and-a-half of him. He greeted me with a big bear hug. My face drowned in his blow-torched mop of hair.
“Harry you old bastard, making a career change are we? Circus carnies and crooners not payin’ the rent anymore?’… Careful bucko, it’s a nasty business.”
A sly smile softened his ruddy face.
“No. Just a one off deal, Max. Was a right place, right time, kind of thing.”
“You didn’t steal it did you? The last thing I need it some fucking Colombian who’s watched ‘Scarface’ one too many times knocking on my door, with his little friend.”
“No, I didn’t steal it.”
“Good, cos those Colombians are fucking crazy. They seem to think Tony Montana is the Messiah – even the younger kids. I’m telling you that movie is like the fucking bible – it’s been passed down through generations.’
“I didn’t steal it from any Colombians or anyone else for that matter. It just kinda landed in my lap.”
Gadget’s eye brows raised to within breaking point of his last Botox shot.
“What, just landed from the sky on your lap? Or did Santa Claus come early this year?”
He shot me a genuine look of concern.
“Be careful Harry… You’re in a new ballgame now, there’s all new players involved and they get kinda scratchy. And when they get scratchy, people die.”
He slopped out two large whiskeys.
“You brought a sample, right?”
I threw a small bag of powder on the table. Gadget dumped the lot onto his glass table top and rolled a glass tumbler over the pile. He corralled the fine spray of powder into two small mounds with a gold money clip.
“Harry, I hope you’re not wasting my time with shit.”
“It’s good. Don’t worry. Suck it and see, my friend.”
A bank of security camera monitors, broadcasted activity from every corner of the club. Private rooms were not so private. Middle aged men lived out their fantasies with Gadget’s girls under the watchful eye of Go-Go Gadget.
“You’ve got enough cameras covering this joint to start your own reality TV show, Max.”
“Yeah, be more entertaining than most of the shit that’s on the box these days.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Gadget cloaked his nose with a wad of tissues, blew a low E, balled up the contents and scored a three pointer in the corner wastepaper basket. He slipped a narrow, silver funnel up his left nostril and guided it over one of the little mounds of white powder. One mound disappeared into the sound of a snort.
“This is not bad shit Harry. I can tell that it’s had the pitter patter of baby powder over it but it’s pretty damn fine toot. How much of this do you have?”
“Two kilos.”
His eyes tautened.
“Well well well, Harry boy you have moved up in the tribe,” Gadget said with a tone of approval and surprise. He pulled out a remote control and zapped a paneled wall. A hidden door popped open from the wooden paneling.
“Let me show you something, Harry.”
He motioned me to look inside.
“Very James Bond, Max. Max Goldfinger. It’s got a ring to it. Is there a blonde waiting to be rescued in there?” I asked.
Gadget’s cackle sounded like an animal choking. I poked my head through the door. Florescent bulbs flickered in a hundred square foot windowless room, above rows of green enamelled metal shelves, stacked with thousands of DVD’s, VHS video cassettes, Betamax cassettes and film rolls, arranged neatly, indexed and filed by format, year and person.
“Your private stash Max?”
He hovered over the secret doorway, keeping a watchful eye on me.
“Sort of. I like to call it the collection of bad judgment. But yeah it’s a veritable cache. More of an investment,” he said proudly admiring his stash of future favours.
“I’ve got something on every motherfucker in this town. How do you think I’ve survived? I’ve been doing this shit for a very long time, Harry. I have a healthy trove of city officials, lawyers, corrupt cops and anyone else that matters, playing footsie with one of my girls. Shit man, I’ve got some 16mm film reels back there from the seventies. Went to video in the eighties.”
He picked up a Betamax cassette and checked the spine. He tossed it back onto the shelf and retreated behind his desk. Names I’d seen in newspapers were written on boxes in red marker. Stacks of video cassettes were carefully labeled and colour coded, according to height, up the food chain.
“Blackmail used to be a growth industry. But the internet and every tool with a camera in their phone ruined that. Scandal used to last. Now it’s two weeks in rehab and a press agent, who could convince their own mother they were adopted and you’re off the hook.”
He collapsed heavily back into his leather chair.
“Holy shit Max, you’ve got some gems in there – a regular Blockbuster of blackmail.”
He poured two more generous whiskeys.
He wearily said, “It’s all diluted. And blackmail has become so passé. Besides most people these days have the memory of a mayfly with Alzheimer’s disease. I only keep one tape and that’s it. They lean my way and they get the only printed copy. I’m righteous like that. None of this internet, You-fucking-Tube stuff. Blackmail used to have rules. There was a certain honour to it. It was a one off deal. You have information that someone doesn’t want out, and it costs. I’m now fining you for your fuck up. It’s kind of a vigilante, slash, karmic fine.”
