Peter Corris - The Washington Club

My hand sweated around the pistol grip. I tried to look away but couldn’t. Then I caught sight of the tattoo on the man’s upper arm as he lunged forward, forcing the girl back, carrying the boy with him. It was red, green and black-a snake, a heart, I couldn’t sort it out, but the same design was only centimetres away from me-on the shoulder of Anton Van Kep.

He was smoking a joint held in his left hand in a gold clip. He wore black lace gloves and a black satin G-string. He had a pillow under his buttocks and was making rhythmic movements with his right hand, sliding a vibrator deeply into his anus. He was moaning softly as similar moans and muted words came from the television.

The camera moved from one set of genitalia to another, guaranteeing that the viewer missed nothing and that nothing was faked. Except the emotion. The faces were vacuous and after the director had shown dick and cunt, mouth and cock, dick and balls a few times, he or she seemed to run out of ideas. The scene badly needed cutting but the players eventually moved it along: the two penises were unsheathed and their owners began to pump themselves until they both ejaculated over the face and body of the girl, who writhed, tongued up the semen, lifted her dress, rubbed it on her hairless crotch and tried to look as if this constituted an entry through the gates of paradise.

Van Kep was dildoing himself furiously but he wasn’t quite able to synchronise with the film. The screen was blank when he came, spurting into the shiny black fabric and letting out a guttural gasp of pleasure. He said something, softly and lovingly, as he slid the vibrator out, but it was in a language I didn’t understand. The vibrator had some shit clinging to its tip. Van Kep wiped it on the G-string and then ran his lips over its surface, kissing it and slipping it inside his mouth.

I took three steps forward and grabbed his long hair, pulling his head around towards me. I knocked the vibrator aside with the pistol and pressed the barrel against his thickly painted upper lip.

‘Want to suck this, too?’

He looked at me, blinked twice and burst into tears. He dropped the joint in its clip as deep sobs racked him. He knuckled at his eyes with his gloved fists and panted for breath. I eased back and lowered the gun. The joint was smouldering on the carpet and I picked it up and dropped it into the ashtray on the table beside the bottle of red wine and the half-full glass. There were three or four fresh roaches in the ashtray.

‘Finish your drink and clean yourself up. We’re going to have a talk.’

‘Who… who’re you?’

‘Just do as I say and be quick. Don’t try anything silly or you’ll get seriously hurt or worse. If you’re sensible you can go back to playing games with yourself; if you’re not, I’ll bury you out there under the fucking roses.’

He tried to drink some wine but his hand, the left, shook and he spilled it down his flat, hairless belly. I gestured for him to stand. He got up slowly; he was well over six feet. He tottered out of the room and I followed him to the bathroom where he stripped off his G-string and washed his face and hands. He was utterly passive, stunned by surprise and the grass he’d smoked, but I watched him carefully. He was lean and athletic-looking, and there’s no rule that says a sexual deviant can’t fight.

In the bedroom he pulled on a dark blue tracksuit and bent to reach under the bed.

‘Easy,’ I said.

Still quiet and compliant, he pulled out a pair of sneakers and held them up.

‘You won’t need them. Stay where you are, Anton. This is as good a place as any to talk.’

He kept his eyes cast down, staring at his long white feet. ‘What about?’

‘Claudia Fleischman, Julius Fleischman, why you’re lying-all that.’

‘How did you find me.’

‘As Joe Louis said, you can run but you can’t hide. Now I know she hired you to protect her from her husband and she went to bed with you. Who paid you to lie about it?’

‘You wouldn’t shoot me.’

‘You’re right. I’ll put this in your mouth and put your finger on the trigger and you can blow your own fucking brains out. Then I’ll arrange all your little playthings around you. What d’you reckon they’ll think?’

He lifted his head and I could see blood flowing back into his pale, frightened face. His shoulders straightened as he summoned up courage. ‘I don’t believe you.’

I was ready for that. I grabbed his hair, pulled hard and twisted until his scalp was strained. His mouth flew open and I rammed the pistol in, bearing down on his tongue. I kneeled on the bed, pinioning his right arm. I grabbed his left hand, bent it far back and brought it up near his mouth. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘You’re left-handed. It’ll look right. No bruises, no cuts. You’re just one beat away from it.’

He went slack and I gradually eased back on all the pressure points. ‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘Tell me the truth and you’ll be okay.’

‘You’re wearing a wire,’ he gasped. ‘It’s them. They’ll do me for perjury.’

‘No wire.’ I lifted the polo shirt. He saw the long white scar running across the left side of my chest, courtesy of an irate wife-beater and a barbed wire fence a few years back. I guess the scar and the taste of the gun oil convinced him.

‘What you say’s true,’ he whispered. ‘I lied. I had to.’

Anton Van Kep wasn’t very bright. He’d worked for Fleischman as a driver, gofer and a standover man as business problems required. He disliked his employer, who he described as a shit, and when Claudia asked him to protect her from Fleischman and offered money and herself, he accepted.

‘Despite what you might think, I mostly like women in bed,’ he said. ‘When it’s one-on-one, you know.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t want to know. Make it quick, your minder’ll finish his tennis soon. Where did the cock-and-bull story about helping to kill Fleischman come from?’

‘Blackmail, sort of. Yeah, blackmail.’

‘Of you? Who by?’

‘I don’t know. After Fleischman got shot a guy came to see me. He showed me some pictures, stills from a couple of the movies I’ve been in. Well, you know what they’d be. Me with another bloke and some kids. No mask. I don’t know how he got them. He reckoned Mrs Fleischman would be charged with the murder and I’d be charged with.. something

‘Conspiracy.’

‘Yeah. He told me what I had to say about Mrs Fleischman. I did it.’

‘Come on, you put yourself in for ten years gaol? I find that hard to believe.’

He lifted his head and looked at me with red-rimmed, moist eyes. ‘I’ve got a rep as a tough guy. That’d be fucked if the pictures got around. And how long d’you reckon I’d last inside if I went up for.. you know. But that’s not the real reason. This guy said the pictures would go first to my mother. She’s old. Seeing stuff like that would kill her. She’s had enough shit in her life from me without that.’

Very strange territory. My mum had died fairly young when I was in my twenties. She was a good-time girl who refused to believe that port, cakes and pies and staying up all night and sleeping all day was bad news for diabetics. Her kidneys collapsed. She had loved my sister and me in her way, but she wasn’t around much. She was warm and funny and I loved her too, but I wouldn’t have gone to gaol for her. Still, it was possible. Van Kep had never served time, didn’t know what it was like. Besides, he was dumb.

He must have sensed my scepticism or maybe it was just the pistol. ‘I got a phone call the day before the cops arrested me. Same bastard. He said there wouldn’t ever be a trial. He said I’d never have to lie in court and I’d get the negatives as soon as it was all over. It’s true. You have to believe me!’