The Condimental Op Read online

  First published by Perfect Edge Books, 2013

  Perfect Edge Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

  Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.perfectedgebooks.com

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Andrez Bergen 2013

  ISBN: 978 1 78279 189 8

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Andrez Bergen as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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  CONTENTS

  INTRO

  PART 1: OTHER BITS

  PART 2: ROY & SUZIE

  PART 3: TOBACCO-STAINED OFFSHOOTS

  PART 4: RANSACKING THE ARCHIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE CONDIMENTAL OP:

  cocktail’d stories served on a bent paper platter

  SHORT YARNS, OFF-CUTS, IDEAS, COMICS, REJECT MATÉRIEL,

  SUBTITLING & IRREGULAR ARTICLES 1989–2013

  COVER ARTWORK BY COCOA BERGEN

  ARTWORK, ABOVE, BY ANDREW CHIU

  ARTWORK, this page, BY NICOLAS GOMES

  ARTWORK, this page, BY MAAN HOUSE

  ARTWORK, this page, BY SCOTT CAMPBELL

  ARTWORK, this page TO this page, BY MARCOS VERGARA

  ARTWORK, this page TO this page, BY ANDREZ BERGEN

  X-RAY, this page, BY THE DOC

  Also by the same author:

  TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF VICISSITUDE

  WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CAPES OF HEROPA?

  ‘ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF VICISSITUDE’ (2012)

  “Charles Dickens collides with Haruki Murakami in a pulsating tale of history, redemption and revenge.” FANTASY BOOK REVIEW

  “A wildly enchanting journey down the rabbit hole.”

  ELIZABETH A. WHITE

  “A cracking great story.” BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY

  “Dreamlike and bewitchingly evocative.” THE FLAWED MIND

  “A unique, memorable story — indescribable, exhilarating.” FORCES OF GEEK

  “Quirky, poignant, and utterly brilliant.” DRYING INK

  “Hard-boiled and entertaining.” ZOUCH MAGAZINE

  “One Hundred Years of Vicissitude reaffirms a postmodern dexterity of Cirque du Soleil proportions.” FARRAGO MAGAZINE

  “Breathtakingly detailed. I defy you to read this book.” STEAMPUNK MAGAZINE

  “Exquisite, incredibly touching and devastating in its beauty.” I MEANT TO READ THAT

  “A terrific book!” BARE*BONES

  “Crime, geisha, time travel; masterfully balances these things and turns its nose up at pretentious literature.” INSOMNIA PRESS

  “A wonderful tale…This is what good literary fiction reads like.” ALWAYSUNMENDED

  “A witty voyage of ideas, history, pop culture, style, characters and scenes that are unforgettable.” RAYMOND EMBRACK

  “A strange mixture of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction.” A FANTASTICAL LIBRARIAN

  “I love this. The narrator is fascinating — as are his two unlikely companions.” LITREACTOR

  “Told in the author’s inimitable narrative style — Bergen relishes wacky tangents and dives head-first into philosophical dialogues that prove to be some of the most satisfying parts of his books.” DEATH BY KILLING

  ‘TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT’ (2011)

  “Andrez Bergen put science fiction, noir, Australia and Japan into a literary hadron collider, and Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat came out.” THE THOUSANDS MAGAZINE

  “Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is an incredible novel, completely unexpected and with such a wonderfully rich and unique style that is simply mesmerizing, unmissable.” SF BOOK REVIEWS

  “Such an engrossing and visual read — with gorgeous, subtle moments in there as well.” LIP MAGAZINE

  “Original and unforgettable.” DARK WOLF’S FANTASY REVIEWS

  “At the heart of Bergen’s novel is the love affair our author has with popular culture. This book is bursting with nods and homages to everything from Humphrey Bogart to Mobile Suit Gundam.” VERBICIDE MAGAZINE

  “A wonderful ambush of a novel. It leads you down a well-tread path and then jumps from the brush and drags you to uncharted lands. It has been a while since I had this childlike joy at turning the page. It’s an insane, hard-boiled future shocker. Wow.”

  JOSH STALLINGS, author of Beautiful, Naked & Dead

  “Flows effortlessly; smart, mesmerizingly dark and difficult to put down.” VICE MAGAZINE

  “Andrez wears his pop-culture influences on his sleeve, and the result is a compote that mashes up a plethora of fictional frameworks into a believable, seamless whole. Floyd Maquina is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self-destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat.”

  THE FLAWED MIND

  “I can say without qualification that not only is Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat one of my Top 5 reads of 2011, it is one of the most creative and engaging books I’ve ever read. Period. My mind is completely blown.” ELIZABETH A. WHITE

  “A post-modern mélange that is the most intriguing of novels — hardboiled and playful at the same time.”

  AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE FICTION IN FOCUS

  “Terrific stuff, truly unique. One of my favourite books of 2011.” HEATH LOWRANCE, author of The Bastard Hand

  “Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is a retro pop culturalist’s dream come true — and entertaining to boot.” PERMISSION TO KILL

  for Cocoa and Yoko

  INTRO

  This grubby medley of written stuff is something I started nutting out last year, in between writing two novels (One Hundred Years of Vicissitude and Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?) at the same time that I cobbled together an anthology called The Tobacco-Stained Sky, worked a full-time job teaching English here in Tokyo, and tried to keep enough spare change time-wise to entertain my young daughter — thereby (hopefully) not ignoring her too much.

  2012 was that kind of fun-filled fiasco.

  To start off this new year in similar ‘style’ I finished putting together the collection resting either (a) in your hands, or (b) on-screen, depending on your preference. Luckily, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, which I published via Perfect Edge Books last October, somehow climbed to #1 at Amazon — giving me the churlish freedom to push this project through.

  You’ll find nips, tucks and evasive moments here that refer directly or indirectly to characters and situations in my three novels (especially my first, Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat), hopefully without needing to consult any of these in the full — but a reading might just enhance the dubious experience and help top up the precariously empty coffers of my wallet.

  Additionally I’ve lobbed in some unrelated stuff: recent(ish) short stories and articles I penned for Geek magazine in the US, Impact in the UK, and Zebra back in Melbourne, along with a few pages of dodgy prose pieces written for a coffee-table tome of fancy photos in 1989.

  For most of the yarns I’ve adde
d a precursory waffle, in italics, which is more insider-trading in case you’ve read my other material. These do contain spoilers, so skip them if you want to read each story fresh.

  On a personal level, enormous gratitude must go to my wife Yoko, who has so patiently understood my need to spend great wads of time daydreaming, writing, editing and promotion. And I love the fact that this particular book comes with cover art done by Cocoa last year, at age six, since it also contains an article I wrote for VICE magazine in 2005 — immediately prior to her birth and about same. Cocoa, more than any individual, is responsible for my rediscovery of the act of story-telling.

  Finally, the title of this book is a silly riff on Dashiell Hammett’s famous detective the Continental Op, whose real name is never mentioned in any outing.

  I used it previously for a chapter in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat and a twelve-inch Little Nobody record I put out through IF? Records in 2010 (with remixes by Detroit’s Aux 88 and K. Alexi Shelby in Chicago).

  Hopefully Dashiell doesn’t writhe in his coffin over at Arlington National Cemetery. Then again, I’m far enough away not to mind.

  Andrez, February 2013

  PART 1: OTHER BITS

  All things start somewhere; so let’s begin here with one of my more recent short stories.

  I wrote Sugar & Spice for Chris Rhatigan’s crime/hardboiled anthology All Due Respect (published via Full Dark City Press) and luckily he dug the story. I was going to throw in the pun ‘respected’ but think I’ll leave the shallow laughs till later in the tome, when you’re punch-drunk and less critical.

  “Crime and postmodernism go together like peanut butter and jelly,” Chris emailed me back from India (really). “Gleefully maniacal stuff.” Fiona Johnston, a fellow contributor, wrote in her review: “The teenagers who attempt the heist haven’t the common sense to work out that the rare copy they’ve spotted displayed might not be all it seems and they pay dearly for this mistake. Yet again, Bergen gives a master-class in short story writing.” (ta, matey)

  The All Due Respect collection brings together some wild people like Fiona, Joe Clifford, Patti Abbott, Nigel Bird, Tom Pitts, CJ Edwards, Chris Leek, Richard Godwin, Mike Monson, Matthew C. Funk, Ron T. Brown and David Cranmer — so hunt it down if you can.

  This particular inclusion was put together in October 2012, while I had my head deeply buried in my third novel Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? —which is all about comicbook lore and superhero culture, mixed up with noir.

  No real surprise, then, that I decided to have two high-school kids knock over a comicbook store in a more contemporary Melbourne.

  The comic shop in question is based on the one I used to hang out at while in high school. Minotaur now is a huge, highly successful institution in Melbourne, but back in the ‘80s it was a small shop down a minor arcade in the city.

  Off Bourke Street.

  Incidentally, these kids hop on the train at South Yarra, the nearest station to my old high school Melbourne High, they have their fingers in the till at the school tuck-shop (sounds familiar) and the bicycle of choice is a classic ‘70s Malvern Star chopper…same as mine when I was that age.

  Sugar & Spice

  Rankine lifted his head off the floor and peered at his gut, at the blood pumping out of the big hole in his shirtfront, running down the sides and creating a huge puddle on the carpet.

  “Crap,” he muttered. “That’s going to be a bugger to patch.”

  Wasn’t supposed to be like this, no way. Three days ago Mitch reckoned it’d be a blow-over, easy street romp — if not exactly sugar and spice and everything nice, then something marginally sweet.

  The shop was down an unpopular arcade, in the city on Bourke Street, not much pedestrian traffic, and the nearest cop house three blocks away.

  Basics, security-wise: a camera that probably didn’t work, just for show to scare the amateurs, and a newly installed magnetic tag security detector straddling the doorway. Probably bought on eBay, but they heard it go off when some kid tried something, so they knew that baby was no Trojan Horse.