Gadget sounded crazy at the best of times but there was a degree of sanity to some of his theory. He was still in business after thirty years, so there must be some meat on his bone of reasoning. He vacuumed back the second mound of powder and slapped the desk hard. He dropped three fingers of whiskey and stood up like some manic professor.
“Private club. Gentleman’s club. My friend these are labels that are a convincing as a kid with a sheriff’s badge at a ten year olds birthday party. Everyone knows he’s not the sheriff but everyone plays along cos it’s fun. People are having a good time. I’m not one of those guys who doses up my girls on smack and ties them to a bed. My girls are looked after. No drugs on the job. I’ve got law students, models and engineers working here. Why do they work here? Cos they’re desperate for money. Everyone is desperate for money. But these girls come to work here because of lifestyle. They don’t want to sling double shots at Starbucks making ten bucks an hour. They make six hundred an hour here. Values dear Harry have dropped out the sewer pipe in to the deep dark sea. Everyone of us is a whore in one shape or another.”
I wasn’t interested in Gadget’s cocaine fuelled, justification of his slimy trade. I just wanted him to indulge my current slimy trade. I didn’t understand why he was showing me his hidden, highly unethical, highly illegal collection, of dirty little secrets.
“So why are you showing me all this Max?”
“Cos you and I are about to do some business. Two kilos worth of business. There’s no telling tales on anyone, after you’ve walked down that road my friend.”
He slapped hard on the table.
“I’ll be generous and give you fifty K a key.”
“What FIFTY? Why don’t I just pull my pants down and bend over that table. You know you can cut this and double up again, even quadruple. Ninety a key.”
“I can taste the baby pink and blue in here Harry. Seventy and one free tape, of a government official, with a penchant for old lace and young ass.”
“Eighty.”
“Eighty? You know there’s a recession on Harry.”
He locked his secret doorway.
“Ok, I’ll do it for the kids.”
“The kids?”
“The college kids. It’s coming up near exam time so they’ll be wanting to pile on the hours at the books. Helps ‘em extend their study periods.”
One hundred and sixty thousand dollars would buy a lot of pens and pencils for Betty’s kid.
“Bless you Max and your contribution to the educational system.”
“Hey buddy, you think I’m corrupt, you should see some other tapes from my stash. That politician kissing a baby at a rally, probably had that same mouth buried ears deep in one of my gals the night before.”
“I’ll pass on watching some pimple assed councilor get his jollies.”
“By the way Max, if you’re gonna fuck me over on this, can you just kill me now, cos I just don’t really need any more shit in my life right now. But make it painless. Then I’ll forgive you.”
“Harry Harry Harry,” he said wrapping his arm around my neck.
“C’mon. We’ve never been close but we’ve both been scuttling along the floor of this fucked up industry, in one shape or another for a very long time. Harry, I’m a dirty old grafter but I ain’t no killer, unless someone fucks me over and then it ain’t murder, it’s payback. Right?”
“Right.”
“So Harry, who in this cesspit of a city can I dig you some dirt on?”
“No Max, not my cup of tea. I’m not really in the blackmail business.”
“C’mon Harry let this be a gift to seal our business deal. Name them. I’m sure I can help you, re-adjust someone’s point of view. …….No one? ….. Harry, we all have to have enemies.”
“How about Jack Walshe?”
“Jack Walshe as in Jack Walshe’s Club?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed.
“Jack Walshe? What do you want with that buffoon?.....You know I’ve got a few judges, with more than their gavels, in their hands. What the fuck do you want Jack Walshe on the hook for? He used to come in here, like twenty years ago, so I’ll have to dig through the archives.”
“No, just Jack Walshe. I just want to get one of my acts a gig there. But really Max, I don’t want it.”
“Bullshit. Nothing wrong with having a few shots of someone else’s skeletons. I can’t promise you anything, but fortunately for you, Jack Walshe once had political aspirations as a councilor. I think he got busted selling cheap, fake vodka from Russia in the late eighties. Political career, disappeared, with a shot of Moscow rot-gut. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if I’ve got him doing the horizontal hula in my collection.”
I didn’t want a sex tape of Jack Walshe. After Gadget entrusted me with his secret grotto of scandal, I just felt obliged to take it, as part of some oddball Go-Go Gadget initiation process. I wanted everything to be as hassle free as possible without rattling anyone’s cage. But I could use it, to get ‘The Stuck Pigs’ a gig at Jack Walshe’s club. I definitely wasn’t going to confront Jack with this proposition. Maybe give it to Johnny Truffle. No, he’d fuck it up. Send it anonymously? That seemed to be the best option. Jack was a tough guy, not shy of breaking a few people’s bones.
“This one is on the house. But watch out for him, he’s kind of cranky,” Gadget said warily. He clutched my hand and shook on the deal.
“Will message you, the when and the where.”