Andrez Bergen is an expatriate Australian author, journalist, DJ, photographer and musician, based in Tokyo, Japan, over the past eleven years. Aside from specializing in Japanese culture and electronic music as a journalist, Bergen has written fiction for Another Sky Press, Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey and Snubnose Press, worked with anime director Mamoru Oshii, and did a book of prose in collaboration with Polish photographer Tomek Sikora. He published his debut novel ‘Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat’ in 2011 and a second novel, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, via Perfect Edge in 2012 that went to #1 at Amazon.

The Condimental Op

cocktail’d stories served on a bent paper platter

By Andrez Bergen

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 Andrez Bergen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-189-8

Contents

INTRO…………………………………………………………….1PART 1: OTHER BITS…………………………………………………3PART 2: ROY & SUZIE………………………………………………..53PART 3: TOBACCO-STAINED OFFSHOOTS……………………………………101PART 4: RANSACKING THE ARCHIVE………………………………………187ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………..295ABOUT THE AUTHOR…………………………………………………..298

CHAPTER 1

Sugar & Spice

Rankine lifted his head off the floor and peered at his gut, at theblood pumping out of the big hole in his shirtfront, runningdown 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 Mitchreckoned it’d be a blow-over, easy street romp — if not exactlysugar and spice and everything nice, then something marginallysweet.

The shop was down an unpopular arcade, in the city onBourke Street, not much pedestrian traffic, and the nearest cophouse three blocks away.

Basics, security-wise: a camera that probably didn’t work, justfor show to scare the amateurs, and a newly installed magnetictag security detector straddling the doorway. Probably boughton 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 twopeople sharing the same beard, receding hairline and dress-sense(bordering on offensive suburban hippy).

There were no nametags to double-check who was who andthey were always too busy reading shit to pay attention tocustomers’ questions — which Mitch said worked to theiradvantage since they wouldn’t know what was going on till itwas too late.

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

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

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

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

Mitch courteously filled in the massive gaps in his Americancomic knowhow: the issue that gave Superman his big break,published in the U.S. in 1938 for just ten cents. Over seventy yearslater 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 punctureon the tyre of his painstakingly rebuilt 1974 Malvern Starchopper, trying not to get tangled up in Mitch’s plans.

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

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

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

“No, you moron — but if that one got two mill, there’s everychance 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 getyour bloody Malvern Star gold-plated if you want.”

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

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

Knocking over a comicbook store would be a breeze. Nothingcould go wrong.

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

Got off at Flinders Street before three, after typical bloodydelays, and waltzed straight to the arcade. Flicked through somebrand new Marvel comics that bored Rankine silly, waiting till noone else was in the shop, and then pulled on the balaclavas andpointed their faux firearms at the bird behind the counter.

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

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

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

“You mean … Are you talking about this?” The man pointed toAction Comics #1, a primitive-looking Superman lifting a greencar 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 wouldwe have it sitting right here in our shop? That’d be lunacy.”

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

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

Rankine observed this spittle traveling across air from hispartner’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 thesaliva, 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 gunstuck in his mitt. Rankine had a sneaking suspicion this babyhadn’t been purchased via mail order from Tokyo; conjectureconfirmed 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, destroyingmuch of the merchandise before he found his real targets.

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

He returned attention to his stomach, felt dizzy, tried to pulltogether the flaps of skin there — same technique as stickingtogether 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 Vesteand 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 charitiesin the U.S. and the U.K.

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

I decided to use the Blake Edwards cross-dressing romp VictorVictoria (1982), which starred Julie Andrews and James Garner — butI’ve never seen it. Can’t say why. I’m not the biggest fan of JulieAndrews. The Sound of Music makes me writhe, but I do tend to likeBlake’s movies from the ’60s.

When I wrote the piece I also wasn’t sure about the title and wasleaning toward Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, since that’s all aboutWorld War I, biplanes, dog-fighting and big dirigibles. Same as mystory. The reason I went with Victor Victoria, I think, is because — althoughthe time frame is just after the Edwardian era — there’ssomething Victorian about the yarn, possibly resulting from theinclusion of Britannia.

I decided to go for a relatively flippant version of Captain W. E.Johns’ classic Biggles romps. You know, the books about the ace pilotand adventurer written from the 1930s. I’m also poking fun at racialstereotypes: the German officer, Wilhelm Klink, is based on ColonelKlink from Hogan’s Heroes and other sham “German” characters I’veseen on the telly.