  The bloke behind the counter seemed to actually be two people sharing the same beard, receding hairline and dress-sense (bordering on offensive suburban hippy).

  There were no nametags to double-check who was who and they were always too busy reading shit to pay attention to customers’ questions — which Mitch said worked to their advantage since they wouldn’t know what was going on till it was too late.

  The big attraction? This was no diamond merchant, not a bank, nor a service station/convenience store. It wasn’t even a dodgy school kiosk, their usual port-of-criminal-call.

  This was a comicbook store, a minor affair specializing in new releases from America and a wad of collectibles. No manga at all, which was one of the reasons Rankine had never heard of the place.

  The thing was, they had a copy of Action Comics #1 up on the wall.

  This meant nothing to Rankine, who coveted an early, uncensored printing of Katsura Masakazu’s Video Girl Ai manga, since later printings changed the art to cover up the nudity.

  Mitch courteously filled in the massive gaps in his American comic knowhow: the issue that gave Superman his big break, published in the U.S. in 1938 for just ten cents. Over seventy years later a rare copy was sold online for $2.16m.

  “You know Nick Ratatouille?” Mitch went on.

  “Maybe.” Rankine had been out front of the folks’ place, sitting on his bum on the nature-strip fixing an elusive puncture on the tyre of his painstakingly rebuilt 1974 Malvern Star chopper, trying not to get tangled up in Mitch’s plans.

  Mitch had a tendency to lead partners astray — namely arrest or injury, or both — even if he always got off scot-free. Still, this was one question Rankine believed he could tackle without a lure or a slap. “Isn’t he the muscle for Occitan and the boys over on Catalan Crescent?”

  “Right on. He heard from a mate who heard from another mate that it was sold by Nicolas Cage.”

  “You reckon the comic in that shop is the same one once owned by him?”

  “No, you moron — but if that one got two mill, there’s every chance the one on the wall in this dive will get half that, at least. A million, R, that we can split down the middle. You could get your bloody Malvern Star gold-plated if you want.”

  That’d been the clincher. Not the gold plating but the swandooly.

  Rankine went along with it all, even forking out the dosh for the ski masks from an army disposals shop on Elizabeth Street and a couple of BB-guns he got FedEx’d from Japan that were replica full-scale Enfield revolvers.

  Knocking over a comicbook store would be a breeze. Nothing could go wrong.

  So they’d skipped out on high school on a Monday — he’d forged the letters from their mums as usual — and got out of their uniforms in the toilets at South Yarra Station before heading into town on a Frankston Line train at 2:10 p.m.

  Got off at Flinders Street before three, after typical bloody delays, and waltzed straight to the arcade. Flicked through some brand new Marvel comics that bored Rankine silly, waiting till no one else was in the shop, and then pulled on the balaclavas and pointed their faux firearms at the bird behind the counter.

  “Give us the fucking comic, dickhead!” Mitch screamed in too loud a voice.

  “Sure, kid, sure, don’t get your knickers in a knot,” old Beard-and-Bald assured him, hands clutching air. “Which one?”

  “Clark Kent up there, on the wall.” Mitch waved the gun in a general direction over the clerk’s head. “Move it!”

  “You mean…Are you talking about this?” The man pointed to Action Comics #1, a primitive-looking Superman lifting a green car above his head and smashing it.

  “Sure. Hand-pass it over.”

  “You boys do realize it’s a repro?”

  Rankine leaned forward. “A what?”

  “Reproduction. This isn’t the real thing — why on earth would we have it sitting right here
in our shop? That’d be lunacy.”

  Rankine couldn’t be sure, but he sussed the old hippy was lying. Mitch, however, was in a rage, shoving his popgun forward.

  “Bullshit!” he shouted, so incensed he lost control of his drool.

  Rankine observed this spittle traveling across air from his partner’s mouth; saw it settle down on the desktop and sit there, bubbly and offensive.

  That was when Beard-and-Bald got angry. He stared at the saliva, and then dropped his right hand—

  Fretting some, Mitch waggled his toy. “Don’t move!”

  —And the man stood up straight with an Uzi submachine gun stuck in his mitt. Rankine had a sneaking suspicion this baby hadn’t been purchased via mail order from Tokyo; conjecture confirmed when the thing start dishing out real 9mm bullets.

  “Nobody spits in my shop! No fucker steals my comics!” Beard-and-Bald raved as he raked the small area, destroying much of the merchandise before he found his real targets.

  Mitch, Rankine could see from his place spreadeagled on his back, was dead as a dodo, folded up against the wall with brains wallpapering a bunch of DC comics in a rack.

  He returned attention to his stomach, felt dizzy, tried to pull together the flaps of skin there — same technique as sticking together the flaps of rubber with the puncture the other day.

  Now, if only he had his tyre-sealant glue.

  The next story was done for a 2012 anthology assembled by Luca Veste and Paul D. Brazill.

  It was called Off the Record 2, included forty-six other writers, and was put together to raise money for two children’s literacy charities in the U.S. and the U.K.

  The guidelines? A story based around a classic film title. Given I’m a movie journalist, this was a Heaven-sent request.