So it’s an adventure, hopefully amusing, and also a convoluted lovestory. With a god.

As it turned out I dug the Britannia character so much I morphedher into Pretty Amazonia (a super-powered, seven-foot human being)in Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, which was writtenstraight after this.

Wilks I liked too, since he’s snatched from a fairly two-dimensional,minor character in the Biggles stories (in which he developed a friendlyrivalry with James Bigglesworth during First World War air combat,and destroyed his own pyjamas with a machine gun). I’ve thought aboutdoing more with this debonair cad.

Oh, and I tagged-on the chestnut following this one (An Octopus’sGrotto is His Castle) since they were written round the same periodand I just noticed they have very, very similar opening lines. Weird.That one was written for the suave Solarcide anthology Nova Parade(check out solarcide.com).

Yes, it lovingly takes the piss out of big-ocean-beastie literature fromthe 19th century (Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Jules Verne’sTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Victor Hugo’s Toilers ofthe Sea, Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter) and theirmid-20th century Hollywood spin-offs.

“Read the story earlier and I’d definitely like to take that one off youfor the collection,” Solarcide’s Martin Garrity said in an email datedApril 29, 2012. “Good stuff, man, good stuff indeed. It’s completelydifferent in style to any of the other stories we have so far and thatrocks.”

I’m not sure what the fixation was with octopuses. Cocoa and I surewere eating a lot of them (with lemon juice — yum) at the time.

Anyway, thought I’d set off the flavour of this old-school section ofthe book with a lovely picture of a bi-plane, courtesy of French designerNicolas Gomes.

CHAPTER 2

Victor Victoria

I do believe my first bona fide blunder of the war was when Ishot a goddess between the eyes.

Unforced error number two came into play the moment I tooknote of said mistake. Having yanked up my goggles, I perched inthe seat of my plane, stunned. With my head turned around,searching for her descent, I obviously wasn’t looking where I wasgoing, and the next thing I knew I’d collided slap-bang up thearse end of a 530-foot dirigible.

The propeller of my Sopwith Pup punctured the rubberizedcotton fabric, the nose went in, the biplane shuddered, and thenwe hung there, conjoined in the clouds several thousand feet up.The name L.19 was written in big gothic letters on a ripped flapthat waved above my head, and beneath that “KaiserlicheMarine”.

I’d buggered a bloody zeppelin.

Hence, it wasn’t long before the Huns on board started takingpot shots at me, having positioned themselves on an iron trellisbuilt into the rear-engine gondola. They were so close I could seethe rifles poking out — standard issue 7.92 mm Mauser Gewehr98s — but the dunderheads were such poor marksmen that Icontinued to sit there, strapped into my open cockpit, unharmedand reasonably unfussed.

Eventually I got tired of the fun, games and projectiles. Iunholstered my Webley Mk IV revolver to fire off three rounds inreturn. The soldiers ducked for cover. Then I glanced around,wondering what the devil I should do.

“You know, that hurt.”

I peered over the side of my aeroplane, past the words “Sea’sShame” that my batman McPherson had stenciled onto thecanvas fuselage, to the jutting-out wooden wheel frame beneathmy Pup. What I discovered alarmed me far more than the pointy-headedfools only yards distant.

Winged Victory, or whomsoever this was, hung there one-handed.In her other hand, the left one, the woman was armedwith a trident and shield, and on top of her head she wore acenturion’s helmet that was at an accidentally jaunty angle — probablybecause it had a couple of dents in it, courtesy of mymachine gun. Golden hair poked out from under the hard hat,and this fluttered in the breeze. Her ocean-blue eyes, however,remained fixed on mine. They were anything but flighty.

“So, are you going to offer assistance? Or would you prefer tosit there and gawk while those men continue shooting?”

“Can’t you fly?”

“Do I look like I have wings?”

She had a point. There was nary a feather on her body.

“She’s younger than me, too.”

“Who is younger?”

“Your Winged Victory.”

I certainly hadn’t expected things to turn out in this squalidmanner — they’d started out innocuously enough. There hadbeen heavy fog the evening before, when a fleet of zeppelins tookadvantage of the cover to bomb a string of inconsequential townsin the West Midlands.

The next afternoon — today — one of the intruders wasspotted over the North Sea, which explained away my currentmission flying a spot of reconnaissance. Having flown out fromFreiston Airfield in Lincolnshire and spent the past frigid, unproductivehour in empty skies, I’d decided to return home to a jollygood cup of warm cocoa, with a shot of Dalmore whisky, whendirectly ahead in my flight path — in the midst of a bank ofclouds and silhouetted by the setting sun — I spied WingedVictory.

Before I could think, I was triggering my Vickers machinegun, the woman tumbled, and I crashed. This surely smacked ofsomething of a feat.

“I do wish you would desist with the Winged Victorynonsense,” called out my unwilling passenger, as I unstrappedand leaned over to give her a hand. “She’s Greek,” that voicenattered on, “and, dare I say it, has no arms and lacks a head.”

A bullet whizzed close by my ear. “Would you stop that?” Iyelled, directing my words at a stout sergeant in a greatcoat anda rather dangerous Pickelhaube spiked helmet. “Can’t you seeI’m busy?”

The man lowered his rifle to act sheepish. “Es tut mir leid!”

“Not a problem. Be a good fellow and go fetch yourcommanding officer.”

At least the gunplay ceased. I encircled the woman’s wristwith my gloved fingers and proceeded to haul, although I had abugger of a time. I barely managed the exercise, what with theheavy armoured trinkets and her Amazonian stature — at aboutsix feet, she was at least as tall as me, and had broader shoulders.

Finally, she propped herself up behind the cockpit, powerful,stark naked legs straddling the canvas for balance. While I’mhardly one to gush, the woman’s face was something precious — chiseled,athletic, magnificently bewitching.

“Is there a way down?” she asked, while I rudely stared.

“You mean to terra firma?”

“No, I mean the moon.”

“Ahh, you’re joking.”

“Bravo.” She breathed out in loud, overdramatic fashion,apparently annoyed. I suppose I would be too, if I were god-likeand recently gunned down by an overzealous aerialist. “Now,about getting off …”

“I think we’re stuck until this zeppelin lands. I heard the Hunshave introduced a device called a parachute, but we haven’tanything like that in the Royal Flying Corps. I suppose you couldjump. You are, I take it, some kind of deity?”

The young lady held up a majestic chin. “I am. I have beenworshipped by people since the Pritani, well before the Romansinvaded Britain two thousand years ago, and in all that timenobody ever shot at me before.”

“Hold on. If you really were some kind of patron saint-cum-goddess,why didn’t you kick the Spigs back to Italy?”

“We choose not to interfere in human affairs.”

“Well, that’s bloody convenient. Why, then, do you botherlugging about the military gear, and what’s the story with theRoman helmet?”

“It belonged to Julius Caesar. I liked Gaius. After he invaded,he named the island after me, Britannia. Claudius I loathed — hehad no respect for foreign figureheads — but Hadrian wasmarginally better.”

“Oh, I see. Britannia. Of course. I do apologize for the WingedVictory bon mot. I’m known as Wilks. Might I call you Brit?”

Since I was leaning out of the cockpit, I felt something tap mybuttocks.

“Are you forgetting the trident?” the woman reminded me.Thank Heavens; she resisted using the sharp bits. “Britannia shalldo nicely. If you’re searching for something earthier, you may callme Frances. I prefer Britannia.”

“Speaking of earth — given that you’re a god, well, I wouldventure to guess that jumping will not be a problem.”

She looked down through the clouds and I would swear I sawa grimace. “How high are we?”

“About three or four thousand feet, the last time I checked.”

“Then it’s a problem.”

“You have height restrictions?”

“Something of the sort.” Britannia shivered. No wonder, sinceshe was wearing only a light shift of linen material that barelycame down to her thighs, and the woman had a lot of cold metalpressing against her.

After I took off my leather coat, I reached across to place it onher shoulders.

“What are you doing?”

“Attempting to be a gentleman.”

“Well, stop it. I reside on a completely different plane. I don’tfeel the chill. Put the blasted thing back on.”

“Right you are.” It was my turn to play annoyed as I buttonedup the coat. “Anyway, I thought Britannia was a nymph of somekind.”

“Hardly.”

“And aren’t you supposed to have a lion? What were youdoing, prancing about on top of a zeppelin?”

“Trying to help — you looked like you were going to flystraight past, so I decided to intervene.”

“Against your better nature?”

“I do that sometimes. These people dropped bombs on mynative soil. I was cross.” She smiled. “I left my lion at home.”Touché.

I resisted a spot of laughter, and again instead looked over theside of the aeroplane. I decided the sea was closer than it hadbeen only a quarter of an hour before. “We’re losing altitude.”
(Continues…)Excerpted from The Condimental Op by Andrez Bergen. Copyright © 2013 Andrez Bergen. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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